On My Desk Now: Junot Díaz and the Double Bind of Male Survivorship

I recently finished and submitted for publication a triptych of essays called Firsts that examines the relative invisibility of male survivors of sexual violence in our society through the lens of my experience as a survivor whose healing is rooted in feminist politics. Right up until the final draft of the third essay in this triptych, I included a discussion of the controversy that ensued when Junot Díaz revealed in “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma” that he’d been raped by a man when he was eight-years-old and, shortly thereafter, the writer Zinzi Clemmons alleged that Díaz had forcibly kissed her when she was a graduate student, even going so far as to suggest that he’d published the essay in order to pre-empt her accusations.

As a result of the fallout from Clemmons’ allegations, Díaz was, as they say, canceled, and his career has never fully recovered, making it almost impossible even to mention his essay without raising the question of whether the consequences he suffered were just and proportional. Indeed, even as recently as 2022, Ben Smith wrote an article for Semafor, in which he asked that question precisely. He interviewed members of the Pulitzer Prize Board—at the time, Díaz was the Board’s chair—who revealed that, according to their investigation, the kiss Clemmons alleged had been an unwanted “kiss on the cheek.”

When I was a union officer, part of my job was to protect the contractual rights of members accused of sexual harassment both when they were questioned and when they were disciplined (if they were). In light of that experience, it seems to me there are two issues here: one regarding the impact that unwanted kiss had on Clemmons, which it is no one’s place other than hers to judge, and one regarding the degree of coercion to which an unwanted kiss on the cheek rises. How one balances those two questions in determining what a fair and just level of accountability would be, assuming Díaz did in fact kiss her (about which more below), is complicated, especially when it involves issues of employability, as it did in this case, since Díaz’ employer, MIT, investigated him as well to make sure he had never behaved inappropriately with his students.

I had hoped in writing my essay to be able to note this complexity and then set it aside, not because I think it’s not important, but because it seemed (and seems) to me that trying to litigate the fairness of what happened to Díaz—especially so long after the fact—obscures an issue that is also important: the degree to which the controversy silenced Díaz as a survivor, short-circuiting the larger discussion about male survivors that his essay might have started.

“The Silence” moved me. “It sucks,” I wrote in the concluding paragraph of an email I sent Díaz when I was done reading,

that men chose to do to us as children what they did…but what we make of ourselves, what we give to the world out of what they did does not have to suck. In fact, it can be beautiful and enriching and deeply, deeply important in helping to make the world a more just place. You have demonstrated this with your essay. I hope you know that.

Some of what Díaz had to say made me hopeful that we might be on the verge of real change in how we talked about sexual violence against men and boys. “‘Real’ Dominican men,” Díaz wrote, “aren’t raped. And if I wasn’t a ‘real’ Dominican man I wasn’t anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.” Díaz also made it clear that coming to terms with what the man who raped him did to him meant confronting head on the value system that defined what a “real Dominican man” was. “I’ve told,” he wrote, “even my toughest boys…fuck the consequences.”

Díaz’ essay, however—and I offer this as observation, not criticism; survivors get to tell their stories on their own terms, full stop—does not explore that confrontation. We never learn what the consequences of telling his “toughest boys” were. Instead, “The Silence” takes the form of a letter to a person from Díaz’ past, a confessional to someone he wished he’d told the truth about himself years earlier, and it focuses much less on analysis than on revelation. Let me tell you what my life was really like in the aftermath of what that man did to me, Díaz says, leading us through a brutally honest accounting of the self-hatred from which he suffered and the harm he did to himself and others as a result, in particular to the women in his life.

Initially, Diaz seemed to want to hold himself accountable in response to Clemmons’ allegations. He issued a statement that read in part, “I take responsibility for my past…We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.” Two months later, however, he essentially took that statement back in a Boston Globe interview carefully orchestrated to repair his reputation. Not only did Díaz categorically deny that he had kissed Clemmons; he also implied that because he’d been raped he would never have allowed himself to do what she said he did. “For someone like me, who’s a victim and a survivor,” he is quoted as saying, “MeToo stuff matters,” as if having been sexually violated had somehow inoculated him against committing such acts himself.

Initially, I saw that response as no less cynical than Clemmons’ assertion that Díaz had published “The Silence” to pre-empt her accusations, and, read in the context of the interview, I continue to see his statement that way. Nothing, in other words, then or now, has given me any reason to doubt that Díaz did what Clemmons accused him of doing. At the same time, however—and this is ultimately where I hoped this subject matter would fit into my essay—I think it’s a mistake to read his statement that “MeToo stuff matters” only through the lens of that cynicism.

There was a time early in my own coming to terms with what the men who violated me did to me when I might have made a similar assertion about myself, not because I had a reputation to salvage, but because I was convinced that the only way to make my status as a victim unassailable was to purify myself of anything that might even remotely align with the behavior of those men. To suggest that Díaz was trying with that statement to claim a similar kind of pure victimhood is neither to deny that the Boston Globe interview was a cynical public relations maneuver nor to diminish or trivialize the behavior of which he was accused. Rather, it is to recognize the double bind in which Díaz found himself. The act of publishing “The Silence” proclaimed his disloyalty to precisely the set of values embodied by what Clemmons accused him of, while Clemmons’ allegations, including her assertion that he’d published “The Silence” to pre-empt her, simultaneously called that disloyalty into question and attempted to cast serious doubt on his credibility as a survivor. That Díaz responded by trying to preserve that credibility in as absolute terms as possible makes emotional sense to me, even as I recognize the cynicism that is inescapably part of that attempt’s subtext.

In the end, I had to take this discussion out of my essay because it distracted from, more than it added to, what I was trying to say there. Nonetheless, I think the double bind Díaz faced is worth sitting with precisely because it is a bind in which any male survivor who is similarly accused would find himself. Even more to the point, since the public discourse surrounding sexual violence implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, characterizes men, by definition, as potential perpetrators, perhaps it is a double bind in which we already exist whether we have been accused or not. For right now, I don’t have much else to say about this. As I said, I just think it’s something worth sitting with.