Stop saying, “You have to understand."

Stop saying, "That was just the culture back then."

Stop saying, "It was a different time.”

Stop saying these things to get a pass on the hard work of revising your own history, relearning, making meaningful amends on behalf of victims of sexual predators and institutionalized sexual abuse.

But who in their right mind would give these as excuses? Well, I'll tell you... friends of mine (see Example 1), the Vatican (see Example 2), and, yes, Pema Chödrön  (see Example 3):
 
EXAMPLE 1:  I was talking to a French friend of mine about how two of the most prominent founders of post-postmodernism were pro-pedophilia activists, actually signing a public petition in France to abolish—I repeat "ABOLISH," not "lower"—the age of consent for sex. I was noting how post-modernism attempts to frame childhood as a social construct, and how queer theory has been used historically to defend and actually advocate for child rape. My friend, a citizen of France, became very agitated. She cut me off: "It was the 1960's! Sartre signed that petition! All the major intellectuals of France signed that petition! (not true) "It was published in the major French newspapers!" (true) "One has to understand the strikes of 1968 and the spirit of rebellion at the time!" 

But, no, actually, one does not. A two-year-old in 1968 is just like a two-year-old in 2019. Any idiot knows that.

EXAMPLE 2:  In 2019, a letter by ex-pope Benedict XVI was released, in which he blames the international epidemics of  priest rape scandals on the culture of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s--especially the social upheavals of 1968. Here is what he wrote:

“Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.”

Benedict XVI goes on to talk about the need for school uniforms and a ban on “sex films” on passenger airlines, because of the tremendous risk that these might provoke aggression. 

Well, here's one for you, Benedict... How about taking a bunch of idealistic young men who feel a religious calling, and forcing them to to tie their aspirations of ministry to a lifetime of mandatory celibacy? Benedict's final verdict:  “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” And, again, any adult with a shred of decency, memory of their own childhood, or responsible caregiving experience knows that's crap.

Look, I grew up with a sex addict for a father. I was exposed to torture pornography as a child. I was raised in a predatory culture. I thought my environment and my role in it were normal. It's called grooming.

But, you know what? I grew up.I remembered. I had to revise almost every single memory of my childhood, and with that revision, I had to change my relationships to my entire extended and immediate family, whose interests were heavily identified with those of the perpetrator. I had to reprogram myself, reinvent myself. It was hard work, it was spiritual work, it came at a tremendous price in every area, and, thank the goddess, there was and there still is a community who support my recovery. You will never hear me say of my experience that it was a "looseness of culture" or "the physiognomy of the 1960's" or "boys will be boys."

I have to work hard every day against the hard-wiring of my childhood. I have to tear up my decades of childhood investment in that rape culture. I have no tolerance for the passive witnesses and bystanders in situations of abuse who indulge themselves in the privilege of refusing to grow up.

Stop saying these ignorant and dangerous things! Stop trying to pass off your enabling denial as some kind of justifiable or even sanctimonious moral relativism! Stop trying to brand denial and enabling as forms of spiritual detachment and transcendence!

Just listen to this moral idiocy: 

Tricycle [magazine]: "You don’t think it would be helpful to name names, to publicize those instances where Buddhist teachers have been repeatedly taken to task by students?" [The interviewer is referring to charges against Shambhala founder Sakyong Mipham for alleged sexual assault, emotional, physical, financial abuse and binge drinking.] 

Pema Chödrön: "That really does feel like McCarthyism to me. I wouldn’t want to see a list of the bad teachers and I wouldn’t want to see a list of the good ones—here are the saints and here are the sinners. For so many of us that’s our heritage, to make things one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong."

Seriously. No. Just no.

Here we see  Pema's dissociation in action: She is clearly able to identify someone, Joe McCarthy, as a dangerous man whose example is to be avoided. McCarthy was a self-styled leader of a cult-like movement for moral purity and spiritual reformation. I don't see any hesitation on her part to reference him as a bad guy who betrayed his own mission. It's only when the perpetrators are members of her own community, when the perpetrators constitute her mentors and colleagues, that Pema remembers to adopt the officially sanctioned position of "zen" neutrality--which, any victim can tell you, is anything but neutral. And, which any victim can tell you, is usually far more incentivized than standing with the victim.

We learn something of Pema's prior playbook from a Buddhist community initiative to expose the Shambhala abuses. In August 2018, this group issued their "Phase 3 Report," which included details of a situation where a woman reported to Pema that she had been raped by a Shambhala Center director and subsequently miscarried. According to the Phase 3 Report, the woman said that Pema told her “I don’t believe you” and “If it’s true I suspect that you were into it.”

Pema, under pressure, later met with this woman and issued a public apology... of sorts: "I hope to be a better listener and not again say such insensitive and hurtful remarks to those who come to me for help.”

Again, no. That is what you might say if you were dismissive of a friend with a bad haircut. This woman was reporting a criminal assault and a traumatic miscarriage. The appropriate amends Pema should have made would include actions taken to better educate herself about rape in religious communities, counseling sessions to understand the nature of her complicity and uncover conditioning and motives of which she is apparently unaware, a public apology to all of the victims she gaslit over the years with similar dismissals before she was finally exposed, and a commitment to supporting future victims in reporting rape to appropriate civil authorities as well as to the leadership of Shambhala. But all she says is that she will listen better and try to be more sensitive. In other words, she will still enable and protect the perpetrators.

This is not some small pocket of myopia on the part of an otherwise enlightened spiritual leader. This is foundational lack of moral integrity, to say nothing of an abysmally compromised capacity for critical thinking. This inability to identify with victims of oppression is pretty much a deal-breaker for spiritual leadership. It may be an asset for rising in the ranks of a religious institution, but, seriously, those who cannot or will not revise their experiences of immersion in toxic rape cultures forfeit their moral authority. Oh, they definitely try to hang onto it for dear life, but it is forfeit, and the followers who give them a pass are likely to upload their guru's systems of denial along with whatever philosophy undergirds their enabling and their perpetrations.

“If your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed… Make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.”--Rebecca Solnit
 
German-Swedish, lesbian painter Lotter Laserstein not only made herself that “small republic of unconquered spirit,” but she created a body of work that documents that Amazonian domain. Most remarkable, she did this in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.
 
Laserstein painted “In My Studio” at the age of thirty. The year was 1928. She had just graduated from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. It was a time of uncertainty and also exhilaration. For the first time, women were allowed to attend public art academies. For the first time, women were allowed to attend nude figure drawing classes. For the first time, women were allowed to sport traditionally male haircuts, the “Eton crop” or the “bubikopf.” They were allowed to wear straight-waist dresses and tuxedo jackets. The “Great War” had opened up employment in traditionally male trades and professions. Women had their own money and began to exercise their autonomy in ways that would have been inconceivable to their mothers.

Laserstein wanted the world to see that she had her own studio, a mark of her professionalism and her success—and that it was an impressive one in an upscale residential area of Berlin, with a panoramic, rooftop view.  She was a brilliant painter, had begun to rack up impressive credentials, and she was not afraid to flaunt it. To be absolutely clear, Laserstein titled the work “In My Studio.” She had, at thirty, achieved not only a room of her own, but a studio no less.
 
And what was happening in this studio of hers? No less than a miracle. Laserstein is painting a female nude, the traditional subject of centuries of male artists. An internet image search for “odalisque” will turn up hundreds of images of reclining female nudes. According to art historian Joan DelPlato, “By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.”

Laserstein was taking one of the most popular tropes in Western art history and subverting it and appropriating it to a lesbian and feminist context. A meticulous and classically trained painter, she executed numerous studies for this painting before settling on this precise position for the model. Fifty years later, Traute Rose could still recall her discomfort: “… the pose was very difficult to hold. Nevertheless, I held on because I saw it develop into a true masterpiece.” Where male painters would lasciviously or puritanically cache the pudendum in folds of fabric or behind a lifted thigh, Laserstein features her lover’s mons in full frontal nudity as the focal point of the painting, locating it at the intersection of two diagonals: one established by Rose’s body and the other by Laserstein’s oblong palette.
 
And what about this model? Her name is "Traute Rose," and was a model noted for an athletic and androgenous physique. Laserstein not only told people that Traute was her favorite model, but their intimacy is the subject of a number of her paintings... paintings that the artist would refer to as collaborations between her and Rose. In a letter to Rose in 1956, Laserstein was describing a painting of a nude that she was then working on, noting that it was “far from being as good as ours.” The relationship between male painters and the female nude models has historically been hierarchical, with the dominance of the painter made explicit in the paintings where they appear together.  Lasertein’s portraits of Rose bear witness to their mutuality and the trust between them. They appear to share an artistic investment in the painting. It is not a commercial relationship.

The term “male gaze” was coined from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1971.  Since then, it has become a well-known and widely discussed theory. In the essay, Mulvaney argues that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in a masculine and heterosexual subject position, where the figure of the woman on screen was depicted as an object of desire. In this era of cinema, the protagonists were overwhelmingly male and audience members, regardless of sex, were encouraged to identify with them... that is, to adopt the "male gaze."  The female charactes in these films  were coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness," objects of male voyeurs and fetishists. This "male gaze" informs most portraits in the traditional canon where naked women are the subject. Laserstein was challenging this head-on, with a "take no prisoner" attitude in these paintings of Rose.

The figure of Rose in "In My Studio" has been referred to by art critics as monumental. She sprawls across the foreground, and there is absolutely no attempt to titillate the spectator with partial concealment with drapery. The model is lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps asleep. There is no "come hither" expression. Her face is turned toward Laserstein, not us. Traute Rose, with her small breasts, her “Eton bob,” her lack of makeup, and her large and muscular hands, defies the expectations of "the male gaze."

Laserstein foregrounds these hands and the gender non-conformity of Rose in her painting "The Tennis Player."

My friend Linda J. Smith Koehler has just written and published a really wonderful songbook, One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth. To help her celebrate, I wanted to do an interview with her. I have had the privilege of attending concerts where she was musical director and where her songs were sung, and I have also had the privilege of being part of sacred singing groups she has led. The songs in this collection are affirmations and distillations that focus intention, unite, and heal. "Spiritual vitamins" is how I think of them. Easy to learn, easy to tuck away in your brain, and very accessible any time there is a need for perspective and connection.

One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth is a songbook containing 111 songs and chants, as well as 13 arrangements, AND... Linda' suggestions on how to use the songs in a singing circle, and encouragement for everyone to write their own songs. 

CG: So, Linda… I see in your description about this book that you talk about how these songs and chants are used in “Singing in Sacred Circles.” What does that mean… ? what is a Sacred Singing Circle? You lead the singing in a sacred circle group called Women with Wings in Bangor, Maine. How is a sacred circle group different from a chorus group? 
 
LK: A traditional chorus stands or sits in rows facing the director and learns songs by reading sheet music. Their focus is usually on preparing for a performance. At Women With Wings we stand or sit in a circle with a candle-lit table in the center, lights off. We learn songs through listening, with no written music or lyric sheets. Our focus is on joining together in song and spirit. On an average Thursday night, you might not recognize that I am the music director because anyone can start a song. Our process is organic in that one song suggests the next. Every evening is different within a consistent flow.
 
Singing in Sacred Circle is a term we use when talking about a group that sings with the intention of simply singing songs that build ourselves into our strongest, most loving selves. We sing to lose ourselves in the music only to find ourselves connected as one voice and energy, individually renewed and inspired.
 
Our songs are mostly short, 4-8 lines each, so are easy to pick up by listening. They are affirmational; the lyrics express what we want to be true, in ourselves, in our relationships, in the world. We use the oral tradition rather than reading from sheet music. This allows us to move quickly from thinking about how to sing a song to singing from our hearts with eyes free to see each other or to close.
 
Women With Wings doesn’t gather to “rehearse,” we just sing. We spend two hours every Thursday singing these powerful affirmational songs. We are not a polished performance group, though we do share what we do in public on occasion, usually to support an organization or cause we agree with. We have sung for organizations that support women, equality, social justice, and the environment.

 
CG: How did you get into this kind of music?  Did you come at it from other forms of music… folk music? Religious music?  What was your first experience?
 
LK: I came to this kind of music through Kay Gardner. The women’s community of my church, Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor, hired Kay to lead a workshop at our retreat. Someone asked her if she would start a women’s singing group in Bangor and she agreed. They put an ad in the paper and on our first night in October of 1993, 35 women showed up to sing. We’ve been singing every Thursday since, for more than 25 years!

CG: I think that one of the things I experience with these songs is how “sing-able” they are: short and with memorable tunes.  It’s like having a spiritually empowering soundtrack on tap. As a child of the 1960’s, I experienced the power of inspiring music in the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War movement. I think about how so much of our popular music is obsessively focused on falling in love, or falling out of love… Music can do so much more!
 
LK: Absolutely! The messages we repeat to ourselves can have a powerful impact on our internal landscape. Choose those messages consciously. The songs we sing paint a picture of the world we want to live in, with peace and unity among people, care for our planet, strength, kindness, and beauty within ourselves. The songs help us feel empowered and connected, with a sturdiness that helps us face the world as it is and act to improve it for all. We know hundreds of songs so I often find myself saying, “We’ve got a song for that.”

CG: I’m curious about your process… Can you pick one of your songs and share with us what inspired it, or how you came to write it?
 
LK: My process is organic; I don’t sit down to write a song. I’ll be thinking about a topic while walking in the woods, driving, or in the shower, and a line will come to me, words and tune together. I’ll play around with that, winnowing down the thoughts into their pithiest expression of what I want to say while fitting it to the tune that started with that first line. Sometimes this happens quickly, all in one day, but more often it takes a week or two, and occasionally it takes years. My subconscious mind is in charge. My conscious mind can help but I can’t force a song into being. I have to wait for it to clarify from of natural inspiration.
 
As an example, the song Awe started while I was camping at Baxter State Park in northern Maine in 2012. While gazing up at the night sky that was ablaze with every star that has ever burned, the first line popped into my mind, “Under the sky of a billion stars I am so small.” In the following days I got the next few lines but I couldn’t find the rest. Three years later while floating in the waves on Scarborough Beach in southern Maine, the rest of the song flowed in, ending with, “I am a voice of the universe singing back to itself in awe.”

CG: What would you say to someone who is reading this who might be thinking… “Oh, I don’t think this is for me. I’m not very musical…” or who is thinking, “Well, you really need to have a group to do this…” 
 
LK: We’ve heard a lot lately about the benefits of singing. It calms the mind, reduces stress, lowers heart rate, improves cognition, boost the endocrine and immune systems. People in ancient times knew this as they chanted. Practitioners from many spiritual traditions throughout time have been chanting. The tunes vibrate through our cells, attune our beings with the universe and our highest selves. The chants in this book are in English so they hold the impact of knowing what you’re singing about.
 
To someone who says they’re not musical: Women With Wings and other circles I’ve sung with are full of women who had given up on singing around other people. They thought their voice wasn’t good enough or that they were tone deaf. True tone deafness is very rare; it’s more often a matter of learning. When these women join the circle, after a few months they find they can carry a tune, the range of notes they can match gets wider, and they are no longer afraid to sing in public. This empowerment has spread to using our voices to speak up for ourselves and others in all aspects of life.
 
While singing with a group is a powerful experience, singing these songs to yourself is also powerful. We need to be very selective in the songs we sing so we are filling our hearts and minds with messages that are positive, promote our well-being, and inspire us to make the world a better place for all beings. What you sing to yourself matters. The songs in this book are positive affirmations, calls to get up and do what you can to make things better, and celebrations of the Earth and all her beings. We can replace old messages with these positive, life-affirming, loving ones. These songs, and this kind of singing, color the lenses I view the world through with positivity and light.

 “The story of [American] women’s suffrage has been told in the same fashion for 100 years: it is familiar, repetitive, and overwhelmingly white."--from press release.

BUT... no more! There is a new history book that has just been published, and it is GLORIOUS! 

Seriously. This book is a terrific read, a complete page-turner. I could barely put it down. The only reason I would put it down was that it was 500 pages long, and, periodically, I actually had to eat and sleep. I was really sad to see it end, even if it did mean we finally got the vote.

So how did Sally Roesch Wagner turn the history of women’s suffrage into the best beach read of the summer?  I’ll let her answer:
 
“I was inspired by nearly 50 years of learning from my students. They taught me what stories they shared with their friends; what information impacted and empowered them; what made them angry; and, most importantly, what they had never been told.”
 
She gives the reader what she wants!  And she also does not give her what she doesn’t want:
 
“I also had to avoid the impulse to replace the ‘great-men-great-wars’ narrative with a ‘great-women' one—not a task for the faint-hearted or the perfectionist.”
 
Sally Roesch Wagner has widened the lens of Suffrage history and refocused the narrative to include the women of color whose presence has always informed the struggle. She does not minimize or excuse the racism of white women, and this is one of the reasons why the book is such a page-turner: The divisions, the issues, the strategies of appeasement vs. radical action are heart-poundingly relevant to the divisions, issues and strategies of today. The major players find their counterparts in today’s Black Lives Matter and across the spectrum of Congressional leadership. In the words of Susan B. Anthony: “Every generation of converts [to feminism] threshes over the same old straw.”

The book is packed with fascinating, complicated, passionate, flawed women practicing radical and visionary politics—and also engaging in abysmal, good-old-white-boy deals-with-the-devil. Roesch shows us the backroom trades, the rhetoric, the scandals, the pernicious impact of mixing religion with politics, and the cautionary divisions that historians have attempted to hide.
 
And the men! Many women have been caught off-guard by the recent tsunami of misogyny that appears to have arisen from nowhere.  Well, it wasn’t “from nowhere” at all! The Women’s Suffrage Movement plunges us deep below the surface of this present wave to experience the historical, bottomless ocean of men’s hatred of women and compulsion to dominate every single aspect of our lives. There are no Sith or Terran Empires, no Necrons, Tyranids, Weeping Angels or other sci-fi villains who can compare with the fiendish forces of white men arrayed against women, and especially against women of color, in the struggle for women’s liberation.
 
So how does this book work?

It works because it is so user-friendly. Wagner pulls us in with her first two “I-did-not-see-that-coming” chapters: “Women Voted Before the United States Was Formed” and “Women Organized Before Seneca Falls.”
 
Just one example. There was an informal meeting of five women on Sunday, July 9, 1848 in Waterloo, New York. History books might tells us that this was where the idea for the first women’s rights convention was birthed. *yawn*
 
Wagner puts us in the room with the women. Four of them had just come from a Quaker meeting. Possibly they decided to meet in the home of the woman with the two-week-old baby, because she was still nursing. A newcomer to the meeting was a mother of five children who lived at the end of a dead-end road, two miles from her nearest neighbor, with an often-absent husband. The four Quaker women all lived in homes that were on the Underground Railroad. Even as they sat there sipping, they were breaking the law. One of these abolitionist activists had traveled all the way to London to attend an abolitionist convention, only to discover they would not seat her because she was female. WOMEN WITH ISSUES.
 
And… one of the women had just gotten home from a month-long visit with the Seneca Nation near the Pennsylvania border, as these indigenous people debated whether or not to abandon their traditional clan-based government and replace it with with a US election system. It was not lost on her that the indigenous women had more voice, dignity, and respect under their own form of government. As they sit in the room with the new-born and her mother, they most likely discussed how the Haudenosaunee people had a visionary provision that all treaties had to be approved by three fourths of all the mothers in the nation.  This provision appears to me to be an acknowledgement of the unique and very physical connection and investment that mothers have with their offspring, connection and investment that incentivizes them to priorize long-term consequences with regards to dispensation of land. And here we are today where female biology is not just considered irrelevant, but taboo to reference!  I often have wished that our government had a Cabinet position, “Secretary of Long-Term Consequences” from the Department of the Future. The Haudenosaunee were on it a thousand years ago.

ANYWAY… The old history books would simply reel off the five names. Wagner puts us in the room with all of those multicultural, multi-generational, trans-European, multi-issue cross-currents swirling around our heads. THAT’s how it’s done, women. Personal frustrations, political indignities, humble acknowledgement that indigenous people have more evolved systems of government, and white women putting their freedom on the line for the liberation of people of color. Given a context like that, almost anything could be the flashpoint for revolution.
 
So then, after these eye-opening chapters, Wagner devotes each chapter to a decade, from the 1850’s up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally passed. Bonus: At the end of each chapter, Wagner includes riveting, primary-source samples of speeches, reports, editorials and other documents from that decade. Why? As Wagner says, “Primary sources take us onto the field where we watch the action, listen to the players, and figure out for ourselves what is going on.”
 
One of my favorite examples of the value of primary resources are the editorials debating dress reform. There is an obnoxious editorial by a master mansplainer, informing Suffrage women that they are forfeiting their right to all respect and credibility in his eyes (oh, no!), because they have abandoned wearing the Bloomer costume. He, of course, never wore anything in his life that would cause threatening mobs of people to follow him down the street, to throw horse manure all over him, and to subject him to endless catcalls and threats of rape everywhere he went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton cleans his clock quite handily and I savored every word she wrote.

Well… I don’t want to give too many spoilers… but in terms of relevance, there is domestic worker Hester Vaughan who either miscarried or aborted a child borne of rape, and who was given the death penalty. What saved her?  Women who organized.
 
There is a 19th century #MeToo moment when Victoria Woodhull, slut-shamed as a "Free Love" advocate, calls out the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher on his adulterous relations with a married parishioner.
 
There is Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, rising to the podium and throwing out the most radical challenge of her career: making the same demands of religion that the movement has made of the State. She is an utter badass and her speech is a complete barn burner. And I am sure that half the women who had baked the cake and put up the party decorations where offended as hell. Because that's how it's done when you are eighty.
 
There is Alice Paul, radicalized by the militant Suffragettes in England, who wants to have a ton of parades and protests. The by-then conservative movement says, “Fine, sweetie. Just raise your own money, because we won’t give you any.” She does, and she hosts rallies and protests that are wildly, insanely successful in terms of attendance and PR… so they kick her out of the organization. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am thinking of you so hard.
 
There is the “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” melodrama of the Tennessee vote to ratify the 19th amendment. It’s the final state vote that will make it law, and it comes right down to the wire, with a senator racing the clock to cast the vote and still make it home to attend the dying of his child. He’s escorted there by the women, who then have to race back to get him. He jumps from a moving train… Dirty tricks, last minute reversals, women staying one step ahead of their enemies. Really, someone needs to make a film.

One of the strongest through-lines of the book is white women’s betrayal of women of color in the movement. The pivotal moment happened in a midnight session of a national conference. It happened with a non-representational body of that organization. It was a dirty trick. But the groundwork for the division had been laid by complex grids of historical, social, and political matrices. 
 
There had been the “divide and conquer” tactics of the 14th amendment. Ostensibly granting citizenship to former slaves, the amendment introduces the word “male” into the Constitution... as a qualifier for voting rights. Should the Suffrage Movement oppose this amendment, so critical to spelling out citizens' rights to African Americans, if it was going to come at the expense of women's suffrage rights... including women of color?  Not surprisingly, women of color in the movement had a very different perspective from many of the white women. 

And then there was the temperance movement. Their organization had twice the membership of all the suffrage parties combined. Why? As Lucy Stone put it, “It’s so much easier to to see a drunkard than it is to see a principle.” The temperance movement has been framed today as a movement made up of Miss Grundy-type Puritanical school marms. In fact, in an era when women had almost no rights, it was a movement to stem domestic violence and especially rape. It was a movement filled with battered women and victims of sexual abuse, including incest. And it was a deeply religious movement, where women were reaching for a higher power than their human lords and masters, to legitimize their claims.

Susan B. Anthony wanted their numbers, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to join forces with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The price was an unholy alliance with organized, conservative, deeply racist religion.

And, finally, there was an appalling level of pandering to the racism of the Southern states. Women's suffrage was sold to them as a way to counter the rising political voice of African American men in the South.
 
In a conversation with Sally Roesch Wagner, she is asked, “What do you think are the most important takeaways from the women’s suffrage movement for social justice movements of today?”
 
Here is her answer:
 
“Eschew expediency. I’d like to see that on a big poster on every activist’s wall, and especially on the wall of organizations. When you abandon principle in order to win, like the later suffragists did, you may indeed win the battle, but you lose the war for justice. You create a legacy of division that continues for centuries.”
 
This is the best reason of all the many reasons to buy and read and treasure this delightful, intrepid, RELEVANT, page-turning, truth-telling book. It offers clarity and vision for our future. Eschew expediency right now and go out and get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ONE: The Busking Drummer
 
Years ago, I read an interview with a woman drummer. I am sorry to say that I did not take note of her name at the time, because I did not know that her story would take root inside me and become so central to my understanding of my own craft. This drummer was talking about a period of her life when she was busking—playing on the sidewalk for donations. She explained how a passer-by would come and stand in front of her, listening, and how she would start trying to “read” them, rhythmically. She would begin to drum the rhythm and patterns that she was picking up from them. And she said that when she did that, their energy would change almost immediately. In a good way.  Okay. That’s the first story.

TWO: A Slogan
 
There is this slogan, "The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance."  Much as folks fear and resist change,  the accepted wisdom is that the first two steps are actually the most challenging. Once awareness and acceptance are achieved, often the change just happens organically. Because change is a law of nature.

So… we have a busking drummer. We have a recovery slogan. And we have a tuning fork with sympathetic vibration going on.
 
What does this have to do with theatre?
 
Well, like the busking drummer, theatre has an audience. It has people sitting in front of the performers, giving them their attention.  As the slogan says, awareness and acceptance are a sequence or process that lead to change.  And finally, theatre tells as story with characters, situations, and themes—and all of these have a resonance, like a tuning fork that has been struck.  And—stay with me—I am going to make a daring suggestion. I am going to suggest that audiences, like that second, unstruck tuning fork, are “vibratory bodies.” They may have been passive when they stepped into the theatre, but, if there is anything in the play (character, situation, theme) which resonates with their own inner truth (in physics lingo “sufficient harmonic relations”), they are going to respond to those vibrations with their own vibration. And, just like the people facing the drummer and hearing their own rhythms reflected in her drumming, they will change. They become aware; they accept; they change.

One of my most recent plays is about a woman who is attempting to maintain a professional persona in the face of intrusive post-traumatic memories and affect. I wrote it because it offers strong and interesting work for a solo actor, and I also wrote it because I believe it can offer healing to survivors in my audience.
 
This play, Miss Le Gallienne Announces the Season, puts something on stage that is rarely seen and even more rarely discussed. It puts something on the stage that goes against the grain in a patriarchal, rape culture. It shows that “getting right back up on the horse” after a traumatic experience is not a path to healing and a pretty risky way to signal recovery.