March 24-30, 2005
cover story
Uncivil Unions
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As same-sex couples fight for marriage rights, activists say domestic violence is getting the silent treatment.
Joyce* remembers cowering in bed, the covers sprawled over the mattress, a gun pointed at her temple. She's the quiet center of the storm, as her partner, Robin*, rages around her. Her lover, she recalls, "was the kind of drinker where you're really Jekyll and Hyde. You'd almost see the change in the eyes."
But the alcoholic outbursts won't persuade her to leave, or to tell — in fact, they only encourage her empathy with Robin's unhappiness. The '70s feminist revelations about domestic abuse have just passed her by, and it will be another 20 years before she comes out about this, her first brush with violence.
Joyce, now in her late 40s, sees her compassion as what kept her coming back: "I should have been more supportive to myself than to her." But on the bed, she has no thoughts of the future. Tanked on beer, Robin won't stop railing, as the gun looms slightly large in her hands, and her trigger finger threatens to tug.
"People have a very rigid and gendered idea of what domestic violence looks like: Male power over women," explains Philadelphia attorney Lee Carpenter, "whether it comes from posters that say, "He doesn't have to hurt you,' or [phrases like] "battered women's syndrome.'" She credits the women's movement of the '70s and '80s with bringing partner abuse to the national consciousness, but explains the unforeseen downside: A lot of people in the LGBT community, experiencing what Joyce did, "don't even know that what's happening to them can be identified as domestic violence."
To get a handle on what goes on behind closed doors, most people would reach for some data. The trouble is, there's nowhere to reach. In the latest national case-count available from the Department of Justice, 2001 saw 691,710 nonfatal assaults made on intimate partners, ranging from simple assault to rape. Eighty-five percent of these cases were perpetrated against women, compared to 15 percent against men. But none of the DOJ figures show individuals' gender identity or orientation, so there's no way to know how many of the male or female victims were attacked by intimate partners of the same sex.
Now, one Philadelphia organization, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, wants to get past working in the dark. Carpenter, a staff attorney for the center providing legal advice for victims of domestic violence, has been charting the cases for the last three years and filing them with the New York-based National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP). These contribute to the annual national report, the first of its kind when it was founded in 1997. It charts known cases across 11 American cities and Toronto, and it isn't afraid to reveal the gaps in the coverage. The 2003 NCAVP report detailed 6,523 known cases of same-sex domestic abuse. (The closest idea of the nation's LGBT population is the 2000 Census, in which 594,000 out of 60 million "coupled households" declared themselves to be same-sex.) But the report cautions that these represent only people who sought help, and that every time outreach is done in a state, the figure of known cases spikes.
In the last two years, the notion of "domestic" same-sex life has been foregrounded in the debate on state rulings on gay marriage or civil unions. Locally, a collaboration between the center and two other Philadelphia organizations is confirmed for the next 18 months, to draw attention to how cases are frequently unrecognized by police and conventional counselors. And survivors and professionals alike say it's time for the LGBT community at large to acknowledge that domestic violence isn't just a straight person's issue.
Joyce never reported Robin. "I had guns loaded at me at short range in bed. I had a machete held close to my throat and had bottles thrown down the street at me," she says, "but I can't say I had the courage to leave. Calling the police never crossed my mind."
"It defies all the stereotypes"What does same-sex abuse look like? It's a question primarily for law enforcement, expected to recognize what's happening on arrival at a domestic dispute. And without the traditional assumption that the man present is the aggressor, things get confused.
Mike Pierson was a star. A passionate outreach activist in Wilkes-Barre, he would tirelessly duck into bars to talk to men about HIV infection rates. Two years after his death, his friends in Luzerne County still talk affectionately about the impact of his work. Stacy Hawkins, a former chair of the Pennsylvania Lesbian Caucus, knew Pierson socially, in Northeastern Pennsylvania's gay scene, which she says "isn't what you'd call happening."
In January 2003, police responded to a call from Kenneth Stephens Jr., Pierson's partner. They found Stephens with a minor stab wound, which he claimed to have suffered in a domestic dispute. The night of the incident, he and Pierson had been driving home during a heavy blizzard. There had been a tussle, he said; he had been stabbed and Pierson had run off. Stephens was young — 21 to Pierson's 40 — and slightly built. Police followed his advice to search for Pierson outside Pennsylvania.
However, Hawkins remembers that "Mike's friends knew something was just wrong." They called on the police to search the area of road where the altercation had occurred, at the edge of Glenmaura National Golf Course in Moosic. But the snowdrifts were thick and, as Hawkins puts it, police "believed they already had the victim." It wasn't until the snow melted two months later that Pierson's body, bearing a fatal stab wound, was discovered near the 16th hole.
"It defies all the stereotypes, you know?" Hawkins says. Police "are used to assuming that the stronger partner has the power, and that's not always the case. Even in lesbian couples, the idea of butch partners as stronger than femme isn't true."
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In Pierson's case, the judgment call made by the police, based on a traditional reading of the situation, didn't fit. And in counseling couples, Judy Morrissey, who heads the Open Door program at the Mazzoni Center, has to keep an open mind as to who's at fault. "Very often, the batterer will be the one to call, to register for counseling. They'll present that they want to work it out together. But bringing the couple in for an intake interview presents a very different picture." In one case, the person who had initiated the meeting turned out to have a pattern of aggression — he had made "terroristic threats" and threatened his partner's dog — and was trying counseling as a way to keep the relationship together. When domestic abuse hasn't been properly diagnosed, couples' counseling can be damaging, Morrissey says, "as the batterer and the counselor form an alliance."
Robin, Joyce's partner, was never successfully counseled for her drinking or her violence, both of which came in cycles of a few months followed by periods of sobriety. Robin eventually left. But Joyce's next partner, Susan*, who was with her for 15 years, controlled their relationship in quite another way. "I was always encouraging her to go out and work," Joyce remembers, "and she wouldn't. She'd just stay home." Joyce told Susan about her past, and points out that this relationship felt tranquil by comparison: Only once, during a fight, had Susan lashed out at her. Nevertheless, Susan became economically dependent on Joyce, which became a problem when Joyce spoke up about wanting to move. When she brought up the idea of living apart, Joyce remembers, Susan "totally freaked out." For the rest of the night, "she just so terrorized me. She hit me with a bottle. She put a hanger around my neck. All night I felt she was chasing me around the apartment and I was trying to dodge her at every turn." And yet, when the night was over, still no police were called.
"In our community," Joyce explains, "there's a tendency, maybe with all the discussion of marriage, to want to be a committed person. You want to stay in a relationship. That's how I felt: "I'm committed, this is a marriage — even though not recognized under the law.' But you have to stay, and try to work things out yourself."
That impulse, says Rachel Baum, associate director of NCAVP, is strong right now: "We, as a community, have a mechanism of not wanting to air our dirty laundry," she says. "We already have enough people trying to pathologize our relationships." Even though the issue of domestic abuse is something that people across all demographic lines deal with, Baum says she has noticed in the LGBT community "an interest in making our relationships seem even better than the others, because we're fighting so much harder to get recognition for them."
Joyce and Susan lived outside Pennsylvania. (Joyce won't specify where.) By the time she came to leave Susan in the 1990s, her state, like Pennsylvania and 27 others, had enacted legislation that allowed anyone to get a Protection From Abuse civil order against an intimate partner — a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or ex. (Domestic abuse can also include cases of violence by a family member, but Baum says the "vast majority" of cases they see at the NCAVP are committed by a partner rather than a parent.) With the help of a friend, Joyce departed silently, while Susan was out of town for an extended hospital stay, and leased a phone and apartment under someone else's name. Since she was out to her bosses, she explained to them the urgency of a transfer to a new location. She even insisted co-workers tell callers she no longer worked there — yes, she says, even if they were "friends, colleagues, business associates."
Once she got some peace, Joyce was able to make a few calls of her own, to a broad range of domestic violence service providers. A counselor referred her to a legal adviser, and suddenly she was surrounded by people telling her that what she'd been through was emotional and physical abuse. Again, she turned down the option to report Susan's attack as criminal, but she took out a temporary injunction that barred all contact, and eventually made it permanent. A legislative amendment being considered in Pennsylvania would lengthen the duration of such PFA orders from 18 months to three years. (See sidebar on p. 24.)
Looking at how she ended up in the situation twice, she paints a picture of a community close at hand but in denial. "I remember living [with Robin] in a collective house with a number of other women, and they must have known the situation," she says. The few friends she told were out, and "even the ones I didn't talk to were also in the LGBT community, but I thought they might be more judgmental about her."
Such a fear of judgment is arguably justified, as there has been an attempt to sensationalize the issue in the mainstream. When William Devlin led a 2003 challenge to the Philadelphia statute that allowed couples to register as life partners, an amicus brief was filed with the state Supreme Court that made use of the latest NCAVP report. The Pennsylvania Family Institute, Family Research Council and state Rep. Gibson C. Armstrong (R-Lancaster County) sought to discredit life partnerships in part by claiming same-sex relationships were more prone to violence than straight marriages. NCAVP's 2001 statistic of 5,046 cases was contrasted with a figure from Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's book, The Case for Marriage, which claims: "Only about 1.7 percent of wives and about three-quarters of one percent of husbands are attacked [battered] even once each year."
Rachel Baum responds, "They love to quote our numbers." She says that comparison of a number of known LGBT cases to a percentage of only straight married couples ignores rates in unmarried straight relationships, and "minimizes what's going on with heterosexual women and their experience." Furthermore, she claims anti-domestic partnership amendments have created barriers to domestic violence protection for straight and gay victims. In Ohio, whose amendment states no relationship has legal standing save a marriage between a man and a woman, unmarried violent partners have claimed that their convictions illegally "confer some kind of legal status" on their relationships and have tried to overturn their charges.
In fact, in the NCAVP report introduction, Baum sets out the belief that the rate of abuse — including emotional and physical — among same-sex couples is roughly 25 to 33 percent, which is comparable to rates in straight couples. But vocal negative stereotyping can reinforce the community's silence, especially when there's no poster-friendly face yet to represent all survivors — or instigators — of same-sex domestic abuse. "There's no Stanley Kowalski," says Carpenter.
"You're talking about abuse? I just want to get my stuff back!"Lee Carpenter sees the community's denial whenever a client mentions abuse as tangential to a simpler kind of legal situation. When men come in, she says they'll often eschew the idea of being a victim: "One will say, "My boyfriend and I broke up, and I need to get my stuff out of the apartment.'" Carpenter would ask, "Why can't you go back in if your name's on the lease?" and the client would say, "Well, when we broke up it was a little bit ugly." A story of a fight ensues: ""He hit me. As I ran out, he said, "If you ever come back here, I'll kill you.' And so here's a person who is clearly in a violent relationship that they had to run out of, but they're [saying]: "Here's my question: How do I get my stuff back?'"
Despite awareness about men's battery by women, most psychologists concur that men, gay or straight, still have a hard time considering themselves victims — hence the apparently greater concern for their "stuff" than themselves. Belongings and the right to access them, including safe access to a shared property, can be covered in a PFA order. What is distinctive about the gay community is what constitutes "stuff." Carpenter sees the social scene as almost a shared area, "because, as small as people think Philadelphia is, it's smaller for gay folks. People say, "I have one [gay] bar to go to — what, am I never supposed to go back there again?'" Within reason, Carpenter writes stipulations into the clients' PFA orders, even down to who can visit what bar on what nights. Of course, she says, if you make them too complicated, they become practically unenforceable. "Then if you try to file a contempt of the order, the judge is going to look at the order and say, "What is this? Is it like a divorce, you got Woody's on Thursday?'"
"You can't just walk up to someone and ask if they're gay."In family court, Women Against Abuse, a local shelter and legal aid center, has run an advocacy program for 19 years, making trained legal staff available to aid domestic-violence victims in filing PFA requests. Two years ago, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights attempted something similar to assist LGBT plaintiffs. But Carpenter says the program foundered. Quite simply, it became impossible to tell who was gay. "We would approach a man," remembers Carpenter, "only to find out he was filing against his brother."
Most local women's shelters and agencies choose not to track whether clients are LGBT. "We want to provide equitable services, regardless of sexual orientation," explains Heather Keafer of Women Against Abuse, which helps file 4,000 PFAs annually and which, despite its name, also offers legal advice to male clients. Similarly, the police treat all cases blind. Police Chief Inspector James Tiano, who has served as LGBT community liaison for seven years, explains that the cops don't keep data on the gender identity or orientation of crime victims, including the 200 or so Philadelphians who call police daily about domestic abuse. "If you're the target of a robbery, we don't ask you that," he says. "And we don't ask in domestic violence cases either."
Rachel Baum of NCAVP understands but believes that through the lack of conventional data, "these voices are being silenced." She says the NCAVP annual report was begun as a way to begin to "bear witness" to those cases, and any outreach center that offers a specific program to LGBT people is eligible to join. "Whenever we see a growth in outreach, we see case numbers start to rise," she says. Financial ups and downs may explain the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights' fluctuations in caseload: In 2002, the Center reported 33 cases; but a loss of program funding in 2003 was followed by a drop to just 19 reported cases. However, in 2004, the Center saw 26 cases, and in October shared a new Department of Justice grant of $160,000 over two years with the Mazzoni Center and Women in Transition, to put out a joint information brochure. Morrissey even says the best place to put them may be public bathrooms, "where people feel they can read them alone."
While Carpenter says of court advocacy, "You can't just walk up to someone and ask them if they're gay," for sheer lack of available data a few researchers have done just that. A 2002 Georgetown University study into domestic violence among gay men tried to locate participants by selecting phone numbers in traditionally gay neighborhoods, and cold-callers initiated 75-minute interviews. These tactics led some, including NCAVP, to criticize the authors for failing to consider the participants' safety.
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Many kinds of emotional attacks play on a victim's sense of security, and survivors' accounts of same-sex relationships mention threats of outing used as a power tool. On February 27, Wayne Keeler, of Bath, Pa., was locked in his house by Donald K. Albright, a man he had dated for five months and had just dumped. Albright allegedly chained the doors once Keeler was inside, and attempted to burn down the property. Very often, as in straight cases, the actions of abusers appear designed in part to grab attention, as Albright managed to do in sensational fashion. But Keeler's ordeal throughout the arson was compounded by the fact that details of his lifestyle appeared in the subsequent newspaper reports, effectively outing him. (Albright's statements allegedly detailed the breakup of their relationship.)
"I think there's a misconception outside the gay community that you're either out or in, that it's an all-or-nothing deal," says Carpenter. "That's not really true. Someone might be out to their boss, but their mother might be super-religious and would freak if she ever found out." Morrissey explains, "Such threats [of outing] may be in relation to family, to employment — someone may not be out at work — or can be connected to child custody." Carpenter adds that for some transgendered people "who may not pass very well, a partner can act as their liaison to the outside world." And Morrissey has seen cases where once a client gained employment with a male or female identity, their partner threatened to reveal their trans status to their boss.
That's a problem because Pennsylvania residents are not guaranteed safety from discrimination based on their gender identity or sexual orientation. Employers can legitimately fire or fail to hire a person because of their sexuality; landlords can evict a gay tenant; and in public accommodations — public spaces, from shops to movie theaters — gay or lesbian couples can be asked to leave. In Philadelphia, the Fair Practices Ordinance aims to prevent such discrimination; under the rule, Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations will assess any case, conduct a hearing if there's sufficient evidence and award damages. But Rachel Lawton, the commission's acting executive director, confirms that a city ordinance is not strong enough to overturn a state law. So in practice, if a gay person loses his or her job on account of sexual identity or orientation, he or she is unable to sue. In 2003, there were 13 new cases of discrimination based on orientation filed and 17 outstanding ones were resolved.
"She can't go hitting on the other women."For serious cases, a shelter may be a victim's next step, but for LGBT folks there's no sure footing. When a female client who had just broken up with an abusive partner contacted Lee Carpenter, she told her that the ex's brother, a drug dealer, was going around the city trying to find her to kill her. Carpenter called around and finally found one shelter bed in the five-county area. But when she explained to the person on the end of the phone that her client was a lesbian, Carpenter remembers the response: "She can come in, but we'll have to talk to her about how she can't go hitting on the other women in the shelter."
Carpenter agrees such reactions are ever less likely, with better sensitivity training at traditional shelters. But the already overstretched network of beds has to adjust for unusual cases. Roberta Hacker, executive director of Women in Transition, a point of contact for roughly 50 to 75 lesbian and bisexual victims a year, says: "Shelters and centers have to be safe," with measures in place to "prevent lesbian batterers finding their partners." All shelters traditionally have barred men from access, but female abusers just don't stand out in the same way.
Nowhere is the disparity greater between services for men and women of any orientation than in shelter provision: There are no shelters designated for male survivors in Philadelphia — or, for that matter, in New York. In 2003, 44 percent of known same-sex domestic violence nationally was reported between men; considering that figure alongside the DOJ's 103,220 cases of violence against men reported in 2001 begins to indicate the size of the community that fails to be served. Looking to other states for solutions provides three basic ideas. Only one U.S. shelter for male victims exists at all, in San Francisco. But a pioneering partnership between the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project and Safe Horizon sets aside two shelter bedrooms in New York City for LGBT individuals, including men. And in Boston, The Network/La Red runs a host home program, placing women in volunteers' houses. They've even started promoting a cartoon strip designed to hype the issue to a younger community.
But in Pennsylvania, there are no cartoon campaigns. Instead, the last two years have held lessons illustrating how a tragedy can do what data cannot to shatter the denial at a local level.
There were no easy answers for the Wilkes-Barre community after Pierson's death. "Friends used to see Mike with injuries," Hawkins says, "and they never asked him about them." While Stephens eventually pleaded guilty to Pierson's manslaughter and was sentenced to six to 13 years, everyone feared locals wouldn't heed what had happened. Pierson's sister, Betty, founded a project in her brother's name, providing domestic violence and other information through a community center and Web site. It partners with other organizations, such as the Domestic Violence Service Center, where Hawkins works: "This is the greatest issue, second only to alcohol and substance abuse, that we [in the LGBT community] don't look at."
In October 2003, Hawkins contributed a "memorial place setting for Mike," to be shown in "An Empty Place at the Table," a statewide memorial for domestic violence victims at Harrisburg's Capitol Rotunda. Pierson, she says, became the first gay person to be represented in the project. And since then, the spike in case figures in Hawkins' area speaks for itself. "One county over, in Lackawanna, they've filed no same-sex PFA orders, virtually none, in seven or eight years," she explains. "Here, in Luzerne County, we file for 50 orders a week, and two of those will usually be same-sex. That's 100 cases a year."
Twenty years ago, Joyce felt utterly alone. Today, familiar faces are cropping up on posters at rallies and centers. In Wilkes-Barre, that Pierson's is the face of an activist brings home the secrecy that left an otherwise informed man with no one to talk to.
Hawkins, however, sometimes wonders how it might have worked out otherwise.
"I had a conversation with Mike three days before he died," she remembers. As chair of the caucus, "one of my projects was to get together same-sex domestic violence posters for lesbians. Mike said to me, "I'd really like to see those posters for men.' And he began to talk a little bit about what domestic violence is like for men."
"I misread the whole conversation. I never thought we were talking on anything but a work level," she says quietly. "I think I was wrong."
* Names have been changed to protect source's anonymity.
Better Protection?
The Pennsylvania bill that allows sufferers of domestic violence to file for a protection order against their abusers may soon be updated to include further safeguards.
The bill, currently referred to as the Protection from Abuse Act Amendments, proposes that PFA orders could last up to three years, rather than the current maximum length of 18 months. It also calls for proper jurisdiction of sheriffs to enforce PFA orders; for an expanded definition of domestic violence to include acts committed by an ex or a nonsexual dating partner; and if an abuser uses a firearm in the course of an assault, for all guns, not just the one involved, to be confiscated.
Sponsors of the bill include state Reps. Kathy Manderino (D-Philadelphia) and Katie True (R-Lancaster) and state Sen. Jane Earll (R-Erie). Other supporters of the measure, many with backgrounds in women's issues and LGBT rights, are encouraged by the National Rifle Association's statement that it "does not oppose" the amendments. The Pennsylvania Coalition against Domestic Violence, which coordinates community programs against all forms of domestic abuse, says it fully supports the proposed changes.
Activists gathered at a rally in Harrisburg March 15 in support of the bill. Stacy Hawkins of the Domestic Violence Service Center in Wilkes-Barre brought bring a large poster of Mike Pierson to the rally and met with local senators to secure their support. The bill will be reintroduced in the state House and Senate during the 2005-2006 legislative session.
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