I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence.  Most essays you read on the subject start from a strongly negative view of sex itself.  But then that’s because most essays you read on the subject come from religious right sources, and the religious right considers joy anathema.  You should be ashamed, ashamed of your body, of your feelings, of your deepest inner self.  Otherwise, why would you want to let them take control of your body, your feelings, your deepest inner self?  Most essays on abstinence start from the premise that there is something evil about sex, and especially if you’re gay, something evil about you.  When people speak of abstinence and gay people, what they’re really talking about is lifetime celibacy, lifetime shame.

Peterson Toscano posted recently about an evangelical teen website, Battle Cry, which advertises itself as righteous teens fighting a war against…well…against sex.

TELEVISION

This generation views 16 to 17 hours of television each week and sees on average 14,000 sexual scenes and references each year. That’s more than 38 references every day.

INTERNET

This generation spends three hours a day online and is the first to grow up with point-and-click pornography. Almost 90 percent of teens have viewed pornography online at one of the 300,000 adult websites, most while doing homework.

MUSIC

More than 25 percent of teen-targeted radio segments contain sexual content; 42 percent of the top selling CDs contain sexual content.

Well no duh.  Human beings are sexual creatures (its how we reproduce), and at a certain time in our lives (scientists call it ‘puberty’), sex starts becoming a pressing interest for us.  So much, so goddamned obvious.  Ask me if I’m happy about the commercialization of sex.  Ask me if I think sex is being treated in this culture with the respect it deserves.  But it’s not like any of the above are things you wouldn’t expect from human beings.  The presence of sex in popular culture is as unsurprising a thing as the presence of weapons and violence.  Note however, that you don’t hear a peep from Battle Cry about how frequently teens encounter violent images in popular culture.  That’s probably because Battle Cry is itself dealing in violent imagery.  It’s okay to imagine yourself as a warrior slaying thousands of your neighbors in blood strewn battle for all that is righteous and holy, but imagining yourself as a lover, laying down with someone and taking them into your arms and driving each other into fits of joyful sexual ecstasy is evil, and you need to have your mind washed out with soap.  Jesus didn’t say love thy neighbor, he said to make war on them.

But if Battle Cry is a teen website, the teens writing for it are doing so with adults looking over their shoulders, and feeding them the words.  Contrast it with a recent essay I found on Mogenic, a site for gay teens, about abstinence.  It’s by a gay teen, and it’s titled, A Virgin, and Proud of it…

…gays have traditionally felt the need to identify themselves as separate from the mainstream. We have created our own subculture, and every subculture needs its own doctrines to follow. We tend to throw out religious teachings—especially Christian teachings—without fully considering their worth. We create our own beliefs, and often we choose beliefs that directly oppose those espoused who have adopted a dislike for homosexuality—like Christians, say. In doing so, we drop many things that perhaps Christianity got right. An example of this is abstinence.

The other problem in gay society is that we don’t have a point to define as the moment when abstinence should end. Abstinence traditionally means waiting until marriage to have sex. As long as gay marriage remains illegal, we don’t have that magical marker in the sky that shows us when, if we decide to abstain from sex, we can stop abstaining. Those of us who choose to remain abstinent, therefore, must forge our own definitions, such as “Once I’m in a meaningful, loving relationship, then I’ll have sex.” But there’s no sure indicator as to when that occurs, and it is easy for us to begin to have sex without infringing upon our morals.

I, personally, am a proud virgin. And by virgin, I mean Virgin, with a capital “V”. Unless you consider masturbation a means to end virginity, I am about as close to 100% virgin as they come. I intend to remain this way until I find myself in the aforementioned “meaningful, loving relationship.” It’s not that I do not find myself attracted to the idea of no-strings-attached sex. In fact, I fairly often fantasize about it. But I cannot imagine myself actually going through with such an act. There are several reasons why I believe abstinence to be the best way to go…

Okay, he gets many things completely wrong in this essay, like when he says "the sexual abandon of gays is legendary".  Yeah it’s legendary…as in urban myth legendary.  There’s a lot of claptrap talked about gay men and sex, most of it pushed by religious right propaganda machines using studies they’ve either distorted or produced themselves to arrive at the conclusions they were after, namely that gay people are dirty twisted sexual perverts who have sex compulsively and never experience anything like love.  This kid buys into a lot of that myth, but so so a lot of us, even many of those of us who should be old enough to know better.  Never mind.

And…personally…I strongly doubt that abstinence before marriage is a good idea.  I think after you’ve made a vow is the wrong time to find out you’re not sexually compatible.  Again…never mind.

What was so heartwarming, so thrilling, about reading that gay teen’s essay, was the self confidant conviction running throughout, that he was entitled as a human being to experience sex in a context of pride, dignity, and self worth.

That’s it.  That’s the golden heart of it.  Right there.  You give that to kids, and it won’t matter what the popular culture says at them.  They’ll take from it what they need, what validates their lives, and ignore what does not.  Look at the example of the Netherlands, where sex education is frank and comprehensive, and prostitution is legal, and yet they have among the lowest of teen STD and pregnancy rates.  Pride matters.  And for so many years, my own teen years included, pride was such a scarce commodity for gay teens.  I have seen the cost firsthand, of the absence of pride.  I have experienced it.  And that is why, to this day, I still fight for it.

I never thought I’d find myself applauding an essay on abstinence.  And there I was, seeing to my delight, the difference, the profound life affirming difference, between an abstinence discussion based on shame, and one based on self worth.  So many kids, so many gay kids especially, never get to have that discussion, because the adults talking to them aren’t really concerned about whether or not they have sex.  They’re concerned that they might wake up one day, and realize that to be a human being, is not a dirty thing.

Kids start believing that, and it won’t matter what the religious right says to them, never mind pop culture.  And that is exactly why the religious right does not want them to have pride, dignity, and a sense of self worth.  They must be ashamed of themselves.  Ashamed of what they are: sexual beings.  Ashamed, ultimately, to be human.

I’ll be protesting in front of Love In Action here in Memphis tomorrow.  Already I’ve heard from some of its supporters, posting on the QAC comment boards, how homosexuals have given themselves up to their base sexual urges, over a holy god.  No.  We have embraced life.  And we are angry at those who would take away from teens, their pride, their dignity, and their self worth, in the name of the creator that gave them life.

[Updated – Fixed the link to the Mogenic essay]