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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: August 29, 2006 at 4:38 am by Eve Tushnet

2006-08-29T04:38:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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SHE THINKS I STILL CARE (Feast of Augustine Dance Remix): Follow-up to post below re: gay identity and stuff. Likely to be at least as scatterbrained and demi-coherent as its progenitor. …This is the really really Christian mix, as opposed to the original really really gay version–but I swear they’re saying the same thing!!! It’s like those pictures that are an old lady, but also a duck.

The kindness of strangers: First of all, um. Thanks very much to everyone who commented on the previous post. I really didn’t expect much of a response. …Religious Left Online comments here; Now the Green Blade Riseth sets me on fire with envy by reminiscing about the Smiths; and an anonyreader writes:

…I think your comment on unmixed pleasures is right on target. I’ve long thought that those who oppose identifying oneself as gay or whatever in even a general sense (I’m thinking of the Courage people here) miss that. Certainly, it doesn’t say everything there is to say about a person, but it does carry a heavy chunk of real meaning, and that *does* say a great deal about someone’s identity as a *person*.

What I think gets left out a lot of the discussion, and which you seem to be bringing into it, is that homosexuality is more than just the moral disorder that a guy wants to bang another guy. It influences how we interact with friends, how we look at gender roles in general, and can sensitize us to shades of meaning that we would otherwise not see at all, or only with great difficulty. And having experienced what it is to be an outsider in a very particular way, we tend to be a bit more aware of the marginalized in general, as you mention. Failure to recognize that wider sphere of queerness leads to discussions that can see in homosexuality nothing but a cross to be suffered or a peril to society and one’s soul. It also leads otherwise good Christians to say very wretched things about people suspected of being gay, even if those people may be as pure as the driven snow, because the identity has been reduced to the mere category of lust. To struggle against the principles of lust doesn’t, I think, require anyone to flee from everything else that homosexuality brings with it.

One last thought, on identity and community, that may make sense from a Jewish p.o.v., too. Growing up a Catholic totally surrounded by Protestants and looking for the handful of people that were also Catholic, who saw the world through similar eyes and had similar problems and experiences, sort of felt analogous to looking for the handful of people who were gay. There was always the danger of projecting one’s own experience onto them (or vice versa, assuming that if they had gone through certain things, then I had to, also), but the sense of identity, discovery, and automatic community was very real.

So. Yeah. I totally agree about the danger of projection, by the way, and suspect I may engage in it in some of these posts, so really, people should call me on it where they see it.

How to do things with wants: In comments over at Claw of the Conciliator, Anactoria offers some challenges:

Her position has always really disturbed me.

Does her choice of inaction mean that she believes god would condemn any action on her part towards her lesbian desires? Since her sexuality is part of her, like it or not, does that mean she abhors a part of herself? Or believes that god does?

Hey, man, if I were going to abhor a part of myself, it would be the part that paid good money for this!

…No, okay. Some thoughts: First, it’s very clear to me that Catholic teaching is much more affirming of my worth as a person than I might be on my own. Unlike me, Catholic dogma is not moody. It just keeps saying, day after day, that all people are made in the image of God, and that all our failures and cruelties can’t take that away.

Second, Christ can get very hardcore on the subject of what one should hate: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Any love or longing, no matter how good it might ordinarily be, must be abhorred and put aside if it leads us away from Him.

And I think it works the other way around, too: What leads us to Him, we should cling to. (Hey, look, Thomas Aquinas has my back here!)

So the question, with any desire, is how to turn it into something like Diotima’s ladder of love: how to move, through longing, upward to Christ. This is what I mean when I bubbitz on about sublimation. I won’t say sublimation comes easily to me–kind of by definition, the sublime is never easy–but it’s a move I find intuitive and one I think I understand pretty well. I wanted to have a bit in this post listing and describing the ways in which I’d “acted on my lesbian desires” by, e.g., writing fiction; going to Confession and Communion; seeking greater humility in my relationships with others, and, especially, trying to be more servant-like in my relationships with my friends; investigating new philosophical paths, giving people the benefit of the doubt, trying to view others the way I viewed the women I loved. Unfortunately, I think if I got specific enough to be practical and useful, I might also make it a little too obvious which women I’m talking about, so, uh, this is all you get. You want more, try the Symposium….

It is shaped, sir, like itself: In a separate comment, Anactoria replies to somebody else (= not me) by saying, “…I don’t quite see the correlation between an inherited or acquired bad temper and a person’s sexual orientation. To me, that’s like comparing apples and oranges.”

And I do see the objection, there. I’ve used the temper analogy before (here–also a journalism analogy!), and I’ve used other analogies as well, like cultures that associate masculinity with cruelty. None of these analogies captures everything important about same-sex desire, by any means! All of the analogies miss out on a lot of important stuff; which is why I’ve tried to write very plainly about the experience of same-sex attraction, to keep in all the elements the analogies miss.

But the analogies often do small, specific things pretty well. The temper analogy was powerful for me because I do have a hot temper, but I’ve come a fairly long way in mastering it, and so I can draw on that experience when I try to figure out how to increase my humility and lovingkindness in other parts of my life.

The journalism analogy is fun because it is so obviously culture-bound, and I wish people would stop pretending that contemporary gay identity is some kind of fixed constant in human affairs. It isn’t. It’s maybe 120 years old, and has only really gained currency in the past thirty years. So something can be a very significant part of a person’s identity (I am really passionate about being a journalist, the professional ethos of it, even though I am a shank and do not do nearly enough reporting) without being some kind of eternal verity.

One analogy I used here is the medieval culture of “courtly love,” and its glamorization of adultery. That’s super interesting for me in the gay context (it’s super interesting in itself, really, but especially w/r/t Gay Stuff) because parts of that culture actually did get transformed into something deeply Christian. CS Lewis’s excellent study The Allegory of Love gives the details there. (Cliffs Notes version: Edmund Spenser began the project of transforming a tradition celebrating adultery into a celebration of married love.) So part of my project, I think, is exploring ways in which (parts of) the gay culture might similarly be transformed. We already had a sub-sub-subcultural version of this transformation in the 19th-c Aesthetic movement. Why not go for a larger-scale version? (“Celebrate Gay Humility”? *g*) Maybe it would sound like this….

Anyway. I do agree with the critiques of analogies, really. I just want to point out that there are good reasons for using them, even though there are also good reasons for clinging more closely to the specifics of gay identity.

Nice girls, not one with a defect: And finally, Anactoria muses:

I suppose it would help if I believed in the whole concept of humanity being an inherently sinful and “fallen” race but I don’t. The Genesis account of man’s supposed fall from grace doesn’t mesh with my idea of a god of love.

I wanted to save that bit for last, because although I do suspect it helps explain our differences, I didn’t want to use it as an “easy out”–I wanted to deal with the part of the iceberg that’s above the surface, first.

But in case talking about what it means to be Fallen will help, here goes. First off, I will repeat what I said (and elaborated on) a couple years ago:

So I ran across this person who says she doesn’t believe in original sin.

Fine.

But what I want to know is, what does she call it? What does she call that yearning toward hate, that reverse heliotropism? What does she call the damage that all of us bear from the time of our earliest memories?

Chesterton, I think, said something about how the Fall is the only obvious Christian doctrine (?). And I agree with that so thoroughly that I’m not even sure how useful I can be in defending the idea–it’s too central to my experience of the world. I mean, look: My mom works in prisoners’-rights litigation. If you want to be convinced that humans are not naturally good, I am hard pressed to think of a better school.

People want, and want very badly, a lot of really awful things. The fact that somebody really, really wants to do something, or believes it’s embedded in and intrinsic to him, doesn’t actually tell me very much about that thing’s moral worth.

But I absolutely, 100% deny that humans are naturally bad or evil, either. If that were true, how could we ever long for or recognize beauty and truth? To be Fallen is to share both the legacy of Adam’s sin, and the memory of his happiness. (See–right up there in the title, I promised you some Augustine, and there it finally is….) Something’s gone wrong with us, yes, but somewhere deep down we do still remember what it was like to be able to love. And by following that submerged and occluded memory, we can learn to accept grace, and be healed, and love truly.

But the thing is… the effects of sin, in our hearts and in the world, are not trivial. They’re deep and subtle and really hard. That’s why people have had to give up things they truly loved, to follow Christ: occupations, relationships, life itself. What I’ve been asked to give up is not that much, compared to the sacrifices of others.

(And yeah, I know I totally haven’t addressed why I’m Catholic and not some other thing that would be all “gay-affirming” or whatever. But that isn’t what I wanted to do in these posts; I’m not wildly good at it [it ends up just being, “Nothing except Catholicism made any sense, and the Church said I had to stop gettin’ girls, so, you know, that’s the end of that party”]; and I am currently a lot more interested in how to be Catholic, anyway. …So, with that unsatisfying parenthesis, I will end this enormous post.)

No one escapes my love.
–Quentin Crisp

And the tears of it are wet: One postscript. If you’re reading this, and you pray, please do a thing for me, okay? Please pray for the repose of the soul of L.S.; and for his family. …Thanks.

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