Who tried to lure Nehemiah into a trap to discredit him?

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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: March 5, 2010 at 1:50 pm by Eve Tushnet

2010-03-05T13:50:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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STILL PREFERRING THE TINSEL: I recently finished Melinda Selmys’s Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism. (Insert “sounds like a Heideggerian lingerie ad” joke here….) I wish I could recommend the book, because it does grapple with some concepts close to my heart–I was really excited to see that later chapter headings included “Beauty” and “Vocation.” But this book did not work for me, at all. I’m not going to do a real review, but I do want to highlight five problems I had, because I think these problems are endemic to orthodox Catholic writing on Gay Whatnot.

So here are five things I wish Sexual Authenticity had done.

1. Remember the miniskirt rule! Discussions of sub-topics should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. Selmys covers sodomy in Christian history in two pages, ex-gay therapies in maybe five and a half. Better to skip these topics entirely than to skimp.

Selmys, for example, describes some of the more shocking 20th-century “cures” for homosexuality, like electroshock and hormone replacement, and then tells us that contemporary ex-gay therapy shouldn’t be similarly reviled. That’s groovy and all, but Selmys doesn’t actually describe even one contemporary ex-gay program. So is she saying we should give this a chance, or the programs described by Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll in my NRO piece here, or this, or something else? I don’t have to think Carroll is today’s Alan Turing to think Love in Action is cruel, ugly, and silly. (I’d really recommend the posts here for in-depth, specific looks at various different approaches to ex-gay identity, practice, and culture.)

2. Avoid monocausal explanations. There are a lot of reasons people drink milk in the morning! Surely there are even more reasons someone might be promiscuous, or unhappy, or defensive. And yet Selmys frequently falls back on rhetorical forms like, “Promiscuous sexuality is, at its heart, an attempt to access something like the Communion of the Saints–to be able to enter into the intimate life of a much larger range of humanity than you would ordinarily be able to access.”

This is intriguing and in a way quite charitable. It’s in line with Augustine’s stance that sins are virtues misapplied. But it’s also, I would wager, unrecognizable to most people who have actually been promiscuous. (Not speaking from experience, MOM.) If you only offer one explanation or reason for an action, you lose the chance for your words to resonate with people who did the action for entirely different reasons. This isn’t such a big deal if a) you’re just talking about your own experience, or giving other specific examples of actual people, or b) you don’t rely on monocausal explanation very often. Selmys went to that well way too often for me.

Oh, here’s another example, and a worse one I think. While arguing that ex-gay therapies fail, when they fail, because they don’t promote friendship and spiritual succour, she says: “The ‘cure’ consists not in the healing of father-wounds, nor even in the assumption of heterosexual relationships, but in humbling yourself enough to admit that a struggle is taking place and that you can’t do it by yourself. This is why frequent confession and compassionate spiritual direction is effective, while testosterone-replacement therapies are not. …This is also why there are some people who will never be ‘cured.’ Because for someone whose primary struggle is the struggle with same-sex attractions, being cured is tantamount to being saved. Regardless of what certain Protestant theologians would like us to believe, that is something not completed until, finally, you stand before the judgment throne of God….”

It’s really just not true–and it’s damaging–to say that people whose same-sex attractions persist throughout their lives are insufficiently humble or are assuming that they’d be saved if only they went straight. I mean, I know people who do frequent confession and have compassionate spiritual directors, and who seek to live entirely in accordance with God’s will as expressed in the teaching of the Catholic Church… and they’re still pretty gay.

3. Don’t say you have special insight into experiences you almost had. This one is tricky. Almost having an experience can give you relevant insight into that experience, depending on the reasons you stopped short. But if you deploy your empathy too readily, you may come across as if you’re attempting to colonize other people’s experiences for your own worldview.

For example, Selmys writes, “I am going to stand up and confess, here, that I understand exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling when they give up on the quest for chastity, leave the Church, and try to find hope and happiness in the gay lifestyle. I have felt it myself: there are times when I look up at my ceiling at night, and I don’t see the face of God–I haven’t seen Him, or felt Him, in months, and I can’t understand the burdens that are piling up on me–and I want to say, ‘To hell with it.’ Literally. Let this entire project of the moral life collapse under its own weight; just let me get out of the building first.”

Which… I’m pretty sure I don’t understand “exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling,” but obviously a lot of people view leaving the Church as taking on a new moral project, a better and truer one, not giving up on the moral life. I think they’re wrong (though they’re quite sincere!), but it’s just not true to diagnose their problem, universally, as despair or willful immoralism.

She concludes that section by writing that if she did not believe in God, “I would run away from my family, or commit suicide, or become a raging alcoholic and curse everyone who came my way. I would be worse–a hundred times worse–than any of the people hanging around the bars down in the Village.” But really, if you’d be a hundred times worse than them, doesn’t that mean you don’t share their experience or know what makes them tick? Or to put it another way, if the problem of the guys at JR’s is atheism, and Selmys understands their temptations and experiences as intimately as she claims, why aren’t they acting as badly as she says she would?

4. Try to have something to say to people who are happy being gay. This is not so relevant if you’re basically writing autobiography. But Selmys is attempting a more theoretical work, aimed at a broad audience. And I think one of the reasons it really didn’t speak to me is that it assumes that lesbian experience will be kind of fakey-fantasy, inherently unsatisfying, and gay life is depressing. This… has not been my experience.

I like being gay! I love being Catholic. (Love is obviously a more fraught emotion than liking.) The intersection of the two can be humiliating, lonely, irritating (it’s very tiresome being constantly told by strangers that you hate yourself), frightening, philosophically challenging, and generally difficult. But it’s also immensely fruitful and, in its own way, fun. Certainly we’ve got a lot of historical precedent to play with! Pasolini is me… and all that….

5. Acknowledge the diversity of vocations. This point is obviously related to the previous one. Selmys, now married with children, often writes as if marriage is the summit of vocation, the only opportunity for real love. She writes that gay relationships are more like friendships than like marriages, which isn’t true on its face (I think gay relationships are different from both, but similar to both–they’re the middle circle in the Venn diagram, overlapping the two outer circles while retaining its own boundaries) and, in context, treats friendship as a cute accessory to the real business of life.

For example, elsewhere: “Friends may hope to stick together ‘through thick and thin,’ but in reality, friendships tend to dissolve quickly when bonds of mutual interest cease to hold them together–they may linger on in name, and occasion the odd greeting card at special holidays, but they cease to involve a genuine knowledge of and involvement with the other.” (I don’t know whether that sentence is more ahistoric, tragic, false, trivializing, or self-fulfilling.) And elsewhere again: “Love involves the whole person. Romantic or erotic love involves the whole person most of all–there are plenty of other kinds of love in which you make a sincere gift that comes out of yourself, but do not actually give yourself entirely.”

You all know by now that I can’t be havin’ with that sort of thing. Friendship is real love. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.

I’m not sure how Selmys’s latria toward married love can allow for priestly vocations, let alone devoted friendship.

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