Originally published in off our backs, March 1, 2006.

I met Tee Corinne at a women writers’ group in her home a few weeks after I moved to Southern Oregon, in 1988. I had just come out, and Tee was the first lesbian artist I had met whose art was for lesbians and from a lesbian perspective. I could not have found a more inspiring and revolutionary model.
 
Tee was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art. According to Tee, “I have seldom succeeded in keeping a diary, but I have almost always carried a drawing pad and, since, my eighth year, I have also had a camera.” 1
 
With a bachelor’s degree in printmaking and painting (with minors in English and history), she went on in 1968 to get an MFA in drawing and sculpture at Pratt Institute. After a few years of teaching and backpacking in Europe, she became attracted to the back-to-the-land movement and communal living. She was also, in her words, sliding into suicidal depression:

Something didn’t feel right. Nowadays they talk about over-achieving adult children of alcoholics and the problems they have with depression… Around the age of thirty I realized that art could no longer solve my problems… I found therapy, separated from my husband, became involved with women and joined the Women’s Movement. I felt better. 2
 
At forty-four, Tee recovered memories of being sexually molested at the age of six. .
I am coming to look on my suicidal years (13-29) through the lens of this information, and find, even then, strengths to be drawn upon: the strength of the survivor; the strength of talking which chips away at the killing silence; the knowledge of the value of my own life. It’s mine. I’ve paid for it.3

Tee’s photography traced the roadmap of her personal journey. In the early 1970’s, after moving to California, Tee began working on the San Francisco Sex Information Switchboard, where she claims she learned an appreciation of sexual information. She began researching erotic art by classical artists like Rembrandt and Michelangelo. At this time, the early Second Wave feminists were arguing that heterosexuality and erotic art objectified women, but Tee’s resistance took an alternate approach: …“sensuality at its best is transformative. If I had a sense of being in touch with God, it would be at the point of orgasm.” 4  
 
She became adept at representing lesbian sexuality in ways that would elude the male gaze. In 1982, she produced a series of photographs called Yantras of Womanlove. Concerned with protecting the privacy of her models, she used techniques involving multiple prints, solarization, images printed in negative, and multiple exposures. Tee consistently and conscientiously included women of color, fat women, older women, and women with disabilities as her subjects. Sometimes printers would refuse to print her works and art galleries would refuse to show it. In 1975, she self-published the Cunt Coloring Book, which is still in print today.
 

In the early 1980’s, Tee moved to Southern Oregon, becoming part of a community of lesbians and other women who were self-consciously creating and documenting a radical, women-only culture. Many of these women were living on “women’s lands,” rural separatist collectives and communes that had been founded in the 1970’s. She became a co-facilitator of the Feminist Photography Ovulars and a co-founder of The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography (1981-83). During the next decade, much of her work would focus on her experiences of growing up in an alcoholic family and being molested as a child.
 
My grandmother Mabel died when I was forty, leaving me a suitcase full of five generations of photographs… 5  Somewhere in the process of enlarging and coloring in the old photo images, I began to bring the past and present together, visually and psychically.6
 

During this period, Tee edited several anthologies of lesbian erotic fiction. As an editor, Tee was scrupulously respectful of class difference as it is reflected in writing, again modeling an authentic, not tokenized, diversity. She looked for “stories about how sexuality could work with the bodies we have, within our disparate personal histories.”7
 
In 2004, Tee’s partner of fourteen years, writer and social activist Beverly Anne Brown, was diagnosed with metastasized colon cancer and given a terminal diagnosis. Wanting to use something more immediate than darkroom techniques, Tee learned to use a digital camera and Adobe Photoshop in order to “push the polite boundaries of portraiture.”8 The result is the series “Cancer in Our Lives.”
 
After the death of her partner, Tee was diagnosed with a rare form of bile duct cancer. On August 27, 2006, she died quietly in her home. She was surrounded by a network of loving and supportive members of her community, who thoughtfully maintained a weblog in order to keep Tee’s wider, international community informed about her health.

In the monograph about her exhibit titled “Family,” Tee wrote:
 
If I look inside me, talk to the child within who, after all, is the one who originally wanted to be an artist, I find that she almost always knows how she wants my work to look: “Beautiful, in a big and powerful way.”9
 
Those words could stand as her epitaph. Tee, you will be missed.
 

Footnotes:
 
1. Tee Corinne, “Personal Statement,” http://www.varoregistry.com/corinne/pers.html
2. Tee Corinne, Family: Growing Up In an Alcoholic Family, (North Vancouver, B.C: Gallerie Publications, 1970), p. 3.
3. Ibid, p. 9.
4. Tee Corinne, interviewed by Barbara Kyne, http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html
5. Corinne, Family, p. 7.
6. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
7. Tee Corinne, Riding Desire, (Austin, Texas: Banned Books, 1990), p.viii).
8. Tee Corinne, “Colored Pictures” from “Cancer in Our Lives,” http://www.jeansirius.com/TeeACorinne/Colored_Pictures/
9. Corinne, Family, p. 13.
 

 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 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.
 

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.]

I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

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Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.

This was originally published as "Sermon on Stories" in Sermons for a Hot Kitchen From the Lesbian Tent Revival.

Stories are great things. Stories can be maps. They can be templates. They can be guidebooks. They can be cautionary tales. They can be mirrors. They can be latitude and longitude. They can be spiritual vitamins. They can be precious heritage. Lesbian poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” That sounds kind of poetic until you look hard at what we call reality, at quantum physics. Then it’s actually pretty scientific.  And here’s poet Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Which brings me back to that great quotation from the Gospel of St. Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 
 
Now you can bring forth that “thing that is in you” in poetry, or painting, or dance, or theatre, or music, or story. And if you bring it forth as story, it may be a story that only you can interpret, and that’s okay.
 
But stories can also be propaganda. That’s why we’re going to synapse around the whole thing of “story” today. Because the propaganda stories can get us thinking along lines that will cause us to betray our own best interests… and often, in scrubbing off the layers of falsehood in popular myths, like fairy tales or folklore or patriotic myths, we can recognize some life-saving truths that underlie the distortion or the appropriation. Kinda like when you find a masterpiece underneath that painting of dogs playing cards.
 
So that’s what we’re doing today.

We’re going to look at a very popular story in the colonization of America. We’re going to look at the story of Sacagawea. Most of us will remember that she was the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition in their efforts to locate a route across the western half of the continent, to the Pacific Ocean. She’s a big heroine in American history, and her image—or some artist’s idea of her image—is on a dollar coin, and she’s been on a postage stamp, and folks love to tell the traditional story about her, because it’s about a strong woman on a bold adventure, and it’s also about interracial harmony.
 
Now, those aren’t bad reasons for telling stories… except that in the case of Sacagawea, they aren’t the whole truth. And the parts of the truth that they are hiding are really, really important parts of the story. And there is also a story underneath that is not being told.
 
So, let’s get out those tools for scraping off those layers of cultural whitewash and mansplainery,  and see a little bit more of what’s really going on in this story.
 
Sacagawea was born into the Shoshone tribe in Idaho around 1788, and when she was eleven or twelve years old, she was in a Shoshone hunting camp near what today is Three Forks, Montana, that was attacked by the Hidatsa, a Siouan tribe of Native Americans. In this raid, four Shoshone men and four Shoshone women, and several boys were killed. Sacagawea was taken captive and enslaved. Remember, she’s eleven or twelve years old. And these Hidatsa force her to walk with them back to where they live in North Dakota, which is about five hundred miles away, as the crow flies. So here’s this eleven or twelve-year-old child who has survived a massacre of family and friends, and she’s now enslaved, and she’s having to march for hundreds of miles back into North Dakota from Montana, and when she gets there, she is—you know—she’s still an enslaved child.

And then, one night, there is this French trapper who shows up in the village, and he plays some kind of gambling game with the Hidatsa, and he wins. And to pay off their debt, the Hidatsa give him Sacagawea. Who is twelve by now, or possibly thirteen. So now she’s his slave. He already has bought another Shoshone captive girl, “Otter Woman,” from the Hidatsa. He calls these enslaved children his “wives.” It is a formalized child-rape arrangement brokered by adults.  And, sisters, remember, every single time you read or hear something about Sacagawea’s French trapper husband and you do not raise hell, you are actually participating in legitimizing this child-rape arrangement. He was her owner, her captor, and her rapist. Period.
 
Sacagawea conceived around the age of fourteen, and the reason we know this is because she was pregnant in the winter of 1804-5, when Lewis and Clark showed up in the Hidatsa village and started negotiating with Sacagawea’s perpetrator for his services as a guide. Lewis and Clark were the two men leading this expedition commissioned by the US government. They were leading twenty-nine white men and one African American man, who was enslaved. Sacagawea’s perpetrator told Lewis and Clark that the pregnant child was his wife, and he negotiated a fee for her services as a Shoshone translator—a fee that would be paid to him, of course. As her captor’s so-called wife, Sacagawea never received a dime for her services—or any form of compensation—for the work that she did.

So here we are, with this fourteen-year-old, pregnant girl, in the company of thirty-two men, most of whom speak a language she can’t understand. She is the only Native American among them, and the only female. She gave birth en route, and, according to Lewis, who attended the birth, it was a very painful and violent delivery. Afterwards, she became desperately ill with what, from Lewis’ journal notes, appears to have been a severe pelvic inflammatory infection, possibly due to her enslaver’s continual postpartum rape of her. In his journal, Lewis expressed a suspicion that she was a victim of a transmitted venereal disease. She came very close to dying, but she managed to recover. She spent the rest of the trip with her baby strapped to her back.
 
Sacagawea trekked on this expedition for two years, four months, and ten days. Sisters, she walked eight thousand miles with these white men and the African American enslaved man… with a baby on her back. She forded rivers and climbed steep mountains and crossed deserts and swamps in snow and rain and sweltering sun. She translated for the men, she foraged for them, she cooked for them, and she did the sewing, mending, and cleaning of their clothes… you know, the “women’s work.”
 
There have been whitewashing and mansplaining efforts to downplay her work as a guide, but the truth is, she was responsible for pointing out the pass they should take through the Rockies and the pass they should take into the Yellowstone basin… the Bozeman Pass. Kind of a big deal, locating these passes.

Oh, and by the way, the only reason we have the record of this expedition is because Sacagawea had the foresight and agility to rescue Lewis’s journals when they were tumbling out of a capsized boat. For her pains, she had a river named after her. But no pay.
 
One of the greatest services that Sacagawea provided was protection. By this time, Native American tribes had come to assume, and assume rightly, that any group of white men traveling into their territory probably constituted some kind of war party. They had learned that it was better to attack first and then try to figure out who they were later. But the fact that this group included a Native American woman with a baby was taken as evidence that these men came in peace. In other words, Sacagawea saved all their lives and probably many times over.
 
So, eventually, the expedition gets to the western part of Oregon, to the coast. And they set up a camp and start sending parties down to the beach to see the actual ocean. And these parties are reporting that some kind of “great fish” has washed up on the beach—possibly a whale. And, unbelievably, these men were not going to allow Sacagawea to leave the camp to go see it. Unbelievable. She had to beg and plead with them, and this was so unusual on her part, that Lewis wrote about it in his journal. And it really pisses me off that she did all this enormous work, as a child, with a newborn, involuntarily, and then when they finally reach their goal—the Pacific Ocean—where there’s this magical, giant fish, this eighth wonder of the world, they make Sacagawea beg and plead just to be able to see it. If there is ever any historical doubt about her degree of autonomy on this expedition, that should lay it to rest finally and forever. She had none.

Sacagawea was dead by the age of twenty-five. Still with her rapist/captor, she was living at a fur trading post in Montana at the time of her death. She was very sick and wanted to go home to her people. She reportedly died of typhus, a disease transmitted by a human body louse—a disease associated with conditions of poor hygiene and sanitation. But, if Lewis was correct in suspecting that Sacagawea had been infected with a venereal disease by her rapist, she may have died from a fever associated with that. We know that she left behind an infant girl, and the typhus or the venereal disease may have taken hold during postpartum weakness. The daughter appears not to have survived. The son was taken in by Meriwether Lewis, who paid for his schooling.
 
I know. It’s a horrible story, isn’t it? Sacagawea was obviously heroically strong, but she was a victim throughout her short life. From age eleven, she was separated from her people and enslaved. She was a victim of ongoing rape from puberty and subjected to involuntary pregnancies. 
 
It’s a story of endurance, but it’s not the story of multi-cultural diversity in the early years of the US. Sacagawea is not the poster woman for biracial marriage.  She was obviously powerful, but she was not empowered. If there is any multi-cultural story to be told here, it is a shameful story of the collusion of powerful men—French, Hidatsa, and Anglo American—in the exploitation of an enslaved, female child. It’s a disgusting tale of adult males bonding through the bartering for forced labor and victimization of a Shoshone girl. However divergent their cultures, these men were all in agreement in their misogyny. They all colluded in characterizing the formalized child-rape arrangement as a legalized marriage.

But, there is another story… one that is very important. It’s actually found between the lines in Lewis’ journal.  Let’s take a look… Bear with me, because we’re going to have to backtrack a little bit in the story before we get to it…
 
So at one point in their travels, the expedition ended up camping at the very place where Sacagawea was captured and abducted by the Hidatsa as a little girl. This was the place where she lost her tribe, her family, her history, her culture, her freedom... and, sadly, her childhood. This was the place from which she was forced to undertake a journey of a thousand miles with her enemy.
 
So, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived at this former Shoshone hunting camp, Sacagawea told them the story of the massacre and here is what Lewis wrote in his journal: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event, or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.” 
 
He seems to be describing her as someone who is kind of shallow or emotionally under-developed… “primitive” in the sense of being in some early stage of evolution or history. He appears to be comparing her affect to that which he believes he might experience, had he been in her shoes… which is as ridiculous as it is unfair. As a white, male colonizer, he has absolutely no context for understanding the trauma of her past, or the context of her ongoing rape and enslavement. He does not appear to understand that he is complicit in enabling her ongoing enslavement.

It sounds to me like Sacagawea was experiencing very severe post-traumatic stress syndromes. She sounds numb, possibly experiencing dissociation from her situation, or maybe even depersonalization… which is a post-traumatic syndrome where your own thoughts and feelings seem unreal, or like they don’t belong to you.

Depersonalization is a kind of complete loss of identity, which makes sense when you consider that her trauma was far from over. And when we consider that this is what Lewis wrote in his journal, it’s a description of Sacagawea that lets him off the hook.  Since she doesn’t seem to register any kind of emotional response to this terrible massacre and abduction… he doesn’t have to feel bad about not paying her, or pretending she’s a married woman, when he knows damn well she’s a slave. It’s kind of convenient for him to see her as someone who doesn’t feel any pain…  It’s like the way they tell you that lobsters don’t feel it when you drop them in the boiling water. What they mean is we don’t have to feel it.
 
This part of the story tells a sad truth about much of human nature. We are incentivized to see and hear what will benefit us. That is a fact. Which is why we, should spend  time working to reprogram our brains so that we can make a primary commitment to the truth. We do that reprogramming by learning to incentivize ourselves against the grain of a culture that will punish us for knowing or speaking the truth. We do this because any time the truth is not a primary commitment, we are greatly at risk of not seeing it, of deluding ourselves… because this is patriarchy, and knowing the truth, our truth, women’s truth… well, that can get you killed.

But let’s get back to the truth about Sacagawea, who is most often depicted as a grown woman making her own choices about helping these heroic white pathfinders, blazing a trail that will “civilize” the West… We, as a nation, are not much incentivized to adjust that soft-focus lens to bring into sharp definition the fourteen-year-old slave child on a mission that will spell defeat for her people. And one of the reasons why we love that grown-woman-in-charge-of-her-own-life narrative is because it tells us she is choosing—sisters, choosing—to help men. There are no other women anywhere in sight for most of those eight thousand miles. A Native woman choosing to help the white men… and even though she has a baby, she takes total, complete responsibility for him. Straps that baby on her back and never skips a beat while she does all the domestic work of caring for these thirty-three grown-ass men. And then she turns her paycheck over to her “husband!” What a fine example. Look at what she did!  Now, surely women today, with all the conveniences of modern civilization, can take those three days of maternity leave and turn their kid over to day care and get right back to work. Be like Sacagawea! Don’t be thinking of motherhood as a second job or a sacred responsibility! Don’t be missing your women friends! Don’t be hoarding that paycheck! Don’t be complaining and comparing! Do it all and don’t take any credit for it!  Be like Sacagawea!
 
Story is everything. It’s the web of synapses we weave to make meaning. As astrologist Caroline Casey says, “Imagination lays the track for the reality train.” It surely does, sisters. And a story is like a line on a railroad… like the Long Island Rail Road or the Staten Island Railway. The story is a route with a destination. We take these stories in when we hear them. We pass them along. We put them in our toolkits for how to live our lives. Story is everything. We have to think critically about the stories we are given. Who is doing the giving and for what purpose? Who is going to benefit from them? We have never had so many stories. Not just books… but Hulu and Netflix and Youtube and cable and movies and podcasts. So many stories…  But how many of them tell our truths?  Women’s truths? Lesbian truths? 

African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote an essay titled, “The Issue is Salvation,” and in it she says, “I work to produce stories that save our lives.” That’s what we should all be doing.  And if we can’t write them, then we can go into uncovering the truth about the ones they hand us.

And that’s exactly what we are going to do now. We are going to go digging for that story that is hidden between the lines of Lewis’ journal. And keep in mind that Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the one that Sacagawea dove into the water to rescue, is five thousand pages long. That’s a lot of pages. But the part that we are are digging for is just two sentences. Two sentences out of five thousand pages. Kind of like a needle in a haystack. But, sisters, if you know what you are needing to hear, if you have a pretty good idea of what these patriarchs are trying to hide… you can find that needle. It’s going to be like a magnetized needle… a compass needle, pointing us to the truth.

So here they are… Here are those precious sentences from Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the needle in the haystack…  This was on August 15, 1805. Lewis is talking about when the expedition came to the camp where Sacagawea’s people lived… where her tribe was—her family—before that massacre and abduction when she was eleven. And keep in mind, she’s been enslaved this whole time. She’s never been back to her people. This is the first time she’s seeing them in four years.

“We soon drew near to the [Shoshone] camp, and just as we approached it a woman made her way through the crowd towards Sacagawea, and recognizing each other, they embraced with the most tender affection. The meeting of these two young women had in it something peculiarly touching, not only in the ardent manner in which their feelings were expressed, but from the real interest of their situation…”

I like that Meriwether Lewis is noticing the “real interest of their situation.” And I like that, after describing Sacagawea as pretty emotionless and shallow, he is now going back on that completely and describing a scene that is ardent… which means passionate, and tender, touching and overflowing with affection. Obviously, Sacagawea had been keeping her emotional life sacred… for another female and a woman of her tribe.
 
So who is this other fifteen-year-old Shoshone girl who is embracing Sacagawea so ardently?  Well, her name was Pop-pank. She and Sacagawea grew up together, and they were at that hunting camp together when the massacre happened and Sacagawea was taken prisoner. Pop-pank had jumped into the river and, leaping like a fish, had managed to get to the other side and escape capture.
 
And here she was when the Lewis and Clark expedition showed up to try to buy some horses on their way to the Pacific. And here she was seeing again her beloved girlhood friend, Sacagawea… now with a baby and enslaved. And this is what Lewis recorded: the reunion of these two girls—and they were both still girls—embracing each other, tender and passionate at the same time.

We can hold onto that story as tightly as Sacagawea held onto Pop-pank. It is a story of an authenticity that resists colonization, of a memory that resists the distortions and erasures of trauma, of a bond that defies appropriation in the colonial narrative.
 
Let us not be fooled by the fact it only warrants two sentences in the journal of Lewis, or that it was only a few stationary minutes out of a journey of hundreds of days and thousands of miles. It is a glimpse into reality, into eternity. It shows up the colonial, patriarchal, misogynist pageant for what it is: an utter sham.
 
I think of something that 19th century feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman said… She said, “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” And every now and then we can part the curtain and catch that glimpse. Maybe only a glimpse, but it contains all that we need.
 
Sisters, let us hold close those two sentences that Meriwether Lewis wrote, not understanding even as he wrote them, because they illuminate the pages of history more than all the rest of the words in his journal.
 

Mia Merrill, a human resources manager, happened to see a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it upset her so badly that she started a petition to have it taken down. Her petition garnered more than 10,000 signatures in less than a week. (see below) She did not ask that it be destroyed... just taken down. In fact, she was even okay if it stayed up:  “I would consider this petition a success if the Met included a message as brief as, ‘Some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus’s artistic infatuation with young girls'.”

And here is the Met's response:  “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present, and encouraging the continuing evolution of existing culture through informed discussion and respect for creative expression.”

And here is my response: "Oh, for f*** sake." Literally.

The painting is titled Thérese Dreaming by Balthus.

Here's the thing...

There was a real Thérese. Her name was Thérese Blanchard, and she was eleven years old in 1936, when she had the misfortune to catch the eye of her Parisian neighbor, Balthus.  She was the daughter of a restaurant worker, and her family may have welcomed, or even needed, the extra income to be had from modeling. In any event, Therese posed for Balthus for the next three years. He made ten paintings of her. The art world considers them his finest work.

Let’s get back to Thérèse. She was a child. She posed for Balthus on numerous occasions for three years. We cannot know if she wanted to pose for him or if she was ordered by her family to do it. In the case of Thérese Dreaming, the child had to hold an awkward and physically uncomfortable position (both arms held over her head) for long stretches of time. She also had to hold an emotionally excruciating position… exposing her elevated crotch and underwear with her legs wide apart. I would submit that the physical and emotional discomfort of the subject were components in of the painter’s choice of pose.  I would also submit that, if Thérèse is dreaming at all, it is of something to make it stop. In fact, the subject’s eyes appear to be squeezed tightly shut, her eyebrows contracting from the effort.
 
Non-consensual voyeurism is a form of sexual abuse, and a twelve-year-old child is not of age to give consent to exposing herself in her underwear to a painter. Repeated non-consensual voyeurism constitutes stalking. Thérèse Dreaming is actually evidence of a crime—documentation of the crime scene. And, yes, harm is happening. The child is being objectivized, fetishized. In posing, she is being compelled to participate. What is happening to her is a violation of her personhood and of her rights to privacy.

The Met appears to be unclear on this point.
 
Seven years ago, the art world was very unclear about a film by Larry Rivers titled “Growing.” The film had been part of an archive of his work belonging to the Larry Rivers Foundation, but in 1910, it was just sold, with the archive, to New York University.
 
“Growing” was a film in which Rivers filmed his daughters every six months over a period of at least five years. According to one of his daughters, when she objected at the time, he called her “uptight” and  “a bad daughter.”  When she confronted him as a teenagers, he gave the justification that his “intellectual development had been arrested.”

Rivers edited the footage of his naked daughters into a 45-minute film that he was intending to include in a 1981 exhibition of his work. The mother of the girls stopped him.
 
Initially, New York University refused the now-adult daughters’ request that the film be destroyed. They did agree to restrict access to the film for the lifetime of the women, insisting that “Growing” was the work of a great artists and not child pornography.  The public did not agree, and the story went viral. In the end,  NYU did not want the controversy, and they returned the film to the Larry Rivers Foundation. The Foundation has said they will never allow the film to be shown publicly.
 
The simple fact is, “Growing” is child pornography, and it is illegal to buy it or to own it. This is a film where the father’s voice is heard telling his reluctant daughters to take off their clothes. The camera zooms in on the breasts or the genitalia, while the father asks prurient questions about their boyfriends and comments on the changes in their bodies. The filming began, like Balthus’ paintings of Thérèse,  when one of the subjects was eleven.

I blogged about the Larry Rivers situation at the time, and in my blog I made a radical proposition intended to break the deadlock over, “When an important artist makes child pornography is it still art?”  I will repeat that proposition here:
 
I propose that childhood be recognized as a sovereign state, and that children be treated as the indigenous populations of a world colonized by adults.
 
Most folks don’t want to think of children that way, because most of us don’t want to consider how many children are living as captives, how the socialization of the child is really about her colonization. It’s easy for us not to think about children this way, because they do not have a voice, a movement, a lobby, a dime—and they never will.  Children do not have a language specific to their experience with which to frame a paradigm of their sovereignty. And that lack of language is one of the most priceless aspects of their culture. It is a culture of astounding plasticity, adaptability. It is a culture of magic, of naiveté, of gullibility, of heartbreaking innocence and spontaneity… and nearly endless opportunities for exploitation.  

“Cultural restitution” is a term that refers to returning stolen works of art and artifacts and bones of indigenous cultures. When the Nazis raided the museums of Europe to enhance their own prestige, they were operating according to the laws of their own corrupt regime. These seizures are not recognized as legitimate by a world restored to sanity, and, after a slow start, the stolen works of art are being identified and returned. It is immaterial that they may have been sold to third and fourth parties unaware of their original status as Nazi contraband. The rights of the victims have been affirmed.
 
“Cultural restitution” also refers to art and artifacts taken from indigenous cultures to be housed in museums or historical collections. Skeletons and burial artifacts are being returned to the tribes from whom they were taken by archeologists. There is an acknowledgement that a sovereign people have a right to their history and their culture, and that it is a violation of the sovereignty for another people, even a conquering one, to appropriate the artifacts of that history or culture.
 
This obscene film by Larry Rivers was an artifact of his daughters’ raided and stolen childhoods. It was never his to bequeath, and it had no place in the archive passed on to the Larry Rivers Foundation, and New York University had no right to acquire it. It belonged to the daughters.

Thérèse Blanchard is not alive today. She, unlike Rivers’ daughters, cannot stake a claim to the documentation of her abuse. But in continuing to display works like this (and much of Balthus’ canon), we perpetuate the prurience of the perpetrators.
 
Children have a right to their lives, to their experience, to their privacy. And when a colonizing, predatory adult invades this world, exploiting and monetizing their vulnerability and raiding their innocence in the name of “art,” children should have the right of an indigenous people to claim the artifact that bears witness to their invasion and colonization. And if the child victims are no longer here to stake that claim, then we should make sure that these crime-scene artifacts, no matter how "tasteful" or "masterful" the execution, will never be revered as works of art.

So… Milo Yiannopoulos.
 
I don’t want to spend one second more time on this subject than is absolutely, bare-bones necessary to interject the perspective of a survivor of child sexual abuse who has spent three decades working with the art and culture of other survivors in recovery.
 
In a nutshell, Milo is a British journalist and public speaker.  He got in a lot of trouble this week  when  a conservative website posted excerpts of a video that he made in a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants. 
 
Here is a transcript from that video from the website heavy.com.:

 
“It sounds like Catholic priest molestation to me, another man says, interrupting Milo.

Milo: “And you know what, I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him.”
 
Other people talk. “Oh my God, I can’t handle it,” one man says. “The next thing in line is going to be pedophilia,” says another man.
 
Milo: “You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty. Who are too young to be able..” [audio unclear and cut off by others]… “That’s not what we are talking about. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not.”
 
Another man said, “You are advocating for cross generational relationships here, can we be honest about that?”
 
Milo: “Yeah, I don’t mind admitting that. I think particularly in the gay world and outside the Catholic church, if that’s where some of you want to go with this, I think in the gay world, some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men, they can be hugely positive experiences for those young boys. They can even save those young boys, from desolation, from suicide…” [People talk over each other] “… providing they’re consensual.”

In this interview, he was asked about the charges of pedophilia against Hollywood director Brian Singer. He disavowed any knowledge of Singer, but said he had attended Hollywood parties by other celebrities where he saw things that “beggared belief” where “some of the boys there were very young…  very young.”
 
So that was Milo a year ago. Also last year, he showed up for a college booking wearing a clerical collar and opened with, “Thank you, thank you. Aren’t you kind. I know what you’re thinking. If every priest looked like this, those little boys would stop complaining.”
 
As of this week, he has just he has just lost a quarter-million dollar book deal, his job as a Breitbart editor, and an invitation to speak at a national conference. It appears that his career may be ended. So… here is the damage control from yesterday’s press conference:

“Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have. One of those men was a priest. My relationship with my abusers is complicated by the fact that, at the time, I did not perceive what was happening to me as abusive. I can look back now and see that it was. I still don’t view myself as a victim. But I am one. Looking back, I can see the effects it had on me. In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s.”

Let’s parse that paragraph…  The relationship to the abusers is “complicated,” because he had been led to believe that what was happening was not abuse. That’s pretty standard. But, good for him, he can now look back and see that it was. But then: “I still don’t view myself as a victim.”  Hmm… That would appear to be a pretty huge disconnect. And then, “But I am one.”  Sounds like the first tentative step toward a long and fraught recovery.
 
He ends with, “Looking back, I can see the effects it had on me. In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s.”
 
Again, good for him. Unquestionably three years’ of sexual abuse at the hands of two abusers would contribute to those behaviors. But what about his early thirties? (He’s currently thirty-three.) Does he believe that, without recovery and/or a substantial reframing of the experience, this history no longer influences his behavior?

He has built a reputation on bullying, race baiting, trolling, and instigating. He attacks Muslims, people of color, women (especially feminists), rape victims, fat people, trans people…. well… just about anybody who suffers marginalization for any reason. Having identified his targets, he then invites others to pile on, and in the age of the internet that is extremely dangerous. His actions have placed his victims at risk and have limited their freedoms.
 
I would submit that Milo has only begun to scratch the surface of the degree to which his sexual abuse has affected him. I believe that his identification with the interests and perspectives of cultural perpetrators across a vast spectrum of oppressions informs his identity, and that what he refers to as a career is actually a compulsion. In fact, he calls Trump “Daddy.”  This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that he has referred to his father as “terrifying.”
 
There is nothing edgy or courageous about deploying hate speech in a cultural climate that is fostering witchhunts on multiple fronts. There is nothing radical about bullying—especially when there is a bully in the White House.

What happened to this man when he was a child was an atrocity, but his inability to heal from it stems from a gay male culture in the late 1990’s where there was still widespread tolerance for pedophilia. The North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), formed in the late 1970’s, was not expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994. Throughout the 1980’s, the controversy over NAMBLA’s inclusion in LGBT coalitions and events raged. At a 1986 gay parade in Los Angeles, iconic gay rights activist Harry Hay wore a sign proclaiming, “NAMBLA walks with me.”
 
NAMBLA’s position was that male sexual predation on male children is integral to the Western homosexual tradition, “from Socrates to Wilde to Gide,” and that this predation was practiced in gay cultures from “New Guinea and Persia to the Zulu and Japanese.”  In NAMBLA’s view, child sexual abuse is central to gay male history and culture.
 
The argument that Milo presented in his 2016 video, that these “relationships” can be enriching and affirming was part of the standard cant in many gay male papers that framed anti-pedophilia activists as sexual puritans bent on denying children their “right” to "sex" with adults. Two of the founding fathers of post-modernism, Derrida and Foucault, both participated in a public campaign in France to abolish age of consent. Abolish, not lower.
 
Milo was victimized by more than just two sick men. He was victimized by a movement and by a community. And, after he came of age with this legacy of abuse and the toxic ideology that perpetuates it, he was further abused by a culture that has and continues to incentivize his dissociation.

And here I am going to step aside and give the floor to Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, a book that has saved the sanity and lives of millions. Here is Dr. Herman:
 
 “Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom.
 
But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood―establishing independence and intimacy―burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships.
 
She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
 
And…

"The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called 'doublethink,' and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call 'dissociation.' It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
 
And…
 
“By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.”

And…
 
“...repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.”  (My emphasis.)
 
In an interview last year with Fusion, Milo explained how his media personality evolved: “I didn’t like me very much and so I created this comedy character." To the New York Times, he admitted, "I don’t have feelings to hurt.”

Several journalists who spent time with him have noted that he does not actually believe most of the things he says. I compare this with the words of African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara: "I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I've felt them doing it... I'm careful about what I give voice to."
 
A child who is taught that his abuse is empowerment will have great difficulty achieving authenticity of voice--or "freedom of speech," if you will. It follows that the person who is still trapped in a paradigm of protecting his own oppression will have little empathy for the vicitimization of others. The followers of Milo who hold him up as a champion of free speech have been hoodwinked. His is the most censored voice of all, the voice of the child who has internalized the affect of the perpetrator. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose when words have lost their meaning.

So, Milo, if you are entering on a path of recovery as a result of this week's events--and I hope you are,  I challenge you to undertake an action that is authentically dangerous, taking these words of Dr. Herman to heart: 

"Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor."

Two things are going on for me this week: PTSD and Martha Graham. The PTSD is from the constant headlines about the sexual predation of one of the leading candidates for the office of President. Martha Graham is from my work on a play about Jean Rosenthal, the lesbian who lit her performances for thirty-five years.
 
In the course of researching Martha, I ran across a Youtube video of one of her most famous dances, “Errand into the Maze.” It’s a recreation of the dance that premiered in 1947. You can see it here.

Twelve years ago, I had watched the video of this dance, but I didn’t’ really see it. At that time, I was mostly interested in it from a biographical perspective. Was this about Graham’s ambivalence about marrying Erick Hawkins, one of her dancers? I had accepted the analysis of the dance pundits that “Errand” is about a woman’s fear of sexual intimacy.

Watching it this time, with active PTSD, I arrived at a very different understanding of the dance. I felt I was watching a woman wrestle with retrieval and integration of a traumatic rape memory. “Errand” was suddenly personal and relevant to me.
 
The dance is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the story, the warrior Theseus must slay the Minotaur that lives in a labyrinth. Adriadne, the king’s daughter, helps Theseus by giving him a ball of thread that he uses to find his way out. In Graham’s version, there is no male warrior. It is Ariadne herself who enters the maze and slays the monster.
 
What Martha Graham has done is take us into the internal landscape of the survivor and her memories. Every single beat of this dance was suddenly intelligible and relatable to me. As an archetype, it reinforces the map of a survivor’s terrain: You are here. You may find yourself here later on. And if you can manage to get here, you’re out of the woods.

The dance begins before the dance. Martha would lay out the labyrinth before she danced it. It was made from lightweight, flexible boning that dressmakers used. One could buy it by the yard. Boning, unlike rope or ribbon, has something of a mind of its own. It resists, and the dancer must dialogue with that. I believe this is important. I believe it is why Martha chose it, instead of rope. It has a will… as do traumatic memories. And I like that she would lay out the labyrinth as a personal ritual, before each performance. Dancers still do that today. The path back into our memories is profoundly personal, if subconscious.

So… the stage is set with a stylized moon, a path of boning, and a V-shaped sculpture at the center of the maze that resembles an inverted pelvis with both legs up in the air.  The dance begins with pelvic contractions… labor pains? (Martha suffered from agonizing menstrual cramps.) The dancer begins to move as if she is being compelled against her will… Some have said that the world is forcing her, but her spirit resists. I see the opposite. I see her spirit calling her, her memories coming to get her:  It’s time.  The resistance is her habitual self, the armor of denial or routine that has been her protection.

Traumatic memories arrive. Their arrival feels unbidden, intrusive, pathological. In fact, often they arrive to be healed. The psyche that has been hiding them may be suddenly ready. Sometimes there is a trigger, an event that replicates the trauma, and we are set on that path again, greatly against our conscious will. But in Martha’s dance, this struggle is set in motion by an action that archetypically marks the beginning of labor, of birth. Unbidden, intrusive, seemingly pathological… but necessary for creation.

So, bent double with the violence of the contractions, the woman begins her journey dancing down the path of the boning, dancing into the maze toward the memory. She arrives at the crotch of the torso, or the trees, where she appears to ground herself temporarily, and then pull away, and then return. “I can’t but I must; I can’t but I must.” And then suddenly the Minotaur appears, a male dancer, mostly nude, with horns on his head and his arms yoked over a bone/staff.

Here it is: The Memory. She shields her eyes from the sight. She turns her back. It menaces her. She finally, turns toward him, throwing up one arm in a futile gesture of resistance. He literally bends her to his will and the horror is accomplished. She pushes the memory away, refusing to look. In denial mode, she retraces her steps back into the maze, this time, pulling up the boning behind her and weaving it between the legs of the torso as a kind of shield, just as the Minotaur returns, looking for her.

She does not want to come out from her defenses. The memory is exerting a pull over her. This time, she collapses on the floor, not even attempting a defense. She rolls as he steps over her, appearing to kick her along. He pulls her onto his back and carries her curled up in a fetal roll. He drags her back when she attempts to crawl away. He swings her around by the wrists. The Minotaur/memory literally kicks her ass.
 
But all this time, she has been growing stronger. This time, when he leaves, she discovers a joy, a lyricism in her body. She discovers pleasure. The contractions return, but she is integrating them, owning them as part of her body—part of her process. They are no longer an alien force violating her. She participates. She experiences them as part of her strength. And when the Minotaur returns, she still doesn’t want to look, she still experiences the dread.  He gloats, he menaces, he taunts. She is avoidant, she tries to move away… He still frightens her, but there is a new determination. Her hands are over her uterus.

Suddenly, she spins around to face her tormentor. She grabs his hands and leaps onto his thighs, towering over him, wrestling him, staring him down. She holds her ground. He collapses on the ground, the stiff bone that held up his arms rolls away, and he dies.

She returns to the torso/altar and unwinds the boning, stroking the legs/bones/trunks. She is free. Her body is her own. The "errand" is accomplished.