And haven’t men been gaslighting women, abusing their lovers, harassing their girlfriends, murdering their wives for as long as human history has existed? And isn’t their violence always a footnote, an acceptable causality? David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at Mary Karr and pushed her out of a moving car, but no one ever really talks about it. Carl Andre almost certainly shoved Ana Mendieta out the thirty-fourth-story window of their Greenwich Village apartment and got away with it.51 In Mexico, William Burroughs shot Joan Vollmer in the head; her death, he said later, made him into a writer. These stories are so common that they are no longer shocking in any meaningful sense; it is more surprising when there is no evidence of a talented man having hurt someone at all. (I confess, I never quite believe it; I just assume those men are better at hiding than most.)
I have spent years struggling to find examples of my own experience in history’s queer women. I tore through book after book about the queer women of the past, pen poised over paper, wondering what would happen if they had let the world know they were unmade by someone with just as little power as they. Did Susan B. Anthony’s womanizing extend to psychological torment? What did Elizabeth Bishop really say to Lota de Macedo Soares when she’d been drinking heavily? Did their voices crawl with jealousy? Did they hurl inkwells and figurines? Did any of them gingerly touch their bruises and know that explaining would be too complicated? Did any of them wonder if what had happened to them had any name at all?
I’ll never forget the gut punch I felt when one of the first lesbian couples married in Massachusetts got divorced five years later—a kind of embarrassed panic. I was recently graduated, newly out, trying to date women in Berkeley. I remember feeling dread, as though divorces weren’t the kind of thing happening all around me at every moment, as if they weren’t a complete nonentity. But that’s the minority anxiety, right? That if you’re not careful, someone will see you—or people who share your identity—doing something human and use it against you. The irony, of course, is that queer folks need that good PR; to fight for rights we don’t have, to retain the ones we do. But haven’t we been trying to say, this whole time, that we’re just like you?
It’s not being radical to point out that people on the fringe have to be better than people in the mainstream, that they have twice as much to prove. In trying to get people to see your humanity, you reveal just that: your humanity. Your fundamentally problematic nature. All the unique and terrible ways in which people can, and do, fail. But people have trouble with this concept. It’s like how, after Finding Nemo, people who were ill equipped to take care of them rushed to buy clown fish and how the fish died. People love an idea, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Even if they only know how to do exactly the wrong thing.
51. 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?”