In the Dream House: 119. Dream House as Equivocation Summary & Analysis

In the present, Machado describes a short story in which a group of lesbian friends talk about their friend’s house which was vandalized. Though one of them suggests they all band together to help the friend, another in the group says that they have other things, “community things,” to do instead.

Machado says that the queer community can fail itself by trying too hard to “save face.” When the queer community started debating domestic abuse in lesbian relationships, some lesbians tried to restrict the term “abuse” to the actions of men: women would never abuse each other! In one of the first domestic lesbian abuse trials, the sole lesbian member of the jury was reluctant to place blame on the defendant because she didn’t want to convict a fellow queer woman—ignoring the fact that the victim was also a queer woman.