tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post5184156693730801220..comments2024-01-20T00:00:10.459-08:00Comments on Mudblood Catholic: Gay and Catholic, Part III: AndrophiliaGabriel Blanchardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-26287426608607094902016-07-07T16:54:25.773-07:002016-07-07T16:54:25.773-07:00I don't consider the distinction between love ...I don't consider the distinction between love and sex at all arbitrary, personally, though I get the impression I'd have some difficulty persuading you to credit it.<br /><br />As to whining and copping out, well, since I don't consider asserting the legitimacy of same-sex romance to be disrespectful, and since (as far as I saw, though of course I may have missed something) the photo wasn't copyrighted, I assumed that my use of it wasn't important enough to merit pursuing its source. Naturally if they ask me to take it down, I will, but for yourself, if you're concerned about justice and respect for LGBT people, I'd assume that literally anything else than cross-examining blog illustrations would be more worth your time.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-38381679636034888852016-07-07T13:04:12.772-07:002016-07-07T13:04:12.772-07:00Given that the next photo in the series you took t...Given that the next photo in the series you took this from without permission is of the couple kissing, I think it's safe to assume their relationship is sexual. You can appeal to arbitrary line-drawing and dissonance to claim you're not demeaning their relationship, but let's get real, you are. I think the couple would agree. I've tracked this image to its source (whining that it's hard is a rather lame copout on your part), and I will try to make the couple aware of the way you've used their image. Expect to hear from them soon.Doubleleopardyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05462794570797328518noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-53440834532935408862016-07-07T12:48:53.424-07:002016-07-07T12:48:53.424-07:00Well, since I got the photo off the internet, I do...Well, since I got the photo off the internet, I don't know who those men are, which makes my power of getting their permission pretty remote. (Technically I don't even know that they're gay or a couple, though it seems the likeliest explanation for the embrace; I know only that they are embracing.)<br /><br />As to their relationship being a sin, I don't believe that. I believe that *gay sex*, specifically, is a sin; but no relationship worth having can be reduced, morally or emotionally, to the sex it does or doesn't contain. And for that matter, one of my chief reasons for writing this post in particular was to make that point, that delighting in male beauty and having profound, even romantic, affection for another man aren't in my opinion wrong things (a view that, e.g., the Catholic clergy of East Anglia seem to have agreed with when they gave their approval to Dunstan Thompson and Philip Trower, who had been lovers before converting, to continue living together). It's a point I've made in several other posts.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-85513779813881351062016-07-07T10:01:52.978-07:002016-07-07T10:01:52.978-07:00You used a photo depicting an intimate embrace bet...You used a photo depicting an intimate embrace between a gay couple in this post. Did you get their permission to use their image as part of a series of blog posts arguing that their relationship is a sin? I very much doubt they would approve.Doubleleopardyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05462794570797328518noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-14007836074510163282016-04-14T14:40:27.364-07:002016-04-14T14:40:27.364-07:00Not really. To me it'd feel strange to have a ...Not really. To me it'd feel strange to have a sexuality that was completely harmonious with my values from the get-go; not in the sense that I think being conflicted about one's sexuality is a natural or healthy thing, but that I've always thought of it as raw material, and raw material that isn't totally transparent to the intellect. The only ways I can imagine having a perfect harmony between my sexuality and my beliefs would be being asexual, believing that all sexual impulses were automatically good, or choosing whom I was attracted to. And I at any rate am in none of those positions.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-73224996087534524622016-04-14T13:02:50.679-07:002016-04-14T13:02:50.679-07:00But isn't that...troubling? That you can't...But isn't that...troubling? That you can't say *why*? My sexuality makes sense to me as part of my values and personality in a way I can explain. Don't you ever wonder if the inability to explain it doesn't maybe suggest there is an explanation there that is...hiding itself for whatever reason?A Sinnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05083094677310915678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-17222652219631162812016-04-14T12:01:41.461-07:002016-04-14T12:01:41.461-07:00I don't think being attracted to one sex versu...I don't think being attracted to one sex versus the other is necessarily objectifying. To like something about someone, such as sex, isn't the same as *reducing them to* that liked quality, which seems to me to be the only really useful definition of objectification.<br /><br />I'm not much more enamored of Freud than you are (literally or figuratively). The like-me-ness of other males is admittedly appealing, but, as far as I can read my heart, the predominating element in my attraction is delight in men as men, rather than in men as like-me. The idea that I would get masculinity from other men because I feel a lack of it, doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me; I'm sure there are people who do that -- "little miss daddy issues" is a hackneyed stereotype for a reason -- but it doesn't seem to me like it could exhaust someone's orientation. Not if they were psychologically mature, at least. And I've only found my interest in men to increase as I've gotten more confident and comfortable in my identity as a man.<br /><br />I think a big part of the reason I find complementarity appealing is that I was raised in a household where it worked, and worked remarkably well. My family had our faults. But blaming things on one sex or the other, power plays, insisting that others (or oneself) stick to predefined gender roles, none of those were among them, even though my mother believed (and still does believe) quite firmly in male headship of the home. (Part of the reason I found this belief so easy to accept was that my father, being a very upright and respectful man, would never have invoked his wife's obedience unless our lives depended on it.) We were *in fact* pretty traditional in behavior, but there was no disguising the fact that we were that way because we were very comfortable with that dynamic.<br /><br />Anyway, point is, it gave me a chance from a young age to observe the beauty of a marriage of contrasting strengths. The differing energies* that each sex brings to things do, in my opinion, complement each other more than nicely.<br /><br />That said, I wouldn't say I'm attracted to men because I find that they complement me any more than I'm attracted to men because I find them to be the same as me. I don't know if I can analyze it that deeply, honestly. I'm just like, "Hey look, dudes, awesome." Not that I don't find women awesome too, but they don't stir my heart the way men do.<br /><br />*I am a Californian.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-87013088072490005762016-04-14T11:06:13.746-07:002016-04-14T11:06:13.746-07:00My sexuality most definitely was a rejection. I sa...My sexuality most definitely was a rejection. I saw in the culture, as a pre-teen, what I would now call something like "Freudian heterosexuality" (or "Woody Allen heterosexuality") and it was so unappealing to me, seemed so mutually objectifying and unsatisfying, that I think this caused me to tend towards homosexuality and the idea of finding "another self."<br /><br />Which is why I suppose this notion of "androphilia" disturbs me too, as it seems to objectify maleness (and raise the question of why your own maleness isn't "enough.")<br /><br />Because, see, I'm not sure I'm so obsessed with the male. It's just that I want to find someone "like me" and I happen to be a male. Really I'm looking for a "human" it's just that it can't be a female human because the fact of the contrast there would threaten to introduce all the "psychodynamic" symbolism of Freudian-heterosexuality in which the sexual difference in the person-to-person relationship would become entangled with some sort of symbolic transference dynamic and suddenly I'd be treating her as Woman and not herself.<br /><br />My homosexuality in its development was very much about rejecting gender roles and gender scripts, because in the older generation that just seemed to cause so much neurosis and unhappiness. Relationships where husband and wife were basically from different planets (hence all the sitcom humor) which to me felt so alienating and unlike real intimacy, because of the constant miscommunication and differences in values and priorities (even when it comes to something like sex itself; I'm attracted to other men in part because I know what men want because I am one! Navigating female sexual ambivalence, on the other hand...not something I envy straight men).<br /><br />And then, I suppose because the world hates me, it's turned out that among Millennials (at least the "blues" if not the "reds") this sort of dropping of the strict *gendering* and weird gendered transferences is happening among the heterosexuals and (o me miserum!) it's the gays in my generation who are, as it were, a "generation behind" aping all the weird symbolic gender transferences of the older generations.<br /><br />Except in a way that isn't even logically coherent or healthy seeming, because if I were to seek some sort of "symbolic exchange", some sort of transference dynamic, with someone...I'd seek it with a person who had what I didn't. I have maleness of my own. I can understand why "Woody Allen heterosexuals" would seek a woman to provide the feminine in their life, to "balance out" their own half. I think the effort is fraught with constant tension and conflict, and it's sort of "using" the other person to provide a transference fix, but at least I understand why it would make sense. But it just seems very traumatized to me to be seeking psychosymbolic sexual values in someone of the same sex as yourself.<br /><br />Basically I understand homosexuality as a way to take the whole question of gender and gender-complementarianism out of the picture. But it makes no sense to me WITHIN that framework, and under such a framework I'd have to agree with conservative objections regarding its psychological health, because it just seems incoherent and delusional at that point...A Sinnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05083094677310915678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-7511907004664226242016-04-14T11:05:41.479-07:002016-04-14T11:05:41.479-07:00To me partner is a modern form of something like t...To me partner is a modern form of something like the word "helpmate," which is highly Biblical.<br /><br />We can agree on "Lover." Great word, the best word probably, utterly awkward and unusable in public lol.<br /><br />I suppose my problem with husband is the incoherence you only further lay out for me here. It is a word with complemtarian connotations, and seems to be liked precisely by those gays who have a complementarian romantic imaginary...but then verbally you wind up necessarily complementing it with itself. Yin and...yin.<br /><br />The lover/beloved word-pair again shows its superiority here, as it allows for complementarity on the personal level without, I dunno, *gendering* it. Every lover can also be a beloved, the active/passive roles are fluid. But trying to translate this onto "husband" leaves us with weird ideas like "we're both husband and wife depending on the dynamic of the moment." But of course, few gays want to say they're "also wife," so I'm back to the problem of yang/yang...A Sinnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05083094677310915678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-9550325806801533112016-04-14T08:09:53.183-07:002016-04-14T08:09:53.183-07:00"Bucolic." Now there is a word one doesn..."Bucolic." Now there is a word one doesn't encounter in a com-box every day. :)<br /><br />I was always rather put off by the term "partner" myself, mostly because it sounds so businesslike. "Lover" was my favorite in some respects, but it doesn't adapt itself well to everyday use ("Hi, I'm Adam, and this is my lover, Steve," which kind of leaves the hearer wondering awkwardly whether the next sentence is going to be "We do butt stuff together.")<br /><br />I'm with you about *homosexualities.* I really never thought of my sexuality as a rejection of ... well, anything, and I've always found complementarianism more interesting than, oh, *flat* equality. (I tend to find contrasts in general more interesting than sameness.) One of the reasons I actually do like the term *androphile,* despite its terribly unfortunate associations via suffix, is that it puts the accent where I find it: on liking men. For me that doesn't necessarily imply radical egalitarianism or anything along those lines; "philosophical" homosexuality, as it were, always seemed kind of unromantic to me, and I have always been a romantic at heart, even in my rationalism.<br /><br />Yours doesn't make me uncomfortable, but, for the reasons I've stated, it's never been the sort that appeals to me. That said, I can see why the idea of wanting a husband could feel emasculating -- it doesn't to me, because I also want to *be* a husband, but the response makes sense to me.<br /><br />I won't try to defend *complementarian homosexuality* as a coherent concept; I don't think it is. Indeed, one of my only internal difficulties with homosexuality has always been the difficulty of reconciling my delight in complementarity (and, indeed, in the bucolic) with my being gay. Not being philosophically bound to *try* to reconcile the two does in one sense make my life simpler, though in all the other senses it's more complicated.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-19985137095316297022016-04-14T06:20:33.113-07:002016-04-14T06:20:33.113-07:00Your agrarian images are bucolic Tim, but they'...Your agrarian images are bucolic Tim, but they're also part of my problem with the word. I'm not a farm animal, and my partner is not either. When there is still a question of breeding, then it makes a little more sense...but even for heterosexuals I prefer "bride and bridegroom" to "husband and wife" (the latter of which is the sort of word I expect to hear after prefixes like "mid-" and "fish-").<br /><br />Maybe I'm coming at it from a different place. To me, I've always known being gay was something inherently modern, likely urban, and so something feels terribly affected about trying to fit it in the mold of rural-ish domesticity, or even bourgeois suburbanity, because to me that order is exactly what my homosexuality was a rejection of. <br /><br />To me being gay is about the sort of radical egalitarianism represented by a term like partner. "Husband and wife" imply a complementarian notion, and if I was looking for a complement rather than an equal, if I was looking for my other rather than my same...I'd either look for a woman or feel inclined to identify as one myself!<br /><br />Which I suppose gets to the heart of my discomfort; being complementarian terminology, to me wanting a husband would imply I was the wife. And that's emasculating to me; frankly at that point I'd prefer saying that *I* was the husband looking for my "boywife" or something like that (but of course that just sounds creepy, and hardly represents the sort of egalitarianism I feel my sexuality implies).<br /><br />So maybe we're all back to the fact of *homosexualities* plural...because I barely recognize the homosexuality being described here as at all similar, in its psychological framework, to my own. And honestly, and I say this only to be honest, the one being described here does strike me as more, I dunno, perverse and incoherent, in exactly all the ways that the conservatives always accuse but which I felt my own model proved to be just caricatures and bogeymen. But apparently some gays really do operate according to it, and that makes me, I will admit, profoundly uncomfortable.A Sinnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05083094677310915678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-11403310873798426092016-04-13T19:46:29.559-07:002016-04-13T19:46:29.559-07:00I don't know. It's a very good question, a...I don't know. It's a very good question, and Eve's book has already whetted my appetite to read Bray, who hadn't been on my radar before. (The closest I'd come before was in reading "Brideshead Revisited," which obviously is *not* very close.) One of the reasons that I was, and in some ways remain, grieved by how brief my one romantic relationship was is that, even in its short span, my boyfriend and I both grew markedly as men. Disentangling the different longings that longing for a husband involves for me personally is a difficult work, and it seemed easier when I had, oh, *concrete matter* to operate upon. Whether it would have proven easier in the event is most likely impossible to know.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-28327820891926487082016-04-13T17:51:36.699-07:002016-04-13T17:51:36.699-07:00I agree, Gabriel: "husband" is a beautif...I agree, Gabriel: "husband" is a beautiful word. I like husbandman even better and would love to see it recovered for common use (albeit for less lyrical, more conceptual reasons). It's a quintessentially masculine role (one played, of course, by farm wives, shepherdesses, lady gardeners, etc.) Call it coaching, mentoring, etc., it's the calling forth, the careful provocation, the skillful care, the recognition and cultivating of potential, the recognition and heeding of limits and vulnerabilities. In this sense, boys require husbanding to become men, and men need husbanding to thrive. One wonders if your use of the word includes such notions.<br /><br />One wonders also whether (and how and to what degrees) your sense of "husband" might relate to traditional practices (more lost even than "husbandman") of 'betrothed friendship' excavated by Alan Bray in "The Friend." (For instance, would you imagine Ambrose St. John, grave-mate of John Henry Newman to have been the Cardinal's "husband"?) One wants to ask the same question about the notions of friendship Ron Belgau is exploring over at spiritualfriendship.org.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16885513387693998566noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-10242988493436076822016-04-11T11:18:11.447-07:002016-04-11T11:18:11.447-07:00Well, when I speak about wanting a husband, I do s...Well, when I speak about wanting a husband, I do specifically mean that *I* want a husband -- not that wanting-a-husband is a quality of gay men in general. It clearly isn't, even incidentally. And even my own desire is a rather complicated thing which I don't fully understand. "Husband" is the best word for it, I find; but it's a mixture of a lot of things, most of which are erotic, but not all (and the sex doesn't predominate even in the erotic element). I don't know how closely my desire corresponds to the typical partner-longing of other gay men. I do tend to think, increasingly, that for me *personally* it would make it inordinately difficult to conduct a covenanted friendship with a man who was gay or bi, but that's *my* problem, not a problem of gay men in general.<br /><br />As for the word itself, I think it's rather attractive, actually. But I've heard other people complain of it.Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-28201886271783502502016-04-10T15:20:54.690-07:002016-04-10T15:20:54.690-07:00It's interesting you say here now that Eros is...It's interesting you say here now that Eros isn't necessarily intrinsically connected to marriage (I'd agree) but then describe your desire for a romantic life-partnership with a man (obviously more than a miscellaneous friendship) as wanting a "husband."<br /><br />I have the same desires you do. But I've never thought of myself as wanting a husband. A "boyfriend" or "partner" or "life partner" definitely. A "lover" even (or a "Beloved".) But I've never felt that "husband" really fit into all this exactly for the reasons you say about Dante and all that.<br /><br />Husband as a words sort of makes me cringe. A figure out of a sitcom, not a romance. To me, a husband is something with a wife, and "husbandry" is something practiced by (quite literal) breeders.<br /><br />I wonder why you feel otherwise.A Sinnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05083094677310915678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-49789633417461190272016-04-09T15:56:10.378-07:002016-04-09T15:56:10.378-07:00Well, part of the reason that I haven't answer...Well, part of the reason that I haven't answered that question here is that I wasn't trying to; I was only trying to explain what being gay means to me, and why I prefer to talk about it as I do. But to address your concerns.<br /><br />In talking about the various non-sexual expressions of the longing for a lover, I wasn't so much trying to talk about liceity versus illiceity of desire. My primary concern was to illustrate that this is not just about sex. Since *most* sins are not sexual (almost all of them, in fact), this doesn't correlate to innocence or degrees thereof. It does involve a difference in *quality,* however, that I feel corrects a misconception I've run into regularly in dealing with people who object to gay language. And, while sex versus not-sex doesn't correspond at all to bad versus good, I do think that the assumption that gay sexuality is all about screwing, without any other elements, is both offensive and harmful, so it's worth endeavoring to correct it.<br /><br />Turning now to the question of liceity, I actually *would* be prepared to argue that romantic love from one man to another is not necessarily wrong. This is partly because the only thing that the Church explicitly condemns is indulging in homosexual sex, but it's for other reasons as well, the main one being that I don't believe romantic love is intrinsically directed to marriage. I've written about it before and plan to again, so I'll be brief here, but Dante provides a colossal counter-example to the notion that romantic or erotic love for someone who isn't, and can't be, your spouse is automatically something diseased. Charles Williams points out near the beginning of "The Figure of Beatrice" that marriage between Dante and Beatrice was not only impossible but, as far as we can tell from his writings on her throughout his life, was never a thing he even contemplated; eros was not presumed to be intrinsically connected to marriage at the time, and I think that's because it isn't.<br /><br />But of course this isn't a thorough answer. I hope more shall become clear over the course of the series (and naturally I solicit comments either way).Gabriel Blanchardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17607504369762849930noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5766538007498037282.post-39418646657951473442016-04-09T09:21:11.949-07:002016-04-09T09:21:11.949-07:00While I find this emotionally compelling, it doesn...While I find this emotionally compelling, it doesn't seem to answer the question propriety that animates so much of the argumentation around this matter.<br /><br />In trying to explain the desire, you describe yourself wanting "someone to fuss over you when you’re sick, someone to bicker with about whether to get a dog, someone to try a new restaurant with, someone whose taste in music is clearly wrong but whose errors you generously tolerate" and imply that, given the innocuous nature of these particular desires that they ought be morally licit. I'm not sure that follows.<br /><br />To begin with, the theologically precise terminology the Church uses to describe homosexuality, disordered, means that a licit desire is directed towards an illicit object. I don't see any argument here as to why the desires you bring up here, though licit in themselves just as sex is, aren't rendered illicit by their object, another man.<br /><br />You may respond that since there is nothing overtly sexual about these things that they <i>ought</i> to be licit. However, you seem to recognize that the underlying nature of what you're desiring here, different from "a miscellaneous live-in friend," is such that there's an obvious subtext of romance whose ultimate end cannot be satisfied by any of the non-sexual items you're trying to use to fill that void.<br /><br />It's not that I take any joy in pointing this out. I <i>want</i> there to be a space for all of these relational goods. I <i>want</i> to "know and be known." I <i>want</i> to believe that my sexuality has not been rendered utterly depraved by homosexuality. However, it seems that every attempt to find a licit space for these things amounts to flirting with the near occasion of sin and the presumption inherent to it.irksome1https://www.blogger.com/profile/00805469860229478026noreply@blogger.com