48 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
secrecy could be an advantage. Neigh-
bors sometimes called the shelter to re-
port suspicious people hanging around;
the police knew where they were, and
the staff wanted them to know. Med-
nick also thought that donors would feel
more connected to the shelter if they
could be part of it, so she decided to
throw some garden parties in the back
yard. “It took a lot of cajoling,” Mednick
says. “There were some Old Guard peo-
ple who—maybe the word is ‘appalled.’”
“Women needed a safe space, and Risa
had parties there!” Wylie Doughty, who
started volunteering at the shelter in the
eighties, says. “The residents were like
her canapés. She would trot them out—
it was disgusting.”
Also in the early two-thousands,
Transition House appointed its fund-
raiser as an interim director, and this
produced a torrent of outrage, because
the fund-raiser was a man. Chris Wom-
endez, Cherie Jimenez, Betsy Warrior,
and other women who had been in-
volved in the early days wrote the agency
a furious letter. “What does it say to
women who are trying to escape depen-
dence and the authoritarianism of male
domination when they come to a sup-
posed refuge and find a man is in
charge?” they wrote. “Former residents
have reported to us that he assigns
them housework and then, in some
cases, admonishes them on the inade-
quacy of their efforts.” (The interim di-
rector denies assigning or critiquing
housework, and says that he worked
mainly in the administrative
office.) What was worse,
Transition House had an-
nounced that its search for
the next director would be
gender-neutral.
The interim director was
rapidly replaced, but there
was worse to come. Around
2010, a new regulation stip-
ulated that any emergency
shelter that accepted fed-
eral funding must not discriminate on
the basis of gender: Transition House
had to be open to men. There was more
outrage, but the law was the law, and
Transition House could no longer sur-
vive without government funding. The
staff apologized to the women in the
shelter, but the women found the idea
far less strange than the staff did. Around
2011, a man came to stay. The staff looked
on, nonplussed, as the women coddled
him and shared food with him in a way
that they didn’t do with one another.
Chris Womendez, who had gone on
to found a shelter called Finex House,
was forced to accept the new reality,
but she didn’t like it. “It’s very different
from sheltering women, very different,”
she says. “One guy was showing women
pictures of his penis on his cell phone.
One guy, even though he said he was
gay, ended up crawling into bed with
the women and trying to do stuff. They
would shave at the breakfast table, read-
ing the newspaper like a guy, just tak-
ing over everything.”
It was understandable that the found-
ers would be upset by the idea of men
in the shelter, but by then the gender
analysis that had driven the passion of
the early years was no longer tenable.
If women could batter other women,
and men other men, then gender could
not be the taproot of oppression. If
women who stayed in Transition House
went back to their batterers, then con-
sciousness-raising and a place to run to
were not enough. Many of the women
who worked at Transition House in the
seventies believed that if only people
knew what was happening and knew
there was an alternative way to live, then
violence against women would soon
end. Four decades later, nobody thought
that anymore.
“We had debates about it,” Risa Med-
nick says. “I remember saying, If we
can’t aspire to eradicating
domestic violence, then
why are we doing this? But
the other side was: We’re
here to be supportive of the
victims—isn’t it mislead-
ing to say that we do more
than that?” “It’s like the
nonprofit industrial com-
plex, right?” Cherie Jimenez
says sadly. “Now they’re a
social-service agency, and
their whole thing is about maintain-
ing the agency. But that wasn’t the ini-
tial intention, to have shelters forever.”
Transition House has survived for
forty-three years because it moved be-
yond the blazing revolutionary purity
of its early years and adapted to the
complexity, and perhaps the perma-
nence, of its foundational problem. Itwas necessary to see the complexity for
what it was; and it had been equally
necessary, in the beginning, not to see
it. But, inevitably, the adaptation felt, to
some of its founders, like a betrayal. “It
is in some ways the antithesis of what
it set out to be,” Ann Fleck-Hender-
son, who wrote “Transition House 1976-
2017,” a book to mark the shelter’s for-
tieth anniversary, says. “But, if you’re
going to make a revolution, it’s not so
easy to see the difference between suc-
ceeding and selling out.”W
hen Michael was in college, he
fell in love with Tom, a boy he’d
known since he was a child. He and
Tom became a couple and stayed to-
gether happily for thirty years. They
moved away from their home town to
live somewhere warmer, and started a
business together. But then Tom died
suddenly, in an accident, and, two years
later, Michael met Ed. (All three names
are pseudonyms.) For the first year, ev-
erything was great: Ed was handsome
and charming and loving. Soon, he
moved in. Ed had two cars, and he added
Michael’s name to the titles. Michael
felt he should reciprocate, and he and
Tom had shared everything, so he added
Ed’s name to his bank accounts and the
deed to his house.
Ed wanted Michael with him all the
time. At first, Michael found this en-
dearing, but soon, if they were apart, Ed
would accuse Michael of cheating on
him. Even if Michael was just watch-
ing a movie in the next room by him-
self, it would drive Ed nuts. Michael
also noticed that Ed didn’t get along
with most people. He thought all his
colleagues were idiots.
It started with a shove. Barely a shove,
more like a tap. Then harder shoves.
Then, a few months later, Ed gave Mi-
chael a black eye. The next day, he apol-
ogized and said that he had to learn to
control his temper, but a few months
after that he punched Michael in the
jaw. It was always dumb things that set
him off—maybe Ed wanted to go out
for dinner and Michael wanted to stay
home. Michael started doing whatever
Ed wanted, to avoid a fight. A couple
of times, Michael called the police, but
they were useless. Even though Michael
was obviously injured, and Ed was six
inches taller and close to a hundred