A friend sent me a screenshot of a conversation thread from some Renaissance Festival Facebook page. Someone had posted something derogatory about the actor who plays the King, lamenting that the actress who played the Queen was no longer in the role. In her response, the former Queen wrote about “being unceremoniously deposed by he who shall not be named.” The suggestion being that I had pushed her out somehow. I know. Who gives a shit.
The truth is cleaner, and worth a glance.
She was a long-standing performer at the show, along with her husband, and had become Queen before I had much of a role in management. Her version of the character was poised and strong. She understood how to command an audience. The owner of the show preferred a King to match, so she was paired with another veteran performer whose good looks and charm were a garnish on the Queen’s arm, and whose weak skills as an actor were obvious.
A few years passed. Then the Queen announced she would be stepping down to pursue a Master’s Degree. She said so in front of a small group. I was there. So the next season we cast another woman as Queen, which seemed uncontroversial.
I was wrong, of course. One thing I’ve learned since being accused is that I’m a convenient pin cushion for complaint. If something went bad, or someone was unhappy, it was because of me. Somehow. The truth is, I never dumped her.
A couple of years ago I ran into this actress at a theater in town. We were both there to see a show. We sat in the lobby before it began and talked. It was a nice conversation. I told her I regretted not doing more to convince her to come back the following season, even after she’d announced her intention to focus on her studies. She made it clear she felt no animus toward me. She’s a credible sort. We parted with kind words.
But.
This is how it works.
It’s a strain to admit, but our value to others is completely situational. I thought we were good. I thought she was being forthright about our professional relationship, and she was — at the time. Nothing changed after that lobby conversation. Except the valuation. I have little or no social or economic value to her or to that community anymore. My value had been assessed in relation to my power within the enterprise. This is an insignificant relationship, and I’m long gone from the place. But it’s illustrative of how worth gets determined, what changes it over time, and how little we understand the process while it’s happening.
It took years of self-reflection and conversation with friends to understand why some of my formerly close friends vanished in the wake of the wrongful accusation. Someone once offered the insight that I “collect people” and assume, erroneously, that we will remain friends for life. That’s not true. But I want it to be true. I believe it should be true, even as I have myself abandoned past friendships for reasons I can no longer remember.
The whole idea of friendship is a bit of jive. As if it’s an independent thing that lives and breathes and lasts as long as we like it. It doesn’t work that way. Like everything else, valuations change. A close Christian friend faded away after I told her I was an atheist. A very close professional friend quit because remaining my friend, post-accusation, was too expensive. The women she worked with made it prohibitive. Gone.
What happened is simple. What I had to offer the world changed, and for some people the price of remaining publicly attached to me became too high. For a few, they rewrote our history and cast me as the villain. The guy who “unceremoniously dumped” them.
In a social thread in 2018, one of the scolds suggested that the common thread running through all the complaints about me, accusations of violence, predatory behavior, personal callousness and arrogance, was me. That I need not look any further than the mirror.
Some of that is true. I lacked focus. I could be cold and indifferent. True. True.
But the harder reality is that a clutch of aggrieved irritants, through a coordinated effort, simply changed the valuation. They shifted the calculation so that standing near me became more than most people were willing to pay. And since my power within the community was stripped, I wasn’t worth much to anyone. Add to that the loss of income and status, and now being my friend is just about being my friend. No coupons to offer. No million-dollar home to hang out in. No free travel. I lost my utility within the community, and branded a rapist for life.
What I’m naming here is the stigma of disgrace that now attends my name, even without evidence that I did anything disgraceful at all. In the wake of the accusations and the news coverage in particular, my value was reduced from being a whole person to something broken, contaminated, and impure. Some of this was brought about by people who, in reality, had much to hide in their own pasts, and who could use me as a cause célèbre to tacitly rehabilitate their virtue. By attacking me, or standing with those making specious claims, they got to look good.
The tragedy in all of this is how distorted one becomes to oneself in the wake of shit-slinging, and how the relentless invocation of violence can lead a person to believe the accusers must be right. It never occurred to me that I might start to believe I was guilty, because the media hue and cry looked so real. But it was all a goddamned mirage.
Jon Ronson spent three years interviewing victims of public shaming. He identified the mechanism precisely. We want to destroy people, he said, but not feel bad about it, so we reach for a word that makes them something less than human. “We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it.” (His TED Talk is well worth the viewing)
The sociologist Erving Goffman had a name for what happened to me. He called it a spoiled identity, the process by which a person is reduced, in the social record, from a whole human being to something broken, contaminated, and set apart. The spoiling doesn’t require evidence. It requires only enough noise, and enough people willing to move away from the smell.
