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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: November 22, 2008 at 10:10 pm by Eve Tushnet

2008-11-22T22:10:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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MIXING MEMORY AND DESIRE: NOTES FROM MY THEOLOGY ON TAP THING. This isn’t going to be an outline of my presentation, because a) it was ridiculously scattershot (hey man, I could barely speak! Don’t expect brilliance from a petrie dish!) and b) a lot of it was stuff I’d said before, most notably here and in my essay in Faith on the Edge. (So if you liked it, read that piece and buy the book!)

So instead, these are notes about what I said, and what I was asked. I’ll try to say things I’ve never said before. In order from least to most interesting, I think.

1. “Do you believe gay sex is a sin?” The TOTNYC people collected questions on paper during and after the talk, so I could answer them, and this was one of the more frequent ones.

I think this speaks to a problem on my part: I find it, in fact, humiliating to say that I do. I’m okay with saying, “I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches”; c’mon, I said this at my baptism. But to say, “Hey, I’m the chick who doesn’t get to git wit’ it,” seems a bit more humiliating!

There are more defensible reasons I got this question several times over: I truly believe it’s important to focus on sublimation as the opposite of repression, and on how I can express my lesbian desires while not merely respecting but even strengthening chastity. Possibly that focus can make me sound like chastity isn’t crucial to me, when in fact the need for chastity is precisely what’s pushing me to develop this understanding of sublimation as expression of eros.

But I need to keep in mind that the fact that a statement is humiliating is never a reason to avoid making it. I need to practice more humility and honesty–I know this–and I think these virtues would have helped my talk be more clear. As well as being good for, you know, my life.

The other thing, though, is that it’s worth keeping in mind that I am pretty up-front about where I stand on Catholic sex stuff, and yet it’s still very difficult for me to say some of these things. I think just as it’s very easy for gay people to underestimate the tragedies and humiliations inherent in heterosexuality, it’s easy for straight people to underestimate the ditto inherent in homosexuality. I don’t in any way mean to say, oh my life is so hard!–not at all, more just that I was startled by how difficult this particular thing turned out to be. It reminded me that there will always be difficulties I don’t choose, no matter how trivial.

2. Gay marriage. This is one of the other questions I got on several different slips of paper. (The third was some variation of, “How do I talk to my gay friends without being horrible?”, which is a real question, but which depends so much on your own persona, your friend’s persona/self-conception, and your relationship, that I don’t feel comfortable answering it on the blog, where I can’t get into the nuances of circumstance.)

First, and most importantly, I want to separate this question from the question of what Catholics who find themselves erotically drawn to the same sex should do. They are somewhat related questions, because both turn on the nature and meaning of human sexuality, but the differences are at least as important as the similarities. And so I focused, at TOTNYC, on drawing this line of separation, because I thought it might give people some degree of emotional space in which to work out their beliefs about the personal question–what should I do?–before moving on to what the laws should be.

But I think also that people asked me this question because they were grappling for a language with which to address marriage. Marriage, as a pre- and non-liberal institution, is exceptionally hard to talk about. Eros in general is pre- and non-liberal, and extraordinarily hard to talk about–this may be why feminism is both so attractive, and so convoluted and self-opposed–because eros is not really about happiness or choice, and those two categories are the only ones in which we’ve been taught to think.

So, while I want to re-emphasize that I do not think this question is the same as, or even follows obviously from, the question of Catholic chastity–I do want to give people some sense of how I talk about gay marriage. This post rounds up several other articles/posts I’ve written on the subject.

3. Ars longa, vita brevis. One of the best things about being Catholic is that there has been a lot of Catholicism already. This is also one of the most difficult things about being Catholic!–viz. my posts on the mintiness of the Pope. But for gay Catholics, specifically, the Church’s age is important in at least three ways:

a. We are not sola Scriptura, in part because that doesn’t make sense. Every text needs interpretation; every interpretation requires tradition (language is itself a tradition); every tradition requires a beloved or Beloved, real or imagined, Who gives content to its abstract nouns.

It is easy to pick apart the references to homosexual acts in Scripture. It is much, much harder to argue against the entire orthodox interpretive tradition (i.e. what the Church has for two millennia taken those curt phrases to mean) or the overall symbolic pattern of Scripture (i.e. the fact that marriage is treated as a mirror of the divine love affair with humankind, and so is same-sex friendship, but the latter is never conflated with the former).

Let me unpack that parenthesis a bit. There are many metaphors for God’s love in Scripture, covering just about all of our human loves: filial love, friendship, eros, even the love of the stranger, even the love of the enemy. And yet these metaphors are all different facets of the crystal broken at the Fall. If we are going to be excruciatingly precise about the translation of arsenokoitai , shouldn’t we be equally clear on the fact that the Bible can portray many different kinds of love without ever suggesting they are the same love, or that they should be expressed in the same way? And that sacred Tradition might have something to say about that?

b. Keats and Yeats Are on Your Side, While Wilde…. The second important point about the Church’s age is that She is rich in resources for contemporary gay people–because She is rich in resources for just about anybody. You have incredible models of sublimation, people who poured out their friendships or their eros as oil across the feet of the Crucified. (The Roden book here is the book I mentioned at the talk, btw.) Why aspire to be liberated when you could aspire to be Teresa?

c. Fra Angelico cats come out tonight! The last, and perhaps most controversial, way in which the Church’s age is important is that She has provided images of vocation even outside of those officially recognized.

The most obvious of these is the artistic vocation. Who will stand up to say that Flannery O’Connor was a bad Catholic? Perhaps soon the same will be said of Oscar Wilde, or even Morrissey. (I’m of the belief that if the Messiah tarries, Wilde will be canonized sometime in the next few centuries.)

I don’t have any problem with the privileging of the vocations of marriage and vowed religious life. But I do think the Catholic Church, with its eccentrics, its holy fools, its uncanny and astonishing saints, offers a whole bestiary of forms of love for God; and the diversity of that bestiary is the freedom of Catholics.

4. What is the point of you? The previous points blend into this final one. I think one of the most pressing questions for gay Catholics–and maybe for anyone, but there is only one thing that I know how to do well etc–is, “What is the point of me?” Why am I the way that I am, with my besetting weaknesses, my strange silences, my crimson joys?

A guy wrote to me at one point to ask, among other things, whether he would still be gay in Heaven. I wrote back a bunch of things, but one thing I said is that we know from Scripture that there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage in Heaven. Whatever marriage is here, it is a foretaste of and preparation for what we will experience if we end up in Heaven. And similarly, St. Aelred delineates how friendship can be our means of seeing the face of Christ, and presenting His holy face to those we love.

And so where there is love in homosexual relationships, that love too, I think, is a preparation for something in Heaven, as all love is. It likely reflects a different aspect of our love of God. Marriage, for example, plays on the eros of difference, the thrill of la difference. But anywhere there is love, be it capable of chaste sexual expression or requiring complete sublimation of sexual expression or completely absent of any desire for sexual expression–anywhere, that love is preparing us for Heaven. Maybe by bringing us to the Cross; maybe by teaching us how to sacrifice with joy; maybe by teaching us to sacrifice while expecting nothing in return; maybe by pushing us outside the bourgeois world of society and family, the world that makes things work, and exposing us instead as fools for Christ.

What love does to you will depend–like drinks at Philip Larkin’s party!–“on where you are; or who.” But there is a point to you, and to your love. Christ is Lord of Time, and He has brought you into this world in this time and place and culture for some purpose; you have been given some unique way of manifesting His love to the world.

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