Queer Wounds; or, What We Owe Each Other
An Excerpt From My Book "Touch Me, I'm Sick"
Hello dear ones,
On Fridays I share excerpts from my forthcoming book “Touch Me, I’m Sick,” a memoir-in-essays that map my healing journey from a traumatized adolescent to a chronically ill adult. My book will be published in the fall of 2025, so you’re getting to see it before anyone else does!
Today’s writing comes from Chapter 6: Queer Wounds: or What We Owe Each Other.” In this section, I really lay the groundwork for the chapter by defining conflict, hurt, harm, and abuse, while also addressing patterns of harm that I see happening within queer community (and in the radical left more broadly). Next week, I’ll share an excerpt about a past relationship where harm occurred.
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So far I have been talking about the harm and violence I have experienced at the hands of straight cis boys and men. I wanted to write a book about the ways in which queers living with chronic illness and trauma can foster forms of intimacy that support our healing and enable us to thrive in the face of oppression. We need these stories.
And, at the same time, we also need stories about the pain we can and do cause one another, of the harm and violence enacted, and the wounds that we create, and then, hopefully, try to heal. “We will all mess up and make terrible mistakes,” writes transformative justice activist Mia Mingus.“We will all hurt people we love and care about at some point. We will all have our time on the chopping block.”
Harm, abuse, and violence aren’t the exclusive domain of cisheternormativity; they happen in queer relationships as well because we have all grown up in this toxic landscape. And yet there are not very many of these stories out there – and I understand why.[1] Earlier in this book, I shared Melissa Febos’s thoughts on why there are so few depictions of bad queer sex. She explains how “This is in part because there are so many fewer descriptions of queer sex overall, but it is also due to the phenomenon of image management that often occurs in representation of marginalized communities.”Despite the fact that “all of us queers know that not all of our sex is healthy and satisfying,” we are beholden to policing by “our own communities to represent our sex in an idealized way.”
The same holds true for our relationships. We do not want to name the harm and violence that occur in our interpersonal intimacies and in our communities because of the fear that such truths will be weaponized against us by those who seek to destroy our ways of loving one another. In an interview with AnOther Magazine, author Carmen Maria Machado is asked about her memoir of domestic lesbian abuse, In the Dream House. To the question, “Why do you think we read so little about queer people who experience this kind of abuse?” Machado responds:
“Queerness and abuse are both subjects that are typically thought of as shameful and not worth committing to the page or the archive. I think there’s also a pressure that queer people feel to kind of ‘perform virtue.’ Because we’re constantly fighting for rights of various kinds, there’s this desire to be, like, ‘Look how good I am. Queer relationships are great – they’re just as great as straight relationships!’”
If queer relationships are as great as straight ones, then they are also capable of replicating the same kinds of violence. Machado resists the tendency to only represent the good queer relationship, writing in 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 … I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my own story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.”
It feels important, at the outset, to offer some definitions, as there has been much conflation between the words harm, disagreement, conflict, and abuse. The organization Spring Up defines disagreement as “a lack of consensus or agreement, there is a difference of opinion,” whereas conflict is “a disagreement stemming from deeply-rooted opposing wants and needs.”
In my conflict workshops, I define conflict as a disagreement in which something we care about has been threatened (that threat can be perceived or real). We might disagree on which contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race should win; we might get into conflict if my best friend is one of the contestants and you are one of the judges who thinks they should go home.
As Sarah Schulman has so famously put it in her controversial book of the same name: conflict is not abuse. There are competing definitions of abuse out there, so I have gathered a few that resonate for me. For somatic practitioner Kai Cheng Thom, abuse “is the misuse of power to cross someone else’s boundaries.” Similarly, in her book We Will Not Cancel Us, adrienne maree brown defines abuse as “behaviors (physical, emotional, economic, sexual, and many more) intended to gain, exert, and maintain power over another person or in a group.” Abuse tactics include gaslighting, coercion, manipulation, neglect, isolation, denial, minimization, and leveraging one’s power over another with less power.
Conflict and abuse can and do cause harm. brown defines harm as “the suffering, loss, pain, and impact that can occur both in conflict and in instances of abuse, as well as in misunderstandings steeped in differences of life experience, opinion, or need.” For Spring Up, “harm is when the actions of a person (or people) or system(s) has a negative impact on a person (or people) that creates unmet needs and obligations. This is often an abuse of power.” What differentiates hurt from harm is that hurt is short-term pain and it doesn’t result in long-term damage. Harm, on the other hand, can impact our sense of safety, belonging, and self-worth.
As humans, we all have core needs. In addition to our basic needs for food, shelter, mobility, resources, and education, Staci K. Haines includes safety, belonging, and dignity.“We are tracking for safety, adapting to belong, and organizing ourselves to find dignity,” writes Haines in The Politics of Trauma. We feel safe when we have access to our material needs. But safety isn’t limited to the material realm, and includes emotional, spiritual, and relational safety:
“Safety gets created when your agency, your interdependence, and your autonomy are affirmed. Emotional and relational safety is created when people acknowledge and support your emotional life, your empathy, and your capacity to act on your own behalf, as well as on behalf of others.”
We feel safe not only when our material needs are met, but when we can feel “secure and vulnerable, authentic and without fear that this vulnerability will be used against [us],” Haines explains. In situations of harm and abuse, our safety can be threatened in all of these ways.