So, it’s finally happened. Russell Brand, comedian-turned-radical-political-podcaster, is being called out internationally about an alleged, decades-long history of sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior toward women and girls. He was called out by an investigative article in the UK’s Sunday Times and a documentary exposé on Channel 4.
 
Here’s the Wikipedia condensed version:

Now, here’s the thing. Russell Brand has been in active recovery from substance abuse disorder—including alcohol and heroin, since he went into rehab in 2002. He’s been clean and sober for more than two decades, and he has shared publicly and generously about his journey in recovery. His book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, was a best-seller. In 2005, he entered rehab in the US for sex addiction, and since then, he has been very open about the harms of pornography. In his autobiography he wrote about having drawn up an extensive ‘victims list’ of women he had “wronged” as a result of his sexual addiction.

In addition he has shared his history of sexual abuse. When he was a little boy, he was sent to a tutor who, according to Brand, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls."  He told his mother, who told his father, and the tutoring stopped, but nothing was ever done. When he was a teenager, his father took him on an Asian "sex tourism" holiday, and his father rented a prostituted woman to "teach him to be a man." The father stayed in the room to watch.  According to Brand, he was advised to leave his childhood abuse out of the book, but, he wrote, "The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in Chapter Four you see this happen, when in Chapter Twelve, I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary."

All of this is to say, I believed in Brand's recovery. My first reaction to The Times account was, "Oh, my god! He’s going to own it! He’s going to do something that none of these predators have ever done before! He’s going to model 12-Step accountability, and he’s going to do it on a public stage!  He’s going to walk his talk and set an example for the world!"

My second reaction reinforced my first:   "He's no Harvey Weinstein! He's no Bill Cosby!  The man has reinvented himself!"

Russell Brand is no longer a man-boy, mommy-shocker, BBC clown-prince, bad-boy comedian. He’s a political commentator, and an extremely competent one. He has rebranded himself as a whistleblower who is not afraid to take on the government as well as huge corporations. Some consider him the king of conspiracy theories, but, whenever I have watched his podcast, he brings the receipts, posting and citing all of his sources. Impressive. Oh, and he has attracted something like seven million followers… He is actually giving mainstream media a run for the money.

An example: There is a memorable video on Youtube of Russell Brand receiving an award at the 2013 Gentlemans’ Quarterly [GQ] Annual Man of the Year ceremony.  This ceremony is sponsored by Hugo Boss, a leading global fashion and lifestyle company. Boris Johnson, then-mayor of London, has just made a joke about the Labour Party’s lack of support for the war in Syria. So, now Brand takes the stage and says:
 
“This environment is not designed for sincerity, you realize… We will struggle if we start bringing sincerity into the situation… I’m glad to grace the stage where Boris Johnson has just made light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, meaning that GQ can now stand for “genocide quips.” I mention that only to make this next comment a bit lighter, because if any of you know a little bit about history and fashion will know that Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis, but… and the Nazis did have flaws, but, you know, they did look fucking fantastic…”

It is you who are being called to account for your past perpetration. Like the fashion giant, you are just wanting everyone to move on and celebrate who you are today. But, there were very real victims in your past collusion with a toxic, profoundly misogynist culture. And this time, Mr. Brand, it is we the people who have the receipts. There are dozens of videos of your comedy act, your hosting, your game show participation where you parade your history of misogynist predation as if it was a joke. There are videos of you grabbing, groping, kissing women. All of which are criminal acts, you realize. And then there are the women who were part of the BBC investigation. In the week following the publication of the story, there have been a half-dozen more who have come forward. And then there is the video clip from a talk show where you brag about having just exposed yourself to a woman in a bathroom minutes before going on air. In that encounter you called her by a name that was not hers and insisted you were going to continue calling her that and that you were going to "f*** her." She was terrified. It made a great joke on air.

Surely, with all that yoga, meditation, chanting, healthy lifestyle, recovery proselytizing, and especially with all of that whistleblowing, you are going to take responsibility for your actions... After all, you have made millions--millions!—by calling out the sleazy tactics of public figures who are trying to evade public accountability!

We are looking to you not to use the same-old, same-old, banal, corporate playbook of denial, lawyering up to intimidate and discourage potential witnesses, deflecting, and—of course—throwing the women and girls under the bus. We are looking to you not to take the easy way out, the rich man’s way out—which, of course, is to retraumatize your victims by discrediting them. Surely, you’re not going to play the victim, to pretend that these women are all gold-diggers or vindictive exes.  One of them was sixteen when you were thirty!  Surely you are not going to trash the child that she was!

Surely, with all of this, Mr. Brand, you are going to show up and own everything… You can’t possibly be that big of a phony and a hypocrite, can you?  Surely, now, with two daughters of your own, you can’t model this kind of misogyny? With all your pride about your working-class background, you can’t lean into the classism behind “out-lawyering” your victims? Surely, with two decades of sharing your recovery with the public, now that it’s crunch time, you’re going to “walk the talk,” aren’t you…?  Mr. Brand…?  Aren’t you…?

No, he's not.
 
And, actually, in anticipation of this kind of exposure, Brand has already been hiring high-power attorneys to threaten former alleged victims who have attempted to go public with their personal stories of rape and predatory behavior. He’s not owning a damn thing. He appears to feel completely entitled to retraumatize these women with legal threats.

Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the article went to press, Brand chose not to. Instead, he made his own video on September 16:

“Obviously, it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week, and I thank you very much for your support and for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with… But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute… These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous… Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual… What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations…”

Brand is revealing his defense strategy: The watchwords will be “promiscuity” and “consensual.” He is parsing his words to avoid libel. He says the “relationships” were consensual. He is not saying anything about the alleged acts. In fact, he has been accused of assault and rape within these relationships. These acts are criminal even if they transpire between married couples. He is leaning into the word “promiscuity,” which is defined as “characterized by many transient sexual relationships.” It’s also defined as “implying an undiscriminating or unselective approach.” “Promiscuity” would indicate that the only one harmed is himself, for dating women not in his league.  These words, “promiscuity” and “consensual” have been carefully chosen to counter the multiple charges of criminal behavior.

Predation, not promiscuity.  Nonconsensual, not consensual. According to the women coming forward, he ambushed women, he assaulted them, he propositioned them in the most intentionally vulgar and demeaning ways. He resorted repeatedly to coercive tactics, including emotional abuse, manipulation, physical intimidation, and force.

In addition to minimizing the allegations in his video, Brand  characterizes the professional investigation as some kind of conspiracy of “news media making phone calls and sending letters to people I know.” That’s actually what’s known in journalism as “research.” He goes on to say that it feels to him like a “serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of [alternative] spaces and these kinds voices.” Then, to clarify, he adds, “And I mean my voice along with your voice.”  Summing up, he again qualifies his actions as promiscuous and consensual, but absolutely not criminal.   

After this, he went silent for a week as more women came forward and more criminal allegations were made. And then the hammer dropped: Youtube demonetized his channel. What does that mean? It means he can no longer earn ad revenue off his videos on that platform. (It’s estimated that he was making a million a year off Youtube ad revenue.)  In addition, his management company dropped him, his publisher is suspending any planned publications, and the remaining dates on his current tour have been postponed.

On September 22, Brand issued his second response video. In this video he is actively deploying his defense strategy: a full-throttle call to the faithful to support him as the victim of a massive, international, corporate witch-hunt that will soon engulf us all:

"By now, you're probably aware that the British government has asked big tech platforms to censor our online content and that some online platforms have complied with that request. What you may not know is that this happens in the context of the online safety bill which is a piece of UK legislation that grants sweeping surveillance and censorship powers and it's a law that's already been passed."

Yes, every citizen in the UK has reason to be very wary of this legislation. And, yes, Russell Brand has many corporate enemies. He is absolutely posing a threat to mainstream media. He is a consummate showman, and he brings that A-game to his podcast. He makes traditional broadcasters look like sleepwalkers. And his numbers (seven million) are insane. Yes, there are many powerful people who would like to see him taken down.

And, none of that invalidates the allegations by these ten women of decades-long sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior... much of which is actually documented.

Back to this second video:  Brand directs his followers to move over to the platform Rumble, which will now be his primary platform. (Rumble has not demonetized him.) He outlines the topics of of his future broadcasts: the Trusted News Initiative he referenced earlier, the "deep state" and corporate collusion,” big pharma, media corruption and censorship. At the end, he begs his followers to stay with him as he needs them “now more than ever and more than I ever imagined I would.”

He made no mention of the allegations. It's now all completely about a global conspiracy to shut down his broadcast. 

Unquestionably, the stakes are extremely high for Brand. A public amends would be a confession of crimes, and, as of yesterday, he is already the subject of a police investigation. He stands to lose his wealth and spend the rest of his life in prison.

But the stakes are very high for his victims, and these are not just the women coming forward. The victims are also cultural. How many males modeled themselves on Brand, because they saw it worked. They saw him lifted up and richly compensated as a stud. They saw his rape jokes garnering huge laughs. How many women were silenced and disbelieved in the culture for whom he was a figurehead? 

The UK has no statute of limitations for sex crimes. Does Russell Brand want to become the test case for challenging that?  Does he want to see the UK adopt the kind of time limits for prosecution we have in the US? Because every victim in the US can tell you that these limits only protect the perpetrators. Many criminals move away from the person they used to be when they committed their crimes. Some go on to do good work. Does this mean they are no longer accountable? Brand, consistent with his perpetrations, is now marshaling his forces to set a rape culture precedent in the UK of non-accountability.

I want to say very clearly that Russell Brand is not in recovery from sex addiction. He's taken the playbook of rape culture to a new low in the last two weeks. And if his 12-Step sponsors are endorsing his decision to lawyer-up, to lie, to deny, to deflect, and to do everything he can to discredit his victims, then they are violating their own recovery just as he is violating his.

Mr. Brand, I call you out on your hypocrisy and your ongoing perpetrations. You, yes you, are part of one of the most heinous conspiracies in human history, the conspiracy to degrade, exploit, and subjugate women and girls. Your recovery is a complete sham, and however you attempt to justify your actions to yourself, all of your good works have now been utterly co-opted as part of your criminal cover-up, and they will be remembered in that light. We see you.

Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007

Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder.  Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction.  And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? 
 
The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage.  Eleven foster homes.  One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse.  Her mother?  Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday,  her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her.  In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager.  Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead.  Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.”  Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.

But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality.  What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal,  incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders —  a woman who was  raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history —  that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?

What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value.  Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified  they feel. 

Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men.  The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child. 
 
At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold  for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.

 Originally published in Trivia: A Journal of Women’s Voices , Issue 7/8, September 2008.

A few years ago, I wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s traumatic childhood—which included being raised by a single mother who was repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness, placement in multiple foster homes, multiple incidents of child sexual abuse, and being legally prostituted at fifteen in a brokered marriage. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. I made the argument that a woman who could have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress syndrome was being celebrated, instead, as an icon for adult female sexuality:
 
"What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe ‘s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel. Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?  The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child."
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Few people who remember the heyday of the Happy Hooker know that she spent the first two years of her life interned in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Here is her story:
 
Hollander’s mother, an Aryan, was living in Germany with her family in the 1930’s, when Hitler came to power. She became engaged to a Jewish friend of the family, but, panicking at the wedding, she ran away. A gang of Nazi teenagers cornered her on the street, beat her and stoned her, shaved her head and forced her to wear a sign with the words “Jew whore.” Her family, shocked and terrified, smuggled her into the Netherlands. Here she met and married a Jewish doctor, who was the head of a hospital in Indonesia. Their courtship had been brief, and even before they left for Surabaya, Hollander’s mother discovered that her new husband was a notorious womanizer.
 
In June 1943, Hollander was born, and two months later, she and her mother were taken to a Japanese concentration camp. Her father had already been taken prisoner. Hollander’s mother had the option of going to a camp for Aryan women, where conditions were not so brutal, but she refused to be separated from her daughter, and chose to join the Jewish women with their children.
 

Hollander was able, as an adult, to reunite with a fellow child-survivor from the camp, a woman who had been six years old at the time of her imprisonment. It seems that some of Hollander’s information about her experiences may have been augmented by what her friend could also remember.
 
Hollander recounts how she saw soldiers repeatedly caressing and fondling her six-year-old companion, who was being prostituted by her mother for food. She remembers how all the women had to crouch down “like frogs” in front of the soldiers:
 
"The women were obliged to accept all kinds of humiliation; the slightest sign of disobedience was punished with mindless severity. A favorite practice was for the man to thrust his fingers into the sides of a woman’s mouth and then tear it open from cheek to cheek, leaving a bleeding gash where there had been a mouth. As more and more savage soldiers took over guard duties, there were many who took delight in inflicting torture for its own sake. They would rip open mouths without even the justification of an act of disobedience or a glance of defiance, just as they would inflict beatings as the whim took them." (Hollander, p. 54)

Food was scarce at the camp, and the women and children were all suffering the effects of malnutrition. Some of them were starving, and women attempted to barter with smugglers for any extra provisions they could get. One woman, caught with contraband for her starving child, was burned alive. Hollander’s mother, who had smuggled diamonds into the camp by hiding them in her vagina, was also caught. She was beaten and left for dead among piles of corpses. Managing to survive, it was weeks before she was able to return to her daughter.
 
Hollander describes what may be her most intact memory:
 
"One image survives of me, a lonely, frightened child sitting on a tiny suitcase containing everything I owned, sobbing in terror as a squad of soldiers marched past, each sporting three or four watches stolen from the women, shouting strange words at the top of their voices. Kirei, kirei: bow down, bow down!  There was the uncanny sight of a group of women, bowing and frog-squatting, while on the other side of a barbed wire fence, rifles at the ready, these frightening men strode by. I burst into an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Where was my mother? No one came to dry my tears. An orphan has to look after herself. "(Hollander, p. 59)
 

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

Originally published as "Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Gay Icon?" On the Issues, Winter, 1996, New York.

In a recent gay-and-lesbian theatre newsletter, there were two notices about Oscar Wilde.  One was recruiting petitioners for a campaign to obtain an official pardon for Wilde, and the other was recruiting support for an Oscar Wilde celebration.
 
I strongly object to Oscar Wilde's being marketed as some kind of figurehead for gay and lesbian theatre activists.  And I object to gay men's attempts to unilaterally define what is touted to the media as coalition culture.  And I object most strongly of all to what I call lesbian "theatre wives," who, for the questionable privilege of a male-funded theatre roof over their heads are willing to table women's issues in favor of those which speak to the interests of their theatre husbands.
 
Oscar Wilde is a case in point.  His "culture" - arrogantly classist, misogynist, pedophilic - shares nothing in common with lesbian-feminist values, and as lesbians we need to be knowledgeable about the facts before we join our gay brothers in celebrating as a martyr someone whom many of us would consider a criminal.

According to the record, Wilde was sent to jail because of his sexual exploitation of working-class and poverty-class child prostitutes.  It was they who presented the testimony against him, and it was their evidence that sent him to prison.
 
Furthermore, it was Wilde's homophobia that set the whole legal process in motion in the first place!  His lover's father "accused" Wilde of homosexual behavior, and Wilde, in a fit of pique and egged on by his narcissistic lover, sued the man for libel - in other words, for lying.  Hardly a stand for gay rights!
 
And here is Wilde retaining an attorney for his suit: 
 
Sir Edward Clarke advised him, "I can only accept this brief, Mr. Wilde, if you can assure me on your honour... that there is no and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you."  Wilde stood up and declared the charges "absolutely false and groundless."  It is important to remember that Wilde was prosecuting, and that Clarke, like most attorneys, was not interested in taking on an unwinnable case.   To his credit, Sir Edward continued to defend Wilde through his subsequent trials, even after he discovered how his client's deliberate duplicity had placed him on the losing side of a sordid and sensational case which became known as the "trial of the century."  The suit proved such a professional embarrassment to him, Clarke omitted any mention of it in his memoirs.
 
And what about his family?  Wilde was married with two children at the time that he instigated the frivolous libel suit.  It was an action taken without consulting his wife and without the funds to pay the legal fees.  Foolishly, Wilde trusted his lover to cover the costs.  After his incarceration, his creditors moved in, and his family's possessions - even the children's toys - were ruthlessly auctioned off.  His wife, compelled by the scandal to leave England, found that it was necessary to change her name and her sons' names even to obtain lodging in a foreign hotel. 

Although Constance Wilde was strongly advised to divorce her husband, he importuned her from prison, and she decided against taking such action.  In fact, she continued to demonstrate   extraordinary consideration towards the man who had shown so little for her and for their children, traveling in poor health from Switzerland to Reading Gaol in order to convey in person the news of Wilde's mother's death.  After his release from prison, Wilde proceeded to violate all of the agreements he had made with her to protect the family from any further notoriety.
 
As a footnote to the marriage, Wilde had not had sexual relations with Constance for several years.  The reason he had given was that his syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute during his student years and had believed to be cured, was, in fact, still virulent.  There is no evidence that Wilde ever shared this information with any of the boys with whom he had sexual relations.
 
Wilde was brought to bankruptcy while in prison when his lover's father brought suit to recover his damages from the ill-advised libel suit.  Not only did Lord Alfred, Wilde's lover, renege on his agreement to cover these costs, but as Wilde reminded him in his famous letter "de Profundis," this parsimony was all the more reprehensible, because Wilde had squandered many times that amount on Lord Alfred.

But, back to the trial...  Needless to say, the man that Oscar Wilde was suing did everything he could to prove his innocence - as most people will do when they are being sued.  And so, not surprisingly, he produced as witnesses a number of the child prostitutes whose "services" had been procured by Wilde.
 
And at this point, a number of my gay brothers will insist that I make a distinction between "child prostitute" and "teenaged prostitute."  I confess that the distinction is lost on me, and I will leave it to those for whom qualifiers of age, class, geography, period in history, etc. provide a certain rationale, if not outright justification, for a practice which is apparently so intrinsic a part of gay male culture and so violently antithetical to lesbian-feminist values.
 
Some gay brothers will also jump to Wilde's defense, claiming that the boys were being paid by the defendant to testify, either that, or cooperating with the state in order to avoid prosecution.  That some of these boys had histories of blackmailing their "clients" has also been used to discredit their testimony.  Leaving for a moment the fact that Wilde admitted to friends on several subsequent occasions that the charges had been true, let us look at these objections.

Why shouldn't these boys protect their interests against a class of sexual predators who had chosen to victimize them specifically because of their disenfranchisement both as children and as members of a profoundly oppressed underclass?  Why should anyone be surprised that Wilde's affectionately engraved cigarette cases should find their way to the pawnshop?  If, as a function of his privilege, Wilde chose to romanticize his sexually exploitive transactions - such sentimentality was hardly a luxury his victims could afford.  When wealthy members of an elite class pay bargain prices for the sexual services of children, based on the poverty-class economy of these children, -can they be surprised if the more enterprising of these boys turn around and charge them premium prices for privacy based on their economy of privilege?
 
The relationship between the john and the prostituted boy  is not a mutual one.  It is the standard method of operation for colonialists, enslavers, and pimps, to brutalize the members of an underclass created by economic and sometimes social violence, and then to point to their brutalization as a rationale for the conditions to which they are subjected.  This circular and self-serving logic is in play when Wilde's defenders attempt to discredit his victims as "blackmailers and thieves." 
 
Wilde gave a speech during the trial, which is often cited as a testimonial to his gay pride.  In fact, he gave the speech as an attempt to prove that his relations with Lord Alfred were not gay, but rather a platonic bonding between an older man and a younger man.  The context in which he framed his famous "love that dares not speak its name" speech was profoundly homophobic.

During the trial, Wilde persisted in denying any participation in homosexual activity.  Repeatedly questioned about his frequenting of a notorious male brothel, where his "companions" were children who worked as valets, grooms, and coachmen, Wilde stated that he sought the boys out, because they were "bright and entertaining," insisting that he was oblivious to class differences: "I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied."  And again, "I recognize no social distinctions of any kind... "
 
This is difficult to believe when, on one occasion, Wilde picked up a boy who sold newspapers, and took him to a hotel in Brighton for a weekend.  In order to disguise the obvious nature of the relationship, Wilde bought the boy a suit of clothing with insignia that would associate him with a prestigious private boys' school.  In court, he insisted that the choice of the school's colors had been the boy's. 
 
In fact, Wilde was very class-conscious.  In "de Profundis," he told a very different story - and one in which class difference features prominently:

"People thought it was dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life... It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.  I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and make it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air...  Their poison was part of their perfection." 
 
To what does "poison" refer if not their class antagonism towards Wilde and his kind?  And what a patriarchal reversal of the power relations!  It is remniscent of the rhetoric used against incest victims, characterizing them as promiscuous and vampiric.
 
One of the boys who testified had not been procured for Wilde.  He had been employed as an office boy at Wilde's publishing firm, and Wilde had cultivated the friendship by exploiting the boy's interest in his writing.  The boy testified that he had been ignorant of Wilde's intentions, that he was traumatized by the sexual contact, and that he was subsequently fired from his job for his association with Wilde.  His emotional confusion about his victimization by a "benign" perpetrator was used against him in court as proof that he was crazy.
 
After his conviction, and halfway through his two-year prison sentence, Wilde wrote the following words in a petition to the Home Secretary.  No doubt the homophobia is exacerbated by his desire to win a pardon, but Wilde's attempt to characterize his homosexuality as a disease or the result of bad company is cowardly to say the least:

"The Petitioner... was suffering from the most horrible form of erotomania, which made him forget his wife and children, his high social position..., the honour of his name and family, his very humanity itself, and left him the helpless prey of the most revolting passions, and a gang of people who for their own profit ministered to them, and drove him to his hideous ruin."
 
Hardly a gay rights manifesto. 
 
And after prison?  Wilde went to Paris, where he rendez-voused with Lord Alfred, who was being serviced sexually at the time by a fourteen-year-old boy who sold flowers on the street.  This boy claimed to be "keeping" a twelve-year-old at home, and Lord Alfred was attempting to gain sexual access to the boy.  Wilde himself, in the words of his lover, was "hand in glove with all the little boys on the Boulevard." 
 
I cannot imagine a lesbian couple deliberately choosing a vacation spot where economic violence and/or colonization has created an underclass of girls who are coerced into selling their bodies to wealthy women tourists.  I cannot imagine this loving lesbian couple buying these little girls and exploiting their poverty for the purposes of sexual self-gratification.  And I cannot imagine two lesbians experiencing this exploitation as a pleasurable and harmless recreational activity around which they could bond. 

And yet this is the kind of vacation activity in which such gay male luminaries as Andre Gide, Tennessee Williams, and Oscar Wilde would habitually indulge.
 
Oscar Wilde was a pedophile, a woman-hater, a colonialist, a classist, a coward, and a colossal liar.  The record speaks for itself. I call upon my gay brothers to drop the euphemisms surrounding the culture of prostitution and child sexual abuse, and to come out of denial about the nature of the men who participate in that culture. 

[If you found this blog interesting, I have another about Wilde...  "Oscar Wilde:His Father's Son."]

                                                                           

Originally published by Trivia: Voices of Feminism, 2009

Portuguese translation: “A verdade inconveniente sobre Teena Brandon”

I want to talk about an inconvenient truth. I want to talk about the fact the person who was named Teena Brandon was a survivor of incest. You won’t hear this mentioned in Boys Don’t Cry, and you won’t hear it mentioned in the documentary “The Brandon Teena Story.” You won’t read about it in the current Wikipedia entry. It is, like I said, inconvenient.
 
“Inconvenient” means “causing trouble or difficulties.” The inconvenient truth of Brandon’s incest history causes trouble because incorporating information about child sexual abuse into the narrative of Brandon’s life pathologizes the transgendered identity adopted by Brandon and for which she has become an icon. This is perceived as disrespectful and transphobic—as an attack on Brandon’s identity and a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity.
 
But the omission of Brandon’s incest history is disrespectful and phobic to survivors of child sexual abuse. It also constitutes a posthumous attempt to appropriate a victim’s identity. As a survivor, I am disturbed by the revisionist histories of Brandon that omit Brandon’s status as a victim of child sexual abuse—and all of the subsequent inconvenient truths accompanying that status.
 

Inconvenient truths have a way of remaining unarticulated, because they exist outside the frame of reference that has been established. The first difficulty one encounters in telling this inconvenient truth about Teena Brandon is the issue of pronouns. Brandon was sexually abused as a female child, born biologically female, by an adult male perpetrator who was a family member. The gender of victim and perpetrator are clinical details that are critical to the understanding of the perpetration and the impact it had on Brandon. Because of this, I will be using a female pronoun to refer to Brandon as a child, even though, in adulthood, Brandon would identify as male. This places my narrative outside the accepted protocol of respectful dialogue about trans identity.
 
In this essay, I will refer to her as “Brandon,” because, as an adult, she chose to adopt her given surname as her personal name. In titling the essay, I have used her legal, given name “Teena Brandon.” It is another inconvenient truth that Brandon never used the name “Brandon Teena.” This name was posthumously ascribed, and then picked up by the media. It was a convenient untruth, because it constituted a clever reversal of Brandon’s birth name, flipping the name to correspond with flipping gender. “Brandon Teena” is a PR-savvy metaphor… and a fiction.

In Aphrodite Jones’ biography, All She Wanted, the first narration of the sexual abuse shows up in an interview with Sara Gapp, Brandon’s best friend when Brandon was twelve. “She [Brandon] told me that one of her relatives was doing something to her that she didn’t like. She just kinda said that, you know, he would kinda whip this thing out and kinda play with it a little bit… and she said occasionally he’d have her touch him and then he would play with her and tell her, ‘oh, you like it. You know this feels good… You know you don’t want me to stop.’” (Jones, 43) According to Sara, “At that point in time, she didn’t want anyone to know about what happened. She didn’t want the guy mad at her… She was embarrassed. No matter what he did to her, she still loved him.” (Jones, 43)
 
Brandon’s therapist later confirmed the story of the abuse, adding that, according to Brandon, the sessions of abuse would last for hours and that the molestation continued for a period of years, from childhood into adolescence. In one counseling session, Brandon confronted her mother JoAnn about it, but requested that she not confront the perpetrator, who may have been one of JoAnn’s relatives. Brandon’s sister Tammy, also a victim, confirmed Brandon’s account. It is possible that this abuse was a factor in Brandon’s decision to leave home at sixteen, get a job, and move in with her then-girlfriend, Traci Beels, an older classmate.

In her book Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self, Janet Liebman Jacobs states that incest represents “the most extreme form of the sexual objectification of the female child in patriarchal culture.” (Jacobs, 11) She makes a compelling case for the fact that incest has a major impact on female personality development, including gender identity.
 
Jacobs’ book highlights significant developmental issues that influence the personality formation of sexually abused daughters, and among these is identification with the perpetrator. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child psychoanalysis, elaborates on this process:
 
'A child introjects some characteristic of an anxiety-object and so assimilates an anxiety-experience which he [she] has just undergone… By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself [herself] from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat." (Freud, 121)

Turning away from her mother, whom she perceives as an untrustworthy betrayer-of-her-own-kind, the victimized daughter looks toward the male perpetrator, who, because he is her abuser, is perceived as powerful, and who, because he is male, still hold the potential for objective idealization. “Female,” for the daughter, has become identified as the subjective gender for victims and betrayers. According to trauma researcher Judith Herman, “In her desperate attempts to preserve her faith in her parents, the child victim develops highly idealized images of at least one parent… More commonly, the child idealizes the abusive parent and displaces all her rage onto the nonoffending parent.” (Herman, 106) Describing her research with survivors of father-daughter incest, Herman notes, “With the exception of those who had become conscious feminists, most of the incest victims seemed to regard all women, including themselves, with contempt.” (Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, 103)
 
Rejecting the mother and her own female identity, the victimized daughter begins to imitate the aggressor. E. Sue Blume, author of Secret Survivors, describes how the daughter reinvents herself through identification with the perpetrator.
 
"...child victims often recreate themselves, developing alter egos who offer a positive live alternative to their own. Most commonly, this is a male persona: female survivor clients may either substitute alternative male personalities, or attach to a male fantasy companion. This is simple to understand: as a victim, and a female, she associates her vulnerable state with defenselessness; males, however, are seen as physically stronger, and not easily targeted for victimization." (Blume, 85)

Brandon didn’t like wearing dresses to school. When her mother asked the reason for this, Brandon told her that dresses were cold (this was Nebraska) and that the boys could look up them when the girls climbed the stairs. Because she attended a school that required uniforms, she wore the pants and ties that were standard for the boys, but that girls were also allowed to wear. According to her best friend Sara Gapp, “People kept saying she dressed like a guy. She didn’t… She dressed in clothes that she felt comfortable in. She didn’t go to the guys’ section to buy those clothes. Those were women’s clothes she was wearing. She just liked baggy clothes. She wore short hair. Does that make her a guy?” (Jones, 55)
 
The choice to wear baggy clothes is consistent with the choices of many survivors of sexual abuse. Brandon’s “passing” as a man began later as a practical joke on a teenaged girl who dialed Brandon’s number by accident and mistook her for a boy on the phone. According to Sarah, “Up until Liz Delano [the mistaken caller], if you had called her a boy, Teena would be offended. She didn’t want to be recognized as a guy. She didn’t feel like a guy.” (Jones, 54)
 
Brandon has also been described as indulging in male role-playing. According to her sister Tammy,
 
"The church was really significant to her. We went to Catholic school, and I think they kind of brainwash you in kindergarten on being priests and nuns. They always bring in priests and nuns to talk about how they got the calling and how you’ll know if you have the calling… Teena never wanted to be a nun; she always wanted to be a priest, and I thought it was funny because I had to participate in her masses, and I’d get really bored half the time, ‘cause she’d read from the Bible and make us sing. I thought it was just a game she played; then every once in a while she’d say, ‘Oh, I want to be a priest someday.’" (Jones, 34)

Was Brandon identifying with the power to officiate or with the gender? In light of the Church’s ban against women priests, which denies women the prestige, ceremonial office, and opportunity for leadership associated with the priesthood, it would be irresponsible to attribute Brandon’s desire to be a priest to “gender dysphoria”—a term that, when applied to females, could as well be defined as “sex-caste resistance.” Identification with gender roles in a male dominant culture cannot be separated from identification with the privileges that accompany those roles. As pioneer psychoanalyst Karen Horney notes, “We live… in a male culture, i.e. state, economy, art and science are creations of man and thus filled with his spirit.” (Horney, 152)
 
Brandon’s discomfort with her developing body has been documented. In her book, Aphrodite Jones reports that Brandon hated the pain caused by her developing breasts, and that she also complained of the pain of menstrual cramps and the inconvenience of having to deal with a monthly flow of blood. Were these the objections of a “male trapped in a female body,” or of a particularly self-assertive and articulate girlchild appalled by the inconvenience, embarrassment, and pain of the adult female body?
 
Brandon’s discomfort ran deeper than annoyance. She reported that it would “make her feel sick” (Jones, 47) to have anyone stare at her chest. Again, a girl need not be an incest survivor to register disgust at the sexual objectification of her developing body at puberty, but the female incest survivor who has internalized a masculine ideal faces a different set of obstacles:
 
"While puberty represents a painful time for many adolescent girls, for daughters in incest families this transition into female adulthood may be especially difficult and confusing as her body signals not only the passage into female adulthood but the recognition that the internalized masculine ideal is truly a fantasy of other and can never be the real self. "(Jacobs, 86)

The rejection of the female self can offer an explanation for the prevalence of eating disorders at puberty among incest survivors. Brandon, at the time of her attempted suicide, was reported as manifesting serious eating disorders.
 
"For the incest survivor, her body becomes the symbol of her victimization and thus the focus of her desire for control. Further, the obsession with a thin, boyish body, rather than an expression of femininity, may represent an unconscious rejection of the female self through which the daughter attempts to integrate the internalized male ego ideal with an external image of a masculinized child’s body." (Jacobs, 88)

Brandon reported that in October 1990, she was raped. That same fall, when she was almost eighteen, Brandon tried to join the army. According to her friends, she was eager to be a part of Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately, she did not pass the written exams. This appears to have been a turning point for her. According to her mother, “She was really upset… She started to change.” (Jones, 47)
 
One of the biggest questions about Brandon’s choices is “Why didn’t she identify herself as lesbian?” She may well have been trying to do that when she attempted to enlist. Why would a transman want to enlist in a strictly segregated, all-female environment? The military, in spite of its homophobic policies and witch hunts, has always appealed to lesbians, because it has historically provided a same-sex living and work environment for four years.
 
Although rape and sexual harassment occur in the military, a survivor who associates her violation with isolation and ongoing exposure to access by males might feel there was safety in an all-female environment, and especially if she had just been raped. Also, army regulation uniforms provide protective covering that de-emphasize sexual characteristics and discourage sexual objectification. It would be naive to assume that Brandon, who had, by high school, identified her sexual attraction to women and who had already moved in with one girlfriend, was unaware of the association of lesbians with the military. She may well have been looking for the lesbians, and this may explain in part her extreme reaction to failing the entrance exam.
 
If this is the case, then why didn’t she go looking for the communities of lesbians in her hometown? Because “don’t ask, don’t tell” was not a policy that applied to working-class gays and lesbians in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1990. The homophobia there was overt and potentially life-threatening. Harassment could take the form of anonymous, obscene phone calls, drive-by threats and insults, and physical assault. Because rape is viewed by homophobes as a “cure” for lesbianism, harassment can take the form of threats of rape, or the act itself.

For a young woman who had a horror of male sexuality and who had told friends that rape was one of her biggest fears, and who had just been raped, the prospect of this kind of harassment must have been terrifying. The October rape may, in fact, have been a homophobic assault directed against her, as a woman who didn’t date men and who had a history of cohabitation with a girlfriend.
 
But there was another reason why Brandon wasn’t identifying herself as lesbian: Lesbianism had become a power issue between Brandon and her mother.
 
In March of 1991, shortly after Brandon’s rejection by the army, a teenaged girl named Liz Delano dialed a wrong number and reached Brandon by mistake. Liz mistook Brandon for a teenaged boy, and Brandon played along, calling herself “Billy.” For a joke, she put a sock in her underwear and met Liz at a skating rink as Billy. Liz continued to call the Brandon home and ask for “Billy,” and JoAnn began to understand that her daughter was posing as a boy. She was not happy.
 
A few weeks later, Brandon began a relationship with Heather, a fourteen-year-old friend of Liz. She moved in with Heather, posing as a male and calling herself “Ten-a.” JoAnn Brandon understood that this relationship was a sexual one, and she began telephoning both Heather and Heather’s mother, insisting that the young man they had taken into their home was her daughter. Heather, like Brandon, was an incest survivor. According to the account in Jones’ biography, the focus of Brandon’s relationship was intense, romantic role-playing, not genital sex, and Heather responded initially with gratitude for the thoughtful behaviors and absence of sexual pressure. Brandon deeply resented JoAnn’s attempt to sabotage the relationship, and she especially resented her mother’s attempt to cast her in the role of a sexual (lesbian) predator.
 
To explain away her mother’s persistent calls, Brandon told Heather that she had been born a hermaphrodite, but that JoAnn had chosen to raise her as a female in order to “keep her for herself.” (Jones, 89) According to Heather, “He [Brandon] had a legitimate answer for everything. He’d tell me his mother couldn’t accept the fact that he was male, that she wanted two little girls, that she was just playing a joke.” (Jones, 67) Brandon’s knowledge of hermaphroditism had come from an episode of the Phil Donahue show.

JoAnn herself tells a different story: “I knew that all of a sudden there were beer parties going on and I have an eighteen-year-old daughter over there that’s not supposed to be drinking or doing anything.”(Jones, 67) She understood that any sexual activity between Brandon and the fourteen-year-old Heather was statutory rape. JoAnn was outraged by Brandon’s claim of hermaphroditism. “I gave birth to her; I know what sex she is. There were no attachments anywhere that had to be removed.” (Jones, 68)
 
JoAnn stepped up her campaign to “out” her daughter. She sent two lesbian co-workers to visit Heather’s mother. They had photographs of Brandon as a little girl and a copy of her birth certificate. In response, Brandon tore up every picture of herself she could find. Perceiving lesbianism as her mother’s attempt to break up her relationship, Brandon began binding her breasts, lowering her voice, and using men’s rooms in public.
 
In June 1991, Brandon filed a complaint against her mother for harassment. She and Heather took the tape from their answering machine to the police. On it was a message from JoAnn calling them lesbians and threatening to expose them. Her mother’s insistence on Brandon’s lesbianism had become a serious enough power issue to involve the police.
 
Lesbianism was a family issue in another sense. The winter following Brandon’s attempt to enlist, her sister Tammy had given up a baby for adoption—to a lesbian couple from San Francisco. Brandon had urged her sister to keep the baby. She had wanted desperately to be an aunt. Later, one of Brandon’s gay male friends would report how “He [Brandon] hated lesbians; he was totally against lesbians,” (Jones, 93) citing the adoption as the reason for this hatred.

That same summer, Brandon began forging checks in order to buy groceries and gifts for Heather. She had obtained a fake identification card and was getting jobs as a man. She began telling friends that she had gotten a sex-change operation in Omaha. By October, she had been cited on two counts of second-degree forgery. Brandon’s illegal activities began to accelerate, as did her drinking, compulsive behaviors, and eating disorders. Finally, Sarah, her best friend, decided to take matters into her own hands. She met with Heather and explained to her that Brandon was a female. Heather terminated the relationship and Brandon attempted to kill herself by taking a bottle of antibiotics. This landed her in a crisis center, and here, finally, she was able to receive professional counseling.

Brandon spent seven days at the crisis center. Dr. Klaus Hartman wrote up the initial report. Brandon’s history would have included twelve pending charges of forgery, a possible charge of sexual assault on a minor, an untreated rape in October 1990, eating disorders, binge drinking, and an ongoing sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl. The diagnosis? A mild case of identity disorder. After just a few days of counseling, Brandon told her mother that a sex change operation had been suggested by her therapist.
 
Was transsexualism Brandon’s idea or the therapists’? Mental health clinician Deb Brodtke took over Brandon’s case at the crisis center and continued to treat her for almost a year on an outpatient basis. Brandon is reported telling Brodtke she wanted to be a male, “to not have to deal with the negative connotations of being a lesbian and because she felt less intimidated by men when she presented herself as male.” (Jones, 83) If this is true, what Brandon told her therapist was not that she felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body, but a woman trapped in a world where it was dangerous to be female, and especially dangerous to be lesbian.
 
Jones’ book does not record any attempt on Brodtke’s part to challenge Brandon’s internalized lesbophobia. There is no record in her narrative of efforts to supply Brandon with information about lesbian culture or lesbian history, information about lesbian coming-out groups or groups for young lesbians. There is no record of her attempting to connect Brandon with an adult lesbian who could counsel or mentor her. The “gender identity disorder” (GID) diagnosis reflects the historical heterosexism of the mental health field, which has traditionally understood gay and lesbian desire as evidence of the desire  to become a member of the other sex.
                                   
Brandon’s diagnosis appears not to have included alcoholism. It’s interesting to note how prevalent the use and abuse of alcohol is in the documentary, the biography, and the feature film—and yet how absent it appears to have been from the treatment plan. If alcohol abuse had been identified as even a contributing factor to the chaos and torment of Brandon’s young life, it seems logical that there would have been some attempt to incorporate a recovery program into the treatment plan.
 

And finally, Brandon’s GID diagnosis, so replete with homophobia and gender bias, also appears to have ignored the “elephant in the living room”—the incest. The account of Brandon’s treatment and diagnosis does not appear to include Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome commonly associated with survivors of child abuse, and especially survivors of incest. This is remarkable given the fact that, at the clinic, Brandon presented with a record of years of untreated child sexual abuse, a report of a recent rape, an escalation of criminal activity, a history of multiple identities, sexual predation toward under-aged girls, extreme risk-taking behaviors, avoidance of medical care from fear of routine examinations, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, terror of being in a female body, expressed fear of men, preference for protective clothing, and compulsive bathing—six or seven showers a day with changes of clothing. (Brandon’s obsession with cleanliness would continue throughout her life, and, according to friends, even in her last years, she was still taking three or four showers a day.)
 
Instead of a diagnosis related to trauma, the therapist apparently sent Brandon home with information about “gender reassignment” surgeries, which would include such procedures as suturing the vagina, removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus, transplanting the nipples, constructing an appendage using skin grafts from the thighs, and administering steroids. Brandon’s friends reported that Brandon expressed a marked ambivalence about these recommendations.
 
Her sister Tammy remembers the family’s reaction:
 
"Basically, we were getting worried about Teena. And we couldn’t get any help for her… you know, not help to deal with her being gay or anything like that, but help to deal with her trying to figure out herself. Maybe she needed some counseling. And she had mentioned to us about committing suicide, so we kind of used that as a reason of getting her to there [Lincoln General Hospital], and the psychologist there said that Teena needed long-term help… which I don’t know if that was really the case, but they did send her out to the Crisis Center, and… I wish I really knew what Teena had told them or what those doctors had told Teena, but basically, she came out of there saying, ‘I want a sex change,’ and… ‘They told me I need to do this and that.’ And they might have told her that, but I don’t know if that’s really what she wanted to do.” "(Muska)

In advocating for the surgery that would facilitate Brandon’s transition, the therapist advised her of the professionally-mandated, year-long probationary period, a period in which the patient would be required to live as a man. Had Brandon described her current strategies for passing as a man in relationships—strategies involving the deception and statutory rape of naive and inexperienced minors who were unlikely to be assertive or educated enough to confront Brandon’s sexual subterfuges? If the therapist did address the legal, ethical, or safety issues of these strategies, Brandon never saw any reason to revise them. In fact, armed with the official diagnosis of “Axis I: transsexualism,” Brandon escalated her deceptions and seductions.
 
After this counseling, her repertory of lies expanded to include tales of her grandmother’s plans to send her to Europe to have the surgery done, and of scheduled dates in June 1993 for a bilateral mastectomy. She told her various girlfriends at various times that her vagina had been sewn up, that “something” had been implanted that would eventually grow into a penis, and that she had begun hormone therapy. Like the stories of hermaphroditism that preceded the transsexual diagnosis, all were untrue.

According to the studies of Jacobs and Herman, the victimized daughter’s repudiation of a female identity and her internalization of an idealized male represent responses to childhood sexual abuse.
 
If gender is considered an aggregate of sex-caste markers in a system of dominance based on biological sex, then it is simplistic and misleading to characterize it as “performative.” Viewed in the context of a patriarchal culture, gender is emblematic of a system of dominance in which women are universally oppressed as a caste.
 
The victimized daughter who adopts a male persona is not “fucking with gender.” Gender has fucked with her, and, in attempting to identify with the power that has hurt her, she is adopting the strategy of a desperate child whose only option has been to alter her perception of herself.
 
"What the transgender movement calls gender-fucking is simply an exercise in moving markers rather than any fundamental change in gender. Gender still exists. It is still an organizing structure for society. What’s different is that you just ‘do’ it differently: it is ‘allowed’ to be attached to different bodies. The aim of transgender politics is to allow you to be ‘be’ the gender that you ‘are.’ However, being your gender still means what you wear, what you do, how you express yourself and is still attached to fundamental notions of what it means to be men and women… And it’s no surprise that what is female and what is male in this view exactly tracks what is already defined as male and female. "(Corson, 3)

Transgender politics does not disrupt the positions of men and women in the gender hierarchy, but what it does do is “render women’s choices to oppose this hierarchy as women and on behalf of women incomprehensible.”(Corson, 3)
 
In addition to its participation in the larger political system of male dominance, the GID diagnosis also acts on a more personal front to protect the perpetrators. If the victimized daughter’s “gender dysphoria” is a post-traumatic response to sexual violence, it reflects an attempt to dissociate, or split off, the trauma.
                       
"A trauma that cannot adequately be represented or narrated remains estranged. It is an alienated chunk of experience that resists any assimilation into the personhood of the host on whom it feeds. Dissociation can also be understood as a narrative act. It narrates fragmentation, breakage, rupture, disjunction, and incommensurability."(Epstein and Lefkovitz, 193)

Dissociation is a survival strategy.
 
"It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation (double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it allows escape from experiencing the event and from responsibility/guilt, and it may serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self. The child may begin by using the dissociative mechanism spontaneously and sporadically. With repeated victimization and double-bind injunctions, it becomes chronic. It may further become an autonomous process as the individual ages." (Courtois, 155)
 
Dissociation is a way of altering consciousness. As millions of survivors can testify, these dissociated memories have not really gone away. Whether or not they ever surface to the conscious mind, they continue to exert their influence through somatic disorders, flashbacks, sleep disturbances, intrusive dreams, and dissociative disorders. Repressed memories do not go away because one wishes them away. The survivor takes control of her life by understanding and assimilating repressed trauma, not reinforcing the split. And this is precisely why the GID diagnosis is so potentially pernicious when applied to the victimized daughter.
 
When the GID diagnosis is substituted for identification and treatment of PTSD, it reinforces the splitting that was a result of childhood trauma. However “queer” the diagnosis, it does not deviate from a model of normativity based on traditional sex-caste roles. The GID diagnosis that recommends transsexualism as a “cure” seriously compromises the victimized daughter’s potential for recovery from the effects of her trauma. Instead of offering techniques to aid her retrieval of memory and reintegration of dissociated material, the GID diagnosis enables and encourages an even deeper investment in the disorder, by offering a false promise of legitimizing this ahistorical dissociative identity through “reassignment” of gender. It exploits, rather than deconstructs, the syndrome.

Finally, when the transgender identity is an extension and amplification of the victimized daughter’s identification with the perpetrator, a divided consciousness continues to inform the survivor’s psyche, playing itself out in scenarios of revictimization.
 
"In both the play and imagination of the survivors, a tenuous relationship exists between the internalized male abuser and the violated female child… While the introjection of the perpetrator may at times mask the daughter’s identity as victim and thus contribute to the construction of a false persona, patterns of revictimization reveal the extent to which the unprotected and violated female self also inform the personality of the victimized daughter." (Jacobs, 99)
 
Revictimization was the story of Brandon’s short adult life, as she played out serial fraudulent identities that resulted in arrest and incarceration, seduction of under-aged girls who rejected her when they discovered her secret, and increasingly dangerous alliances with violent and homophobic males. Brandon’s sexual deceptions, deceptions that escalated after her official diagnosis as transsexual, put her girlfriends at risk in very real ways. Her girlfriends in Lincoln had been teased and harassed by their friends, but when Brandon moved to the more provincial Richardson County, the stakes became even higher. Both of Brandon’s Humboldt friends, Lisa Lambert and Lana Tisdel, were being harassed at their workplaces and at social events. One of Lisa’s friends described Lisa’s dilemma: “Everyone in Humboldt knew about Brandon. Lisa didn’t try to hide it. Lisa couldn’t believe something like this happened to her. She made it clear that she was too caring to shut Brandon out. She was mad and hurt about it, but she didn’t want to hurt him [Brandon], didn’t want to turn him out on the streets.” (Jones, 205) Her compassion would cost her her life.
 
Lana’s situation was complicated by her friendship with ex-convicts Tom Nissen and John Lotter. When Brandon was arrested for forging checks on December 15, 1993, she had phoned Lana to bail her out, but Lana was horrified to discover that her “boyfriend” was being held in the women’s section of the jail. Instead of going herself, Lana sent Tom, her former boyfriend, to bail Brandon out. The arrest was reported that week in the Falls City Journal, making public Brandon’s biological identity as female, and, consequently, Lana’s participation in what would be perceived as a lesbian relationship. Friends of Brandon believe that the bailing-out was the beginning of a set-up for the subsequent rape. Nissen and Lotter appear to have felt deceived and humiliated by Brandon’s gender presentation. In the words of one friend, “He [Brandon] played a player and [the player] got even for it.” (private email, December 20, 2004)

According to Jones, however, Lana had attempted to protect Brandon, even after she realized she had been deceived. She told her family and Tom Nissen and John Lotter that she had seen Brandon’s penis. But Tom and John were not convinced, and they performed their own investigation—strip-searching her. These were both men with histories of violence, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. It may have been that Lana’s safety was seriously compromised once it was known by these men that she had participated in a sexual relationship with a biological female and had lied to protect the fact.
 
Three days after Brandon had, at Lana’s urging, gone to the police to report the rape, the police questioned John and Tom, but did not arrest them. John denied the rape, but said that Lana had asked him to find a way to determine Brandon’s sex. On December 30, the two men went to Lana’s house looking for Brandon, but Brandon, who was no longer welcome there, had taken shelter at Lisa’s farmhouse. Lana reported that John said he “felt like killing someone” and told her she, Lana, was next. This may have been why Lana’s mother told them where Brandon was hiding. After they left, no phone calls were made to warn Brandon or Lisa that the men were on their way. Conflicting testimony suggests that Lana may have actually been in the car, or even at the house, on the night of the murders.

Many aspects of Brandon’s life would have been easier in a culture that was not transphobic, but recovery from incest trauma would not have been one of them.
 
"Recovery from traumatic sexualization… begins with the process of reintegration whereby the original trauma is brought to consciousness. Only then can the idealization of the perpetrator give way to the reality of his sexual violence. With the deconstruction of the idealized father, the daughter can begin to reclaim and redefine the female self, diminishing the impact of the internalized aggressor." (Jacobs, 165)
 
When the internalization of this ideal has become incorporated into the gender identity of the victimized daughter, specifically as a response to the trauma, this kind of deconstruction is impeded. These may have been so damaged by the incest that it might appear more expedient and more therapeutic to adopt a differently-gendered identity that is not so apparently freighted with traumatic associations. This identity, however, cannot—by definition—offer the integration that characterizes recovery.
 
So, how does the victimized daughter heal? In Victimized Daughters, Janet Liebman Jacobs elaborates some of the stages associated with recovery, noting that not every survivor will experience these changes: (Jacobs, 136)

As an adult, Brandon exhibited behaviors consistent with a diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome associated with incest survivors. Gender dysphoria has been clinically identified as a response to child sexual abuse and incest, and it is logical to question whether or not it was therapeutic in the case of Teena Brandon to diagnose transsexualism and recommend surgical reassignment in lieu of focusing on diagnosis and treatment of Complex PTSD. If healing from child sexual abuse and incest requires retrieval and assimilation of dissociated material, a strong case can be made that Brandon’s transsexualism diagnosis served to enhance her dissociation, impeding recovery from the incest and enabling an escalation of high-risk behaviors based on a dissociated identity.
 
As a final footnote, one of Brandon’s friends has shared this story about the week between the rape and the murder:
 
"On Christmas day of 1993, when Lisa brought Brandon back… from Falls City, [a friend] met him[Brandon] at the door and said “Hi Brandon” In reply [the friend] was told by Brandon that there was no Brandon, Brandon was gone. Her name is Teena. That didn’t change at any point in that last week." (private email, December 20, 2004).

 References

 
Blume, E. Sue. Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990.                                                                              
 
Chodorow, Nancy and Susan Contratto, “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” in Barrie Thorne, ed., with Marilyn Yalom, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. New York: Longman, 1980.
 
Corson, Charlotte. “Sex, Lies, and Feminism,” in off our backs, June 2001.
 
Courtois, Christine. Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.    
 
Epstein, Julia and Lori Hope Lefkovitz, Ed. Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
 
Ferenczi, Sandor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Pscyho-analysis. London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.
 
Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanism of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1981.
 
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
 
Horney, Karen. “The Masculinity Complex in Women,” Archive fur Frauenjunde 13 (1927): 141-54.
 
Jacobs, Janet Liebman Jacobs. Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self. New York: Routledge, 1994.
 
 Jeffreys, Sheila. “FTM Transsexualism and Grief,” in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue #15.
 
Jones, Aphrodite. What She Wanted. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
 
Muska, Susan and Gréta Olafsdóttir. The Brandon Teena Story. New York: New Video, 1999.
 
Peirce, Kimberly. Boys Don’t Cry. Hollywood: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 1998.
 
Shengold, Leonard. Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989.
 

The island I live on has a “barter-and-swap” Facebook page, which many of us bargain-hunters read on the the regular. One day, an intriguing request popped up, and it gave me pause. It was from a school librarian in one of the towns on the island. She was producing a “Human Library” day at her middle school, and she was looking for volunteers to be the "resources," if you will, in this one-day library. Specifically, she was looking for folks with identities and experiences outside of the ordinary… folks who could enhance the kids’ understanding of diversity from a first-person-narrative perspective.

Like many lesbians of my generation, public schools have not been especially welcoming or safe spaces for us. I have had my share of negative experiences, including one in which my lesbian theatre company was involved in a “national priority” ACLU lawsuit, because the composer for a musical I produced had been fired from a public school teaching job because of her affiliation with my theatre. This was the late 1980's, and in that state it was still legal to fire gay and lesbian teachers, but here's the catch:  This teacher had been fired for merely being associated with a lesbian theatre company... hence the ACLU's interest. They saw it as a legal foot in the door, because it broke Constitutional law.  (For a quick refresher on the relevant Bill of Rights clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”) The case, which was against a school district, a local arts council, and the state arts organization, did eventually  settle after an aggressive, state-wide PR campaign. It was a victory of sorts, but my valiant little theatre company had dragged so viciously through the homophobic mud, it was necessary for me to close it and move to another state. (Thank the Goddess, it was before the Internet and viral hate campaigns!)

But, dear reader, the universe is generous in its offers for do-overs, and this was mine. I volunteered. I actually had two identities that would qualify me for the project: I was a lesbian and I was autistic. For reasons that were part boredom from forty years of coming-out and part trauma from the ACLU thing, I chose to apply as autistic and undiagnosed. The other three human library books were a woman with an eating disorder, an immigrant who had spent time in a refugee camp, and a Jewish woman who had grown up in a small town where she had been the only Jew among her peers.  We were assigned to a classroom, where would talk about our lives and answer questions for thirty minutes, and then a new group of students would rotate in. Each of us would give our presentation three times. So this is what I said:

“I’m Carolyn Gage, and I am autistic. I was not diagnosed until very late in my life, and I’m going to talk about what was going on for me when I was a child. 
 
I was given a doll when I was a very little girl--I believe six, or maybe even younger. Her name was Ginny, and I immediately recognized that she was a queen. She looked something like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz. Ginny was wise, and she was good, and she was very powerful. I was intensely engaged with Ginny  and her story, which I was making up as I went along, but which I experienced more as getting to know her. 

Word got out that I liked dolls, and family and friends began to give me all kinds of dolls on my birthday and for Christmas. I would inherit the neighbors’ outgrown dolls. My collection would eventually include over fifty dolls, and my cousins built me a dollhouse that was four feet high and six feet wide, with four floors, an attic and a dungeon.  It was basically a stack of boxes with doors cut between them.  For me, it was a palace. It had a  a chest of jewels in the dungeon; it had a garden terrace with a fountain; it had an attic garret for the servants. Yes, there was a full contingent of servants right out of the fairy tales: scullery maids, and grooms, and footmen in livery... It made no difference that I didn’t know what they did or even what livery was.
 
I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance... There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother--who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT... in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit... which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.

And now a word on “hyperfocus.”  That is a word applied to us autistic folks when we are passionate about some subject or activity, when we are able to devote our entire attention to said subject or activity for long periods of time with a high degree of concentration. It might be snakes, or magic tricks, or collecting coins… but it is something from which we derive immense satisfaction, which is why we focus our attention on it. Our special interest will trump every other activity or interest in our lives. Quite simply, nothing can compare.  Neurotypical people, who are not autistic, feel like there is something wrong with that... something a little too much about our special interests. Hence the word "hyperfocus." (In the bad old days, our special interests were even more insultingly characterized as "obsessions!") From my perspective, I think there is something sad about people who are not blessed with their very own, highly personal wellspring of profound satisfaction. They seem to suffer from a condition of  "hypo-joie-de-vivre," for which they compensate with excessive and superficial socializing. Neurotypicals don't hold the monopoly on pseudo-scientific name-calling.
 
So, anyway… my so-called hyperfocus. My mother had noticed my intense relationship with the dollhouse and with the dolls. Worried that it was going to crowd out everything in my life, she made me pack up the dolls every summer, in the hopes I would go outside and play with the neighborhood kids... you know, "be normal."  Yes, I would go outside, but I had an emergency kit of miniature dolls. I would go into the woods with a copy of Peter Pan and enact the entire book down by the creek.

When I turned thirteen and was entering high school, she came down to my bedroom, which was in the basement, and she told me that I was now too old to play with dolls,  and that it was time to pack them up for good. For me, this was like having your mother tell you that it’s time to murder your fifty best friends. I was profoundly upset and I began to cry hysterically. She was shocked by this and told me that I could go upstairs and that she would pack up the dolls without me.
 
And what do you think happened? Yes, I was lost. It’s like when you pull the centerboard out of sailboat…  You can’t set a course anymore. The boat just blows around and very likely will capsize. It’s also like losing your compass. There’s no more “north” anymore. All directions are the same and equally meaningless. No centerboard and no compass, I wandered and I also went whichever way the wind blew. I copied my friends. I tried to please other people.  My mother wanted me to get married, so when I was eighteen I got engaged, and three months after I turned nineteen, I walked down the aisle. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. But, never mind. It didn't matter. There had been this massacre of the imagination. My entire tribe had been wiped out.

I didn’t find my way again until I was thirty years old, and I went to college to get a degree in theatre. It had taken me seventeen years to find my way back to the dollhouse, and some of those years were very hard and very dangerous, because of autism but also because I had lost my centerboard and my compass.  And some of those years were fun and easy, because I was pretending to be someone fun, and I found myself in circumstances that were easy. But the main thing was that I wasn’t being myself. And for the folks who knew me and loved me during that era, this does not in any way mean I am not so grateful to have had you in my life, or that I don't love you. I believe that several of you actually saved my life. But, in spite of that love...  I was still far, far from home.
 
So, at thirty, I was back in the dollhouse. Back making up stories and bringing characters to life. I was an actor and a director, and for a little while I taught theatre classes, but eventually, I found that my true calling was being a playwright.... which was what I had been doing in the dollhouse. And I have now been a professional playwright for more than forty years. I have written over a hundred plays that are published in nine collections of my work. I have toured all over the US, and some in Canada, and in Europe, and I have met a whole lot of really wonderful and interesting people. I have had a great life. Full of challenges, but always rich in meaning.

The moral of the story is my mother didn’t need to worry about me. My special interest was going to give me a life... the life I was meant to have. It wasn’t the life she had planned for me, but it was the one I wanted.

So I want to tell you another story. Yes, it is connected to the dollhouse, so put a pin in that. We'll get back to it. This is a story about Beatrix Farrand, who was a landscape gardener here on Mount Desert Island. (She didn't like to use the word "architect" for what she did.) I don’t know if she was autistic or not… Back in her day very, very few autistic women were ever diagnosed, but she did have a thing about which she was passionate and to which she devoted her life, full-time, and even over-time... as in, “hyperfocus.” It was designing and executing gardens. She designed a lot of them here on Mount Desert Island. She designed Abbey Rockefeller’s garden, which  you can still visit. And she designed her own garden down on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor.  She had inherited a cottage and some acres there. It was named Reef Point, and Beatrix wanted to create an internationally famous garden where people could come from all over the world to  appreciate the beauty of the plants and of the Maine coast. She also collected a huge library of books about landscape gardening that she intended to make available to folks who were serious about gardening.

So, this is the important part of the story:  Her land went right down to the ocean, with rocky cliffs and huge boulders, and huge firs and spruce trees. When you looked out at the ocean, you would be looking through these trees, and she loved that view. And so do I. It's very specific to Maine. And Beatrix thought the natural landscape around the house was spectacular.  Now, some of her clients wanted their homes to look like the European homes of rich people with huge flat lawns all planted in grass, that would extend right to the edge of the water. And they wanted gardens that would have these geometrically laid out garden beds, in squares and diamonds with short little hedges around them and a fountain in the middle. And the way you built a garden like that was by cutting down most of the trees and pulling out all those big rocks, and then bulldozing the whole thing completely flat and planting it with grass. And the plants in those gardens would come from all over the place, and only a few of  them would be native. And everyone’s garden kind of looked the same.

But Beatrix had a little saying, and it went something like this:  She said “Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”  What did that mean? It meant take a good look at those gorgeous trees and those huge rocks that are so unique to this island, and all those dips and bumps in the ground… and then make a design that works around them. Maybe put in some native plants around some of the rocks, to draw the eye. Maybe even add some trees to make the skyline a little more balanced… but you start with what's already there, the ground. You don’t start with your plan, and then bring in the chainsaws and bulldozers.
 
So my mother had a plan for me, but she didn't take into account what my ground was.  Or maybe she did, and she thought if she packed up all the dolls and ripped apart the plywood of the dollhouse—if she bulldozed who I was—then her plan would work. And I guess it did... for a while.  I was married for a year. And then I just went drifting. But eventually, after seventeen years,  I began to evolve a plan, or a series of plans, that would fit the ground of who I was, an autistic person with a definite special interest. 

Why am I telling you this? Because lots of people throughout your life will have plans for you. Your parents... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. They love you, and it's natural for them to have some idea of how they think your life should be. Your teachers, your friends, your partners... they may all have vague or definite plans for you.  But sometimes--most times--they don't really see the ground of who you are. Or they see it, but they don't "get it." They think the trees block the view, and the rocks are hard to mow around. Your ground won't work with the plan they have in mind.  But your job is to understand your ground: what is you and what isn't you, what probably  isn't going to change, what you love, what makes you the happiest in the world. And no matter how weird that is, if it's your special interest, you can probably make a great life out of it.

Why? Because you will do that thing long after everyone else has clocked out and gone home. You will do it on weekends. You will do it on holidays. You will do it for low pay or no pay. And in time,  you will probably stand out, because you will be working harder, smarter, better than everyone else, because of that so-called "hyperfocus."  You may not see the plan now, but trust the passion. It's a gift. These are the years you should be learning your ground, appreciating it, standing up for the beauty of it and your right to inhabit it.

So, if you take away anything from what I've said today, I hope it's this:  t

“Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”

Here’s the problem.  Amber Heard presented two photos as evidence that she was a victim of battering. They were actually the same image, but one of them had been edited. When cross-examined about this, she insisted that they were two separate photos. She said that she took the first photo, and then turned on a light and took the second photo. Hmm… Then the photos were displayed to the court with their time stamps. They were both taken at exactly the same second. Exactly.

So Ms. Heard explained how she took the first photo, then broke the pose to turn on a light, and then got back in exactly the same pose to take the second photo… all of this in less time than one second. The same identical angle, the same identical expression, the same identical placement of every single hair. What she was asking us to believe was impossible. It was, to put it bluntly, a lie. We all had eyes. We were all looking at the photos, at the time stamps. We all knew how brief one second is. Did she take us for idiots?  And if she had no difficulty presenting us with such a blatant, demonstrable lie, how could we believe anything else she said, especially if it was a lie that might help her case?

At this point some of us were remembering her inadvertently disclosing to the court that she owned a “bruise kit.” What is a “bruise kit” you may ask…. Well, it’s a “cosmetic item that comprises a disc with many color palettes, including red, burgundy, violet, purple, yellow, and sallow green compacts. As per the Ben Nye Makeup Company, the wheel is made up of hues that closely resemble the color seen in bruises and skin abrasions.” Actors use bruise kits to make themselves look bruised. Heard told us she owned one. And then she quickly disavowed it.
 
Ms. Heard could have made a different choice when she was caught submitting an edited photo as evidence. She could have said, “Yes, it is the same image, but since this is such an important piece of evidence, I edited it to better delineate the bruise on my cheek.” Some of us might have still been skeptical. Some of us might have thought, “Well, that makes sense. She’s entitled.” Some of us might have wondered, “Is that even allowed?”  But there would have at least been some wiggle room.

What Ms. Heard told us was such a blatant lie, it insulted our intelligence. And this happened over and over again during the course of the trial. She would be challenged about something she said or something she presented as evidence, and in order to defend it, she would generate a whole new string of lies, usually more implausible than the original. She did this with her lie that she had donated all the money from her divorce settlement to charity. Though not included in the trial, she did it when confronted about her arrest and her night in jail for domestic violence. She did it when caught with falsified papers, attempting to smuggle her dogs into Australia. She did it with her version of how part of Mr. Depp’s finger was severed.
 
And then, after all these documented inconsistencies and contradictions, there is the issue of how much she asks us to take her at her word...The complete absence of medical records of injuries from alleged years of horrific battery and rape that would go on for hours and days. The lack of witnesses, apart from a sister who, according to a court declaration, was herself a victim of Heard’s violence. The lack of photographic evidence—apart from the bruise photo— when there are dozens of photographs of spilled wine, broken glass, defaced mirrors, lines of cocaine, Mr. Depp passed out/sleeping. And there is the videotaping of his behavior without permission. It’s not like Ms. Heard was shy about documenting. Why didn’t she just step in front of the mirror when she photographed it? The photographs she submitted as proof of injury in no way matched the narratives of extreme violence that she described. Not even close.

The UK trial admitted therapy records into evidence as “medical records.” In the US, therapy  records are considered hearsay--which they are--and, as such, they are rightfully disallowed. The judge in the UK trial, a man who had personal and professional connections with the publication being sued and who would have been disqualified as a juror in the US, relied on Ms. Heard’s word to reach a verdict. The US jury did not. I feel it's worth noting that the judge believed at the time, as did the rest of the world, that she had already donated her seven-million-dollar divorce settlement to charity. Because she had said so, repeatedly.
 
Look, many of us who followed this trial are survivors.  And many of us were abused by people who lie. Our responses to lies and liars can be skewed by this experience. I remember my mother explaining to my father that I had broken the back window of our station wagon. I was probably ten, or younger. The window had somehow been rolled up not in the track, and forced so badly that it would not roll up or down anymore. I hadn’t done it. I was confused. How could I have forgotten doing that? Did she mistake someone else for me? And why was she being all giggly about it?  Today I understand that my mother broke the window and lied about it, because she was terrified of my father, and she was probably high. Maybe she thought my father would be less angry at a child. Whatever she was thinking, she counted on my loyalty in that moment, and I did not disappoint.

I knew I had not broken the window. I knew my mother was saying something that she knew was not true. I did what many survivors learned to do. I refused to connect the dots. Connecting the dots would leave me with one of two conclusions: “I must be crazy” or “My mother is a dangerous liar.”  So I just turned on the internal fog machine that so many abused children have learned to deploy. I let the testimony of my own experience and the lie of my mother coexist, unconnected, in my brain. I needed to believe my mother, because my father was terrifying. That was my overriding ideology: Trust my mother.
 
But I’m not a child anymore. I have disabled the fog machine, in spite of the fact that this complicates my life. I have had to ditch the ideology that kept me from connecting the dots. In recovery, there are no ideologies that justify sacrificing my experience of what is true.

Amber Heard has just lied to a courtroom, to a jury, and to me about a piece of critical evidence. And it’s obvious to everyone watching.  Yes, I want to believe survivors. I have written the largest canon of plays dealing with violence against women of any playwright in the English-speaking world. I am a survivor. I have skin in this game.  And among many feminists, especially feminist activists, there is an ideology about always believing women who claim to be abuse victims.

But Amber Heard has just lied and I saw her do it.  I no longer have a way to let that coexist in my brain with believing her. The dots connect themselves these days: She lied; therefore she is a liar; therefore she is not to be trusted.

And these dots also simultaneously connect up: This is a really, really inconvenient truth in a world where there is finally a global movement of women coming forward to name powerful men as perpetrators. The vast majority of perpetrators of violence against women are, of course, men. And it’s  a really, really inconvenient truth that otherwise powerful men can occasionally be victims of domestic violence at the hands of women.

But... any movement that purports to be for survivors, and at the same time demands that its followers disbelieve the testimony of our own eyes, demands that we give liars a pass on their documented deceptions, and that demands of male survivors impossibly high standards for evidence--even in just one instance--is a movement that lacks credibility. Because that's how lying works.

About 35 years ago, I got the idea of building a museum to commemorate and honor women who are victims of rape. I was inspired at the time by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. I eventually published "The Women's Rape Museum" as a blog on this site.

Because of this blog, two architecture students from the University of San Carlos in the Phillippines reached out to me, asking me to be a consultant on their thesis project, which was to design a museum for survivors of sexual violence. The two students were Allen Celestino and Fairyssa Biana Canama... and they did an incredible job with their project, titled "Walls of Silence: A Survivor's Museum." It was designed for a site in Cebu City, but it could and should serve as a model for similar museums in any city.

Celestino and Canama studied a range of Holocaust and war memorial museums, and came up with a design that would take visitors on a healing journey through the different stage of assimilating the trauma of rape. To aid in the presentation of their thesis, they made a beautiful short video that takes the viewer on a graphic tourof the various passages and chambers of this architectural journey.

Their video journey is only 3.5 minutes long... and well worth the viewing! They have broken down the chaotic and inchoate process of healing from post-rape trauma, helping the victim access an experience that too often is an internal and unassimilated secret.

The genius of their project is that this is also a healing and integrating experience for the friends and families of survivors, who often have no idea what their loved one is going through. In this museum experience, they can literally accompany them through these externalized stages, offering enormous opportunity for dialogue and empathy. 

For those who are interested in the process behind their choices, their half-hour thesis presentation is fascinating and also available online.  (It includes the shorter video of the museum tour.) Both Celestino and Canama come out as survivors in their video, and their design process reflects their constant engagement with their own experiences.

I encourage survivors and those who love us to take the short tour of Walls of Silence, and then the longer tour of the thesis presentation. I encourage all of us begin to think more deeply about the needs of survivors in our culture and ways to bring this tangible, visible proof of caring to our communities.

I have a friend named Elliott, who is a disabled, radical, working-class, Jewish, lesbian-feminist activist. She wrote an interesting article about the political implications of the contents of the supplemental dictionary of her word-processing program. The supplemental dictionary is a file that allows the user to customize the spell-check program by adding words that are not in the default dictionary that came with the program. Here is a partial list of words from Elliott’s file:
ableism
ableist
accessibility
Ashkenazic
assimilationist
batterer
classism
classist
clit
dyke
Eurocentric
feminisms
futon
heterosex
heteropatriarchal
homelessness
ism
lesbophobia
miso
mythologize
sephardic
sizeism
tampax
tempeh
therapism
yiddishe

Obviously, the words that are critical to Elliott’s defining her experience—not only her day-to-day reality, but also her identities and her oppressions—are missing. The point of Elliott’s article was to make visible the usually invisible process of marginalization. What does it mean when “tits” is in the dictionary, but “clit” is not? What does it mean when there is a term for hating queers, but not one specific to the combination of homophobia and misogyny? What does it mean when “ablebodied” is in the dictionary, but “ableism” is not? What does it mean when every conceivable category for christian sects and denominations is included, but the words descriptive of Jewish ethnic origins are not? What does it mean when all the pejorative terms for poor people are in the dictionary, but “classism” is not?

Elliott’s printout of the contents of her supplemental dictionary file makes visible a process that is usually hidden. The printout not only exposes a mechanism of exclusion, but it also suggests connections and patterns of oppression among her diverse identities.

What is missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature? Turning to the supplemental file of my own canon of plays, I find that nearly all of the archetypes I use are absent from the traditional canon: the avenging mother, the survivor of sexual assault who is believed, the angry young woman, the ambitious winner, the fiercely loyal sisters, the venerated crone, the lesbian lover. My archetypal narratives are also missing: the sanctioned patricide, the woman’s resurrection through rage, the recovery of memory, the shifting of paradigms, the de-colonization of the body, the furious re-invention of the self, the reconstruction of the ruptured mother-daughter bond.

There are many archetypes in my lesbian-feminist culture that are missing from the traditional canon of dramatic literature. As with Elliott’s supplemental dictionary, I find it instructive to examine these omissions for what they reveal about that mainstream canon. These archetypes include the rejected older woman who, instead of becoming consumed with revenge like Medea, liberates
herself joyously from the entire heterosexual paradigm that would put her out to pasture at menopause. In the patriarchal canon, the archetypal survivor is Cassandra, whose ability to predict the future is seen as a curse, not a strategic advantage, because no one will believe her. In my culture, the survivor of male atrocities uses her second sight to heal herself and to rescue and recruit other victimized women. In our epic dramas, the daughter, unlike Elektra, sides with the mother against a perpetrating father, and our goddesses, unlike the motherless Athena, endorse the patricide of the perpetrator, not the matricide of the avenging mother. Our Antigones, longing for a voice in the political process, are not satisfied with impotent and self-martyring protests against a sadistic, misogynist system, but seek out the alliances with other powerful women. We have a literature
replete with warrior women from long lines of unbroken matrilineal bonding. Why are these rich roles and archetypes missing from a canon that purports to be universal?


I suggest that it is because of the censorship of incest as a subject fit for inclusion in the canon. If we believe the statistics that tell us one third of all girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen, usually by a male caregiver, the case could be made that incest is the central paradigm for women in patriarchy. Incest is the template for a woman’s experience of betrayal by her fathers and her brothers. When the mother is forced to choose between the interests of her male partner or male offspring, and the interests of her daughter, she will most often align her interests with what will give her the most stake in a male-dominated system. Sadly, most mothers will reject their sexually abused daughters. And here we see the Cassandra who cannot erase her memory of trauma, but who cannot find the women—or the men—who will believe her. Here we see the Clytemnestra, who, in
avenging the murder of her daughter, falls victim to another daughter and a son who identify with the perpetrating father. Here is Medea who avenges her sexual rejection on the younger woman and on her own children. Here is Athena, defining the father as the true parent, the one who provides the “seed,” and the mother as only the empty carrier, the borrowed womb.

When incest is not named, when the incest story is not told, it becomes the accepted paradigm, part of the default lexicon for defining accepted reality.
In preparing this paper, I asked the members of my theatre newsgroup for titles of plays that dealt with child sexual abuse/incest. I say “child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest,” because, in my experience of working with survivors, the two are most often synonymous, or, at least, very closely related in terms of scenarios and syndromes.

The first thing I noticed from the list of titles was that the “slash” has disappeared. There is almost no connection at all between the portrayal of incest and child sexual abuse in the majority of these plays. Incest as a titillating scenario of adult desire is a recurrent theme. Child sexual abuse is all but absent.
A sampling of incest titles from the traditional and contemporary canon include: Oedipus Rex, Phaedre, Pericles, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Desire Under the Elms, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Ghosts, Fool for Love.

Lots of stepmother-stepson adult attraction, lots of half-brother-half-sister adult attraction, and a couple of cases of adult parent-child, mistaken-identity attraction. I know and have worked with hundreds of incest survivors, and not one of our stories even remotely resembles any of these. In fact, I don’t know anyone whose story resembles these. The popularity of these models for incest must be attributable to either the fantasies or the subconscious fears of the male playwrights who employ them as plot devices.

Moving away from incest to plays that deal with child sexual abuse, we find the field thins out considerably. Almost all of the plays in this category are recent ones. One of the oldest is Turn of the Screw, with its suggestions of sexual abuse by a tutor and a governess. Part of the much-touted mystery of this play, however, is the fact that audiences never know if the story is true or just the neurotic, projected, sexual fantasies of a frustrated spinster. There are two contemporary plays about child sexual abuse set in all-male environments, focusing on the fate of the perpetrator in prison communities: Lilies and Short Eyes.

Two of the suggested titles finally dealt with experiences of child-sexual-abuse-slash-incest. The first is Nuts, a play by Tom Torpor that was made into a feature film starring Barbra Streisand—a film which, unlike other Streisand films, received almost no critical attention. The protagonist is a prostituted woman who has murdered a john. During the course of her trial, she recovers repressed
childhood memories of paternal incest.

And then there is How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, which has just won a Pulitzer. In this play an older girl is sexually abused by her uncle. What does it mean that a play on the traditionally taboo subject of incest has been officially recognized by being awarded the Pulitzer? Is this a sign that the silence about incest is being broken, or just a subtler form of censorship. In order to answer
that question it is important to look carefully at the depiction of the survivor in How I Learned to Drive, and it is also important to understand something about the process of a child when she is sexually abused, especially by a trusted adult or caregiver, as is the case in Ms. Vogel’s play.

The experience of the sexually-abused child is this: “This can’t be happening to me” and “This is happening to me and I can’t stop it.” There is a variation on that second part: “This is happening to me and it’s going to keep happening to me, night after night, for years and years and years, and I can’t stop it.” Obviously, “This can’t happen” and “This is happening” are mutually exclusive propositions. To accommodate them in one body, the mind splits off the second part--the
unthinkable, the unspeakable part. Some children literally experience themselves rising up to a corner of the room and watching it all from the ceiling. Others spontaneously repress the memory as it happens. In the case of Marilyn Van Derber, a former Miss America who was raped by her father for years, she had a “day child” and a “night child” identity. The “night child” had no communication with the “day child,” until Van Derber was in her 30’s and began to recover her
memories, the recovery apparently triggered by her daughter having reached the age at which her own abuse had begun.

Some children experience displacement. A typical episode of displacement involved a child who was raped by a friend of her father’s while her father held her down. During the rape she focused on a poster of a rock star that was on the wall, and afterwards she “remembered” the abuse being perpetrated by someone whose description tallied with that of the rock star. She successfully displaced the identity of the rapist to protect herself from information too dangerous to access.
In some cases, the child does not travel to the corner of the room, but instead, she merges her identity with that of the perpetrator. In this syndrome, referred to as “fusion with the perpetrator, “ the child identifies with him during the abuse, adopting a pornographic perspective toward her own body as “other.” Because of her complete lack of agency, it is safer to identify with the experience of the perpetrator than with her own. The child who experiences fusion during the trauma learns, as a survival skill, to become aroused by her own pain, fear, and humiliation.

Most survivors split off not only the incest, but also various emotional affects associated with the experience. The child whose natural instinct would be to fight off or even kill her assailant is obviously in a dilemma if this assailant is a primary caregiver on whom her survival depends. In cases of incest, normal healthy emotional responses can jeopardize the life of a child and she may develop completely various dissociative states to store these taboo and life-threatening emotions and behaviors. Rage at her rapist and grief at the betrayal are two of the strongest and most taboo emotions for the survivor, and it may be very difficult for the victim to access these, even later in life, because of her early association of these emotions with life-threatening conditions.

Getting back to How I Learned to Drive and the Pulitzer… Ms. Vogel’s play is an accurate depiction of a certain type of incest, in which the girl is older and the perpetrator is not violent and poses as someone supportive of her interests. In situations like these, it is common for the victim to feel complicitous, to mistake the perpetrator’s predation for a “relationship,” and to romanticize or sentimentalize the experience. Her confusion stems from the still-necessary repression of rage and grief.

Does this have anything to do with its official recognition? I maintain that it has everything to do with it. The key to that Pulitzer lies in what is missing from the canon: the incest play from the perspective of a recovered survivor—the survivor who has integrated her rage and her grief and who understands her experience in the context of a male-dominant culture dependent on the sexual subordination of women.

Ms. Vogel’s play was praised for the “humanity” with which she treated her subject. She was also praised for depicting the “complexity” (read “mutuality?”) of incest, the fact that is not always so “black and white.” They praised her even-handedness in the sympathetic portrayal of the perpetrator, the confusion of the victim. In other words, the majority of the critics were not noticing that the point-of-view was pathological, that the victim was still deeply dissociative. But in order to
notice this, they would have to notice the lack of anger or grief. I submit that her critics did not miss the anger or grief at all, and, furthermore, I submit that she received the Pulitzer precisely because that anger and that grief were missing. She told an incest story in which there is not political context, in which the act itself is as isolated as a tree falling in the woods, in which the perpetrator is not a sadistic predator, but “merely” a loser. Her survivor is resigned, superior, moving on. How poignant, how handy.

How I Learned to Drive is not the only dissociative narrative being valorized as the whole story. There are several well-known performance artists, women and self-declared survivors of horrendous sexual abuse, who tour to colleges and universities where they take their clothes off and even recreate scenarios of sexual abuse in the name of sexually liberating themselves or protesting the
objectification of women. Performance art critics have written tomes of theory about these artists, none of which incorporates a shred of theory about trauma and recovery.

What if these “radical porn feminist activists” are actually partially-recovered survivors still in the “acting out” phase of early recovery? What if the replication of traumatic scenarios under these more controlled and therefore subjectively more empowering circumstances (no pimps, no johns) is part of their process in integrating? What if the audience is watching an unrecovered survivor
parade her pathologies in front of us in an articulate, but still incoherent attempt to tell her story and integrate? What if these are not sexually liberated adult women at all, but women who are still slaves to their traumatized childhoods?

One sure way of finding out would be to compare their performances and their narratives to the work of recovered survivors, whose narratives incorporate anger toward the perpetrator and a full sense of the lost entitlement of safety and agency, with the cultural context in which their abuse occurred as subtext. But these narratives are conspicuous in their absence. The story of the fully integrated
survivor is missing, even as the survivor who sentimentalizes her perpetrator or who recreates her own abuse for mass consumption receives the official endorsement of the mainstream.

Why aren’t more women noticing and protesting this absence, this censorship? Well, let’s imagine we are at a play right now. And let’s assume that those of you who are listening to this paper are the audience. Let’s break it down: Half of you are women. For every three women in the audience, one will have been sexually abused as a child, most likely in a situation involving incest with a male
perpetrator. Let us consider that those women, those women who comprise one third of the female audience. Do they remember at all? Many will not. If these women do remember, how have they dealt with it? More to the point, with whom are they sitting? Probably with family. Would those seat companions be there if she remembered, if she told? If the companion is a spouse, would he welcome the inevitable disinheritance, the stigma, the disruption of childcare arrangements, the
awkwardness at family gatherings? Is he up for the financial and emotional demands of the healing process? If she’s there with parents, would she lose one? Both? And how many siblings? Most of these women will have tried to forget or ignore. Frequently they are helped out in this by dissociative disorders which keep the memory conveniently disconnected from the emotions, which have been hermetically sealed off in other parts of the psyche. And here How I Learned to Drive, with its deeply dissociative heroine, will provide reassurance and validation. This play will be much more comfortable for the woman in denial than a play about a recovered survivor.

If these survivors in our audience are inclined to be religious, they can mistake this dissociation for forgiveness or transcendence, as did the critics of How I Learned to Drive. Forgiveness and transcendence are both endorsed as feminine virtues in ways that anger or a sense of entitlement are not.

But maybe these women in our audience have forged an entire identity from their fusion with the perpetrator. Maybe they experience themselves as sexually liberated, because they revel in the recreations of scenarios of their abuse. Certainly a pornographically-inclined partner will not be likely to complain. In fact, mainstream culture will endorse the woman who enjoys acting out sexually against herself. One could, in fact, make the case that this is the point of incest. If this third
of our female audience is still experiencing fusion with the perpetrator, they might enjoy the work of performers who treat their own bodies as “other,” and who arouse themselves with self-violation.

But what if this audience is not identified with the perpetrator? Then they are likely to react to this kind of “performance art” with sexual shock, retreating into the various dissociative states to which they have become habituated. Or maybe they are further along in their healing than the performer and they are feeling anger toward the rest of the audience for their exploitation of an obvious survivor. But if these women express this opinion, if they protest what is going on, or if they walk
out of the theatre, they will be labeled puritans, members of the sex police, feminazis. They are greatly at risk of calling attention to themselves as survivors, which is very dangerous in a situation where sexual predation is being encouraged. She may feel trapped with dangerous perceptions she
cannot articulate. If she is on a road to integrating, she may be forced back into splitting, and this is tremendously destructive of the healing process.

What is my point?

My point is that the canon is skewed, that the depictions of child sexual abuse that are allowed serve an agenda to marginalize the voice of the recovered survivor. My point is that we cannot possibly understand what we are seeing on the stage, nor can we theorize about it, until we have allowed all the voices of incest survivors to be heard, and especially the voices of those who have integrated
their experience and who can make the larger connections between a culture that looks the other way when girls are raped and then turns around and markets their damaged sexuality as role models for all women.

[Originally presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, Toronto, 1999.]