Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Matt Bernstein Sycamore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136572432
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

Queer survivors piece together the clues to discover their own lives!

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation. Twenty-six stories illuminate the reality of growing up in fear, struggling to rebuild lives damaged by sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. The book explores how abuse turns queer survivorsmale, female, and transgenderedinto healers, heartbreakers, and homicidal maniacs, presenting brilliant stories that sear and soar.

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving addresses all forms of abuse head-on, representing a cross-section of queer survivors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, education, origin, sexuality, and gender. Contributors use their own life experiences to create a book that takes back control from well-meaning outsiders, as they recount the daily struggle to overcome the damage done to their minds, bodies, and spirits in a world that denies their gender, sexual, and social identities.

From the editor: Dangerous Families consists entirely of writing by survivors of childhood abuse. That's rightno therapists analyzing our plight, no talk-show hosts exploiting usjust survivors, exploring our complicated, frightening, and fulfilling lives. These stories dispense with the usual technique of carefully massaging the reader's fragile worldview before plunging this unsuspecting innocent into a world of horror. They go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off-guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back.

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving is an anthology of 26 true stories of growing up queer in families that magnify the horrors of the outside world instead of offering protection. The book is an essential read for therapists, caseworkers, cultural studies specialists, and anyone struggling to survive childhood abuse.

LANGUAGE

gonna get my girl body back

this is a work in progress

leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha

stone femme

healing is my own anticolonial war. my incest story is about my white mama’s fingers ripping apart my kinky hair & the curve of my brown ass while at the same time telling me not to wear a black tank top, i’ll look like a whore, like those puerto rican girls but you’re not puerto rican, don’t you forget it. like most of this generation of new mestizo, i was not the happy rainbow baby that made the love-see-no-color dream into flesh.

this light brown body, sri lanka slamming into ukrainian-irish genes to make me look more ’rican than anything else, this body’s mestiza green almond eyes, mangopeachchutney skin, skinny curvy down to the long legs i show off in boots, cutoffs, minis, vintage lowrider jeans, outtie, get me the fuck out of here. kicked my ex across the room & broke his nose for the eighth time. my invisible crip broken hips where she threw me against the wall at four, aching ass when it’s humid or cold, limping legs that give out, hips that freeze shut on the dance floor. am i failing the coloredgirl litmus test? well, she dances like a whitegirl so i guess she really is one. “weak, it’s weak down here,” the asshole shiatsu practitioner says as he presses fingers into a node above my fucked hips. “underdeveloped.”

yeah, depending on which way you look at it it’s either an underdeveloped or a strip-mined country, but maybe there’s pockets of diamonds and coal still hidden. if the miners come back this ground will buckle and collapse. hips that hold diamonds, demons, ghosts longer than this memory, than this life. leaning on my dumpstered cane, too young to be invisibly disabled but what the fuck else did you expect me to be. after all i’ve been through it’s a miracle, isn’t it/that my cock can go up there/that there isn’t justa bunch of jagged meat down there.

when you tried to put your fingers inside i bled and bled, long after i popped my cherry. i don’t think this is working, the best lover said when i was 19, why don’t i just go down on you. i’m the girl the doc always says, this shouldn’t be hurting so much to during the gyn exam. but it does. i bled every time and she slammed her door shut on you, my body she was smarter than me. she tells me things. it’s why i’m still alive.

gonna get my girl body back, gonna take her with me. gonna get my brown body back, gonna take it back and flow with it. gonna find her, where she’s hiding, that body, that girl body doesn’t got a new hole ripped in it. gonna be a girl, be a bratty girl, a whiny girl, a silly girl, a fake-valley-girl-accent brown girl. Boricua loca, junglee, funny, one who knows how to walk down the street or can figure it out. I never seen a pretty girl look so tough, oh baby. Gonna be that girl, the girl i was meant to be

mother daughter dyke

i guess this is how reincarnation really works. how i carry memories of my mother finger fucked by her mama-raped silent trapped mama, to put her to sleep. the way the austrians and germans did in the ’20s and ’30s, which is part of what gave birth to nazism. it’s how come it’s casual to me as i say to blondie, “i decided to stop fucking white because my hips have these body memories of my great-great-grandmothers getting raped when the dutch east india company invaded sri lanka.” this is how reincarnation really works, that i get born to remember. remember everything they didn’t work out. And do something different with it, or die, or go crazy.

i was queer before my mama ruined it for me. if i still lust after women this much despite the fingers in cunt as kid, i figure i must be pretty fucking queer.

but there’s more.

what kind of lover have you made me, mama, you who i loved more than anyone, who taught me there were choices, who told me I could get out, who told me to question the world, who put her fingers in my vulva when i was months old and ripped my brain apart. my mother the multiple half-perfect beaming woman, half woman fullup with scars. mama lying in the darkness on her recliner telling me at seven that i was the only one who understood, who could save her, who could save her whole life. who used to walk in on me in the shower, who wouldn’t let me close the door to my room or go for a walk by myself off the deadend street because somebody would rape me. how do i allow myself to love women, to fuck women the way i want to, the way i wanted to before you ruined it for me. how do i figure out how to fuck the ones i really want after this. this which doesn’t leave.

relearning to fuck

i used to take a lot of pride in being the best fuck all my lovers ever had. i had quite a lot of sex in the prememory days. i was miserable and crazed and i didn’t really know how to make friends or keep them or to use language or get people to fuck off, but i did know how to fuck. since i was psychic i could figure out exactly what my lovers wanted and deliver it. because i was a skilled performer i could act out anything they wanted to see. i came out to carol queen and pat califia and bi-queer-sex-positivity. my friends in high school were the smart slut girls, the ones who wanted pleasure not boyfriends and got tortured for it. plus the pack of queerpunk kids who roamed the streets of worcester, mass, dodging the jocks who drove around waiting for the moment when they could pull over and pull out their hockey sticks.

all my lovers were survivors, too, even though we never talked about it. we just knew. it’s why i loved them. i slept with queer men because it was easy and i crushed on girls and was too scared to do anything naked, for reasons i wasn’t safe enough yet to let myself know. and i stayed true to the girl i fell in love with when i was 16, the woman who saved my life. she’d fuck boys for coke, stick the vials up her twat when the cops pulled them over, laugh. she usedta tell me she didn’t feel any emotions anymore, since her last lover had tested positive and shot himself in the head with the results on his parents’ kitchen table in front of him. but she loved me, and she loved me too much to fuck me. i understood completely.

“sex is a prison, a kingdom of death.”^* yeah yeah, yeah yeah. where that black red hole between my legs is. we fucked boys/girls/trannies we loved/worshiped/tricked off/hated/pleased, to stay in control, to feel something, TO FEEL IT, the feeling, that place before the world of words destroyed us. the place that always felt good in the middle of chronic agony. that place where we knew what to do. yes and no. “no matter how much i say otherwise, every lover of mine has been an eraser,” says Chrystos, First Nations Two-Spirit poet whose poems love sex.

survivor world

After the end of a meal ticket scholarship, falling in love with a poor, crazy survivor street mestizo faggot brother feels like heaven. After I ran way to Canada for a lot of reasons, but most fundamentally to put a national border between me and my parents. After the stone rolled off the cave of memory and I stopped lying about what I felt all the time. After all the tears, the antipsych counselor who let me tell the stories. After the chosen family, after the chosen family busting open and reweaving over and over again, after confrontation day, after I left my lover when he didn’t stop being abusive. After I crawled out from other. After two years of incest survivor celibacy I wanted to be queer and fuck again. And I had it all figured out. Like before, but only with women of color. Like before but only with butches, because that way I would always know they weren’t my mom. Like before, but I would be even more perfect now. I was fixed now. Now I would not be ashamed of only wanting to sleep with people who were in town for a weekend or were already partnered, so the barriers would be built in. That would make everything easy.

I had money to dress in colors again, buy perfume. I danced with my crew on every coloredgirl dancefloor in the city, had crushes, bought The Survivor’s Guide to Sex, did yoga with the half-breed desi dyke teacher. Finally it occurred to me one day that the reason I couldn’t get a girlfriend was real simple. I’d just spent more than three years fulltime in the radical abuse and psychiatric survivor world. Three years where I never came up on anyone from behind. When I never asked anybody personal questions, ever, I just waited for them to tell me whatever they were comfortable with, years of conversations that sounded like small talk if you couldn’t decode what we were saying with our eyes and vibes. Where if I held somebody’s hand after knowing them for a year it was a big deal, one that could be withdrawn tomorrow. So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

reality

My best sex has always happened in my head. I would come over and over again in the dream world of possibility. In my dreams, I was free. I usta explain it by saying only in a world where nobody got raped could I open the doors and fly free, fuck in magic loft beds, take my girl’s fist all the way to the back, find this Latino boy with locks like black water all around mine. I grew up thinking and being told that I was not a person made to live around other people, that there are those who are made to do that but I and we are not them.

“Sleep with people you trust.” Many queercoloredgirls I know have been fucked over so many times in so many positions that double/triple/million-tuple jeopardy had made them trust few, and those are your fam, your crew. Sisters can’t fuck.

I was always being ethical and wanting to touch my fam, sex up, but instead seizing up, stuck cuz they were the ones I trusted enough to fuck but I didn’t want to fuck my family. I wanted, at last, a family where there would be no fucking. I was a sober, nonsmoking boundary queen who liked my vibrator just fine, thank you.

brown girl/whitebody/white boys

whenever i used to jerk off, I usta dream there was a machine that made my tits big & white, my legs long & shaved, made my hair blonde.

I used ta get wet thinking about becoming the whitest white girl in the world—just for fun, just ta be sexy, just ta be real

first i didn’t want to be an ugly sallow girl

then i didn’t want to be a pretty high-yellow exotic eurasian dream

then i didn’t want to be an ugly yellow girl

then i switched/back

and forth

Many of my lovers have been white queer scrawny boys. Light brown bi girls are a hot commodity to the indie rock boys of the world, and sometimes I took that opportunity. Plus, I had this perverted fascination. I bossed them around and got normality off them in exchange—I thought. Later on, it was still seductive cuz I knew exactly who they were and it was so not me. I didn’t have to worry about the boundaries blurring, me being swallowed up by her cunt. Sometimes it’s easier to go for white, “because maybe her mystery was no mystery to them. Because sometimes dark eyes looking into dark eyes hurts too much./Because there are so few of us that friendship is safer and lasts/Because it is more comfortable to be loved by those connected to those who run everything.”^*

& there would be this refrain repeating itself in my head: this doesn’t matter, this isn’t what i really want, this doesn’t matter, this isn’t what i really want. Bio-boys are fools, you use them and run it. I’d feel no neccesity to reciprocate and I’d feel it was some kind of reparations. 508 years of colonialism slightly evened up by me getting 16 hours of head from some dumb white boy.

stuttering

I just need to have sex a couple of times with people I never have to see again. So I can figure out how to fuck who I really want. Fuck my way through the numbness, learn clumsy and stupid until my inside gets it and I can shine and still be the head of the class. I’m gonna kiss girls a few times that don’t feel so hot, just so I can get the hang of it like I did with boys, couple times feelin nothing, just the wet thick of her tongue. I needed to grab her, kiss her, and never see her again because I was gonna make an ass of myself the first couple times. This don’t make me straight. Just raped.

I have a fixation on being the perfect fuck to save this body that has to be ugly because of what happened at the begin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dangerous Families: An Introduction
• Language
• Monsters
• Escape
• About the Editor
• Contributors