1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 195

MOLESTATION 101 Child Abuse, Homophobia, and The Boys of St. Vincent Kevin Ohi

It is nearly impossible today to open a magazine or newspaper without reading an account of a shocking child abuse scandal. Such scandals provide “commentators” with endless opportunities for numbing reiterations of their banal outrage and with a culturally sanctioned outlet for their prurient imaginings of ritualized retributive violence.1 Much of this violence is, whether explicitly or not, homophobic, and the discourse around child abuse has given stalwart homophobes (that is, almost everyone) a seemingly unassailable venue for homophobic ecstasy in the guise of inflamed righteousness. That, for example, gay child abusers are statistically negligible, especially compared to the abusers sheltered in healthy heterosexual homes, does not prevent gay pedophiles from attracting the lion’s share of public scrutiny.2 The antihomophobic “solution,” however, is not to insist that homosexuality has nothing to do with child abuse. The link between child molestation and homosexuality may well be, in other words, a homophobic illusion, but the effort to challenge the political ideology underlying this link — an ideology of sexual oppression in general — is better served by a thorough examination of structures uniting homophobia and abuse paranoias than by a simple debunking of this homophobic illusion as counterfactual. I would further resist the collapsing together of child abuse and pedophilia, as well as the distancing of homosexuality from both; while it should go without saying that pedophilia, whether “acted out” or merely fantasized, is not the same thing as child abuse, the fact that pedophilia and pedophilic relationships are legible only under the rubric of abuse attests to the power of the bleakly monochromatic discourse around child abuse, pedophilia, and childhood sexuality. Such a collapsing together of pedophilia and child abuse often lurks in popular attempts to clean up homosexual desire for public consumption, the often abject apologias that chastise gay pedophiles, among others, for frustrating one’s heartfelt gropings toward normality, for giving queers a bad name. But queers GLQ 6:2 pp. 195 –248 Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

196

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 196

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

already have a bad name (precisely, that is, the name queer), and the queer and the child molester — who is treated as synonymous not only with the pedophile but with anyone who dares utter the possibility that children have desires—are demonized in similar ways and, I will argue, for similar reasons. It should then become clear that an antihomophobic project should not try to distance itself from pedophilia and child abuse.3 The energies mobilized by and against the figures of the child, the child molester, and the queer point to structures underwriting both child abuse panics and homophobia: in homophobic ideology, the molester and the queer register as analogous faults in a system of representation whose phantasmic coherence is upheld, in part, by the fetishization of childhood innocence. The molester and the queer, through the ruptures they introduce, perform the violation of coherence necessary to sustain the wholeness of this system and to locate the blame for breaching a fetishized innocence elsewhere than in heterosexuality’s fixated gaze at the purity through which it would discover an image of its own lost ideality. Through readings of the press coverage of a child abuse scandal at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Saint John’s, Newfoundland; the press reviews of The Boys of St. Vincent (a Canadian film based on the events at Mount Cashel; dir. John N. Smith, 1992); and the film itself, I will examine some of the interrelations among homophobic ideologies and those most frequently articulated around child abuse. The Boys of St. Vincent, I will argue, enacts and critiques a homophobic ideology of endangered childhood innocence by interrogating the system of representation that supports it. The film does so by manipulating the erotic allure of a blank innocence whose violation the child molester allows us so gratifyingly to imagine. The material explored in this essay comes from the different national contexts of the United States and Canada.4 While national specificities do shape particular instances of discourse around child abuse and pedophilia, it is perhaps more interesting to note how little difference national context actually makes. What is surprising, in other words, is the uniform tedium of the response to pedophilia and child abuse almost, one is all but brave enough to generalize, worldwide. Canadian responses to the Mount Cashel scandal and U.S. responses to The Boys of St. Vincent are animated by remarkably similar panics and express them in remarkably similar ways. Whatever economic or cultural pressures are active in a given local context, the discourse of molestation proves obligingly available to distract, inflame, or assuage anxieties or to perform a seemingly endless amount of varied cultural work. Why, then, is this discourse so endlessly available, so effortlessly portable, so routinized, so tediously the same even as it has the power, with each reiteration, to appear so scandalously new, so ready to shame those who previously neglected abuse’s truth or failed to notice it lurking in

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 197

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

every corner? The rhetoric of molestation is so powerful that those who do not join in its danse macabre are often accused of participating (either literally or figuratively) in the abuse, and among the ways it ensures the monotonous unanimity of its chorus is to assert implicitly that anyone who has failed to notice (and vocally to deplore) the omnipresent abuse has failed to notice the transcendent innocence of children. Such lapses of attention are not forgivable, because they often become simply synonymous with abuse. The fetishization of innocence can then view itself as the morally upright guardian of purity and redouble its pleasure by locating elsewhere the passions this guardianship inflames. The encrypted arousal of passionate guardianship is not the only purpose served by the construction of a transcendently innocent childhood, although it may be the most immediately satisfying. The child’s fetishized innocence also provides meaning with a stable mooring: an innocence yearned for and but lately lost counteracts adult instabilities of meaning that come to be represented by the child molester and the queer. Thus Jacqueline Rose has argued that the construct of the innocent child allows adults to work out their anxieties about language and sexuality.5 To Rose, the expectations brought to children’s literature — particularly the demand for coherent, transparently referential narratives that continually underline their “truthfulness”— go hand in hand with certain assumptions about what a child is. Readers’ expectations point to (and are rooted in) a conception of the child as an uncontaminated (and hence contentless) origin needed to stabilize the discomfiting vicissitudes of language and the unnerving ambiguities of sexuality: the phantasmic construct of the child gives unity to language, subjectivity, and history.6 The allure of these moorings is perhaps only increased by their tendency to give way, and the innocent child is perhaps never so reassuring as when it allows us to imagine its violation. Such rapture is not without its dangers, however, and it is often difficult to distinguish the lullabies we sing to reassure ourselves from the (delicious) bone-chilling horror stories we tell to terrify ourselves and those we love. Children’s books are written not for children but for adults, and there is a way in which, as Henry James’s fiction might suggest, every children’s story is already a ghost story, conjuring up the figure of a child that is haunted and haunting, knowing and innocent, molested, and possessed. The transgressive “original” text of Peter Pan is framed as a story told to abduct a child, for example, and Rose offers a fascinating reading of the double service of seduction and protection that children’s stories provide. One question her argument does not explicitly address is why Peter Pan also details a fantasy of escape to a never-never land of unbridled homoeroticism. Why are boys who won’t grow up queer? The question defies a simple answer, but it involves, among other

197

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

198

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 198

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

factors, a developmental model of sexuality in which male same-sex eroticism appears as a stage to be surpassed.7 However that may be, the queer boy faces a doubled abjection in the service of stable meaning. To stave off the problems created by a childhood innocence that is too explicitly fetishized, responsibility, not only for the perhaps inevitable disruption of meaning congruent with child abuse but also for the very nostalgia for the transparency of the sign represented by the child, is assigned to — contained in and abjected through — the errant desire of the queer, cast as pathologically fixated on the image of the child. And if the queer boy is the boy who won’t grow up and enter into productive adult sexuality, this rupture and nostalgia as a fixated pedophilia appear through the static, ever culpable, and inevitably self-destructive erotics of narcissism. Queer culture, then, is erotically invested in childhood innocence, while straight culture is morally invested in it. This polarization, needless to say, mobilizes traditional binaries around sexuality—surface-depth, falsity-sincerity, narcissismaltruism — and in each case the queer is aligned with the binary’s denigrated term and registers as a representational mistake. Thus many press accounts of the Mount Cashel scandal, as well as many reviews of The Boys of St. Vincent, implicitly align morality with stable representation, and they prop their meaningful moral reaction against child abuse on the child’s innocence while disavowing any erotic interest in that innocence. Innocence is therefore often marshaled by these accounts in defense of cognitive certainties undermined by abuse. It is, moreover, often the only category through which the fact of abuse can be established: sexual knowledge is the retrospective index of its occurrence. Thus one article suggests that teachers should be on the lookout for telltale signs of knowledge: children who have been abused “may exhibit inappropriate sexual behavior or knowledge for their ages.”8 The euphemistic vagueness of knowledge or behavior “inappropriate . . . for their ages” that abused children “may exhibit” suggests a certain diagnostic uncertainty until one realizes that any knowledge or any sexualized behavior gives away the secret of abuse. It seems, therefore, not only that abuse is the only way to traverse the distance between sexual innocence and sexual knowledge but also that the binary frame through which both innocence and abuse are established tends to annul both categories. Because innocence in these accounts is the only index through which the facticity of violation can be certified, they have, paradoxically, to maintain an innocence not touched by the knowledgebringing violation. Neither innocence nor knowledge can exist in a pure state, uncontaminated by the other, and so the two parts of this picture of abuse — the logical progression from innocence to knowledge (through abuse) and the a priori assumption of a pure innocence to be corrupted by a pure knowledge — conflict

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 199

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

with one another. The very grounds used to establish abuse tend to annul both the innocence and the violation. Homophobia offers one way to secure innocence and meaning from the corrosive incoherence of this binary frame. Homophobia is thus often an unspoken point of reference for critiques of the psychoanalytic shift from seduction to unconscious fantasy—briefly and simply, a founding moment in psychoanalysis when Freud shifted the focus from the empirical facticity of seduction to the psychic effects of a fantasized seduction, whatever its (often undecidable) roots in empirical reality, thus displacing, among other things, any simple opposition between “fantasy” and “reality” without entirely severing this link, and giving to psychic life a reality and agency of its own — especially when those critiques rely on reified scenes of abuse within a binary frame of pure innocence and pure violation.9 Dismissing the unconscious, these accounts often make fantasy equivalent to “make-believe”— and hence to an embarrassingly childlike resistance to the empirical—and, because this notion is grounded in blameless innocence, they often see any discussion of childhood desire as a reversal of blame (making Freud’s emphasis on child sexuality and his turn away from seduction equivalent to each other and to the abuse of his patients). One such critique—granted, not a very sophisticated one—is Sylvia Fraser’s “Freud’s Final Seduction,” a Saturday Night article inspired by the revelations at Mount Cashel and elsewhere in Canada that charges Freud with substituting for the abused child the “child pervert” of the Oedipus complex who “actively” seduces his or her parents. Freud, argues Fraser, turned the “innocent child” into a “sexual aggressor,” and her article works to reestablish this innocence as a stable mooring for meaning.10 As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, such arguments render accounts of the child’s desire “disfiguringly ritualized.” The “dispiriting debates on ‘the seduction theory,’” she writes, “have pitted a psychoanalytic-identified view of the totally volitional, unproblematically ‘active’ child against a feminist-identified view of the child as the perfect victim, totally passive and incapable of relevant or effectual desire.” Instead, Sedgwick argues, we might assume the “near-inevitability” of a seduction marking the child’s entrance into any number of sexualities that will be, to a greater or lesser degree, painfully disjunct from the child’s felt desire.11 The more or less disempowered child might, in some cases, have access to a greater or lesser degree of choice about what and whose desire to internalize. Sedgwick’s account presents a much more complicated trajectory than do those built around pure innocence molested by pure volition; such accounts, indeed, make it difficult to imagine how sexuality comes about at all, or, rather, they nostalgically yearn for an untraumatic accession to sexuality through a route other than abuse, an accession that is an impossibility within their own logic.

199

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

200

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 200

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Whatever its incoherence, the positing of childhood innocence has many ideological effects, perhaps most explosively, though not exclusively, when sexuality intersects discussions of parenting and pedagogy. Sedgwick’s argument here brings to mind the dispiriting rhetoric around sex education and queer parents and teachers. The suggestion that a child might have desires (and especially desires outside heterosexuality) is, according to homophobic ideology, itself a seduction, a “conversion” of desireless children to (homo)sexuality, and arguments against queer parenting and teaching often cast the child as a completely passive mimetic medium, ready to take the impression of the contagious desires of its queer “role models” (who are also more obligingly ready to molest their students or children).12 Such accounts provide fascinating examples of the selective use to which our culture has put the work of Freud, and the politics underlying such appropriation is perhaps the central reason that reading the ideology of childhood innocence is important for the critical study of homophobia. Sedgwick’s notion of “queer tutelage” begins to rewrite in antihomophobic terms the usual narrative of seduction; she asserts, for example, that if it is important to study how subjects are victimized in their entrance into sexuality, it is equally important to celebrate those who do negotiate marginalized identifications and to find theoretical tools more nuanced than the bleakly binary frame through which abuse casts the oneway passage from variously traumatic sexual awakenings to livable or, more often in these accounts, unlivable identifications. Sedgwick’s assertion that injury need not be grounded on the irreproachable innocence of a perfectly volitionless victim is important, among other reasons, because it offers a way to begin to disentangle conceptualizations of sexual victimization from homophobia. A “fascination with reified innocence/ignorance” proves so tenacious in part because it sustains a model of transparent representation that allows heterosexuality and the heterosexual family to define themselves against both child abuse and homosexuality.13 This transparency of stable meaning is thus grounded in, and grounds, homophobia, and what Sedgwick calls “queer tutelage” can be foreclosed through the same movement that decries the monstrosity of child abuse. From the perspective of the family fortified under the aegis of compulsory heterosexuality, child abuse and homosexuality register as the same disruption to representation and meaning, and their indistinguishable erring can, as pathologized breaches, be brought into the service of heterosexuality and stable meaning. Thus Fraser writes that until she realized she had been abused, her “life’s major decisions, passions, turning points, illnesses, and eccentricities seemed like loosely linked random events.” Having discovered that she was abused, she writes that these elements could now form a “dynamic, purposeful, internally consistent

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 201

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

whole. The difference could be likened to stargazing without understanding that the earth moves around the sun, then knowing that it does.”14 Abuse, and the pure innocence it violates and establishes, thus allows meaning to be secured, in terms that Fraser’s hyperbole suggests might extend to the boundaries of the universe and the movements of the spheres. Copernicus was a child molested by Freud.

Young Men at the Microphone: The Scandal of Child Abuse at Mount Cashel The 1984 Badgley report, issued by a Canadian government commission on child abuse, found, based on a National Population Survey, that a startlingly high number of Canadians had been abused as children: “About one of two females and one in three males had been the victim of sexual offenses. . . . Children and youths constitute the majority of the victims. About four in five victims were under age 21 when the offenses were first committed against them.” The report also found that one in five women and one in ten men had been the victims of attacks that involved attempted intercourse or forcible sexual assault.15 Such figures are not, as far as I am concerned, evidence of anything—and I doubt that they would be illuminating even if their empirical facticity could be definitively established. What they do illustrate is the tone of crisis and panic that they themselves helped spawn. The Badgley report was only the beginning of a decade of traumatic revelations of child abuse, many of which centered on the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland. In this economically depressed area (where unemployment hovers around 30 percent), the church has often provided the only public social support for the poor and the only available education for many children.16 Not surprisingly, between September 1988 and December 1989, when twenty priests, former priests, and other lay members of the church in Canada were charged with or convicted of sexually abusing boys, periodicals registered a nationwide “crisis of faith” spreading outward from small, isolated communities in Newfoundland.17 Central as an institution there, the church is simultaneously outside traditional family structures; it is thus paradoxically within and outside the traditional value systems to which it supplies some of the most important support.18 This paradigmatically abject position set the stage for, and figured, the shock of the abuse revelations that were traumatic as much because they were familiar as because they were unexpected: the “shocking realization that pedophilia was a fact of life in the church itself.”19 Making “shocking” what is already “a fact of life,” the revelations also disclose an inversion suggesting that the priest, often appointed to have that fateful chat with a child about the “facts of life,” might have in mind facts other than marriage and heterosexual procreation.

201

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

202

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 202

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Perhaps the most famous scandal surrounded the Catholic-run Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland. In 1975 Shane Earle’s mother complained to Saint John’s police that a brother at Mount Cashel had beaten her son with the buckle end of a belt for losing his library card, and police interviews of Earle and twenty-five other boys uncovered widespread physical and sexual abuse at the orphanage.20 Two of the brothers admitted to and implicated other brothers in abuse, but no arrests were made. The two brothers were relocated to boys’ schools outside the province, but, according to news reports, abuse continued at Mount Cashel at least until Earle’s departure in the mid-1980s.21 There was no further legal action until former bureaucrat Steve Neary called a live radio show on 13 February 1989 to suggest that government officials had covered up the 1975 investigation. Following this call, Michael Harris ran a series of interviews with Earle in the Saint John’s Sunday Express, and the resulting public outcry precipitated a nine-month government commission investigation in which Earle and other former Mount Cashel residents detailed their abuse.22 The commission hearings were telecast daily, and, as one commentator remarked, “the scandal became a Canadian equivalent of Watergate or the Clarence Thomas –Anita Hill hearings in terms of the national soul-searching precipitated.”23 For the Canadian press, Mount Cashel resulted in both increased (and often cynical) scrutiny of the Roman Catholic Church and paranoia about child abuse. Such paranoia inspired frequent attempts to delineate a taxonomy of child abusers. These attempts are striking not only in their proximity to the scientific and medical discourses around homosexuality that Foucault explores in his history of sexuality but also in the difficulty they profess to have in holding a vanishing object of inquiry beneath their scientific gaze. For example, “Every Parent’s Nightmare” reports: Most professionals concede that detecting a potential abuser is extremely difficult even for the most vigilant parent. [William] Marshall [director of the Kingston Sexual Behaviour Clinic in Ontario], for one, said that after assessing and treating thousands of pedophiles (adults who prefer children as sexual partners), he has concluded that there is no such thing as a typical offender. According to Marshall, they do not possess common personality traits or recognizable personality profiles. There are some signposts: 97 per cent of pedophiles are male, and most develop their preference for children as teenagers. Their sexual fantasies usually involve children, and some choose jobs and hobbies that will give them access to young people. And many pedophiles are clever, manipulative, and deceptive.24

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 203

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

A parent’s vigilance is sorely taxed, but the difficulty of detection seems less the result of naive guardians who need the word pedophile defined for them than of the structure of abuse. “There are some signposts,” the article reports, and then provides categories legible only in retrospect (if, indeed, such a broad taxonomy can be said to constitute categories): Is it a signpost, for example, that 97 percent of abusers are male? Or that abusers choose jobs that give them access to children? The temporal inversion in the signpost’s betrayed promise to provide a legible sign with which to warn the vigilant in advance reveals a gap in logic in its categorization of offenders: not all men and not all people who work with children are molesters. (One cannot simply round up everyone at the day care — although it does seem to be a popular tactic with the police.) The one positive feature of a child molester is precisely that he cannot be spotted. His resistance to detection and classification unsettles the model of representation through which he would be known: “Many pedophiles are clever, manipulative, and deceptive.” They may have “personality profiles,” but not “recognizable” ones. Vexed questions around visibility and categorization are also enacted in “Every Parent’s Nightmare” in the conflation of pedophilia and molestation. If such articles make any distinction between these two terms, it is usually by opposing the latent to the manifest: pedophilia is the hidden criminal desire that finally (and inevitably) surfaces in abuse. Undecidability in the realm of the visible, however, is a definitionally crucial part of abuse itself. It is not merely a matter of abuse discourse’s explicitly articulated fear that abuse will go unreported or, more radically, unremembered. This fear takes for granted abuse’s occurrence and centers its anxiety on whether representation will prove an adequate medium of expression. But abuse is not separable from its mode of expression, from the remembering or reporting that is supposed to contain it. Casting abuse as a theme that may be adequately or inadequately conveyed can obscure the fact that hesitation between the visible and the invisible, the narratable and the unnarratable, constitutes abuse. The resistance of abuse accounts to representation or narration is a structural feature of abuse, however much the rhetoric of abuse may seek to cast this resistance as bearing witness to the pathos-laden plight of particular children made mute by shame or fear. The blurring of pedophilia into abuse — when they are defined oppositionally in terms of visibility—is therefore a definitional part of abuse as it is formulated by this ideology, and pedophilia cannot be disarticulated from abuse without unsettling its coherence as a category. This definitionally central conceptual blurring has paradoxical effects, leading not just to a fear that abuse will go unreported but to a paranoid suspicion that pedophilic desire will never become visible: actual abuse, then, can salve anxieties about

203

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

204

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 204

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

those threats to one’s cognitive, sexual, and identificatory certainties that are represented by the unseen. The insistence that abuse be reported is thus also an insistence that it be made visible, not so much to relieve the trauma of abuse victims as to relieve the rest of us living in the anxiogenic shadow that pedophilia casts over the visible, to alleviate the anxiety generated by abuse’s hesitation between the latent and the manifest. Child molestation panics are thus structured much like the paranoia of homosexual panic. Put most simply, a heteronormative society cannot fully achieve its dream of eradicated homosexuality, for eradication would only generalize the threat to omnipresence; such a society needs some gay desire to be visible so that its threat may be abjected. It needs homosexuality graphically and visibly to demonstrate its becoming invisible.25 Today’s child molester has taken the position of the homosexual in the heyday of homosexual panic in the 1940s and 1950s, and that it seems almost unimaginable in public discourse to point to the scapegoating function served by the molester indicates the virulent need for such a scapegoat. Such dynamics ensure their self-perpetuation, and the paranoia around molestation thrives on the impossibility of ever rendering pedophilic desire fully visible; it thrives on keeping pedophilia just present enough, a threat everywhere except in one’s own home or one’s own desire. An account of the pedophile’s point of view is so impossible that the minimal empathy necessary even to identify a pedophile becomes a confession of errant desire. To sustain a stable picture of the pedophile, it is thus paradoxically necessary to assert that pedophilia cannot be detected, that a pedophile cannot be pictured at all. The same gesture that renders him locatable and quarantined makes him unlocatable, omnipresent, and dangerously at large — just the way we like him. So it is quite difficult to spot a child molester, and these paradoxes of visibility become rhetorical paradoxes with ideological consequences and motivations. When journalists from 1989 to 1991 attempted to provide a propaedeutics of pedophile spotting, they were faced with a problem of address. Although the most likely child molester is a parent, these articles had to ground their otherwise ambient worries about child abuse by addressing concerned parents. “Every Parent’s Nightmare,” for example, enacts the paradox of address through its baffling inability to comprehend itself: asking “whom can parents trust with their children?” it reports that abuse is so common that “in some perverse and isolated cases, the parents themselves have participated in the cruelest crimes,” and it later quotes an “expert” who says that “50 per cent of all abuse occurs in the home and another 30 per cent at the hands of trusted individuals, including relatives, doctors, and sports coaches. The remainder involve strangers.”26 Parents would seem to perpetuate or to be complicit in most of the “perverse and isolated cases” that make up

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 205

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

80 percent of child abuse. By enacting a discursive space at odds with itself, this article figures the difficulty of maintaining a phantasmic ideal family that can see child abuse as a threat from without. Like the innocent child and the family, the article upholds itself by subverting itself, by enacting the incoherence of which it remains extravagantly ignorant. By stating and then disavowing knowledge that the threat to the family might come from within, such articles sustain and perform innocence. Incoherence is brought into the service of stable meaning as the family, often the spoken or unspoken site of contestation in these taxonomic difficulties, allows these articles to contain child molestation for representation and cognition. In one of the many articles about child abuse that were inspired by Mount Cashel and other cases in Canada, Nora Underwood reports: Men who sexually molest children generally fall into one of two groups. Dr. John Bradford, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Ottawa, said that many men who sexually assault their own children often do so as a way of finding sexual release during periods of emotional or financial stress. A second group of offenders is made up of pedophiles, who suffer from a lifelong sexual attraction to children. Bradford said that new research carried out at the Royal Ottawa Hospital has pointed to the possibility that biological abnormalities may be at the root of pedophilic behavior.27 The unstated hierarchization of child abusers gives one pause: family men, apparently, have reasons to seek “sexual release,” whereas pedophiles “suffer” from a lifelong attraction to children, a malady that might be explained by “biological abnormalities” (which simultaneously contain the pedophile in familial structures of heredity). This hierarchization is even more apparent when Underwood turns to the question of “treating” these two types of abusers: According to Bradford, men who have had sexual relations with their own children are relatively easy to treat and infrequent[ly] re-offend. During therapy, offenders learn how to alter their thinking patterns and to develop greater self-control. Experts say that marital difficulties, as well as drug or alcohol problems, often play a part in driving such offenders to seek sexual gratification with children. But Bradford added that treating pedophiles is more complicated. As well, pedophiles are more likely to repeat their offense — even after being treated. As a result, doctors may administer hormonal agents or drugs from a family of chemicals known as anti-androgens, which decrease

205

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

206

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 206

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

production of the male hormone, testosterone. Those drugs, which Bradford likens to a “chemical castration,” help to reduce the pedophile’s sex drive and suppress deviant sexual fantasies. Added Bradford: “It gives them control.” (56) The pedophile’s desires are made susceptible to representation through a double movement framed by the assertion of the transparency of the family man’s easily treatable abuses (his “needs,” which “drive” him to abuse, can be listed and indeed proliferate), which contrast with the pedophile’s unfathomable, less easily treated desires. First, the two figures are pathologized differently: at stake are the family man’s actions, which he can learn to control, and the pedophile’s “deviant sexual fantasies,” which, tantamount to actions, must be suppressed. Second, the bifurcation of actions and desires into representable and unrepresentable, understandable and unfathomable, is healed through a sexualized synecdoche. The focus on hormonal therapy, metaphorically rendered as “castration,” limits the desires of the pedophile to his constitutive (and erring) “part” and brings them into scientific view.28 Reified as errant genitals, these desires can reassuringly be both represented and cut off at their source. Thus Bradford’s final comment (“It gives them control”) takes on the added significance of making the pedophile analogous to the abusive father: the latter can (easily) learn “self-control,” while the former can, through castration, (easily) be given it. Traditionally, the homosexual has similarly frustrated both the taxonomic gaze bent on his detection and the therapeutic interventions bent on his cure, and it is not accidental that, in addition to bearing witness to pedophile detection running amok, the reactions to Mount Cashel were more or less overtly homophobic. Press coverage of a traumatized Newfoundland often reported a marked increase in homophobia, sometimes noting that the conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia was a category mistake. Glen Allen, for example, reports that “Jennifer Mercer, a Saint John’s social worker who acts as coordinator of a committee on violence against women, said that some Newfoundlanders are confusing homosexuality with pedophilia, a condition that is marked by a compulsive sexual attraction to children who may be of the same sex as the pedophile. Said Mercer: ‘The message is getting out that homosexuals are dangerous.’ ”29 Nevertheless, the press often cited this reaction without marking it as a mistake, implicitly condoning homophobia as a “natural” reaction to the abuse of boys.30 Similarly, several articles on Newfoundland’s crisis of faith cite a new kind of “grim” joke as one way for the common people to deal with the trauma.31 Often markedly homophobic, these jokes — which I will not repeat here — are equally markedly devoid of humor, not

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 207

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

only to the queer reader but to the writer who repeats them, enabling these reports on the humor of Newfoundland barflies to serve a double purpose: they assert the perfect naturalness of a homophobic reaction while distancing the comparatively urbane writer from it. In other words, they always mark these jokes as the (understandable) unfunniness of the hick, simultaneously asserting the writer’s irreproachable and irremediable distance from the ignorant (even innocent) creep in a bar, while allowing the writer to bear witness to a (natural, or primary) homophobia that he or she can then suavely disavow. Similarly, reports on the church and abuse routinely note that 30 percent of the North American clergy is homosexual.32 Although these articles consistently deny the connection between homosexuality and child abuse, the recurrence of this (by my estimate, surprisingly low) figure as a startling and often unassimilated non sequitur surreptitiously reasserts the connection. An unacknowledged homophobia often allows the articles to maintain a certain moral clarity; in the logic of these articles, a moral lens that perceived the possibility that homophobia, too, was “wrong” would compromise an unequivocal denunciation of child abuse, largely because homophobia stabilizes the frame of meaning through which these moral claims are adjudicated. Press coverage of testimony before the Hughes commission dramatized such suppression of moral equivocation: In a makeshift hearing room in a former residence for the mentally handicapped, John Williams told a graphic story. [The first to testify in the Mount Cashel hearings, he told the panel] that he was physically abused by Brother Edward English . . . after Williams had objected to the man’s sexual advances on another boy. Williams testified that he had called English a “queer” after the brother put his hands inside the boy’s pajamas. English, Williams added, kicked and slapped him, leaving bruises on his arms, legs and hips. Later, Williams said, English hit him on the back, leaving marks that lasted two weeks. Declared Williams: “It’s just something that was sickening and stuck in my head.”33 It is not immediately clear to me exactly what is “sickening” in this “graphic story,” and the “moral” problem is not simple. While the brother’s violence certainly cannot be condoned, his urge to hurt a little kid who called him a queer is far from incomprehensible. The article cannot sustain any moral ambiguity, however, and it cannot conceive of a moral plane where both homophobia and child abuse would be reprehensible. It cannot simultaneously endorse the child’s objection to abuse and

207

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

208

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 208

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

question its homophobic framing; thus the homophobia becomes absolutely justified in proportion to the abuse’s absolute reprehensibility. Any blurring of the moral frame, moreover, tends to appear as a repetition of abuse, to constitute the very breach of morals the article laments. The questioning of homophobia is thus aligned with child abuse itself in part because the model of morality that the article shares with much of the culture at large—and the possibility of this model’s straightforward adjudication — is founded on a model of representation as transparent mimetic mirroring. Homosexuality and child abuse put pressure on this model of representation, and both register as disruptions to a moral system built on the transparency and significatory certainty of one’s moral response. The press accounts’ deployment of homophobia through the constitutive “ignorances” of ideology thus seems tied to structures of representation and language and to the fractures that appear when they rub up against homosexuality and child abuse.34 Fraser is again illustrative as her article nears the apogee of its moral indignation: “If we, as a society, have the courage to hold firmly to the truths we now know, the gentlemen’s agreement whereby children are treated as sexual pacifiers, as disposable as condoms, will come to an end. Perverts will always be with us, but they will be pushed to the fringes of our society, where we’ve always pretended they were.”35 This passage is disconcerting because the slippage of its language enacts, in at least two ways, the very disruption of representation with which it implicitly charges abuse. First, the metaphors are so visceral that you can taste them, because they are spectacularly mixed. In particular, the “sexual pacifiers” that are “as disposable as condoms” conjure up the child’s body in a sodomitical mixing of orifices, violating that body through the very firmness of the moralist’s grasp and, in spite of the negation, making this grasp merge with an ecstatically oral grip on the child’s body. While a pacifier is normally inserted into the mouth, the sexual pacifier here figures a receptacle into which the male genitals can be inserted (whether it codes vagina, anus, or mouth). Not only reversing insertion and reception and confusing the orifices of mouth and anus or vagina, the figure of the sexual pacifier, by infantilizing the abusers, also transgresses the division between adult and child. Fraser’s prose thus enacts the infraction she discusses, an infraction not just of child abuse but of sexual definition: “perverts” need to be put back at the “fringes” of society, where they belong. Second, the threateningly ambient category of the “pervert” seems to code male homosexuality, not only in its traditional connotations but in its definitional slippage, which reasserts itself in Fraser’s specification of the representational delusion in “our” self-satisfied locating of perverts: they are not at the “fringes” of society; “we” have merely “pretended” that they were.36 Thus homosexuality

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 209

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

appears not only in the sodomitical disruption of Fraser’s language but also in the incoherence of the (unavowed) mobilization of its phobic charge. To conclude this section, then, I quote from an article about Mount Cashel and many other abuse cases involving the Roman Catholic Church. Reporting on a church-sponsored counseling session on child abuse, the article implicitly figures abuse in terms of gay male sex acts and locates the disturbance it causes explicitly in the realm of language. More to the point than it at first seems, the disturbance has to do not with acts performed but with the words used to describe them: There was an audible gasp as the young man at the microphone listed the ways in which children could be sexually abused. Addressing a panel of three men and two women seated on the raised wooden stage before him, Kent Anstey, a Saint John’s, Nfld.– based spokesman for Victims of Violence, an organization that publicizes the plight of victims of a range of violent acts, used words such as “anal penetration” and “sodomy.” They were terms that few of the 250 people attending a church inquiry in the dim auditorium of Saint John’s Holy Heart of Mary Catholic High School had ever wanted to hear. The list of indecent acts, however, was a blunt reminder of the shocking reality that the audience and the panel alike were trying to deal with.37 The passage’s work of deeroticization, which implicitly pathologizes the “few” who may have “wanted to hear” the words sodomy and anal penetration— words that, in spite of the phobic frame that erases any possibility of varying contexts for these sex acts, that makes such words simply synonymous with the “violent acts” of abuse, may have opened up thrilling possibilities for more than a few members of that audience, members who, so unimaginably to their journalist observer, may, even consciously, have welcomed having such words poured in the porches of their ears — stages the very work of aural seduction it simultaneously forecloses, conjuring up this seduction through the emphasis of its negation. To my mind, “audible gasps” are among the precious few points of contact between such moralistic meetings — evoking, for instance, the scandalized school board’s gasp as prurient literature is pruriently pulled from helplessly exposed library shelves — and the often campy signifiers of sexual arousal’s tendentious “realism” in porn films. The young man at the microphone and his blunt reminders of shocking realities inspire an audible gasp that locates the audience’s reaction to purely linguistic erring in an involuntary (and quietly eroticized) group somatic response.

209

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

210

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 210

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

When Bad Things Happen to Boys Town: Reviews of The Boys of St. Vincent Produced in 1992 for Canadian television, director John N. Smith’s film The Boys of St. Vincent is divided into two parts, each about an hour and a half long. The first focuses on the boys at the St. Vincent orphanage in the mid-1970s, particularly two of them, Kevin Reevey (Johnny Morina) and Steven Lunny (Brian Dodd). Adumbrating sexual and physical abuse at the orphanage, especially that perpetrated by Brother Lavin (Henry Czerny), this part shows the beginnings of a police investigation sparked by the complaints of Brian Lunny (Steven’s brother, played by Ashley Billard) and a concerned janitor. The investigation is shut down by the Department of Justice when the offending brothers are removed for medical treatment, but the film suggests that the abuse continues. The second part takes place fifteen years later when the investigation is reopened. Lavin has married and has two children, and the boys he abused are now in their early twenties. Punctuated by scenes from a live radio show and by television coverage, this half of the film shows the effects on Kevin, Steven, and Brian of testifying in a trial and details the reactions of Lavin and his wife, Chantal (Lise Roy). Based on the fear that it would prejudice ongoing sexual abuse trials, a court-ordered ban blocked out the original broadcast of the film for roughly half of Canada. Subsequently shown on television networks worldwide, the film was seen in the United States only in a few nonprofit movie houses and at several film festivals. Although it made the top-ten lists of Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and other publications,38 no major U.S. network (including the Public Broadcasting Service) was willing to air it; finally it was shown on A&E cable (with the few moments of [relatively] explicit abuse edited out). Yet The Boys of St. Vincent did receive considerable attention in the U.S. press. Before presenting my reading of the film, I dwell on some of these reviews, not merely because I think the film was universally misread but because the ways it was misread, and the peculiar discursive position in which it placed its journalist readers, raise questions about the relations among child abuse, representation, and homophobia that provide the framework for my exploration of the film. The politics that emerge from the reviewers’ praise and description of the film are inscribed in representational questions about its referentiality and realism and in the difficulty of maintaining distance from its cinematic spectacle. Reviews of The Boys of St. Vincent almost uniformly praised both its “realism” and its “restraint,” most often crediting the restraint or ambiguity of its representation for its stunning realism. Thus one reviewer writes that “the first

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 211

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

part is devoted to discreet accounts of the outrages that have occurred at the orphanage” and later writes of being “fascinated” by its “near-scientific calm.”39 That accounts of “outrages” could be “discreet” is not merely a testimony to the film’s delicacy; the reviews suggest that part of the outrage that the film presents so discreetly is the very possibility that an outrage can be discreet. The scandal of representing child abuse is thus partly that a refusal to represent abuse — to glance away from it with discretion — forms the most direct, brutal, “realistic” representation of abuse. The scandal of this contradiction begins to appear in another review: “A shockingly effective film about tyranny, buried secrets, institutional hypocrisy and the persecution of the young by the older, the poor and weak by the strong, The Boys of St. Vincent . . . presents a nightmare world with devastating understatement and haunting, luminous clarity.” The luminous clarity and devastating understatement that the review consistently conjoins as peculiarly synonymous, apparently assuming, but never explicitly stating, a causal link between them, seem both to be generated through the constitution of a secret, and the review continues, “But it [the film] has something more: a sense of private anguish and almost hideous illumination, a hint of deeper mysteries than the ones we see.”40 It is hardly surprising that a desire to know would fuel one’s absorption in a scene of abuse; more striking is that the concealment of “deeper mysteries” should be called realism, as if a “real” encounter with abuse would unveil the impossibility of unveiling, an unnameable and unspeakable mystery brought to light as that which could never be brought to light. More important than what is hidden from view, then, is the very fact of having a secret to hide from view, a structure that unsettles reviewers’ praise of the film. Thus another review ties the contradictory discreet but shocking realism of the film’s secret to a rupture in representation when its phrasing reveals the contagiousness of the ambiguities that constitute the film’s force: “The film works as powerfully as it does because its explosive material is handled with restraint and control, making most of its points by implication — especially from the boy’s-eye-level placement of the camera as the victims advance with zombie complaisance toward their summoning predators.”41 The review praises the film’s peculiar “explosive restraint” even as the review’s mixed metaphors manage to be explosive while falling conspicuously short of restraint. The review obscures agency by casting the zombie, usually the haunting victimizer in horror films, as the victim; more important, the word predators, when combined with the children as zombies, turns pedophilia into necrophagia. The lurid figures surrounding the reviewer’s emphasis on restraint and clarity suggest that the explosiveness that these reviews write about is not fully explained by the inflammatory subject of

211

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

212

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 212

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

child abuse; rather, there is something explosive in subjecting child abuse to representation, a disruption enacted by the self-rupturing rhetoric of the reviews themselves. This disturbance begins to explain the discomfort that reviewers report in watching a film whose constitution of a secret creates its verisimilitude and an “unsettling ambiguity,” its realism: Henry Czerny’s portrayal of Brother Lavin is at once terrifying and mesmerizing. . . . It would have been easier, perhaps, to portray Lavin simply as a monster, but Czerny avoids this trap. Instead, he presents a man who is at various points loving, terrifying, abusive, deceitful, remorseful, and confused. It is the verisimilitude of Czerny’s performance that makes the film all the more frightening. The molestation is suggested rather than shown. Before it becomes clear what’s going on, some images, such as a boy of about 10 sitting on a priest’s lap, have a profoundly unsettling ambiguity. . . . “Boys”. . . is extremely restrained, but this makes it even creepier. “Boys” sometimes has a flatness that works to its advantage. There’s something eerie in its matter-of-factness.42 The ambiguity is frightening most immediately because it marks a preterition obscuring but highlighting sexual acts performed on children. Nevertheless, the impact of this realistic ambiguity goes beyond that of any more fully specified referent, and the eerieness is explained, in part, by the film’s unsettling of representational boundaries and by the compromising specular fascination thus created in the viewer.43 A disturbed fascination registers, then, in critics’ inability to separate the watching of a represented scene of child abuse from the perpetrating of molestation. Notably, one of the two or three scenes that fascinated nearly every reviewer is one in which Lavin watches boys in the shower at the orphanage. Because the film does not show sexual abuse directly, most reviewers turned to this scene for an example of child abuse. Lavin is an abuser because he looks at boys’ bodies with “too much interest”: Mr. Smith observes St. Vincent’s daily routine and lets it imply a great deal about both the boys’ and the Catholic brothers’ behavior. The boys scrub hard in the shower, where some of the brothers watch them with a shade too much interest.

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 213

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

In one scene, Brother Lavin is shown staring at the buttocks and legs of little boys in the shower. Other priests are shown drunk or violent or sitting on little boys’ beds at night.44 The tendency of that little adverb hard to wander toward a concupiscent adjectival attribution — whether as a compromising symptom (embarrassing the reviewer’s prose like ill-disguised arousal) or as a conscious staging of wish fulfillment, that adjective stands out as bait for the prurient, providing the pleasure of projecting desire to the scene of where it may have already been (the naked boys) from where it most certainly was, even as it was disavowed (the reviewer) — replays the erotic allure of the film’s discretion, as does the slide that conflates looking with other violations of priestly decorum. More important, perhaps, the film does not show the gaze that the reviews dwell on: instead, there are two separate shots. The camera dwells on the boys’ buttocks, and then it reverses to a close-up of Lavin cut so that it does not show where he is looking. The gaze at the boys is implied in this shot–reverse-shot sequence, but it is not explicitly shown. The reification of an ambiguous gaze points to the reviewers’ own disavowed fascination with naked boys — somebody was looking, and so it had better have been the priest — a fascination registered in the reviewers’ tangible discomfort when they report on the consistently peculiar experience of viewing the discreetly luminous ambiguity of a film that simultaneously fascinates and repels, pains and rivets them: It is a profoundly painful thing to watch. Viewers will certainly be tempted to stop watching at some points. The Boys of St. Vincent . . . is almost too painful to watch — yet you can’t keep your eyes off of it. The Boys of St. Vincent may test the patience of viewers even as it transfixes them with the child-abuse miseries at a fictional Catholic orphanage in Newfoundland, Ontario [sic]— evil acts obscured by fat layers of church and government cover-up.45 The fascination here is in part a desire to know generated by the film’s ambiguous realism, a desire to see the horrid spectacle unveiled. However, as the passages on Lavin in the boys’ shower may suggest, it is difficult to separate this epistemological fascination from a more explicitly eroticized specular fixation. As if to testify to the inseparability of child abuse as a fixated gaze from its representation, the

213

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

214

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 214

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

reviewers register even more explicitly their own fascination with the boys’ bodies. This is not to say that they are child abusers; it is to suggest that their need to assert the boys’ perfect innocence leads the reviewers to eroticize the very bodies that bear witness to that innocence. Thus one reviewer writes, “Besides Czerny, the boys themselves, with their open faces, close-shaven hair, and plaid shirts, are heartbreakingly convincing”; another adds, “But what lingers long after the end of Boys of St. Vincent is the image of Molina [sic] as the young Kevin. His performance is solemn and inward, conveying the heartbreaking helplessness of childhood. Or, rather, the heartbreaking lack of a childhood.”46 While it might be overreading to place stress on Murray’s journalistic “but” at the beginning of his sentence, or on the erotic rhythm that the proximity of “open” and “close” in Turbide’s “open-faces, close-shaven hair” sets rocking, these accounts nonetheless dwell on the depiction of the violation of childhood with a regretful languor that can only be called rapturous. The repulsion asserted by the reviews is perhaps merely the disavowal that is the flip side of this eroticized gaze. The proximity of child abuse to a rapt gaze at innocent childhood is both attested to and disavowed in the metaphors of bodily rupture and disintegration and in the descriptions of visceral repulsion with which reviewers, attempting to assert their distance from the spectacle they have witnessed, paradoxically assert their proximity to it: In a scene that almost rips your heart out and prompts a sense of tearful rage, Lavin beats Kevin senseless after the boy tries to escape but is returned by police. Adding to the horror is the sight of Czerny’s offender being only one of a handful of clerical abusers — they make your skin crawl when they eye the boys showering. What this intense horror story doesn’t do is explain why so many of these Catholic brothers are child molesters and how it would be possible for so many psychologically gnarled misfits to be assigned to the same orphanage. What it does do is expose in ways that make you wince, the enduring pain of abuse victims, pain that translates to ruined lives. The whiff of tabloid sensationalism never intrudes upon the heartbreaking, bone-chilling tone of The Boys of St. Vincent.47 All of these metaphors assert a morally outraged distance from the filmic spectacle in figures that bear witness to the film’s assault on, even penetration of, the

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 215

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

viewer’s body. Except in the final quote (and the disorienting combination of childlike tantrum and stagy performance in the first quote’s prompts a sense of tearful rage), the reviewers disavow this assault and the uncanny proximity of the film by putting their encroaching metaphors in the second person: the film rips your heart out, it makes your skin crawl, it makes you wince. This disavowal operates not only by removing the reviewers’ “I” from the scene of the transgression of their bodies but by hypostatizing their readers as viewers of the film in the form of an imperative: it will make your skin crawl. While this imperative in many ways simply replicates a collapsing of the viewers’ distance from the film, more important, it forecloses the possibility of imagining viewers who take erotic or visual pleasure in this beautifully shot film. That a viewer could find boys’ bottoms erotically enticing without condoning child abuse is one such foreclosed possibility. I would argue, furthermore, that a failure to consider such a viewer is a failure to read this film, whose interrogation of representation and moralism is sustained in part by the alluring texture of eroticism around the bodies of young boys. The elaborate dance these critics do around their fascinated gaze and eroticized vision of a purely innocent childhood perhaps attests that erotic investment in the film’s spectacle is impossible to avoid, but the phobic charge that leads them to disavow this spectatorial pleasure disfigures their attempts to come to terms with the film. The difficulty of cordoning off an erotic investment in childhood innocence — to assert the distance of such erotic pleasure from one’s own firm moral rectitude — thus finds a representational corollary in the “explosiveness” of representing child abuse, a cause and a symptom of pedophilia’s tendency to wander as an accusative attribution. The projectile volatility of representing child abuse both derives from and enables the erotic fixation it betrays in its viewers, the eroticization of innocent bodies in the mode of deeroticization, whose polemical overemphasis only bears witness to its titillation. The relation of this disavowed rapture to compromising fractures of representation around innocence and violation also appears in praise given the “realism” of Czerny’s “magnetic and repellent” performance.48 If the reviews most often dwell on the psychological realism of Czerny’s acting, they also dwell on his good looks, and one reviewer writes that Czerny’s Lavin is “a far different figure from the fleshy, sherry-soaked diddler that’s become the stereotype of the sexually abusive priest.”49 Paradoxically, the realism of Czerny’s performance seems to inhere in the deceptiveness of his looks: an erotically appealing child abuser would seem to misrepresent the abuser’s twisted psyche, which apparently would look more like a “fleshy, sherry-soaked diddler.” Czerny’s realism is thus realistically to represent his character’s difference from himself, to represent Lavin’s representational

215

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

216

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 216

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

duplicity by misrepresenting his character. The disturbance that such realismgrounding duplicity engenders migrates to the reviews and appears, for example, in figures such as “Henry Czerny, as the worst and most implacable of the abusers, is a vessel of rage beneath a tightly stretched membrane of control.”50 The transfixed repulsion of this luridly corporeal figure suggests an erotic investment only partly explained by a need to exact moral retribution through sexual violence. Reviewers’ sexualized language attests not only to a desire to see Czerny penetrated in punishment for his crimes but also to a fetishization of him as penetrator: Presiding over St. Vincent’s is the young, stiffly handsome Brother Lavin (Henry Czerny), who has singled out the beautiful 10-year-old Kevin Reevey (Johnny Morina) to be his special boy. After Kevin attempts to escape, we discover (in one of the several scenes unfortunately truncated for American viewers) just how aberrant is the love Brother Lavin feels toward his charge, and how quickly that love can turn to rage. When Kevin refuses to call him Mama, he beats him savagely with his belt.51 First, and most clearly, the description’s phrasing replays the scene of penetration that it never speaks: the “stiffly handsome” Lavin and the “beautiful” Kevin star in a lurid sexual tableau quietly staged by these adjectives and adverbs.52 The sexualized language suggests a fascination with and an eroticization of the beating of a child. Moreover, the passage enacts the disturbance created by its own fascination with the spectacle it contemplates, a disturbance troped in a reversal: Lavin is “young,” while the closest adjective to Kevin is “old.” This reversal is mirrored in the syntax of the following sentences, which seem to enact the aberrance they describe (especially in the interrupted sentence “We discover . . . just how aberrant is the love . . .”). The focus on realism once again covers over an unstable spectatorial fascination and an enactment of sodomitical disturbances. The almost convulsive need of these reviews to attest to their own moral disapprobation of child abuse is also symptomatic of a peculiar rupturing of referential frame that seems to make it impossible for reviewers facing The Boys of St. Vincent to separate child abuse from its representation. Expressed in compulsive reminders that the depicted events “really” happened, this conflation is perhaps most striking in the reviews’ repeated insistence that the filmmakers were careful not to traumatize the child actors during the filming.53 The representation of child abuse seems to be as traumatic as child abuse itself, even for actors on the set. These reassuring statements swaddle the child actors in innocence (even stupidity) insulating enough to prevent them from noticing that they are in a film:

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 217

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

In casting the child actors, consideration was given to their families’ ability to discuss issues of abuse openly. A psychiatrist was hired for the production (and ultimately cast as the court-appointed doctor who counsels the accused priest). Because of the film’s theme of child abuse and the presence of many young actors, Smith took extra psychological precautions while making The Boys of St. Vincent. He hired a therapist to help those involved in the film to understand and deal with its disturbing subject. “We followed the therapist’s advice in making sure that Henry Czerny, the actor who plays the role of Brother Lavin, and the little boy, Johnny (Morina), who plays Kevin, became good friends off the set,” Smith said. “We saved those scenes [involving abuse] until the end, when they had become good friends and the boy understood that, ‘Here’s his friend Henry, and he and Henry had to play their roles.’ ”54 I certainly wish that there were someone in my life to take “extra psychological precautions,” but the necessity of taking them paradoxically redoubles the abuse. If the children are in danger because they are too innocent to tell a representation from the real thing, the need to reassure the public that precautions have been taken seems to make the same mistake and to inscribe these reviews in the same innocence and endangerment. It is also striking that Smith’s comments to Jon Matsumoto inscribe the protecting of passive childhood innocence in terms of a peculiarly staged, hardly innocent manipulation of innocence that makes Morina sound more and more like a stage prop (while the violation of Morina’s innocence is saved, like a delicious dessert, until the end of the shooting). Moreover, if Lavin is most often villainized for the faults he introduces in representation — if, for example, he is perverted because he thinks that his warped representation of motherhood is as good as the real thing — the reviewers’ confusion here also figures child abuse and the representational disturbance it causes.55 These readerly “mistakes” help focus the reviews’ unacknowledged homophobia, which seems to inhere in the serenity with which their rhetoric can remain completely unaware of itself, their explicit statements about the film’s avoidance of homophobia, for example, couched in a figuration that is meanwhile preoccupied with attesting to an unassailable and unquestioned homophobia.56 Thus Bruce Headlam can write, with knowing urbanity, of Hollywood’s tendency to cast Czerny as a villain (while the more “lumpish” Harrison Ford gets to play heroes): “Czerny is cast as the heavy because Hollywood likes its villains a little

217

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

218

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 218

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

androgynous.” Headlam moves immediately from androgyny (not, to my eyes, a word descriptive of Czerny, any more than it is of Ford) to the “homoerotic”: “Clear and Present Danger doesn’t exploit the theme of homo-eroticism in the White House as obviously as Kevin Costner’s silly 1987 movie, No Way Out, but it’s worth noting that, in a film full of gunfire and political double-crosses, one of the bigger surprises turns out to be finding Czerny’s character in bed with a woman.”57 It seems to me that the “theme” here is not “homo-eroticism” but the power of homosexual panic to overwhelm men even when they are ostentatiously not in bed together. More remarkable than the blurry logic of Headlam’s assertions, however, is the coy knowingness-as-innocence of their homophobic assumptions. The homophobia, in other words, discreetly dresses itself as wide-eyed surprise. Implicitly, homosexuality is the charge, and finding Czerny in bed with a woman is unexpected because it is exculpatory. The facetious open-mindedness of Headlam’s review allows it to be unaware of its own homophobia, and this kind of suavely disguised homophobia also allows critics to read the film without admitting that they are reading it: That [the orphans] have nowhere to run to is apparent 15 years later, when we see the damage they’re still trying to cope with. It’s expressed by their pain and shame and self-loathing when they’re asked to go public with their stories so the case can belatedly be prosecuted. One [Kevin Reevey] is able to press forward only because of the love of a strong woman; another [Steven Lunny], lacking any support system, implodes into drug addiction. The adult Kevin . . . is an inarticulate loner with no interest in reliving the past. His scrappy old pal Steven . . . is now a drifter floating from one high to the next.58 Left unspoken in these summaries is the sexual politics that animates them: while Steven is the only man identified (mainly by suggestion) as potentially gay in the second half of the film, Kevin’s heterosexuality is firmly established, even belabored.59 Thus the first review just above implies that Kevin survives because he is, at bottom, uncontaminated by his abuse; his heterosexuality, in the guise of a “strong woman” (and just how strong any woman in the film is, is open to debate), allows him to “press forward” through the trials. Steven, by contrast, lacks a “support system” and “implodes.” The gendering and sexualizing of this description equate the “strong woman” not only with a source of moral, even locomotive drive but with a “support system,” even as Steven’s implosion suggests that what he lacks is internal buttressing, which no woman, however

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 219

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

strong, could furnish him. The awkward, potentially pop-psychological phrase support system, moreover, aligns a woman’s apparently indispensable heterosexual support with the architectural figures often used to sell underwear, such as men’s briefs and jockstraps or women’s “foundation garments,” full-support or underwire bras, all of which mobilize a tropology that allows the consumer to imagine a feat of monumental containment, a language that suggests that certain body parts with a privileged relation to desire are less likely to implode than to explode. (Pressing forward, in other words, is the problem and not the solution.) Steven’s problem is perhaps not his lack of a support system but his lack of a need for one. Attributed to his lack of heterosexual momentum toward an other, Steven’s implosion figures a destructively narcissistic and self-reflexive involution (stagnant but seepingly liquid) that refers both to his homosexuality and to his drug habit (both of them troped in the second review as “floating from one high to the next”). Finally, this kind of unspoken politics is most condensed in Jay Carr’s peculiar logic: “But while the film is obviously intended as a corrective, it never demonizes the offenders and never succumbs to homophobia.”60 Left vague here is what exactly the “corrective” is meant to correct, even as the oppositional structure (“But while . . .”) suggests that Carr’s assertion of the film’s noble avoidance of homophobia is built on a homophobic assumption: why a critique of child abuse should ever run the risk of “succumbing” to homophobia is a more crucial question than how a film could manage to be a “corrective.” The sentence gravitates almost to the point of naming homosexuality as an offense by mobilizing a homophobia (cast as a natural, or at least expected, reaction) that is then disavowed. An implicit or explicit homophobia thus allows these reviews to stabilize representational disturbances introduced by the subject of child abuse, disturbances that break down such boundaries as those separating a representation from what it represents, subject from object, abuser from abused. Such disturbances often testify, more or less obliquely, to an eroticized gaze at a fetishized sexual innocence. As I have begun to suggest, the reviews bear witness to the explosiveness of representing child abuse through disruptions in their own rhetoric. One of the most condensed expressions of the kinds of fractures I have noted is Rosellen Brown’s New York Times article “When Bad Things Happen to ‘Boys Town.’ ” Praising the film’s discreetness and “thoughtful silence,” she highlights, like the other critics, its realism, and she implicitly locates child abuse in the breaking down of the distance between spectator and spectacle, describing Czerny’s character as deceitful in a series of unfortunate puns that enacts the contagion of this deception in Brown’s own prose:

219

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

220

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 220

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Those at the bottom of the human chain make a habit of pursuing certain unlucky favorites, alternately beating them and making sexual advances that the boys are not free to refuse. Though there are a few visibly unsavory types, the chief offender, far more dangerous, is the handsome, virile Brother Lavin (Henry Czerny), who is naturally wily enough to control his wayward impulses in the presence of outsiders. Behind closed doors — the old story, forever riveting— he singles out as “his boy” the solemn 10-year-old Kevin Reevey. . . . His pure-faced victim, bewildered and terrified, will not buckle until he is utterly without escape; he will not call Brother Lavin his mother. “My mother is dead,” the child insists as the priest cajoles him. He knows who he is not, even if this imprisonment denies him the chance to know who he is. In one of the most searing scenes, Kevin, suffering his worst beating yet, surrenders and in a small, defeated voice tries to placate the priest by calling him “Mom.” It is a moment to make a viewer weak in the knees.61 Brown’s summary conflates two separate scenes in the film: Kevin’s “worst beating yet” occurs when he refuses to call Lavin “Mom” early in the first part of the film, while he does call Lavin “Mom” toward the end of this part to avoid a second beating. This seemingly inconsequential mistake is scripted by the movement of Brown’s prose, determined by a constellation of puns around buckle and searing that thematize the viewer’s reaction to (and reenactment of) the scene she has witnessed. Whereas it is in the first scene, when Kevin does not “buckle,” that he is beaten with the buckle end of Lavin’s belt, Brown inscribes this beating in the second scene, when Kevin seems to “buckle,” giving in to (and playing a part in) Lavin’s fantasy. Though Kevin is not beaten in this scene, the viewer seemingly is, and Brown describes as “searing” the moment during this nonbeating when Kevin gives in to Lavin’s desires. It is this “searing” moment that makes the viewer “weak in the knees,” the moment when the viewer’s knees “buckle” beneath her. Reenacting both Lavin’s discursive deceptiveness and the searing experience of being beaten with a buckle, Brown’s language repeats what this passage seems to thematize: the loss of distance between the reviewer and the film merely repeats the collapse of the distance between Kevin and Lavin’s fantasy. Just as Kevin is said to know who he is not by knowing who Lavin is not (you’re not my mother), until he is finally “beaten” and implicates himself in Lavin’s fantasy, the reviewer here experiences the film as if she were experiencing abuse: she is beaten until her knees (and her prose) buckle. The collapse of spectatorial distance again plays itself out in a referential confusion that conflates the film and “reality,”62 and Brown’s need to assert a

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 221

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

transparent referent for the film that would allow her to transpose its spectacle into the “real” world seems to be an attempt to stave off the contagion of the representational disturbances with which the film has infected her writing. The prophylactic device, however, merely repeats what it would stave off; her confusion of referential frame is another version of representational disorder.63 The child as the pure innocence of a transparent signifier arrives to stabilize the rhetoric of the review in a movement that implicitly relies on the abjection of male homoeroticism. For example, Brown begins (and ends) her review by citing Orwell, not his (seemingly more apposite) dystopian fiction but his comments on the British public schools: “It’s time, ladies and gentlemen and Speaker of the House, to haul out our wellthumbed George Orwell, whose wisdom doesn’t age, and revisit the British public school, circa 1915, where Orwell learned his first hard lessons about institutional life: ‘Your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than by fear, where you did not have to be perpetually on your guard against the people surrounding you.’ ”64 Admittedly, my copy of Orwell’s writing is hardly “well-thumbed” (to say nothing of Orwell himself, whom Brown seems to haul out in propria persona), but Brown’s choice of quotations is interesting, and not merely because Orwell — whose wisdom, like Peter Pan, never ages — conveniently provides a high-culture instance of soggy, idealized nostalgia for familial love and devotion. Sliding between “fiction” and “reality,” “fact” and “text,” this opening implicitly grounds its defense of the beleaguered family in an unspoken linking of abuse to homoeroticism. The institutional brutality that serves here as the backdrop to the family occurs in a space that, removed from the confines of the family, allows the (limited) expression of homoerotic desires. This homoerotic potential appears in novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues in modern film representations of boarding school.65 Brown’s unspoken foreclosure of this space aligns her argument with the (more or less explicit) homophobia that seems inevitably to accompany the transcendently innocent child trundled in as the last defense of the heterosexual family and of the representational structures through which it comes to have meaning.

Crime and Punishment: The Boys of St. Vincent The two parts of The Boys of St. Vincent tempt us to read them as detailing an easy moral trajectory on which hidden offenses are brought to light and crime is followed by the punishment appropriate to it. If Lavin pretends in part 1 to be Kevin’s mother, part 2 shows that his wife, Chantal, is the real mother, whose rage, if we follow this trajectory, we fully identify with in the closing scene of part 2: asking

221

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

222

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 222

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Lavin if he feels “no shame, no guilt,” Chantal tells him that what he felt for the boys in the orphanage was not, as he has claimed, love. “Kevin Reevey,” he says, “was a lonely little boy I befriended out of the goodness of my heart. . . . I loved him,” but she counters by redefining (or, in this posited moral reading, by simply defining) his words: “You call that love? . . . That is not loving. That is hurting. You have hurt this little boy. I could kill you.” Chantal then asks whether he has ever “touched” their children; when he responds, “Why don’t you ask them yourself? They’re your children,” she again asserts discursive control: “That’s right. They’re my children. They’re no longer your children.” The film’s close thus shows Lavin doubly dispossessed through a movement that exposes his fraudulent use of language. Love is given back its proper meaning by a mother’s proper care for her children, and Lavin’s resulting dispossession encapsulates a larger movement of crime and retribution. Betraying the trust of the boys in his keeping (the orphans), perverting the love he feels for them and making them feel unsafe and exposed, Lavin is himself exposed and dispossessed of the boys (his and his wife’s) who make him feel loved and safe. Such a reading, however, has other, less comforting consequences. First, the investment in Chantal as the proper mother redounds out of the context in which it appears here, particularly in relation to the depiction of the older Steven (David Hewlett) and the older Kevin (Sebastian Spence). Steven, who, as a male prostitute, is the one character who seems to engage in some form of (at least nominally) consensual gay sex, is surrounded by heterosexual couples:66 Kevin and his girlfriend, Sheilah, and Brian and his wife, Donna. A character’s proximity to heterosexual normativity becomes an index of how successfully he has transcended the experience of abuse. Thus the contrast between Kevin and Steven, which figures sexuality as the permeability or impermeability of bodies, is somewhat alarming. Kevin, who several times appears stuffing more and more insulation into the house he is building, is always pictured in tight (but not too tight), restrained clothing, primarily plaid shirts and jeans. His shirt is untucked only once, toward the beginning of part 2, and he is never shown undressed farther than his undershirt. His clothing and his build provide the visual figures for the impermeable self-sufficiency to which his competence at house building would seem to bear witness. In contrast, the more wispy Steven (who does appear undressed) wears gaudy clothes that stream off his body and attest to his partiality to fringes, frills, sequins, and loud jewelry. His clothes code the ambiguous pleasures of self-evacuation and ostentatious display, and his body’s tendency to overflow its bounds is figured by his drug abuse; unlike Kevin, insulating his house as he seals up his body, Steven is forever sticking needles into himself, making visible, through a

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 223

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

body prone to disintegration, his own practices of gay sex. In fact Steven does disintegrate: accused of drug abuse, male prostitution, and molesting other boys in the orphanage, Steven collapses on the witness stand and is found dead from a drug overdose soon after. His abjection from the film not only prompts Kevin to testify but also seems a necessary moment in an uncritically unnuanced reading of the morality of the film, which could not deal with the ambiguity of Steven, the molested who molests. For such a reading, this unsettling ambiguity would be figured by the permeability and uncertain boundaries of Steven’s gay body, fringed, flowing, pierced.67 Because no ambiguity in the film’s moral could be “pictured,” this abjected body simultaneously would figure the visual uncertainty through its own resistance to containment in the visual image and would contain, through its abjection, that very resistance. The resistance of moral ambiguity to visualization would be located, contained, and abjected through the disintegration and disappearance of a gay male body. Second, the gender politics of this posited moral movement would also prove unsavory. If Chantal is to be read as the redemptively genuine mother, protecting her children as Lavin could never protect his, this deployment of the maternal has to be read in relation to the other female characters in the film. It would collude not only in the abjecting of Steven, who falls outside heterosexuality’s protective coupling (dramatized by Brian’s concern for his children and the film’s almost obsessive establishing of Kevin’s heterosexuality in a long, otherwise irrelevant sequence of Kevin and Sheilah slow dancing and kissing), but also in the proper placement of women vis-à-vis this heterosexual pairing. If, as one reviewer puts it, the “love of a strong woman” helps Kevin testify, his testimony also puts this “strong woman” back in her place as a seemingly necessary concomitant to the film’s morality and Kevin’s redemption.68 Before the trial Kevin is often shown being comforted by Sheilah in recumbent positions that place him below her in the frame, but after his testimony these positions are reversed. The film’s final shot of Kevin pictures him with Sheilah, Brian, and Donna on a bench in a vacant courtroom, and Kevin leans over to cradle a crying and incapacitated Sheilah. Through his testimony, then, Kevin would seem to face Lavin, asserting that he is no longer afraid of him, to reclaim the prerogatives and strengths of his (never terribly endangered) masculinity. Chantal’s maternal “strength” appears as merely the vehicle of a reflective (and peculiarly economic) justice through inversion, where the attainment of masculine prerogatives is the index of justice’s efficacy. Most explicitly, then, the closing scene with Lavin and Chantal resists its apparent moral simplicity because of the role that gender plays in the inversion of power. Chantal’s final speech does not merely correct Lavin’s earlier parenting but

223

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

224

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 224

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

also figures an inversion of power made explicit by her reenactment of Lavin’s style of discursive address, especially when she picks up his trademark gesture, pointing her finger at him menacingly to punctuate her statements. Moreover, Chantal’s speech here is only the final example of a series of speeches in which one person asserts discursive authority over another by speaking to him or her as adults speak to children, with a condescension (infuriating, as I remember, to the child reminded of his or her powerlessness in the face of the cruel or the petty) that intimidates through repressed violence. This sequence of scenes may seem to assert a simple reversal: whereas Lavin initially asserts authority, a growing number of people later assert authority over him. In the first half of the film, the exercising of authority is primarily a masculine affair, where (in extreme close-up) one man intimidates another, usually invoking his superior institutional power. Thus Lavin yells at various boys; Lavin intimidates and later fires the janitor; Lavin yells at one Detective Noseworthy; Lavin intimidates his lawyer; the archbishop and the monsignor each assert their authority over Lavin; Noseworthy yells at Lavin; and the police chief yells at Noseworthy. In the second part of the film, the positions of power are not merely reversed but more and more gendered. Thus if the handyman can yell at a female secretary, Lavin is suspended by his female boss. Like Chantal’s, then, her empowerment is only a figure for Lavin’s disempowerment. The culminating scene with Lavin and Chantal marks his final disempowerment, and if after the trial Kevin can take up his masculine position of domination over Sheilah, Lavin is figuratively castrated by his domineering wife and is left to pound impotently on a table in the closing shot of the film. The film no doubt participates in a moral reading that would condense its reversals through power inversions based on a deployment of gender within a presumptively heterosexual frame. Nevertheless, it is a trajectory of crime mirroring punishment that the film ultimately throws into question. The film complicates its ostensibly straightforward morality in a number of ways, particularly by questioning the picture of representation underlying this morality. If one feels that justice has been served at the end of the film, this feeling comes from an essential reversal in power positions that becomes justice in a sealed and stable referential frame where punishment mirrors crime, and it is precisely the possibility of such mirroring that the film suggests is undermined by child abuse itself. For the film, child abuse disrupts this mirroring not only because it inserts into this reflexive frame an event that exorbitantly exceeds the possibility of mirroring (in the simple recalcitrant fact of abuse) but also because this reflexivity is in itself disruptive. The simplest way to conceive of this disruptiveness is to focus on what is reflected by way of justice’s reciprocity. Reading abuse in terms of domination figured (and

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 225

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

constituted) by sodomy means that to get even with the man who has raped you as a boy is to rape him: as the prosecutor says to Kevin at the beginning of part 2, “After what that bastard did to you, you don’t want to nail him? I don’t believe it.” While the film admirably avoids deploying the phobic charge of male same-sex sex acts, it does suggest that the need to assert ( just) reciprocity through power reversals is inscribed in the very desire it would punish.69 This mirroring structure, which finds its correlate in the notion that a moral question has an answer (crime should mirror punishment), is figured (and interrogated) in the film through its scrutiny of the catechism in part 1.70 The catechism seems to be the ultimate example of a mirroring frame of significatory adequation for morality, where both questions and answers are memorized in advance: the question is asked (what is heaven?) and receives an instantaneous answer that mirrors it in form (heaven is the kingdom of God’s glory and of his angels and saints). The Boys of St. Vincent undermines the structure of the catechism through its framing. The boys are first shown learning their catechism just after Kevin has been beaten senseless by Lavin. The scene opens, moreover, with a shot of a stuffed fox and duck, frozen by a taxidermist in poses of excruciating immobility, and their glassy-eyed gazes seem to stand in for the vacancy of the catechism’s pure reflection. In the second scene of catechism Kevin, Steven, and two other boys rehearse the ceremonial acceptance of a state grant. Brother Mack’s questioning of the boys (again, what is heaven?) is heard while the camera zooms in on Brother Lavin’s arms wrapped around Kevin’s body. Also in this scene the camera notices a sign in the gymnasium (“A Healthy Body is a Healthy Mind”) that seems the textual equivalent of the vapid, glassy-eyed former animals. The film thus puts pressure on the structure of the catechism by juxtaposing it with incongruous images that explode its closed circle of knowledge (as child abuse would exceed this frame of question and answer by giving children questions that the catechism cannot address). The focus on the catechism, however, does more than highlight a certain irony in the boys’ situation, exposing the distance between mouthed religiosity and the boys’ actual experience. The film challenges the structure of the catechism by calling attention to the way its reflexiveness evacuates it of content (and the catechism often seems numbing in its sheer repetitiveness).71 If crime and punishment mirror each other in a stable unity of signifier and signified, the film shows that the constitution of this moral signification is built on a reflexivity that, emptying the reflection of any content other than the fact of its reflection, leaves the mutually determined categories of crime and punishment as vacant and vapid as a glassy-eyed, immobile fox proclaiming, “A Healthy Body is a Healthy Mind.”

225

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

226

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 226

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

If the breaking down of the catechism here might be read as a critique of a certain model of reference, the film also interrogates this model more directly, often by highlighting the duplicity of the sign. Just after one of Kevin’s beatings, for example, Police Chief Kennedy tells a gathering of businessmen and clerics that he was raised at St. Vincent and has “the bruises to prove it.” The chief’s clichéd invocation of tough love, don’t-spare-the-rod child rearing exposes, seemingly in spite of itself, the abuse at the orphanage and the sadistic underside of tutelary discipline, which allows one the guiltless pleasure of spanking a child for its own good.72 The exploration of linguistic duplicity often circulates around the unsaid and the difficulty of specifying sexual abuse: scenes where the janitor insists to Brian that he does not know “exactly” what Brian means by “pervert” and a scene in which Noseworthy’s painful sincerity and a social worker’s significant eyebrow raising make explicit the uncomfortable load that the word touching has to bear in relation to sexual abuse, highlighting the weight of preterition, which refers without explicitly referring or, rather, refers by highlighting its missing reference.73 In one of their arguments Kevin uses Sheilah’s contentless words—“it,” “what he did to you,” “it isn’t fair”— to accuse her of hiding a prurient curiosity behind referential discretion: “Is there anything else you want to know?” Most important, the film suggests that Kevin has been victimized, in part, by the linguistic deception inherent in signification itself. For instance, Noseworthy makes a promise to Kevin with an insistence that foretells that it will be broken: NOSE.

It’s going to stop, Kevin. We’re going to put an end to this stuff, I promise you. We can’t give you your family back, but trust me, it’s all over. KEVIN. You’ll come back and see me? NOSE. I promised you, didn’t I? The detective’s insistence foregrounds the inherent rupture of the promise insofar as the various linguistic registers in which it becomes legible — for instance, commenting on a prior state of certainty or constituting through its utterance the promise itself — prove disruptive to one another.74 It is partly in relation to linguistic duplicity that regional specificities in Canada become important for the film. In part 2 Lavin moves to Montreal, where he raises a family with Chantal, a native speaker of French. Indeed, the film obsessively underlines the bilingualism of Lavin’s new family. The importance of tropes of translation and bilingualism lies less in the thematic links they might be seen to make between child abuse and nationalist conflicts in Canada than in the way they generalize the film’s exploration of duplicitous representation. For example,

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 227

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

bilingualism is an explicit version of the different “languages” Lavin speaks inside and outside the orphanage. Kevin’s romantic involvement with a French teacher in part 2, the particular moments when Lavin’s wife feels compelled to lapse into French, the film’s visual linking of Francophone spaces (particularly Lavin’s home) to the gothic space of the orphanage in part 1, however, all make it difficult to determine how the issues confronted by Francophone Canada figuratively operate in the film. The proliferation of ambiguous instances indicates how the bilingual stands in for representation itself or, rather, how undecidability in the film’s figuration in turn figures linguistic rupture or duplicity. Translation between languages, in other words, is not just one example among others; it cannot stand in for a particular content that might be expressed through either language (if merely, and most simply, because language is the medium through which such content would have to pass). If linguistic duplicity cannot be straightforwardly figured in language, neither can it become an unproblematic figure for something else, for any transparent meaning that it would carry. Linguistic duplicity that appears through translation, therefore, cannot be said in any simple sense to figure or represent child abuse; the same difficulties would apply to a reading that would cast abuse of the boys as a figure of or as figured by the sovereignty of Francophone Canada, where the breached coherence of the (implicitly male) subject would stand in for the violated sovereignty of the nation, and vice versa. It would be more accurate to say that the delusion that language could adequately represent abuse, or that a stable metaphorics could be established with abuse as either ground or vehicle, would, as a delusion perhaps inherent in language, figure abuse itself. The emphasis on the bilingual in the film, therefore, generalizes the duplicities exposed by the catechism to language as such, even if it troubles such a movement of generalization. Concomitant with its troubling of the possibility of transparent representation around abuse is an undermining of the moral claim that a punishment could be (and ought to be) found to mirror the crime. The film thus includes as a thematic element a questioning of the grounds of mimetic adequation through language. Moreover, it extends this questioning to visual or filmic representation. In the most general terms, it questions the possibility of filmic representation itself, nearly always tying this exploration of representation to the moral issue of crime and punishment. This critique is most evident in the courtroom scene in part 2, when Kevin finally testifies, and in the police station in part 1, when detectives interview children from the orphanage. The second half of the film is punctuated with traumatic flashbacks that ostensibly illustrate a character’s memory with scenes from the first half. But while these flashbacks might seem to be among the clichéd resources of the television docu-

227

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

228

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 228

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

drama, those in Kevin’s testimony, recalling scenes we have not seen before, suggest that the film has an unusually complicated relation to such resources, which are meant to establish verisimilitude and build suspense. The conclusion of Kevin’s testimony runs as follows: LAWYER.

Do you remember the first time [that Lavin abused you]? The first time was in the pool. LAWYER. Do you remember how it started? KEVIN. It was Easter, and all the other ones were gone to visit, so I went to him to ask him how come I couldn’t go out anywhere, because I was alone. I wanted to know how come I didn’t have an aunt or an uncle or anything who would come to see me and take me out. I mean I remembered Mom and Dad and the funeral, and so I knew I was an orphan, but I got to thinking I must have some family. I went to see Brother Lavin. He was real nice to me after that. We went swimming. We were alone in the pool, and I remember we were having a good time. He was throwing me up in the air, and I would splash down. Then suddenly he was holding me and pressing me against him. Then he took off my bathing suit, and then he took off his bathing suit. He was pressing me against him. LAWYER. What did he do next? KEVIN. He was rubbing himself against me. Then I felt him get hard. He was trying to force himself inside me. I remember I was crying because it hurt so much. It seemed to go on for a long time. He was moaning and groaning. Finally, he stopped. And after that I was his boy. He would have me called to his office. KEVIN.

During his testimony the camera focuses for the most part on Kevin, but it makes two kinds of cuts away from him. First, it cuts to Lavin, to Chantal (who with each accusation raises her eyebrows in shock and turns toward Lavin), and to Sheilah (with occasional shots of Brian and Donna). The shots of Chantal and Sheilah in contrast to an impassive Lavin, especially, are standard reaction shots. Second, however, the film cuts to flashbacks that complicate these reactions. Initially, the flashbacks seem to be the visual equivalents of what Kevin tells: the first instance of abuse “was in the pool,” and he and Lavin are shown in the pool, with Lavin throwing him into the air and Kevin “splash[ing] down” underwater. It is not surprising that the alternation of testimony and flashback breaks down when Kevin begins to describe arousal and anal penetration; it is surprising that the film highlights this breakdown by showing itself not showing. As Kevin says, “He was rub-

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 229

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

bing himself against me,” we are shown Lavin’s hand rubbing the bottom of Kevin’s leg; clearly, this is not what is meant. Why does the camera offer a visual pun, so visibly substituting one rub for another? Even more fascinating, the reciprocity of word and image breaks down precisely when Kevin says, “Then he took off my bathing suit, and then he took off his bathing suit”: the camera cuts to an underwater shot of a swimsuit floating in slow motion through the frame. The shot is incongruous, with the silliness of the lonely and abject swimsuit puncturing the heavily dramatic frame, because it seems to represent the fact that it is representing. Its own perfect reference marks the moment that reference breaks down: he said bathing suit, so here’s a bathing suit. The referential weight that the shot has to bear makes it ridiculous. The floating swimsuit cuts open and infects the sealed significatory frame underlying the morality of the reaction shots during Kevin’s testimony. The film’s positing of its own moral reading through the pairing of Kevin with moralizing reaction shots takes on, once again, the vacant hermetic mirroring of the catechism. Similarly, in the police station in part 1 the camera offers visual equivalents of the boys’ statements, panning, after a series of interviews, around the waiting room and pausing on different boys, with cuts to images of abuse. Noticeably chaste (they show beating and other physical abuse but only imply sexual abuse), these shots are, however, made lurid by the incongruous details that puncture them. In one of the most graphic sexual scenes, an older boy kneels, evidently to perform fellatio on one of the brothers (who is pictured from behind). The camera first shows the boy’s face and then pans down the back of the brother, dwelling on his unfashionable brown tube socks (hiked up almost to his knees) and sandals and finally moving back to include the boy’s knees and white tennis shoes. The tube socks are the center of the visual frame (marking where the camera’s vertical and horizontal movements meet) as well as the center of its narrative (marking where the camera comes to rest). The scene in the police station also focuses on writing and implies that it is another form of abuse. The scene sets up a rhythm of alternation (boy-memory-boymemory), only to disrupt it by cutting from a boy to a detective and, more important, from the boy to a close-up of the detective’s pen as he takes notes during the interview. Finally, as if in response to the scenes we have been viewing, a boy is shown with unexplained tears running down his face; the camera then cuts not to any specific memory of his but to a close-up of a boy’s hand signing a statement. The easiest reading of this scene might be simply to reassert the apparent logic of the flashbacks: the alternation of scenes of abuse with scenes of writing implies that nothing has been lost, that what we see is what the boys experienced is what is

229

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

230

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 230

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

written down on the page. Such adequation, however, is undermined on at least two levels. On the level of “content,” the images offered as reified scenes of traumatic memory undermine their own representational status. The tube socks, for example, function much as the swimsuit does: through their own recalcitrant materiality, they mark the vanishing point of the seamless reference they simultaneously uphold. More important, the film undermines the notion of representational adequation in formal terms, folding into these moments of traumatic memory a generalized questioning of filmic conventions. Thus the framing of the scene in the police station marks a divorce between sound and image, rendering uncertain the equivalence of the visual images to the boys’ traumatic experiences. Each interview is shot through the glass that separates the offices where the interviews are held from the waiting room. As the camera highlights the glass by panning across the wood slats that frame the windows, the sound track places the interview simultaneously on both sides of the glass. We hear the noise of the waiting room and the interview itself, and as the camera moves from room to room, the voices in the different interviews seamlessly blend together. This series of shots creates the impression that the boys’ statements are perfectly audible to everyone in the waiting room; more important, it figures within the film our position as viewers. Made originally for television, the film reminds us that we, too, are watching a drama through a pane of glass, a drama whose sound, emanating from an unseen source, similarly crosses this glass and is yoked, technologically, into correspondence with the image. The film in fact obsessively shows people watching television: Kevin’s inner turmoil, for example, is never fully articulated but is expressed in close-ups on his anguished eyes as he watches news reports on television. The same is true of Chantal: the film establishes character by showing how people watch television. Another scene shot through glass is as uncannily permeable to both sound and light as the glass in the police station. After Steven dies, Kevin goes to the elementary school where Sheilah teaches French and knocks on the window of her classroom as she shows her students how to conjugate the verb regarder (“Nous regardons le tableau,” she says, just before he knocks). After she leaves the room to speak to him, their conversation in the hallway, again perfectly audible, is framed through a glass pane in the classroom door. Her students, initially amused, watch the scene with increasingly distressed absorption. Ils regardent le tableau: the pun highlights both writing and spectacle. Having been told to take notes on what Sheilah has written on the chalkboard, the students watch the wrong tableau, which not only suggests that the tableaux are to some degree interchangeable but also casts pedagogy (particularly the teaching of writing and language) as the manipulation of specular rapture.75 The film thus thematizes the corruption of

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 231

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

children through their absorption in a visual tableau shot through glass. (One suspects, moreover, that Johnny Morina and Sebastian Spence were cast because of their beautifully expressive and vulnerable eyes, often shown in extreme closeup.) It is striking, once again, that the position of being compromised by viewing a scene through glass is precisely the position of the viewer, as if watching the film on television were an experience of the same order as being abused.76 At the same time, as the camera’s scrutiny of Spence’s and Morina’s eyes might suggest, just as their gazing eyes become a spectacle for us (as we, for example, watch on television Kevin watching television), the positions of gazing and gazed-on are peculiarly reversible, and the positions of abuser and abused are both simultaneously that of seeing too much and that of being too much seen. Thus if the audience is in some ways assaulted by the film, it is equally figured as implicated in the abuse of the boys. This is indicated most clearly by the filming of the boys themselves, which inscribes desire for them in the spectatorial economy of the film. In each of the four scenes of naked boys in showers (two scenes in each part of the film), the camera slowly pans down their backsides to dwell on their bottoms. In one of these scenes the camera follows shampoo washed out of a boy’s hair down his back until the soap cleaves his buttocks. These meandering suds seem to be as close as the film comes to a visual figure for anal sex. The eroticization of the scene and its staging for the camera seem to collapse anal penetration of the boys with the very act of looking at them. Regardless of the viewer’s “actual” arousal, the film’s highlighting of the visual pleasure of contemplating the form of the naked boy draws into proximity the penetrating of boys and the cinematic rapture generated by the film. One might argue that the shots of the naked boys identify, through reversals to Lavin’s eyes, his gaze as violating (and if there are any eyes more fetishized in this film than Morina’s and Spence’s, they are Czerny’s), and the eroticism of these shots would then be in the service of psychological “realism,” showing us the otherwise unimaginable spectacle of the boys as Lavin saw them. The opening of the film, however, suggests that if this gaze is Lavin’s, it is also ours. After a shot down a darkened hallway, four naked boys are shown lined up in front of urinals, and no viewer is posited for this equally erotic and highly composed shot other than the viewer of the film. In structural parallel, part 2 of the film similarly opens with a spectacle without a spectator: shots of black-and-white photographs of the younger boys and then, in extreme close-up, the young Kevin’s face and eyes (the image that ends part 1 as well). These shots of still photographs heighten the pathos of the boys’ predicament. The photographs seem partly a regretful picturing of lost innocence: they capitalize on the melancholy one nearly always feels when

231

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

232

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 232

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

looking at photographs of beautiful young people who are now old or dead. “This will be and this has been,” writes Roland Barthes of a portrait of a convict before his execution: “I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose, the photograph tells me of death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. . . . Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”77 For The Boys of St. Vincent, the suggestion is partly that we, but more important the boys themselves, relate to their younger selves in such a melancholy historical mode: their testimony attests to what, in the photographs, will have been, and the distance between them and the photographs becomes irremediable because of this fatality. That such a melancholy invocation of lost boyhoods is not, for the film, there simply to underline a moral point, however, is suggested by the shot’s visual pairing with the opening of part 1. The shot of four naked boys lined up in front of urinals and the melancholy gaze at old boyhood photographs, this pairing suggests, partake of the same eroticism and produce similar pleasures for a viewer.78 In spite of the film’s underlining of this eroticism, its scrutiny of the visual could again be in the service of a moral trajectory of reversal: just as the boys are abused, in part, by always being in view,79 Lavin is in turn exposed. The film highlights the way the formerly powerful Lavin is reduced to powerlessness through his submission to the gaze of the press, the public, and his wife (“I am going to see for myself,” she tells him, insisting on accompanying him back to Saint John’s from Montreal). Moreover, the film figures guilt as something that must be hidden from view. “We can’t be seen giving a million dollars to a bunch of perverts,” one government official says as the investigation in part 1 is shut down, and the archbishop says to a police official, “We all carry scars of one kind or another; I can only pray that ours will be less visible than others.” Thus Lavin, who once kept St. Vincent secure from the gaze of social workers and police officers, is left at the end of the film sitting alone with blinding sunlight shining in his face. Most simply, this trajectory is challenged because exposure is never simply reversed: if Lavin is exposed to view, Steven and Kevin equally suffer under the glare of the world’s scrutiny. More important, the film seems again to read the very desire to find this trajectory as implicated in abuse itself. On the one hand, the film baits its viewers with eroticized images of boys and ties this pedophilic desire to the cinematic absorption it generates. On the other, it figures, through its own structure, the desire for a punishment mirroring the crime as the desire for the narrative coherence that would unify the film. The desire for crime to mirror punishment, in other words, is a desire for narrative doubling, and the film gains coherence through a series of visual and narrative pairings. As on Noah’s ark,

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 233

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

nearly everything comes in pairs. On the level of characters, the film pairs Kevin and Lavin in part 2 through parallel shots of their eyes as they stare impassively away from both the camera and other characters around them. Similarly, Sheilah doubles both Donna and Chantal; Glackin doubles Glynn; and Steven, as the abjected third between Kevin and Brian, doubles the position of Lavin, who appears as a third term between Glackin and Glynn as the abuser who, unlike these two, does not look like an abuser. The narrative structure of the film also is built on structures of doubling and repetition, and the first part coheres because of a series of doubled images: for example, paired scenes of Kevin walking down darkened hallways, of naked boys in the shower, and of Lavin, in climactic scenes, standing next to an image of Christ lend structural coherence to the film. Similarly, certain narrative elements underline repetition seemingly in the service of moral reversal. Thus, when just before his trial Lavin kneels in his hotel room, fingering a rosary as he repeats “Hail Mary,” he seems to have become the man in the moral story he tells the children in part 1 (about a terrified man alone with his rosary), suggesting that he has entered the place prepared for him by his own narrative. More striking, perhaps, are two scenes in which Lavin kisses, in the first part, Kevin and, in the second, Chantal. They are shot from the same angle and contain the same gestures: a close-up shows Lavin unbuttoning Kevin’s and Chantal’s shirts; Lavin is placed in the same position (somewhat below each of them); the sound track (the sound of Lavin kissing) is the same; and both Kevin and Chantal gaze out of the frame (their eyes not visible to Lavin) in obvious displeasure. Such pairings, on the levels of images, characters, and plots, give the film its visual and narrative coherence; they are shown to be the ground of our own absorption in the film, an absorption that has already begun to double the positions of both the abusers and the abused. The film thus highlights reflexive structures of doubling; it highlights both the structure of its own filmic representation (pointing, for example, to the yoking together of sound and image, event and visual representation, signifier and signified) and the doubling structure underlying its narrative coherence. The foregrounding of doubled structures challenges the apparently straightforward morality of the film. Seemingly the most obvious way to read the critique of sealed moral reference and the breaking down of the catechism’s mirroring — namely, that it breaks down because of child abuse, that child abuse is the term that intrudes on the perfect mirroring of sign and referent in the catechism — is complicated by the scrutiny under which the film puts notions of visibility, doubling, and reversal. This structure is shown to be not simply the beleaguered but upright grounding of an unquestioned morality unmoored only by the exorbitance of child abuse, but rather

233

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

234

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 234

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

the structuring condition of that abuse, of any easy moral reaction to it, and of our own desire in watching a narrative film. Thus abuse appears as in part a function of our desire for significatory clarity, played out both in an ostensible moral trajectory in the film and in the narrative structure of the film. By situating the viewer’s visual pleasure in the structure of abuse and exposure and, in a larger sense, by questioning the grounds of visual and moral reference in its presentation of the story of St. Vincent, the film complicates any easy moral reaction to it. It suggests that Lavin may really have loved the boys he abused; that, moreover, one can find the bodies of these boys desirable without condoning child abuse; that in fact such desire is the necessary, if usually disavowed, ground of a moral reaction itself.

Conclusion I have tried to suggest some of the political repercussions of the picture of representation that animates and ruptures the ostensible moralism of the press coverage of Mount Cashel and the reviews of The Boys of St. Vincent, a moralism tied to the constituting of the child as an innocent and unknowing origin. I have tried to highlight the unspoken strategies through which a seemingly necessary discursive incoherence can mask itself by assigning its traumatic “fault of cognition” to the indistinguishable erring categories of the child abuser and the homosexual.80 I have attempted to show how The Boys of St. Vincent negotiates and interrogates these representational politics. One danger for this reading is that it might be difficult to maintain a precarious distance from a reinscription of a homophobic logic of abjection. In other words, the representational disturbances scrutinized by the film, the frustration of an easy trajectory of crime and punishment, might be less a critique of such moralism than a dramatization of the conniving erring duplicities of homosexuality and pedophilia. To put structures of moral reference and reversal into question might endorse the moralism while seeking a scapegoat for its demise, in effect leaving the principles of the moralism intact. In other terms, the film’s troubling of a simple model of reference might be seen as already inscribed in the dubious pleasures of a self-evacuating Narcissus; the baiting of the film, then, would be explicitly geared toward the abjecting of homosexual and pedophilic desire, not only in the more lurid images of naked boys but, more generally, in the film’s figuring of cinematic rapture in terms of a fixated reflective gaze. The self-subversion of the reflexive and doubling structures of the film would proceed with the confidence that it need do nothing to ensure that this desire would be abjected; if narcissism can be counted on to be anything, it can be counted on to be self-destructive.81 The disruption of the film’s moral trajectory

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 235

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

would then be in the service of that morality; its disruption would be contained in and abjected through the figure of a self-ravishing and rapt, homosexually identified narcissist. The film would merely repeat, rather than critique, the representational structures I have explored. However, it is through the film’s proximity to such a reading that it avoids this dynamic of abjection. The moments when the film seems most explicitly homophobic are the moments when it most registers its own distance from this homophobia. In other words, I would read the film’s baiting in precisely the opposite way: it baits a moralistic reading the better to unsettle its premises and its conclusions. Moreover, the film’s structures of doubling cast this doubling not as a peculiar and isolated readerly choice but as the most generalized necessity of reading itself. The identifying of narrative pleasure with child abuse serves not to expose and abject this pleasure but to show how both, and the strategies one has to deal with them, are caught up in the same representational dynamics. By skirting the possibility of abjecting representational disturbances as inherent in the narcissistic self-betrayal of the pedophile and the homosexual, the film enfolds this possibility as another form of bait, inscribing the desire for this closure in the cinematic absorption through which the film interrogates and betrays the assumptions underlying the ease of moral reaction to the abuse of a transcendently innocent child. Homophobia has never relied on the unbreachable coherence of its articulation to sustain its hegemony, and pointing to fissures in its edifice, perhaps merely reasserting its phantasmic coherence, is as easy as pointing to the ways it inevitably partakes in the very desires and practices it marginalizes. A demystification of incoherence in homophobic ideology does not necessarily undermine it and might only offer one the pathos of experiencing the gulf between constative and performative language and of realizing that to gain cognitive leverage in a situation does not necessarily change it. To dwell on the pathos of disempowerment and the ruses of demystification, however, is to enjoy melancholy compensations that are not dissimilar to those of dwelling, with inflamed, but rapt and immobile, outrage, on the image of a violated sacrosanct childhood innocence. If I have no delusions that my taking apart journalistic writing — deftly or not — does much more than provide me with entertainment, I nevertheless insist on the importance of reading critically the rhetoric around child abuse for an antihomophobic theory and practice, and not merely because an antihomophobic project should work to understand how all sexual oppressions are linked and related, to understand that freedom purchased for one sexual minority with the oppression of another achieves but a tenuous grasp on a freedom that is hardly worth having. I have therefore avoided equating pedophilia and child abuse, just as I have avoided denying that

235

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

236

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 236

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

I am a pedophile. I have also avoided qualifying my argument with any pacifying nod toward the well-known reprehensibility of child abuse or with any historical contextualization that would generalize about current power relations in our culture in order to rule out equalities in sexual relations between adults and children. While I cannot claim to know whether such assertions are true, I have avoided such qualifications because every rebuttal I can think of — such as that the raising of children into sociality and sexuality is, by nature, abusive, though of course to varying degrees; or that there is no such thing as a sexual relation of equality; or, more pastorally, that child love can be beautiful — gives up the very argument I have wanted to make: these rejoinders partake, more or less clandestinely, in the reification of a prior, uncontaminated purity of childhood that can be shown, in every case, to participate in the sadistic pleasures of purity’s ruin. Such models of purity are important and dangerous for many reasons, including the rhetoric of contamination flung with assaultive regularity at every queer who contemplates becoming a parent or a teacher — not to mention anyone who ever contemplates becoming a queer. Blame for the violation of childhood nearly always devolves onto the nearest deviant, and the suggestion that children have desires, especially gay desires, is read as already a form of seduction: all desires are contaminating, as they are all perhaps mimetic, but some are more mimetically contaminating than others. Challenging a notion of childhood purity is thus a necessary step toward thinking our way out of the paranoid (but not for that unpleasurable) double bind that polices perhaps all of us, of never knowing whether or not we are child molesters.

Notes Many readers have helped me with this essay. Thanks especially to Ewa Badowska, Russell Bergstein, Bonnie Blackwell, Carolyn Dinshaw, David M. Halperin, Ellis Hanson, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Mary Jacobus, James Kincaid, Antonia Losano, Anne Mallory, Kolin Ohi, Rachel Roze, and an anonymous reader for GLQ. 1.

Lance Morrow’s essay “A Boy Dies in the ’90s: Nothing Human Is Foreign? Nothing Foreign Is Human? Choose One,” Time, 20 October 1997, 120 — an essay I find idiotic— is but one recent example, chosen virtually at random. Citing the murder of ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Susan Smith’s murder of her children in South Carolina, and Leopold and Loeb’s murder of Bobby Franks, the essay seems to have been occasioned, most immediately, by the murder of eleven-year-old Edward Werner by Sam Manzie, then fifteen, in New Jersey. This murder, reported in Time a week earlier (Gina Belafante, “Finding Trauma Next Door: A Child’s Murder

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 237

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

2.

Reveals a Separate Tragedy: A Victim Turned Victimizer,” Time, 13 October 1997, 41–42), is usually blamed on “convicted pederast Stephen Simmons,” who was having an affair with Manzie. It never occurs to Time in its reporting or to Morrow in his commentary to blame Manzie’s parents, who ended the affair, tried unsuccessfully to institutionalize their son, and helped convince him to cooperate with an official investigation of his lover. Nor is the investigation ever seriously criticized. Rather, a “convicted pederast” lurks in the gloomy background at the beginning of a radically underspecified causal chain ending in the murder of a child. According to Morrow, such “atrocities” produce in “us” a natural will to violence: “A healthy character, in its raw state, is a nasty little fascist, equipped with an intolerant immune system; it rejects such deeds as the Cambridge murder and necrophilia in the way that a healthy body rejects an invasion of microbes.” The link between a healthy character and a healthy immune system in Morrow’s incoherent metaphorics (is it good or bad to be a fascist?) shows that a certain self-satisfied homophobia never goes out of fashion, but the essay’s violence does not end there. Imagining, but not specifying, a punishment “more vivid and, so to speak, Islamic” than execution for Curley’s murderers, Morrow later invokes the lynch mob as one of the four personified attributes of human nature (along with the psychiatrist, the theologian, and the lawyer). By casting the lynch mob as one of the personified elements in his little allegory, Morrow provides his readers with the satisfactions of an imagined lynching without ever having explicitly to endorse the practice. Lynching is invoked instead as an all-too-human, even justifiable, reaction to difference; moreover, by suppressing the racial history of lynching, he capitalizes on (and implicitly naturalizes) this country’s reservoir of racial hatred, redirecting its violence toward pedophiles. In Morrow’s truly hateful logic, violence toward pedophiles and violence toward racial minorities justify and energize each other. The essay ends in a pseudoreflective suspension between the forces of reason and the forces of nature, concluding, illogically, that the law will have to sort things out but that “even the knowledge is contaminating.” Morrow does not make clear what this knowledge is or who may have it. Implicit, nevertheless, both in his statements about natural reactions to abuse stories and in the article’s irresolute “position” is the assumption that to know — or to attempt to know — pedophilic desires poses a threat to the very category of the human. This scrutiny comes in spite of the fact that discussions of abuse in self-help discourse, certain strands of feminist theory and practice, and the debates about “recovered memory” largely center on female survivors of incest. Regardless of the attention that the recovered memory debates have brought to questions of incest (often, unfortunately, in ways that do more to confirm than to challenge heteronormativity), what interests me here is the lurid fascination that surrounds accounts and depictions of gay male pedophilia. The gay male pedophile is the latest vampiric figure in public panics about sexuality, and portrayals of his misdeeds form a veritable subgenre in television and Hollywood film.

237

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

238

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 238

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

For an effective polemical argument with a theoretical frame different from mine see Pat Califia, “The Age of Consent: The Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of ’77” and “The Aftermath of the Great Kiddy-Porn Panic of ’77,” in Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex (Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1994), 39 – 52, 53 – 69. Califia, addressing her remarks to a gay audience, persuasively argued (almost twenty years ago) against demonizing pedophiles (and, more generally, against valorizing a project of gay normalization), since such efforts at scapegoating and abjection can backfire on the queer who attempts to exploit their exonerating force. More recently, James Kincaid’s brilliant books Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) have examined the work of eroticization performed by our culture’s obsessive “protection” of children from child molesters. Kincaid does not offer a sustained analysis of the relation between homophobia and such rhetorics of protection. But because he is among the first contemporary writers to submit the discourse around child molestation to critical analysis — to assert, in fact, that there is something beyond the reiterated self-evident to read in this discourse — his work is central to any thinking about children and sexuality. Thus, although my theoretical orientation and some of my conclusions differ from his, I am indebted throughout to his valuable insights. Thanks to Ellis Hanson for pointing me to Califia’s essays and Kincaid’s work. It is perhaps already clear that this essay focuses primarily on male same-sex intergenerational relationships and the way that their phobic depiction (as, for example, “abuse” pure and simple) dovetails with homophobia, particularly, though not exclusively, as it is deployed against gay men. I do not address either female same-sex or cross-gender relationships. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984). Tracing this conception of childhood to Locke and Rousseau, Rose follows the evolution of the “text” of Peter Pan itself and the metamorphosis of its contradictory versions into the original, if not simply the, children’s story. The history of Peter Pan, she argues, mirrors the fraught production of the child as an analogous origin. Barrie’s text, which continually recedes from us (and which Barrie himself seemed unable to complete), takes up the position of the child as an innocent origin that paradoxically appears only in retrospect, an origin intelligible only as the prior state posited to make possible and meaningful its inevitable violation. Peter Pan thus allows the highly sexualized attention to the spectacle of the child to take on the meaning of innocence (Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 99). Jeff Nunokawa suggests that such models allow the celebration of forbidden erotic bonds within a structure of mourning that casts them as aspects of a developmental stage that has been overcome (“In Memoriam and the Extinction of the Homosexual,” ELH 58 [1991]: 427– 38). Such a model of “regression” to or “fixation” at an earlier

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 239

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

“stage” of development — almost, but perhaps not quite, redeemed by a lushness of description that wallows in the evocation of what has been lost in growing up — also informs certain debased psychoanalytic accounts of homosexuality, including some offered by Freud himself. 8. Nora Underwood, “The Abuse of Children,” Maclean’s, 27 November 1989, 56. 9. The shift from seduction to unconscious fantasy is much more complicated than I have indicated here. For concise accounts of the complexity of this shift in psychoanalysis see Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986), 5 – 33, esp. 11; and Laplanche and Pontalis, “Scene of Seduction; Theory of Seduction,” in The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Norton, 1973), 404– 8, esp. 407. 10. Sylvia Fraser, “Freud’s Final Seduction,” Saturday Night, March 1994, 18 – 29, ProQuest Direct, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York, 26 February 2000 . Although Fraser’s article seems to diffuse any criticism of it through its assurance of its own unbreachable moral rectitude (which is, admittedly, strengthened by the sometimes moving — though sometimes comic [she has repeated dreams that she is the concubine of “King Farouk”]— accounts of her own experience of incest), and although its misreadings of Freud and its crescendo of self-subvertingly shrill (and racist) hyperbole (“I was, in reality, bred as my father’s concubine. . . . though we may not run child brothels, as in Thailand or in the Philippines, what we take for granted as the stability of family life may well depend upon the sexual slavery of our children”) may be predictable popular reactions to Freud, the article is nonetheless shocking in its conclusion, which seems sadistically to envision Freud’s death from cancer as his well-deserved punishment for not believing the reports of incest victims: Freud obeyed the demands of society and “killed [the] Frankenstein monster” of his original seduction theory, “but did the gun go off in his face?” Her essay closes with an account of Freud’s death, dwelling on his demand that his doctor end his unbearable pain. This closing tableau aside, I would simply note that Fraser’s reading, although it often intelligently questions the “myth of an ordinary childhood” and suggests that child abuse may be endemic to the structure of patriarchy, reinscribes the very ideology she attempts to subvert through its resolute reliance on an innocent victim. 11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 64. 12. It perhaps goes without saying that this ideological construct of the child has had its most disastrous results in AIDS prevention education for children and teens. For it is only within the delusional frame determined by the concept of a completely blank childhood innocence that explaining to kids how to have safer sex can become synonymous with forcing them to have sex. More generally, it is disastrous whenever potentially gay children are told that they cannot have gay teachers for fear that if they did, they might turn out to be gay.

239

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

240

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 240

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

13. Ibid., 43. 14. Fraser, “Freud’s Final Seduction.” 15. Committee on Sexual Offences against Children and Youths, Sexual Offences against Children (Badgley Report), vol. 1 (Ottawa: Department of Supply and Services Canada, 1984), 193, 181. 16. Danny O’Quinn, in private conversation in 1995, offered these observations on the centrality of the Roman Catholic Church in the social and educational support of economically depressed areas of the Maritime Provinces in Canada. 17. Nora Underwood, “Charges of a Coverup: Disturbing Testimony about Mount Cashel,” Maclean’s, 4 December 1989, 66. 18. It is perhaps not surprising that coverage of the events at Mount Cashel often focused on the Roman Catholic Church’s structure and traditions, particularly the celibacy of the clergy: “Certainly, the current crisis has shaken the foundations of several central elements of Catholic tradition. The most common charge is that the church’s insistence on celibacy for priests increases sexual frustration. Several speakers attending the Winter inquiry [a Catholic inquiry into the problem of child abuse at church institutions] have suggested that priests should be allowed to marry” (Greg W. Taylor, “Sins of the Flesh: Anger and Shame Grip the Roman Catholic Church in Scandals That Involve Priests and Sex Crimes,” Maclean’s, 17 July 1989, 10). Dare one ask: sexual frustration for whom? At any rate, this peculiarly economic, even hydraulic, vision of desire sees a particular object as completely irrelevant, denaturalizing heterosexual desire even as it reinscribes all desire in a family structure: if sexuality is the (presumptively male) letting off of sexual steam into the nearest convenient vessel, the only proper release of steam occurs within the confines of the (heterosexual) family. 19. Glen Allen, review of Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel, by Michael Harris, Maclean’s, 14 January 1991, 51. 20. Underwood, “Charges of a Coverup,” 66. 21. Nora Underwood, “Sex and Scandal: An Inquiry Hears Graphic Allegations of Abuse,” Maclean’s, 30 October 1989, 84. 22. Allen, review of Unholy Orders, 51. 23. B. Ruby Rich, “Far-from-Mainstream Films: Two That Fight the Current — A Canadian Scandal Retold as Fiction,” New York Times, 29 May 1994, sec. 2, 9. 24. D’Arcy Jenish, “Every Parent’s Nightmare,” Maclean’s, 22 June 1992, 24. 25. My understanding of the paranoid dynamics around homosexuality in the field of the visible relies heavily on Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. “Homographesis” (3 – 23) and “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex” (173–91); and D. A. Miller, “Anal Rope,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 119 – 41. For the

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 241

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

definitive account of homosexual panic as a drama of an interiorized double bind occasioned by moments of indeterminacy (where the most accepted bonds between men cannot be distinguished from the most reprobated ones), as well as an account of the intertwining of misogyny and homophobia in the articulation of compulsory heterosexuality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic” (182–212). Jenish, “Every Parent’s Nightmare,” 24. Underwood, “Abuse of Children,” 56. The drugs that are so blandly referred to here are often horrible, not least because they are often carcinogenic. For a concise account of some of the unpleasant side effects of perhaps the most popular of these drugs, Depo-Provera, as well as details about some of the chilling ways it has been used on prison inmates, women in the Third World, and others, usually without consent, see Daniel C. Tsang, “Policing ‘Perversions’: Depo-Provera and John Money’s New Sexual Order,” Journal of Homosexuality 28 (1995): 397–426. Tsang writes: “The list of effects and side effects associated with Depo-Provera when used on males reads like a phantasmagoria of medical symptoms, including: increased appetite and weight gain of 15 –20 pounds, fatigue, mental depression, hyperglycemia, impotence, abnormal sperm, lowered frequency and intensity of thoughts/erections/ejaculations, lowered ejaculatory volume, insomnia, nightmares, dypsnea [sic] (difficulty in breathing), hot and cold flashes, loss of body hair, nausea, leg cramps, irregular gall bladder [sic] function, diverticulitis, aggravation of migraine, hypogonadism, elevation of the blood pressure, hypertension, phlebitis, diabetic sequelae, thrombosis (leading to heart attack), and shrinkage of the prostate and seminal vessels.” Evidence of Depo-Provera’s carcinogenic effects is more definitive in the case of women subjected to the drug; for men, however, the side effects are horrible enough that the fact that it is prescribed (by doctors and courts) points to a murderous disregard for the civil rights of sex offenders. Glen Allen, “A Church in Crisis: Sex Scandals Shake Newfoundlanders’ Faith,” Maclean’s, 27 November 1989, 66. I would also note in passing how often pedophilia is referred to as a “compulsive” sexual attraction to children (ibid.), as if there could be such a thing as sexual desire without compulsion. Such phrasing implicitly sets up “normal” sexuality as something controlled, while it also admits some degree of “normal” (vis-à-vis compulsive) sexual attraction to children. See, e.g., Glen Allen, “A Breach of Faith,” Maclean’s, 13 March 1989, 16. Ibid. Nora Underwood, “Scandal on the Rock: Newfoundland Is Shaken by Charges of Abuse,” Maclean’s, 2 October 1989, 61. I refer to Sedgwick’s discussions in Tendencies, 23–51, and Epistemology of the Closet, 4– 8.

241

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

242

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 242

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

35. Fraser, “Freud’s Final Seduction.” 36. The connection to male homosexuality is also asserted in Fraser’s phrasing of the “gentlemen’s agreement,” which suggests that child abuse is really a substitute for men’s desires for each other. 37. Taylor, “Sins of the Flesh,” 10. 38. Jon Matsumoto, “A&E to Air ‘The Boys of St. Vincent’—Television: Controversial Canadian Film Has Won Critical Acclaim for Its Thoughtful Portrayal of Sexual Abuse in a Catholic Orphanage,” Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1995, F2. 39. Janet Maslin, “Orphans in the Hold of an Evil Authority,” New York Times, 1 June 1994, C11, 18. 40. Michael Wilmington, “‘Boys’ Underscores Trauma of Sexual Abuse,” Chicago Tribune, 11 November 1994, microfilm, K. 41. Jay Carr, “Bleak and Powerful ‘Boys of St. Vincent,’ ” Boston Globe, 16 December 1994, 55. 42. James Martin, television review of The Boys of St. Vincent, America, 18 February 1995, 25; Phil Kloer, “A Chilling Tale of Clergy, Children,” Atlanta Constitution, 17 February 1995, P23; Steve Murray, “‘The Boys of St. Vincent’: Look at Abuse Turns Viewers into Believers,” Atlanta Constitution, 14 October 1994, P14. 43. Martin, television review of Boys, 25. 44. Maslin, “Orphans,” C11; Rich, “Far-from-Mainstream Films,” sec. 2, 9. 45. Martin, television review of Boys, 25; Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55; Howard Rosenberg, “Neither Big Nor Great, They’re Still Miniseries,” Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1995, F28. 46. Diane Turbide, “The Hidden Terror: A Strong Drama Outlines the Abuse of Orphans,” Maclean’s, 7 December 1992, 67; Murray, “Boys,” P14. 47. Peter Stack, “Painful Look at Pedophilia: ‘Boys’ Based on True Story of Abuse in Orphanage,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 February 1995, C3; Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55; Rosenberg, “Neither Big Nor Great,” F28; Matt Roush, “‘St. Vincent’ Is No ‘Boys Town,’” USA Today, 17 February 1995, D3. Italics added. 48. Roush, “St. Vincent,” D3. 49. Bruce Headlam, “It Ain’t Easy Being Mean,” interview with Henry Czerny, Saturday Night, March 1995, 79. 50. Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55. 51. David Ansen, “Dark Side of the Church — Television: An Extraordinary Film about Abuse,” Newsweek, 20 February 1995, 69. Italics added. 52. Roush’s review features a photograph of Czerny carrying Morina, their heads almost side by side, with the enticing caption “GRIM FILM: Henry Czerny, top, and Johnny Morina star in ‘St. Vincent.’” The description of the photograph seems also to describe a sex act: does it take a pervert to think that what is missing from the caption is Morina’s “bottom”? Similarly, Wilmington’s description of the “crystalline” clarity of the film introduces a peculiarly sexualized opacity of double entendre into the orphan-

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 243

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

53.

54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

age: “When ‘St. Vincent’s’ central character — Henry Czerny as . . . Brother Peter Lavin . . .— cracks in his bare office and begins embracing his ‘favorite,’ 10-year-old Kevin Reevey (Johnny Morina), the scene has a silvery clarity that suggests Lavin’s deranged bliss even while it coolly records his transgressions. And the orphanage itself is bathed in that same crystalline light, open to that same unblinking gaze” (“Boys,” K). I do not know if my acute pleasure comes from contemplating a bare crack or simply from the beautiful idea of “deranged bliss.” Similarly, the conflation of the film with “real” events is given a paradoxical formulation by Turbide: “The series also features some interesting cameos, including one by Derek O’Brien, a former Mount Cashel victim, as the policeman who arrests Lavin. O’Brien’s appearance strikes a note of poetic justice. And The Boys of St. Vincent, with its unpalatable home truths, has brutal but redemptive power” (“Hidden Terror,” 67). I do not know what “unpalatable home truths” are (meat loaf? tuna casserole?) or what they have to do with a “brutal but redemptive power.” But the redemption seems to come in part from a confusion of representational frames. For this is quite literally “poetic” justice: O’Brien is avenged by arresting, in a film, the character based on one of the brothers who abused him. Rich, “Far-from-Mainstream Films,” sec. 2, 9; Matsumoto, “A&E to Air,” F2. It is interesting to note in passing that the scenes with the therapist (improvised in one afternoon when Czerny put his character through therapy [see Headlam, “It Ain’t Easy Being Mean,” 79]), scenes highly praised for the depth they added to Czerny’s character, were completely a by-product of concern for the children’s safety. For example, the sexual politics of praising the riveting realism of Czerny’s performance is never questioned when his performance is compared to Ralph Fiennes’s portrayal of a Nazi in Schindler’s List (1993), to Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (Stack, who also notes that the film is not homophobic [“Painful Look,” C3]), to Iago (Carr, who notes that Lavin remains “as impenetrable as Iago” [“Bleak and Powerful,” 55]), and to Dickens’s Fagin (Rosenberg, “Neither Big Nor Great,” F28). Headlam, “It Ain’t Easy Being Mean,” 79. Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55; Murray, “Boys,” P14. Steven is a male prostitute, which, if it does not necessarily identify him as gay, does associate him with gay sex, which Kevin seems to have surpassed. Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55. Rosellen Brown, “When Bad Things Happen to ‘Boys Town,’ ” New York Times, 19 February 1995, H34. Italics, except “not” and “is,” added. Brown’s review is framed as a critique of Newt Gingrich’s infamous proposal to put the children of unwed mothers in orphanages; in part for polemical effect, then, Brown’s review marks no significant difference between the “real” world of the film and the “real” world of Gingrich’s America. This conflation is apparent, for example, in the peculiar placement of secrecy, exposure, and the real world when Brown writes: “Its

243

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

244

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 244

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

[the film’s] achievement is in the way it painfully captures the loneliness and vulnerability of children without protectors. It isn’t only fear that darkens souls like Kevin’s; it is the terrible isolation of lives lived in public, in harsh and unforgiving light, with no one but one’s fellow sufferers to confide in and be comforted by. “In the real world, which has never been a ‘Boys Town,’ where secrets can least easily be kept, unwholesome secrets flourish. That’s what we see in the uncertain glances of these children under the endless scrutiny of strangers. Isolation, the summons to the office of authority, the walk down the long polished hall, the clamor — years of it — of waking to a military muster. How can these little boys ever feel the security of loved children who know that they are irreplaceable? “Some children are unlucky enough to have to be raised by the state. But how could any politician with clear vision and honest intentions entertain the illusion that compulsory group life can be a panacea for poor, unstable families?” (ibid., H36). This passage is not remarkable for its coherence: what, for example, is the relation between the difficulty of keeping secrets and their unwholesome flourishing? It is a confusing passage for many reasons, but largely because of its sliding between the film and the “real world” (particularly the transition to the unspecified place of the real world [“In the real world, . . . where . . .”]). On the one hand, the real world is the life that the boys experience in the second part of the film, when they have to testify at the trial of Brother Lavin. On the other hand, it is the world outside the film. Thus the “harsh and unforgiving light” that victimizes them is simultaneously the public scrutiny they suffer, the gaze of authority in the orphanage (from which it is difficult to keep secrets), the light that exposes the abuse there, and, ideally, the “clear vision” and “honest intentions” of the politician who (unlike Gingrich) would see that orphanages were not the answer to social problems in America. 63. That Brown never successfully challenges Gingrich’s rhetoric — his dizzying alternation between moist sentimentality and harsh vindictiveness—grows in part out of this confusion of referential register, which attempts to combat Gingrich on the level of “content” rather than “form.” Brown’s failure effectively to address Gingrich’s rhetoric perhaps illustrates why it was so successful: his opponents often resorted to dire images of starving children that, whatever his proposals’ effects, remained on the same level as his fictive rhetoric. Gingrich’s “Contract with America” pushed the opposition between fiction and reality to its vanishing point, giving American domestic policy an ambience that without exaggeration might have been called Dickensian, and part of the difficulty of resisting Gingrich’s rhetoric and its aftermath had to do with its improbability. Exorbitantly unbelievable, it often placed more demands on our suspension of disbelief than any work of fiction. 64. Brown, “Bad Things,” H34. 65. Consider not only the ambivalent example of Good-bye to All That (1929) but also the extremely popular novels focusing, more or less explicitly, on the public school as an enabling locus of male homoeroticism. These novels certainly served other

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 245

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

purposes and often encased homoerotic potential in an abjecting developmental model (killing off one lover for sentimental effect, helping one or the other transcend the relationship and accede to heterosexuality, or both), and they are often marred by a dispiriting misogyny that is seemingly part of an even more dispiriting masculinist ideology, often subsumed under “passing the love of woman.” Similarly, they often depict breathtaking violence — not to eroticize it, as Swinburne might lead us to hope, but, much less interestingly, often simply to gloat about how much these manly little boys are able to bear. However they may partake of the disciplining technologies of masculine subjectivity, such novels articulate a space where samesex eroticism momentarily becomes not only possible but celebrated. They include Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1858), Sturgis’s Tim (1891), Vachell’s Hill: A Romance of Friendship (1905), and perhaps also Forster’s Maurice (1971) and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Although these novels might read today as either repressive and masculinist or else quivering, neurotic, and “repressed,” they began to articulate a place for male subjectivity and same-sex eroticism outside the family. Modern films have picked up on this tradition. Another Country (1984), School Ties (1992), Dead Poets’ Society (1989), The Browning Version (1994, remake of a 1951 film), Toy Soldiers (1991), Scent of a Woman (1992), Oxford Blues (1984), Taps (1981), and, obviously, Maurice (1987) and Brideshead Revisited (1982), among others, exploit, to vastly different ends, the homoerotic potential of the American private or British public schools. A similar tradition — with a slightly different genealogy — informs depictions of girls’ schools, from Havelock Ellis’s “School-Friendships of Girls” (appendix D to Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2 of Sexual Inversion [Philadelphia: Davis, 1908], 243 – 57) to films such as Mädchen in Uniform (1931, 1958), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Therese and Isabelle (1968), The Children’s Hour (1961), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). 66. I do not mean to imply that Steven’s gay sex as an adult is “equivalent” to any sex he may have had with the brothers at St. Vincent. My reading contends, among other things, that a moralistic account of the film would rely on such a notion of equivalence and that the inability to distinguish between these sex acts would mark a homophobic reading. Such an account would also be unable to distinguish between pedophilic sex and abuse and would state categorically that all sex between adults and children is equivalent, that it is always and everywhere abusive. The film puts pressure on such easy equivalences and thus challenges easy moral adjudications intertwined with homophobic certainties. 67. It is notable in this context that Kevin and Steven seem to be two sides of the “real-life” person who started the Mount Cashel hearings, Shane Earle, who, according to his own testimony, molested younger orphans. As Underwood reports: “In his testimony last week, Earle . . . [said] that during the late 1970’s, he saw older boys having sex with younger boys. Earle himself became the subject of a 1982 investigation after five resi-

245

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

246

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 246

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

dents complained to relatives that they had been abused by Earle and another boy. Earle told the hearing, ‘I was partial to sexual acts by older boys with myself, and later getting involved with my peers and boys much younger than myself’” (“Sex and Scandal,” 84). The ambiguity of the molested who molests is never quite contained by accounts—of varying theoretical sophistication—of the identificatory processes through which an abused child becomes an abuser. This “cycle of abuse” presents yet another version of the excruciating tautology that becomes formally synonymous with abuse. For unambiguous moral reactions to abuse, such explanatory accounts lay bare the moralist’s vengeful lust for the putative victim, for pity never evaporates quite so quickly as when the abused turns to abuse, even though this introjective dynamic is supposed to be a natural part of the cycle of abuse. Indeed, such an abused abuser would, one suspects, “count” as a victim, were such ambiguity sustainable in this moralizing discourse and were he not too old to titillate anyone who wanted to imagine him victimized. Carr, “Bleak and Powerful,” 55. It is partly the phobic charge of male same-sex sex acts combined with a picture of punishment as the inverted image of the crime that makes for such ecstatic scenes of violence in representations of child abuse. Thus, for example, the film Sleepers (1996) (dismal despite its photogenic protagonists) cannot pump enough bullets into the nasty molester Kevin Bacon (violence that the film justifies by asserting that there is not a single miserable detail in any of their miserable lives that cannot be directly linked to and explained by his abuse). These hyperbolically violent scenes of retribution seek to break the charged circle that would make retribution mirror the crime, unwilled sodomitical penetration for unwilled sodomitical penetration. The very mirroring that makes for such punitive adequation, that links the punishment to the crime and justifies the punishment, threatens to make the punishment indistinguishable from the crime. Even such violent excesses cannot escape this closed system, for, within a phobic framework in which sex between men (or between a man and a boy) can be legible only as a violent breach of the penetrated partner’s subjectivity — and is, if not the limit of, then at least the figure par excellence for, all such violation — the more violently one rips open the body of the perpetrator in retribution, the more the violence looks like a figure for the original act, a figure that cannot, moreover, sustain its figurative status and slides into mere repetition. Fortunately for films like Sleepers, sometimes a sufficiently virulent homophobia can be insulating enough to ensure that viewers can thoroughly enjoy themselves in spite of these precarious proximities. The correlate in the second half of the film would be Steven and Brian’s discussion of forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” is the moment in the Lord’s Prayer when Brian walks out of Steven’s funeral. It is notable in this context that Chantal’s final speech marks not only an inversion of power but a repetition, of the scenes of discursive intimidation and of an already doubled structure. “Take the following two scenes enacted in a shopping mall, say, or on the street or in

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 247

CHILD ABUSE AND THE BOYS OF ST. VINCENT

73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

the park,” writes Kincaid. “In the first an adult is striking a screaming child repeatedly on the buttocks; in the second an adult is sitting with a child on a bench and they are hugging. Which scene is more common? Which makes us uneasy? Which do we judge to be normal? Which is more likely to run afoul of the law? A society, I believe, which honors hitting and suspects hugging is immoral; one which sees hitting as health and hugging as illness is mad; one which is aroused by hitting alone is psychotic and ought to be locked up” (Child-Loving, 362). At least since the late 1980s touching has been a favorite word of “educators” and public service spokespeople, who delight in manipulating its embarrassing euphemistic primness to designate sexual abuse. My sense of the paradoxical role of the promise is inflected by Paul de Man, “Promises (Social Contract),” in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 246 –77; and Ian Balfour, “Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/ Inchbald),” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 225 –50. The film eventually tells us that the good-hearted janitor, who is fired for taking Kevin to the hospital, is unable to read or write. Only illiteracy seems to guarantee immunity from specular fixation and linguistic duplicity, and only the illiterate, it seems, can speak frankly and avoid the erotic allure of boys. Perhaps the most poignant shot of Kevin in part 1 is not in any of the scenes where he is abused but in the penultimate scene, where he is shown watching a brother abuse Steven after the police investigation has been shut down and Lavin has left the orphanage. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 1984), 96. In part 1, long before there is any explicit abuse, the camera dwells on the hands of the brothers touching different boys. Each of these encounters is seemingly innocent (usually a brother touches a boy on the shoulder or back or pats him on the head). What makes them something other than innocent is the insistence with which the camera focuses on them in isolation. The film leaves open to question whether it is the touching or the filming of the touching that is erotic and/or abusive, making it difficult to separate a depiction of lost innocence (no matter how moralistically it may be glossed) from eroticism. Thus Brian’s remark to Kevin that Steven died because he “was spread out for the whole world to look at” is only the final time that the film highlights Steven’s victimization in such terms. After he has been raped by one of the brothers, for example, Steven shouts at the cafeteria full of gaping boys, “What are you looking at?” and appears, the last time we see him alive, on television as the voice-over from the newscast details his drug abuse, prostitution, and abuse of other boys in the orphanage. Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,”

247

1026-02.Ohi (195-248)

248

5/1/00

12:26 PM

Page 248

GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 48 (1991): 535. 81. As Anita Sokolsky writes: “Narcissus requires no other retribution than his insatiable yearning to make him pine away. Thus those who censure narcissism always manage to remain outside of its charged circle. Narcissism has the peculiar status of an impulse which inflames the structure of authority which condemns it, yet against which such authority does not even need to raise a finger, secure in the knowledge that narcissism must ultimately destroy itself” (“‘A Commission That Never Materialized’: Narcissism and Lucidity in Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’ ” in John Ashbery, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1985], 234).

molestation 101

archy, reinscribes the very ideology she attempts to subvert through its resolute reliance on an innocent victim. 11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies ...

247KB Sizes 16 Downloads 108 Views

Recommend Documents

Read Online Evolutionary Psychology 101 (Psych 101)
appetite of a growing number of students who have been inspired by this provocative, ... Publishing Company. 2013-10-10 q. Language : English q. ISBN-10 : ...

Geocaching 101
to learn about longitude and latitude (thanks to ACME)). Letterbox(ing). Letterboxing is similar to Geocaching, but you use a series of clues to find a container.

Christian Leadership 101
To aid your Bible study, we recommend consulting a good commentary such as .... or call USA 1-800-772-8888 • AUSTRALIA +61 3 9762 6613 • CANADA ...

101.pdf
¿Puedo mirar tu pañal? Guido Van Genechten. El gato tragón. Patacrúa. Sapo y Sepo, inseparables. Arnold Lobel. Las diez gallinas. Sylvia Dupuis. Una nube.

'— [3m 101
Nov 14, 1995 - level softWare algorithm of the audit monitoring system. DESCRIPTION .... capable of tracking the number of times the interior of the vending machine ...... 310 has indicated that cash be paid back to the customer through the ...

Christian Leadership 101
do in public—is important. But our ... What other questions and observations does the text prompt? ... We cleanse ourselves for service through obedience. For a.

'— [3m 101
Nov 14, 1995 - to retro?t applications, vending machine audit monitoring system 10 is particularly adapted to interface With a large variety of different types of ...

BRDE-101- English
Bachelor's Degree Programme. (BDP). Elective Course. Rural Development: Indian Context. Assignment. (For students admitted in. July 2016 and January 2017 ...

101 Formulaic Alphas - arXiv
Dec 9, 2015 - Free University of Tbilisi, Business School & School of Physics. 240, David Agmashenebeli ... Business School and the School of Physics at Free University of Tbilisi. ...... Grinold, R.C. and Kahn, R.N. “Active Portfolio Management.â€

Screenwriting 101
THE BUSINESS OF SCREENWRITING . .... The horror film producer has rejected more than a dozen ideas presented ..... Small though the town may be, how-.

FMIP-101 O O
Answer all the ten questions. 10x2=20. 1. How does Hobbes define Property ? 2. Define Intellectual Property Rights. 3. What do you mean by the term rights ? 4. Define right in personam. 5. Define rights in rcm. 6. What are the rights of the patentee