In the Dream House

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

There is a Panamanian folktale that ends with: “My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it off.” It’s the only true kind of ending.

Sometimes you have to tell a story, and somewhere, you have to stop.

There isn’t a lot of writing about queer domestic abuse and sexual assault. But what I did find, kept me going. I read Conner Habib’s heart-stopping essay “If You Ever Did Write Anything about Me, I’d Want It to Be about Love” in the immediate aftermath of my abuse, and it devastated me and also gave
me something to hold on to. A few years later, Jane Eaton Hamilton’s exquisite “Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers” gave me new ways to think about what had happened to me. When I was trying to finish this memoir, Leah Horlick’s lush and devastating poetry collection For Your Own Good slayed me with its beauty. Melissa Febos’s essay “Abandon Me” traced queer relationship trauma with brilliance and candor. A chapter in Sawyer Lovett’s Retrospect: A Tazewell’s Favorite Eccentric Zine Anthology—“Hello…”—came to me just when I needed it. Terry Castle’s The Professor made me laugh out loud more than once, which was a pretty shocking thing to do in the middle of writing this book.

We think of clichés as boring and predictable, but they are actually one of the most dangerous things in the world. Your brain can’t engage a cliché, not properly—it skitters right over the phrase or sentence or idea without a second thought. To describe an abusive situation is almost certainly to deploy cliché: “If I can’t have you, no one can.” “Who will believe you?” “It was good, then it was bad, then it was good again.” “If I stayed, I would have died.” Awful and dehumanizing, and yet straight out of central casting. This triteness, this predictability, has a flattening effect, making singularly boring what is in fact a defining and terrible experience.

And so as I waded through account after account of queer domestic abuse, little details stood out. This is the one that stuck with me the most:

A woman named Anne Franklin wrote an essay about her own abuse in Gay Community News in 1984. Her blonde, femme lover—a healer who gave massages and did star charts; who had, before meeting her, almost become a nun—once stoned her on a beach in France. “I know it sounds incredible,” she wrote. “The image is cartoonish.” She swam out into the water to escape the stoning. (The stoning.52 This image has followed me for so long; what both has been and is a punishment for homosexuality, inflicted by the woman she loved. Swimming out into the ocean to get away. Stone. Stone butch. Stonewall. Queer history studded with stones, like jewelry.) “Later,” she wrote, “we both laughed about it.” Laughed about how she, Anne, was stoned on a beach in France. How she ran deeper and deeper into the water, like D-Day in reverse.

homed in on your soft spots

Andre was tried for, and acquitted of, Mendieta’s death. In his 911 call, Andre told the operator, “My wife is an artist, and I’m an artist, and we had a quarrel about the fact that I was more, eh, exposed to the public than she was. And she went to the bedroom, and I went after her, and she went out the window.” Whenever Andre has an exhibition, protestors show up. They create outlines of bodies on the ground, as if someone has fallen from a great height. They leave animal viscera smeared on sidewalks. They ask, “¿Dondé está Ana Mendieta?”

In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz writes, “The key to queering evidence, and by that I mean the ways in which we prove queerness and read queerness, is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor.”

Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.

—Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison’s short story “Violence Against Women Begins at Home,”