The night was beautiful — starlit and sultry as only a night in the country at the end of summer can be. I was sitting by the lake at the campground with my lover. It was picture-postcard romantic, the stuff of lesbian personals.

Until we heard the screams.
Our romantic reverie irrevocably shattered, we ran to the sound and found a woman crying, one side of her face bloodied and swollen. Since we were at a lesbian retreat in the Poconos and no men were on the premises, we couldn’t imagine what had happened.

The woman told us her girlfriend had hit her, repeatedly. I took her to the first aid tent, while my butch lover headed off to find the violent girlfriend.

What happened next stunned me. The battered lesbian, who was African American, was treated with contempt at the first aid tent, told her face was “only scraped” and she should “try not to antagonize” her lover.

“An apology would probably make everything better,” advised the woman in the first aid tent. Meanwhile, my lover had found the batterer, who was ready for more, calling her girlfriend a whore and the slang for female genitalia. She told my lover that her girlfriend had been flirting at the dance, so she “took charge of the situation.”

I knew the women who were running the retreat and went to one of them, herself African American, and tried to get the batterer thrown out of the camp. I complained about the actions of the woman at the first-aid tent. But my friend was unmoved and even suspicious.

ROBERTA HACKER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF WOMEN IN TRANSITION

“How do we know who started it?” she asked me. Then she suggested that black women have a different way of interacting with each other than white women. “We can be very loud,” she said, dismissively. “It’s not a big deal.”

My lover and I took the battered woman to our cabin for the night. But the weekend was ruined for us.

That incident happened years ago, yet I still remember every detail.

Deborah Peifer’s experiences are more recent, but equally brutal.

“The story begins the first time that L hit me,” Peifer began. “I did everything right. I threw her out, packed her stuff and left it on the landing for her. Then her therapist called and assured me that L was working so hard on her anger issues that she deserved another chance. I broke my own rule and took her back.”

As with many domestic-violence situations, there was a “honeymoon” period during which there was no violence between Peifer and her partner. Then that ended.

“A year later,” Peifer explained, “L decided that we should break up. She made every effort to break me. I’d never been beaten up before, and I was paralyzed with fear. When I realized that she was not going to stop, I ran away — in my bare feet, in Chicago, in the winter. Fortunately, I knew someone in the building and was able to go to her apartment. After I cleaned up and calmed down, I knew I had to go back to the apartment to get some shoes, my wallet, other things. I called the police. Two Chicago cops, not known for their progressive attitudes, arrived. They were not sympathetic, but agreed to escort me to the apartment.”
Peifer takes a deep breath and continues, “When I opened the door, the cops were standing on either side of the door, so L could not see them. Even though several hours had passed, she got up, fists cocked, ready to batter me again.”

Unlike the situation at the lesbian retreat, however, Peifer got a surprise assist from the two officers.

“When the cops saw that,” Peifer said, “everything changed, and they became my big brothers. L tried to get past them to get to me, and that affront to their authority outraged them. They offered to arrest L, but I just wanted the nightmare to be over, so they sent her out to calm down while I gathered some clothes.

“Then one of the cops said, ‘So, youse are gay?’ ‘Yes, we are,’ I replied. “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my brother is a gay.’”

These two stories of lesbian domestic violence highlight the similarities to heterosexual domestic violence as well as revealing the dichotomies surrounding relationship violence in the GLBT community. Assimilation has heightened awareness of queers among heterosexuals, like the police Peifer encountered. Conversely, that same assimilation has also led people in GLBT relationships to hide anything that the straight community might seize upon as negative.

“We like to protect our own from outsiders,” asserts Lee Carpenter, legal director at Equality Advocates Pennsylvania (formerly the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights). “We don’t want our dirty laundry aired in the straight arena. We don’t want to give them reasons to point fingers at us.”

Carpenter has handled domestic-violence cases and protection-from-abuse orders for GLBT clients. She recently gave a workshop on domestic violence in same-sex relationships at Equality Forum, which she facilitated with the Mazzoni Center, Philadelphia’s only GLBT-focused health center, and Women in Transition, the area’s oldest support agency for battered and abused women.

However, although domestic violence occurs in a third of all GLBT relationships, the workshop was not well attended.

“We just don’t want to acknowledge that this is a problem for us,” Carpenter sighs. “The perception that women don’t hurt each other or that battering is solely a heterosexual crime only adds to the isolation of lesbians who are in violent relationships, however.”
“Lesbians in abusive relationships have a hard time reaching out,” says Roberta L. Hacker, executive director of Women in Transition, where Hacker established the first counseling program for women being hurt by same-sex partners.

“There are stresses on lesbian relationships that aren’t present in heterosexual relationships,” Hacker asserts. “Homophobia, isolation, self-loathing, the feeling that you only have each other against the outside world. All of these things can play a role in an abusive relationship between two women. They also make it that much harder for women to seek help — or find it.”

Teresa Calisto didn’t know where to turn when her partner of eight years began abusing her.
“It seemed to happen overnight,” Calisto said, disbelief still in her voice. “Megan and I had a really solid relationship. Then I started a new job where I had to travel once a month. Things got really tense. She didn’t want me to go on business trips. She’d call me constantly to check up on me and to see if I was really at the hotel. It started to make me angry. Then one night I came home exhausted from a conference and she just hauled off and slapped me. I tried to leave the room and she grabbed me by my hair so hard I fell down. It was very scary.”

Calisto and her partner talked about going to counseling, but then decided they could work it out themselves.

“She was so remorseful,” Calisto insisted. “Things were better — until I went away again.”
The verbal abuse intensified when Calisto wasn’t away. When she would return from a business trip, her partner would shove her and pin her up against the wall, demanding to know what she had done while she was gone.

“Megan was obsessed with the idea that I was cheating on her. I finally called the national domestic-violence hotline, but the woman I talked to seemed to think that because we were two women, this wasn’t really abuse. She didn’t offer me anywhere to turn.”

Finally, Calisto moved out one day while Megan was at work. “I was that scared,” she explained. “I just didn’t know what she might do. I was 28, I had been with this woman since college and all of my finances and everything were tied up with her. But I just wanted to escape. I didn’t care what I lost. I took clothes, photos, my cat and left.”

As is true for many women who flee abusive relationships, Calisto’s partner began stalking her.

LEE CARPENTER, LEGAL DIRECTOR OF EQUALITY ADVOCATES PENNSYLVANIA

“We see the same kinds of behavior in lesbian domestic violence that we see in heterosexual DV,” says Carpenter. “Stalking is a big one for lesbians. And since the community is small, it is easy to do. And very frightening for the partner being stalked.”

The insular nature of the GLBT community adds to the problems abused lesbians face, says Carpenter. For lesbians, the illusion of safety a women-only community is supposed to provide can turn nightmarish.

“Women-only space is not safe space,” says Carpenter. “It’s an aspiration — a lot of women want desperately to have a safe space. They think, ‘If I eradicate the presence of men, then it will be safe.’ Except that it’s about eradicating the violence, and a lot of women are carrying that around with them. We are so PC as a community, we tend to treat the battering lesbian and the battered lesbian the same. Which makes the woman being victimized feel victimized by her own community.”

The frequency with which this kind of abuse happens is alarming, says Hacker, who is also president of the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “The statistics speak for themselves, but they only tell part of the story.

“Of course we don’t have accurate numbers because no one is really tracking domestic violence in any uniform way, but we do have approximate numbers and those are pretty intense,” explains Hacker.

According to reports compiled and released by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs in 2005, between 25 and 33 percent of GLBT relationships include abuse — which is comparable to heterosexual relationships. However, as with domestic violence in straight relationships, DV in GLBT relationships is on the rise.

“There is acculturation about what domestic violence is supposed to look like,” explains Carpenter. “It provides an easy out for the batterer. ‘I’m not a man, you weren’t abused.’ It’s emotionally crippling for the person being battered. It invalidates the reality of her trauma.”
Added to that, Carpenter says, is the response of the GLBT community. “We have this bunker mentality — we just shut down the idea that it’s happening, because our relationships are constantly being pathologized. So it’s safe and convenient to pretend it isn’t happening.”
“I wasn’t really sure for a long time if what Megan was doing to me even counted as abuse,” said Calisto. “By the time I was sure, I was really in danger.”

There have been several cases of lesbian domestic-violence murders in Philadelphia in the past few years, and other cities have had similar tragedies.

“Lesbians need to know what the signs of abuse are,” Hacker says. “Knowledge is power, and it is also protection. If you are being abused, reach out to someone. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t happening. If you don’t feel safe, you aren’t.”