Being Able To Say This Out Loud

Author’s Note: As I point out below, our public discourse about sexual harassmant and assault tends to assume a male prepetrator and a female victim/survivor. I was very happy, therefore, to be invited—again, the first time was in 2018—by the Sexual Assault Awareness Sub-Committee of my campus’ Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to speak during our annual Sexual Harassment & Assault Awareness Week. I am sharing the text of the talk with you now, at the beginning of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, because I think it’s important, especially during this month, to make sure the voices of men like me are heard, but also to let you know that I am available to give a talk like this for your organization, if it’s something you would like to fit into your programming. Either way, I hope you will consider sharing this post as far and wide as you are comfortable doing. You have my thanks in advance.

One last thing: It is important to watch the video before reading the text.

If, like the women who read the accounts of sexual abuse at the beginning of that video, you assumed the accounts themselves had been written by women, I’d like you to take a moment to think about why.

Then I’d like you think about the statistic that appeared briefly on the screen: that researchers estimate one in six men have experienced some form of sexual victimization. That’s an awful lot of men. It means that one out of every six men in this room, in this college, town, county; one out of every six male police officers, deli owners, CEOs, elected officials, plumbers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, waiters, fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons—the list could go on—one out of every six men lives his life shaped by the impact that we know sexual trauma can have on those who have experienced it.

I’ll say it again: That’s an awful lot of men.

Granted, men’s sexual violence against women is a normalized, systemic part of our culture, but the fact that our cultural discourse about sexual violence assumes almost exclusively a male perpetrator and a female victim begs the question of what it is about men, about our collective idea of what it means to be a man, that men like those who appear in that video are essentially invisible as survivors of sexual violence. Or to focus the question on why we are here today: What is it about how you see me that makes it hard to imagine the skinny and terrified twelve-year-old boy I was, absolutely powerless to stop the old man in my building from violating me; or to imagine the shy, awkward, insecure, and desperately needy boy, who, just a few years later, could not stop another man, a casual friend of my family, from feeling me up whenever he wanted to?

In order to share with you some thoughts I have about why that is, I am going to tell you parts of my story in some considerable and sometimes explicit detail. Before I do that, though, I want to say something else. I am taking a risk in speaking to you here today, especially because Nassau Community College is where I work. You will walk out of this room knowing things about me that you could, given the opportunity, use against me. I am, in other words, choosing to trust you, knowing full well that some of you might not be worthy of that trust. I believe the risk is worth it, though, because being able to say out loud what I’m going to tell you here today has made the difference, as it has made the difference for others who have similar stories to tell, as it could make the difference for those of you, because I know you are here, regardless of your gender, who have not yet told your stories—being able to say out loud what I am going to say to you today has made the difference between living the life I have wanted to live and feeling like the only life I deserved was the shame-filled half-life that the men who violated me tried to force me into.

***

I never knew his name. When I picture him now, I see a man somewhere between my age—I’m sixty three—and ten or fifteen years younger. I don’t think of myself as old, but I think of him as “the old man in my building,” because that’s what he looked like to my twelve-year-old eyes. He was white, with dirty-blonde hair and a mustache. In my memory, he walks with his shoulders rounded forward as if he were always tired. I also remember that he wore glasses and that he had very kind eyes.

Shortly after he moved into the apartment at the top of the staircase to the second floor of our building, he said hello to me for the first time. I was standing alone in the courtyard and he stopped as he walked past, nodding and smiling. “Hi!” was all he said. The second time he saw me, he did the same thing, and by the third or fourth time, a ritual of greeting had grown between us. He would smile and say hello first; I would smile, say the same thing back; and then, for a long silent moment, he would fix me with his gaze, while I stood there, a kid hungry for attention, too happily embarrassed to move, wishing when he walked away that I’d done something, anything, to prolong our conversation.

My parents separated when I was three, divorced by the time I was five, and the man who became my stepfather when my mother remarried had not too long before the old man in my building first said hello packed up what had been our family station wagon and run off to North Carolina. I was hungry for adult male attention, and the old man in my building seemed willing, even eager to give it to me. So, when one day in late summer he did not keep walking after our usual exchange, I felt a thrill of anticipation run through me. “When am I going to see you?” he asked. I stood there, wordless in the warmth of his smile. He nodded in response, as if he understood everything I did not know how to say, and then he walked off, still smiling, to wherever he was going.

That question—When am I going to see you?—was how he greeted me for a while after that. I don’t remember what, if anything, I said in return, but then, one summer afternoon, as I was heading out of our building to meet my friends, the old man was walking down the staircase leading from his apartment to the front door, which we reached at the same time. As I went to turn the knob, he held the door shut with his left forearm, maneuvering me with his right till I stood facing the corner near the mailboxes where the doorframe met the wall. Pulling me tight against him, he ran his hands beneath my shirt and up the legs of my shorts; he groped my chest and belly, squeezed my butt, and cupped between my legs, all the while whispering hoarsely into my ear, over and over again, “When am I going to see you?”

I had no words for what he was doing, no training such as young children get now in how to attract an adult’s attention or try to scare off an attacker. All I could do was stand there till he was finished, and when he was finished, I ran. I don’t remember how far or how long or in which direction, but I ran as if I could leave my skin behind, as if running would turn me into another person. When I finally stopped running, in the small park across the street from the Lutheran Church, I sat a long time with the knowledge that my running had undone nothing, that my body was still the body he had touched.

I had no idea what to do with this knowledge, though, and that shamed me, so I kept it to myself, and in order to make it appear that nothing had happened, I continued to say hello to the old man the same way I always did, pretending not to see the ironic twist he added to his smile each time he asked, “When will I see you?”

I don’t know how long after that first assault it was, but I was sitting with some friends in front of my building when the old man came home from food shopping and asked me to help him upstairs with the bags in his shopping cart. I wanted to say no, of course, but I didn’t know how without raising for my friends the question of why I was being rude. The last thing I wanted was to explain myself to them.

“I’ll give you a dollar,” he said, when he saw my hesitation. “No, two,” he insisted, as he took a wad of bills out of his pocket, peeled off two singles, and nodded towards the top bag. (In 1974, two dollars went a lot further than it does now.)

I took the money from his hand—I did not know what else to do—picked up the bag he pointed to, and followed him upstairs, where he opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him. I stepped inside, thinking I’d leave the bag on the floor and get out as quickly as I could, but he was too fast for me. He closed and locked the door behind him before I could turn around, then took the bag from me and dropped it. The cans at the bottom landed with a crash that shook the whole apartment. With his hands on my shoulders, he gently guided me further inside. Then he snaked his arms around my waist, undid my belt and unzipped my pants, pushing them down so they fell around my ankles. All I could do was stand there, frozen to the spot where my feet had stopped moving.

Looking down at me with a wide smile—he’d come around to face me and I have the distinct memory that he was suddenly missing his two front teeth—his eyes, at what I imagine must have been the fear in mine, grew tender. “You’ve never had a blowjob before, have you? Don’t you want me to love you?”

In the silence with which I responded, he pulled down my underwear and took my penis in his hands—I remember thinking his fingers were like a cage—and he told me how beautiful and big it was, how good he wanted to make me feel, and then somehow I was sitting on the couch that had been a few steps to my right, my pants still at my ankles, and his own pants were down, and his penis, large and reddish purple and semi-erect, hung in front of my face.

His voice came from somewhere above me, urging me to play with it, at least to touch it, and the next moments are blurred in my memory, but I can still feel his hands on either side of my head, the steady pressure of his fingers at the hinges of my jaw, and even now, fifty years later, I still gag a little each time the damp metallic taste of him fills my mouth.

I don’t remember getting dressed, but I can see myself unlocking his front door and walking out of his apartment.

The rest of that day is a blank to me.

The following afternoon, the old man saw me standing by myself in the courtyard. He stayed a short distance away and pleaded with me to go upstairs with him again. This time, he promised, would be different. He would move more slowly, be more gentle. I stared off into the space in front of me. “No!” The word came from somewhere inside me that I did not recognize. I don’t remember if he responded, but I know I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there, ignoring him until he walked away.

He did not speak to me again for the rest of the time he lived in my building.

***

I sometimes wonder how my life would have been different if I’d told someone what the old man had done to me. Then I remember that I tried, and that it did not go well.

I was sitting in front of my building with my friend Vanessa when the old man happened to walk by. He nodded in our direction, pausing in front of me for the space of half a breath. I glued my eyes to the ground.

Vanessa, who had responded to him with her own greeting, turned to me after he went inside. “Why were you so rude?” she asked. “He was just saying hello.”

I continued to stare at the ground in silence.

“Oh, come on! Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me.” She pushed at my arm to make me look up. “What’s wrong?” She fixed her eyes on mine. She was my friend and she was concerned.

“It’s no big deal,” I tried to brush her question aside.

“But he looked right at you! Why did you act like he wasn’t even there?”

My thoughts were racing and my mind went blank at the same time. I trusted Vanessa. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what I could tell her that would make any sense. Even a statement as simple as He touched me would not have meant back then what it means today. Then, suddenly, as if it had come from somewhere outside my body, the urge to say something filled me, and I spit out the only thing I knew at the time that was supposed to signify without question that he was the kind of man who would do what he had done to me. “He’s a faggot!”

I tried to put as much venom into my voice as I could, hoping it would give those three words the weight of the accusation I wanted them to be, but Vanessa was unmoved. “So he’s homosexual? So what?” The slight edge in her voice told me she was getting ready for an argument. “Why is that a problem?”

I was crestfallen. I’d known as soon as the words left my mouth that they did not mean what I wanted them to mean. I did not think there was anything wrong with being gay, but I did not know how to take my words back without inviting more specific questions than I was ready to answer. Silence was the only response I had, and so all I have of the end of that conversation is the memory of my friend and me staring at each other across a wordlessness neither of us knew how to bridge.

***

I need to take a step back here to say a few things. Back then, the women’s movement was just beginning to bring men’s sexual violence against women into mainstream public awareness. No one, and I mean no one, was talking about the sexual abuse of boys, and the dominant image of the person who committed such acts was a mentally ill, depraved and perverted homosexual man whose goal was to “recruit” boys into homosexuality. That’s why I hoped that calling the old man a faggot would make Vanessa understand what I was trying to tell her.

It should not need saying, but I am going to say it anyway. There is nothing about being gay that has anything to do with whether or not a man chooses to sexually abuse a boy. I think most people these days understand this, but that understanding has not prevented the persistence of homophobic misconceptions about boys who are abused by men. Among these misconceptions is the belief that such boys will become gay as a result of the abuse or that they already were gay, even if they didn’t know it, and that this was what drew the abuser to them.

Neither of those misconceptions is true, of course, but you can understand how fear of the emasculating stigma attached to them might keep a boy or man from disclosing the abuse that was done to him. Indeed, that fear is one reason men sometimes wait decades before revealing that they were victimized, and many go to their graves without ever telling a soul.

I first told someone, my girlfriend at the time, whose name was Pat, when I was in my early twenties, just a few years after the second man who molested me was no longer in my life, and the reason I was able to do so was that I heard a voice. I know that may sound to some of you like mystical mumbo-jumbo, but it’s true. I was reading an essay by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich—some of you may know her work—and I came to a passage in which she was talking about the connection between the sexual objectification of women and men’s sexual violence against women. When I finished that passage, I heard a boy’s voice inside my head ask, “But what about me? What about what happened to me?”

I knew immediately that it was the voice of my twelve-year-old self pointing out that I had recognized without acknowledging it that what I’d read could also be applied to my experience with the old man in my building.

At first, I tried to pretend that I hadn’t heard what I heard, but doing so made me sick to my stomach. The only thing that relieved the nausea was promising myself I would to tell the truth about what the men who victimized me had been done to me. I found the conceptual and analytical framework for telling that truth in feminism, but feminism also gave me something else: the gift of anger, the white hot clarity of and absolute commitment to the idea that the only person responsible and accountable for an act of sexual violence is the person who perpetrates it. I certainly struggled with the shame and humiliation of having been violated, but that anger taught me never to blame myself.

My own healing, in other words, is inextricably rooted in feminist politics. Yours doesn’t have to be. In fact, no one’s healing should ever be politicized, in the sense that no survivor of sexual violence should ever be told that their healing needs to conform to this or that political agenda. At the same time, though, it would be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that, were it not for the feminist critique of men’s sexual violence against women, it is entirely likely that my experience and the experience of other men like me would be as relatively invisible now as it was back then.

***

I will tell you a little later the story of how I came to tell Pat about what the men who violated me did to me. For now, I just want to tell you about how remarkable it was that she believed me. I say remarkable because, though I did not learn this till years later, the conventional wisdom in the 1980s, even among therapists, was that the sexual abuse of boys was so rare that a boy, or man, who revealed that he’d been abused was almost certainly talking about something that happened in his fantasy life, as a kind of wish fulfillment, not something that had happened in the real world. At the heart of this practice and, I believe, at the heart of why sexual violence against men and boys continues to be basically invisible in our society, is a failure of the imagination rooted in the heteronormativity of our culture. You may not use the word heteronormative, but you know what I’m talking about. It’s why, for example, as a matter of cultural expectation, men are supposed to pursue sex with women, not the other way around, and why women are supposed to play the role of the pursued; and it’s also why, though we each may judge it differently, we recognize it as being outside the norm when people don’t fulfill those roles.

Men’s sexual violence against women, in other words, is congruent with heteronormativity—he pursues her; she is pursued—and it is indeed a bitter irony that when a man sexually assaults a woman, his actions actually confirm her role in the heteronormative script. This also means, however, that if she chooses to speak out, nothing she reveals about her experience would call her gender identity into question. I certainly do not mean to imply that it is therefore easy for women to reveal that they have been sexually assaulted or to dismiss or trivialize the hell that they are all too often put through when they do reveal such things, but the structure of that revelation in cultural terms is very different from the one that applies when both the perpetrator and victim of sexual violence are men, a circumstance that violates heteronormativity by definition.

For a man to reveal that he was sexually victimized by another man, in other words, is for him to confess that he allowed himself to be forced out of the role he is supposed to play, that he was, essentially, unmanned, not only by the actions of the man who victimized him, but also by the fact that he did not defend himself. The man who reveals that he was abused by another man thus risks the integrity of his gender identity in a way that a woman in a similar situation does not. No wonder so many sexually abused men choose silence. No wonder you may have assumed that the stories of abuse at the beginning of that video were told by women.

***

I want to switch gears and talk to you now about a different misconception when it comes to sexually abused boys, the one that says, say, a fourteen-year-old whose middle school teacher coerces him into having sex with her—who, in other words, rapes him—was not actually raped at all. That, in fact, he “got lucky” in the best sexual sense of that expression, and that for him not to see himself that way, especially if he has the temerity to say so publicly, is for him to admit that he is gay and does not deserve the manhood into which having sex with a woman supposedly inducts him.

At the heart of this misconception is the notion that men should always want and always be ready for sex, but that is really just another way of saying that men should have no sexual boundaries. Applied to the fourteen-year-old boy I just asked you to imagine, that notion is patently ridiculous, but consider this exchange, which took place in a discussion about consent I was having in a Women and Gender Studies course some years ago.

The class was all-female and, as far as I knew, all-heterosexual, and the woman who had become the unofficial spokesperson summed up the conversation to that point. “In other words,” she said, “we are dead tired of all the fucking clueless ways men keep hitting on us, especially all that unwanted touching, even from the ones you might potentially be interested in.”

“What would happen,” I asked, “if a guy you were kind of interested in asked permission to touch you first?”

“A guy who asked?” The spokeswoman was incredulous. “He’d be the clingy and weepy type for sure, and who wants to put up with that shit?”

The rest of the class agreed. What my students wanted—this was the spokeswoman again, the rest of the class nodding along—was “to be hit on by men who know how to take what they want, without asking and without apology, and who make you feel like you’re the only woman in the room worth having while they’re doing it.”

I decided to try a different tack.

I asked the class to imagine a man they wanted to kiss. Given everything they had just said about unwanted touching, would they consider asking him first or would they just kiss him? A different woman spoke up. “Why would I need to ask? I’d just kiss him. What man, what real man, if you put it ready-to-eat on his plate, is going to say, ‘No thanks. I’m not hungry?’”

“What if he did, though?” I asked her. “What if he did say ‘I’m not hungry?’”

“Then what the hell good is he?!”

The entire class erupted in laughter.

I found myself feeling that day a frustration similar to the one I experienced the first time I told a girlfriend who wanted to have sex that I didn’t. She took it personally. My lack of desire, according to her, could mean only one of two things. Either I was no longer attracted to her, maybe because I’d found someone else and hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell her, or because I’d realized I was gay and hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell her that either. “You’re a man,” she said, and everything she knew about men told her that saying no just wasn’t how I was supposed to respond “when your girlfriend strips naked, sits in your lap, and tells you she wants to fuck.”

Like women, of course, like anyone of any gender, men have the right to decide for ourselves when and whether we want to have sex; and, just like for women—and this is the feminist insight without which I would not have been able to say much of what I have said in this talk so far—that right is the fundamental prerequisite for defining on our own terms the relationship between our sexuality and the rest of our lives.

When I say it like that, it seems so obvious, so self-evidently true, that I begin to wonder why I think it needs to be said at all. Culturally, though, we don’t think about men’s bodies in this way. Consider, for example, that we know what verb to use to describe what a man does when he uses his penis to rape a woman. We say, “He penetrated her without her consent.” No corresponding verb comes easily to mind, however, to describe how a woman who genitally rapes a man uses her vagina to do so. In fact, except for those jurisdictions where rape is defined most straightforwardly as having sex with someone without their consent, even legal definitions of rape that are supposed to be gender neutral are built on the model of penetration.

The Department of Justice, for example, defines rape this way: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Since this definition includes penetration with an object, rape can be committed without a penis—meaning, in theory, that anyone could rape anyone—but for the crime to qualify as rape, the object needs to have been used as if it were a penis. In this sense, rape remains a gendered crime in most of the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) does acknowledge on its website that women can and do force men to have sex with them without consent, but the CDC itself acknowledges that the phrase it uses to describe this behavior, “made to penetrate,” was chosen specifically to distinguish it from rape, because “rape and made-to-penetrate [are] separate concepts [that describe] two…distinct types of violence with potentially different consequences.” It’s as if penetration is the only way the CDC can conceive of sexual intercourse, and so only non-consensual penetration that is both willful and proactive, in which the penis or penis-like object is used as a weapon, can be construed as rape.

***

Almost thirty years ago, in a book called Intercourse, a feminist named Andrea Dworkin offered a different perspective. Noting that “[consensual] intercourse [has been] commonly [understood] as [an] act of possession in which…a man [occupies] a woman [by] penetrating her” Dworkin wondered why

> it is not the man who is considered possessed…[His penis] is buried inside her[,] surrounded by strong muscles that contract like a fist shutting tight…[His penis is] enveloped, smothered, in the muscled lining of flesh that he never sees, only feels, gripping, releasing, gripping…[until he] rolls over dead and useless afterward, shrunk into oblivion…beat[en], defeated in endurance and strength both.

Even though she is talking about consensual sex, Dworkin demonstrates quite convincingly with this description that it is possible to think of the vagina as an instrument of conquest and possession, and of the penis as an organ that can be violated. She even offers a verb to describe that particular use of a vagina, noting the irony that a man is not considered possessed in sex “even though [his penis] is engulfed inside her.”

Engulfment, however, does not register culturally as a sexually meaningful act in the way that penetration does. If it did, our understanding of the sexual boundaries of a body with a penis—of what it means to negotiate those boundaries in consensual sex and what it means to violate them—would have to incorporate this fact: consensually putting your penis inside the body of another person is no less an act of trust, no less a sharing of vulnerability, than the consent that other person has given you to put it there.

***

There’s a lot more that can be said about the issues I’ve raised here, but our time is limited. What I hope I’ve done is sketch out for you some of the reasons why I think we have the cultural blind spot when it comes to sexual violence against men and boys that the video I showed you is constructed to highlight and why men and boys are often so reluctant to tell their stories.

As I said earlier, I want to end this talk by telling you the story of how I came to tell Pat that I’d been abused. Because, while feminism may have given me the intellectual and psychological apparatus to name my experience and begin to come to terms with it, the emotional courage it took be public about it, to tell others, to go to therapy, to write the books of poetry and essays I’ve written that are rooted in this experiencce, to give this talk, emerges first from the fact that she believed me. There is, or will be, for each of you in this room who has been sexually victimized someone like Pat in your life. I hope you will take the opportunity to talk to them when the time is right. And for those of you who have not been sexually victimized, in addition to hoping that you never will be, I hope that if someone like me does come to talk to you that you will be for them the kind of friend Pat was for me.

All you need to know about this part of my story is that Bill was the name of the second man who abused me.

I had not thought about Bill for a long time when Pat put her hand on my hip and we started moving in a not very graceful imitation of swing dancing as the Lionel Hampton Band played its first number at Vassar College’s Spring Semiformal. After about thirty seconds, though, I stopped dancing.

“What’s wrong?” Pat asked.

I bent down and whispered in hear ear, “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Neither do I,” she smiled. “That’s what makes this so much fun!” She started moving again, and so did I, and suddenly it didn’t matter that we were faking it.

When the music slowed and the crowd thinned to those couples drawing close for the evening’s first slow dance, Pat leaned into me, put one hand on the back of my neck, playfully grabbed at my butt with her other one, and pulled my ear down to her mouth. “I like the way you move,” she whispered.

I don’t know if Pat saw the moment’s hesitation I felt before I smiled, but her words and the way she touched me had returned me to the room in which Bill would feel me up. I no longer felt like dancing, so I told Pat I was thirsty and headed towards the bar. I wanted a few minutes alone to clear my head.

I liked Pat, a lot, and the thought that what Bill had done to me might ruin the good time she and I were having made me angry. Didn’t I deserve to dance with my girlfriend, to enjoy the way she was enjoying me, without shame? I decided I had to tell her.

The smart thing, of course, would have been to tell her when the semiformal was over, or even to wait until the next day, after we’d each had a good night’s sleep, but I was afraid I would lose my nerve if I waited any longer. I handed Pat her drink, sat down facing her, and took a deep breath. “I have to tell you something,” I said.

“What?” She hadn’t heard me. The music was too loud.

“There’s something I need to talk to you about.” A quiet passage left room for me not to raise my voice.

“Okay,” she nodded her head, but her eyes were on the dance floor and she was tapping her feet restlessly to the music.

“No, really, there’s something about me that you need to know.”

That got her attention. She turned to face me, leaned her elbow against the back of my chair, rested her chin in her hand, and waited.

“When I was a kid, I was mol—” At that moment, the entire horn section began to play, drowning out the rest of my sentence.

“When you were a kid what?” She had to raise her voice to make sure that I heard her and I could see the question on her face. Couldn’t this wait till later?

“I was molested when I was a kid.” I nearly shouted back, hoping none of the people around us were paying attention.

“You were what?!”

“Molested. By a guy I worked with at the catering hall I told you about.”

“Uh-huh?” Her voice was noncommittal, except for the rising, tell-me-more tone at the end.

When I did not answer her—just saying it once had left me drained—she took my hand and led me to the dance floor, holding me close and tight as we moved. I did not know then that she would ask me the next day to tell her my story, all of it, including both Bill and the old man in my building, or that she would respond not just with warmth and understanding, but with a fierce and tender protectiveness for which I will never stop being grateful. What I knew was that the world had not fallen apart. I’d said the words “I was molested” and not only had my girlfriend not walked out in disgust; she still wanted to dance with me, which in that moment was more than enough.

Thank you.