We think of clichés as boring and predictable, but they are actually one of the most dangerous things in the world. Your brain can’t engage a cliché, not properly—it skitters right over the phrase or sentence or idea without a second thought. To describe an abusive situation is almost certainly to deploy cliché: “If I can’t have you, no one can.” “Who will believe you?” “It was good, then it was bad, then it was good again.” “If I stayed, I would have died.” Awful and dehumanizing, and yet straight out of central casting. This triteness, this predictability, has a flattening effect, making singularly boring what is in fact a defining and terrible experience.
And so as I waded through account after account of queer domestic abuse, little details stood out. This is the one that stuck with me the most:
A woman named Anne Franklin wrote an essay about her own abuse in Gay Community News in 1984. Her blonde, femme lover—a healer who gave massages and did star charts; who had, before meeting her, almost become a nun—once stoned her on a beach in France. “I know it sounds incredible,” she wrote. “The image is cartoonish.” She swam out into the water to escape the stoning. (The stoning.52 This image has followed me for so long; what both has been and is a punishment for homosexuality, inflicted by the woman she loved. Swimming out into the ocean to get away. Stone. Stone butch. Stonewall. Queer history studded with stones, like jewelry.) “Later,” she wrote, “we both laughed about it.” Laughed about how she, Anne, was stoned on a beach in France. How she ran deeper and deeper into the water, like D-Day in reverse.