Shattered Queer Utopia: The Quiet Prevalence of Violence Within Our Community
Written by Lindsey Goodrow
Trigger Warning: Partner Abuse
She often screams at you when she’s upset. She finds the words that hurt you the most; painful jabs at your family, your education, or your worth. She tells you that she hates you.
Once she calms down, she offers an explanation in lieu of an apology. She’s depressed, work is stressing her out, or her family life growing up was degrading and abusive. This is how she excuses her tendency to resort to anger with you, her actions that intend to destroy you, and her enjoyment of making you feel small. You accept it, even though you’re scared. You continue loving her and enduring her problematic behavior.
You met when you were 17 and 16, respectively. She was the first girl you ever dated. The first person you ever slept with. The first person you said “I love you” to. She was also the only person you loved who hit you. The only person who screamed even louder at you after you began to cry. The only person who has locked you out of apartments, dorm rooms, and cars. The only person you have felt utterly lost with but hopelessly drawn to. Her pain was ingrained in you from the beginning - you wanted to be her savior. You had a ten year relationship with someone who was incapable of understanding the love that you gave and unable to give you the love that you deserved. She physically abused you *only* a handful of times, but emotionally and psychologically abused you throughout the decade span of your “love.”
Because you met her at such a young age, you had no previous context of what love, especially queer love, was. You assumed her outbreaks were just part of the package of dating another woman. Society loves to portray women to be more emotional than men, so you accepted her cruel emotions. It was normal to feel so happy with someone who simultaneously made you feel so miserable. But you started having a conversation with yourself every time she showed you her temper, “Is this how I would treat the person I love?”, “Is this something I would do to another human being?” The way she spoke to you. The way she let her anger go unchecked and unaccounted for. But you didn’t walk away. When she pounded her fists on your chest one night, you forgave her because she was drunk and physically weaker than you. When she molested you and hissed cruel words into your ear while tears were flowing down your face, you hid in the bathroom all night but acted as if nothing had happened the next morning. You still didn’t walk away. It wasn’t until she chose to hang out with another woman she happened to be sleeping with instead of being by your side the night you put your father in hospice that you finally left her.
The few people you confide in about the violence all ask you, “What if my partner had acted that way with me? Wouldn’t you tell me to run, not walk away?” But these were mostly straight women, and you found it less excusable for a man to hit a woman than for a woman to. You realized this was problematic. Abuse is the misuse of power over another person. Behavior may vary; it may include intimidation, threats, physical acts, sexual acts, humiliation, passive aggression, and so on. No matter which abusive behavior is inflicted, the abuser’s goal remains the same: gain, maintain and regain control. It should make no difference what the gender, sexual orientation, physical strength, or race of the abuser and abusee is.
In In the Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado which documents her own abusive relationship with a former girlfriend, she mentions Annette Green, who, in 1989, shot and killed her abusive female partner, leaving the jurors and judge trying her case bewildered. She was “one of the first queer people to use the term ‘battered woman syndrome’ to justify her crime. The idea of a battered woman was brand new...but both abuse and the abused meant only one thing [in a heterocentric world]: physical violence and a white, straight woman.” Green was convicted of second-degree murder, but her attorney argued that had she been white and straight, she would have been acquitted.
It is not only in courthouses that queer violence is silenced or not taken seriously. There is a quiet prevalence of hushing the abuse within our very own community. It is a farce that queer people have escaped the barbarous hetero-society from which they were born in order to find a magical utopia free of partner abuse and violence. The lesbian utopia does not exist. The queer utopia does not exist. Intimate partner violence permeates regardless of your sexual preference.
It might seem like a discredit to the queer community to admit that we are not fully immune to the brutality that occurs in a straight couple’s relationship. There may be fear of admitting our abuse to authorities, of not being accepted into battered woman shelters, or of not being believed by our own.
Womxn of color/trans womxn are exponentially more prone to not only police brutality, but partner abuse and lack of compassion from people outside of their community. It is understandably difficult for these womxn to come forward with their abuse. Who will believe them? Who will understand them? Who will act?
Although womxn in abusive intimate relationships with other womxn have historically been left out of the popular construction of “battered women” - a term that has applied more so in the past to straight cis women in relationships with straight cis men - there is now an abundance of personal narratives and an increase in the need for research behind abuse within our community. The truth is that cultural heterosexism and pervasive homophobia leads queer people to experience abuse just as much, if not more than, their straight counterparts.
It took me ten years to address, understand, accept, and move on from my abuse. It still affects me to this day, and I imagine it will for the rest of my life. The hardest thing for me to realize was that the love I believed I had for my partner and that she had for me was not love. Control and fear do not equate to love.
To end with bell hooks,
“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”
Resources
Naming the Violence - The first anthology of writing by queer women addressing domestic abuse within their community
In the Dream House: a Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado
National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s Lesbian Task Force
All About Love by bell hooks
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