Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences [Hardcover]

Sarah Schulman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2009

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.

“Familial homophobia,” as prizewinning writer and professor Sarah Schulman calls it, is a phenomenon that until now has not had a name but that is very much a part of life for the LGBT community. In the same way that Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will transformed our understanding of rape by moving the stigma from the victim to the perpetrator, Schulman’s Ties That Bind calls on us to recognize familial homophobia. She invites us to understand it not as a personal problem but a widespread cultural crisis. She challenges us to take up our responsibilities to intervene without violating families, community, and the state. With devastating examples, Schulman clarifies how abusive treatment of homosexuals at home enables abusive treatment of homosexuals in other relationships as well as in society at large.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A message that needs to be heard in all its complexity. People should read this book.
—Lambda Book Report

Ties That Bind is one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in years...this is a rewarding, wide-ranging, and challenging work from an original mind and a talented pen, one that will make you think and help you live.
—Doug Ireland, Gay City News

Schulman boldly declares that visibility is a failed strategy for cultural change.
—Utne

[Schulman is] a writer who has played a pivotal role in the cultural and political spheres of the gay community.
—Curve

To call her book [Ties That Bind] pioneering would be redundant. . . . With its personal appeals, its call to arms — or rather, ethics — and its advice for therapists, family members, and gay people, I continue to be struck by the book’s usefulness above all else. . . .[I]t gives me hope that one day — just as Schulman stipulates — homophobia could actually be a punishable crime, we could be liberated from the systematic shame and humiliation that currently defines our culture, and in that liberation necessarily granted the rights that
we’ve lived without all this time.
—Velvet Park

Schulman’s lucid dissection of the role that families play as incubators of homophobia could hardly be better. This [is] a truly indispensable book. It should blow away the hot air generated by the public debate about ‘family values.’
— Andrew Ross, chair of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at York University

Sarah Schulman Ties That Bind tackles the familial and cultural homophobia that still pervade our society. She starkly lays out the fundamental immorality of such shunning behavior and its destructive consequences for everyone involved. This is an important and original book.
— Martin Duberman, award-winning historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist

Sarah Schulman is brilliant, vulnerable, and relentless. Ties That Bindshould be required reading for every family—gay and straight.
— Ellen Bass, poet and author of The Courage to Heal

A cri de coeur woven into a Utopian vision.
— Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

Sarah has taught me a great deal over the years of our being fellow activists and this book teaches me even more.
— Larry Kramer

About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of nine novels, four nonfiction books, and numerous plays. A recipient of a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Schulman is a professor of English at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, and a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (October 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595584803
• ISBN-13: 978-1595584809
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #880,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Schulman is the author of seventeen books, including nine novels. Forthcoming is a new nonfiction book, ISRAEL/PALESTINE AND THE QUEER INTERNATIONAL from Duke University Press. She recently published THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: WItness to a Lost Imagination by University of California Press, the paperback of TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences and the paperback edition of her novel THE MERE FUTURE from Arsenal Pulp.Previous novels are THE CHILD, SHIMMER, EMPATHY, RAT BOHEMIA, PEOPLE IN TROUBLE, AFTER DELORE, GIRLS VISIONS AND EVERYTHING and THE SOPHIE HOROWITZ STORY. Her nonfiction titles are TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, STAGESTRUCK:Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, and MY AMERICAN HISTORY: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years. A working playwright, her productions include: CARSON McCULLERS (published by Playscripts Ink), MANIC FLIGHT REACTION and the theatrical adaptation of Isaac Singer's ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY. As a screenwriter, her films include THE OWLS (co-written with director Cheryl Dunye)- Berlin Film Festival 2010, MOMMY IS COMING (co-written with director Cheryl Dunye)- Berlin Film Festival selection 2011, and their upcoming web series SIMI, produced by Effie Brown She is co-producer with Jim Hubbard of his feature documentary UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP. As a journalist, her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Interview. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwrighting, a Fullbright in Judaic Studies, two American Library Association Book Awards, and is the 2009 recipient of the Kessler Prize for sustained contribution to LGBT studies. Sarah is Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, College of State Island, a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. She was the US coordinator of the first LGBT Delegation to Palestine. She lives in New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterful and moving book-length essay November 5, 2009

By C. Bard Cole

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

To me, Sarah Schulman is up there with James Baldwin and Gore Vidal as a practitioner of the essay form, and Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences is a tight and focused master work. Her approach to talking about the painful family dynamics in her own life is unlike anyone else's, so unlike the calculated confessional approach of memoir and transgressive fiction that I hardly know how to describe it. It's cool, intellectual, self-controlled -- but perhaps like Perseus looking at the Gorgon only as a reflection in his shield. She looks at the worst emotions most gay and lesbian people have ever felt and never equivocates in naming them and calling them out. It's a brave and intense book, and I'm already thinking of the young gay people I know who ought to read this as soon as they can.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Bold, confident, and controversial... November 30, 2012

By L. Alessio

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Ms. Schulman's approach is left of mainstream and different from much of the literature and advice given to those dealing with familial homophobia. Her approach is that all too frequently, it is the LGBT individual who has to do the work of healing family bigotry, and this is not only unjust, but of questionable value. Her approach comes at the problem from the belief that it is the family that needs the intervention. A survivor (barely!) of such familial failure, I found the author's approach eye-opening, affirming and unlike much of what I had read before, experienced in my work counseling gay men, or discovered in my own journey to a healthy life.

Ms. Schulman suggests, quite strongly, (and validly) an alternative to that standard advice given when one's family of origin is dysfunctional: develop a "chosen" family of friends and loved ones. Standard, but again, Ms. Schulman rightly believes that every individual has entitlement to a loving supportive family, and a person who does not, should be supported by others who can arrange an intervention to set right the blood family. Oh, if that could only happen every time; how much pain and loss would we avoid.

From a practical standpoint, I wish the author had explored not just the need for intervention, but both alternatives to intervention and methodology of intervention from the standpoint of the individual experiencing familial abuse. How does a victim, already disempowered by the loss of family support, and who, very likely, has little social support find the resources and stratagem to implement an intervention with a dysfunctional family? The author is entirely right that it is the family that needs the therapy or intervention, but realistically, I wish Ms. Schulman had gone a few steps further. For example, how might a teen or even an adult, whose familial structure has been for a long time (or a lifetime) heterocentrist, begin? In truth, interventions are sometimes neither possible, nor successful.

Further in the book, the author reveals some of the prejudices with which she has dealt in her professions, which some may feel takes the book's titled direction a bit astray.

I found the book otherwise excellent.

That said, the author has the gift of presenting her arguments clearly and interestingly, passionately, but not pompously. Thank you for this valuable voice against this all-too-common problem.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Predictable to a Younger Generation April 22, 2012

By Corinne E. Blackmer

Format:Hardcover

I assigned this book and one of Schulman's novels (The Child) for a university level general education required course that dealt with the subject of LGBT literature. None of the students in the class selected into the course because of their sexual identities, so it was a fair sample of the general population. In the first place, like most (but not all) young people I've seen, they were not homophobic. Often, they were very pro-gay. I will never assign this book again, however. Unlike Foucault, with whose ideas about the history of sexuality they really grapple and find illuminating, this book was too self-evident and too transparent for their tastes. They also disagreed with several premises and conclusions. They thought the analogy with Hitler was offensive and inappropriate. They still believed that most people shunned gays out of ignorance, perhaps mixed with self-interest. They were shocked to discover that the therapists Schulman knew did not regularly do "third party interventions." Of the students in the course who had been in therapy, all the therapists had done third party intervention when it was appropriate or requested. They thought the therapists the author had seen were criminally incompetent, and they suggested she try again. This is not the best book for a sophisticated audience of young and intelligent people, who found it self-evident or inaccurate. They also thought that the discussion of the author's troubles with getting her plays produced was a distraction, particularly since they showed up in the novel as well.