In 1994 Bruce Bawer was invited by members of St. John's Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado, to give a Sunday evening talk. This was part of an effort to help straight parishioners to understand homosexuality and the issues surrounding it, and to make the cathedral more welcoming to gay parishioners. He gave the talk on 18 September 1994 to a large, diverse audience whose willingness to listen respectfully, ask blunt questions, and reexamine long-standing assumptions and prejudices proved inspiring.
As many of you undoubtedly know, to
talk to straight people about being a gay person, and especially
to talk to straight Christians about being a gay Christian, can
be frustrating and painful. There's an incredible amount of misunderstanding
and discomfort in our society surrounding the subject, and good
people can say hurtful things without even realizing it. In approaching
encounters such as this one, I find it helpful to remind myself
that coming to understand and be comfortable with homosexuality
can be a long and difficult process not only for most straight
people but for most gay people, too. In fact it's the same process,
except for gays it's imperative - if we want to live emotionally
whole and healthy lives - to try to understand and come to terms
with homosexuality, because it's something that society has conditioned
us to think of as a bad thing but which is inside us and integral
to our identities. For straight people, it's something that you
can choose not to think about. Unless, of course, the subject
touches you closely because a close friend turns out to be gay,
or your sibling, or your child.
I begin my book A Place at the Table
with an anecdote about such a child - a teenager, actually. One
day when I was in my mid-twenties I went into a bookstore in New
York and saw a well-dressed, obviously well-loved and well-taken-care-of
boy of about fifteen standing alone at the magazine rack. As soon
as I saw him I felt a rush of awareness, a sense of intimate and
absolutely certain knowledge that stunned me and that forced me
to stop what I was doing. I stood there watching while he picked
up and glanced at one magazine, then put it down and did the same
with another, and another. I knew he wasn't interested in those
magazines but was trying to work up the nerve to read something
else. I stood there because I wanted to see if he'd work up that
nerve.
He did. He picked up a copy of the New
York Native, a gay tabloid. If he'd just paged idly through
the other publications, he went at the Native with a thirst
like that of someone who'd crossed a desert and stumbled on a
flowing stream. I was proud of him. Because I'd known from the
moment I saw him that he was gay, not because he displayed any
stereotypical characteristics that might jump out at some of you
but because there was something about him that resonated powerfully
with me, that connected with my memories of myself at that age,
that communicated a fear, a curiosity, a tentativeness, an intense
aloneness that I recognized and identified with. In any event,
I knew in that moment that he was gay and that he was beginning
to realize that fact, and I knew also that there was nobody with
whom he felt he could talk about this momentous discovery he'd
made about himself. And so he'd come to this bookstore.
But what had he found? Standing there
I could see some of the pictures in the Native. There were
ads for strip clubs, for drag shows, for leather bars, for escort
services and phone sex, all of them illustrated with photographs
of near-naked men, some of them in leather, some of them simulating
sadomasochistic sex acts, and so forth. This wasn't the sort of
thing I'd been looking for at that boy's age, and it wasn't anything
that I or most of my gay friends could identify with, and I suspected
that boy wasn't looking for that sort of thing either. He was
confused, and such images could only aggravate his confusion.
I know that in his shoes, looking at those pictures, I would've
said to myself: "But that isn't me." I worried
that he might be thinking, "Well, if that's what it means
to be gay, then I guess I must not be gay." Or, "Well,
I'm gay, so I guess I'd better try to become like that."
Or, "Well, I'm gay, but I refuse to become like that, so
I guess the only alternative is to repress it and marry."
The irony of it all was that there I
was, standing there. I could've explained things to him. I could've
told him that gay life is a spectrum just as straight life is.
Yes, there are gay men who are into S&M or cross-dressing,
gay men who are very promiscuous. And there are also straight
men into all those things, too. But most gay people are in most
ways pretty much like most straight people. The main difference
is that they're virtually invisible. They're essentially silent
about being gay; so that the basically mainstream-oriented majority
of gay people don't contribute very much to the public image of
- or the public dialogue about - what it means to be gay. The
image is formed, rather, and the "gay" end of the dialogue
largely carried out, by that very visible and extreme segment
of the gay population. Standing there behind that boy, I realized
what a bad thing it was that that was the case. Because by being
silent I was powerless to help him, to correct the images formed
in his mind by those pictures in the Native. If I dared
to speak to him, he might think I was trying to pick him up -
and that thought would probably terrify the hell out of him. I
wished at least that I might be able to hand him a book that might
help him to understand who he was. But there wasn't such a book.
That's why I eventually wrote one.
There's a line in Shadowlands,
the movie about C. S. Lewis: "We read in order to know we're
not alone." One of the loneliest things you can be in this
world is a young person who's begun to realize that he or she
is gay, who doesn't have any idea what that might mean in terms
of his or her future, who doesn't know what to do about it, and
who has nobody in his or her life - no parent or teacher or clergyperson
- with whom he or she feels that the subject can be safely raised
without fear of estrangement, rejection, condemnation. That's
why the boy went to that bookstore and stood at that magazine
rack and worked up his courage to read the Native.
Many gay readers have responded very
strongly to that anecdote. When I handed the manuscript of the
book in to Simon & Schuster, my editor sent copies of the
first twenty or so pages around the company. In the next few days,
she said, virtually every gay man at Simon & Schuster came
into her office and said to her, "That boy was me."
And in the six months since this book was published, I've met
several gay men who have said the same thing to me: "That
boy was me." They don't mean it literally, of course; they
simply mean teat they identified with that loneliness, that need
to understand and be understood.
A couple of straight readers have protested
to me that they had similar experiences at that age, sneaking
a look at Playboy or whatever. But that's different, and
it points to the real difference between growing up gay and growing
up straight. A straight kid is surrounded by images of what it
means to be straight, surrounded by potential role models. His
parents, his parents' friends, the couples on TV shows and in
movies, the relationships that are sung about on the radio and
MTV, the family situations in the stories and books that he's
given to read in school. His inner sense of himself, of his sexual
identity, is reflected all around him in a spectrum of images
of which Playboy is only one extreme. For a gay kid, things
are utterly different. It's not easy to explain how different
it is, and how it feels. To be a gay kid in most families is to
grow up very confused. It's to find an utter contradiction between
your very powerful but unarticulated inner sense of who you are
and the notions of who you are that are communicated to you by
your parents and other people in your life and in fact by the
whole world. It's to look around and see all these images of men
and women sharing their lives together and being intimate, and
to feel an utter lack of identification with those images. From
infancy onward, your parents assume you're straight. It's expected
that when you reach a certain age you'll want to start dating
someone of the opposite sex; everybody asks what kind of girl
you like, and if you have a girlfriend. And somehow, even if you
haven't figured it out yet and connected who you are with that
funny word gay, it all feels wrong, as if somehow you'd
been set down on the wrong planet.
For too many gay kids, there's no one
in their lives to make them feel right. Try to imagine
what it feels like to be a gay kid of thirteen, say, who's struggling
to understand his feelings when he's surrounded by things like
an ad I saw in the New York Times a week or two ago. It's
an ad for "Partnership for a Drug-Free America" and
it shows a boy of about thirteen who's preparing to snort a line
of cocaine. The caption reads, "It used to be, at thirteen,
little boys became interested in girls." To a thirteen-year-old
boy who's started to become interested in other boys, this ad
is one more message that tells him there's something wrong with
him, that he just doesn't fit in. Nobody meant any harm with this
ad, of course; it's trying to do good. That's the whole point:
we send these messages out without even realizing it. Just two
or three nights ago, I saw a TV commercial for a movie called
Blue Sky in which one character said to another, "You
are the reason that men like women in the first place." My
point isn't that references to heterosexuality should be banned
or censored; and it's certainly not that gay men don't like women.
It's just that we could be more sensitive to the consequences
on gay kids of this steady stream of media and pop-culture signals
that tell them over and over, with very few exceptions, that all
men fall in love with women and all women with men, period.
As the House of Bishops' new pastoral
study document, "Continuing the Dialogue,"
observes, "Our society … acculturates all youth to presume
they are heterosexual. Advertising, movies, romance novels, and
virtually all of our educational programs (secular and religious)
presume heterosexuality. For most of those adolescents who are
homosexual, the already difficult adolescent experience becomes
a nightmare."
A novelist named Robb Forman Dew has
just come out with a memoir entitled The Family Heart,
about how she felt and what she learned after her son came out
to her in 1991 when he was a sophomore at Yale. After talking
to him over a period of weeks and months, and after meeting the
parents of other gay kids, and hearing about the problems and
the suicides of some of them, she came to realize that "gay
children grow up alone" and that "parents' assumptions
of the heterosexuality of their sons and daughters … are
a threat to their children's lives." She also came to be
very angry at Dr. Spock and other child-care "experts"
who don't mention the very real possibility that any parent's
kids might grow up to be gay, and don't talk about how to deal
with that. Mrs. Dew writes, "I find their irresponsibility
shocking; they might have saved lives."
Every day gay kids all over the country
come out to their parents. Every day gay kids commit suicide because
they've been rejected by their parents, or are terrified that
they will be. And it's all so unnecessary. There's no need for
them to go through the loneliness and confusion they experience.
The only reason this happens to them is that there's still so
much discomfort, confusion, rage, insecurity, unconscious prejudice,
automatic disdain, and condescension on the part of a lot of straight
people when it comes to homosexuality. When most parents think
of homosexuality, if they think of it at all, they think of it
as something "out there" that their kids have to be
protected from. But the fact is that if your son, say, turns out
to be gay, it's not because of something or someone out there
that infected him or recruited him. It's because of something
inside him that he's likely been aware of, in some way,
from a very early age; and because neither his parents nor his
teachers have ever prepared him for this or explained to him what
this feeling might be, he feels incredibly alienated, different,
weird. It's probably taken him years to put a name to this feeling,
and perhaps years more to work up the nerve to mention it to anybody.
Though homosexuals as ordinary people
in daily life remain almost invisible, homosexuality as an "issue"
has been all over the media. It's a staple on the daytime talk
shows. The news media cover gay news much more extensively than
they did a few years ago. Some straight people have learned a
good deal; some people's prejudice has diminished or even, in
some cases, dissolved. But there's still an incredible amount
of misinformation and discomfort. Some people are tolerant, but
not yet accepting. They don't like the idea of gay people
being as open about their lives as straight people are. Deep down,
they may suspect that someone close to them is gay, but they simply
don't want to think about it. Until those people move beyond prejudice,
or beyond a grudging tolerance, the lives of their gay children
or friends or siblings will continue to be more difficult and
more lonely than they have to be.
Public discussion of the subject of
homosexuality has been controlled mostly by ideological extremes
- the extreme gay left and the extreme anti-gay right - and the
debate between these two extremes has shed more heat than light.
There are those who, in the name of God, go out there and tell
lies about what it means to be gay. Not only do they tell lies;
the whole way in which they discuss the subject is a lie. They
have a lexicon of words that a lot of people who mean well have
unconsciously taken up - and even to think about the subject in
such terms is to distort it utterly.
They speak of homosexuality as being
a "choice," when it isn't. They speak of the "gay
lifestyle," as if all gay people lead the same kind of life.
They speak of gays "promoting" and "advocating"
homosexuality and "recruiting" young people into it,
which makes no more sense than advocating being left-handed or
recruiting people into having blue eyes. They speak of gays "shoving
a homosexual agenda down their throats"; wanting to live
your life honestly and to be respected is not an agenda.
This kind of rhetoric politicizes the
subject of homosexuality, dehumanizes it, makes it easier to put
out of one's mind that we're talking about people's lives. Homosexuality
is described as a threat to the family. Yet those who attack homosexuality
and gay rights in the name of "the family" are precisely
those whose kids, if they turn out to be gay, are most likely
to end up as runaways, prostitutes, drug addicts, suicides. It's
anti-gay rhetoric, not homosexuality, that's a threat to
the family. Some people say gays want "approval." No.
You can approve or disapprove of an act; you can't approve or
disapprove of a fact. In my book I speak of acceptance - meaning,
accept the simple fact that this exists, and that it is what it
is and not what some hateful people say it is, and that certain
understandings and adjustments must of necessity and out of a
concern for justice follow from that acceptance.
The phrase "moral equivalence"
comes up a lot. Perhaps the cruellest single comment that I've
had as a consequence of my book was made by a former editor of
mine. I quit his publication several years ago when he refused
to run a very tame review that I'd written of the movie Longtime
Companion, which was about several gay male couples' experiences
with AIDS. When a reporter called him for an explanation, he said:
"Bawer's review was striking a total equivalence between
a heterosexual couple in love and a homosexual couple in love.
I think that's not convincing. I haven't come across it."
Well, I have. I've lived it. Love is the same, gay or straight;
a lot of people just don't see that, or don't want to. They feel
a strong compulsion to see the personal lives and feelings of
gay people as being somehow different from their own. They say,
in effect, "You can be my friend, you can work for me, you
can belong to my church - but your life by definition is tinged
with sinfulness in a way that mine is not." When they think
about sex in their own lives, they place it, quite properly, in
the context of their loving relationships; when they think about
sex in gay people's lives, they often isolate the sex from the
life in which it occurs and the love of which it is an expression,
and they call it "sexual behavior" or "conduct"
or "practice." Imagine such terms being applied to the
sexual component of your own loving committed relationships and
try to understand how demeaning it is to be thought of and talked
about that way.
The whole thing comes down to a basic
fact: homosexuality is a naturally occurring variation in sexual
orientation. It may not be natural to most individuals, but it
is, like left-handedness, the natural condition of a significant
minority. Homosexual people are as capable of love as heterosexuals
and need deep, committed human attachment in the same way that
heterosexuals do. Sexual activity is not the only element in such
relationships, but it's an important part of them. The bishops'
study document quotes a 1958 document in which the Lambeth Conference
describes the role of sex in marriage. "Sexual intercourse,"
it says, "is not by any means the only language of earthly
love, but it is, in its full and right use, the most intimate
and the most revealing; it has the depth of communication signified
by the Biblical word so often used for it, 'knowledge'; it is
a giving and receiving in the unity of two free spirits which
is in itself good (within the marriage bond) and mediates good
to those who share it." This is as true of a loving, committed
union between two homosexuals as it is of one between two heterosexuals.
Homosexuals are created in such a way that the only kind of marriage
in which this kind of bond can truly exist for them is a homosexual
marriage. In fact, what sexual orientation is ultimately about
is not sexual capability or sexual pleasure - because many straight
people are capable of having and receiving pleasure from in homosexual
sex under certain circumstances, and many homosexual people are
capable of having and receiving pleasure from heterosexual sex
under certain circumstances. Sexual orientation is essentially
about how an individual loves; it's about the kind of unity of
two free spirits that a given individual is, by his or her intrinsic
nature, capable of forming.
To my mind, these truths lead inexorably
to a recognition that the only Christian way for the church to
respond to the fact of homosexuality and the identicality of homosexual
love and commitment to heterosexual love and commitment is to
bless gay unions and to allow the ordination of openly gay clergy.
It's taken me a long time to arrive
at this place. I'm a product of a denominationally mixed marriage.
My mother was baptized in the Southern Baptist Church; my father
was raised as a Roman Catholic. As a child, I attended a Lutheran
Sunday school for several years, which was chosen mainly because
it was around the corner from our home. We weren't a regular churchgoing
family, but I said my prayers every night with great conviction.
And I did so right up until the night before the day I accepted
consciously that I was gay. I stopped cold and didn't pray again
for nearly ten years. Why? Because everything I had ever been
taught made me believe that you couldn't be gay and Christian.
The moment I realized that I was gay, I also realized that it
was an essential part of me and that there was nothing wrong with
it. In fact, that realization was such an extraordinarily positive
and beautiful experience, it was about wholeness and self-knowledge
and truth and the possibility of love, and I couldn't imagine
believing in any God that would ask me to deny these things. So
instead I rejected Christ.
Thankfully, that wasn't the end of it.
Years later I fell in love with someone who had been brought up
in a Seventh-day Adventist faith community and had left that church
after realizing he was gay. Together he and I found our way to
the Episcopal Church, and it was our love that served as the vehicle
of the Holy Spirit. It wasn't until then that I was able to understand
to the depths of my being what it means to say, "God is love."
For me, those three words bring everything together; they make
sense of it all for me. Yet there remains a tension for me, as
for all gay Christians, because while our committed relationships
seems for us to reflect God's love more truly than anything else
in our lives, the church as a human institution continues to suggest
that the very aspect of us that makes that love possible is profane
in the eyes of God. A priest can bless our cat or our apartment,
but he can't bless our relationship with each other.
Last year Andrew Sullivan, the openly
gay editor of the New Republic and a practicing Roman Catholic,
gave an interview to the Catholic magazine America about
being gay and Catholic. He describes how difficult his coming
out was because of the teachings of his faith. But he goes on
to say that "as soon as I actually explored the possibility
of human contact within my emotional and sexual makeup - in other
words, as soon as I allowed myself to love someone - all the constructs
the church had taught me about [homosexuality] seemed just so
self-evidently wrong that I could no longer find it problematic.
Because my own moral sense was overwhelming, because I felt, through
the experience of loving someone or being allowed to love someone,
an enormous sense of the presence of God - for the first time
in my life." I identify very, very strongly with that.
Sullivan says of the Roman Catholic
Church that "it defines gay people by a sexual act in a way
it never defines heterosexual people, and in this the church is
in weird agreement with extreme gay activists who also want to
define homosexuality in terms of its purely sexual content. Whereas
being gay is not about sex as such. Fundamentally, it's about
one's core emotional identity. It's about whom one loves, ultimately,
and how that can make one whole as a human being." Indeed,
he says, "the moral consequences, in my own life, of the
refusal to allow myself to love another human being were disastrous.
They made me … frustrated and angry and bitter. It spilled
over into other areas of my life. Once that emotional blockage
is removed, one's whole moral equilibrium can improve, just as
a single person's moral equilibrium in a whole range of areas
can improve with marriage, in many ways, because there is a kind
of stability and security and rock upon which to build one's moral
and emotional life. To deny this to gay people is not merely incoherent
and wrong, from the Christian point of view. It is incredibly
destructive of the moral quality of their lives in general. Does
that make sense? These things are part of a continuous moral whole.
You can't ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human
being and then to lead blameless lives. We are human beings, and
we need love in our lives in order to love others - in order to
be good Christians! What the church is asking gay people to do
is not to be holy, but actually to be warped."
Many heterosexual Episcopalians have
come to recognize that there's something good, and dare I say
holy, in the loving committed relationships of gay people. Yet
many of those same straight Episcopalians have a residual discomfort
with the whole business, and a residual attachment to old ways
of thinking about things, that keeps them from following through
logically on their increased understanding of gay people and relationships.
They accept homosexuality as a constitutive, unchangeable, intrinsic
characteristic, yet they can't bring themselves to countenance
the adjustment of conventions and institutions in such a way as
to truly acknowledge the existence of homosexuality and make a
real, full, and equal place for homosexuals who seek to lead whole
Christian lives. And the tension between the ability of many heterosexual
church members to perceive what's fair and right and their attachment
to old ways of thinking can give rise to resentments, can make
them feel as if gay people are causing trouble, pushing their
private lives in other people's faces, trying to destroy things
that are familiar and precious. I know that some straight Episcopalians
look at homosexuals and think: "How much do these people
want? Why can't they leave well enough alone?" They worry
that the Episcopal Church is being turned from a church into a
social-services organization, and that gay people are less concerned
about their responsibilities as Christians than about their rights
as members of an institution. Many of these people get tired of
hearing about sensitivity to gays and lesbians.
I certainly know that I get tired of
talking about it. But there's still much to be talked about, because
to a large extent when gays and straights talk about these things
we're still speaking two different languages. You and I, if you're
straight, can hear a sermon and have two very different experiences
of it - because it may contain a phrase or a line of argument
that doesn't trouble you because it conforms to a truth about
your life, but that makes me feel excluded because it implicitly
rejects a truth about my life. This sort of disjunction can be
especially pronounced at ceremonies like weddings and funerals.
For me, at least, my happiness at the wedding of straight friends
is always mixed with a constant awareness of the difference between
the church's view of my relationship and its view of theirs. From
the moment that couple walks back up the aisle together, they're
viewed as a couple by the church and the state. Their relationship
is official. From that moment on, they take for granted a universal
acceptance of their membership in each other that to a gay person
in a loving relationship seems beyond one's wildest hopes. Yes,
there are gay people who have wedding ceremonies, and some Episcopal
priests are even willing to perform them. But it's not the same;
the church and state don't recognize it, and neither do most Episcopalians.
Think about how often you're asked to check a box on an official
form: "single," married," "divorced,"
"widowed." In my heart I'm married; on the dotted line
and in the list of my church's members, I'm single. That's not
wholeness.
The Episcopal Church, in short, is our
family. And it's a tolerant family. And some members of it are
loving in their acceptance. But the family itself isn't yet fully
accepting.
The usual way of defending this lack
of acceptance is to turn to Scripture. Of course the Bible has
been used to justify slavery and polygamy, among other things,
because there are passages in which those practices are treated
as acceptable. Also, while Christ taught us to love our enemies
rather than make war on them, and taught us also not to store
up treasures on earth, you don't see members of the religious
right protesting outside military bases or the houses of millionaires
with placards bearing those quotations the way they protest at
every Gay Pride Day march with signs bearing quotations from Leviticus
and Romans and the handful of other Biblical passages that supposedly
condemn homosexuality. Few things have been more widely taken
out of their historical and textual context and more dishonestly
and maliciously misused than those passages. First of all, exact
translation of them is difficult, if not impossible, because most
of the ancient words pertaining to sex roles and sexual identity
have no exact modern equivalents. This makes sense, since ancient
societies had different sex roles than ours does, had different
understandings of sexual relations, and had no concept of sexual
orientation. Some ancient cultures had male temple prostitutes,
for example, and publicly recognized man-boy relationships, and
the terms used to refer to those roles and relationships in certain
New Testament passages have often been mistakenly translated as
"homosexual." As the House of Bishops' study document
says, "The biblical views about sexuality are thoroughly
enmeshed in cultural and historical circumstances… Sexual
mores are governed or influenced by various taboos and concerns
about ritual purity… Procreation and the continuation of
the people are, understandably, important concerns." Another
concern was that the Israelites distinguish themselves from the
Canaanites, whose social and religious practices included all
sorts of things, including homosexual relations.
A concern for ritual purity informs
Leviticus 18:22, which reads: "You may not lie with a man
as with a woman; it is an abomination." This, as the bishops'
document notes, occurs "in a context of teaching about ritual
and moral holiness," along with passages that forbid eating
pork or wearing a garment containing more than one material or
sowing fields with two different kinds of seed. These injunctions
were laid aside by early Christians; yet two thousand years later
people still quote Leviticus 18:22 against homosexuality.
Genesis 19, the story of Sodom, is also
used against gays. Sodom is destroyed because the men of Sodom
attempt to gang-rape two angels, not known to be angels, who have
been taken in as guests by Lot. Most serious biblical scholars
agree that the homosexual element, however much it might turn
the heads of certain readers, is not the point of the story. It's
not about homosexuality; it's about a breach of hospitality, which
was a sacred trust in biblical times. It's obscene, in any event,
to suggest that a story of an attempted violent gang rape is intended
to convey to us God's view of a loving committed relationship
between two men or two women.
Similarly, Paul's reference in Romans
to how "God gave [the Gentiles] up to dishonorable passions,"
exchanging "natural" sexual relations for "unnatural,"
is not a judgment on homosexual orientation, or even on homosexual
acts per se; rather, Paul uses the debauched life at Rome, which
included homosexual relations, to support an argument for Christianity
and God's natural order and against Roman paganism and what they
saw as unnatural. Of course the ancients, Paul included, didn't
understand that there are some people for whom homosexuality is
natural; he assumes the Gentiles to be people for whom heterosexuality
is natural but who give themselves up to something which for them
is unnatural. In any event, the ultimate point of this passage,
which many people hurl at gays, is precisely that people shouldn't
use such passages to judge others, but rather as aids in examining
their own morality - "for," as Paul says, "in passing
judgment on another you condemn yourself." (Romans 3:10)
Jesus himself said nothing directly
about homosexuality, though the bishops' study document cites
his quotation of the lines in Genesis saying that "a man
shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and
the two shall become one flesh." Yet Christ wasn't insisting
here that all men must marry women - he didn't - rather, he was
replying to a question about divorce by making the point that
marriage should be regarded as indissoluble. Indeed, while Jesus
never condemned homosexuality, he was very blunt in forbidding
divorce. As the Bishops note in their document, "Perhaps
the most obvious discontinuity we currently live with in the area
of sexual relationships is the practice of divorce and remarriage,
which stands in the face of Jesus's explicit prohibition against
both the dissolution of and the contracting of subsequent marriages.""
Christians who reject the ordination
of homosexuals or the blessing of committed homosexual relationships,
even though they accept that it is better for some marriages to
end in divorce, have to ask themselves honestly if they're taking
these positions because they've read their Bibles and feel morally
compelled by what they've read to take these positions - or if
they've gone to their Bibles to find or fabricate scriptural support
for a pre-existing prejudice or discomfort, an attachment to the
familiar, a fear of something that just seems too radical or alien
or outrageous.
For the fact is that when you listen
to some Christians talking about homosexuality, and then turn
to the gospels, you find an absolute divergence in tone and emphasis.
When Christ talks about good and evil, he doesn't focus on sex.
It's clear from his preaching and his example that for Christ
morality means being kind, gentle, responsible, considerate, and
generous of spirit. It means being willing to rethink your assumptions,
reject your traditions, and act boldly in the cause of God. As
Christians we're very diverse, but we share two things: our baptism
and our moral obligation to the Summary of the Law, which tells
us to love God and to love our fellow human beings. And tied up
in the pairing of those two loves is a recognition of human love
as a reflection of divine love - and implied in that recognition,
it seems to me, is an obligation to honor and to take joy in the
love that other people bear for each other. Christianity is all
about the struggle to get beyond your prejudices and to look into
the eyes of the scruffiest, smelliest, most ornery and obnoxious
stranger and to see God and to feel love. To say that someone
is straight or gay is to say that they've been made to love in
this or that way. Not to embrace that love and recognize a commitment
based upon it is to condemn love, to demand that certain people
live without love, and nothing could be more un-Christian.
How can we live this out in the Episcopal
Church? How can we be more inclusive? Well, first of all, we must
recognize what inclusivity is and isn't about. Inclusivity in
the Episcopal Church isn't an open-ended accomodation of all human
beliefs, dispositions, moral commitments, and needs for ritual.
Certain things are required of all members: that they be baptized;
that they acknowledge the scriptural authority of the Bubke and
that they read it intelligently, thoughtfully, and critically;
that they attend to the importance of tradition, including the
creeds, prayer book, and catechism, while recognizing the fallibility
of all human institutions and interpretations; and that they employ
and respect the human faculty of reason, which includes bringing
to bear on Scripture and tradition the lessons learned from real-life
experience, the illuminations yielded through scientific discoveries,
and the information provided by social and historical research.
Inclusivity is about agreeing to differ within an informed framework,
and to strive corporately toward the justice and respect for individual
dignity we promise one another in our baptismal vows. That said,
here are a few specifics. The idea, first of all, should not be
to accept gay people as gay people, but as Christians who happen
to be gay. Avoid an "us" and "them" mentality,
a special-interest mentality. Instead of thinking in terms of
"welcome gays and lesbians into the parish family,"
think in terms of welcoming people into the parish without regard
to their sexual orientation. And also of making sure that gay
people who are already members of the parish family, but who keep
their homosexuality to themselves, feel free to be as open about
their sexual orientation as straight people are about theirs.
In any case think of all the members of the congregation as individuals,
some of whom are in the natural order of things are going to be
gay - are going to be individuals who have the same capacity to
love, the same need for relationships, the same human dignity.
Not long ago I read a memoir by James
Ferry, an Anglican priest in Canada whose bishop defrocked him
for being gay. He had the support of many people in his congregation.
For me, the saddest line in the book was something that one of
those people said to him after he learned that a small group of
parishioners was going to complain to the bishop about his homosexuality
if he didn't resign first. That night he was going to preach at
the local Metropolitan Community Church, which is a mostly gay
denomination. When he mentioned this to that parishioner, she
said kindly, "You'll be with your own people tonight. I'm
so glad." She didn't mean to hurt him, but she did. Because
she didn't understand that to him, his sexual orientation didn't
determine who his "own people" were; his parish family
were his "own people." That woman loved and respected
him as a priest and friend, but for her, his homosexuality still
made him different in some way, made him a member of some other
group. That's the kind of thinking that we have to be aware of
in ourselves, and that we have to learn to get beyond.
Part of this has to do with what's said
from the pulpit. Many clergy who have the best intentions toward
homosexuals nonetheless giver sermons that presume the congregation's
heterosexuality, addressing parishioners in a way that assumes
they're married to, or will be or have been married to, someone
of the opposite sex, and using the word family to mean
nothing other than a man and a woman and their children, if any.
Many clergy will deliver sermons that specifically and positively
address gay issues but will then in the next sermon go back to
saying things that unintentionally make gay people feel excluded.
One of the more moving experiences I've ever had in church took
place several years ago in the company of a conflicted young gay
friend of mine, who'd grown up in the parish I now belong to but
who'd left it as a child - and, at the time I attended that service
with him, had recently become involved in a committed relationship
that he felt had cut him off from God, even though it felt to
him intensely holy. The preacher at that service was Paul Moore,
Jr., who was then the bishop of New York. It was the day of the
solemnity of the conversion of Saint Paul, and the bishop talked
about his own road to Damascus, about the experience that had
made him accept his vocation and become a priest. As an Army nurse
in World War II, he treated men whose shattered bodies were the
most horrifying sights imaginable. He realized afterwards that
when he'd looked into those men's eyes, he'd been looking into
the eyes of God. For, he told us, "that's where God resides:
in the flesh, in the corrupt, imperfect flesh, in the flesh of
everybody around you - your closest friend, the homeless man on
the curb, your husband, your wife, your lover." Yes, that
was the word he used, lover. And when he said it, I turned
to my young spiritually tormented friend, and I saw that his eyes
were full of tears, because with that one word, lover,
the bishop had included him, embraced him, and acknowledged the
holiness that he himself felt to be present in his committed relationship
but that the church, as an institution, refused to recognize.
There are a number of ways in which
various churches have shown their inclusivity. Their parish bulletins
or service announcements acknowledge anniversaries not only of
heterosexual marriages but of gay unions. They publish newspaper
ads that include sentences such as "Men and women of all
sexual orientations are invited to participate in the life of
our church." They offer counseling to gay couples of the
same kind they offer to straight couples.
And, of course, in some churches the
clergy bless gay unions. Most don't, of course. And to be gay
and to sit in the church week after week beside your partner of
five or ten or thirty years and hear announcements of weddings
and to know that the two of you can't be married in the church
is to be reminded that you're not really full, equal members.
As a heterosexual you take for granted that you can walk into
a church as a couple, hold hands in the pew if you're moved to
do so, introduce each other to other members as "my husband"
or "my wife" and not have to steel yourself waiting
to see how people will react, whether they'll even speak to you.
Of course the priest will marry you; of course the congregation
will accept you as a couple, a family, as two people who belong
to each other. For gay people in the church, that's not yet a
reality.
Then there's the question of ordination.
In 1991 the church's Commission on Human Affairs recommended "that
the Church be open to ordaining gay men and lesbians otherwise
qualified who display the same integrity in their sexual relationships
which we ask of our heterosexual ordinands. We recommend this
because we consider the opening of the ordination process to gays
and lesbians a matter of justice when justice should no longer
be denied… Explicitly opening the ordination process in this
way is desirable to clear the Church of the taint of hypocrisy,
since the presence of gay men and lesbians among the clergy is
no secret." The report also mentioned "the irrational
fear and hatred of gay men and lesbians rampant in our society"
and said, "We cannot effectively advocate civil rights for
gay men and lesbians in society at large if we appear to deny
such rights within our fellowship."
I would add that permitting the open ordination of openly gay men and women would make a big difference to the emotional health, pastoral effectiveness, and spiritual integrity of clergymen and women who happen to be gay. A disproportionate number of letters I've received about my book have been from gay Episcopal and Anglican priests, some of whom are married and who say that I'm the first person they've every told about their homosexuality; some of whom are in committed gay relationships - who have beautiful, loving domestic lives that they're compelled to keep secret from everybody except a small circle of highly trusted friends. And some gay priests feel that it would be such a risk to attempt to live in a committed relationship, or haven't found anybody, understandably, willing to live in such secrecy, that they've pursued sex lives - not emotional relationships, but fleeting sexual encounters - furtively, guiltily, in inappropriate places and with inappropriate strangers. The torment and loneliness in which all those gay priests live, and the deep sense of guilt over the duplicity forced upon them by the church's "don't ask, don't tell" approach to gay clergy, are indescribable. What impressed me so powerfully about the letters I've received from those priests, however, is the strength of their faith, their sense of pastoral duty, and their love for the people that they serve.
I'll close with a quote from the bishops'
pastoral study document: "Understanding develops through
prayer. Scripture, study, worship, life in a community, mission,
and in confrontation with the realities of history. Such realities
of history include the many critical questions Church and synagogue
have had to face at other historical crossroads. In reality, theology
is generally done in response to questions raised either inside
or outside the community of believers that come to challenge the
current understanding of the faith."
"The Jerusalem Church early faced
the issue of whether and how to overcome the religious barrier
between Jew and Gentile … so that the latter might be admitted
to the Christian community without first being circumcised…"
"Galileo's and then Darwin's theories
forced the Church to review an revise the theological understanding
of their time about the nature of the world. They required serious
and painful adjustments which in some ways we are still working
through. Today's questions are also painful and raise issues with
which the Church would rather not deal… What is clear is
that challenges are not new, that the function of theology is
to grapple with such challenges, and that the questions being
asked of the Church today, like some of those yesterday, may result
in new insights and a deeper and more comprehending faith."
Amen.