Our dirtiest secret: Domestic violence in our community
By Victoria A. Brownworth
PGN Contributor
© 2007 Victoria A. Brownworth

Part two of a two-part series

Matthew Shepard, 21. Gwen Araujo, 17. Brandon Teena, 21.

These names are all too familiar to our community. They are among our martyrs, each brutally murdered —Araujo and Teena sexually assaulted as well — by heterosexual men who are now serving life sentences for the killings.

Though violence against GLBT individuals is well known, as evidenced by the murders of Brandon Teena, Matthew Shepard and Gwen Araujo, domestic violence in the GLBT community is more hidden — partially, experts say, because of the desire to avoid further denigration from heterosexual society. Poster memorializing transgender teen Gwen Araujo, who was murdered in 2002 because she was anatomically male and living as female. PGN file photo

Shepard, a gay man; Araujo, a MTF; and Teena, a FTM, were victimized because of their sexual orientation. The stunning brutality of their murders made them famous in death when they were just ordinary people in life. Books have been written about them, films have been made of their lives and grisly deaths. They are now part of our collective history — the dark side of our history.

But while these three murder victims are well-known to the GLBT community, what is lesser-known is that extremes of violence against gay men and transgender people are on the rise — from within our own community. Gay men and transgender people are being victimized regularly for who they are, but the people assaulting them are not random strangers out to kill a fag or bash a queer. The violence against these gay and transgender people is coming from the men who are supposed to love them.

Rocco Giordano (not his real name) is 6-foot-1 and has the kind of body that only comes from working out every day. So when Giordano, 35, confided to his best friend that the lover he had recently moved in with was beating him, his friend “just rolled his eyes. He actually rolled his eyes at me and said, ‘Come on — you aren’t some pussy. You could take him easily.’

“The biggest lie you can tell me is that we can’t get hurt by our lovers because we’re men. We’re supposed to be tough. Allegedly we can dish it out as well as take it. That’s crap.”

Lee Carpenter has heard stories like this before in her role as legal director at Equality Advocates Pennsylvania (formerly the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights). The myth that only small men like the 5-foot-2, 100-pound Shepard get beaten is, she says, just that — a myth.

“We assign strength and weakness according to gender role differential,” she explains. “We have a view of batterers as being more male, or more butch if it’s two men. As straight society, the police and even our own community see it, the ‘typical’ domestic-violence situation looks like a male batterer and female victim. But that is definitely not always the case.”

Giordano’s partner of seven months was neither as tall nor as well-built as he, but “Tony really could pack a punch. Plus, he would constantly sucker-punch me. I would be walking out of the bathroom or into the kitchen and bam! — he would just slam me in the face or the gut.”

Giordano said the violence began before the two moved in together, but at first he wasn’t sure how to characterize the assaults.

“I was crazy about this guy,” he admitted. “We seemed to have a really great relationship, the kind that goes somewhere. But we’re both Italian, both a little macho and sometimes we would get into it. And he just couldn’t take being wrong or not in control. When he was pissed off, he’d just haul off and clock me.”

“What I have heard about domestic violence between gay men,” says Roberta Hacker, executive director of Women in Transition, Philadelphia’s oldest agency for battered and abused women, “is no different from what I have heard from lesbians and straight women. There is shock, there is anger, there is disbelief and there is fear. But the social contract says men are never supposed or even allowed to be victims, so there are few places for a man to turn when he is battered by his male partner. One of the reasons we hear about more cases of male-male domestic violence than lesbian domestic violence is because the damage can be so great to the victims. We see a lot more gay men reaching out for help for this reason. Cases come into the ER and they are brutal. Violence between women can escalate to serious injury, but violence between men results in serious injury or even death with very little effort. Strength really does make a difference. We cannot minimize the seriousness of gay domestic violence by dismissing these cases as men just roughhousing with each other. If some random man did this, it would be aggravated assault or attempted murder.”

A South Jersey emergency room is where the relationship between Giordano and Tony took a pivotal turn.

Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998 because of his sexual identity. PGN file photo

“I still don’t even know what happened, exactly,” Giordano acknowledged about the relationship that he is still in, even though his partner nearly killed him. “We were a little drunk, we were visiting friends at the shore and we’d been partying. And I don’t even think he meant to hit me as hard as he did. But he knocked me backward and I hit my head and the blood was everywhere.”

Giordano needed more than 20 stitches in the back of his head. The emergency-room physician urged him to press charges against his “friend,” who had also given him a concussion. Giordano didn’t, but he threatened to leave Tony if the violence didn’t stop.

“He agreed to go to anger-management classes and we went to counseling together. He hasn’t hit me again since that night. But I still flinch when I come out of the bathroom or go into the kitchen. Force of habit.”

Not every batterer recognizes his violent actions are wrong, however.

“I see people when they come for protection-from-abuse orders, restraining orders,” says Carpenter. “That’s when the violence is so out of control that guys don’t know what else to do.”

According to Carpenter, one of the differences between heterosexual domestic violence and that in the gay or transgender community is the threats batterers use against their victims.

“One of the things you see a lot of is threats against someone’s job,” she explains. “Threats of outing, threats of exposing someone to their boss or their family. There’s a lot of stalking behavior as well.”

When Elayna Rojas (not her real name) wanted to leave her abusive boyfriend, he threatened to kill her.

“He stalked me everywhere,” said Rojas, 24, a slender Latino pre-op transsexual. “We had been together a long time — almost two years. But he was always very jealous. He did not like me going out without him, he did not like me dressing up without him. He did not even want me to wear makeup if I wasn’t going out with him. Like my putting on makeup was for somebody else, instead of for me.”

Rojas said the jealousy escalated to small acts of violence. “And then he kicked my dog and hurt her, and that was it. I was out of there.”

But when Rojas moved back in with her mother temporarily, her former lover stalked her to her mother’s house.

“I would be getting ready for work and I would see him out there, waiting for me. I was very scared that he would do something to my mother or my aunt just to get to me,” she said. Rojas didn’t know where to turn for help.

“I ended up getting a bunch of guys I know to tell him to back off,” she said. “He finally started leaving me alone. But I still feel scared.”

Joe Tyler (not his real name), 29, describes himself as “a typical Wharton grad with delusions of grandeur.” Tyler works for an investment firm and “I am so in the closet, you’d think it was 1950.”

So Tyler didn’t know whom to tell when his partner of two years, a former client and an attorney, began to “just smack me around — I can’t really explain it better than that. We’d have a fight and he’d smack me. Not a punch, but a really hard smack. Never in my face, but it always left a bruise, it was so hard. It became his way of ending a fight — he’d just smack me and that was that. I think he knew I was afraid he’d do something worse to me if I continued to argue with him. And that’s how he got control of me. I felt like I had nowhere else to turn except back to him.”

Tyler said he was out to some friends, but not to his family who don’t live in Philadelphia and didn’t know he was living with Ben. He was definitely not out to his coworkers.

“I’m the prototype for the personal ad that reads ‘straight acting, straight looking.’ I just don’t know how to be out in the world I am working in. It’s very old-school. Ben knew that and took advantage of that and my love for him to keep me with him and controlled by him. I really started to feel like a prisoner.”

According to Hacker and Carpenter, Rojas and Tyler’s experiences are very similar, even though they come from different places on the GLBT spectrum.

“Isolating a partner is one of the first signs of an abuser,” explains Hacker. “Cutting your partner off from family and friends, making it difficult for them to have some kind of barometer about the relationship, is pretty classic abusive behavior. Often this is a gradual process. The abuser just decides he needs more control in the relationship because the victim is becoming more independent than he can cope with.”

In the nearly 40 years since the Stonewall riots in New York City, GLBT people have become both more open about their sexual orientation and more assimilated into the larger society. As a consequence, it seems there should be no more secrets — and no more reason to hide or be closeted. But as Tyler noted, not all professions are as willing to embrace out GLBT people as others might be. And not all secrets are easy to reveal.

“It’s ironic but true that with greater visibility of the LGBT community has come greater backlash,” asserts Carpenter, and because the straight community “pathologizes our relationships,” we are less likely to draw attention to anything that does, indeed, seem pathological — like domestic violence.

“As a community, we have adopted a bunker mentality,” she explains. “Our relationships are constantly being pathologized, so it’s safe and convenient to hide anything that might look bad to the outside straight world. Unfortunately, this benefits the batterers.”

And, as Giordano and Tyler both acknowledged, it’s not easy to find suitable partners with whom you feel you can build both a relationship and a future. Even in a city the size of Philadelphia, the GLBT community remains small, even claustrophobic, in comparison to the larger straight community. It’s exceedingly difficult to escape one’s exes, whether they are violent or not. This can present more complications for victims of GLBT domestic violence.

“The community doesn’t have a will to address domestic violence because the community will then have to take sides in these violent relationships,” says Carpenter. “We are supposed to protect our own against the outside world, so you will hear people say of the batterer, ‘But he’s gay, too’ or ‘How do you know which one is the batterer?’ We don’t hold the community accountable for its own behavior. Then there’s the very personal issue of ‘Yes, but he’s on my softball team.’ We’ve split the bars on protection-from-abuse orders. This one goes to Woody’s on this night, this one goes on the other night. You have to do it because the community is so small. This is not something that straight couples negotiating protection from abuse have to deal with.”

Hacker says it’s also important to remember the facts about domestic violence and how they apply to GLBT relationships as opposed to straight ones.

“Domestic violence is physical, emotional or sexual violence used by one partner to control another,” she says. “Domestic violence is about power and control. One partner uses intimidation and control tactics to gain power in the relationship. It’s not about wrestling, or consensual S/M or sexual game-playing. It’s about violence. One of the things we don’t like to consider, since the LGBT community is a sexual-minority community, is that gay men, TG partners and lesbians sexually assault each other in domestic-violence situations. That’s a very hard thing for LGBT people to deal with. That just adds another harsh dimension to the problem and makes it harder for victims to seek help and to heal.”

Carpenter says until the community deals with domestic violence with honesty and forthrightness, little will change for the victims. “We have to stop protecting the secrets as if keeping them somehow protects us,” she says. “Our community doesn’t take care of itself. It’s the community killing itself. We are incredibly defensive about the community being a healthy place. You’re constantly told that your queerness is pathological and sick, so people have to defend their identity, no matter what. Covering up the violence isn’t healthy. We wouldn’t do it if it was coming from outside, so why should we do it when it’s coming from within the LGBT community?”

“I think talking out what was happening to us saved our relationship,” said Giordano. “But sometimes I wonder — what if Tony hadn’t admitted what he was doing to me was wrong? Then what? How many other guys are dealing with that very thing right now?”