We hear a lot about generational divides. What we hear much less about are the bridges: how people of different generations can and do connect; how we can support and help one another and each offer the other things of great value. Just as often as a given experience, or even life as a whole, is different for people of one generation and those of another, there are also some things that are or have been the same, and all have our own wisdom to share, whatever our age may be.
People of different generations are not incapable of connecting or understanding each other, despite the way so much media can often make it sound that way, or the despite day-to-day frustrations and challenges we have probably all experienced with one another when trying to connect.
Often I am asked to explain things about one generation to another, illustrating differences as well as common ground to each. I often find myself telling people of one age group how to try and better understand the other; making appeals for more empathy, more understanding and fewer assumptions on both sides. But what I really want to start seeing more of are people of all ages doing that with and for each other, without an intermediary like me speaking for them.
Anyone who knows even a little about me probably knows that at the times I think, "Gosh, I really wish there was...." about something, I often dive in shortly thereafter and do my best to make that thing happen. So, because I think people of all ages stand to benefit by connecting more often and more deeply, and think we can all benefit by seeing what some people can offer each other intergenerationally, I put a call out last week for this new series, asking for volunteers of different generations to step up with a shared issue, experience or identity related to sexuality to be matched and interview one another, allow me to observe via email, and then format and reprint those interviews here.
This piece today is the first of the series. I have enormous gratitude for the two women who participated, especially with an issue and experiences that can be so hard to talk about. Being allowed to read their conversation as it happened was pretty amazing, and I think in reading it yourself you'll find both of them and what they had to offer one another as awesome as I did. ~ Heather
Who's AAG in her own words? I am a 41-year-old cisgender woman. I identify as queer, which to me means that I like people of all genders, though in the past I've had long-term relationships only with men. I'm single, poly, and the mother of three children.
The abuse against me was committed by my father. It started when I was eight, as far as I can recall, and lasted about ten years. It consisted of fondling, pressuring me for more physical contact, and lots of verbal inappropriateness.
Who's Tien in her own words? I am 16 years old. I am mostly a straight A student and plan to become a child/adolescent psychologist specializing in sexual abuse. I also want to be a lawyer working as a state prosecutor in the child abuse unit. Recently this happened to me with a man who was over 10 years older than me and he was someone I trusted. He was also a family member, my cousin. He used manipulation and my trust to get what he wanted along with other forms of abuse that I didn't reconize at the time. This relationship lasted four months. It would have lasted longer but thankfully my mother and a counselor at school found out about it and reported him.
AAG: How have your friends and family members reacted to all of this? Are they in any way blaming you for what went on? If so, how do you handle this?
Tien: My friends support me. They listen to me when I am depressed or just need someone to talk to. My family members react differently from each other. The ones that directly know what happened support me whereas others who don't know the full information either hate/blame me or don't know how to react. I handle the blame by just not thinking about it since if they do not know the full information, how can they judge me?
AAG: How are you dealing with the emotions? Do you find yourself angry? Hurt? Missing whatever good parts of the relationship you had?
Tien: My emotions are random right now. Sometimes I am fine, then the next day I am depressed. When people found out about the relationship I was angry at myself because he was someone I thought I was in love with and I did not want him to get in trouble. I do not feel hurt, just confused since he is someone who should protect me but instead hurt me. I do not miss the good parts of the relationship, the good parts were essentially the talks we had together and when we went out to restaurants.
AAG: How do you relate to your cousin now? Do you still have to see him at family functions? How have his parents and/or siblings received the news of his abuse?
Tien: Right now if I saw him again I would probably slap him and tell him how much he hurt me. I am in the process of writing a letter to him stating just that. I would not be seeing him at family functions for a very long time, since not only did my mom report him, she pressed charges. From what he told me the last time I talked to him, his parents hate him. As for his siblings, I do not know how they reacted to the news. Do you feel betrayed by your father?
AAG: Very much so. Family abuse -- even if it only happens once! -- rips away the feeling of absolute safety and security a child should have.
Tien: Did you tell or want to tell someone what was happening to you? Was it difficult for you to tell, if you did?
AAG: I told my mother constantly that I didn't like my dad to have his hands all over me. She ignored me, minimized the abuse, and urged me to "be more loving" to him. I didn't tell any other adults then. Once I started dealing with the abuse (in my late-20s), I told a few close friends, then a few more, then more, to the point that nearly everyone in my life knows about it. I've written about abuse frequently on my blog. Every time I talk about it, people disclose their own abuse to me. Every time I talk about it, it gets a little easier. How did it feel when you first realized that your mom and the counselor were digging into your business? Were you angry? Hurt? Relieved?
Tien: With my school counselor, I told her about the relationship and I did not expect her to report him. My mom caught me trying to sneak out one night and started digging through my things. She found this story I wrote about the relationship, questioned me about it and I confessed everything. At first, I was angry at them for reporting him but later on when I figured out that he abused and manipulated me, I was relieved. How did you react when you figured out that your father was abusing you? Were you confused, angry?
AAG: I always knew what was happening was weird or odd or unusual, but I minimized it until I was in my late-20s and began thinking about starting a family of my own. It was only when I thought about how I'd protect my future children from my abuser that I realized that the abuse had affected me -- a lot.
Tien: Did you go into counseling? How did it help you?
AAG: I started counseling in my late-20s. I've continued it on-and-off since then, as I've felt it was necessary. It has helped enormously, but it's not easy. In some ways it would be easier to pretend like nothing happened, but I have to consider the safety of my children when they are around my parents. Are you receiving any counseling? Is it helping? Do you think you'll continue?
Tien: I used to receive counseling but had to stop because of my mom. It helped and when I am older I will continue counseling. How did family members react to what happened to you?
AAG: My mother reacted and continues to react very poorly. She will not believe that anything happened to me. She likes to believe that I was brainwashed by my counselor. There is also a religious component: They both think that because God has forgiven them, that I should forgive them too -- and a part of that should be letting them see their grandchildren unsupervised. That will never happen. How do you see this relationship affecting you in the future, like dating or raising children?
Tien: In the future, I plan to help children who has gone through the same things I did. I think that in dating, I will be more cautious and question things more. Also, I will have to tell them about the abuse to an extent because I have figured out some of my triggers which are things that he(my future boyfriend) might say or do. With my future children, I would talk to them about how adults should treat a child and that they could talk to me about anything. My parents did not tell me any of this.
AAG's words of wisdom and support for Tien: Here's what I wish I knew when I first started dealing with the abuse: Nothing, no part, not even a tiny bit of this is your fault. No matter what anyone else might tell you (or ask you), don't ever feel like you did something wrong.
Being a survivor of abuse is a permanent condition. No matter how hard you work on it in therapy, nothing's going to change that fact. I don't say this to depress you. I say it so that you won't beat yourself up when, after a long period of feeling so much better, you find yourself in a bad period again. It will gradually get better over time, but don't expect it to be a smooth progression without any setbacks.
Tien's words of wisdom and support for AAG: I would like to say that you sound like someone who has gone through a lot. I am sorry that your mom did not fully comprehend what your dad was doing to you. My advice to you is to keep continuing what you are doing, like you said it gets easier the more you talk about it.
Toni Weschler used to be my neighbor, a fact that caused me to squee more than a little loudly and scare the bejeezus out of my pets when I first discovered it. Sadly, we didn't connect as often as I wish we had before I moved out of Seattle and to a more remote island outside the city.
A while back, I sent Toni some questions for Scarleteen, and many months later, she apologized for sending them to me so late. Now I owe her an even bigger apology for publishing them far later than that!
If you don't know who Toni is, she's the author of Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement and Reproductive Health, which is pretty much THE book for people who want to chart fertility, and the book I used to learn how to do it well in my 20's. She also wrote a great book about menstruation and charting for teen women, called Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body. She's an amazingly dedicated and energetic person who also just happens to really, really like chocolate croissants.
You've dedicated your life's work to menstrual charting: why do you think charting, and awareness of menstrual cycles, is so important?
In a word, it’s incredibly empowering. In addition to helping to increase self-esteem by helping women to take control of their bodies and appreciate their incredible intricacies, charting is infinitely practical. It’s wonderful as an overall means of maintaining gynecological health, as a method of natural birth control, and as an aid to pregnancy achievement.
What myths about menstruation do you think do us the most harm?
Ovulation occurs on Day 14
First and foremost, I’d say the myth that ovulation occurs on Day 14. Not only is this myth responsible for more unplanned pregnancies, but also for untold numbers of women not being able to conceive.
The issue of unplanned pregnancies is huge. Unfortunately, most of us grow up hearing that the egg is released on Day 14, so if we just avoid that one day of our cycle, we can prevent pregnancy, right? Wrong! First of all, not all women ovulate on Day 14. Secondly, even if some women do ovulate on Day 14, the day of ovulation may vary from cycle to cycle. Thirdly, sperm can live up to 5 days inside the woman’s body, so if a woman has sex on Monday, she can still get pregnant that following Friday!
The opposite ramification of this myth pertains to the issue of infertility, which can feel even more overwhelming for scores of women desiring to get pregnant. Again, a woman may ovulate on Day 14, but could just as well ovulate on any other day. So she could theoretically try for years to get pregnant by timing intercourse for that one mythical day, only to discover that she never ovulates then, but rather weeks later!
A normal menstrual cycle is 28 days
Actually, a normal menstrual cycle can vary from about 24-36 days. Not only do cycles vary substantially among girls and women, but they often vary within each individual person. There are numerous things that can impact a cycle. One of the most unfortunate results of this myth is the needless anxiety that it causes people who are led to believe over and over again that they may be pregnant because their periods are “late.”
Vaginal discharge is a symptom of an infection
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, it’s true that discharge can be a sign of an infection if it is accompanied by itching, odor, or inflammation, but the female body has a predictable way of revealing how healthy it really is. Every cycle, when a girl or woman is about to release an egg, she will produce a wet, slippery substance for several days leading up to ovulation. It is called cervical fluid, and is absolutely healthy!
So rather than feeling shame or running to the gynecologist every cycle when you produce this normal cervical fluid, take pride in the fact that your body is doing what it was designed to do!
A lot of young women tell us they want to avoid touching themselves genitally, an obvious problem in a lot of ways, but also when it comes to charting and menstruation. What do you think about that, and what do you think can help?
It’s so sad that in our society, boys are often raised to take pride in their bodies, especially their penises, while girls are taught to not even discuss what’s “down there.” So is it any wonder that girls feel uncomfortable with the idea of looking at their vulva, let alone touching it?
One of the best ways to help girls get over their squeamishness is to give them a mirror and encourage them to look at their vulva in private, after having taken a shower or bath. Once they feel comfortable in just looking at their external anatomy, they will probably feel more relaxed about touching their vaginal lips and exploring their bodies more.
Another way to help girls get over their squeamishness is to help them appreciate how amazing their female bodies really are. Once they learn all the incredible things their bodies do every cycle, they will take much more pride in them and undoubtedly want to get to know them better.
Do you see any trends in increases of reproductive health problems for young women, and if so, do you think they really are new, or are instead only just being diagnosed now (or, of course, misdiagnosed)?
Girls are tending to have sex earlier in the last few generations. And whenever someone has sex, their chances of contracting an STI increases. The younger a girl is when she starts to have sex, the more partners she will probably have, increasing her chances of developing a reproductive problem that could ultimately affect her fertility when she is older.
What makes this situation especially problematic is that the cervix in young girls is not fully developed, so that the most vulnerable part is most exposed to pathogens that can cause infections, reproductive problems, and even cancer.
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) is a different situation. It is only relatively recently that physicians have started learning about the condition and its pervasiveness. Fortunately, girls are now being diagnosed and treated earlier, before it has a chance to impact them so negatively.
How do you feel about menstrual suppression, especially for younger women?
In a word (or two): Bad news! For starters, there hasn’t been any research yet on the long-term health effects of suppressing periods in women in general, and teens in particular. History has already shown us that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had potentially disastrous effects on women, but its repercussions were discovered only after years and years of use.
What we do know is that periods are necessary to rid the body of excess iron which can help lower a woman’s risk for cardiovascular disease. In addition, periods wash away bacteria inside the reproductive tract. And probably most importantly for teens, suppression of menstruation is likely to interfere with bone and breast development, as well as long-term fertility.
And, of course, periods are nature’s way of alerting a woman to the fact that she is not pregnant. Without them, it would be next to impossible to know if or when a woman got pregnant.
Finally, girls should grow up understanding the amazing ways their bodies work. Menstruation is an indication of the health of their bodies, not something to be eliminated!
I'd like to start a new series at Scarleteen to address some unique first-person experiences while also looking at generational differences and similarities, divides and bridges. All too often, people with shared experiences but of different ages talk past or over each other; have a hard time connecting and seeing where they connect, where they don't and landing in a place where we can all respect each other's experiences, no matter how different we may be.
Ideally, how I'd like this to go is to get two people of different generations -- one under 25, one over 40 -- for each of the following themes/experiences in the list below. Rather than myself or other staff asking the questions or leading the topic, I'd like each of those two people to write out five questions for the other, then each answer the questions they were asked, adding more if needed during that back-and-forth conversation, and we'll edit it all together into something polished and cohesive.
What's the point? First to get some more first-person experience content for the topics below. But it's also to provide conversation between generations on these experiences and really look at what's different and what's the same, the ways either person might not understand the other's experience, and to build some generational bridges. I think the self-interview format will allow those participating to focus on what they want to know, rather than what I might want to as an editor, and will allow people with these experiences to decide what their big deals have been rather than anyone possibly outside those experiences deciding for them.
By all means, if there's a pairing here you think I've overlooked, or you know you want to be part of but isn't on the list, let me know!
Interested in participating? Drop an email, letting us know which set you're interested in being part of. I'll keep tabs, connect people via email when we have some pairs, and give you some guidance with formatting. If you only want to be identified by a specific name to the other person/readers per your privacy, please let us know.
Teams we now have for a topic are those marked. Topics where we have someone of one age but not the other waiting for a match are also noted.
I cannot stand this show. No sense in being shy about it, because this is a bias I cannot hide, as will be apparent in nanoseconds.
If I had anything even remotely decent or interesting to say about it, I would have blogged it before now. But every single blog post I have even started to think about writing in the past about it had the same title every single time, one composed entirely of profanity except for the articles of speech linking all my four-letter words together.
Summaries and commentaries that read like these do not balanced critical commentary make:
Alas, that's the only kind of commentary I usually have. So, I have kept it from the page, saving it for rant sessions I have alone in my office, where I can yell as loudly as I like without worry of traumatizing anyone. Except my pug. She sometimes looks scared. But mostly confused, which is how she usually looks whether I'm yelling or not.
I hate to watch it at all, but this is the kind of thing I should try to keep up with. None of our users have really talked about it -- potentially because they're holding in the same potty-mouthed critiques I am myself -- but because of it's subject matter, I should know the scoop. Shows or films like these also almost always result in questions from users pertaining to the misinformation in them about sexual response, bodies, birth control, safer sex or pregnancy, so it helps to be warned in advance. Would that I'd known that when American Pie came out. It would have saved me many nights of scratching my head while pointlessly asking the office wall, "Where are they getting this stuff?"
The only scoop I usually get while watching this show is a pooper-scooper, mind, but now and then it's not always just torture. Sometimes it's bad enough that it's funny-bad like MST3K, or instead of just hurling bitter invective, I first laugh, then huff, then spit, then sigh, and THEN hurl bitter invective while also channeling the spirit of Dorothy Parker, which I don't have to do alone because everyone seems to find it very entertaining.
But. It's not a big but, but it's not a teeny one either.
But.
The last episode ("She Went That A'way") showed something I found very truthful and real about abortion and support with abortion and reproductive choices. The character choosing to have an abortion (which you knew was never going to happen: if you become pregnant on this show, you will be having babies, missy) already had excellent support from her mother, whose talk with her daughter was pretty darn righteous itself.
What I find myself quite surprised to be giving a high-five to is an ad-hoc counseling session that occurs in the lobby of the clinic between the character there for a termination and the mother of her ex-boyfriend. What made that such a good representation of support and counseling with abortion is that almost nothing said in it was prescriptive (that bit about "some choices" that you can't undo that seemed to be about abortion was prescriptive, since you can't undo a birth, either). What was said could have empowered and supported any choice well, not just the one the character made to remain pregnant. It was a loving, sage and compassionate talk.
That exact kind conversation can, for the record -- and often does -- result in a woman choosing to have an abortion (especially when she comes into the clinic already very sure about terminating) and feeling good about it. Just so's you know, because you're sure as hell not going to see it in this show.
Back to my props: not only was the counsel and support, and the way it was given, excellent, it also didn't come from a clinic counselor. Instead, it came from a connection made in the waiting room with someone who was not clinic staff.
Counseling and other staff from clinics certainly can and do provide great options and general counseling and support: it's something I have done and do myself. I'm not saying counsel or support is automatically better when not coming from clinic staff. The point is that sometimes in clinics what goes on in the waiting room, either with patients and other patients, or with patients and other people's support people, can be pretty radical. Some powerful, intense connections can happen between women in abortion clinics. Women who don't even know each other can wind up being supportive of each other in an instant and with great strength. It's something we see and love working in clinics, and that some of us have experienced ourselves as patients in clinics, but rarely, if ever, is shown in media. So, a good and real waiting room scene -- which is so much more than I can say for Juno -- and a really good supportive talk around choice? Both in a place I least expected to find them.
Of course, there is something else that's real about Secret Life as a whole.
At first I was going to say that what's real in it is that it's an excellent presentation of the way many adults conceptualize, imagine and treat teens and teen sexuality.
But I think it's actually one step beyond: I think it presents not only the way many adults think about and treat teens and teen sexuality, but also purposefully puts that conceptualization in such a light so it looks like The Very Right, Wise Grownup Way of Thinking. Well, to anyone watching at home who isn't who isn't laughing or swearing at it, anyway. Young people didn't write this. Older adults are writing this, about young people and without, no doubt very intentionally, the perspectives of young people like they're writing about.
This is one of the reasons why this show makes me want to gouge my own eyes out, and why I find a film like Thirteen (youth-written) or a show like the UK's Skins, written about young people but also BY young people (they have a mixed-age writing team), to be such a horses of a different color. Certainly both of those are representing slightly different populations, but not really. The difference between Skins and Thirteen and Secret Life aren't about the differences in the teenagers being portrayed, but about how the teenage portrayals in them are so different. Both have their own flaws or character issues, but I'll take flaws or shortcomings coming from young people in how they see and conceptualize themselves and their peers any day over flaws and failing of older adults trying to send teens moral messaging who should remember how crappy it was when adults presented you in certain ways to further their own morality fables. Apparently Brenda Hampton, the creator of Secret Life (as well as of the socially and politically conservative 7th Heaven), allows her young actors to give input on conversational lines, but that's it. It shows.
What I watched today does not redeem the show in my eyes. The Mad Max trilogy cannot redeem Mel Gibson, and a couple brief bright spots cannot light the deep, black hole that this show and the cloying, obvious propaganda it is. Even the way the whole episode played out was predictable, with an anticipated over-simplicity on their part, an anticipated annoyance on mine and one more baby en route. What followed after the good stuff almost undid the good stuff all by itself.
But not quite. When anyone in media does a decent job with or around abortion, and I happen to see it, I'd feel remiss not giving a nod of respect and thanks. I appreciate it, quite a lot. And when a writer or director's agenda is pretty darn crystal, and what they wrote is real, not myopic, and potentially even challenges that agenda, I appreciate it a little more, even if I choke a little saying so. And so does my little dog, who is happily snoring away, enjoying a night blissfully free of the usual tirade I'd be on about this show by now.
Today we have one more another installment of our first-person profiles of queer people of color. If you're queer and of color, we're hoping this series can illuminate some of your own diversity, allow you to feel less isolated and know you're not alone. Queer youth (and queer people on the whole) are often isolated. That isolation hurts and can and does do very real damage. LGB young people who are also oppressed, marginalized and rendered doubly invisible because of race tend to face even greater challenges and isolation.
No matter who you are or what your deal is, we think you'll find these profiles challenge many perceptions and may make you reconsider or refine ideas or questions about orientation and race. It can also help you and others grow your compassion and your care, better understanding that every kind of marginalization and oppression both does very real harm and always has the capacity to do so, especially if it goes unseen and unheard.
Color/race you are/identify with: South Asian
When did you realize you were gay, lesbian or bisexual? I was at university, aged around 21. I developed a huge crush on one of my straight female friends. All of my friends, except one, seemed outwardly straight at the time. I think I'd been questioning my sexuality since I was around 13. I've only had one brief sexual experience before and this was with another girl, when we were going through puberty. Ever since then, I had some inkling that I liked girls and their bodies.
How did you feel about that realization? It was very scary and isolating. I didn't tell anyone initially. Then I started secretly going along to a 'Rainbow Youth' group (after walking past the door five times, finding it too hard to go inside). I attended on and off for 2 years but I didn't tell anyone there how hard it was for me to come every week and I didn't cry. I just tried to fit in. It was hard because I wasn't interested in the drinking and bar scene. Because of this, combined with study and family pressures, I began to feel overwhelmed, depressed and alone. I called the Gay helpline one day and spoke to a young Indian man. Among other things, he told me that he thought he could never come out to his parents. I found this even more depressing.
Have you been able to come out? One day, while at university, I went to talk to my professor in charge of student welfare as I needed some stress leave and wasn't coping. As I sat there crying and talking about feeling lonely and how I hadn't dated anyone before, he seemed to read between the lines and asked me if I could be gay. After talking to that first person, it became easier to tell others. It's been a very slow process for me though. I told my GP and my counsellor first. I told one of my South Asian friends; she was really caring and supportive about it. Six months later, I told another two friends. A year later, another two friends. To my extended family, most of my friends, the South Asian community where I live and to my work colleagues, I remain in the closet.
How supported do you feel by your own family and your community of color? Although I think of myself as South Asian, I was born overseas and have always lived in a Western country. Our family still carries many of our traditional values from back home and we have a large community here. I came out to my parents around 3 years after having my own realizations. The impetus for this was that they had started to look for marriage partners for me. I dated one man that they introduced me to for a few months. At the same time, I was secretly trying out different queer groups and it was a really confusing time. I knew that I had to tell them. That conversation and the conversations that followed were so tough. Remembering them still upsets me and that first day, I almost had a car accident afterwards. My mother thought I had thrown out all of my values and had no concern for us as a family. My dad thought I was unnatural and that I had no concern for my mother's health. You see, my mother told me that I had made her suicidal and that she must have burned someone in a past life to deserve a daughter like me. It was a huge guilt trip which effectively silenced me. One of the most hurtful parts was telling me not to associate with my South Asian female friends and not to have too much contact with my nieces and young cousins, not to stay at their houses overnight. My parents were afraid I'd pass on my lesbian perversions to them. Those kind of responses amplified the shame I already felt inside. Even now (2 years later), if I come out to someone, I have the urge to add "I'm lesbian......but, I'm still a good person, please keep me in your life!". Part of me feels like I need to be an 'extra good' daughter to make up for the gayness. Our current situation is that they are aware of my feelings but we don't talk about it at all. I also try to be as discrete as I can about discussing with other family members or people who know my parents so as not to make it awkward for them.
It's hard because although they don't support this part of me, my family has been so loving and supported me immensely in other areas of my life. I owe much of my success to them. I will always be grateful to my parents and I want to be here to support them as they age. I know that they only want me to be happy. I guess they feel that getting married to a nice South Asian man and having children is the only acceptable route to that happiness. Unfortunately, they are still looking for potential marriage partners for me.
My community would not be supportive of my coming out and I do not feel safe to do so. I expect that if my sexual orientation becomes widely known, I and perhaps even my family will become distanced from the community. I will not be welcome in their homes. I know one other gay man in our community and I hate how people denigrate and shame him behind his back. Of course, another barrier is my own internalized homophobia. Sometimes my own shame isolates me from the community and makes me feel like I can't face them as an unmarried woman. Although they would not support me as my authentic self, it is still scary to think about the possibility of losing them. If I were still living in the country my parents came from, I am aware my situation could be much worse.
I belong to one community group working in the area of domestic violence prevention and intervention among ethnic minority women. On my first day, I remember testing the waters, asking about whether they offered specific support for women belonging to sexual minorities. I'll never forget how kind that Indian lady was. She asked me whether I was enquiring for myself and when I affirmed I was, she smiled and told me that they had had many lesbian staff members and clients and that I was very welcome there. Just that sentence made a world of difference to me.
How about by the queer community? ell, to an extent I have felt supported. The problem is that the queer community where I live is predominantly white, and tend not have familiarity with issues such as my marriage predicament. Sometimes I do feel pressure from the queer community to come out, as if that will be the solution to all of my problems. I do have some wonderful white gay and lesbian friends though who make an effort to listen and understand. One woman in particular is my mother's age and her advice and sharing of her life experience has really helped me through the hard times. Also when I watch her with her partner and her kids, I feel optimistic that maybe that kind of future is also possible for me. I love meeting other queer people of colour, particularly from the South Asian community, but I don't often get this opportunity.
How has managing your romantic/sexual relationships gone? In what, if any, ways do you feel being a GLB person of color has impacted your relationships? I haven't had any romantic relationships outside of the dates with South Asian men that my parents have set up for me. In an ideal world without prejudice or discrimination, I dream of having a long term relationship with another South Asian woman who speaks my mother tongue and shares my religion (Buddhism). I don't know if that's possible and it doesn't leave alot of potential partners to choose from. Sexually, I've been quite inhibited in the past and and I struggle with feeling shame about my desires but I'm working on that. I grew up with the values that I needed to be a virgin until marriage. Although I'm an adult now it's still hard to reconcile that with my sexual orientation.
What do you feel are particular challenges for gays, lesbians and bisexuals of color? Where would I even start to talk about this? I can point you to a resource that I particularly like and can relate to- "Brown Like Me is a short documentary brought to you by the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP)s Queer South Asian Youth (Q-SAY) project. This short film captures the experiences of 6 queer-identified South Asian youth living in the Greater Toronto Area who speak candidly about identity labels, homophobia, coming out, pride, resiliency, and family."
We're all so different from each other and I feel I can only speak for myself. For me, the biggest challenge is avoiding isolation and othering within various communities. Finding a place where I am understood and emotionally safe. Meeting other queer people of colour. Meeting potential partners. Thinking about childbearing outside of a heterosexual model. Dealing with my own internalized prejudices. Fighting stereotypes. Wow, I find myself dealing with stereotypes regarding my age and appearance, my gender, my ethnicity, my immigration status, my sexual orientation..sometimes all within the same day. That can be really tiring! It has also made me strong though.
How do you feel others can help with those challenges? Don't assume. Don't assume that because I'm brown, I'm straight. Don't assume that because I'm brown, I don't speak English or that I'm a refugee. Don't assume that because I identify as gay, I am on my way out or that I won't get married to a man. If you're not sure who I am and what I stand for, please ask. Appreciate and learn about diversity in all its forms, whether it's about different cultures or about sexuality and gender. Be inclusive; don't make me feel alone.
If you're white and I'm telling you about my family and community, I'm taking a big risk and trusting you. If you're brown and I'm coming out to you, same deal. Please don't call my culture sexist or uneducated, don't make jokes about "arranged marriages" and don't deny my orientation or demand that I come out to the world; instead, ask me about my experience and how you can support me. Be an ally whenever you can. When you hear homophobic or racist comments, you need to stand up for us. Sometimes it's hard for us to speak up for ourselves and we need you to be our voice too. Be aware that we are here. Don't ever tell me that there are no queer people at your school or in your community or in your country! We may not always feel safe to be out, but we are everywhere. In return, we have so much to offer. We understand acutely what it is to be part of multiple minorities.
Does one kind of bias you face -- racism vs. homo/biphobia -- feel larger, more oppressive than the other? HAll bias can be large and oppressive, but in my life, I've been lucky not to face too much racism. At the moment, homophobia, both external and internal, feels more oppressive. (I also agree with Ellaris' wise answer to this one).
What do you feel like GLB people who are not of color don't get about the differences being GLB of color? What about hetero white people: what do they miss? There's no simple answer. Just that my experience of sexuality and coming out can't be equated to anyone else's, whether they are white or of colour. The more that we ask questions of each other and make an effort to understand our mutual differences with respect, the easier it will be.
Want to be part of this series and share your experiences and ideas about being gay, lesbian or bisexual and of color? We'd love to include you and get your voice out there. Drop us an email and we'll send you the questions!
Here's another installment of our first-person profiles of queer people of color. If you're queer and of color, we're hoping this series can illuminate some of your own diversity, allow you to feel less isolated and know you're not alone. Queer youth (and queer people on the whole) are often isolated. That isolation hurts and can and does do very real damage. LGB young people who are also oppressed, marginalized and rendered doubly invisible because of race tend to face even greater challenges and isolation.
No matter who you are or what your deal is, we think you'll find these profiles challenge many perceptions and may make you reconsider or refine ideas or questions about orientation and race. It can also help you and others grow your compassion and your care, better understanding that every kind of marginalization and oppression both does very real harm and always has the capacity to do so, especially if it goes unseen and unheard.
Color/race you are/identify with: Black
When did you realize you were gay, lesbian or bisexual? I was 15.
How did you feel about that realization? I, personally, felt fine about the realization. I hadn't dated any male or female at the time yet and knew that I didn't have to in order to be queer.
Have you been able to come out? I came out willingly to my school friends, and to my older sister shortly after I realized I was queer. I was only bullied very little at my predominantly white high school, partly because the other students were terrified of me.
I knew my own parents were no good to come out to. My mother is super-religious, and my step-dad has mental-health issues that make him speaking with him about any topic difficult, if not impossible. However, I was outed to my mother by a co-worker of hers a few years ago. I confirmed her questions about it and we haven't spoken about it since.
How supported do you feel by your own family and your community of color? My family is supportive of my life, as long as they get to ignore the queer part. I know they can't handle it so I don't talk about it with them. As for my community of colour, the only one I've ever really been a part of is my mom's church family, and I know they wouldn't be able to handle it either.
How about by the queer community? As a bisexual, I can't say I feel particularly supported by the queer community.
How has managing your romantic/sexual relationships gone? In what, if any, ways do you feel being a GLB person of color has impacted your relationships? It hasn't, really. I think my poor record with relationships is more just a personal thing.
What do you feel are particular challenges for gays, lesbians and bisexuals of color? Many of us are from very religious backgrounds. They do not accept us, and are very slow to change. They will fight us until they die, so I feel that our best bet is just to let a couple of generations pass, unfortunately.
How do you feel others can help with those challenges? I have a pretty pessimistic view of this particular challenge. Many of us are forced to choose between being honest with our families, or having families.
Does one kind of bias you face -- racism vs. homo/biphobia -- feel larger, more oppressive than the other? Homophobia is more oppressive to me because it separates me from my own family. After all, they are the same colour as I am.
What do you feel like GLB people who are not of color don't get about the differences being GLB of color? What about hetero white people: what do they miss? I think queer white people sometimes don't appreciate the privilege of family acceptance. Of course, I know that not all white queers enjoy that privilege, but as far as I know it seems almost non-existent among black communities.
Want to be part of this series and share your experiences and ideas about being gay, lesbian or bisexual and of color? We'd love to include you and get your voice out there. Drop us an email and we'll send you the questions!
I was one of several guests on a radio show in Baltimore on Friday. The topic of the show was apparently going to be about sex education and social justice, but turned out to be more like fear-mongering and a whole lot of projections around teen sexuality mixed with focus on parents and teen sexuality. I got the impression all four of us who were asked to take part, despite some of our disagreements, were very frustrated with the show and the host clearly asking questions he didn't want factual answers to, despite purportedly asking us to take part to provide just that.
At one point, he asked one of the guests to talk about rape victims and survivors. She said she did not do any work with rape or survivors, but instead of deferring to any of us who had, or just saying "I don't know," she went ahead and did some postulating and guesswork. There were several things she said in a rush of words that bothered me, but one of the most troubling was a statement that rape survivors "compulsively have sex."
This is a very common stereotype. It's one that can be incredibly damaging in several ways. It's also one which has long since been dismantled by rape survivors, people who work in the field as advocates for survivors and educators about rape.
I had to wait a while before I got a chance to respond, since the host accepted what was said at face value. I should mention that with a response like the speaker's, the onus was not just on her but also on the host to defer the question elsewhere or ask that speaker to talk about something that was within her area of expertise. This is one of a couple reasons why I'm not naming names here today out of courtesy. The whole show was so badly organized and biased that I don't want to tar someone who said some uneducated things when I am sure did not say them with malice, and when she may very well take responsibility for them herself elsewhere.
When I got a chance to do some correcting, I was cut off before I could do so well. Part of why I got cut off is that the only chance I got to correct the information was in answering a question about what parents should know per teen sexuality and talking to teens. I think I was also cut off because in explaining some of this, I identified as both someone who has worked with a survivor and as a survivor myself, which I got the impression, made the host seriously uncomfortable. While I was going a little off-topic in making the corrections, not only were they important not to let stand, the information was relevant to what parents should know, and I want to explain why.
Part of what kept getting bandied about was the primarily media-manufactured idea that teens are now having sex earlier than before. In asking all four of the guests -- all sexuality educators, and two of us work with very large, broad sex education groups and have for many years -- if this was in fact true, we all said that it was not, each explaining why. (At some point in the show I was asked to explain what "sexualizing" teens meant, and I regret I did not throw tact to the wind and say "Adults endlessly obsessing about what kinds of sex and how much sex teens are having, especially when trying to insist they're having sex at rates they are not, in order to be provocative for their own notoriety is an example of sexualizing them.")
In the discussion, it began to seem like that the host, just like all too much data on sex as a whole, was not separating consensual sex from rape. The host also used the term "unwanted sex" at some point -- again, just like all too much data continues to do -- instead of saying rape.
One thing I'd mentioned earlier about ages of sexual debut was that when discussing sex and 13-15 year olds, we know from an awful lot of study and work with that population that a great deal of young women that age "having sex" -- having intercourse -- aren't having sex at all. They are being raped.
One third (33%) of sexually active teens 15-17 reports “being in a relationship where they felt things were moving too fast sexually”, and 24 percent have “done something sexual they didn’t really want to do.” More than one in five (21%) report having oral sex to “avoid having sexual intercourse” with a partner. More than a quarter (29%) of teens 15-17 report feeling pressure to have sex. Nearly one in 10 (9%) 9-12th grade students report having been physically forced to have sexual intercourse when they did not want to at some point. (Kaiser Family Foundation, National Survey of Adolescents and Young Adults: Sexual Health Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviors, May 2003.)
NONE of that data is about fully consensual sex: most of it is about rape and other kinds of sexual abuses.
As well, the younger a girl is when she has sex (a statistic which again, often does not separate rape from consensual sex, but just counts any vaginal intercourse as 'sex") for the first time, the greater the average age difference is likely to be between her and her partner. (Abma JC, Martinez, GM, Mosher, WD., Dawson, BS. Teenagers in the United States: Sexual activity, contraceptive use, and childbreaing, 2002. National Center for Health Statistics. Vital Health Stat 23(24). 2004.) When it comes to rape, for victims of all genders, it's most common for rapists to be a male older than the they are, especially the younger the victim is. This is not to say all age-disparate relationships involve rape, but it is to say that many do, particularly for the youngest people.
It's accepted and understood that around one on every 4-6 women are raped in their lifetime, and around one in every 33 men (though in both cases, underreporting is an issue, so both numbers are likely higher, particularly the male figure). Data we have on rape also has long shown us (and plenty of us have the personal experience to know this already) that the rate of rape for people of all ages is usually highest for the youngest people: teens and young adults of every gender are victimized at the highest rates and are at the highest risk of being raped.
When someone is raping us, they are refusing and removing our autonomy. A rapist is taking control of our bodies against our will to get what they want sexually and/or emotionally for themselves, and not only when we don't want it, but often expressly because we don't.
After rape, it's common for survivors to feel like that robbery of body ownership and sexual ownership can hijack or co-opt ourselves and/or our sexualities in many ways for quite some time. If we choose to have wanted, consensual sex and have body memories or other post-traumatic reactions, if we find we can't not think about our rape or rapes in some way during sex, you can perhaps understand why we feel that way. If rape or other sexual abuse leaves us feeling like our only value is as a sexual object, you can perhaps understand why we feel that way. If we can't even think about sex we want without thinking about rape, you can perhaps understand why we feel that way. If we can't chose to have any kind of sex without someone suggesting it's merely a compulsion about our rape, you can perhaps understand why we feel that way.
The belief or statement that if we have sex after rape, it is only out of compulsion or reaction to our trauma is one way we are also robbed of autonomy and choice. What that purports is that after rape, for weeks, months, years or ever after, we still are no longer able or allowed to make the free choice to have sex we want when we want it. That kind of statement is yet another robbery of our personhood, and our right to want and/or do the things people who were not raped want or do. It's one of many statements made about rape and sexual abuse survivors that suggest we are all damaged goods, a statement not only biased and ignorant, but unsupportive and damaging. This is one of many ways in which it's not just our rapes themselves that do us harm but the way we are treated by others because we have been raped. It puts survivors in the mode of being perpetual victims, not recognizing the hard work many of us have to do heal, and the strength and force of will our healing process can give us. Frankly, speaking both for myself and the wealth of other survivors I know and have spoken with through my work over the years, once any of us have come through that process, I'm inclined to say we're a group of people who generally are more equipped than most to ONLY choose to have sex when that is absolutely what we want, not less.
The speaker also said sex was "always more confusing" for survivors. That can certainly be true sometimes. But it's important to remember that most of us not only figure it out in time, but tend to have even more clarity around what is or isn't wanted, what is or isn't sex, because we have had an experience which has made very clear what sex is NOT and what is NOT wanted. That's an experience those who have not been abused or assaulted have not had in the same way, and often are more unsure about than we are by virtue of our experience. As someone who has worked in sex education for over a decade, who has had tens of thousands of one-on-one conversations about it with individuals and whose work just never seems to stop piling up, it also seems to be stating the obvious that sex is clearly confusing for a whole lot of people, not just rape survivors.
Do some survivors have sex compulsively as a reaction to rape or other sexual abuse? Yes, some do, but so do lots of people who have never been sexually assaulted or abused. Compulsive behavior after assault can also manifest in a lot of different ways when it is an issue. But many rape and sexual abuse survivors don't ever have sex by compulsion.
Of course, it's also possible that just like this host and many others call or see rape as "unwanted sex", that what is seen as "compulsive sex" is instead, yet more rape. Many rape survivors are raped more than once, either because they feel it was made clear they do not have the right to say no, because they have not been able to identity dangers when it can be seen coming, because they have not left or been removed from the relationship in which rape happened the first time or a host of other scenarios. This can particularly be an issue with the youngest victims: girls who were victimized before turning 12 and then again as adolescents (ages 13–17) were at much greater risk of both types of victimization as adults than any other women. (Siegel, J.A., and L.M. Williams, Risk Factors for Violent Victimization of Women: A Prospective Study, Final Report.) Since so many people still think of rape only as stranger-rape, rather than the more common contexts it happens in -- especially to the youngest victims -- where the rapist is a family member, boyfriend, friend or otherwise known person, it can be all the more easy for people who conceptualize rape simplistically to continue to conflate rape with sex.
Why do parents, not just young people, all people, or advocates, need to know this stuff? First and foremost because it's just not okay, wise, beneficial or kind to misrepresent people, and it's particularly shitty to marginalize people who have been already been marginalized by abuse. In other words, everyone needs to know things like this because it's unacceptable to stereotype survivors or other or objectify us further.
Many parents also assume that if a young person says they had sex or is discovered to have had sex that it must have been consensual. By all means, most of the time, that is the case, since the majority of people are not raped. However, that minority isn't minor: it's millions of people. Because of the way people and so much of our culture talks about and treats rape, like calling it "unwanted sex," because of how much victim-blaming there still is, because of how hard and scary it can be to disclose or report rape (of which false assumptions or suppositions about victims are part), and because people generally do NOT want to have been raped, it's not uncommon for people to be very reluctant to disclose rape or to call their own rapes rapes. Many people don't realize how many rape victims don't disclose or report because they worry about being further attacked or "getting their rapists in trouble." Of course, assuming that any sex must be unconsensual just because of someone's age or gender is problematic, too.
If and when a young person has been raped or otherwise sexually abused, it's also vital to do things that will help that person heal. Presenting someone as damaged goods does not help with healing: it just adds insult to injury. Suggesting that wanted, consensual sex must be a compulsion or post-traumatic reaction does not help anyone heal, particularly since part of most of our healing is to get to a place where we can have our own sexual life. Suggesting our minds, bodies and sexualities will never be fully our own is not only false, it also gives us the message that you think our rapists won in taking us, and we can never have our whole selves back. I have had to help plenty of survivors unpack their hurtful internalization of these messages, messages many have received from people and the world around them long after they were raped or abused, over and over again.
Again, sometimes survivors do have sex that is compulsive or reactive. We also want to be sure to recognize that sometimes that's about trying to relive the experience to process it or change the script or other known on unconscious motivations which can be about processing and healing. In other words, even in some cases where it is or appears troubling to an outsider, it may just be where someone is at in their own process, and outsiders should carefully consider the judgments they may make about that, or any way they may pathologize behavior that may not be pathological. Hopefully, people can also start to garner an awareness that judging a rape survivor's sexual behavior can put even more baggage on a person than it can to non-survivors.
A lot of the time, rape survivors of every age are having sex because sex is what we want, because it makes us feel good about ourselves, our bodies and our interpersonal relationships, and for the whole range of reasons people who have not been raped want to engage in sex.
Once more with feeling, all survivors of rape do not behave the same way, just like all survivors of concentration camps didn't, all survivors of other hate crimes do not, all people who have been mugged do not, all veterans of wars do not. Just like many other kinds of trauma, not only are all rapes different, all of the people who survive them are different, as is our process in reacting, healing, surviving and thriving.
A post over at Shakesville sums this up so well:
There is no such thing as a “typical” response to rape. Immediately following a rape, some women go into shock. Some are lucid. Some are angry. Some are ashamed. Some are practical. Some are irrational. Some want to report it. Some don’t. Most have a combination of emotions, but there is no standard response. Responses to rape are as varied as its victims. In the long term, some rape victims act out. Some crawl inside themselves. Some have healthy sex lives. Some never will again."
It's important for everyone, including parents, to understand the manufactured myth of the "right response" to rape, or the way victims are "supposed to act" is myth and is dangerous. Just like the idea that if someone isn't crying or angry after rape they haven't been raped, the idea that if someone is having sex -- either of any kind, or in ways or frequency arbitrarily considered acceptable or not -- or isn't tells us who has been raped or who hasn't, who is healing or who is not is also false. Ideas or statements there are right or wrong ways to behave, sexually or otherwise, post-rape leave many victims feeling unable to disclose or report as well as unable to either heal or be recognized as having healed; as a whole person, like anyone else, not as some kind of one-dimensional person who is but merely as someone who got raped, an idea that suggests we our rapists didn't just rob our personhood while raping us, but forever.
Sometimes, being careless or clueless about any of this will hurt our individual feelings as survivors and make us feel crappy: that's not acceptable, but most of us can and will deal, even though it sucks (particularly since we're often all too used to it). Some survivors can't deal with that, and it sets them back in or keeps them from healing. But the effect can be even more serious and far-reaching than that, because statements like this, especially broadcast widely and with a voice given any kind of authority, also can enable rape and the continued maltreatment and dehumanizing of survivors.
Be careful how you talk about us, especially if and when you haven't shared our experiences or done any work yourself to really listen to us as a large, varied group or haven't done a whole lot of homework in reading the work of those who have, and those who have collected sound data on rape and rape survivors. If you're asked about rape or rape survivors and you're talking about your personal experience, qualify it as that. If you're talking about rape or survivors as a group with no experience, personally or professionally, then either refer people to those who have that experience, to sound sources of general data like RAINN, or just say you do not know. If you want to know or speak about what our experiences have been like? Ask us. We're right here, willing, wanting and able to speak for ourselves, needing you to allow us to do just that by not speaking for us.
If there's a common compulsivity in all of this, it's the habit of non-survivors or uninformed speakers to speak with bias or ignorance about survivors. Foot-in-mouth disease when it comes to talking about rape victims and survivors is long-established and epidemic compulsive behavior.
I want to wrap this up with something a lot of survivors and thoughtful people who work with survivors know, but a lot of people don't realize.
If and when you have been raped or sexually abused in some other way, when the time comes that you can experience consensual, wanted sex, that in and of itself -- even if the sex isn't all you wanted it to be, whether or not you get off -- can be a profoundly liberating, healing experience. It is watershed to have positive, enjoyable and reclaiming experiences about parts of our bodies or selves that were traumatized, just like it's a huge deal for someone who had an injury they were told meant they'd never walk again to find themselves walking. Tangibly experiencing and clarifying that rape and sex are radically different things is huge. Having a wanted, consensual sexual life is not only of the same value to us as it is to everyone else, it can also help send our hearts a clear message that no matter what others say or intimate, we are NOT damaged goods, forever cursed to be sexual objects or dysfunctional sexually or interpersonally; that no matter what happened to us, our bodies and sexualities are still absolutely our own, by our choice, within our control and for our own pleasure and joy.
I moved to Seattle around four years ago from Minneapolis, where I lived for six years after leaving my hometown of Chicago. Growing up in Chicago, living in Minnesota and after an early childhood on the east coast, I was used to old things, to history, to a total lack of shiny-and-new. Growing up poor and in a number of far less-than-ideal living situations, my normal in how and where I lived was often pretty rough around the edges, and often involved a lot of effort from me, typically more than my fair share.
Seattle, however, is kind of the land of shiny-and-new. Almost every place I looked at when I was apartment-hunting felt sanitized and kind of like Barbie's Dream House to me: without my kind of character and so already-finished that I didn't see where there was room for my own stamp in them. The allure of the fixer-upper was nowhere to be found. I've always liked fixing places up that anyone else would see as hopeless: it's a challenge, and a situation where I might have the ability to feel like I'm awesome because I took something shitty and made it fantastic. I've always felt more at home in places that were a bit of a disaster, probably because that's just what I was used to, but whatever.
As it turns out, I found this house to rent that seemed amazing: it was over 100 years old, and in a neighborhood that at the time, had more old character and charm than new stuff. It had a ton of kooky little quirks I found really charming. It needed a bunch of work done to potentially make it nice, but it had the raw materials to be something awesome with work. I didn't think twice about how quickly the landlord rented it out to me, because I wanted it, so that just seemed like serendipity. Like this was meant to be my house, to the point that I had this idea that had anyone else tried to rent it, it would not have been so easy for them.
I did do a lot of creative work with it, though not as much as I'd have liked to. I just didn't have the time or the resources to do so much of it mostly on my own. As well, even from the start, I should have seen some red flags I just didn't. For instance, while I was so into working on it, my housemate wasn't as invested in that as I was. I should have recognized that when a landlord says you can just do whatever you want with a place with no limits, they're either not being truthful or just don't care much about the place. I also had to pay some of the costs of fixing it up, rather than the landlord paying me to do labor he should have done himself.
As the years went by, more things kept falling apart and breaking. I tried to keep up with them mostly on my own, especially since when I asked for help, what was given was either substandard or radio silence. Within a year, my lease also got shifted to a month-to-month lease, meaning that the landlord could ask me to go pretty much anytime with very little notice. Having survived that exact situation more than once in my life, and so barely, that felt horribly unstable, but I just accepted it instead of trying hard to assert my needs. Still, I felt more comfortable here than I thought I would have felt moving, both because moving or any kind of big start-over is so hard, and because this place felt so familiar, not just with its style and age, but with it's whole vibe: I've lived almost all of my life in places that were falling apart or neglected. I was used to that, and however uncomfortable that as, something about that did feel like home.
Last year, it finally became clear that I could drive myself batty trying to keep this place liveable and it just wasn't going to happen. I spent a winter without working heat in half the house, wrapped up in blankets all day working in front of a space heater. The basic fixtures kept breaking. There were leaks, including one that nearly took down my kitchen ceiling, and a lack of insulation that cost me more money in bills than I have to spend. One day, I was so frustrated with two things that broke that I just gave up, went to get myself a glass for some wine, and when I opened the cabinet, the door fell off in my hand. On top of my house falling apart all around me, I didn't even like the city it was in very much, and my neighborhood had also changed radically during the time I lived here in ways I did not like at all, and was not going to change back. I sank to the floor in a pile of tears, already upset due to building stress from managing work and some other huge changes in my life. It all felt so hopeless, and I so felt trapped in it, especially since at the time, moving wasn't an option I felt I could handle financially or practically.
But why was I staying in a city I didn't really like in the first place? Why was I staying in a house that was falling apart all around me more and more? Why did I keep trying to convince myself I could fix everything when I knew I couldn't, or that my landlord would suddenly do all kinds of things he'd never done? Why did I keep focusing on the small things that I loved about the house when the big things were so awful? Why was I investing more and more money, effort and love into something where getting a real return on that investment was about as likely as a million dollars falling from the sky? Why was I staying so focused on what this house could be, rather than focusing on the way it actually was and was most likely to remain? Why was I accepting a total lack of help from the people who should be helping me with it while ignoring some potential help others could have given me to be somewhere better? I'm a smart person: why on earth was I being so stupid?
Ultimately, I think it came down to the fact that I was so bogged down and overspent with a lot of things in my life, including this damn house. On top of everything else I was dealing with, the idea of feeling displaced from any kind of home at all, even a poor one, just seemed like too much. I had taken part in digging myself in deeper and deeper into a pit: having to take responsibility for the place I was keeping myself in was harder than being unhappy, but being able to pin it entirely on what the house was doing, what my housemate and landlord were not doing. I had gotten attached and stayed so attached to the "what-ifs" and had invested so much time, money and heart into this place: I was having trouble accepting my hopes for it were simply never going to come to fruition because it seemed like such a waste. I had gotten scared of making a change, and had strangely managed to forget that I was capable of making it and had done so many times before in my life, even when it was harder than this was now. I had become comfortable in being uncomfortable.
In a few weeks, I'm moving out.
I'm leaving this house and this city for one of the beautiful small islands just outside of it. For many years no, I've talked about how I've spent almost all of my life in very urban areas, yet when I needed peace, it's rural areas I've gone to to find it, and so I felt I might actually be a lot happier living rurally. The way my workday most often is, I can actually get away with only needing to go into the city a few times a month for work, so it is doable. Because it's just a short ferry ride into the city, I can be rural here while also having easy access to the city. I found a place to move to with almost the exact same rent as I'm paying now, but where everything works and nothing is broken. Sure, it's only 20 years old, so that feels and looks unfamiliar to me, but it's beautiful inside and out. I will literally get to wake up every day and walk out into the forest, which is heaven on earth to me. As is often the case, if we can shake ourselves out of our miasma, we can usually identify not only ways to get out of it, but ways that getting out can be part of pursuing more of what we've wanted and had as goals all along.
Of course, this means my having to pack up everything and move again. It means money spent on moving and resettling, which is always a major strain. It means all the practical, tiresome crap you have to do to relocate. That means risking that a new place or space may or may not be better than the old one in some ways, even though it most certainly will be in other ways. That means having to deal with change, which even when it's positive, is often uncomfortable and scary.
You may perhaps be wondering why I'm going on here at Scarleteen about my move. I'd be wondering, too.
I only just realized one of the big things that got me to these realizations about my house were conversations with some of you about your unhealthy, abusive or otherwise crummy relationships. So, I figured the least I owed you for that epiphany was the possibility of doing you the same turn, especially since your bad relationships have the capacity to screw you and your life up you a whole lot more than my bad house has the capacity to screw me and my life up.
We often have users come to Scarleteen who are in abusive, unhealthy, dysfunctional or craptastic relationships. Most of the time, you do know they're bad before we talk with you about them. Sometimes, you don't realize how bad until we talk, or have been trying to hold unto denials or the hopes that the relationship will just get better, either by some kind of magic, by someone who has never made any effort miraculously starting to, or by you, yourself, going nuts to try and make something bad into something good alone. Just like me, with this house.
I could stay here. My rent would keep going up and the house would keep costing me more and more while it all kept falling apart around me. I could put in continued effort while my landlord kept putting in less and less. I could freeze through another winter, trying to keep myself warm with the memory of the heat that used to work, the way the house probably was 50 years ago, the beautiful changes I made that could never quite get all finished but still might, and the hopes I had for this house, when it felt like nothing but lovely and positive possibility. I could stay here and risk the whole ceiling caving in on my head, which has become a real possibility.
You could stay where you're at, too. You could stay and, at best, things would stay just as bad or as substandard as they are now or, more realistically, you could stay and they would keep getting worse. You could stay and keep investing more and more while getting less and less. You could freeze through another winter, trying to keep yourself warm with your hopes, those past feelings of possibility, and the time when things did seem okay, shutting out the reality which has made clear that those hopes will only ever be hopes. You could stay and risk someone abusive and unhealthy doing you the kind of harm that you can't come back from, which is often a real possibility.
I could stay, and so could you. But I can also go. I can take the chance and the risk of something better, remember or learn what I'm really capable of. I can get the hell out of here and do the grieving I need to about what could have been, but wasn't, and move forward, putting my time and effort and energy into something or somewhere much more likely to be worth that kind of investment. I can move into something that doesn't need fixing now or right from the onset. I can step outside my comfort zone and likely wind up feeling more comfortable once the dust settles, rather than less. So can you.
I know that it's hard as hell to leave a bad or abusive relationship, especially the longer you've been in it, the more hopes you tacked on to it, the more promises you believed, the more your whole life got sucked into it and tethered to it. It's harder still if you have managed to convince yourself or allowed yourself to be convinced that any or all parts of the abuse are love or some kind of natural and unavoidable consequence of your existence.
I could tell myself that he floor that is wasting away in this house was once so, so beautiful, and old things just need my love to be better. I could convince myself that if I made more money, or chose to do something else with my life than I do, I'd not be in this house, I'd be able to have kept it running better, or able to have been more assertive with my landlord. I could figure that all of this would be something I could handle if I had done things differently and had more to fall back on. But I didn't, so this is why this is happening, right? This is what I am solely responsible for and stuck with, right?
Wrong. My house is falling apart because before I even got here people who were supposed to take care of it well didn't. It's falling apart because it needs a kind of help that my love or my residency can't provide. For sure, I have some responsibility in what happened here: I could have moved out earlier if I'd have asked more people for help, if I'd taken some positive risks earlier -- and maybe even put myself in a temporary space to be able to do that that wasn't great, but helped me get closer to being able to make positive changes. All the same, while I'm responsible for not changing my circumstances when I could, what I'm not responsible for is for this house not housing me well, just like you're not responsible for any way someone abused or mistreated you. You're just responsible for doing all you can to get away from it to a place that's safe, sound and where your love, effort and care will be returned in kind.
Am I going to miss things about this old house, this neighborhood, this city? Absolutely. There's an old clawfoot bathtub here that is divine, even though the faucet never stops leaking. I made a great garden here and a meadow up front. I painted things here that are very creative and cool and have my unique stamp: I hate to leave them, they feel like part of me. I have routines here. I have a couple places I go here that I really like. I'll be further away from a couple of friends. But I'll deal: new places offer new things to value. When I'm honest with myself, it's impossible to deny that what I'll be missing the most was how things were when I first moved in, when the bloom wasn't off the rose. When my feelings about everything were painted with the exceptional spackle that a sense of possibility is and the desire for something great can be. I had hopes for this house, but they didn't come to fruition. That sucks, but it also happens in life, and usually more than once. You accept it, your brush your knees off, and then you find new hopes, hopefully getting a little better each time at identifying where those hopes are more likely to become realities. You also accept that we've got to take risks for the good stuff.
It may be that the change I'm about to make, the next place I'm going, turns out similarly. I'm pretty sure it won't, because I've applied some lessons I learned from this. I've set it up, for instance, so that I have a long-term lease: I made clear from the start I refused to sign unto something month-to-month, because I know that doesn't provide me the stability I need and know I deserve to have my needs met. I recognized that getting a better place, a more functional place, meant the screening process and the way in took more time and was not quite as easy as getting this place was, and I accepted that. I've made sure that nothing needs to be fixed by me: walking into this new place, everything already works and nothing is already broken. I've asked for help and support from the people around me in my transition, and they're glad to provide it. I'm leaving things behind here that I just don't need or that I know hinder me.
Sure, it's more shiny-and-new than I'm used to, it's somewhere I haven't lived before, and I'm going to have to learn to do some things well I'm not yet good at. And maybe the forest that has always felt like a great refuge for me won't feel the same when it's where I live instead of where I visit. It's totally possible. If and when we do things differently, apply what we've learned and make choices based on goals we've had for ourselves... that's when we tend to net different results, better results.
While my move comes with some question marks, continuing to stay here comes with few. The trouble is, the certainty in staying is all about being sure that, at best, things would stay exactly as crap as they are. What's even more likely is that they'd get crappier. When we're honest with ourselves, we all know something falling apart is going to stay falling apart once we've done all we can to try and repair it with no results. I have to recognize that things would get worse if I stayed: more things would fall apart, and I'd get more and more hopeless and trapped, especially since the longer I stay, the tougher it is to go.
Am I scared? You bet. Big changes are scary, even when they're potentially good ones. Even as someone who has taken many big risks in her life and gone through a lot of changes, big change never really stops being scary. I'm nervous and scared and I feel a bit unsteady on my feet, even though I'm moving toward something I have wanted and dreamed about, something that very clearly is far more likely to be positive and better.
So I keep reminding myself that this is living. Trying new things, taking risks that seem likely to be beneficial, stepping outside my comfort zone in pursuit of personal growth and positive change, is all of what being alive is all about. I shouldn't feel stuck in the ground until I'm six feet under, after all. Staying stuck, sticking with anything that clearly isn't working, avoiding what's new and unknown is the antithesis of living: it's refusing to be fully alive. That's not who I am, and I'm sure it's not who any of you are.
I know that my house isn't exactly your relationship, particularly since, as an object, it doesn't have the ability to have the kind of power over me another person could have, and I also couldn't get as attached to it as I could to another person. While the conditions of my house are awful, my house itself can't manipulate me or try and control me. My house isn't doing anything maliciously, nor does it know it's treating me horribly and trying to rationalize it or someone make it's actions seem like my fault. My house also doesn't have the capacity to fix itself, unlike whoever you're in a relationship with.
My house isn't calling me names, isn't telling me I'm stupid or a slut, isn't accusing me of things I haven't done or trying to control where I go or who I talk to. My house isn't trying to keep me from my friends, family or other people who care about me and would make sure I'm always safe; my house isn't trying to limit me in what I do in my life so that it can feel superior to me or make it tougher for me to go. My house isn't destroying my cherished belongings on purpose. My house isn't hitting or punching me, isn't raping me or trying to coerce me into sex or pregnancies I don't want. My house isn't doing horrible things to me and telling me I asked for them. My house, itself, didn't actually make me any promises it knew it couldn't keep. My house also doesn't have the capacity to choose what it does or doesn't do, and isn't actively choosing to treat me badly. It earnestly can't help or change the state that it's in, unlike the person who is failing or abusing you who has chosen not to work on themselves to get better and to stop hurting you, others and themselves. My house isn't telling me that I couldn't do better, that it's as good as it gets. My house will let me leave a bad situation without trying to trick or force me into staying in something where I'm going to continue to be harmed.
My house isn't your relationship or your partner. If any of those things are happening to you in your relationship, your house, as it were, is in a much worse state than mine is. Which begs the big question: why are you staying when I'm leaving?
Like I said, I know leaving a bad relationship is hard, and that leaving an abusive relationship is even harder. I've been in that spot (which is some of why I feel so bothered by how it took me so long to recognize the problems with this house), and have had friends there, too. If you need help in leaving, come and ask for it. You can ask me or one of the staff here and we'll be happy to help you find local resources to help you out, you can call any number of hotlines, look up your local domestic violence/intimate partner violence shelter or support group or you can ask the people you know really love and care for you for help, being honest with them about what's going on.
But if you don't want to freeze through another winter, have the roof cave in on you or wind up more and more trapped in your interpersonal version of this sad, crumbling house, then you've got to take at least one step that'll get you to the kind of space that will earnestly be a good home for your heart and your spirit, even if those first steps feel shaky or your knees knock when you take them. I deserve and am worthy of that. So are you.
Time for another installment of our first-person profiles of queer people of color. This one is from someone older than the age group we serve at Scarleteen, but who came into hir sexual identity at 20. I think it's valuable to have a look at someone with more years to process all of these issues than our readers have usually had.
Again, even if you're not of color and queer, not LGB or not of color, we think it's vital to cultivate an awareness of what it means to be not just a member of one of those groups, but of both. If you are queer and of color, what we're hoping this new series can do is help illuminate some of your own diversity, allow you to feel less isolated and know you're not alone. Queer youth (and queer people on the whole) are often isolated. That isolation hurts and can and does do very real damage. LGB young people who are also oppressed, marginalized and rendered doubly invisible because of race tend to face even greater challenges and isolation.
No matter who you are or what your deal is, we think you'll find these profiles challenge many perceptions and may make you reconsider or refine ideas or questions about orientation and race. It can also help you and others grow your compassion and your care, better understanding that every kind of marginalization and oppression both does very real harm and always has the capacity to do so, especially if it goes unseen and unheard.
Color/race you are/identify with Multiracial, South Asian/white
When did you realize you were gay, lesbian or bisexual? Age 20
How did you feel about that realization? Just fine. It was almost a nonissue. The only people I didn't tell (for the first seven years) were my parents.
Have you been able to come out? Yes. With my parents it was tricky, but with everyone else it was easy. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, so I was lucky to be operating without a lot of religious and cultural baggage. My friends were more queer than straight; my college was offering queer studies classes. I'd been an out-and-proud ally for years, so it was a smooth transition. Literally, I woke up one morning and thought, "Oh look, I AM actually attracted to women. Cool." I never worried about telling my friends, or even my then-boyfriend. Everyone took it in stride.
How supported do you feel by your own family and your community of color? My own family tries. Really they do. I don't think the level of cluelessness is off the charts, but it's not much more than average, either. My community of color? I live in the rural northeast. Being queer and South Asian isn't easy; being queer and mixed is harder,because any community can put it down to the OTHER identity group. That said, my Indian grandmother has been incredibly supportive, and no one has written me hate mail or disowned me. I'm very grateful for the internet, and for the time I've spent in larger cities. Both give me a sense that there's someplace I might sort of fit in. However, I'm acculturated white and I don't speak any language other than English, so fitting into South Asian communities has always been tenuous for me. Mixed communities of color are easier because the standards of cultural inclusion are broader. I definitely feel more brown than white, but I'm most at home in multicultural groupings. The experience of being mixed is pretty specific. I'm often not x enough: not Indian enough, not brown enough, not queer enough. That's another layer of struggle.
How about by the queer community? It's way easier, if you're talking about white queer community. There is some exoticization (is that a word?) but not too much in our generation -- fewer and fewer people fetishize being brown. It's much worse in generationally mixed groups, where the older members of the group have the same race issues that most people of our parents' generation have. But no one has told me I'm too brown to be here. I do get criticized for my choice of "queer" over "lesbian" and end up doing a lot of explaining about gender continuua and the changing face of queer identities, but I don't think that's because of my race. Sorting out what problems are endemic and which are specific to my identity stack is one of the harder tasks that I only sometimes engage with.
How has managing your romantic/sexual relationships gone? In what, if any, ways do you feel being a GLB person of color has impacted your relationships? Because my mix of races is fairly unusual, there's pretty much no chance of a same-race relationship for me. Every one involves some measure of education about stuff, and some sense of cultural distance that must be bridged. It's more work, but it means we assume less, so maybe there are fewer major explosions. Maybe. You know that "whoosh" of relief from knowing everyone around you gets it? I have had that maybe once or twice in my life. Sometimes I'm really, really tired.
What do you feel are particular challenges for gays, lesbians and bisexuals of color? I hate trying to generalize from my experience to everyone's, but having a place where we can just relax and be ourselves seems most consistently difficult. Every identity is another limiting factor -- if you're like me, a mixed-race (South Asian), queer (bisexual), liberal religious, gender nonconforming (boyish with girl bits) person, it can be almost impossible to have a place where everything is already explained, where nothing has to be justified or detailed.
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be in a relationship where race never enters the equation, but when I take a hard look at it everyone has cultural barriers to overcome unless they work really hard to only date people exactly like them. Because I grew up UU, the racial barriers seem huge and the sexual orientation barriers seem much smaller. UUism has its own issues with race and class with which we struggle, but we have worked hard and succeeded in some measure on issues around sexual orientation, and it shows. On the other hand, sometimes we think we're more progressive than we are.
How do you feel others can help with those challenges? Anytime people are more accepting and more educated, it helps. People of color can stop drawing the lines quite so tightly. In general, when the communities are more inclusive, they are less likely to exclude people who walk the borders. It sounds obvious, but it seems like maybe it's not. Being aware, self-educating, and doing the ally work is all good stuff. If you're queer and white, don't equate your experience of oppression with mine; don't try to set up a hierarchy either. But keep asking who's not at the table, and if I'm not, or if I'm the only one, pay attention. It's the little things. Like this one dance class I took where a woman who was there with a guy kept correcting the instructors from "ladies and gents" to "leaders and followers" over and over and over, which meant I didn't have to, nor did I have to wince. That's ally work. Even more? Do it when I'm not there, just because it's the right thing to do.
Does one kind of bias you face -- racism vs. homo/biphobia -- feel larger, more oppressive than the other? Can you talk about how? It all depends on the moment and the location. Context is everything. Whatever group isn't the majority is the one that feels bigger. Being in a room full of queer people of color is a strange kind of heaven.
What do you feel like GLB people who are not of color don't get about the differences being GLB of color? What about hetero white people: what do they miss? Everyone gets or doesn't get a different thing. Some hetero white folks are
educated and aware and on top of things; some aren't. Some people are seriously homophobic. Some are seriously racist. I do feel like that Onion article about a more virulent racism was spot-on; I think we're moving in that direction with homophobia too -- it's going underground. As a culture we haven't really figured out how to manage this second-generation prejudice yet for any group. As someone with educational and class privilege I can say that it's pretty easy to miss the depth of struggle involved for someone trying to work around/overcome prejudice; it can seem like no big deal until you get in the trenches. I don't think anyone's really immune to that.
Want to be part of this series and share your experiences and ideas about being gay, lesbian or bisexual and of color? We'd love to include you and get your voice out there. Drop us an email and we'll send you the questions!
Many people have been asking about when our next peer sex educator training will be, and I'm sorry to say that I'm coming in with my founder and executive director hat on to deliver some not-so-awesome news about it.
We have a very long waiting list for another session of our training. I was hoping to be able to do another round this spring or summer, but as of right now, it simply will not be possible to do until late fall, and may even need to stay on hold until 2011.
I like to run the organization as transparently as possible, so I'll briefly explain what's up with the holdup. Long story short, there are three major factors right now which are the issue.
With the waiting list being so long, we want to train a larger group in than last time. But even with the small group that we had last year, it was clear that doing the training mostly on my own was very difficult, and I feel that shortchanged our trainees. So, I need some pro-bono help from a handful of other qualified educators who can and will commit to actively help for the whole of the six-week session and the final review. Those people are very hard to find. I'd love to be able to pay trainers for their time and effort, which would help, but that gets us to the second issue.
Our funding for this year is not at all ideal. Last year's end-of-year fundraiser went exceptionally well, but not only did some of that funding not wind up coming through, since that fundraiser donations to the organization have been exceptionally low. Last year's fundraiser was also mostly about taking care of last year's budget, not this year's budget. I was able to shift some of the funds over to this year, but there's still a big gap between what we have and what we need, especially with additional programs beyond our most basic operating expenses.
Doing the training already comes with a cost per materials and my own labor to direct, oversee and manage the whole program, and as it stands right now, we barely have the funds for that. There are no additional funds to compensate trainers, and it's hard to find people who can afford to solidly commit to several hours a week for the whole of the session without any kind of payment. Of course, last year we were able to offer a stipend to some educators who said they could help, but unfortunately, even the two who said they would do so with a stipend did not follow through with participation. (Never let anyone tell you only teenagers are flaky, for the record. It's so not true. Everyone can be flaky.)
Additionally, I am making a fairly major move of both my home and office in less than a month. I'm staying in Washington, but moving out of the city and unto one of the islands that surrounds it; shifting from urban to rural. That's a major change that involves a lot of preparation, especially for a packrat like me moving both their home and work, particularly on a super tight-budget and while dealing with chronic illness, and without the ability to take much, if any, time off from an already demanding and heavy daily workload to orchestrate that move.
I'm terribly sorry to have to give you this news because I know there are young people who really want this training, and I love to do anything I can to help more awesome peer sex educators out there. Unfortunately, this is one of those times where I'm hitting up against the limitations of what we can do at any given time, of which there are always many as an organization which serves millions of people a year, but which is incredibly small in proportion financially and administratively.
I have kept a record of everyone who has emailed wanting to know about the training or who wants to apply to participate. As soon as I know when we can do it, all of you will get an email back from me with that information and the application.
I know how it sucks to want to get started on something and to be unable to, so I want to make sure that everyone with interest knows there are other opportunities to get training as a peer educator. Planned Parenthood, for instance, offers peer educator training. You can find out if your local branch can offer you that by just giving them a call. This page from Family Health International lists some programs for peer educator training internationally. The Red Cross offers peer educator training. Another great way to get training is to check in with any sexual health clinics or community groups -- such as LGBT groups -- about internships where you can learn on-the-job. If you're at a high school or university, you can ask your guidance counselor if they know of any trainings. Please don't let our limitations limit you.
If you're a Scarleteen supporter who wants to help with funding the peer educator training program, or a sexuality educator who may have the availability to volunteers, by all means, drop me an email and I'd love to talk with you.
Again, I'm sorry to be the bearer or bad news, especially any news where I have to tell young people motivated to do something awesome who want our help in that that we just can't help.
Time for another installment of our first-person profiles of queer people of color, this one from a young man who talks very candidly about being on the down-low, masculinity and race.
Again, even if you're not of color and queer, not LGB or not of color, we think it's so important to cultivate an awareness of what it means to be not just a member of one of those groups, but of both. If you are queer and of color, what we're hoping this new series can do is help illuminate some of your own diversity, allow you to feel less isolated and know you're not alone. Queer youth (and queer people on the whole) are often isolated. That isolation hurts and can and does do very real damage. LGB young people who are also oppressed, marginalized and rendered doubly invisible because of race tend to face even greater challenges and isolation.
No matter who you are or what your deal is, we think you'll find these profiles challenge many perceptions and may make you reconsider or refine ideas or questions about orientation and race. We'd be lying if we didn't say it also helps you and others grow your compassion and your care, better understanding that every kind of marginalization and oppression both does very real harm and always has the capacity to do so, especially if it goes unseen and unheard.
Color/race you are/identify with: Black American
When did you realize you were gay, lesbian or bisexual? I've known that I am attracted to men* for as long as I can remember. I identify as a MSM or as "downe" rather than as bisexual.
How did you feel about that realization? Being attracted to men didn't bother me as much as how that attraction would play out. There aren't many black MSMs [men who sleep with men] in the media so it was hard for me to reconcile my race and my masculinity with my attraction to men. I felt as though I would be seen as weak or effeminate by others.
Have you been able to come out? I have friends I know through local queer groups that I am "out" to. The process was fairly easy because of how I met them. Personally, it's been difficult openly sharing this part of my identity - one that I keep a secret by choice - and feeling masculine despite that openness.
In my community, it's not same-gender attraction that is looked down upon, it's being open about that attraction. "Real" men can do whatever they want behind closed doors as long as the front they give to society is one of traditional heterosexuality. So telling others about my attraction somewhat diminishes my standing in my community.
That said, for me being "closeted" is as much a personal decision as it is one influenced by society. Being attracted to men isn't a big deal and I don't feel the need to build a big identity around it.
How supported do you feel by your own family and your community of color? My attraction to men is like an open secret in my family. Everyone understands that it's there, but we don't acknowledge it-- anyone can be attracted to men, but being Gay (socially, politically, etc. involved in the GLBT community) is a white thing. My family doesn't like it, but they accept it and they are supportive.
How about by the queer community? I'm not very much involved in the mainstream queer community. I go to parties with other MSM of color where I'm just another guy.
How has managing your romantic/sexual relationships gone? In what, if any, ways do you feel being a GLB person of color has impacted your relationships? I don't have romantic relationships as a result of my attraction to men. I regularly have sex with men, but I have no desire to be in relationships with them for a number of reasons. Even though I am polyamorous, I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with a woman who isn't aware that I have sex with men. Instead of telling a potential partner-- which is an affront to my identity-- I'd rather just not date.
What do you feel are particular challenges for gays, lesbians and bisexuals of color? I think the biggest challenge is educating the mainstream queer community about the different experience of people of color. For example, I am not a closeted bisexual, I am a MSM whose identity includes nondisclosure. In the mainstream community this doesn't make sense, but a lot of black MSMs understand that experience.
Does one kind of bias you face -- racism vs. homo/biphobia -- feel larger, more oppressive than the other? Can you talk about how? Racism is definitely a more oppressive force for me. Certainly, there are a lot of people who would be physically abusive if they knew of my attraction to men, but I have the freedom of choosing whether or not to disclose. With racism, my skin is like a marker of who/what I am and there's no way around it. Also, I am seen more threatening as a black man than a MSM, therefore institutions are more oppressive towards me. When hanging out with gay-identified friends, I've never been around followed in a store, when hanging out with other brothas it happens regularly.
Want to be part of this series and share your experiences and ideas about being gay, lesbian or bisexual and of color? We'd love to include you and get your voice out there. Drop us an email and we'll send you the questions!
I was watching a debate about sex education today, one rife with a lot of ludicrous statements, but the statement that quality sex education could not possibly help prevent sexual abuse stuck with me. It was all the more infuriating as someone who knows too well that a lack of knowledge about bodies and sex, and a lack of information about sexual consent and autonomy are some of the hugest reasons why sexual abuse is so prevalent.
Now, this is hardly a new form of cluelessness (nor is it exclusive to Canada: we've all but made an art form of it stateside). I've addressed this issue before, at Scarleteen and in some talks and interviews I have given over the years, and also in a piece a little while back for the Guardian in the United Kingdom.
Hopefully it's obvious the reason I, as a sexuality educator and activist, and Scarleteen, as an organization, provide sex education isn't just about preventing unwanted or negative outcomes, like unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, or rape. We are just as deeply invested in doing what we can to help people assure and create positive, wanted outcomes with their sexuality and whatever sex lives -- even if it's no sex life at all -- as we are in risk or abuse prevention. We want our readers not to just wind up with a life that is or becomes free of negative outcomes or traumas, but which is also full of enjoyable, enriching positives.
However, I'm of the mind that one of the many fantastic things comprehensive, inclusive and progressive sexuality education of care and quality can offer the world and everyone in it is the possibility or actuality of decreasing and disabling rape and much of what enables and perpetuates rape. I also think good sex education has the capability of helping survivors of rape and abuse heal and feel supported and empowered. I care about this aspect of sex education a lot, both as a survivor of abuse and assault myself, as someone who advocates for and supports many other survivors and as someone who simply really wants for all of us to be able to live in a world without rape and other kinds of abuse.
What are some of the ways good sex education can help prevent and dismantle rape? Here's the transcript of our impromptu Twitter feed from this afternoon on the subject:
If you're gay, lesbian or bisexual (LGB) and also of color, you don't need us to tell you how challenging that can be, nor that a lot of people -- especially those who aren't of color or who aren't queer -- don't realize, see or acknowledge much of what you've gone through or what you deal with. We're rolling out a new blog series today we hope can help counter that compound invisibility.
Even if you're not of color and queer, not LGB or not of color, we think it's critically important to cultivate an awareness of what it means to be not just a member of one of those groups, but of both. If you are queer and of color, what we're hoping this new series can do is help illuminate some of your own diversity, allow you to feel less isolated and know you're not alone. Queer youth (and queer people on the whole) are often isolated, and that isolation hurts and can do and does very real damage. LGB young people who are also oppressed, marginalized and rendered doubly invisible because of race tend to face even greater challenges and isolation.
No matter who you are or what your deal is, we think you'll find these profiles challenge many perceptions and may make you reconsider or refine ideas or questions about orientation and race. We'd be lying if we didn't say it also helps you and others grow your compassion and your care, better understanding that every kind of marginalization and oppression both does very real harm and always has the capacity to do so, especially if it goes unseen and unheard.
When we first put out a call for these profiles, the idea was to collect a bunch and then pick and choose answers to create a collective group roundtable. But the interviews we've gotten back say so many valuable, important things that editing or diluting them in any way seemed a big loss. What we've chosen to do instead is to run these in full in an ongoing series, and we hope you find them as enlightening, challenging and important as we do.
Color/race you are/identify with: Black American
When did you realize you were gay, lesbian or bisexual? I figured out my sexuality over a couple of years (although they felt ten times longer). Between the ages of 16 - 19, I questioned the thoughts I had about men and women. From the time that I started having fantasies, around age 10, I dreamt about men and women, but men filled my dreams more. Thus, I considered myself straight and brushed off my feelings for women. Besides, I became a Christian while in middle school - and my lustful feelings and my homosexual feelings conflicted with my religious beliefs. God knows I often was riddled with guilt when I acted on those feelings with myself.
How did you feel about that realization? When I entered high school, there was a shift and I started to fantasize about women a lot more. Again, I was riddled with guilt. "Sure, lustful feelings and masturbation could be forgiven and/or kept secret; however, if a homosexual spirit overtook me, I would be sinful for life whether I acted upon those feelings or not," I thought to myself.
At the same time that I had these thoughts, I started to question the Church's views on sexuality. Ironically, I had always been interested in learning about sex, sexual reproduction, and different cultures' views on sexuality. I mean, I was that 12 year old girl running around telling people about the history of vibrators, to the young and the old. By age 17, I educated myself enough to know that most people, including religious people, didn't think lustful feelings and masturbation were going to send someone to hell and that most people considered masturbation a normal, healthy act - at least Dr. Berman and the folks at Scarleteen did. So I was free of that guilt. Yet, the verdict on homosexuality was still unfavorable; it was a sin or it was weird and abnormal.
At age 17 during my senior year of highschool, I was at a crossroads. "Should I turn against my religious beliefs and how I was raised or should I listen to my heart and live the life that I want?" I chose to be a righteous Christian and a good daughter. I prayed at the altar many times my freshmen year of college. I even enlisted myself in a Prayer Warrior class, which required me to go to Sunday School every week. Yet, I felt more disconnected with my Faith each time I prayed about my "ungodly" feelings. I wondered, "Why am I trying to change who I am? If God didn't want me to have these feelings, wouldn't He easily take this thorn from my side, especially since I've prayed so much." I ask God to let me know if my feelings for women were wrong; I felt in my spirit that God did not believe it was so. Afterwards, I left the Church and would later become a spiritual, not religious, person.
Have you been able to come out? If so, can you tell us more about how that's gone/how that went for you? My sophomore year of college I starting coming out to myself more and more. I started eying girls on the streets, drooling and daydreaming over them, and yet my fantasies about men remained. I knew I was 'in-between' and probably would remain in-between. After doing some research on the web, I realized that I was either bi-curious or bisexual, terms I had never heard. Once I had my first real crush on this young woman at my college, I knew I was bi.
I came out to my parents probably too soon after realizing this fact; but I didn't want to lie to them about this part of me and I didn't want to lie to them about whom I was dating. One summer day, I prepared myself to come out to my mother. We were lying in bed and I told her. As I predicted, she responded, "I can't accept this. Your father and I both won't approve." Later on, she responded that I broke her heart for making this choice. The next day, I came out to my younger sisters, which was much more dramatic and hurtful than coming out to my parents. They pulled out the bible and told me it was a sin. I don’t know why but I expected that they would be way less judgmental. I guess I forgot we grew up in the same house. Over the next weeks, they both called me f*****, which hurt me so much. Luckily, my father chose not to talk to me, which was fine with me. At that point, I preffered the silent treatment than yelling.
I don't come out to my friends very easily. Actually I came out to my friends, except my best friend, after I came out to my family. My lack of experience in regards to dating and my bisexuality kept and keeps me from talking about my sexuality. I often think, "What's the point of coming out when I haven't even been intimate with anyone yet? I practically could be wearing one of those promise rings."
How supported do you feel by your own family and your community of color? Now, the drama is over in my family in regards to my (bi)sexuality. I feel like I can be myself around my family now that I've come out. They still believe that homosexuality is a sin and/or is weird; however, they don't treat me wrongly and have assured that they love me regardless. I even talk candidly about being my crushes and being queer around them. Coming out to my family has made it easier to come out to my extended family.
I feel that there is a diversity of opinions in all communities, including black communities. Each black person holds their own beliefs, are more or less willing to change their minds and hearts, and are influenced by their environment and identities in different ways.
For instance, some older black people grew up around LGBT people and may be more supportive of queer people. Some may still look down upon queer people because of they own thoughts or because of their religious beliefs. In addition, like most people in America, I have seen that many black youths use LGBT slurs to degrade each other and many black people believe bisexuality is disgusting, spreads diseases, and/or is not real.
How about by the queer community? Again, I find there is a diversity of opinions in all communities. The queer community is so fragmented. Most queer people I know embrace my brown skin and kinky-afro hair. I haven't dated so I don't know how much a hindrance my skin would be or how much racism still lurks in my local community. In regards to my bisexuality, I only know a few who are truly supportive. I still hear the whispers about "cross-overs" and the gasps when a lesbian is found to be dating a man. However, the LGBT student organization at my local university did bring in Robyn Ochs to speak; so open-mindedness is growing around the subject in my town; plus, they are looking at working with the black student center on our campus next year.
What do you feel are particular challenges for gays, lesbians and bisexuals of color? Generally, as people of color, we have to deal with systemic oppressions such as lack of quality education, housing, and employment. We also deal with less visibility and less opportunities to have our voices heard. Many communities and families have overcome these barriers but may still deal with subtle, exclusionary racism and stereotyping.
Internally, we deal with biphobia, homophobia, and transphobia as well. Many in our communities spread the same stereotypes about lgbt people such as they spread diseases, are sinful, and are abnormal.
Obviously, since we are small in numbers, forming relationships and friendships with people who look like you or who have similar experiences, if that's your goal, is challenging. LGBT people often need mentors or people to give them advice on being queer. Finding mentors of color might be difficult as well.
How do you feel others can help with those challenges? Support efforts to reduce poverty, to educate and train adults who were left behind, and to bring quality and comprehensive education to our children. Support other organizations/groups by attending functions and meetings, by donating funds and service, and by inviting people of different background to speak.
Create events for all people. Be inclusive.
Educate your own community about different communities. Share resources -( for instance, someone shared with me a website that talked about being queer and a Christian when I was questioning). Mentor others. Challenge stereotypes. Be an active bystander and do something when you see someone harm or degrade another.
Does one kind of bias you face -- racism vs. homo/biphobia -- feel larger, more oppressive than the other? Personally, I have been hurt by homo/biphobia in more direct and painful ways than by racism (i.e being called a f*****, being told that my identity is false).
Yet, do I see black and brown faces hypersexualized in the media (which our own communities consume)? Do I see black and brown faces demonized and portrayed as violent creatures in the media (not to say that violence in our communities in not outrageous)? Yes, I do know and see that racism still prevails.
However, I have a black family to comfort me if ever directly confronted with direct racism. In addition, society recognizes and supports the concept of race. In contrast, not everyone in society supports the concept of bi/homosexuality. So, I feel I can complain about the mistreatment of people of color but not so much about the mistreatment of lgbt people.
I guess I feel more support when dealing with racism in contrast to homo/biphobia.
What do you feel like LGB people who are not of color don't get about the differences being LGB of color? What about hetero white people: what do they miss?
Again, depends on the person. White LGB people may not fully understand how being less visible affects LGB people. They also may not understand cultural variations. The same goes for white hetero people; plus, many don't understand cultural variations within the queer communities and may not even know the "basics" about the LGBT community (i.e. what does LGBT mean?).
Want to be part of this series and share your experiences and ideas about being gay, lesbian or bisexual and of color? We'd love to include you and get your voice out there. Drop us an email and we'll send you the questions!
On top of doing what I do here at Scarleteen (and everything else I do), I also do some outreach sexuality and sexual rights education for a youth homeless shelter here in Seattle. My partner also now works full-time at that shelter, and when he came home last night and filled me in on some things that had gone on that day, I got struck very hard in the gut with some feelings I hadn't fully realized for myself until then, both about that work and the young people there, but also about some of my experiences with some of the users at Scarleteen.
So, I wrote the residents there a letter this morning that I'd also like to share with you, because the way I feel about them is also the way I feel about plenty of you. Because most of Scarleteen happens online, very few of our users are currently homeless or transient, but some have been or will be. In addition, plenty over the years have shared similar struggles, either being in the foster care system or in unsafe homes, surviving loss, assault or abuse, having with disability or mental illness, dealing with racism, sexism, sizeism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia or any other number of really tough challenges, especially when you're young. So, what I'm saying to them, and what they have done for me, very much applies to many of you.
Some of you know me, others of you don't, but I'm an outreach worker who has provided sex education at the shelter for the last couple of years. Some of you who do know me may also know that when I was younger, I went through some really rough stuff, including abuse, really devastating loss, depression, sexual assault and also not having a safe place or home to go to sometimes. In other words, some of you know I have been where you're at, and I know how hard it can be and how very much it hurts.
Because I make part of my living both writing about my own life, and also providing education for young people, I'm pretty in touch with my own teen years. I don't have the opportunity to forget them because of that work and the way I do it and process it. But you probably know for yourself that it's common for any of us to put the toughest of our memories or experiences out-of-mind sometimes, or to try and forget them so that they're less painful.
I was thinking about all of you a lot last night, and was feeling something about you I realize I've never had the chance to share. When I'm working with you, while I always leave wishing for much better things for all of you, I also leave always feeling very inspired by you, and reminded of good things about myself when I was your age I often do forget and really shouldn't, and which I also really didn't know back then.
The biggest thing I get reminded of in talking with and watching you is how incredibly strong all of us are or were who have been in the spot you're in. I forget that teenage-me was able to handle and survive some things, things many of you have, that a lot of people who are older and who are much better supported couldn't handle. I forget that the fact that I came through all of that and made a good life for myself and became the kind of person I wanted to be is a major achievement. I forget that the fact that I was able then to still be kind to other people despite how hurt, scared and angry I was and could be made me an incredible person. I forget that being able to be without some of the most basic things I needed, including care from some of the people who were supposed to care for me most, and to try and do things, mess up, but keep trying again and again to get it right until I did was a really big deal. I forget how hard it was to shake off how bitter I often felt seeing other kids who took what they had and I didn't for granted.
I also forget how little credit I usually gave myself, how hard I was on myself for the times I really couldn't handle everything, even though what I was being asked to handle was more than anyone should ever be asked to.
One of the amazing things that all of you do for me when I come in to see you and work with you is to remind me of all of that. Because I can see how strong you are, I'm reminded of how strong I am and have been. Because I can see the way you can care about each other even when it feels like so many people aren't caring for you, I'm reminded of how I was able to do that. Because I see you struggling but still surviving and trying so hard, I'm reminded of my own struggle and survival, but also of how, however awful and unfair it all was, it's such a huge part of the person I grew to be. Yes, the work I do for and with you is about you, not about me, but that doesn't mean I don't benefit from it, too.
I want to make sure you know that for me -- and I know I'm not alone in this -- you're my heroes and sheroes. I think all of you are absolutely amazing, and if you don't know it now, I want to assure you that you are until you can feel and know that for yourselves. I don't know about you, but the people I tend to look up to most in my life, who I'm most inspired by, are not the people who had it easy. They're people who had to work harder than other people, who had more challenges to surpass, and yet, who did more than most people do, despite having less to start with or having to work twice as hard to get there. That's you: that's who you are and will be. You have the capacity to grow into being everyone's heroes. I have no doubt that you will do exactly that.
Of course, because I see how hard you can be on yourselves, I'm reminded of that, too. Because I see how often some of you don't forgive yourselves for your own mistakes, I'm reminded of how many times I didn't do that for myself. Those are tough mirrors to look into: I should have been a lot nicer to me and a lot less hard on myself. So, I also want to remind you that it's so important you cut yourselves a lot of slack and respect yourself for the awesome person you are. You are not an error, a mistake or a failure; you are not the people screwing up your world or anyone else's. You're the people who are unjustly hit hard with other people's mistakes, screw-ups and failings, the people who are doing the very best you can to deal with that injustice. None of that is your fault or your doing: your doing, what you're responsible for, is what you choose to make of yourself with what you've got and how you take care of yourself or don't.
So, please take care of you and be kind to you. If and when you make your own mistakes, don't beat up on yourselves; be forgiving of you. Everyone makes mistakes: it's one of the most basic ways we learn everything and anything. If it takes you a little longer to figure some things out that it might others with less challenges, know that not only is that okay, but that it will probably mean you'll also wind up understanding things more deeply and clearly than others will.
Thank you for being who you are and for -- whether you meant to or not -- reminding me so often of who I am. Even if you don't think you're inspiring to anyone, know that you probably are. You most certainly are to me.
Rachel, who blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, poses this question from her 16 year-old self: how do I stop creepy old men from hitting on me? Rachel writes of a recent encounter with her favorite advice columnist, Melissa Hoyer:
Me: “OMG, I loved your column! When I was 16, I was going to write in to asking for advice. I wanted to know how I could dress differently to stop attracting creepy old men and start attracting guys my own age instead.”
Melissa Hoyer: “Er, I don’t think I would have been able to help you with that one.”
Rachel explains:
At the time, I had come to the conclusion that the reason I was attracting more attention from men who were 18 or 20+, right through to 40 or so, than guys my own age (the ones I was actually interested in) was because I dressed in manner that was too “adult”. I wanted to write to Hoyer because I was searching for a way to reconcile my desire to dress in clothes that I felt an aesthetic affinity with, with my desire not be designated an “adult” - an identity I was far from ready to take on at 16 - or a piece of meat because of it.
It was a question that was about far more than fashion, though - and I suspect that’s the reason Hoyer told me she wouldn’t have been able to answer it (although I like to think she would have been touched had I ever sent it off). At its heart, it was a question from a girl/young woman trying to come to terms with and navigate her own objectification.
As a feminist and a father, a professor and a former youth leader with years of experience working with teens, I thought I'd take a shot at answering Rachel's query.
If I were writing to a 16 year-old named Rachel, I'd say:
I wish that I could offer you specific fashion tips that would guarantee that creepy older guys wouldn't hit on you. For that matter, I wish I could share with you how to dress in a manner that would assure that your peers wouldn't frequently judge you, either to your face or behind your back. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how to ensure those things -- because the sad truth is that no matter how you dress, no matter what you wear, you will be perceived by some men as a target for their unwanted advances.
You may have heard people say things like "girls who wear short skirts are asking for 'it'". By "it" they may mean anything from rape to crude comments and penetrating stares. But as you may already have noticed, girls aren't immune from harassment when they're wearing simple or "modest" garb either. I've had plenty of students who've been accosted while wearing sweatpants or long dresses. I've had Muslim students who chose to wear head coverings, and they've been harassed both religiously and sexually. The bottom line is that there's nothing you can wear that will guarantee respect from others. And the reason is that the root of this problem isn't skin or clothing, it's our cultural contempt for women and girls.
Have you noticed the way this works yet? If a girl is thin, she's accused of being "anorexic"; if her weight is higher than the cruelly restrictive ideal, she's "fat" and "doesn't take care of herself" or "has no self-control." If she wears cute, trendy clothes she "only wants attention" and if she wears sweats and jeans, she "doesn't make an effort." If she's perceived as sexually attractive, and -- especially -- if she shows her own sexual side, she's likely to be called a "slut." If her sexuality and her body are concealed, she's a "prude." As you've probably figured out, the cards are stacked against you. You cannot win, at least not if you define winning as dressing and behaving in a way likely to win approval (or at least decent respect) from everyone.
The advice I'm going to give may sound clichéd, but it's important nonetheless: you should dress in a style that makes you comfortable.
Comfort, of course, has many dimensions. There's physical comfort to consider. A fashion choice that leaves you sweating and itchy on a hot day, or shivering on a cold one, is by definition uncomfortable. When the weather's warm, wearing more revealing clothing is often as much a matter of comfort rather than style.
Of course, there's a psychological aspect to comfort, too. The more revealing your clothing (regardless of your reasons for wearing it), the more of your body others can see. It's important to be honest with yourself about how that makes you feel. Different people have different levels of comfort with having their bodies noticed. That's a normal variation, and the key thing is to be aware where you are on the spectrum. If your peers or parents urge you to dress in a style that leaves you feeling vulnerable and uncomfortably exposed, you have a right to push back against them. The reverse is true, too.
It's important too to note that however much skin you are revealing, you are never responsible for another person's inappropriate behavior.
Save for the blind, we are all visual people. We notice each other. There is no right not to be seen. But there is a right not to be stared at with a penetrating gaze of the sort that makes you feel deeply uncomfortable. While it may seem that you get those leers more often when you're showing more skin, you've probably noticed that you get those creepy stares at other times as well. And the key thing you need to know is that men can control their eyes -- they really can -- and women can control their judgment. Your body is not so powerful that it can drive others to distraction. (And yes, if we're honest, sometimes we wish that our bodies were that powerful, particularly if it meant drawing the attention of someone to whom we are attracted!)
If some men choose to be distracted by you, that is their choice, a decision for which they (not you) are solely responsible. No matter what anyone tells you, you need to remember that.
It is not inconsistent to want to be seen and not be stared at. You know the difference, I suspect, between an "appreciative look" (which can feel very validating) and the "penetrating stare" that leaves you feeling like crawling into a hole. While people are not required to give you the former, it's not unreasonable to expect them to avoid giving you the latter. It's also not unreasonable to want guys your age to be interested in you, and want the creepy old ones to leave you alone. Remember, it's not hypocrisy or naiveté on your part to dress in a way that you hope will get you that positive attention you want without also bringing the negative attention you fear and loathe.
Sometimes, of course, we need other people's insight and advice. There are little fashion rules that it can be helpful to know (even if only for the sake of breaking them, like the old one about not mixing browns and blacks, or not wearing dark-colored bras under light-colored tops.) Friends and family members may have suggestions for what colors or styles are most flattering to you, and sometimes those suggestions may be helpful. I'm certainly not suggesting you shouldn't listen to those tips. But I want you to know there's a world of difference between saying "you know, I think lime green isn't really your color" and saying "you shouldn't wear short skirts, because then men will think you're easy." The former bit of advice is rooted in an aesthetic truth (aesthetics is a fancy term for the study of what is beautiful or good), the latter in an anxiety that is based on a false assumption about male weakness.
It's okay to ask, when headed to a new school or a workplace or a party, about the dress code. Few of us want to stand out as totally different from everyone else. Most of us can figure out that what you wear to a birthday party at the water park is different from what you would wear to a funeral service in a church. Dressing for the occasion is part of living in a community with others. But that standard should still have room for a lot of flexibility. A bikini is probably not appropriate at Thanksgiving dinner (unless you're poolside), but when it comes, say, to school, don't let anyone tell you that can't dress up (or down) depending on how you feel.
Here's a key point: As a father and a teacher and a youth leader and a feminist man who has been around a while (and worked with thousands of young people), I want you to know that while not all men are safe and trustworthy, men's bad behavior is never, ever, ever, ever, ever "your" fault. Your miniskirt doesn't cause guys (of any age) to do anything they don't choose to do (no matter what they say to the contrary). It's not your job to dress to keep yourself safe from men.
Lastly, let me say that finding your own style is an adventure. It involves a lot of trial, and some not infrequent errors. I promise you, ten or twenty years from now you'll look at photos of yourself at 16, roll your eyes, and say "What was I wearing? What made me think that looked good?" Despite what some folks tell you, these are not the best years of your life. Not even close. And in terms of your style and your beauty, you aren't anywhere near your peak. I say that not to belittle you, but to reassure you that you don't have to get it right yet. You have much more time than you think.
Much love and best of luck,
Hugo
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