Exchanging the Truth for a Lie

The October 2021 issue of the evangelical monthly Christianity Today contains an article on fundamentalists' struggle to come to terms with the homosexuals in their midst.  The author, one Greg Johnson, is gay, which makes the article seem a bit different from similar writings I've seen on the subject; but I think it only seems so.  As usual in such cases, the open-minded stance is really just a facade for the same old crap.

Johnson begins with a reminiscence from 1997:

"You know, Mike, I used to be gay," I said.  Mike stopped moving as the words fell clumsily from my mouth...

He'd asked me about my schooling, and we got to talking about faith.  Mike had explained to me how he felt he could never go to church because he was gay.

"I know they say that's not supposed to happen," I went on, after dropping the bombshell.  "But that's my story."  Mike stared at me with interest as he set the paint can down, gently balancing his brush on its edge.

Johnson doesn't tell us what happened next; I picture some hot gay-to-ex-gay action myself.  (It just occurred to me that it would be fun to rewrite my account of my conversation with a local bartender in the manner of Christian testimonies like Johnson's.  But as in other evangelical writings I've seen, the intention is to tout the missionary's supposed courage in speaking to an unbeliever.)

But here Johnson surprised me.

To be clear, my sexual attractions at the moment were drawn as exclusively to other men as ever.  I was still at the top of the Kinsey scale that researchers since the 1940s have used to classify sexual orientation.  What made me ex-gay was that I used the ex-gay script. I was trying to convince myself that I was a straight man with a disease -- a curable one -- called homosexuality.  A condition that was being healed.

My terminological maneuver was an integral component of conversion therapy.  Alan Medinger, the first executive director of Exodus International, described it as "a change in self-perception in which the individual no longer identifies him- or herself as homosexual."  It was all about identity.  The testimony made the man.  And, within my ex-gay framework, I wasn't lying; I was claiming my new reality.

I was ex-gay.

The emergence of Exodus International in 1976 had set evangelicals on a hopeful path toward curing homosexuality.  Founder Frank Worthen explained, "When we started Exodus, the premise was that God could change you from gay to straight."  What followed was a decades-long experiment on hundreds of thousands of human test subjects.  The movement collapsed after Exodus president Alan Chambers's 2012 statement that more than 99 percent of Exodus clients had not experienced a change in their sexual orientation.

These might seem bold statements to make in a conservative evangelical publication, but they still drip with bad faith.  Johnson denies it, but his tortuous rhetoric can't conceal the fact that he was lying.  He was still gay, even if he managed to abstain from overt sexual activity with other males; and that's doubtful.  The ex-gay movement was wracked by scandal from the beginning, with its "clients" relapsing, with each other or with movement leaders. Those relapses, naturally, were blamed on the subjects' lack of faith, never on God's failure to cure them.

It was always strange that an ostensibly religious movement should have relied so heavily on secular psychiatry.  Christians from Jesus onward have used medical metaphors for sin, but the ex-gay movement didn't bother with metaphors.  Sin took a back seat to sickness in the ex-gay imaginary, and movement leaders adopted discredited psychiatric theories about "confused" gender identity caused by overbearing mothers and absent fathers.  The ex-gay movement took off just as secular psychiatry officially stopped regarding homosexuality as a sickness, and there was probably a connection.  But even clearly physical illnesses, up to and including death, were subject to Jesus' healing power; if God had wanted to change sexual orientation, it shouldn't have been beyond him.  As gay Christians have liked to say, maybe he didn't want to - though that's not necessarily a sign of divine approval, as we'll see.

Even more intriguing to me is Johnson's adoption of relativist identity language: if you adopt an "ex-gay script," if you identify as straight while continuing to burn with lust for persons of your own sex, then that's reality.  Of course this was never the rationale of the movement at its beginnings; at most it has been promoted after it collapsed.  Conservative Christian theology always claims, however falsely, to be about reality, and that it's only unbelievers who live in a fantasy world of their own making.  I'll be interested to see if CT publishes any letters from readers on this theme.  At a time when reactionaries are furiously denouncing airy-fairy postmodernist denial of reality by unbelievers, it's funny to see that Billy Graham's flagship journal has let the devil into its pages.

But speaking of Graham, Johnson goes on to shake the dust of the ex-gay movement from his feet and try to raise "an older orthodoxy that included a paradigm of caring for believers who aren't straight."  (The homosexual-movement rhetoric of gay/straight is still in there, you can see.  And seriously, are we not all -- gay and straight alike -- twisted and broken by sin?)

What follows is a lot more interesting and informative to me.  Johnson tells how numerous 20th-century Christian celebrities taught that "a homosexual orientation was part of the believer's identity -- a fallen part, but one that the gospel doesn't erase so much as it humbles."  He discusses Henri Nouwen, John R. W. Stott, C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Billy Graham, all of whom exemplify this supposed "paradigm of caring."  They regarded homosexual orientation as something inborn, not sinful (though still "broken") so long as it isn't acted on.

Two points about this: one, it confirms my claim that belief in inborn homosexuality is not the get-out-of-jail-free most LGBTQ+ Americans assume it to be.  It's perfectly compatible with the demand for total sexual abstinence that antigay Christians like to make of gay people, though not of straight ones.  Johnson laments what he and fellow gay Christian Eve Tushnet call "a vocation of No": "No sex. No dating. No relationships. Often, no leadership roles."  Spoiler: Johnson never specifies what his paradigm of caring offers as an alternative; he's carefully vague on the matter, though he refers to "celibacy" as part of his prescription.

Second, almost none of the comforting pastoral counsel Johnson reports was made in public during these celebrities' lifetimes.  It comes mostly from private letters and conversations that most of their audiences were unaware of at the time.  In public they took uncompromising positions against homosexual "sin" and the "born this way" claims of the gay movement.  That includes gay Christians, who seem not to have been aware of this concession any more than I was.  (I was aware that the Roman Catholic church regards homosexual orientation as inborn, and of course that concession has never stopped it from practicing antigay bigotry.)  I'd be more impressed by these posthumous revelations if Johnson's heroes had spoken out boldly and publicly while they were alive, instead of jumping on the culture-war bandwagons, to say nothing of endorsing the ex-gay movement.  Johnson shows them privately rejecting vulgar bigotry of the Jerry Falwell variety, but not taking a positive stance in public.

Most of the rest of the four-page article is hot air about caring for the homosexual with specifics left out, but towards the end Johnson quotes a 1978 book, Homosexuality and the Church, by the Christian historian Richard Lovelace,

There is another approach to  homosexuality which would be healthier both for the church and gay believers, and which could be a very significant witness to the world.  This approach requires a double repentance, a repentance both for the church and for its gay membership.  First, it would require professing Christians who are gay to have the courage both to avow [acknowledge] their orientation openly and to obey the Bible's clear injunction to turn away from the active homosexual life-style. ... Second, it would require the church to accept, honor, and nurture nonpracticing gay believers in its membership, and ordain these to positions of leadership for ministry.

(The interpolation of "acknowledge" and the ellipsis before the last quoted sentence are Johnson's.  "Avow" and "acknowledge" have different connotations, it seems to me, with "avow" being a lot firmer.  Or did he think CT's readers wouldn't know what "avow" means?  By the way, Lovelace published another book on this topic in 2003; I don't know if his position changed in a quarter century, but it's fair to doubt it.)

"Tragically," Johnson says, "I write this as a lament for a road not traveled on this side of the Atlantic."  I've seen other American evangelical writers take the same tack in the past several years, though they don't assert the innateness of homosexual orientation, and they're no more impressive than Lovelace or Johnson.  Except for leadership roles, Lovelace offered the same vocation of No -- "No sex. No dating. No relationships" -- that Johnson had seemed to declare unacceptable a couple of pages earlier.

Lovelace also played a little game that nowadays is known as "both-sidesing."  The church must accept, honor, and nurture celibate gays (I don't really see any "repentance" there), and gays must declare themselves openly while embracing a vocation of No (I presume this includes "repentance" for any sodomitical acts they've already committed). This is lopsided, to put it nicely.  It's as if white evangelicals were to "repent" showily for their historical support for slavery and Jim Crow, while demanding that black evangelicals repent for their resistance to and criticism of white Christian racism.  Or as if Christians repented for historical anti-Semitism, while demanding that Jews reciprocate by repenting for killing Christ.

Lovelace continued: 

The church's sponsorship of openly avowed but repentant homosexuals in leadership positions would be a profound witness to the world concerning the power of the Gospel to free the church from homophobia and the homosexual from guilt and bondage.

Except that, as Johnson has acknowledged, the Gospel has no such power.  Lovelace's church is still homophobic, and a vocation of No is not freedom from bondage.

It's not for me to tell Christians what to do, only to criticize their mealy-mouthed paradigm of caring.  I agree that the Bible forbids sexual acts between persons of the same sex, but I don't see that's an obstacle for the church, which cheerfully ignores a great deal of explicit biblical teaching on any number of matters, from slavery to divorce and remarriage.  American evangelicals' embrace of divorced and remarried politicians from Ronald Reagan through Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump shows that the Bible is only as authoritative as they want it to be, which isn't very. I wouldn't criticize the churches for imposing the same official sexual ethic of monogamous marriage on gay believers that they impose on heterosexuals, though gays who slip into adultery and fornication should be extended the same latitude and indulgence straying heterosexual Christians, including clergy, enjoy.

Demanding total sexual abstinence of gays, but not of straights, is not going to witness the saving power of the Gospel to the world -- very much the opposite.  Gay believers will go on doing what they've always done: abstaining and feeling guilty for their desires until they finally give in to temptation, which will set in motion a new cycle of guilt and repentance.  Or alternatively, screwing around as much as they like but neglecting to mention it in church. In other words, exactly what the ex-gay movement produced.

Straights at least have a licit outlet, but there's no such thing for gays in traditional Christianity.  It's not the only reason Christianity has a bad reputation, but it's certainly part of it.  And Johnson's article is merely one more dishonest example of Christians being asked for bread, but offering a stone.  Its only novelty, that it was written by a gay man, is witness to the doublethink that religious belief fosters in all its adherents.  As the philosopher Walter Kaufmann put it, there but for the lack of grace of God go I.

By the way, the CT website has two new articles about denominations splitting over LGBT issues, the Brethren and the Reformed Church in America.  As the RCA article points out, other denominations verge on similar splits.  A book review is also relevant.  And the Southern Baptist Convention -- remember them? -- has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into an investigation of sexual abuse by clergy of their flocks.

I Don't Mean to be Judgmental, But ...

The local newspaper carries the venerable advice column Dear Abby, and the first letter in today's column struck a chord, or a nerve.

DEAR ABBY: I am a senior male. I understand I may have some beliefs that others find old-fashioned. However, I consciously try to be tolerant of others’ feelings and beliefs. That said, my problem is with my younger brother, who is a homosexual. I have always tried to ignore that side of his life and, consequently, we have always had a good relationship. He lives in another state, so we only talk on the telephone.

A couple of months ago while we were talking, the subject of sexuality came up, and I told him I find the fact that he is gay “disgusting.” I know it was a poor choice of words. I merely meant to say that I, myself, am and always have been totally heterosexual. I have never had any sexual interest in members of my own sex. I never meant my comment to be judgmental of my brother or anyone else.

I left several messages apologizing for anything I said that he found objectionable. Now, when I try to contact him, he doesn’t answer my phone calls.

Abby, I miss my brother. I truly love him, and I don’t want to lose all contact with him. If you have any advice for me, please give it to me. I’m desperate and can think of nothing I might be able to do to restore our relationship. — FEELS LIKE A FOOL IN WASHINGTON 

Abby was refreshingly unsympathetic, which is in keeping with the Dear Abby brand.  Her mother, the original Abby, was pro-gay before it was cool, and before her sister "Ann Landers" shed her own old-fashioned views on the matter.  In one famous 1972 column, she slyly told an inquirer who asked how to improve their "once-respectable neighborhood" after a gay couple moved in: "You could move."

My take on today's letter takes a wider view.  Bigots of whatever stripe like to see themselves as merely "old-fashioned," unable to understand why others get indignant when they refer to Negroes as monkeys, to women as whores, to gays as a form of bestiality.  Indeed, another syndicated column in today's paper, by an elderly white man, began by declaring that none of his best friends are black, then explaining that he was just being provocative, but jeez, people have gotten so sensitive about race "in the past couple of years."

For me the key to "Feels Like a Fool in Washington"'s letter was this paragraph:

A couple of months ago while we were talking, the subject of sexuality came up, and I told him I find the fact that he is gay “disgusting.” I know it was a poor choice of words. I merely meant to say that I, myself, am and always have been totally heterosexual. I have never had any sexual interest in members of my own sex. I never meant my comment to be judgmental of my brother or anyone else.

I have no doubt that he had been obnoxious to his brother many times before and that he'd been wanting to use the word "disgusting" for decades, so it's not surprising that it finally popped out.  And though he pretends to be remorseful, he proceeds to try to justify himself: "I merely meant to say..."  Sure he did.  There's no reason why his supposed total heterosexuality requires him to be disgusted by his brother's homosexuality, but again, this is what bigots say when they blurt out something reprehensible.  They merely meant to say that as white people, as men, as Christians, as Americans, as whatever, they naturally loathe those outside their granfalloon.  I remember talking with a young gay man who declared that older gay men should not have sex with anyone at all, not even each other, because it was sick and unnatural and disgusting, they should be kept out of sight: he wasn't being judgmental, he meant them no harm, but he just wasn't attracted to them.  I've heard the same line applied to 'stereotypical' gay men.  But "Feels" never meant the word "disgusting" to "be judgmental."

I also doubt very much that the two had "always had a good relationship."  It's a safe bet that his brother had put up with expressions of this man's bigotry for decades, and finally drew a line.  Even now, "Feels" tries to put it all on his brother: there was nothing really wrong with what he said, but his hypersensitive cancel-culture brother "found it objectionable" anyway.  I wouldn't take his phone calls either.  What Sarah Schulman wrote about a conflicted lesbian student applies here too: "I know that her parents do not love and do not support her.  All they care about are themselves.  They do not see her as real.  And for now, she agrees with them."  The brother may have tried to persuade himself that "Feels" loves and cares about him, but it appears that "Feels" finally persuaded him he was wrong.  "Feels" cares only about himself.

Why We Didn't Wait

There's been a lot of excitement this week after reports that a new documentary shows Pope Francis telling an interviewer that he supports civil unions for same-sex couples.  As usual when a Pope says something vaguely humane, many people exaggerated its significance, but for once they were roughly in the ballpark.  The interview was evidently snipped from a 2019 television interview that never aired in its entirety, but it appears that the pontiff did actually say it.

There are, as usual, some minor complications.  For example, Francis had spoken in favor of civil unions in 2010 while he was still a cardinal in Argentina, though this seems to have been partly a bargaining chip, a compromise to ward off legalization of same-sex marriage there.

Before he was elected pope, Francis served as archbishop of Buenos Aires, and in that role, he advocated for same-sex civil unions in an attempt to block a same-sex marriage law. Argentina legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, which then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio called a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” But in meetings with other Argentine bishops, Cardinal Bergoglio urged them to support civil unions as a way to keep marriage distinctly heterosexual. Bishops rejected the idea, but an L.G.B.T. activist in Argentina said the cardinal called him to say he personally supported the idea of civil unions.

As you can see, the effort to prevent same-sex marriage in Argentina failed.  It's hard to tell whether Bergoglio "advocated for same-sex civil unions" publicly, or in conference with other princes of the Church.  I don't entirely trust the activist who claims the cardinal called him personally; people have a tendency to hear what they want to hear in these situations.

Anyway, the documentary shows Francis saying "What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered."  This is much clearer than his previous statements.  But here in the US, as in numerous other countries, we already have same-sex marriage; civil unions are beside the point.  And "we"?  The Pope isn't a legislator, and in any country where Catholicism isn't the state religion, his opinions should have no weight, any more than any other religious leader.

Francis also said in the film, “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”

This is nice, I suppose, but I don't need the Pope's permission to have a family.  And typically, it's ambiguous enough that some people got ahead of themselves. Did he mean that Catholic adoption agencies will have to place children with same-sex couples?  It's hard to say for sure, but probably not:

While the pope did not elaborate on the meaning of those remarks in the video, Pope Francis has spoken before to encourage parents and relatives not to ostracize or shun children who have identified as LGBT. This seems to be the sense in which the pope spoke about the right of people to be a part of the family.

Some have suggested that when Pope Francis spoke about a “right to a family,” the pope was offering a kind of tacit endorsement of adoption by same-sex couples. But the pope has previously spoken against such adoptions, saying that through them children are “deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God,” and saying that “every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help them shape their identity.” 

The first thing I wondered was what Francis thinks civil unions entail.  Francis said in the same interview that gay people "have a right to a family," before adding: "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least." The Catholic hierarchy aren't known for their knowledge of the real world, so I would bet he thinks that civilly united couples won't do the nasty.  Marriage, whether civil or religious, is supposed to be consummated, but civil unions may not be.  However, it's reasonably certain that they usually will be, and the Catholic position that you can be homosexual as long as you abstain from any genital contact isn't binding in such unions.  Some same-sex Catholic couples may choose abstinence, but I don't believe most will, any more than most heterosexual Catholic couples eschew contraception or abortion.

So my take is that while Francis' remarks are a small advance, they also lag behind the real world -- even much of the Catholic world.  They are already infuriating reactionary Catholics who already hate him.  How much and what kind of effect they'll have will have to be seen, but I don't expect much.

This morning NPR's Morning Edition featured an "openly gay" Catholic priest named Bryan Massingale who was predictably "excited and even jubilant" about the news.  He asserted -- probably incorrectly, as we've seen -- that "I think what the pope is saying is that he is not opposed to the legal recognition of family life and the right for gay and lesbian persons to raise and have families."  And:

He has not changed church teaching regarding behavior or conduct. He still would see that as being morally problematic. However, he goes back to his question, do we focus on behavior, or do we focus on persons? And even sinful persons still have human rights that we're all called to respect and to protect.

This is really reaching, and "morally problematic" is the understatement of the day.  But he was on a roll:

I think for queer Catholics, it's a sign of hope that the church can change. It can grow. It can evolve. I think it's also a sign of hope that especially in places where LGBTQ persons are more actively persecuted, this is a sign of hope that that kind of persecution cannot be reconciled with the Christian faith.

Ah, hope.  That might be more salient for queer people who are "more actively persecuted"; in America and elsewhere, it's too little too late. As I wrote on a similar occasion a few years ago, "You can hope for anything you like, regardless of what the Vatican says, and you can make up whatever fanciful tales you like about what the pope says or believes, but that doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want."

Another thing that annoys me is the way many people scour Francis's statements for what they "hint" or may "imply" or "suggest," as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them.

I kept thinking of the Southern Baptist Convention's very tardy abandonment of slavery and Jim Crow in the 1990s.  The excuses many people -- not only Catholics, to my surprise -- made and continue to make for Francis' footdragging are ironic, really: I recognize that you aren't going to move a dead dinosaur easily or quickly, but the Church claims to be a moral leader, not a follower.  Instead it shambles along in the wake of wiser people, many of them not even religious, and expects to be applauded when the Pope makes a half-assed concession to a better moral stance. Those who want to may do so, but if they expect me to join in, they'll find me with my arms crossed, tapping my foot: What took the Church so long, and why is it still clinging to bigoted positions on so many issues?  I'm glad the gay movement around the world didn't refuse to wait for the Vatican to come around: we not only challenged churches, we attacked them when they tried to interfere with progress.

Remember when John Paul II tried to prevent a gay pride celebration in Rome in 2000?  He delivered a diatribe against it, but it took place anyway, "amid heavy police security after threats by neo-Fascists to disrupt the proceedings."  There were reports, as I recall, of collusion between the Vatican and the neo-Fascists, but in the end nothing happened.  I had some online exchanges with some gay Catholics who asked why the homosexuals decided to have the parade when they did, during a Holy Year?  I reminded them that the celebration was scheduled for the end of Pride Week, commemorating the Stonewall Riots, a very holy day for the gay movement.  (For an entertainingly overwrought paleo-Catholic denunciation of that celebration, see this.)  And that was only one less-effective attempt by the Church to impose its will on people over whom it had no authority.

I don't get why so many gay non-Catholics invest so much emotion in Francis and other Popes.  Those I've talked to try to put in terms of their sympathy for others, but they take Francis' pronouncements too personally for me to believe them.  I think they're authoritarians at heart.  They love authority so much they'll welcome the yoke of people who have no authority over them at all.  It's like Americans who follow the British royal family, except that the Queen isn't telling Americans how to govern ourselves.  It's especially ironic at a time when so many Americans are having conniptions over alleged or (occasionally) real foreign interference in our political affairs.  Francis isn't likely to have much impact on us, but it's the thought that counts.

A Great Hill to Die On

Now for unChristian's chapter on Homosexuality.

This passage encapsulates Kinnaman and Lyons's approach, not just to homosexuality but to Christian/"outsider" interaction and perception in general.

In our research, the perception that Christians are “against” gays and lesbians—not only objecting to their lifestyles but also harboring irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them—has reached critical mass. The gay issue has become the “big one,” the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation. It is also the dimension that most clearly demonstrates the unChristian faith to young people today, surfacing a spate of negative perceptions: judgmental, bigoted, sheltered, right-wingers, hypocritical, insincere, and uncaring. Outsiders say our hostility toward gays—not just opposition to homosexual politics and behaviors but disdain for gay individuals—has become virtually synonymous with the Christian faith.

Let me begin by assuring the reader that unlike more extreme atheists, I do not hate Christians; I object to their lifestyles but do not harbor irrational fear and unmerited scorn toward them.  I know and love many Christians, some of whom I assume are good people.  I don't disdain them, I only oppose Christian politics and behaviors, and would like to help them, if I can.  That includes David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, whose painful struggle with Christianity is evident on every page of unChristian.  David and Gabe, it's not you, it's your lifestyle.  You can change.

Of course I don't believe that Kinnaman and Lyons would feel warmed by my welcoming words, though I mean them sincerely.  I imagine they'd feel patronized, and recognize that my insistence on my love and concern for them is only meant to distract attention from my principled rejection of Christianity.  My acceptance of them doesn't mean I accept their faith.  In the same way, it's not their surface conduct toward gay people that I, and I presume the young Christians and ex-Christians they surveyed, reject: it's their teachings about homosexuality.  (And about many other issues as well, but they're not my subject here.)

I'm not surprised that many of the young Christians Kinnaman interviewed put their objections to conservative evangelical Christianity in terms of hate and hostility, or in terms of opposition to gays and lesbians.  As Kinnaman admits, hatred and hostility have been hard to miss in Christian antigay campaigns.

Here is an example: one seventeen-year-old churchgoer described her experience bringing a gay friend to church. “The youth pastor knew I was going to bring him, and even though his talk really had nothing to do with homosexuality, he still found a way to insert ‘God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’ into his comments. I was sitting there, just dying. This happened more than once. My friend was at a point where he was interested in seeing what Jesus might offer, and the door was just slammed shut” [102].

It will be an uphill struggle for Christians like Kinnaman who profess goodwill toward us to convince us that they really do mean well.  I suggest that merely professing their good intentions and biting back the "Adam and Steve" jokes is not going to be enough; at the very least they're going to have to put more pressure on their leaders and peers to change their attitudes.  Lots of luck with that.

People do have a tendency to confuse opposition to someone's actions with opposition to the person him or herself, which presumably is why so many people told Kinnaman that Christians are "against" gay men and lesbians.  Kinnaman himself slips up on page 103: "Because of our opposition to homosexuals, outsiders cannot picture the church as the loving community of believers Jesus envisioned."  Much if not most of the time, the distinction is made dishonestly, because in practice the distinction doesn't matter.  I suppose there are a few heterosexual "unChristians" with LGBT friends or relatives who'd be reassured by Kinnaman's moderate tone, for a while at least, in some cases long enough to drift back into the churches they'd previously rejected.  I doubt that many gay people or many straight friends and relatives will fall for it.

It's difficult to figure out exactly what Kinnaman and Lyons think the place of LGBT people in their church should be.  For one thing, they and the commentators to whom they give space in unChristian tend to focus less on us than on themselves.  For example, the writer Sarah Raymond Cunningham, who informs us that "I have braved a few real-life conversations with homosexual friends" (113):

There were dozens of tangible traits I cherished about my friend, and I told him so. But—in a voice trembling with nervousness and compassion—I confessed I was afraid my friendship might seem insincere if I couldn’t affirm what he held to be a central part of his identity: his sexuality.

“As far as I can tell,” I gulped, “the Bible only introduces one kind of sexual union, and that is between a man and a woman. So, I have to believe this is the course that leads to the fullest life—the life the Creator intended for us.”

When I spit out these defining sentences, I worried all my friend could hear was Blah-Blah-Christian-Blah-Blah.  But he stared back at me kindly, so I continued...

I think the conversation changed me more than my friend, because it forced me to acknowledge parts of God’s will I sometimes overlooked. To accept that God doesn’t want me to do things even he does not choose to do—to control or hijack someone else’s freedom [113, 114].

It's as if what matters most is her, not her friend.  Given that "he stared back at me kindly," it sounds as if he was counseling her, not the other way around.  Perhaps that's how it was, and should have been.

I've run into my share of people like Cunningham, and I try to reassure them that I don't mind much if they can't "affirm" my homosexuality.  It's not really their business anyway.  But if they keep trying to negate it, if they can't let it fade into the background and attend to other traits or interests that we do have in common, we can't be friends.  That's only a problem if they see me not as a person, but as a notch on their missionary bedposts.  But if they do, and if they can accept that I don't affirm what they hold to be a central part of their identity -- their Christianity -- friendship is possible. 

Or consider Rick McKinley, pastor of Imago Dei Church in Portland:

Recently, I spent a year with a guy who thought he was born gay. We spent time working through what I believed to be God’s design for him. I believe God’s design is clearly male/female union or heterosexuality, however, he concluded that God made him that way (homosexual) and wanted to embrace this lifestyle fully. Therefore, he left the church, but it was a healthy parting. I am not sure how you avoid this kind of messiness when building relationships and loving people who are struggling with sexual identification issues [116].

Here too the gay man fades into the background.  It's all about the "healthy parting" and the kinds of "messiness" a pastor has to deal with.

Third one's the charm.  Chris Seay, of Ecclesia in Montrose, Houston:

As I walked closer to the place where our church was positioned, I realized there were three transvestite prostitutes working on the street corner. I decided to strike up a conversation with them, which led to me going inside and bringing them water. They were thirsty, so I gave them something to drink [114].

That's the whole story.  I suppose I should be glad he didn't tell us that the three transvestite prostitutes were so moved by Seay's Christian charity that they joined his church and in a few short months had become linebackers for the Houston Texans; but as it is, they are just props in a story about himself, his compassion, his courage in going near three homosexuals, braving the peril of homosexual cooties. Just like Jesus. 

Throughout unChristian the writers and commentators give the impression that homosexuals are something Out There, a kind of person they've never met before.  (The chapter following "Homosexuality" is "Sheltered," but I think that's the wrong word; "Closed Off" or "Hermetically Sealed" would be more like it.) You'd think the book had been written in the early 1970s, not the first decade of the twenty-first century.  "Despite widespread mobilization over the last decade, most Christians have become even more isolated from homosexuals," Kinnaman declares on page 106.  It may be true of the circles Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators move in, but as Kinnaman admits,

Our research shows that one-third of gays and lesbians attend church regularly, going to churches across a wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds, including Catholic, mainline, nonmainline, and nondenominational churches. Most gays and lesbians in America align themselves with Christianity, and one-sixth have beliefs that qualify them as born-again Christians. Most have been active in a church at one time, such as this gay man: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile the ‘Christian movement’ I see in politics today with the kind, generous people I knew from my own days in the church. I remember the Christians I knew (and once considered myself) to be students of God, who wanted to serve him and spread his good news and message of hope to a needy world.” The bottom line: some gays are antagonistic to Christianity, but many are not [97].

It appears to me that Kinnaman is being disingenuous here, equivocating in a typically conservative-evangelical way.  He'd like the reader to suppose that the gays and lesbians in America [who] align themselves with Christianity" agree that homosexual behavior is sinful, and so do the "wide spectrum of denominations and backgrounds."  No doubt many do, but not those churches that offer union or even marriage ceremonies to same-sex couples, nor the couples who exchange their vows in those churches.

Going by the gay Christians I've known, it's a safe bet that not even all those whose beliefs "qualify them as born-again Christians" agree that they are sinning when they have sex, in marriage or out of it.  UnChristian was published several years before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex civil marriage in the US, but American churches had been examining and revising their positions for decades by then.  Those gay people who still want to join churches have other options available to them than the brand represented by the writers of unChristian.

Because of the increased numbers of more or less openly gay people around, it takes strong determination for conservative Christians to avoid knowing us, or to pretend that they don't know us.  The rise of fundamentalist-run businesses and spaces since the 1980s might have made it easier for evangelicals to avoid dealing with outsiders, but since gay people are already Christians, we are already inside those spaces.  We are already in their families and workplaces and churches.  Even if we are immediately expelled upon discovery, they still have known us.  Perhaps they repress the unpleasant knowledge.

What, then, do Kinnaman and Lyons and their commentators have to offer to Christian LGBT people?  They are carefully vague.  Even the gay man given space at the end of the chapter, one Levi Walker, who reports that he returned to church four years earlier after "twenty years of depression, twelve years of drug addiction and dealing, and several suicide attempts" (117), says nothing about the kind of church he's in now, how it treats him, his place in it.  Walker's the kind of homosexual Christians like Kinnaman love: the drugs, the suicide attempts, the depression -- only AIDS is missing, but nobody's perfect.  The heterosexual commentators, as I noted, mainly talk about themselves and their spirituality, how bad they feel when they're stereotyped as "gay-hating bigots" (110), how they bravely had "real life" (as opposed to imaginary?)  conversations with homosexuals.

To their limited credit, no one in this book touts ex-gay ministries, at least not explicitly.  Maybe they're aware of what ineffective and scandal-ridden scams they are.  But it's fair to find in their ramblings a belief that change will occur once a homosexual joins a welcoming community, and if not that ...

As a church [writes Rick McKinley of Imago Dei], we have to hold to what Scripture says is true about the practice of homosexuality—the acting out of same sex relationships is a sin. However, we are wondering if it is possible to experience same-sex attraction but give yourself to living a celibate lifestyle. What if we could provide intimate Christ-centered community and accountability for him or her in that pursuit? We believe that community is the answer to everyone feeling loved and human [116-17].

Celibacy may be "possible" for a few, just as it's possible for a few to run a mile in under four minutes or scale Mount Everest, but it is not a realistic option for most human beings. Offering it as a solution -- to gay people, not to straights of course -- is not a good-faith approach.  (It's also Albert Mohler's bad-faith recommendation.)  As for experiencing same-sex attraction without acting on it, Kinnaman points out that "Jesus raised the bar beyond skin-on-skin contact and said even a simple thing like sexual thoughts can defile us [Matthew 5:28].  Our approach should embrace this high standard of sexuality" (104).  So Kinnaman's church, at any rate, can't even offer membership to gays on condition of overt sexual abstinence.

"It is necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that marriage is between one man and one woman," Kinnaman declares (105).  Appropriate perhaps, but hardly necessary, since the Biblical model was one man and numerous women, whether wives, concubines, or the odd harlot by the side of the road.  That's the original Biblical standard; the New Testament standard is that marriage is for weaklings who can't cut the mustard, either by self-mutilation (Matthew 19:12) or gritting one's teeth and abstaining from sexual life altogether (1 Corinthians 7).  Monogamy became the Christian standard not because of biblical teaching but because gentile Christians adopted Roman customs.

One would think it necessary and appropriate for Christians to affirm that divorce is not acceptable except under very narrowly defined conditions, but although Kinnaman and his commentators occasionally mention divorce as a problem because of our broken sexuality and our decadent society, they don't discuss its acceptance by evangelicals, both for themselves and their chosen politicians.  Ronald Reagan's divorced and remarried status didn't bother them at all, nor does Donald Trump's evangelical base mind his multiple marriages and divorces.  If they can overlook a lifestyle that was specifically prohibited by Jesus, perhaps they can (and probably will) learn to overlook the conflict between the Bible (though not Jesus, at least not explicitly) and same-sex sexual expression.

The olive branch Kinnaman and his commentators hold out to potential gay converts is that everybody's sexuality is "broken."  "But there is not a special judgment for homosexuals, and there is not a a special righteousness for heterosexuals," writes Shayne Wheeler of All Souls Fellowship in Georgia (page 111).  Rev. Alfred Ells of Leaders Last Ministries chimes in:

And I would add this caution: I have counseled many more straight Christians than homosexuals. Many believers are dealing with significant sexual issues, from marital unfaithfulness to pornographic addictions and other things you would not believe. Don’t underestimate the power of sexual problems—gay or straight—to devastate even the best families and the best churches [118].

That, like the recommendation of celibacy, is not going to win many homosexuals for Jesus.  Heterosexuals are granted presumably unbroken sexual expression in marriage, but homosexuals are a "sexual problem" in ourselves, like "pornographic addictions or other things you would not believe," with no loophole.  Fewer and fewer people, gay or straight, will go along with this anymore, and since there is no real moral argument against homosexuality except a biblical prohibition -- which evangelicals are as ready as other Christians to ignore when it's convenient for them -- conservative evangelicals had better expect to see their numbers continue to dwindle.

Kinnaman doesn't advocate secular laws against homosexual activity, though he's not clear as to why. He does claim that "laws provide significant parameters that determine Americans' behaviors, so lawyers and legislators should work diligently to pursue a biblical perspective that achieves appropriate goals" (105).  This is followed by his remark, quoted above, about one-man / one-woman marriage.  Apparently he hasn't heard of the First Amendment.  He concludes that "You change a country not merely by bolstering its laws but by transforming the hearts of its people" (106), but he and his ilk have failed, thankfully, to do even that much -- they have not, on the evidence of this book, even managed to transform their own.

Christians point out the importance of a father and a mother in child development and reject the claims that gay couples should be able to adopt. And, of course, I recognize that it’s offensive to homosexuals to say that a child needs both a father and a mother; it’s a difficult part of what Christians believe. However, though this is an important conviction, Christians have to avoid rhetoric that dehumanizes people, especially in interpersonal interactions. Our most important concern must be the response of young people to Christ, not merely what type of home they grew up in ... If the people of Christ attack, mock, and criticize a child's parents, the chances that the child will ever commit his or her life to Christ are diminished [106].

There's plenty wrong here, starting with the invalid assumption that gay people only become parents through adoption, and moving on to the assumption that if you can't offer an ideal (by Kinnaman's standards) set of parents you should not be allowed to have or raise children at all.  Children have been successfully raised by widowed parents, for example.  I've known children who grew up in households headed by two women, both widowed or abandoned by husbands, who turned out okay.  Children will also have an easier time if their parents aren't poor, or members of other despised minorities; but I doubt Kinnaman would want to take them away from their parents or tell them they should never have been born, no offense kids but your parents fail to meet our high Christian standards of Family.  Same-sex couples, as far as we can tell, do as well by their children as mixed ones; the absence of both male and female in the parent couple doesn't mean the kids won't have meaningful interaction with other adults.  But Kinnaman has evidently ignored all the research and discussion on this matter; if you have Scripture and Christian-Right publications, what more do you need?

I find myself wondering, though, just how he envisions Christians of his sort coming into contact with children of gay parents.  Surely not because the parents attend his church?  Maybe he just visualizes such kids wandering into his youth coffeehouse or being brought to his church by friends.  (It's a trap, kids! Don't go in!)  He even seems to be aware of the harm done by bullying. But in the end, he sees them purely as targets for conversion, though it's not impossible or unlikely that they will already be Christians, attending with their parents a church that Kinnaman doesn't approve of.

It's easy to see, on the evidence of unChristian and other handwringing writings on the declining influence of fundamentalist Christianity, why young people are staying away from their faction in droves.  (It shouldn't be forgotten that all denominations, including liberal ones, have the same problem, if it is a problem for anyone but them.)  I'm not talking only about their reactionary and harmful politics, but about their lack of engagement with actual human beings.  Despite their talk about being confident and fearless in the Lord, they come across in this book as terrified of just about everyone, to the point that having a "real life" conversation with an outsider (or even another Christian with differing views) feels risky and brave to them.  They recommend listening to others, but there's little indication in their own accounts that they do so.  They have to force themselves to make outreach, which is their right but incompatible with their own missionary platform.  As a queer atheist who's worked and talked with a wide range of people who don't agree with me over the years, I had trouble at first realizing how disengaged Kinnaman and his collaborators are.

Whatever they're selling, there's a dwindling market for it.  (I noticed that one of the more successful ministries touted by the commentators is a coffeehouse in Washington, DC, which is still around a dozen years after unChristian was published.  The commercial front, not the evangelism, probably accounts for its longevity.)  That's no ground for complacency, because even small groups of fanatics can do a lot of damage to a society.

I kept thinking of the prominent evangelical Carl F. H. Henry's remark* that "A redemptive totalitarianism is far preferable to an unredemptive democracy; a redemptive Communism far more advantageous than an unredemptive Capitalism, and vice versa."  This implies what should be obvious from much other evidence: Christianity is about purity (doctrinal and moral) and salvation, not about social justice or ordinary human decency.  Sure, you can import a concern with social justice into your implementation of Christianity (many have done it), but it's not the core of Christian concern.  According to the Gospel, helping others is not an end in itself but a means to getting oneself into Heaven.  (Besides, Christianity is about the Kingdom of God, not the Democracy of God.  Its worldview is hierarchical, not egalitarian.)

As I've said before, I don't advocate the a priori exclusion of Christians (or members of other religions) from public discourse.  But their Christianity is independent of whatever of value they have to contribute.  (I feel the same way about many atheists, who are apt to inject their fantasies about "the visions of Bronze Age goatherds" and other village-atheist bullshit to derail serious discussions.)  As unChristian shows once again, even on their own turf conservative evangelicals have very little to contribute; at best they distract from the serious thought and work that needs to be done.

*In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, originally published in 1947.  Quoted here.

I Am a Fluke of The Universe, and So Can You

Sometimes I suspect I'm even weirder than I've always thought (and often been told).

I'm always baffled when people talk about their lives, or Life, having a purpose.  That we were put here for a reason.  And so on.  Evidently to many people that idea feels reassuring.  To me, if I took it seriously, it would be a prison.  As a gay man, for example, I know that I am expected by both my culture and by science to marry and reproduce heterosexually, to carry on the family name.  That's my function, that's my purpose, that's the reason I'm here. In Christianity, and at least in some other religions, my purpose is to serve and glorify God.  I see no reason why I should do any of these things, and luckily I live in a time and place where I don't have to.

Maybe for most people the idea of having a purpose assigned to them feels good because it's a license to do what they want to do anyway.  I suspect that's what it is.  But with the craving for such a purpose there often goes the feeling of emptiness when you don't know what it is, what you should be doing.  The language of intention, of plan, expresses the idea that someone, human or superhuman, either knows or is competent to decide what you should do with your life, and I see no reason to suppose either that there is such a being, or that I am obliged to obey it if it did exist. For one thing, such a person would have purposes, aims, of its own, for which it would use me: I would be a means to an end rather than and end in myself.  Where would it get its aims?  Why should I care if they are carried out?  What is its purpose in the great scheme of things?  Whether the purpose-giver is a god, a parent, or a monarch, these questions are not supposed to be asked.  But they should be asked.

Yet it's obvious to me that many, maybe most people, feel a great need to be told what to do.  This craving would be connected to what Walter Kaufmann called "decidophobia," the fear of making fateful choices, in his book Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973).

This need, or desire, or craving, is not an artifact of religion, however: it's a cause of religion, and of other ways people try to give authority to the purposes we invent.  Samuel Delany posted today on Facebook:*

I have read--or rather re-read--a wonderful book: The History of My Shoes, and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, by Kenny Fries. At first it seems to be two books, one of the relation of Charles Darwin, and his supporter, critic, and sometimes editor, Alfred Russell Wallace, who realized that "Nature . . . does not so much select special various species [natural selection] as exterminate the most unfavorable ones [Herbert Spencer's phrase, 'survival of the fittest"] p. 96."

This weaves through a brilliant discussion of adaptability, in terms of that area often called disabilities.

In a passing discussion of the narrator's homosexual desire, we find comments such as: "'In matters of sex,' sexologist Alfred Kinsey observed, 'everything that you can possibly imagine has gone on and much that you cannot imagine.'"

Although the instinct for protection and survival of the species most often explains the desire for procreational sex, there have been a myriad explanations for homosexual desire. To Western science, homosexuality, both in animals and humans, is an anomaly, an unexpected behavior requiring some some sort of explanation, cause, or rationale. But to many indigenous cultures around the world, homosexuality is a routine and expected occurrence in both humans and animals. Biologist Bruce Bagemihl has shown that a good deal, if not most heterosexual sex in both animals and humans is without procreative intent. Thus, homosexual sex is not so different from most heterosexual sex. Except for the cultural context that labels it so. (p 113)

The book first came out in 2007, but with its discussion of things like ADD, social Darwinism and eugenics, it seems even more relevant than it once was. Before my retirement, from time to time I taught sections of it. Rereading the whole of it from end to end today, I wish now that I had devoted entire terms to it.

I haven't read Fries's book (and I can't tell where the quotations from it begin and end here), but it sounds interesting and important; it sounds as if his take on these questions might be similar to mine, though it easily might not.  I hope to find out.  If I didn't already have a large backlog of interesting and important books to read, I'd get to it now.  But soon.

Someone else commented under Chip's post:

We are non-reproductive but essential to the larger well-being of the community, just as neuter insects are to a beehive or an ant colony. Darwin's 'sympathy' as a secret to human success = Harry Hay's "subject-subject consciousness".

It's sad and a bit strange to me that people find it so difficult, even terrifying, to stand on their own, as it were.  (Kaufmann again: etymologically "decidophobia" is also a fear of falling.)  "We have a right to be here becuz Evolution." Or becuz Science. Or becuz Nature.  Or becuz Indigenous People.  Whose purpose, and where did they get it from?  It doesn't really matter why there are gay people, why there's gender, or anything else. We are the First Cause for culture, the buck stops here, and there's no need to invoke Evolution, or our genes, or other cultures to justify ourselves.  We don't have to justify ourselves; we're here.  Get used to it.

I don't want to live in an "indigenous" culture; I don't assume that the niche it would assign me would be any less repressive than the ones my own culture tries to impose.  But again: my culture now has freedoms and possibilities that no indigenous culture can offer.  I don't care whether Evolution or Nature planned me, for here I am.  (As I've said before, if I exist, I'm a product of evolution and nature.  It's not really possible to be otherwise.)

In the psychologist Carol Oyama's brilliant book The Ontogeny of Information (Duke, 2000) she shows how biologists have persistently tried to make genes, or DNA, or evolution, into a First Cause, updating the traditional Argument for Design for a scientific age; or into a homunculus that controls and guides organisms.  The efforts keep failing, but they can't seem to stop; they mostly don't even realize they're doing it, which suggests that they're driven by a deep, pre-rational need for a superior being (genes? DNA?) to order and direct them. If there were a designer, or a homunculus with a joystick in my pineal gland, there is no reason to assume that it knows what it's doing any better than I do.

Even when people get rid of gods, we can't seem to stop relying on them, inventing new ones and pretending that they invented us. We are a fluke of the universe, we have no right to be here -- but that's okay, because neither does anyone else: our existence has nothing to do with rights.

*Chip is dyslexic, and he doesn't proofread his Facebook posts, so I've silently corrected obvious slips of spelling etc. here.

Reading Reed

David Bowie wasn't the only queer* rock musician to get mainstream attention, of course: there was also Lou Reed.  It occurred to me, though, that just as Bowie's sexual orientation was a matter of some dispute as he came to disavow his public declaration that he was bisexual, I wasn't sure about Reed's.  So, after I saw another reference to Reed as bisexual, I asked my friend Google, "Was Lou Reed bisexual?"

Google coughed up some useful answers.  It appears that because of the scandalous subject matter of some of Reed's songs for the Velvet Underground, many people assumed that Reed must be gay.  And you know what happens when you assume.

There was a widely circulated claim that Reed was subjected by his family to electroshock "therapy" as a teenager because he was gay.  His sister has denied this, admitting the electroshock but denying that it was because he was gay.

During Lou’s teenage years, it became obvious that he was becoming increasingly anxious, avoidant and resistant to most socializing, unless it was on his terms ... Verbal fights between Lou and my parents erupted — about going into the city to play band dates, about the dangers he might confront. My parents were frightened, upset, and bewildered ... Lou was not able to function at that time. He was depressed, anxious, and socially unresponsive ...

It has been suggested by some authors that ECT was approved by my parents because Lou had confessed to homosexual urges. How simplistic. He was depressed, weird, anxious, and avoidant. My parents were many things, but homophobic they were not. In fact, they were blazing liberals. They were caught in a bewildering web of guilt, fear, and poor psychiatric care. Did they make a mistake in not challenging the doctor’s recommendation for ECT? Absolutely. I have no doubt they regretted it until the day they died. But the family secret continued. We absolutely never spoke about the treatments, then or ever.

Our family was torn apart the day they began those wretched treatments ...

So, you see, it was all the doctors' fault.  And no doubt it was.  I'm not sure I believe her completely, since as she says the family "absolutely never spoke about the treatments, then or ever."  Homosexuality in most of American culture in those days was unspeakable, so there's no reason to believe that she'd know if it was a factor for their parents.  So much of the piece sounds like the familiar denial that one's family, one's parents, could ever have done something bad.   But it does seem that the confident and casual claim I kept encountering, that the ECT was meant to burn out the gay, is based on rumor and has never been verified. 

The rock legend endured gay-curing electroshock therapy as a teenager ...

It was only years later that I learned that the teenage Lou, like me, had spent time in mental hospital as a result of his “homosexual tendencies”.

It’s 1959 and Louis Allan Reed is acting up. If it’s not the 17-year-old’s mood swings or the bad grades, it’s his recent displays of homosexual behavior. At their wit’s end, his parents give him what any other strict, conservative Jewish parents in middle-class Brooklyn would: electroshock therapy

... he underwent electroshock treatment as a teenager to curb “homosexual tendencies,” an experience he described scathingly in his 1974 song “Kill Your Sons.”

The lyrics to "Kill Your Sons" do evidently refer to the ECT, but there's not a word about the reason for it.  Whatever the source for the claim, it doesn't appear to be Reed himself.  So until we have a real source for it ...

The same goes for the claim that Reed "was widely rumored to have slept with both men and trans women in his Warhol years."  That comes from Queerty, a site I trust about as much I trust Breitbart.  (That Reed had a relationship with a "trans woman" is true, and I'll come back to that in a moment.)  In any case, "widely rumored" tells us nothing about Reed, though it tells a lot about those who invented, spread, and believed the rumors. 

I found one halfway good article on the matter, by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate, who concludes that although Reed was often referred to as bisexual, including by his biographers, "during his lifetime, Reed was perpetually evasive on the topic of his own sexuality." I haven't found anything yet that refutes that.  The answer to the question "Was Lou Reed the First Openly Bisexual Rock Star?", then, would appear to be "No." 

There doesn't, on the other hand, seem to be any doubt about Reed's three-year relationship with a "trans woman," though remember that "trans woman" is a twenty-first century construction that didn't exist in the 1970s, and since very little is known about "Rachel" we don't know how she identified herself.  According to Steyn, Reed referred to Rachel as both "he" and "she," switching pronouns in rapid succession: "Nothing could impress her. He’d hardly heard my music and didn’t like it all that much when he did."  Rachel inspired a notably phobic reaction in Lester Bangs, who described her in terms that fit his background as a Christian cultist but not his pose as a sophisticated rock critic. But the Sixties and Seventies really weren't as cool as people would have you believe anyway.  Depending on how you define "bisexual," then, it may be that Reed was bisexual without being openly so, while the openly (because declared) bisexual David Bowie wasn't really bisexual.

The rumors about Reed's sexual orientation also tell a lot about attitudes toward and beliefs about sexual and gender nonconformity in the Sixties down to the present.  Steyn, for example, writes:

During his glam rock years, Reed’s on-stage persona frequently bordered on androgyny, which—combined with his well-known and tumultuous friendship with the openly bisexual David Bowie—created an impression of epicene pansexuality.

Steyn is critical of writers who carelessly throw around the word "bisexuality," but he's just as careless here.  What does he mean by "bordered on androgyny" and "pansexuality," "epicene" or otherwise?  I've quoted before Ellen Willis's confused take on such words: "Androgynousness is an important part of what the Beatles and the Stones represent; once upon a time Mick Jagger's bisexual mannerisms and innuendos were considered far out."  They still are, since a mildly sissy young man with a high-pitched voice like Shamir Bailey still unnerves many critics and journalists.  (Katha Pollitt pointed out during the Monica Lewinsky scandal that American journalists, despite their pretense of sophistication and worldliness, are very conservative about sex and gender.)  As Reed told Lester Bangs in an interview Steyn quotes, "Guys walking around in makeup is just fun. Why shouldn't men be able to put on makeup and have fun like women have?"  Exactly.  It's fun, if you get into it, but it's not specifically gay.  In a part of the same interview that stuck in my mind (I read it when it was first published) but that Steyn doesn't quote, Reed also said:

"The makeup thing is just a style thing now, like platform shoes. If people have homosexuality in them, it won't necessarily involve makeup in the first place. You can't fake being gay, because being gay means you're going to have to suck cock, or get fucked. I think there's a very basic thing in a guy if he's straight where he's just going to say no: 'I'll act gay, I'll do this and I'll do that, but I can't do that.' Just like a gay person if they wanted to act straight and everything, but if you said, 'Okay, go ahead, go to bed with a girl,' they're going to have to get an erection first, and they can't do that."

I saw this interview in the Detroit-based rock magazine Creem, which at around the same time published a think piece on homosexuality in rock.  I must see if I can find it.  I remember that it referred to Iggy Pop as a "blatantly bisexual rocker" ("bisexual" again!), but I've never seen anything to back that up.  (The picture of Pop dressed in a slinky dress and carrying a purse, again, does not tell me anything about who he has sex with.)  Speculation, gossip, rumor are fun, but they're not reliable information.

And this, for example --

The weird sex part of his public persona was there from the very beginning, in the Velvet Underground's name. It was taken from a 1960s book about America's underground S&M scene. If that reference wasn't enough of a hint, there's the song "Venus in Furs" on the Velvet's first album, an homage to the erotic novel by the man who gave us the term "masochism."

-- although it was written in 2013, has the same OMG-giggly adolescent excitement about even mentioning "weird sex" that I might have expected from a thirteen-year-old in 1967, but not from a presumable adult four decades later.  Ditto for Queerty's take on "Venus in Furs."  I get the impression that none of these writers remember or have bothered to inform themselves about the anti-censorship struggles of that period.  Reed and the Velvets were riding a wave, not going anywhere new themselves.

I consider it a good thing that Reed wrote about sexual variation and kink, along with the other taboo subjects he took on.  I never felt personally addressed by it, though, because 1) aside from liking boys I was really not all that far out, and 2) even as a teenager I could tell that Reed and the Velvets were deliberately trying to shock, but since I'd already read a lot of the literature they referred to, I knew it was old hat, dating back centuries.  Most of my peers, of course, didn't know that, and even fifty years later, people still don't know much better.

* I'm using "queer" in its broadest sense here.

All the Sade Young Men; or, Kill for the Love of Killing

I've been reading a bizarre novel from the late 1960s, The W.A.S.P. (Bantam, 1968) by Julius Horwitz.  "Bizarre" doesn't mean bad, mind you; it's a serious work about blacks and whites in mid-century America, perhaps all the more interesting because it was written by a white man.

Julius Horwitz (1920-1986) doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but there is a Facebook page dedicated to him, maintained by his younger son.  He wrote eight novels, and The W.A.S.P. is the first I've read.  He was a welfare case worker for New York City between 1956 and 1962, and that experience probably informs The W.A.S.P.

The novel begins with the narrator, John Brooks, attending the funeral of a liberal white lawyer, Samuel T. West.  Brooks is an expert on the welfare system, and he (along with everyone else, it seems) anticipates the arrival at the funeral of Thomas Emerson, a black friend of West's, who dropped out of Yale Divinity School and plunged into the most impoverished parts of New York City.  At the time the novel begins Emerson is running a storefront church which mainly functions as an afters-school activity center for troubled Harlem Youth.

Emerson arrives and delivers a twelve-page eulogy of West, describing the blight of poverty in New York City and recounting the dead man's good works, which ended when he went to Harlem to inform the mothers of two young black boys that their sons were in jail for bludgeoning to death an elderly white couple in their apartment building.  He was only able to tell one mother about it, because when she heard the news she began to scream, and West had a heart attack and died in his tracks.  This was the first sign for me that The W.A.S.P. was something other than a realist exposé.

Brooks tells the reader about his friendship with West, who introduced him to Emerson.  West, like the other white characters, was fascinated by Emerson; he saw him as one destined to become a murderer (another sign that the novel was moving into phantasmagoria) because as an aware black man in America, he could have no other destiny; and as an Ivy-League-trained minister, Emerson was in some obscure fashion the One, who by becoming a murderer would bring about some kind of apocalypse:

"Emerson knows murder," West said.  "He's seen murder in the children he works with. We need a murder. I mean America needs a murder. Not a Leopold-Loeb vase, which was sensational because it invoved money, murder and homosexuality.  We need a murder that will make us stand in awe of everything that we call justice.  We need a murder committed by a man who knows why he is killing, why he is taking a human life, why he chooses to kill a man at a particular point in his life.  A murder that threatens all of us, that alerts all of us at the same time.  The ancient human sacrifices were such murders.  The priest killed at an exact time to achieve an exact effect.  We need a murder to open our eyes.  The murder I might commit or that Brooks might commit or Emerson might commit if we believed that murder could accomplish what we couldn't accomplish by law or logic" [65].

This isn't just West talking; almost everyone in the novel talks like this, including Brooks, Emerson, and the professional participants at a conference on the welfare system that occupies pages 82 to 98, the junkie who rhapsodizes on heroin for three pages, the young Southern white woman, Jenny Beal, who is fascinated by Emerson -- all are demented bullshit philosophers in love with their own nihilistic voices. It's often difficult to tell just which character is speechifying at any given moment. (Notice the reference to homosexuality in the passage I just quoted.  The novel is mildly obsessed with homosexuality.  As the Kirkus review blurbed on the back cover of the paperback kvells, "Atrocities, murder, addiction, rats, homosexuality, right down to black babies being tossed out of Harlem windows -- it's all here.")

".... I had one boy that I used to give a quarter to run out and buy me cigars.  He was picked up by a detective for hustling, selling his fourteen-year-old ass to the homosexuals on Riverside Drive.  The boy called me because I was the only person in the world whose telephone number he had.  I got him a lawyer and he beat the charges.  I gave him money to go to Cleveland, where he had an uncle.  He got a job with a cousin of mine and now he's making a down payment on a house within three minutes of Shaker Heights" [The W.A.S.P., 111-2].

West showed Brooks the long letters that Emerson had written to him, describing the horrors of poverty that he'd observed.  A sort of friendship grew up between Brooks and Emerson, and eventually, divining that Brooks was reading the letters, Emerson began directing them to Brooks instead.  Emerson shows Harlem to Brooks, and when the story circles back to West's death, eventually Emerson finds his victim.  More than that I won't say, in case the reader should want to find out personally how it turns out.

I don't believe it diminishes the enormity of poverty and racism in America to say that the horrors Horwitz describes and lists are not really important in the novel.  If anything, The W.A.S.P. diminishes them by using them to work through the author's apparent obsession with ultraviolence, sexual and otherwise.  I happened on a review of Horwitz's earlier novel, Can I Get There by Candlelight?, published in 1964. That one concerns an American soldier stationed in London toward the end of World War II, and according to the review it involves "alcohol (consumed with a relentless dedication), orgies (a few), and fornication (lots)."  (I'm tempted to read it to see what the "orgies" look like.)  It sounds as if Horwitz had his Big Theme and looked for settings that gave him an excuse to write about gang rapes, people thrown from the tops of buildings, old people clubbed to death by feral children, heroin, and so on, rather than being moved by a situation that needed to be addressed.

To be fair to Horwitz, there was a lot of this kind of rhetoric in the air in America in the Sixties.  Horwitz's older contemporary William S. Burroughs loved to fantasize apocalyptic violence, for example, and I was reminded of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream as well.  It has roots in American sensational fiction, such as George Lippard's 1845 best-seller The Quaker City, which in turn is descended from the apocalyptic works of antiquity.

It happened that I read a little further in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2002) today.  After discussing David Hume's demolition of natural religion and the Argument from Design, Neiman moved on to the Marquis de Sade.

Sade longed to be more criminal than he was.  Indeed, he longed to be more criminal than was conceivable.  For he often noted, with a mixture of rage and pleasure, that true crimes against nature are improbable.  If the impulse to crime is natural, mustn't nature cooperate in any urge to its own destruction?  There may be a way around this objection, and Sade sought it without rest [170].

Neiman noticed Sade's ambivalence, which probably had multiple functions.  It's a lot like Burroughs' ambivalence; as I wrote of him: "It is never clear to me whether Burroughs actually considers this debauchery noxious or not. Sometimes he seems to disapprove, even while he is cataloguing the practices in enthusiastic detail."  This fits with what I've read by Sade, and I think it also fits Horwitz's outraged yet voyeuristic catalogues of sex and violence.

"... The girl had a big belly filled with a baby.  She had the needle in her arm when I kicked open the door.  The needle dropped. She fell down on the toilet floor like an animal.  She started licking the stuff, licking it off that toilet floor.  Get out, I screamed at them.  Get out and kill yourselves."  Eaton said one day that I should get Harris up to the Foundation for a lunch [The W.A.S.P., 103-4].

In one of his letters Emerson tells of a visit to a police station, where a lawyer tells him this story.

He said, I've got to hang around this court because some white pig accused my client of rape.  One look at the pig would tell you that she couldn't be raped.  But my client is black and the pig is white.  He was driving home from work, the nut, when he stopped for a red light in Chelsea.  This pig opened the door to his car.  That should have been a cue for him to slam the door shut and take off against the light.  But the pig was white, young, looked attractive, at least in the time he had to see her while the light was changing, and she said it would only cost him twenty dollars.  He said, Move in.  When she got into the car they looked for a place where she could go to work.  He didn't want to take her to his apartment, for a very good reason -- he lives in a middle-class project with his wife and three children.  Finally he said to her, Maybe we'd better call this thing off.  He made the mistake of not giving her the twenty dollars or at least a five-dollar bill  The pig called the police, gave them a solid description of my man and the car and said she had been raped.  He has no defense unless the yellow sheet proves the pig is a whore [The W.A.S.P, 143-4].

Emerson "couldn't understand why he was telling me, a complete stranger, the details of his case, unless it was his way of telling me that the Part 1A court didn't exist, wasn't real and he had to confide in me to keep his sanity as he waited for the case to come up" (144).

Why did Horwitz tell his readers, complete strangers, the details of this fictional though perhaps not entirely unrealistic case?  He certainly told me something about himself -- that he didn't believe a "pig" could be raped (only hot babes can be raped) or that a whore could be raped (if she's selling it it's okay to steal it from her) or that in the world of white liberals the word of a john of any color is to believed over a whore of any color.  Perhaps he thought he was being extremely daring by making the whore white and the john black.  (If it had been the other way around, I wonder which one he would have sided with.)  Granted, the story is filtered through the words of the defense lawyer, but Horwitz invented the lawyer too.

Of course I don't know anything about Julius Horwitz as a person, and I'm not saying that he was a sadist who wanted to rape women or throw babies from a rooftop.  A writer, like anybody else really, is not his or her fantasies.  He was probably -- no sarcasm -- a nice person with a social conscience, and working in the welfare system surely must have given him good reason for anger and despair, which (being a nice person) he expressed through writing fiction and advocacy nonfiction instead of through violence.  Or something; I am not sure what he thought he was doing.

I don't think The W.A.S.P. works; the message gets shoved aside by the subtext.  The few quotations I've typed in here probably don't get across the cumulative effect of the descriptions of poverty and violence, which fails for me because Horwitz and his characters don't really seem to care about the victims.  Emerson is really the only black character in the book; the others -- children, gangbangers, mothers -- are disposable, extras, there to suffer and die.  All of Horwitz' spokespeople are hopeless about them: the children are feral, barely human, and it seems pointless to try to help them, unless you can get them away from the Homosexuals in time and send them to Cleveland.  As though there were no homosexuals or prostitutes or drugs in Cleveland.

Saying No in Ways That Sound Like Yes

Thanks to Alas, a Blog, I found this curious essay at slacktivist.  The writer, Fred Clark, asks a useful question: The Biblical position on women's equality, especially in the churches, is still being debated after centuries, with no resolution in sight; so is the Biblical position on homosexuality.

Given the apparent insolubility of those battles over clobber texts, it’s strange to consider that another similar argument — one far more heated and contentious — has simply vanished entirely. This was a fierce argument over biblical interpretation that split denominations and congregations, shaping and reshaping America’s churches, American culture and, ultimately, America’s Constitution. And then, abruptly, it just ended. It was settled, once and for all, and no credible person living today regards it as even slightly controversial.

I’m talking about slavery...

After summarizing some of the debate on slavery and the Bible from the 1800s, Clark concludes:

The dispute wasn’t resolved by exegesis or by theological argument. It was, rather, as Mark Noll wrote, “left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.”

That's cute, but it overlooks a few things. Yes, it took the most horrific war in history up to that time, with 600,000 or so dead and many more wounded and maimed, to bring slavery to an end -- in the United States.  In England, by contrast, slavery was abolished in 1833 by act of Parliament without resort to warfare.  As this timeline from Wikipedia indicates, the US is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the abolition of slavery.  If Clark were serious about the biblical and theological aspects of slavery, a look at how they were handled in England and other Christian countries would be instructive.  (I notice that the next day, he posted about American exceptionalism, though I haven't bothered to read that one.  But his post on slavery is a textbook case of American exceptionalism: it's all about Us, and outside our borders no one has dealt with this issue at all.  I daresay he knows better -- but in this post he chose not to know better.)

Did the Civil War resolve "what in fact the Bible meant" about slavery?  It did not.  It would be interesting to follow the theological discussion of slavery in the US after 1865, and see just how and why biblical defenses of slavery were abandoned.  Although slavery was formally abolished de jure, it survived de facto in various forms, and white supremacy was defended on Biblical grounds well into the twentieth century.

Still, as far as the US is concerned, the blogger is more or less correct: hardly any American Christian nowadays will defend slavery on biblical grounds. Most Christians try to ignore the biblical evidence, and explain it away if they must confront it.  (The same is true of secular rationalizations of slavery: I've argued before that drapetomania, a purported disease which caused slaves to run away from their masters, does not seems to have been proven bogus so much as abandoned in embarrassment.  Scientific racism, of which drapetomania is an example, endures to this day, however.)

In sum, Clark writes,

That’s a huge, enduring problem for American Christianity. For one thing, it doesn’t offer any potential approach for resolving other theological and interpretive disputes. Opponents of women’s equality will continue to cite 1 Timothy 2:12 as authoritative proof that they are right, while advocates of women’s equality will offer alternative interpretations, but neither side will have the option of settling the matter definitively by burning Atlanta.

But the larger problem is this: We have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth. Yet, because we choose not to explore why or how they were wrong, we are unable to learn from their grievous mistake. We have no way of knowing whether or not we are, in fact, repeating their mistake. We have no way of avoiding such a repetition.

Now, this confuses me.  Even if we could burn Atlanta, would it really 'settle the matter' of women or homosexuals in the church?  I don't think it would, and I don't believe that Fred Clark believes so either.  As he acknowledges, the question of slavery wasn't really settled but abandoned by American Christians; I don't think that's really the outcome he wants for other issues.

I'm especially confused by the claim that "we have concluded that some of our foremost and most influential theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars were utterly wrong about a monumentally important matter of biblical truth."  I can't tell for sure, but I guess he means that virtually all twenty-first century Christians now believe that slavery is wrong, and I guess he believes that he regards the contrary view as held by "some of our foremost theologians, pastors, and biblical scholars" is a "mistake."  Or maybe the mistake lay in letting the Civil War settle the issue of slavery: American religious thinkers and teachers abandoned their obligation to determine "biblical truth" for themselves.  But he seems to have lost the thread of the argument.

There are two separate questions here. The one on the table, so to speak, is whether slavery is wrong according to the Bible.  There is no reason to think so, as Clark more or less admits.  The other question is whether slavery is wrong (or right, for that matter), regardless of what the Bible says about it.  I think Clark confuses the issues, and that's why the article as a whole makes little sense.

By "clobber passages" Clark means the parts of the Bible that treat slavery as morally unproblematic, an institution to be regulated but not abolished, and indeed a model for the relationship between the believer and Christ.  He also means the parts of the Bible that assume or explicitly endorse male supremacy, the subordination of women.  But these are not isolated passages which can be used to "clobber" critics who reject these practices and principles: they permeate the Bible from beginning to end.  (The passages relating to male homosexuality, by contrast, are relatively isolated, but there is really no Biblical material that counters them.)  This is relatively uncontroversial; no honest scholar would deny that the Bible treats slavery and male supremacy as unproblematic, and I've noticed that numerous gay Christian apologists admit that the Bible treats male homosexuality as a serious sin even as they try to explain away the problem ("clobber") passages.

The question, then, is not 'what the Bible says' about these issues -- that's clear enough -- but what to do about aspects of the Bible that modern Christians can no longer accept as authoritative.  There are many of them, not limited to these three issues, and not all Christians today reject them.  But Clark seems to think that if we could just really understand what the Bible says, we could resolve these theological and interpretive disputes.  I think the English scholar and theologian Dennis E. Nineham identified this problem in The Use and Abuse of the Bible (Harper & Row, 1976, p. 205):

If I may quote Leonard Hodgson again, it must be on the understanding that quoted out of context he may seem to be saying more than he intended to; or should I say that he spoke more wisely than he knew?  'For too long,' he writes, 'study of the biblical writers (and, for the matter of that, of patristics, scholastics, reformers and the rest) has been based on the assumption that someone, somewhere, at some time in the past, really knew the truth, that what we have to do is find out what he thought and get back to it.'  It may be significant that this statement occurs in Hodgson's last book; for years he had been moving towards it.  My only doubt is whether even in the end he applied it with quite sufficient rigour either to Jesus or to the architects of trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy.

What Nineham is talking about here is the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which most people confuse with "literalism."  It holds that the Bible, properly understood, is without error, and that if there seems to be something wrong with the Bible, it's really the reader or interpreter who has gone wrong.  Very non-literal interpretation is necessary to get rid of the inconvenient material. No issue can be resolved with this approach.  If you start at your end point -- the conclusion you want to reach -- only those who agree about the conclusion will find your interpretation plausible, and your critics will easily show what you got wrong. That accounts for most of the endless debate Clark laments, I think. It also indicates why that debate won't end.

The philosopher Walter Kaufmann also addressed this issue a quarter century before Nineham, in his book The Faith of a Heretic.  (I'm quoting from the 1963 Anchor paperback edition.)  In a print debate with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the influential Protestant scholar and theologian Rudolf Bultmann asked rhetorically: "He [i.e., Jaspers] is as convinced as I am that a corpse cannot come back to life and rise from his tomb ... What, then, am I to do when as a pastor, preaching or teaching, I must explain texts ... ?  Or when, as a scientific theologian, I must give guidance to pastors with my interpretation?" (quoted by Kaufmann, 95).  Kaufmann commented:

Up to this point, Bultmann had generally referred to "the Easter event," and students had debated just what, according to Bultmann, had happened at the first Easter.  Now Bultmann let the cat out of the bag, not only about one particular belief but about the nature of theology ... 

Bultmann, asked about eternal torture in a conversation, said that on that subject he agreed with Lessing.  He had every right to expect that a younger colleague, no less than a student, would proceed to the nearest library and begin reading through a set of Lessing's works, in search of the crucial passage.  After the first ten volumes, he could safely be expected to give up.  Encouraged by my American training, however, I asked: "And what did Lessing say?"  The great theologian hesitated, then allowed that Lessing had once said somewhere that if even a single soul were in eternal torment he would certainly refuse to go to heaven.  It would seem, then, that Bultmann disbelieves in any form of eternal punishment.  In his huge Theology of the New Testament, hell and eternal damnation are simply ignored.

This refusal to let one's No be a No is one of the central characteristics of theologians no less than of committed Communists.  One does not emphasize one's points of disagreement with tradition or the scriptures; instead one emphasizes points of agreement and sidesteps embarrassing issues by raising questions of exegesis.  As a consequence, the agreement among committed believers is, to a surprisingly large extent, apparent only ...

[An American Protestant theologian like Paul] Tillich, like [Reinhold] Niebuhr, shares few of [Billy] Graham's religious beliefs ... But, like Bultmann, they say No in ways that sound like Yes [95-97].

I think this is a bit unfair to theologians: the behavior Kaufmann describes here is also common among lay believers.  (For that matter, Jesus often said Yes in ways that sounded like No, and vice versa. Consider "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," which cannily dodges taking a stand on the very live issue of Roman taxation in first-century Judea and Galilee.) Theologians, because of their specialist knowledge, probably feel the conflict between apologetics and scholarship more acutely -- though that doesn't stop them from trying to evade it.  One of the first commenters on Clark's post wrote sarcastically:

Gosh, if only there were an all good, all powerful being who loved us deeply that could manifest itself and bring clarity to these sorts of issues. That would certainly help end a lot of arguments.

To which another commenter replied, apparently in all seriousness:

If only he had. But, he didn't clarify. He, in fact, made the law into a square circle that institutionized racism, sexism, and slavery and also commanded love and the golden rule. At no point does the bible even theoretically acknowledge a conflict. So, for biblical literalists, or at least those who believe God made the old law based on perfect morality, you're stuck trying to square that circle of being both loving and oppressive.
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If Jesus existed, was God made manifest, and was morally perfect, and wanted this clear, he had ample opportunity to clarify the evils of slavery, of making women into a second class of person, etc. At ,east according to the bible, he did not make use of that opportunity.
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So, yeah, it would have been nice, for Christianity, had Jesus clarified the matters.

From there the discussion turned largely into a debate about the historical reliability of the gospels, but that's not really important here.  I'm more interested in the fact that these people clearly want to see Jesus and the Bible as authoritative guides to morality, and they expect God's morality to agree with theirs, but it doesn't seem to occur to the second commenter that Jesus might not have bothered to "clarify" matters like slavery, not only because he agreed with the status quo of his time and place, but because he didn't see these issues as important matters of biblical truth.  And if you're a Christian, Jesus' opinion presumably counts for more than yours.

According to the gospels, Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God was "at hand," that is, it was going to be established on earth ("as it is in heaven") within the lifetimes of most of his followers.  (The rest of the New Testament is built on this assumption.  I'm not as informed on the "gnostic" scriptures as I am on the canonical ones, but they don't seem any more concerned with social justice, as opposed to individual spiritual purity, than the New Testament is.)  What mattered was not working for social justice but making oneself ready for the coming judgment, which would not be based on whether one owned slaves or allowed women to preach, but on other criteria that aren't spelled out coherently in the New Testament.  This doctrine is summed up in a well-known problem passage, "The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me" (Mark 14:7 and parallels).

These issues can't be resolved for modern Christians by biblical interpretation.  The Bible (leaving aside the absurdity of referring to the Bible as it were a person with a single point of view, but that's the convention) has no objection to slavery, the subjugation of women, the devaluation of homosexuality, and so on.  That doesn't mean modern Christians must agree with all of the Bible; no Christians ever have.  The problem, once again, is not "literalism" but inerrancy.  Liberal, even radical Christians still can't seem to shake the assumption that the Bible, properly understood, has all the answers.  This leaves them closer in principle to fundamentalists than either faction wants to think.  Some Christian thinkers, like Nineham, James Barr and others, tried to move away from inerrancy, but most Christians continue to try to fine-tune it.