It Takes One To Know One

To show that I'm not totally out of it, that I have my thumbs pressed firmly around the Adam's apple of the American zeitgeist, this little anthem of American diversity. Be warned, it's not work-safe -- or, probably, human-safe:



According to Jeff Gordon's website, he's welcomed God into his, um, life. Is that like being taught the mystery of the kingdom of God?

Tim Wilson's kinda cute in an aging-yuppie way, and very postmodernly knowing in his comedy. Is that accent real? Who knows? But as I wrote to the late Francis Vincent Zappa: work it, girl!

And while I'm being trivial and catty, the very model of a modern homosexual, let me pass this along: Garfield Without Garfield -- via a comment at DTWOF, but it seems to be getting around.

Can 50,000,000 Barack Fans Be Wrong?

It’s not that I’m not paying attention, really it’s not. I am paying attention, kind of -- I mean it, I am! I glance at the headlines to see how the primaries are going, and check the usual elitist, hard-left sexist, extremist sites to see which way the wind is blowing. And I admit, I was a bit quicker than usual seeing how Tuesday’s primaries had turned out. Partly because I want it to be over. Presidential election campaigns, like the Christmas shopping season, start a little earlier each cycle, and I find myself feeling almost sorry for Clinton and Obama, who must be exhausted by now, even with their expensive support networks, with eight months still to go. But only almost. And luckily, I’m not in the middle of the vortex.

I have heard only brief clips of either Clinton or Obama speaking, partly because reading is faster than listening but mainly because I’m not interested in their charisma or lack of it. If you’re paying too much attention to the glory emanating from his visage, you’re not paying attention to what he’s saying, and that’s what counts as far as I’m concerned. Noam Chomsky famously likes to belittle his own uncharismatic speaking skills for just that reason. I recall, after a debate during the 2004 campaign I believe, a broadcast pundit dismissing questions about how well the candidates had done on the issues: the issues are unimportant, he said, what counts is which candidate you’d want to invite to your house for dinner. I don’t know, myself, what most voters think about that, but if I needed another reason to avoid TV news, that statement would be it. If I were Hannibal Lecter, I might be interested in having that pundit for dinner.

I find it interesting that I don’t feel much need to explain why I don’t support Hillary Rodham Clinton. She’s a Democratic Leadership Council Reagan Democrat, the kind of pol that has helped the Republicans run the US into the ground. In an ideal world I’d be thrilled to see a woman elected President, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I think that I’ve known since the days of Margaret Thatcher that when we got a woman President, she’d be more like Thatcher than Shirley Chisholm. I don’t object to Clinton’s personality (about which I don’t know much anyway, never having met her, and of course you don’t suppose that you get an accurate picture of her personality in the corporate media?), but her politics. I confess, I’d figured until now that the first woman to get this close to the Oval Office would be Condoleezza Rice, who combines all the stigmatized traits one could wish for, with vile politics and Republican Party affiliation.

No, it’s not wanting to vote for Obama that I feel defensive about. Sometimes I find myself thinking I should watch one of his speeches, and see why so many people are excited about him. Maybe I should anyway, but I don’t expect it would change my mind – I know too much about him. The Anti-Christ’s Running Mate has summed it up here better than I could, and there’s more, like the recent revelation that his senior economic policy advisor reassured officials with the Canadian consulate in Chicago:

“Noting anxiety among many U.S. domestic audiences about the U.S. economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign,” the memo said. “He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

Goolsbee disputed the characterization from the conservative government official.

“This thing about ‘it’s more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans,’ that’s this guy’s language,” Goolsbee said of DeMora. “He's not quoting me.

“I certainly did not use that phrase in any way,” he said.

Well, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he has been misinterpreted. But I wouldn’t lay money on it. (The Clinton campaign has tried to accuse Obama of “doublespeak” on trade, but that’s not going to let her off the hook, since it was the first Clinton administration that pushed NAFTA through Congress.) [Update and clarification here.] Obama has also chosen Samantha Power as his Henry Kissinger, and she is busy assuring Israel that “She absolutely does not believe in ‘imposing a settlement.’ Israelis and Arabs ‘will negotiate their own peace.’” (Power, for those who don’t recall, wrote a popular book lamenting other countries’ genocidal atrocities while minimizing those of the U.S. Perfectly mainstream, and that’s the trouble with her.) He's left himself some interesting loopholes with regard to the War in Iraq; and now see his take on the Colombian incursion into Ecuador. [Update: Power has left the Obama campaign after embarrassing it by calling Clinton a "monster."]

But what about the Hope, the Hope for Change? Am I just a jaded old man who’s given up hoping for change? Maybe so. But it struck me that the bright-eyed hopeful young people who’ve fallen in love with Obama are mostly too young to remember the dawn of the Bill Clinton era fifteen years ago, when everyone was thrilled by his promises, his charm, his ability to say the words “gay” and “lesbian.” Yes, really, and that was an improvement, however minimal, over his predecessors. Unfortunately Episode 150 of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Our For isn’t available online, since it captures the moment well, so I’ll transcribe some dialogue. Jezanna, the full-figured African-American proprietress of Madwimmin Books (since defunct) contends with the Cassandra-like Mo:

JEZANNA: … Bush and the Bible-thumpers are gone! We’re actually gonna have a President who can pronounce the words “Gay and Lesbian!” Plus four new women in the Senate, one of them the only black senator since Reconstruction! The anti-gay initiative in Oregon failed! The pro-choice referendum in Maryland passed! I feel hopeful! I feel young again!

MO: Yeah, well, don’t throw out your Geritol yet! The homophobes won in Colorado, Iowa defeated an Equal Rights Amendment, and the Senate’s still 94 percent boys!

As it turned out, Bill Clinton could also pronounce “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and “Defense of Marriage”, and rather more convincingly. I hear that Obama has spoken out fairly forcefully on glbt issues, but never forget that so did Bill Clinton when he had his eye on the prize.

I can hear – indeed, I have heard – the liberal whimper: Why are you negative and bitter? Are you afraid of looking foolish? Is that why you won’t give Obama a chance? This sort of question only makes me dig in my heels the more. It’s not about me, really it’s not. I’ll be quite happy to look foolish if Obama wins and keeps the promises that have engaged so many people of all ages and backgrounds. But there are cracks in the façade, which his followers don’t want to see. Looking foolish is not what concerns me, though; it’s how many people will be badly hurt.

P.S. As Michael J. Smith writes, "The Fasc-O-Meter twitches into the red zone: ...

... The incantatory repetition of the Great Leader's name. The waggling, pointing Uncle- Sam- Wants- You fingers. And all those nice-looking young people with appealing cheekbones, intense but not un-cool -- that's the worst. That's the authentic Riefenstahl touch.

And it's not just a matter of style. Obama just endorsed a terrorist assassination by the country with one of the worst human-rights records in the hemisphere (see above on Colombia), and has already advocated some crimes of his own:

In a strikingly bold speech about terrorism Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama called not only for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but a redeployment of troops into Afghanistan and even Pakistan — with or without the permission of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges," Obama said, "but let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Can 50,000,000 Barack fans be wrong? Yes They Can.

Bird-Eyes

Another book review for Gay Community News, published sometime in 1988. Bird-eyes won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Novel. Madelyn went on to publish a fine collection of stories, On Ships At Sea (St. Martin's Press, 1992) and another novel, A Year of Full Moons (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Another novel is reportedly in progress; I hope her health allows her to finish it. Meanwhile, here she honors the memory of our mutual friend, Steven Cuniberti.

Bird-eyes
by Madelyn Arnold
Seattle: The Seal Press, 1988
201 pp.
$8.95 paperback

It's scary enough just reading, let alone reviewing, the work of someone you know, especially if diplomacy is not one of your strong points. So when Madelyn Arnold asked me to review her first novel, Bird-eyes, I was eager to see it but nervous. I've known Madelyn for seventeen years but I'd never read any of her work before. It didn't help that the deal with Houghton Mifflin she'd once mentioned had evidently fallen through and a small press had published the book instead. Maybe it's just my bad experiences as a reviewer, but it seems to me that small gay and lesbian presses aren't what they once were. I've read too many books the last year or so that mainstream houses probably rejected not for gay content but for amateurish writing. Oh well, I thought, as I unwrapped the package from Seal Press, if I don't like it I can always ask Stephanie to give it to someone else.

I needn't have worried. Bird-eyes is good; rough, painful, but good. It's the story of Latisha Prentiss, who in 1964 at the age of sixteen is committed by her family to a state-run mental hospital for being a lesbian, a runaway, a prostitute (how else could a 16-year-old runaway in 1964 support herself?), and a junkie (“If you can't relax when you hustle, sex will hurt you--which is where jazz comes in” [116]). In 1964 in Middle America these things spelled C-R-A-Z-Y, and things haven't changed that much since then, including the power of parents to sweep their deviant children into institutions. With the help of a gay male patient named Bryan, Latisha is planning her escape from East Central, to return to her lover Tina, the woman who introduced her to prostitution and smack.

As the novel opens, a new patient arrives: Anna Robeson, a farm woman of forty who became depressed after her husband died and was pressured by her children into committing herself as suicidal. Anna is deaf, but she is forbidden by the hospital staff to use sign language (it's “animal-like: something out of caveman-throwback stories”; again, if you recall last March's student revolt at Gallaudet College for the deaf, whose administration was hostile to Sign, things haven't changed all that much since 1964). Latisha, wounded by the sight of Anna's naive directness, tries to teach her how to get along in East Central, and the two become friends. Despite the prohibition, Anna teaches Latisha some Sign, naming her Bird-eyes. Eventually their subversive disobedience is discovered by the staff, complicating Latisha's plans for escape.

But this is only one thread, though an important one, in a novel in which a lot is always going on. A mental hospital is a handy symbolic microcosm of society for novelists, and it encourages the creation of a Dickensian gallery of grotesque characters, among both the patients and the staff. So we have (among others) Vivian-who-never-talks, Weird Diane with her outbursts of almost random violence, Doctor Kim, “a Korean Mormon whose English was the kind you hear in kamikaze movies”, and Nurse Wykowski with her incestuous motherliness. They are the conventions of the fiction of madness, and they lend a paradoxical predictability to Bird-eyes. Arnold does this just to let you know that she knows what she's doing, however; it's as if she were saying, OK, here's the usual stuff—but now it's going to get weird.

East Central is no shelter from a violent world. Bird-eyes reminds you of the psychiatric fads of the Fifties and Sixties -- aversion therapy, Electro-Convulsive Therapy, lobotomies – asking bitterly, “Treatments come and treatments go; where do you bury the survivors?” (148). Latisha is taken out of the hospital, drugged, straitjacketed, to be “interviewed,” i.e. put on display at a downtown medical center seminar. But there's more. Bryan pimps Latisha to the male staff, she pimps herself to Wykowski. She is attacked by a male patient:

And there's more laughter but now his attendants are yelling at him easy Danny, easy -- now don't hurt that girl and we're all tangled up, he hardly can move and so he shoves; . . . My lip is bleeding: I shove as hard as I can and then it's his fist, my teeth explode and my head snaps back, cracking hard against the seat: instant nausea, I can hardly think; and suddenly they've got him up under the arms and they're standing on the seats on either side of us, twisting his arm -- there they are, much too late as usual, his attendants [100].

Compared to which the streets don't look so bad:

We were just on the street and hungry, by ourselves, without a pimp (and you need a pimp, a man to crush other men, but he'll make you want to kill him). And what proves I'm no good is that sometimes I was happy on the street. Bad things happen, but none of it is personal. There's an uncertain feeling that's sometimes very nice. . . Sometimes things would get better as the day wore on; that never happened at home. Sometimes we'd have money -- drive-in movies -- southern-fried chicken and jazz, and Southern Comfort. Not too bad. I mean, there's still the fact that you had to hunt up the next trick when the money ran low, but what's perfect [116].

But what really lifts Bird-eyes safely out of the routine and puts it on a level with such books as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time or Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is Latisha's unforgettable voice. Tough, ironic, streetwise, walking a tightwire above an inferno of violence and the fear of madness, Latisha's baby-butch bravado never quite drowns out the loneliness and terror that keen insistently beneath. It is Madelyn Arnold's achievement to have put that voice onto paper in such a way that that you always hear its full complexity. There is some resemblance to the style of Joanna Russ, who also excels at the meticulous delineation of horribly raveled inner states, but Madelyn's style, while no less cerebral, is more concrete somehow. When Latisha stands in the shower -- her only refuge at East Central -- you feel the water drumming on her skin; when she talks of her fear of going crazy, she draws you in so that you feel it too.

You can get so everything's exactly equal: people and walls and Vivian and Diane: the TV and the cement blocks and the way they fold the milk containers, and when everything is equal, what are you? That's when you sit and stare. You have to fight that actively, all that staring: and when you find yourself doing that you have to get up and move. You simply move. Just walk someplace and look back where you were -- not far away – and remind yourself that you aren't there anywhere. So you are not equal to the way you were: that place is not yourself, and you're still free [36].

I don't want to dwell on the autobiographical element in Bird-eyes, but it's there, so it should be mentioned. Madelyn Arnold (which, incidentally, is a pseudonym) was herself committed by her parents to a state mental hospital as a teenager for being a lesbian. There are other parallels between Latisha and Arnold, but there are also differences -- Madelyn always told me, for instance, that she convinced the not-too-sophisticated staff that she was heterosexual by necking in public with a young man who had also been committed for being gay. Eventually they released her. Latisha, on the other hand, escapes. For me this indicates Madelyn's understanding that it's not enough, in writing a novel, just to elaborate on what happened to you or to someone else. The true ending would probably have tipped the story into black comedy; the ending of Bird-eyes shows Latisha taking her freedom, rather than its being given to her, yet leaves her a fugitive forever.

Most of the small-press gay fiction I've had to read the past year or so I will never read again. But Bird-eyes haunts me, and when I'm feeling strong enough, I'll go back to it. Yes, it says, life is hell. But if you let yourself go numb, you've lost. It will take all the courage you've got and then some, but as long as you can feel pain, you are resisting, and as long as you resist, you're still free, however uncertainly. Bird-eyes is terrifying because it dares to face the hell of memory. And I find that I want to boast: a friend of mine, someone I know, wrote it.

Revolting Youth

This past weekend I finally saw Wild in the Streets, the 1968 moving picture about a rock star who takes over the country, lowers the voting age to 14, and sends everyone over 35 to concentration camps where they are controlled by LSD in the drinking water. I wish I’d seen it when I was a lot younger, when I was in its target demographic. I was 17 when it was released, but I don’t remember feeling any urgency about seeing it back then. I don’t remember that anyone I knew saw it, or talked about it. Maybe I sensed that it had nothing to do with “youth culture,” more with adult paranoia and youth’s paranoia about adult paranoia.

There’s general agreement that Wild in the Streets isn’t great cinema. As Pauline Kael put it in 5001 Nights at the Movies, “This blatant, insensitive, crummy-looking …” Well, you get the idea; she sums it up very neatly. “ ... is entertaining in a lot of ways that more tasteful movies aren’t: it has wit without any grace at all, and is enjoyable at a pop, comic-strip level.” Even better, check out Roger Ebert’s original review, which is tastefully hysterical:

Once you've experienced a concert by a group like the Beatles or the Doors, the fascist potential of pop music becomes inescapable. There is a primitive force in these mass demonstrations that breaks down individualism and creates a joyous mob. … For this audience, Wild in the Streets needs no serious political comment and no real understanding of how pop music and the mass media work together. It's a silly film, but it does communicate in the simplest, most direct terms.

Ah, yes: I remember the 60s squares (outdated 50s slang used here by malevolent design) who fretted about “the fascist potential of pop music,” but never seemed to mind the fascist potential of mass sports events, or for that matter mass political rallies. Why pop music should be any more threatening than these all-American staples has never been clear to me, aside from the obvious: all those little girls screaming and wetting their pants for those long-haired creeps, just as their older sisters had for Elvis and their mothers had for Frankie and Bing, plus the Brandoesque bad-boy stance that so many boys adored from an equally safe distance. Would the fans do anything Jim Morrison or John Lennon ordered them to do? I doubt it very much. Or was the spell based on a suspension of disbelief that depended on the knowledge that, in a crowd one could let go for an hour or two, screaming and dancing in a contained freedom? That’s my guess. As far as I know, the only rock’n’roller who went into politics was … Sonny Bono. Radical. (One of Wild in the Streets’ crucial missteps is having its protagonist turn into a ranting Hitler, complete with jackboots.)

So. Wild in the Streets was entertaining, though it looked more like a TV show than a movie, something on the order of The Brady Bunch. The music is typical Sixties movie-rock, which is to say, warmed over rockabilly trying to sound psychedelic. Think of the music that was popular in 1968 – Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, The Doors, Beggars Banquet – and the thinness of Wild’s pseudo-psychedelica becomes all the more laughable. It wasn’t until Easy Rider a year later that a movie would use real contemporary rock’n’roll on its soundtrack, instead of imitations by studio jazz hacks.

The plot, summed up in my first sentence, blusters along with hamfisted glee, though it ends with predictable cautionary Hollywood logic: anyone who breaks out of his or her destined place must be brought low, so our hero Max Frost (Christopher Jones, age 27 when the film was made) discovers at the age of 24 that he is already old to the children he wants to lead. He too will be overthrown in his turn. Soon fetuses in the womb will rebel against their older siblings in diapers, and then what will become of America?

Still, there were some surprises. Wild in the Streets has a major gay character. Amazingly for an American movie made in 1968, he’s not a screaming queen, nor does he die as queers are supposed to, nor does he have a furtive crush on the manly hero. (I'm surprised he's not mentioned in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet.) Billy Cage, aged 14 (Kevin Coughlin, age 22), is a child prodigy, the youngest-ever graduate of Yale Law School (if I recall correctly), and Max Frost’s legal advisor and business manager. Early on he teases Max for having sex only with “chicks”; Max defensively retorts, “You’re a minority”, but Billy isn’t fazed. Max, we are assured, is quite a cocksman, supporting four children (he’s only sure of two). But in another scene he’s almost cheek to cheek with his buddy Abraham the Hook (Larry Bishop, age uncertain but no teenager), as they reassure each other of their mutual devotion – in a manly male-bonding way, of course, until Max’s main “chick” Sally LeRoy (Diane Varsi, age 30) rouses herself from her acid-induced haze to jeer at them, “You guys sound like a couple of fags!” That’s the only expressed homophobia in the movie, too. Later still, as the inner circle confers on how to deal with their former ally, 37-year-old Senator Johnny Fergus, Sally muses, “Maybe I could get him.” Billy grins and counters, “Maybe I could get him.” Unfortunately, we never see Billy with a boyfriend or a trick, but I wonder how 1968 audiences reacted to his blunt openness.

(N.B.: All dialogue is quoted from memory; I don't have the DVD to hand, and the lines I needed weren't in IMDB's memorable quotes. But they're close paraphrases, I hope.)

Aside from that, the movie is predictable in its attitudes, especially towards women. Sally Leroy is one member of Max’s harem. (There’s also Fuji Elly, “typewriter heiress and beach bum,” played by May Ishihara.) A former child star, she now provides eye-candy for the boys on the screen and in the audience, shocking the adults in the film with her casual nudity as she serves drinks at a meeting. (For others, there’s the eye-candy of Stanley X [Richard Pryor, 28] “drummer, anthropologist, and author of The Aborigine Cookbook,” who usually appears either shirtless or with his shirt hanging open.) She’s the earth-mother / hippie-love-child character; her only moment of rebellion is her homophobic jab at Max and the Hook. Also standard is Max’s mother, played by Shelley Winters: a sex-hating, man-hating, castrating wife and a smothering, over-intimate mother, she’s the archetype of Momism – the constant bugbear of sexist males in the postwar era. Winters has such fun in her over-the-top role that you have to love her anyhow. But then, she’s not my mother. Chicks and moms – Wild in the Streets is very much of its time. Only Billy Cage stands out and defies the zeitgeist.

Shirley I Am Coming Soon (Rev. 22.20)

I keep finding more amusing little goodies about the Morton Smith / Secret Gospel controversy. Last November First Things, a rather pretentious ecumenical journal, ran an item by its editor Richard John Neuhaus, praising Stephen Carlson’s Gospel Hoax as a “book that did not get the attention it deserved this past year”. (An odd claim, considering that Gospel Hoax has been widely reviewed, especially in conservative Christian media; earlier today I found a review in a journal from New Zealand.) Neuhaus, formerly a Lutheran minister and now a Catholic priest, tittered:

Morton Smith was a distinguished professor at Columbia University and a not-so-closeted homosexual. You remember the young man who, in the gospel account of the arrest of Jesus in the garden, ran away naked. To those of a certain bent, that is a titillation hard to resist.

Yes, it is, to those of a certain bent – reactionary, closeted, and disproportionately often Roman Catholic. But I shouldn’t stereotype. I don’t actually know anything about the personal sexuality of the men who’ve worked themselves into a lather over Smith’s work. It’s just that, as we’ve seen numerous times in the past couple of years, men with a vocation for denouncing homosexuality have a tendency to tapdance in public restrooms, to hire the services of male escorts, and less innocently, to fondle young orphans in their care. (The first such person I heard of was the late Rev. Billy James Hargis, whose anti-hippie, anti-Communist crusade came crashing down in the mid-70s, when he was accused of seducing students of both sexes from his American Christian College. Reportedly he blamed his straying on his chromosomes.) And then there’s the desperate attempt of the Catholic hierarchy to blame its child-molesting priests on the gay movement. Really, people who live in glass confessionals shouldn’t throw stones.

Look again at Stephen Carlson’s summary:

The sexually charged climax of the Secret Mark means that what these [two different] young man were seeking was, to use the words of New York statute, “a crime against nature or other lewdness.” In other words, Secret Mark easily conjures up to the twentieth-century reader the image that Jesus was arrested for soliciting a homoerotic encounter in a public garden [quoted by Scott Brown in JBL 2006, 373].

The trouble is that there isn’t a sexually charged climax in Secret Mark, and I have to wonder why Carlson is so insistent on seeing one there if he's not "of a certain bent" himself, snicker giggle snort. I don’t see how anyone would suddenly begin to believe that Jesus was gay, solely on the basis of Secret Mark; it seems that a person would already have to have had some contact with the gay-Jesus tradition that existed long before Smith found his manuscript in 1958, and interpret Secret Mark in its light. There are reports that Smith privately believed that Jesus, and also the apostle Paul, were gay, but I never saw any hint of this in his work, and I’ve read most of his scholarly writing. It seems pretty likely that Smith’s accusers are reading homoeroticism into Longer Mark because of their knowledge that Smith was gay, a fact that clearly obsesses them. Why is that, I wonder?

Neuhaus goes on:

In reviewing The Gospel Hoax, Bruce Chilton of Bard College writes: “The pattern of public discussions of [secret gospels] is all too familiar: a discovery is claimed and trumpeted in the press, only to be discredited by scholarly discussion which is then ignored. . . . No literature has suffered more from this problem than that of the second century of Christianity.” The fact that the hoax of “Secret Mark” was credited for such a long time, says Chilton, “stands as an indictment of American scholarship, which prides itself on skepticism in regard to the canonical gospels, but then turns credulous when non-canonical texts are concerned.”

It depends on where you’re standing, I guess. The pattern Chilton describes also occurs in conservative Christian circles with regard to archaeological finds, which get a lot of publicity and then are discredited. (Besides, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library have not been “discredited” – there’s no doubt that they are authentic early documents, not forgeries.) The Gospel Hoax seems more like the sort of thing Chilton is complaining about: a discovery [Smith forged it!] is claimed and trumpeted in the [reactionary Christian] press, only to be discredited by scholarly discussion which is, or will be, ignored. The debate over the authenticity of Longer Mark is just beginning, and Neuhaus is counting his chickens before they are hatched.

For me it doesn’t matter much. I would be disappointed if it were proven that Smith forged the document. If he was taken in by someone else’s fake, that would be disappointing too, but not so important, because my own view of the New Testament and early Christianity doesn’t rely on the letter or Longer Mark.

Smith was always a thorn in the side of conservative scholars, with his iconoclastic views and his vast learning and argumentative skills to back them. What they now hope, I think, is to get rid of the other elements of Smith’s work on Christian origins: the material about secrecy, freedom from the Law of Moses, the magical elements in the gospels and later Christian tradition. Those don’t depend on Longer Mark either – he established them very solidly -- but if Secret Mark is shown to be fake, all of Smith’s scholarship could be brushed easily aside. That probably explains why so many reactionaries have been jumping the gun, to get everyone to believe that he has already been exposed.

A Quick One With The King Of Kings

Fifty years ago, according to the historian Morton Smith (1915-1991), he found a manuscript fragment in the library of a Greek Orthodox monastery near Bethlehem, in what is now the West Bank of the Occupied Territories. The material, handwritten during the 1700s in the endpapers of a printed book, turned out to be a copy of part of a letter from Clement of Alexandria (ca 150 – ca 215), an important early Church father, and that alone made Smith’s discovery significant. In the letter Clement attacked the Carpocratians, a notorious ‘heretical’ sect. But even better, Clement wrote that the evangelist Mark had written a longer, more “spiritual” version of his gospel for more advanced Christians, and Clement quoted a couple of passages from it.

Smith couldn’t take the original with him – it belonged to the monastery – so he photographed it. When he returned to the US, he announced his find and began studying it carefully, to try to determine whether the letter (and therefore the gospel quotation) was genuine. In 1973 he published two books: a dense scholarly monograph, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Harvard University Press), and a ‘popular’ account, The Secret Gospel (Harper & Row). There had been rumblings of incipient controversy before, but now it hit the fan.

The sore point was Clement’s quotation from Longer Mark. Here it is in Smith’s translation, with the immediate context in Clement’s letter:

To you, therefore, I shall not hesitate to answer the questions you have asked, refuting the falsifications by the very words of the Gospel. For example, after “And they were in the road going up to Jerusalem" and what follows, until "After three days he shall arise”, the secret Gospel brings the following material word for word:

“And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near, Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb, they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do, and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.”

After these words follows the text, “And James and John come to him”, and all that section. But “naked man with naked man,” and the other things about which you wrote, are not found.

And after the words, “And he comes into Jericho,” the secret Gospel adds only, “And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.” But the many other things about which you wrote both seem to be, and are, falsifications.

Anyone familiar with the New Testament will recognize that we have here a version of the raising of Lazarus, familiar from chapter 11 of the gospel of John. The most striking difference is the rite it mentions, with the new disciple coming to Jesus wrapped in a linen shroud. Smith concluded that Jesus practiced a rite, the mystery of the Kingdom of God, which united the disciple spiritually with Jesus and set him free from the Law of Moses. In The Secret Gospel he added, “Freedom from the law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union. This certainly occurred in many forms of Gnostic Christianity; how early it began there is no telling” (114). It was probably this speculation that drove his critics off the rails.

The authenticity of the letter is well-enough accepted that it’s now included in the standard edition of Clement’s works. There was always dissent, of course, and especially since Smith’s death in 1991, the controversy has heightened. The basic line of attack is that the letter, including the gospel fragment, is a hoax perpetrated by Smith himself.

To add to the complications, the original document has been lost, perhaps deliberately, by the monastery librarian; at least two other scholars have seen it as late as 1976, and a couple of color photographs were posted on the Web. Stephen C. Carlson, who purports to prove in his recent book The Gospel Hoax (Baylor, 2005) that the document was forged by Smith, had to base his handwriting analysis on Smith’s published photographs of the text.

But the core issue for most of those who believe that Smith forged the letter is that sly aside about “physical union,” i.e., sex. I’m not competent to have an informed opinion on the letter’s authenticity -- those who want to learn more can start here -- but I think I can say something useful about this.

Here I find myself in an unusual position, for me. Usually conservatives will deny that an ambiguous text should be read homoerotically, but this time it’s conservatives who insist that the passage from Longer Mark is about a homosexual encounter between Jesus and the rich young man. They’re not the only ones, it’s true: some openly gay Christian writers have also read it as a positive example for gay Christians today -- but they believe the letter is authentic. I think this unexpected agreement is fascinating, and probably significant.

But I don’t see anything homoerotic in the story. Sure, I wouldn’t mind having a handsome young man appear at my door wrapped in a sheet and nothing else, begging nocturnal instruction. (This reminds me of The Sensuous Woman, a self-help book for frustrated housewives of the 1960s, which recommended that they wrap themselves in Saran Wrap to greet their husbands at the end of the day.) Morton Smith, who was apparently gay, would doubtless have enjoyed it too, as would the gay Christian writers who’ve adopted this story, and so probably would many of Smith’s conservative accusers. But the text doesn’t, as far as I can see, support such a reading itself. Smith provided evidence that early Christian baptism, like initiation rites in other cults, often required the new Christian to wear a linen shroud over his or her naked body, and often took place at night, but his dirty-minded accusers insist on importing their own obsessions into the story.

I’m not calling these writers dirty-minded because I think sex is dirty, but because they do. And they do, Blanche, they do. They give their twisted libidos free rein to fantasize about Smith’s picture of Jesus as “a kind of bathhouse shaman who had initiated his (mostly male) disciples by means of late-night baptismal rituals featuring nudity and most probably sex” (Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ [The Free Press, 1998, p. 265]). Howard Clark Kee explained that Jesus refused to meet with his new disciple’s mother and a friend of hers because “they resented the homosexual relations Jesus was having with his male associates” (What Can We Know About Jesus? [Cambridge, 1990], 36). Another scholar claimed that Smith wrote the gospel fragment as an insider’s “gay joke at the expense of all the self-important scholars” (Donald Akenson, quoted by Scott Brown, Journal of Biblical Literature 2006, p. 373f). That Morton Smith theorized Jesus as a “Gay Magician” is virtually an article of faith among them, repeated without support in article after book after diatribe. It would be interesting if there were evidence that Jesus was gay, but there isn’t any.

In his book The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives from the New Testament (Pilgrim Press, 2003), Theodore W. Jennings makes an interesting case that the New Testament depicts Jesus as erotically drawn to other males, and they to him. (He takes Longer Mark into account, but it’s not essential to his reading.) It’s not a new idea. The Elizabethan writer and spy Christopher Marlowe was accused of having said that “St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma”; many gay men for the past century and more have read the fourth gospel’s references to the Disciple Jesus Loved as romantic or erotic.

There’s also a tantalizing moment in the canonical gospel of Mark. When Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane,

Now a certain young man followed Him, having a linen cloth thrown around his naked body. And the young men laid hold of him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked [Mark 14.51-52, New King James Version].

This fellow has the same keen fashion sense as the rich youth in Longer Mark. Why was he with Jesus that night? Scholars have no idea. The incident doesn’t appear in any of the other gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ arrest.

Now it gets kinky. Stephen Carlson writes in The Gospel Hoax, 70:

The sexually charged climax of the Secret Mark means that what these [two different] young man were seeking was, to use the words of New York statute, “a crime against nature or other lewdness.” In other words, Secret Mark easily conjures up to the twentieth-century reader the image that Jesus was arrested for soliciting a homoerotic encounter in a public garden [quoted by Scott Brown in JBL 2006, 373].

This is a highly revealing speculation, and it indicates what is wrong with a gay reading of Longer Mark: even if Jesus invited the rich youth to come to his room for some all-night lovin’, why did he want him to arrive in such a, well, eccentric outfit? Ditto for the youth in canonical Mark 14:51-52: if he was cruising for action, why was he wearing a shroud? For a burial shroud is what that linen sheet connotes. First-century Judea was, on Carlson’s assumptions, highly advanced in the fetishes of its gay scene. (And not only Carlson: Jennings overlooks the significance of the shroud in his positive homoerotic reading of Mark in The Man Jesus Loved.) Carlson believes that Smith based his fabrication of Longer Mark on American gay customs of the 1950s, but I’ve never heard of guys cruising Central Park, or anywhere else, in shrouds. Even if it happened once in a while, it wasn’t standard operating procedure. I certainly don’t recognize twentieth-century gay men’s customs in these stories.

Carlson also apparently believes that Smith erred by presenting an egalitarian gay relationship between men of about the same age, which didn’t fit the classic Greek model. I can’t see this either: Jesus was a mature man, the rich young man was younger even if not a boy. Jesus was also the teacher (and the Messiah, the Son of God to boot!) and the youth was his disciple. If Longer Mark was meant to depict an erotic relationship, it is not an egalitarian one. (One also can’t assume that Jesus would have followed the pagan Greek pederastic model, which in any case often stretched to include men near to each other in age.) To get the evidence to fit his agenda, Carlson has to twist it around quite strenuously.

Even if they get rid of Longer Mark, Smith’s accusers now must do something with the naked youth in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ love for the rich youth (Mark 10:21), Jesus’ love for Lazarus (John 11:3), Jesus’ love for the Beloved Disciple, which all conjure up homoerotic encounters for the prurient twentieth-century reader. Maybe Morton Smith traveled to the first century in a time machine and put those passages into the original gospels! Maybe Smith and Jesus were gay lovers, who fabricated Secret Mark together to make it appear that Jesus was a “bathhouse shaman” and discredit the modern church! And now that Smith’s accusers can’t look at love between Jesus and another male without seeing hot-hot-guy2guy action, they’re doomed. (For that matter, the loose woman wiping perfume from Jesus’ feet with her hair [Luke 7:38] is pretty steamy stuff. So, the gospels depict Jesus as a swinging bisexual.)

I suspect that these writers think they can discredit not only Smith himself but the manuscript simply by saying that Smith was gay. No doubt this move still works in fundamentalist circles, which to judge from recent events are crawling with closet cases desperate to distract attention from their own furtive gropings by pointing at Teh Gays. That such virulent homosexual panic could sweep through New Testament studies in the 1990s and after doesn’t speak well for the field. More liberal scholars don’t seem to be much better (even the reasonable Bart Ehrman still believes that Smith forged the letter and gospel fragment, for no reason except that he could; and because he could have, he therefore did), but they can mostly stifle their personal discomfort with homosexuality enough to recognize that a smear is a smear.

I first read The Secret Gospel sometime in the mid-1970s, before I started reading seriously in Christian origins. My reading led me eventually to Morton Smith’s other work, which taught me a great deal. I never met him, and to judge from some snippy things he wrote about homosexuality and other matters in his Hope and History, I doubt we’d have gotten along well. But my intellectual debt to him is enormous. I think Clement’s letter and the gospel fragment are probably authentic, though I have some quibbles with Smith’s interpretation and theorizing about them. His opponents’ reliance on ad hominem attacks and smears, preferably after Smith was safely dead, is testimony to the strength of his scholarship generally. If it were really so badly flawed, they could expose its errors. They don’t, so evidently they can’t.

I Like A Girl With Spirit!

There’s a story I’ve been hearing for some time now, from Golda Meir’s days in the Israeli cabinet, before she became Prime Minister. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, but I have found this direct quotation (unfortunately unsourced):

Once in the Cabinet we had to deal with the fact that there had been an outbreak of assaults on women at night. One minister (a member of an extreme religious party) suggested a curfew. Women should stay at home after dark. I said: "but it's the men attacking the women. If there's to be a curfew, let the men stay at home, not the women."

Of course the proposed curfew was not enacted; contrary to what most people who tell this story seem to think, I wonder if it had a chance to begin with, since Meir singles out the minister who suggested it as “a member of an extreme religious party” (this was the 1950s, when the ultraorthodox were not the force they are today in Israeli politics). But everyone loves Meir’s comeback, because despite her general anti-feminism, she put her finger on the key issue: why should women, but not men, have to adjust their behavior?

Remember that one result of such a curfew would be that any woman who was raped after curfew would be legally assumed to be “asking for it,” thus letting off the rapist. (I’m not just speculating; such blaming the victim has been traditional in American practice, unquestioned until feminists fought it.) This would also be a consequence of Thornhill and Palmer’s suggestion, in A Natural History of Rape, that girls be taught not to dress provocatively, which is not just stupid and malevolent, it’s regressive. (The same is true, by the way, for their suggestion of mandatory rape-prevention classes for boys, teaching them that they are biologically prone to sexual assault. You don’t have to be a professional psychologist to know that such teaching would encourage rape, not discourage it. But Thornhill and Palmer are scientists, so they must know what they’re talking about.)

Martha McCaughey, in The Caveman Mystique, page 94, quotes two more guys who

remind readers that they do not mean to imply that women should begin to forgive sexual harassers:

It is simply our hope that the more we understand about the evolution of human psychology, the closer we will be to developing appropriate and effective solutions for such unfortunate and deplorable side effects of human nature and behavior as sexual harassment.

Their solution involves changing

the structure of the organizational environment which would reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances, and allow women more freedom to change jobs or change their working environment, as they feel is necessary.
Allowing harassers more “freedom” to get fired is not mentioned as a solution, nor is equal pay, although earlier the authors state that women’s economic position relative to men’s makes this male strategy surface (the way lots of gardening makes calluses come out). …

Notice the pious beginning, followed by the assumption that “the organizational environment” should be rearranged around men’s immutable “evolved” obnoxiousness, and that women should be freer to “change jobs” or, in some unspecified way, “their working environment.” (Certainly not in any way that would inconvenience the men.) It’s never clear in such discussions how we – that is, evolutionary psychologists -- know that women are so malleable, so flexible, compared to men’s “evolved” rigidity, which will go all limp if it’s not given free rein. I suspect that malleability is simply assumed, on the male-supremacist postulate that women exist to give service to men; not merely sexual and domestic service, but emotional service as well. (There are echoes of behaviorism in McCaughey’s targets: they want to structure the work environment so as to “reduce the stimulus and opportunity for evolved male sexual psychology to motivate the initiation of sexual advances,” which is right out of Skinner.)

Richard Dawkins exploded (he tends to explode a lot) in a 1997 interview quoted by McCaughey (122f):

[T]he opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically. They look at what we say about natural selection, as a scientific theory for what is, and they assume that anybody who says that so and so is the case, must therefore be advocating that it ought to be the case in human politics. They cannot see that it is possible to separate one’s scientific beliefs about what is the case in nature from one’s political beliefs about what ought to be in human society.

It is, however, Dawkins who is clearly too stupid to understand the difference he harps on. In his bestseller The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976, p 126) he wrote:

Since we humans do not want to return to the old selfish ways where we let the children of too-large families starve to death, we have abolished the family as a unit of economic self-sufficiency, and substituted the state. But the privilege of guaranteed support for children should not be abused. … Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

I found this bit of old-fashioned scientific racism (the Pope is ordering the stinking Irish to breed like rabbits so he can take over England!) quoted in Not in Our Genes (Pantheon, 1984) by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In its original context it’s even worse, deranged in fact: to start with, Dawkins believes that there is a gene “for having too many children”, which makes no sense. Evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that all animals have “too many children”: “All species overproduce offspring, not all of which can survive to reproduce in their turn. Thus, there is inevitable competition among the individuals of each species for the means to survive and reproduce, and any inherited advantage in this competition will be naturally selected” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, quoted in McCaughey, p. 27). Further, “the family” is not the “unit of economic self-sufficiency”, communities are, and “the old selfish ways” are a figment of Dawkin’s imagination: societies have always made provision for people who need help, and adults limited the size of their families long before modern contraception. Infanticide, especially, is very old, both as a means of culling and as a means of redistributing children to parents who can and want to support them. (Exposed children didn’t always die, as exemplified by the fictional but realistic case of Oedipus.) I’ve often observed that people who like to think of themselves as hard-headed realists tend to be soft-headed fantasists, and Dawkins fits the mold.

“Men must stop prostrating themselves to science,” McCaughey says (136), but “hiding behind” might express it better. It seems to be typical for evolutionary psychologists to begin their sermons by deploring the amorality of “nature.” (They also tend to personify “nature” and “evolution,” but that’s a topic for another day.) They think that doing so proves they don’t justify rape or male promiscuity, and they get very self-righteous when their magic shield doesn’t work. Considering that they have no real evidence that all men are genetically predisposed to abuse women, they shouldn’t be so surprised when feminists (and not only feminists) suspect that they aren’t as disinterested as they’d like to think. When your conclusions aren’t supported by your evidence, it is only reasonable to suspect that you have a personal investment in your conclusions. As Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote over thirty years ago in her brilliant (though, I admit, uneven) book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976, 215ff):

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are.

I detect just that kind of smirk in David Barash’s complaint, “If Nature is sexist don’t blame her sons,” quoted by Hilary Rose in Alas Poor Darwin (Harmony Books, 2000, 139). Notice first the personification of “nature”; Nature is not a person and cannot be sexist. But “her sons” can be, and often are; hiding behind Mother’s skirts won’t help them.