Category Archives: GLBT

Christian Pop Star Jennifer Knapp Comes Out


My praise goes out today to the courageous and talented singer Jennifer Knapp , a star of the contemporary Christian music scene, who has come out as a lesbian and a person of faith. The Grammy nominee and Dove Awards winner stopped recording in 2003, and now her fans know why.

Though she is no longer on a “Christian” record label, her statements to the media suggest that she still considers herself a believer. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today ran an exclusive interview that is sure to cause controversy among its largely non-affirming readership. Though interviewer Mark Moring can’t resist calling her orientation a “lifestyle choice”, I think the magazine still deserves props for giving her a respectful forum to discuss an issue that many would like to pretend doesn’t exist. Here’s an excerpt (boldface emphasis mine):

Were you struggling with same-sex attraction when writing your first three albums? Those songs are so confessional, clearly coming from a place of a person who knows her need for grace and mercy.

Knapp: To be honest, it never occurred to me while writing those songs. I wasn’t seeking out a same-sex relationship during that time.

During my college years, I received some admonishment about some relationships I’d had with women. Some people said, “You might want to renegotiate that,” even though those relationships weren’t sexual. Hindsight being 20/20, I guess it makes sense. But if you remove the social problem that homosexuality brings to the church—and the debate as to whether or not it should be called a “struggle,” because there are proponents on both sides—you remove the notion that I am living my life with a great deal of joy. It never occurred to me that I was in something that should be labeled as a “struggle.” The struggle I’ve had has been with the church, acknowledging me as a human being, trying to live the spiritual life that I’ve been called to, in whatever ramshackled, broken, frustrated way that I’ve always approached my faith. I still consider my hope to be a whole human being, to be a person of love and grace. So it’s difficult for me to say that I’ve struggled within myself, because I haven’t. I’ve struggled with other people. I’ve struggled with what that means in my own faith. I have struggled with how that perception of me will affect the way I feel about myself.

Are you beyond those struggles?

Knapp: I don’t know. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. But now that I’m back in the U.S., I’m contending with the culture shock of moving back here. There’s some extremely volatile language and debate—on all sides—that just breaks my heart. Frankly, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t be making any kind of public statement at all. But there are people I care about within the church community who would seek to throw me out simply because of who I’ve chosen to spend my life with.

So why come out of the closet, so to speak?

Knapp: I’m in no way capable of leading a charge for some kind of activist movement. I’m just a normal human being who’s dealing with normal everyday life scenarios. As a Christian, I’m doing that as best as I can. The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith. It’s a hard notion. It will be a struggle for those who are in a spot that they have to choose between one or the other. The struggle I’ve been through—and I don’t know if I will ever be fully out of it—is feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.

Have you ever felt like you had to choose between your faith or your gay feelings?

Knapp: Yes. Absolutely.

Because you felt they were incompatible?

Knapp: Well, everyone around me made it absolutely clear that this is not an option for me, to invest in this other person—and for me to choose to do so would be a denial of my faith.

What about what Scripture says on the topic?

Knapp: The Bible has literally saved my life. I find myself between a rock and a hard place—between the conservative evangelical who uses what most people refer to as the “clobber verses” to refer to this loving relationship as an abomination, while they’re eating shellfish and wearing clothes of five different fabrics, and various other Scriptures we could argue about. I’m not capable of getting into the theological argument as to whether or not we should or shouldn’t allow homosexuals within our church. There’s a spirit that overrides that for me, and what I’ve been gravitating to in Christ and why I became a Christian in the first place.

Some argue that the feelings of homosexuality are not sinful, but only the act. What would you say?

Knapp: I’m not capable of fully debating that well. But I’ve always struggled as a Christian with various forms of external evidence that we are obligated to show that we are Christians. I’ve found no law that commands me in any way other than to love my neighbor as myself, and that love is the greatest commandment. At a certain point I find myself so handcuffed in my own faith by trying to get it right—to try and look like a Christian, to try to do the things that Christians should do, to be all of these things externally—to fake it until I get myself all handcuffed and tied up in knots as to what I was supposed to be doing there in the first place.

If God expects me, in order to be a Christian, to be able to theologically justify every move that I make, I’m sorry. I’m going to be a miserable failure.


Amen to that! Enjoy this 2008 live performance of her song “Whole Again”:

Daddy, daddy do you miss me.
The way I crawled upon your knee.
Those childish games of hide and seek
Seem a million miles away.

Am I lost in some illusion.
Or am I what you thought I’d be.
Now it seems I’ve found myself
In need to be forgiven.
Is there still room upon that knee?

If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?

Have I labored all for nothing.
Trying to make it on my own.
Fear to reach out to the hand
Of one who understands me
Say I’d rather be here all alone.

It’s all my fault I sit and wallow in seclusion.
As if I had no hope at all,
I guess truth becomes you
I have seen it all in motion
That Pride comes before the fall.

If I give my Life, If I lay it down
Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?

Can I offer up this simple prayer.

Pray it finds a simple ear.
A scratch in your infinite time.
Not withstanding my fallings
Not withstanding my crime!

If I give my Life, If I lay it down

Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean,
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?

If I give my Life, If I lay it down

Can you turn this Life around, around
Can I be made clean
By this offering of my soul.
Can I be made whole again?

(Lyrics courtesy of allthelyrics.com)

Heterosexism 101: Mike Huckabee


Today’s lesson in straight privilege is brought to you by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 and possibly again in 2012. He is also an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In a recent interview with The Perspective, the student newspaper of the College of New Jersey, he repeated the old slur that legalizing gay marriage is equivalent to approving drug abuse, incest, and polygamy. As quoted in the Associated Press:

Huckabee added that his goal isn’t to tell others how to live, but that the burden of proving that a gay marriage can be successful rests with the activists in favor of changing the law.

“I don’t have to prove that marriage is a man and a woman in a relationship for life,” he said. “They have to prove that two men can have an equally definable relationship called marriage, and somehow that that can mean the same thing.”


Thank you, Mike, for defining inequality in a nutshell. We don’t think often enough about burdens of proof and why they fall where they do. More often, we take sides in existing debates without asking how one group seized the benefits of normalcy and whether they ought to retain it.

Do straights deserve to put gays on the defensive because we’re a majority? I thought one of the cornerstones of our American civil religion was the belief, embodied in the Bill of Rights, that the individual has certain fundamental human rights that shouldn’t be subject to majority vote.

Because we populate the planet? The harsh realities of nomadic desert life could explain why the Abrahamic faiths discouraged non-procreative sex, but environmentalists might say we need the reverse incentive now.

Because we’ve done such a good job keeping our marital vows? Three words: 50% divorce rate.

I think many traditionalists refuse to listen to gay-rights arguments because it’s scary to consider that our favorite “natural” hierarchies might be arbitrary and self-serving. Without even realizing it, we’re all somewhat invested in upholding social categories that make us feel better about ourselves.

The Bible has a word for basing our self-esteem on something other than God’s unmerited love for us. It’s called idolatry.

Of Empty Tombs


They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross.
They crucified my Savior upon a common cross,
And God’s grace will lead my spirit home.

    –“Christ Rose“, 18th-century African-American spiritual

The following story comes from the April 11, 2010 Associated Press newswire (not reprinted here in full for copyright reasons):

THIES, Senegal – Even death cannot stop the violence against gays in this corner of the world any more.

Madieye Diallo’s body had only been in the ground for a few hours when the mob descended on the weedy cemetery with shovels. They yanked out the corpse, spit on its torso, dragged it away and dumped it in front of the home of his elderly parents.

The scene of May 2, 2009 was filmed on a cell phone and the video sold at the market. It passed from phone to phone, sowing panic among gay men who say they now feel like hunted animals.

“I locked myself inside my room and didn’t come out for days,” says a 31-year-old gay friend of Diallo’s who is ill with HIV. “I’m afraid of what will happen to me after I die. Will my parents be able to bury me?”

A wave of intense homophobia is washing across Africa, where homosexuality is already illegal in at least 37 countries.

In the last year alone, gay men have been arrested in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. In Uganda, lawmakers are considering a bill that would sentence homosexuals to life in prison and include capital punishment for ‘repeat offenders.’ And in South Africa, the only country that recognizes gay rights, gangs have carried out so-called “corrective” rapes on lesbians.

“Across many parts of Africa, we’ve seen a rise in homophobic violence,” says London-based gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization tracks abuse against gays and lesbians in Africa. “It’s been steadily building for the last 10 years but has got markedly worse in the last year.”

To the long list of abuse meted out to suspected homosexuals in Africa, Senegal has added a new form of degradation — the desecration of their bodies.

In the past two years, at least four men suspected of being gay have been exhumed by angry mobs in cemeteries in Senegal. The violence is especially shocking because Senegal, unlike other countries in the region, is considered a model of tolerance….


The article goes on to say that the current backlash in Senegal began in 2008 when a tabloid published pictures of a clandestine gay wedding. Suspected gays were arrested and tortured. Worsening economic conditions also fueled the search for a scapegoat, Cheikh Ibrahima Niang, a professor of social anthropology at Senegal’s largest university, told the AP reporter.

…The crackdown also coincided with spiraling food prices. Niang says political and religious leaders saw an easy way to reach constituents through the inflammatory topic of homosexuality.
“They found a way to explain the difficulties people are facing as a deviation from religious life,” says Niang. “So if people are poor — it’s because there are prostitutes in the street. If they don’t have enough to eat, it’s because there are homosexuals.”


Muslim imams preached in favor of killing gays. The same sentiments were published in Senegalese newspapers and magazines. Some people evidently took the exhortations to heart:

…Around this time, in May 2008, a middle-aged man called Serigne Mbaye fell ill and died in a suburb of Dakar.

His children tried to bury him in his village but were turned back from the cemetery because of widespread rumors that he was gay. His sons drove his body around trying to find a cemetery that would accept him. They were finally forced to bury him on the side of a road, using their own hands to dig a hole, according to media reports.

The grave was too shallow and the wind blew away the dirt. When the decomposing body was later discovered, Mbaye’s children were arrested and charged with improperly burying their father.

In the town of Kaolack three months later, residents exhumed the grave of another man believed to be gay. In November 2008, residents in Pikine removed a corpse from a mosque of another suspected homosexual and left it on the side of the road….

…Among the people who appeared in the photograph published from the gay wedding was a young man in his 30s from Thies. He was an activist and a leader of a gay organization called And Ligay, meaning “Working together,” which he ran out of his parents’ house.

He was HIV-positive and on medication.

When the tabloid published the photograph, Diallo went into hiding, according to a close friend who asked not to be named because he too is gay. Unable to go to the doctor, Diallo stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. By the spring of 2009, he was so ill that his family checked him into St. Jean de Dieu, a Catholic hospital in downtown Thies, says the friend.

He was in a coma when he died at 5:50 a.m. on May 2, 2009, according to the hospital’s records. Although the hospital has a unit dedicated to treating HIV patients, the young man’s family never disclosed his illness, according to the doctor in charge.

Several gay friends tried to see Diallo in the hospital but were told to stay away by his family, says the friend.

When the AP tried to speak to Diallo’s elderly father at his shop on the main thoroughfare in Thies, his other children demanded the reporter leave. One sister covered her face and sobbed. Another said, “There are no homosexuals here.”

Hours after he died, his family took Diallo’s body to a nearby mosque, where custom holds the corpse should be bathed and wrapped in a white cloth. Before the family could bathe him, news reached the mosque that Diallo was gay and they were chased out, says the dead man’s friend. His relatives hastily wrapped him in a sheet and headed to the cemetery, where they carried him past the home of Babacar Sene.

“A man that’s known as being a homosexual can’t be buried in a cemetery. His body needs to be thrown away like trash,” says Sene. “His parents knew that he was gay and they did nothing about it. So when he died we wanted to make sure he was punished.”


Where in this story is the Savior who was crucified? On which side do you think you’ll find him?

Deliverance Takes Many Forms


“Change is possible,” goes one common slogan of the ex-gay movement. Survivors of so-called reparative therapy counter that while behavioral self-control may be possible, changing one’s core identity is not. For every anecdote that my conservative friends can share about someone who’s been “delivered” from homosexuality, I can point to another testimony from someone who only found peace in their relationship with God after accepting themselves as a same-gender-loving individual.

A similar debate is occurring in a discussion thread at Gay Christian Fellowship, a new website for open and affirming evangelicals. The site’s lead author, Pastor Weekly, shared a video of a woman performing her poem about being freed from lesbianism, hoping to provoke discussion. Some commenters responded that the only deliverance they needed was from the closet, while another visitor respectfully supported the ex-gay poet. A commenter identified as “Kudo451” made these wise observations:

…[A]s deliverance goes I think it is just as unfair for us to assume that her claims of having been delivered are doubtful based on our experience. I am a gay man but I have meet and have friends who are straight or even bi, that have been delivered from a gay lifestyle. Just as I know gay men and women who have been delivered from a straight life style. We are talking about human beings and once we take off the blinders of gender identity and sexuality and even abuse and trauma, you begin to realize that anything is possible.

The problem with most people who claim deliverance from anything is the assumption that what they have been delivered from is bad for everyone’s life. Yet just because God heals a blind man doesn’t mean that such a man has the right to accuse every other blind person of leading a sinful life that cannot glorify God unless they are healed as well. Nor should he accuse those who go blind in life of sinning while using their blindness as proof. I think that is what Jesus spoke of when he spoke of the Eunuchs and also when he spoke of the sick. Prior to Jesus most people felt that anyone who wasn’t “normal” was assumed to be either caught in their own sin or caught in some generational or family related sin (curse). It was Jesus who really changed that sort of thinking for all of Western Civilization, including the heathen.

Sign up for a free site membership to join the discussion. I also recommend their weekly “Voice of GCF” podcasts, which feature in-depth Bible teachings, commentary on current events, and interviews.

First Amendment Key to Creative Legal Strategy in Same-Sex Prom Case


A Mississippi federal trial court judge ruled yesterday that a public high school violated a lesbian student’s First Amendment rights by preventing her from bringing her girlfriend to the prom. In a case that has been drawing national attention, the Itawamba County school board canceled the prom rather than allow high school senior Constance McMillen to bring another female student as her date. U.S. District Court Judge Glenn Davidson determined that the ban constituted viewpoint-based discrimination that violated McMillen’s right to free expression.

Mississippi doesn’t ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not recognized it as a form of gender bias, so there goes the obvious equal-protection argument. Invoking the First Amendment is a creative move. But is it logical? I could understand it better if McMillen were a transgender student defending her right to cross-dress. Dating seems more like conduct than speech. Being gay is not exactly a viewpoint.

Looking at the big picture, some important protections for women and sexual minorities actually depend on keeping clear definitional boundaries between speech and action. In pornography, violent and medically dangerous acts are sheltered under the umbrella of “free speech” (wrongly, in my opinion) because a camera is rolling, avoiding the restrictions that OSHA would impose on any other hazardous occupation. It’s rotten to get kicked out of your prom, but bullying is a more pervasive problem that GLBT teens face day-to-day. The first national study of cyberbullying of GLBT youth, released last week by Iowa State University, found that more than half of those youth and their self-identified straight allies had experienced online harassment during a one-month period.

In this environment, well-meaning judges should think twice about extending students’ free expression rights beyond their common-sense limits.

Sad Comics for Grownups


The acquisitions staff at our local library shares my passion for graphic novels. The term is a bit of a misnomer because many books in this genre aren’t “novels” at all–they’re nonfiction or collections of short pieces–but it sounds better than “comic books your kids wouldn’t understand”. Below, a brief roundup of some of my latest reading.

R. Sikoryak’s inventive and darkly funny Masterpiece Comics mashes up the plots of literary classics with the visual style of well-known comic strips. This could easily have been a one-joke wonder, but Sikorsky’s thoughtful pairings give this slim volume an unexpected depth. Reading it, you realize that Charlie Brown actually does have a lot in common with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa; ditto for Beavis and Butthead and the protagonists of Waiting for Godot. You come away appreciating the existential sadness under comics’ forced jollity and limited range of expression, as well as the slam-bang action and excitement buried inside these books we treat so reverently. Maybe high school boys would crack open Wuthering Heights if they read Sikorsky’s “Tales from the Crypt” version first.

The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman is often quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Seeking an alternative to my feminist friends’ grim suspiciousness of popular culture and fashion, I picked up Sharon Rudahl’s cartoon biography of Goldman, A Dangerous Woman. The book definitely made me want to learn more about Goldman, a feisty and life-affirming woman who put herself at risk to improve the lives of prisoners, prostitutes, and other marginalized people. However, I was a bit disappointed by the presentation. The visual elements didn’t interact dynamically with the text, feeling more like illustrated summaries than true scenes. Since Rudahl relies mainly on Goldman’s own account of her life, the book always casts her actions in a positive light, glossing over difficult moral questions like the anarchists’ use of violence against civilians. A Dangerous Woman is an intriguing introduction to the subject, but I wouldn’t rely on it as the definitive word on this complicated historical figure.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a witty sapphic soap opera whose humor often arises from the contrast between the characters’ self-righteous political views and their messy personal lives. I binged on 10 volumes of the strip from 1989 to 2005. The left-wing rants sometimes became tiresome, so my favorite characters were the ones who didn’t take themselves so seriously: the gleefully careerist Sydney, a literature professor with a Martha Stewart fetish; Lois, the part-time drag king and full-time sexual dynamo; and Mo’s two Siamese cats, who survey their human companions’ anxious lives with amused detachment.

My highest praise, though, is reserved for Bechdel’s cartoon memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which is both beautifully drawn and elegantly crafted as a narrative. Fun Home intertwines the author’s coming of age as a lesbian with her memories of her brilliant, enigmatic, repressed father, a closeted homosexual who died in an accident that she suspects was suicide. Drawing parallels to sources as diverse as Joyce, Colette, Proust, classical mythology, and The Wind in the Willows, she shows how their shared love of literature substituted for the intimacy they could never express in more personal terms. Some online reviewers felt Bechdel strained too hard to fit their family story into literary templates, but for me, that was what gave the book its special poignancy: ultimately, Bechdel concludes that there are no neat explanations that will give her closure, and we return to the simple image that opened the story, a little girl in her father’s arms.

Thursday Random Song: Scissor Sisters, “Intermission”


I discovered the Scissor Sisters in a (possibly apocryphal) forwarded email in which a conservative pastor was warning parents about cultural influences that would turn their children gay. It’s working.

(The song is only 2:36 minutes but all the videos I could find on YouTube were 3:51 minutes, with an extra minute of dead air at the end. Is it meant to symbolize The Void? Listen and decide.)

Intermission

When you’re standing on the side of a hill
Feeling like your day may be done
Here it comes, strawberry smog
Chasing away the sun
Don’t let those precious moments fool you
Happiness is getting you down
A rainbow never smiles or blinks
It’s just a candy colored frown

You were going on at half-past seven
Now it’s going on a quarter to nine
All the angels want to know
Are you lost or treading water?
And you’re going on your fifteenth bender
But you’ve only got a matter of time
Yes we’ve all got seeds to sow
Not everyone’s got lambs to slaughter

When the night wind starts to turn
Into the ocean breeze
And the dew drops sting and burn
Like angry honey bees
That is when you hear the song falling from the sky
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die
Sometimes you’re filled with the notion
The afterlife’s a moment away
You want to tell someone the way that you feel
But then you ain’t got nothing to say
You fight for freedom from devotion
A battle that will always begin
With somebody giving you a piece of advice;
By the way you’re living in sin

Now there’s never gonna be an intermission
But there’ll always be a closing night
Never entertain those visions
Lest you may have packed your baggage
First impressions are cheap auditions
Situations are long goodbyes
Truth so often to living dormant
Good luck walks and bullshit flies

When the headlights guide your way
You know the place is right
When the treetops sing and sway
Don’t go to sleep tonight
That is when you see the sign
Luminous and high:
Tomorrow’s not what it used to be
We were born to die
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die


Lyrics courtesy of
Sing365.com

Bill Moyers Interviews Boies and Olson on Prop 8 Challenge


Two leading US constitutional lawyers, the liberal David Boies and the conservative Ted Olson, have been advocating for the overturn of Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban, in federal court in San Francisco. Testimony has concluded, closing arguments are still to come, and a decision is expected this spring.

Venerable PBS talk show host Bill Moyers interviewed Boies and Olson on his Feb. 26 show. Watch the video (49 minutes) here. The transcript and related links are also available on the site. One of the most interesting links is MarriageTrial.com. According to Moyers, the district court would not let the proceedings be filmed, so two Los Angeles filmmakers decided to reenact the trial on their website, with professional actors, using the trial transcripts as their script. So far they’ve covered four of the 12 days of testimony.

The Moyers interview contains many quote-worthy passages. I chose this one because it’s a clever argument that I haven’t heard before. Boldface emphasis mine.

TED OLSON: …You asked me the most effective thing that happened on the other side? I will, I didn’t find any of their arguments effective. I have said from the beginning of this case, I’ve yet to hear an argument that persuades me or even comes close to persuading me that we should treat our gay and lesbian colleagues differently and deny them equality.

But what really happened, which was a very eye-opening event, during the course of the trial, during one of the earlier proceedings. The judge in our case asked my opponent, “What harm to the institution of heterosexual marriage would occur if gays and lesbians were allowed to marry?”

This went back and forth and back and forth. The judge kept wanting an answer. “What damage would be done to the institution of marriage if we allowed this to happen?” And my opponent said, finally, he had to answer it truthfully. He paused and he said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” That to me sums up the other side. They say the traditional definition of marriage, but nothing by allowing the two couples that were before the court or others like them to engage in a relationship with their partner where they can be treated as an equal member of society hurts your marriage or my marriage or David’s marriage or any other heterosexual marriage. People are not going to say, “I don’t want to get married anymore if those same sex people can get married. That’s not going to happen.” There is no evidence to support a basis for this prohibition.

BILL MOYERS: And yet your opponents kept coming back to the argument that the central reason for Proposition 8, and I’m quoting here, is it’s role, quote “in regulating naturally procreative relationships between men and women to provide for the nurture and upbringing of the next generation.”

TED OLSON: We have never in this country required an ability or a desire to procreate as a condition to getting married. People who are at 70, 80, 90 years old may get married. People who have no interest in having children can get married.

And what that argument does is tip it on its head. The Supreme Court has said that the right to get married is a fundamental individual right. And our opponents say, “Well, the state has an interest in procreation and that’s why we allow people to get married.” That marriage is for the benefit of the state. Freedom of relationship is for the benefit of the state.” We don’t believe that in this country. We believe that we created a government which we gave certain authority to the government. The government doesn’t give us liberty, we give the government power to a certain degree to restrict our liberty, but subject to the Bill of Rights.

So, our fundamental differences there, no one’s stopping the procreational function of people that wish — heterosexual people to get married and have all the children that they want. No one’s stopping that. It is simply allowing people that have abiding affection for one another to live a civil life as your next-door neighbor. The same way you are.

DAVID BOIES: The most important thing is that there’s no connection between gay and lesbian marriage and procreation. It doesn’t limit procreation. It doesn’t discourage heterosexual marriage. In fact, it allows gays and lesbians to raise their children. They’re talking about the children of heterosexuals, okay? Those people aren’t being harmed. They’re ignoring the children of the gay and lesbian couples, who even the defendants in this case admitted were being harmed by Proposition 8.
…

The Biblical Problem of the Prostitute


I used to believe that Christians could affirm monogamous same-sex relationships without rethinking our other theological commitments. It is possible, but now I question whether it’s such a desirable goal. That is to say, are we merely interested in bringing one more group into the circle of respectability? Or does Jesus want us to identify with others who are marginalized as our families once were, and settle for nothing less than a radical theology that includes everyone?

When Moses presents the Ten Commandments to the Israelites in chapter 5 of Deuteronomy, they’re in an interesting position: rescued, victorious, but still homeless, with a lot of wandering to do before they reach the promised land. Without a nation-state, barely a unified people, they’re entirely dependent on God for their identity. And here we’re given a hint that that identity is supposed to transcend barriers of class, status, tribe, even species.  Consider Moses’ explanation for observing the Sabbath (emphasis mine):

Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. (Deut 5:12-15, NIV)

We can’t truly understand what it means to be created, chosen, and saved by God, unless we see God’s other creatures as essentially like ourselves. The proper response to a blessing is to extend it to others, not to remain indifferent to the ways we benefit at their expense.

The above thoughts were prompted by hearing a gay-affirming evangelical pastor’s analysis of two of the Biblical “clobber passages”, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10. This scholar made a plausible case that the obscure Greek words variously translated as “sodomite”, “effeminate”, “pervert”, and “homosexual” should be read narrowly to describe male prostitutes, pimps, and johns, not all sexually active gay men.

But wait…that doesn’t make the text more fair. To the contrary, it just kicks the condemnation down the road to an even more persecuted group.

The vast majority of prostituted children and adults are victims of sexual slavery, either literally, through human trafficking, or effectively, because there are no social resources to help them kick their addictions and escape from abusive men. (If you need convincing, see the extensive research at the Polaris Project, Our Voices Matter, and NoPornNorthampton.)

As the pastor in my discussion noted, the male prostitutes in St. Paul’s time would have been mainly pre-teen or young teenage boys, probably 14 or 15 at the oldest, servicing much older men. We don’t immediately notice the unfairness of including these sexually abused children in the Epistles’ condemnation lists because, even in our “liberated” culture, the stigma of being prostituted still attaches primarily to the prostitute, the most visible and most powerless member of the triad, while the pimps and johns remain in the shadows.

In the quest for mainstream religious and social acceptance, it’s tempting to divide the MSM community into “good” and “bad” gays. But what have we purchased here? In order for Bill and Bob to get married in First Baptist Church of Wherever, we’re scapegoating men and boys who never had the freedom to live our ideally chaste, monogamous life. Any sexual ethic that ignores class privilege–one of Jesus’ favorite targets–doesn’t seem very gospel-centered to me.

Looked at closely, the condemnation lists in Corinthians and Timothy, like much of the Old Testament holiness code, appear morally incoherent to us. Ancient writers didn’t draw the same distinctions between ritual impurity and personal culpability that we now regard as essential to compassion and fairness. Under a purity-based system, a raped woman would be considered “ruined”, compounding the assault on her dignity, whereas contemporary ethicists would insist that the shame attaches to the sinner, not the sinned-against. It’s a shift away from formalism and toward respect for the sacredness of each person, something else that Jesus cared about a lot.

Too much of queer theology comes down to fudging the facts or quibbling over Greek vocabulary in order to preserve the Biblical writers’ viewpoints intact at all costs. Like the Supreme Court searching for the right-sounding precedent to give a veneer of objectivity to political decisions, we pretend we’re not changing the tradition when we are.

Give it up.

We have a bold opportunity here to question our stifling reverence for a cultural moment that has passed. When we don’t allow ourselves to grow beyond whatever moral philosophy was current 2,000 years ago, we’re turning the Bible into a limit on our ability to follow the golden rule: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Orientation Versus Identity


The Nervous Breakdown, an eclectic intellectual blog covering poetry, politics, the arts, and popular culture, recently ran this insightful essay by Peter Gajdics, a survivor of ex-gay therapy. (Hat tip to Paul A. Toth, who blogs about
psychology, atheism, the writing life, and the cultural bankruptcy of
Sarasota at Violent
Contradiction.)

In “One Road Diverged: Same Sex Desire & the Closet of Homosexuality“, the author observes that both conservative Christians and gay activists tend to conflate same-sex desire and gay identity. The former has always been with us, while the latter is a modern invention. So-called conversion therapy rarely changes one’s inner feelings, but rather teaches participants how to perform a mainstream heterosexual identity. From the introduction:

Trying to “change” oneself from homosexual to heterosexual is a displacement of social identities under the erroneous belief that by changing one’s map, one’s territory will also, oftentimes Divinely, “change.” Such a “change,” however, is destined to fail, with the resulting dissonance between identity and desire ensuring the individual either “tries harder” at changing themselves, or breaks the cycle, like an addict, once and for all, and addresses the conflation between their map of identity, and territory of desire.

Later in the essay, Gajdics writes:

…The institutionalization of homosexuality performs three distinct functions: 1) it divorces same sex desire from the experience of many by projecting it into the experience of few, thereby maintaining a binary view of sexuality generally, and a normative view of heterosexuality specifically; 2) it reinforces the either/or mentality that sustains a hegemonic patriarchy, and relieves a cultural anxiety over what it means to be “male,” a “man,” “masculine”—in other words, as long as I am on the side of the fence marked “straight,” I am safe, loved, accepted, all-powerful; 3) it promotes the implicit idea that “changing” sexual identity from the category of “homosexual” to the category of “heterosexual” is not only possible, but highly desirable—after all, who wouldn’t want to be “safe, loved, accepted, all powerful”?

In his essay, “Love Me Gender: Normative Homosexuality and ‘Ex-Gay’ Performativity in Reparative Therapy Narratives,” author Jeffrey Bennett examines the Paulks’ co-autobiography, Love Won Out, in which the two juxtapose their early immersions “into homosexuality” to their later involvement with Exodus International and “entrance into ‘heterosexuality . . . [in order] . . . to pursue a ‘normal’ life of marriage and children” (2003, 332-34). Their stories spawned national attention, with articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, as well as with guest appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes. Can gays “change”? Should gays “change”? These and other questions were raised amongst media, and public. Unfortunately, there was little, if any, inquiry into what the Paulks, or others like them, were attempting to “change,” when they said they wanted to change their sexuality. While the implication always seems to be a change from same sex to “opposite” sex attraction, this is precisely what does not occur, as I myself can testify, for those who undertake such therapy. How, after all, does one change desire? In practice, the locus of attention in reparative therapies becomes less about desire, about changing one’s desire, than it does the obligatory avoidance of same sex temptation, engagement in “opposite” sex scenarios, and modification of behavior to reflect a normative stance on male and female gender roles.

As detailed by Bennett in his essay, the Paulks’ memoir “attempt[s] to reconstitute the discourses that shape and stabilize abstract notions of the self . . . [by] . . . relegate[ing] identity and authenticity to a system of anticipatory acts that can be modified by altering the conduct of the actors” (332). Nowhere is it claimed the Paulks end up changing their desires; rather, they reduce themselves to actors, playing the part of the “homosexual”: In order to play the part of the “heterosexual,” they simply modify their performance. “If Anne can learn to wear make-up, and John to throw a football, they are taking the necessary measures to redefine and stabilize their heterosexuality by employing an illusory ontological identification” (ibid). In a reversal to Butler’s theory on gender performativity, the Paulks have reframed their collective “homosexualities” as the normative, and their modification to heterosexuality, its subversion.

Throughout their book, the Paulks point to the unreality of “gay life” as justification for “replacing . . . the unnatural homosexual self with the ‘true’ heterosexual identity” (335). This statement alone necessitates delineation. If “homosexuality” points, as I’ve suggested, to the territory of same sex desire, then in one respect the Paulks, or all advocates of such therapies, are correct in their description of an “unnatural homosexual self.” Homosexuality, as with heterosexuality, is the symbol for the thing, and not the thing itself—symbols are, to a large extent, “unnatural.” However, as the Paulks also evidently conflate their map of homosexuality with their territory of desire, their same sex desire, they illogically deduce that if homosexuality is unnatural, heterosexuality must consequently be natural. The “naturalness” they, and others like them, seek lies not in a different map, a different symbol, but in a consciousness, an awakening, to their own, incontrovertible territory of desire. Maps, if lived as territories, will always disappoint: sooner or later they will always be experienced as unnatural, inauthentic, unreal.
…

Read the whole essay here. Read more of Gajdics’ work here, and see a video of him reading at Opium magazine’s Literary Death Match in Seattle.