Not So Much A Heart Of Stone, As A Head Of Stone…
Compassion. There’s the genuine variety, and then there’s the self-serving one. For a healthy serving of the latter, the religious right is always a good source :
Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who complain about the time conservatives spend on the issue wouldn’t complain if we were taking the Andrew Sullivan gay liberationist line. It’s that we don’t do so that they dislike. If we can’t say something nice and cheerful, we shouldn’t say anything at all.
But the issue — the issues — won’t go away.
No shit Sherlock. That’s because knuckle dragging jackasses like you can’t let go if it. It matters to you, that somewhere, someway, somehow, there are gay people in this world who don’t fear and loath their sexual nature, the way louts like you think they should.
Rod Dreher, he who knows that homosexuals can pray the gay away because he himself was cleansed by God (or was it just getting old) of his lustful feelings toward…no, not men, but Betty Blue (no…I’m not kidding…just read his article), wants us to know he feels Compassion for all those poor suffering gay Evangelicals The New York Times profiled the other day. Not that he feels any particular need to treat them as if they were as human as he is mind you, with the same basic human needs for love and intimate companionship that gutter crawling louts like him need to stop demonizing. He has Compassion…Compassion I tell you.
Whatever your stance on homosexuality and religion, you have to have a heart of stone not to feel for men and women caught in this dilemma. For me, it brought to mind something my friend David Morrison told me over a decade ago, about the world he found as he left gay activism and committed himself to living as a chaste Christian faithful to Scripture and tradition.
As it happens, David Morrison was once a friend of mine too. But that was back in his gay activist days, when we were both volunteers on Jon Larimore’s Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS system (David was mostly a theoretical volunteer, since I ended up doing 90 percent of the work he’d also volunteered for). In those days he wore his pride like, as he once said, "an anthem". But over the years we all watched him fall, first into a profoundly reactionary brand of conservatism, and then (surprise, surprise) into an even more reactionary brand of religion. I remember vividly the day he posted to the general forum, that as far as God was concerned none of us were any better then Hitler. He had a boyfriend back then, or so he always claimed. I’ve often wondered how the boyfriend took David’s bellyflop into the gutter. When he later wrote a column for the New York Post, titled "What Crime Of Hate And Anger?" (issue of November 5, 1998) in which he averred that Matthew Shepard had it coming, because he had a history of risky sexual flirting with strangers, I couldn’t have been less surprised:
Newsweek called what happened in Cody last summer a miscalculation on Shepard’s part and it may turn out that he similarly miscalculated in Laramie. But whether he did or did not miscalculate, Americans should think long and hard about the making the feeling of repugnance at an unwanted sexual advance subject to additional penalties under the law.
Angry, yes. But not surprised. You can read the article in full here on Eutopia. (There is also a response in that issue of Eutopia to my letter to the Post. Note the theocrat’s reliable retort that "certitude of experience" must answer to "certitude of truth".)
That was the David we’d all come to know and loath on GLIB. If he’d said the Pink Triangles were a sensible reaction to the repugnance of unwanted sexual advances I couldn’t have been less surprised.
But Dreher thinks David is a fine young man, because David is the only kind of homosexual a moral runt like Dreher can tolerate: a self castrating one.
Looking back, after eight years of seeking to live chastely as a Christian, I believe my time at Trinity represented a turning point in my early Christian life. While I had accepted intellectually the claims of the historic Christian creeds and experienced a deep emotional conviction of Christ’s reality and love, Christianity’s doctrines and disciplines remained merely concepts. It was the witness of the Christians at Trinity Church that put flesh onto the bones of biblical phrases like "love thy neighbor" and "seventy times seven times."
You can love your neighbor, so long as you don’t love yourself…right David?
Sadly, most men and women living with same-sex attraction have had experiences more akin to Gail’s than mine….
Actually David, what a lot of us have had is experience being in love, and being loved, and sharing with the one you love all the wonderful, awesome, life affirming joy of sexual intimacy. And we resent it, when a gutter crawling slimeball like you, who just had to put another cigarette out on a dead gay kid’s body for the sake of your own cheapshit self hatreds, decides to lecture us on how sinful that perfectly human joy is.
Of course, Mr Thank You Jesus For Saving Me From The Clutches Of Betty Blue sees it differently…
In my view, that Episcopal church’s response to David, and to homosexuality, was authentically and beautifully Christian.
An authentic and beautifully Christian approach to homosexuality. Sorta like the one the Catholic Bishops took last month here in Baltimore:
How…beautiful…
December 14th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Interesting to hear your experience of David, Bruce.
I interacted with him at his blog for a while in 2003, and met him for breakfast once in January of 2004.
He has mentioned Dan on a fairly regular basis at his blog as friend, roommate, and former intimate partner, with the sharing of the condo going back 18 years or so.
I don’t know why his blog has gone relatively dormant in the past couple of months — his last post is dated 2 months ago, and his last comment one month — but Dan was mentioned a couple of times in August.
Here is a post describing their relationship, insisting that the best path to a long-term same-sex relationship is giving up sex.
December 14th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Well that’s probably the boyfriend then. If they’re still together after all this time then it must be working for them. Presumably the boyfriend feels the same way Morrison does about sex. (shrug) As Jon Larimore likes to say "Whatever floats your boat". Fact is, there are heterosexual couples too, generally older ones but not always, who don’t have sex either, but still love each other very much. I know at least one college age woman (from the FreeZ group) who regards herself as an asexual.
The problem as usual, is Morrison’s reliable passive aggressive contempt for sexually intimate couples. Those relationships are superficial. Those relationships don’t last. They say they’re intimate, but that’s only a euphemism for sex… That’s our David all right. We all watched him slowly but surely close his mind behind the door marked "Dogma" and he is one reason why I say I’ve never seen anyone who ever did that, walk back out.
So it’s…unsurprising…that in that most recent post of his you mention, David is perfectly comfortable with the new Virginia anti-gay laws. Figure he reckons that since he and Dan aren’t having sex, none of that applies to them. We’re =good= homosexuals…we don’t have sex… Why, the Virginia Attorney General even said that those laws wouldn’t have the dire effects people claim. So it was said too in Ohio, and then the domestic violence laws stopped protecting even unmarried heterosexuals. But I have a hunch that David thinks those unmarried couples, like Matthew Shepard, probably had it coming.
Back in the day we all watched the guy who was often quoted on GLIB as saying "They will shout ‘fag’ at us sooner than ‘gay’ because in ‘fag’ there is an oath, while in ‘gay’ there is an anthem." descend into the Pit in a kind of staring fascinated horror. I think for a lot of us it was the ‘in God’s eyes none of us are any better then Hitler’ crack was the last straw. I know it was for me anyway.
I’ve still got most of those GLIB postings from back in the day stored away. I need to get them onto some more perminant storage one of these days.
December 21st, 2006 at 1:43 am
The passive aggressive contempt extended to other folks’ beliefs, it seemed to me, and that was what left me uninterested in listening or conversing further. David’s favorite word for anyone whose beliefs differed from his own on orientation-related issues was “cheap,” as in cheap faith, or cheap grace.
In the faint and damning praise category, David beats Alan Chambers by not pretending to be straight. And, he persists in the oh-so-platonic relationship with Dan even though it naturally invites the skepticism of gays, ex-gays, and reparative therapists alike.
Arguably, though, he’s emblematic of the stuff his fellow conservatives love to hate. He flaunts his sexuality. (There were solid indications that my grandparents weren’t sexually active after the first half, or even the first third, of their 62 years together, but they never promoted their sexuality, or lack of it, for 30-40 years.) He shoves it down our throats (insisting that he and Dan prove that gay folks need no more than the asexual happiness they’ve found together). All outward appearances suggest that David and Dan ground each other, they complement each other, they go to church together, they are part of each other’s families, they plan their holidays jointly, they worry and care about each other’s nieces and nephews, they have signed contracts to ensure that the death of one will not trigger the eviction of the other from the home they’ve shared.
All of that speaks to what Virginians voted resoundingly against, i.e., a partnership […] to which is assigned the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities or effects of marriage, eh?
Yeah, Bruce, the GLIB postings need to be preserved. It still amazes me how fundamentally the topics have changed in the 13 years since I started coming out. I had a foot-tall collection of newspaper clippings from the late 90s, gathered one page at a time, which I had to jettison in August. It’s hard to imagine even now that marriage wasn’t on the horizon or part of the public conversations until so recently; digital captures of conversations from the 90s will be valuable resources.
December 21st, 2006 at 10:53 am
David’s favorite word for anyone whose beliefs differed from his own on orientation-related issues was “cheap,†as in cheap faith, or cheap grace.
Oh, take me back why don’t you. Yeah. That’s our David.
All of that speaks to what Virginians voted resoundingly against…
Yes. He went on in that column, about how the vote wouldn’t impact anything beyond the scope of marriage, as if the scope of marriage is as limited as that. Those powers of attorney and other legal documents he thinks they have aren’t going to be worth crap if the Virginia courts interpret that amendment as expansively as its written. Which, let’s face it, they’re supposed to. The object is to make same sex couples, which David and Dan certainly seem to be, sexual activity between them notwithstanding, legally strangers to each other as far as the law is concerned. That is exactly the intent.
David is just passing on the right wing boilerplate, because he so desperately wants to be part of their tribe now. But he’ll never be. He needs look no further then the things he’s written, about his struggle for acceptance among conservative protestants. The Catholic church he is now a part of, at least in theory, accepts celibate homosexuals. But he has experienced first hand how that’s not the case with most homophobes, and yet he denies that’s the reality.
And that’s David. Let it be said he has a lot of first hand experiences with the humanity and dignity of out and proud gay people too, that he couldn’t be less interested in remembering accurately now. He says a lot of things about how “cheap” things are in the gay community that he knows from first hand experience aren’t true. And I know exactly what he’s seen, because I was there too, and saw it with him.
I had a foot-tall collection of newspaper clippings from the late 90s, gathered one page at a time, which I had to jettison in August.
Ack! That was history, man. I keep all that stuff. I have a filing cabinet for the paper clippings, and gigabytes of it for the electronic ones online at home, including all my old Usenet logs too, from alt.politics.homosexuality from 93 to 2002.
Yeah a lot of things have changed. But a lot hasn’t. Back in the day, when there was a push on in California to give same sex couples the right to hospital visitation, they were arguing about whether or not that would lead to same sex marriage. They’re still arguing about that, and we’re still having to struggle to secure just that one small thing.
I remember how they use to make every struggle for every little scrap of legal rights, whether it was visitation, or workplace discrimination or repealing the sodomy laws, into a fight about same sex marriage. I think the biggest thing that’s changed since then, is that people have more come to realize that if everything is going to be a fight over same sex marriage, then we might as well fight for same sex marriage.