Reunion Online

Jennifer Fox is an internationally acclaimed producer, director, writer, and camerawoman. The Tale is Fox’s first fiction feature film, which she wrote, directed, and produced. The HBO film is based on Fox’s own life story as the main character, portrayed by Emmy award-winning actress Laura Dern, re-examines her first sexual relationship and the stories we tell ourselves to survive as she rereads a short story from her middle school days.

Nancy Nesbitt is the parent representative on the Connecticut Governor’s Task Force on Justice for Abused Children. She applies her perspective and experiences as a mother of children who were sexually abused at a young age to her work. The task force serves to coordinate agencies in the investigation, intervention, and prosecution of child sexual abuse and serious physical abuse cases.

Both Trav and I can say that while child sex abuse will always color our shared life, it will never exclusively define either of us.

I already knew the story of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s investigation of the Archdiocese of Boston’s cover-up of sexual abuse by scores of its priests. I knew most of the characters. I even caught a glimpse of the name of the priest who sexually abused me back in the mid-1960s. But what moved me most was two boys sitting near me in the theater of the Spotlight film recently.

The revelation this week about decades of unaddressed sexual abuse and assault at a New England school offers some important reminders about the power of community.

We’ve heard it takes a village to raise a child. In a way, these men, by connecting with each other, are recreating the network of support and nurturance idealized in the image of that protective village, which for so many men was unavailable in their own childhoods

I realize now I’d been unknowingly recovering for years before I acknowledged to myself that the unwanted sexual interactions I’d had with my parish priest were abusive.

I learned long ago that repeating myths in an attempt to dispel them actually has the opposite effect. So here they are—just the facts about male sexual abuse.

For several days, one sentence has continued to trouble me: "I'll never forgive you." Those words were spoken by the man identified only as Victim 4 at the Jerry Sandusky sentencing on October 9, 2012. His words say several things to me.

I remember the interview like it was yesterday. The year was 1984, and I was a oh-so-young, oh-so-green social work student conducting an interview with a veteran gay activist at our local GLBTQ center. (Mind you, many of those letters weren’t spoken of back then). I was 24 years-old, straight-define, and I literally quivered with nervousness at being, for the first time in my life, in queer-defined space. My purpose of the meeting—to research the history and advocacy of the centre for my studies in community development—belied my internal emotional state.