#ties that bind

~~~

Although acceptance of difference is on the rise in America, it's the rare gay or lesbian person who has not been demeaned because of his or her sexual orientation, and this experience usually starts at home, among family members.

Whether they are excluded from family love and approval, expected to accept second-class status for life, ignored by mainstream arts and entertainment, or abandoned when intervention would make all the difference, gay people are routinely subjected to forms of psychological and physical abuse unknown to many straight Americans.

Ambitious, original, and deeply important, Schulman's book draws on her own experiences, her research, and her activism to probe this complex issue still very much with us at the start of the twenty-first century and to articulate a vision for a more accepting world.

~~~

It has taken me so much longer than I thought it would to get through this book, especially given how short it is (only around 170 pages). Partly that’s because this author, like so many others, is apparently allergic to proper paragraph breaks (and no, an indent doesn’t count as a full break; seriously, what’s up with that? Is it really so difficult to hit the enter key twice instead of once??) and partly because this is a very heavy topic.

I don’t identify with a lot of what Schulman wrote about in this book – for example, as a non-partnering aroace person, there’s really no risk of my family ever excluding any future partner of mine from anything for the simple reason that I don’t ever intend to have one – but there were a few bits that really hit home for me, which was incredibly depressing given that this book was published a decade and a half ago.

One section in particular is going to live in my brain for a while; Schulman describes multiple attempts to get various members of her family to come to therapy with her to try and mend their relationship, only for the appointment to result in a prolonged session of them bashing her while the therapist sat there and didn’t intervene. If you swapped out ‘lesbian’ for ‘depressed’ or ‘disabled’, that’s literally how every attempt at family therapy has ever gone for me – score one for relatability, I suppose?