Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (Hardcover)
Description
In this groundbreaking book, playwright and social critic Sarah Schulman explores the family, the first place where all people-straight, gay, and bisexual-learn homophobia. For it is within the family that homophobia begins to control people's lives, whether as perpetrators or recipients.Written in the tradition of Susan Brownmiller's revolutionary Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape-which reconceptualized rape and transformed it from a private problem into an internationally recognized cultural crisis that is now punishable in the International Criminal Court-Schulman's book uncovers the hidden crime of "familial homophobia" and moves it into the open for social and political scrutiny. Schulman illustrates how societal homophobia is rooted in the family but reaches into all levels of social interaction, including how gay people treat each other. Ambitious, original, and deeply important, Schulman deftly probes the complex issues involved and prescribes third-party interventions on the part of both individuals and institutions of authority so that we can all live a better life together on truly equal terms.Ties That Bind will fundamentally change our understanding of homophobia and will redefine the political landscape not just for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people but for us all.
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.
Praise for Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences…
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
