Every year around this time””June is of course Pride month in LGBT communities””I go back and reread an older essay by Eve Tushnet called “Romoeroticism.” Tushnet points out that in the nineteenth century, as same-sex love was being newly described as a pathology, a psychological disorder, it was the Catholic Church, of all places, where many same-sex attracted men and women found a home””because it was the Church that, rather than medicalizing same-sex love, celebrated “the possibility of shockingly chaste same-sex love.” When I first read that, several years ago now, it reconfigured my whole way of thinking about being gay and Christian: Yes, Scripture was telling me that gay sex wasn’t the true fulfillment of my longings for same-sex intimacy, but no, it wasn’t telling me to deny the goodness of that longing itself. On the contrary, traditional Christianity, it turned out, was radically pro-same-sex love.
The actual on-the-ground history is messy, of course. Many Catholic parishes aren’t exactly safe places to be out as LGBT, and the rich history of celebrated same-sex love is largely unknown””or suppressed””in many churches. But Tushnet’s point is that the resources are there in Catholicism (and, I would argue, in my own Anglican Communion and other churches too) to dignify and nurture same-sex love. We wouldn’t have to compromise one iota of historic Scriptural, Christian teaching in order to open our doors to gay and lesbian people, to offer them a place free from disdain and rejection and humiliation, and even to affirm their (our!) desire to lay down their lives for a friend.
1. The attack on the gay community at Pulse was horrifying, wicked, repugnant.
2. Wesley always writes in ways that I want to learn from and reflect upon.
3. One of my responses was a sort of inchoate juxtaposition. When Augustine or St. John Chrysostom teach about the theatre or the games or the races, they don’t write about sanctuaries or safety, but rather certain sorts of concentrations of vice. Rather than sites of sanctuary they see them as places of danger. They produce experiences that are a kind of substitute for spiritual joy of knowing God.
Wesley, recognizing the all too human backstabbing, shallowness and hedonism that mark all human communities, finds something akin to an intimation of the gospel in the consolation, solidarity and safety experienced: a momentum that might find its proper home in the Body of Christ but has sinfully not been welcomed.
Juxtaposing say Augustine on the theatre – and Wesley on Pulse – leaves me wondering. Is there a genuine theological difference here? Is it a matter of rhetorical effectivity and cultural appropriatness or is there a disagreement of principle?