The First Man In A Co-Ed Sexual Abuse Group
By Steve Fellner
“You’re a man,” the woman said to me. “We never expected one to attend. You’re our first.”
I always like being a first. “Thank you,” I said.
“It wasn’t a compliment,” the woman said. “Just stating a fact.”
“My name is Steve,” I said. I reached out to shake her hand. I didn’t know if that was the right thing to do. There was a period in my life when I feared the touch of any human being: the dread of skin against skin, a kind pat on the shoulder, a hug, even accidentally kicking someone’s leg underneath a table. I didn’t want to scare her. I didn’t want to ask her to do something that I once couldn’t do myself.
She gripped my hand in hers. It was a strong, confident shake. I liked her already.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “My name is Olive. We can always use a new member. Even if it is a man.”
“I’m gay,” I blurted out. I didn’t know what else to say. I wanted her to like me.
“You’re still a man,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said. “I guess I am.”
Within days, Olive and I became best friends. That’s how things work with me. I waste no time in courting someone who could be a part of my surrogate family. Life is too short. Plus if you don’t move fast enough, there’s the chance of another gay man intruding on your territory.
She told me that she didn’t feel she had to mark her territory — an idea she found “sweet and repulsive.” But she did possess some fears. She explained she had a pattern of befriending gay men who were single. Once they “grew up” and found a boyfriend, she was left alone. I said that was my experience with straight women. They were only friends with gay men to pass the time. What they truly wanted was a straight man to help them bring unneeded kids in the world.
“I’ll take a risk with you,” she said. “You’re cute and desperate.”
“I’ll take a risk with you,” I said. “You’re charming and more desperate.”
“We were made for each other,” she said.
I’ve always had very few male friends in my life — straight or gay. I wish I could pass it off and say my lack of connection with heterosexual men comes from their homophobia. But that would not be true.
I find that straight men are pretty accepting of gay people, at least in the circles I travel. This is their attitude: I don’t really care if you’re gay as long as you don’t hit on me. And if their girlfriend likes you, they go along with it with even more gusto; sometimes they are even flirty. They have a sense of pride: It shows the world how sensitive they are.
I’ve always found young heterosexual women to be much more homophobic. They don’t know what to do with you; you’re not their daddy and if you don’t encourage sentimentality, you’re not their best friend. There is no place for you in their life.
Conversely, gay men can be horribly sexist. They tell women they are beautiful for a number of reasons, not always because they are. To tell a woman she is beautiful means you are looking; it means you have the power of the (heterosexual) male gaze. It makes you feel masculine in a way you might not normally.
Also, having been bullied when I was young, I lost touch with my own body. Sometimes, I still feel like my mind and body are unconnected. The body is always something I’m willing to sacrifice. Sometimes the flesh is too heavy. Through a friendship with a beautiful woman, I can mistake myself as good-looking. I can say to myself: Of course, I’m attractive. There’s no way she’d spend time with someone unattractive. Would she?
After our group meetings, Olive and I made fun of the incest survivors. We were assholes. We were proud that we refused to sentimentalize our abuse. We could tolerate the ones who were raped — especially if it was done by a stranger. “But those incest victims,” Olive said. “They are really whiny. And some of them are ugly as hell. No one would touch them except a bored family member.”
“Some of them do look really messed up. You can tell the stress has wreaked havoc on their skin,” I said.
“Rape ruins your complexion,” she said. “That’s something people really need to start talking about.”
Of course, we made sure no one else heard us talking about them — the “freaks,” we said. We always wondered if they were jealous of us. How could they not be? We were stylish. We took out as much student loan money as we could to buy new clothes and eat at expensive restaurants. Some of the people in the group said they were too depressed to take care of themselves. One said that she stopped cleaning her dishes. She let her dog lick the bowl. Olive and I looked at one another. We could barely control ourselves from laughing. We couldn’t remember. Was she the one who made the cupcakes for the meeting?
Before I came out as gay, my romantic experiences with women always predictably flopped. My prom date was my best friend Alicia who wore a tuxedo jacket/miniskirt combo to the dance and two weeks later came out as a lesbian. My freshman year of college I tried to date a woman and when things turned sexual, we became unnaturally silent and then one of us started crying about something that didn’t matter. The other finally said, “I know what will make you feel better! An ice cream drink.” Which got us out of the bedroom and into a public place where we could just talk and, sure enough, we soon felt better.
For the longest time, my sexual experiences with men weren’t much different, except that I usually became aroused, and wanted to make it through to the end, as long as the end was near. I have no regrets about anything I did. Often during sex I saw myself as an eccentric anthropologist, accumulating data for later projects, observing everything, including myself, with a sweet, dumb, persistent detachment.
“Have you ever kissed a woman?” Olive once asked me over the phone.
This is what I said: “In junior high, I went to a dance with a girl. I was nervous. Not about her. But her brothers. They were Greek and protective and mean. At the dance, I tried to kiss her and she pushed me away. She laughed, ‘I know you’re gay. That’s why my brothers let me go with you.’ Then she stepped forward and said, ‘Come dance with me.’ And I did.”
Olive said, “If I was sitting right next to you now, I’d lean over and kiss you. You’re so sweet. You’re like a little pet.”
As an undergraduate, I never liked going home for the summer. I would see the person who did stuff to me when I was young. Olive never knew how scared I was. I knew what she would say. She would say: no, don’t go back there. Stay with my grandparents and me.
I was relieved and oddly sad she said that. It was the only times in my life that I wanted to marry a woman. I wanted to have that security. Sometimes, to ask for certain things you need to have a contract and a ring.
Now, more than twenty years since Olive and I have been friends, a lot has changed. Gay people can get married in some states. By the time this essay is published, federal law may make it legal in all of them. When marriage became a possibility in New York, I got hitched. My husband is a cute, intelligent man named Phil.
We didn’t waste any time putting rings on each other’s finger. We bought them at Walmart ($15 apiece!) and then raced down to city hall. The rings didn’t fit well. Two days after the marriage, the ring flew off my finger and got stuck in a Wegman’s cashier conveyor belt.
I don’t know if Olive ever got married. If so, I hope they end up getting a divorce. I’m not a mean person. I do want it to be an amiable separation.
I always wondered, when Olive and I were seen in public, did people assume we were dating? On our way to marriage? More than a few times, she said, “People might think you’re fucking me. Isn’t that weird?”
Was she shocked and disappointed that someone would assume she was with me?
She was the kind of person who looked different from every angle. From some, she looked voluptuous and sexy; others, frumpy; and in a few, anorexic. I think she was conscious of that fact. She was always moving. Trying to find her best side. Once I said to her: “You’re so jittery. As if you’re always trying to get away from someone staring at you.”
“There’s probably some truth to that,” she said. “Remember we did meet in a sexual abuse support group.”
Once at the support group, a woman told everyone about her father who snuck into her room and touched her during the middle of the night with a kitchen utensil. Olive was biting her lip to keep from laughing.
The woman was talking about how, for a number of reasons, she hadn’t told anyone about the abuse. There were simply too many other tragedies for her to deal with over the years. One of her brothers lost a leg in a freak boating accident. Her mother had died. Her grandmother was sick. A sister tried to kill herself. I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s suffered more heartbreak. You would have thought she asked for it. God’s punishment.
The woman went home for the summers. Whoever was left of her family would pick her up at the airport. Her father would always go to hug her. She never knew how long the embrace should last.
“Until it feels unnatural,” Olive said.
“My father was the first and last man to ever touch me. I don’t know what natural is,” she said
“Here,” Olive said. She was pointing at me. “Try him out. He’s gay. He’s practically neutered.” Olive laughed. I didn’t get the joke. No one else seemed to either.
The woman approached me and said, “May I have a hug?”
I stood. I put my arms around her.
She slapped me across the face. It hurt.
Olive asked her why she slapped me. “I don’t know,” she said. “The feeling came over me and I just went with it.”
Now I am an associate professor at a state university in an exceptionally dull rural area. But I do actually like my job. I was hired to teach creative non-fiction, more specifically, memoir. There is one word that I ban on the first day of class: courageous.
I know that if I don’t do that they will use the word endlessly. We’ll discuss an essay about bulimia. They’ll say: Courageous. We’ll discuss an essay about divorce. They’ll say: Courageous. We’ll discuss an essay about a bad boyfriend. They’ll say: Courageous.
I try to remember if Olive ever used the word courageous when someone talked about their sexual abuse. I think she did what I do now with my creative non-fiction students when I’m tired.
After they finish, I smile and then look away and say, “Next.”
I always anticipate people leaving me. When I was friends with Olive, I found myself taking a number of women’s studies classes. I liked to pretend to myself that I was interested in the lives of the marginalized, such as people of color, women, and gays and lesbians.
But that wasn’t the truth.
This was the truth: I was looking for someone who would turn out to be an eventual replacement for Olive. The women who took the classes were always more complicated. They knew that there was something else out there. They were suspicious.
I always made sure that I came out as gay in those classes.
I also figured that if I came out, my liberal professors would remember me, look at me fondly, and excuse my spotty attendance, incomplete papers.
It worked. In one of my classes, I completed less than two-thirds of the weekly written assignments and I still received a solid A and a personal note telling me that I made phenomenal contributions to her class. During the first week, I said, “I’m gay. And men — gay and straight — need to fight for the equality of women and men in the world.”
That was all I said for the entire semester. I never did any of the readings. My rationale at the time: feminism is common sense. Why study something I already know in my heart?
You fucking bitch. Those were the first words that came out of my mouth when Olive told me she met a man she wanted to date: You fucking bitch.
She didn’t tell me about their first date; she didn’t think it was important. But now she’d discovered she might like him. This was a brief rundown of his most significant characteristics: He was a chemical engineer and talked about the elements on the periodic table as if they were close personal friends. He was a man who asked you questions. Always a rarity. He was a bit agoraphobic. He was 45 and had no wrinkles. She said it was almost eerie. They made jokes that some big business was going to kidnap him and steal his skin to create an anti-wrinkle formula, making a billion dollars off the product. She loved to watch him eat. He did it with dignity. (I scarfed down my food.) His name was Tim. “He’s obsessed with movies, just like you,” she said.
She brought me along on their third date. She demanded that I call him on the phone. I thought it would look odd. She didn’t care. She wanted me to hear the sound of his voice. “The quality of someone’s voice reveals the texture of their soul,” she said.
He sounded like a good guy, someone who could easily win her heart and take her away from me. I didn’t know what to say to him. I told him my obsession with movie reviews. Every Friday morning, I would wake up and immediately race down to the nearest convenience store and purchase all the local and national newspapers, clip out the reviews and read them over and over again, anticipation building at what I would be seeing over the next week. I had done that for as long as I could remember.
“I’m not that into movies,” Tim said.
“Olive said you were really into them.”
“It was a little white lie,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was lying. Maybe he was trying to build a phony secret with me, so I would approve of him.
“So I win?”
…There was a long silence…
“Win what?” he said. “I didn’t know we were competing.”
Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear had just been released, and I asked if he approved.
I described the movie. He admitted that he loved thrillers, especially the violent and gritty ones. I had read that one of the subplots involved a weird, perverse relationship between a predatory male and an underage girl.
“How will that make Olive feel?” Tim asked.
“She won’t care,” I said. “Just make it clear to her that it was your choice. What matters to her more than anything is pleasing the other person.”
When Tim came to pick us up to see Cape Fear, he said to me, “I didn’t think you’d end up coming with.”
“Today is the night I spend with Olive,” I said. “Gay men aren’t always sashaying around making empty promises.” Men fall harder for women who are in demand. I was being a jerk for Olive. Later I’d tell her she owed me. My rudeness was an act of generosity.
“Friday night is Steve’s night with me. He’s generous in sharing it with you,” Olive said.
Tim said to me, “Olive says how amazing you are. All the time. It makes me jealous. In a good way. Maybe one day she’ll talk about me the way she talks about you.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s cool you met at that group,” he said. “It’s especially cool that you go. Being a man and all. I imagine it must be difficult for a man to be there. Do many go to things like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s the first and only support group I attend. If I become a connoisseur of them, I’ll tell you what one has the best male-female ratio. Maybe if you and Olive don’t work out, it can be a new pick-up joint.”
Things didn’t turn out well at Cape Fear. After the first two violent, extremely bloody scenes, containing the threat of rape, Olive excused herself. I didn’t stop her. I needed there to be something wrong.
“What’s up?” Tim whispered to me in the theatre.
“Let me go check,” I said.
I left him and found her in the lobby, her head in her hands.
“Sorry,” I said, putting my arm around her. “I didn’t think that movie was the right choice.”
“Then why did you take me?”
“Tim took you. I warned him about the movie. Told him you’d have a difficult time with it.”
And then I started to make up lies. I told her Tim thought she needed to toughen up and transcend what happened, and he was just the man to do it. I told her that he thought watching the images could help her recover. I told her that he wanted her to have sympathy for her abuser.
“What a creep,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Away,” she said. “Just you and me.”
“O.K.,” I said, “if that’s how you want it.”
Within a week, Olive found out everything.
Tim begged her to meet him for coffee. She liked him, so she went. How could she not? He was a good man. He could love her in the right way.
Later she confronted me. I confessed my plot.
“But why?” she asked me before our weekly group meeting.
“I needed something.”
She looked at me confused: “You needed me?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
She said she would forgive me if I agreed to find a new sexual abuse support group and never speak to her again.
I said, “How about we remain friends and you just never forgive me?”
“No,” she said.
I did what she asked of me, against my own desire. From time to time, I thought about showing up at the group, seeing if enough time had elapsed, if we could put the past behind us and resume our relationship. Once I even made it as far as the building, but couldn’t bring myself to enter, and instead I circled around the premises, careful not to be seen by any of the people coming in and out. I couldn’t bring myself to go in. Only once I saw her leave. I must admit: I felt the urge to tackle her. Not to hurt her. But just to stop her dead in her tracks and say, “Please listen. I have something to say.” Sometimes you have to be a little forceful with people to get heard.
I feared she would say it was unethical, almost like a violation.
She said no, and I had to listen. Her no meant no. There was no other way to read it. At least that’s what I needed to convince myself of.
Here is a confession: Like most men, I couldn’t accept her no for the longest time. There was a part of me that always wanted to read her no as a timid, shy come on, a closeted yes, a yes waiting to become something else, a potential thank you for not accepting no as no.
I cannot tell you the number of times I wanted to enter that building.
In a way, I felt like I had a right. In some ways, I still do.
By accepting Olive’s forgiveness, by not coming to group, by ending the friendship, by struggling with my own desires, I realized a simple truth: I was, indeed, a man.
This piece originally appeared on The Good Men Project. Follow them on Facebook for more.
Steve Fellner is the editor of two poetry collections, The Weary World Rejoices and Blind Date with Cavafy, and a memoir entitled All Screwed Up. Along with Phil E. Young, he has co-edited an anthology of poetry focusing on social justice entitled, Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest, and Hope.
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