The Stonewall Inn and the Sacred Heart

I had been in enough riots to know the fun was over. … The cops were totally humiliated. This never, ever happened. They were angrier than I guess they had ever been, because everybody else had rioted … but the fairies were not supposed to riot … no group had ever forced cops to retreat before. 

—Bob Kohler, eyewitness of the Stonewall Riots 

I therefore take You, O Sacred Heart, to be the only object of my love, the guardian of my life, my assurance of salvation, the remedy of my weakness and inconstancy, the atonement for all the faults of my life, and my sure refuge at the hour of death. 

—St Margaret Mary Alacoque, from the Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

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In the wee hours of the morning on 28th June, 1969—eight days after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was observed that year—New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar. All gay bars were technically underground establishments at the time; laws instituted after Prohibition ended forbade liquor licenses to ‘disorderly houses,’ which was interpreted by the government to include any establishment frequented by gays or prostitutes, among others. The mafia was therefore largely in control of the city’s gay bars [1], and bribed the cops to be able to carry on with business. That night, the NYPD hadn’t gotten their bribe, so they raided the Stonewall and started arresting people. But that night was different. [2] Many of the patrons were drag queens, hustlers, trans women, or homeless young people (the categories overlapped), who weren’t allowed in other covertly gay-friendly establishments or couldn’t afford them; the Stonewall Inn was for many purposes their home. And that night, they fought for it.

Three names stand out from that first night: Stormé DeLarverie, Sylvia Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson; Rivera and Johnson were trans women [3], DeLarverie a lesbian. As DeLarverie was being loaded into a police van, she cried out to the watching crowd, ‘Why don’t you guys do something?’ and was thrust forcibly into the van. 

It was then the spark caught. As the rumor spread that the raid was in response to a missed bribe, the crowd began throwing pennies at the police. Rivera said, ‘You been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn!’ and Johnson (though accounts vary) is reported to have thrown a shot glass and shouted, ‘I got my civil rights!’ The police tried to continue with the arrests, tried to make the crowd disperse, but the riot had taken hold. The police were driven back, and the demonstrations went on for days. The gay rights movement as we know it today had begun.

I grew up in an America after Stonewall, after the AIDS crisis of the eighties, after the early phase and early failures of the ex-gay movement. The queens of Stonewall are the reason I could and can be openly gay at my college, at my jobs, at my parish, with little fear of harassment or expulsion or violence or getting fired. Little rather than none, but little. I owe them for that.

But what has any of this got to do with the Sacred Heart of Jesus?

Well, strictly speaking, every human person has to do with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, because it is the center of all humanity and indeed of all creation. Charles Williams put it thus:

Compassion is the union of man with his fellows, as is the blood. The permitted devotion to the Sacred Heart is the source of both. The physical heart is, in this sense, an ‘index’ to both. The visionary forms of the occult schools are but dreams of the Divine Body. … The temples of the Holy Ghost are constructed all on one plan: and our duties to our material fellows are duties to structures of beatitude. … The Sacred Body is the plan upon which physical human creation was built, for it is the center of physical human creation. The great dreams of the human form containing the whole universe are in this less than the truth. As His, so ours; the body, in this sense of an index, is also a pattern. We carry about with us an operative synthesis of the Virtues … [4]

But although that truth sets the brain aflame with its implications, it doesn’t pertain to homosexuality more than to anything else, still less to gay rights more than to anything else. (At least, not as far as I’ve discerned to date.)

For me personally, I feel like the Sacred Heart and gayness cross paths in two ways. One pertains to the Pulse shooting three years ago. That was the event that, for lack of a better word, radicalized me. It was the first thing that had ever happened that made me fear for my safety as an out gay man—even the brutalization of Matthew Shephard hadn’t done that; and also the first clear realization I had that, while individual Catholics might, the Catholic Church in general did not care about LGBTQ people. Or maybe they did, but their care wasn’t worth having. I had believed sincerely that if, God forbid, something like Pulse happened, they would show that they really did believe in avoiding every sign of unjust discrimination. But the bishops were silent: fifty-odd words of colorless sympathy on Twitter was the best they could do. [5] After that, incidentally, I was kind of forearmed for the McCarrick scandal and everything that’s come after it; my illusions about the bona fides of the clergy were gone. My faith had never depended on those illusions, thank God. But all the same, I had genuinely believed they meant it when they said they loved us. When it turned out they were lying about that, I wasn’t as shocked by their lies about so much else.

But here’s the thing. That is not how Jesus feels about gay people. The night those forty-nine people were shot in Orlando, he was shot forty-nine times. The blood of their deaths and the blood of his sacrifice are both the life of the image of God: for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof. No matter how faithless his Church is, he is not faithless to her nor to humanity. He held those forty-nine people in his arms as they died, and unless they finally refused him, he holds them still. Their wounds are in his Heart as I write these words.

Which brings us to the other intersection between that Heart and homosexuality. Nothing is wasted. No injury, no indignity that was inflicted on Jesus was wasted; every moment of pain was used to restore creation. There’s so much meaningless suffering in the world—the promise of the Sacred Heart is that, in reality, all that suffering appears meaningless but it isn’t. Any belief in a just deity includes the belief that, from the cruelest to the pettiest, every evil will be acknowledged and recompensed in the Last Judgment; devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is an adamant assertion that all those evils will not only be stopped, they will be transformed into greater goods—not only made powerless, but humiliated in their turn—evil does not, ever, get the last word in any way at all. No concession is made to it when its very existence is made the felix culpa that summons a glorious Savior.

It’s easy to distort this truth into the petty, saccharine maxim that Everything happens for a reason. No. Not everything happens for a reason. At any rate, not in the sense the people saying that think. Not only the pain of suffering, but also the horror of meaninglessness, will be honored by the final consummation; otherwise it couldn’t really be final. But for that exact reason, there must be no rushing to the end, no pretending that we have the final meaning now. That is why, in its ikons, the Sacred Heart still bleeds as well as burning. The grief of the world will end, but it has not yet ended.

Which has what to do with being gay? My traditionalist readers will probably think I’m talking about what a wound being gay is, while some of my progressivist readers may think I’m unconsciously reflecting the unnecessary burden laid on me by the Catholic Church. I take neither of these views, actually; though I’d point out to both that Jesus did not carry his cross in secret, and asking me to conceal either my sexuality or my beliefs is, accordingly, not going to land. In any case, I believe in a standard of chastity that I cannot manage to live up to; and that's uncomfortable to a lot of people. They want something neat, something that makes sense, something that fits their categories, and I don't offer that.

But the mystery of the Sacred Heart leaves me with some (some) assurance that the messy and uncertain life I lead is not a waste. Being gay in a world that’s mostly straight is hard; being gay in the Catholic Church is hard; being Catholic in the queer community is hard. But not fruitless. As bitterly as loneliness and guilt and anger and worry still, often, bite into me, I’m not afraid like I once was that they’re symptoms of a pointless life. Whether suffering comes from the inner struggle for self-discipline, or from homophobic (or, occasionally, Romaphobic) sources without—I might be scared of the pain, because who isn’t, but I’m not scared that it’s all for nothing, because I see that picture of a bleeding Heart above me, and that’s the center of everything. And that blood runs through every heart, in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

Happy fiftieth anniversary.

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[1] Were you honestly thinking that the law was going to stop any queen from getting her vodka soda on and dancing to ‘Sugar, Sugar’? 

[2] For one thing, it was the night following Judy Garland’s funeral, so raiding a gay bar was not perhaps the most cunning thing the NYPD has ever done.

[3] At the time, the commonest term was transvestite; the term transgender had not yet been coined. Nonetheless, they would most probably fall under the transgender umbrella today, especially as both used female pronouns.

[4] From the Dublin Review of July 1942, republished in the posthumous collection The Image of the City.

[5] My parish did better than average. Our pastor added a petition for the victims to the Bidding Prayers (it was actually the first thing I heard about Pulse), and I had an opportunity to give a couple of lectures on homosexuality and Christianity a few months later. But the Church in general proved too apathetic, or too cowardly, or too hateful, to even say (let alone do) anything of substance.

Review: "I'm Gay" by Eugene Lee Yang

Every single courageous act of coming out chips away at the curse of homophobia. Most importantly it’s destroyed within yourself, and that act creates the potential for its destruction where it exists in friends, family, and society.

—Anthony Venn-Brown, A Life of Unlearning

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Photo by Noam Galai

Eugene Lee Yang of the Try Guys (a foursome who try weird new experiences on YouTube) recently released a coming out video, simply titled I’m Gay. It tells his story wordlessly, through dancing and music, and while ‘interpretive dance’ sounds … well, put bluntly, pretty fucking stupid to anybody who grew up in my generation, this video floored me. I first saw it on Saturday and I’ve already watched it six or seven times, as well as his making-of video. It’s stunning. And I am not the first to observe that, of the possible ways, an intricately designed, visually spectacular internet video of interpretive dance is arguably the gayest way to tell people that you’re gay.

The story is arranged in six scenes, corresponding to the six colors of a typical Pride flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Yang tells his archetypal yet fairly complex story with incredible economy—only a single scene (the red) lasts longer than one minute, and every movement is choreographed to communicate its meaning vividly. The best way I can review it is just to describe it, pointing out a few of the symbols that stood out to me. I’ll take the scenes one by one, adding the keywords from the making-of video.

The Red Scene: Nature

This presents Yang in a family setting. A coffee table surrounded by a couch and two chairs sits in front of a red wall, with father, mother standing behind, brother and sister on the couch on either side of Yang; he is dressed in an androgynous red costume representing his different-ness, while his family are in grey, suggesting that they have not yet taken a side, perhaps not recognized a conflict. Childhood, playfulness, and innocence are the salient characteristics of most of the children’s movements. At first their playfulness is not gendered, their mother’s beauty and their father’s rigidity are equal ingredients in all three; but their play soon begins to be an imitation of the same-sex parent—except Yang, who begins imitating his mother more than his father. The camera pulls out more and more, away from the wall, showing that its confines are artificial and belie the real shape and size of the room and that there are large windows letting in bright light further off. When Yang is about to use his mother’s lipstick, his father slaps it out of his hand and hits him; then the family marches offscreen into the next scene.

The Orange Scene: Nurture

A large crowd of people dressed mostly in grey, American clothing (save for Yang, who is in orange-colored clothes that seem to be some variety of hanbok, traditional Korean garb) are marching into a room full of benches. This is stated in the commentary to represent school and work as well, but the primary imagery chosen is that of a church, with a cross-bearing pulpit and two candelabra full of bright orange candles. The main mass of people march in an ordered pattern, sometimes covering their eyes or grabbing their heads as if in pain or anger. Yang’s dancing and leaping become wilder and more joyful as he goes, until one of the grey-clad people stops him, moving his body into a rigid, pious posture like the others, then forcing him to bow and dismissing him. Yang takes a seat in a pew with a toothy smile, and the grey clothes of the others shift to white and black: sides are being taken, opposition expressed. The man behind the pulpit is in white, as are the people on the far side of the aisle from Yang, whose side is in black; the pastor figure begins making violent gestures like a fundamentalist preacher, and the camera zooms in on Yang’s face as he looks away.

The Yellow Scene: Love

This scene is particularly complex in its action. The music shifts suddenly to a lighter passage, building gradually through the scene. Sitting on a bench in front of a stand of trees and sunflowers and golden streetlamps, dressed in a vest and yellow trousers, Yang sees a girl in black dancing. The floor is covered in yellow leaves, as if signifying the organic change that is about to take place. He gets up to dance with her, and they leap and swirl for a while, until he sees another figure, a male, also dressed in yellow trousers. He moves into a pas de deux with him, with acrobatic, extraordinarily graceful movements. At first the two men move away from the girl and she moves more slowly after them. Then the men briefly move back: Yang reconnects with her, and she gives a kindly gesture connecting the two men again. (Yang describes her as representing the genuine ally, helping him discover and accept himself.) The other man lays himself on the ground, catching Yang in a suspended hold and slowly lowering him onto his body. They are about to kiss as the scene changes.

The Green Scene: Community

Here Yang appears in an elegant, sequined, deep green drag costume with a large pompadour wig, going down a set of stairs, greeting and embracing other drag queens and women as they head down to a dance floor. Their costumes are in an assortment of rainbow colors, but green predominates, at once dark and lush. The music has become energetic again, and characters dance for a few moments—then a figure in white, shown only from behind, approaches them, his fingers in the shape of a gun: likely a tribute to the mass shooting at Pulse three years ago. The dancers pause; then the outer ring ducks out of sight, then the rest, leaving only Yang visible, his face fearful as he raises his hands as if to stop the shooter, but then arms reach up from below and pull him out of the frame.

The Blue Scene: Hate

This is maybe the toughest part of the video to watch. We see Yang from above, in a crowd of anonymous white-clad people, bloodied and being kicked from every side. He is dressed only in a pair of jeans that are much longer than his legs; he cannot walk, cannot escape. The brutalizers disperse suddenly, and the camera moves down, showing him pulling himself along the ground, a blue dumpster and garbage bags behind him. Suddenly his family reappears: his mother and brother are now in black instead of grey, and his father and sister are now in white. His mother and brother move to help him up, but his father and sister begin fighting them, and before long his family are all fighting each other and slide out of the shot; Yang is pushed onto the ground again as they leave, and lies there, convulsing, trying to get up. Darkly echoing the first scene with the red lipstick, Yang touches the red blood on his mouth as he finally manages to sit up, then stand.

The Purple Scene: Pride

Yang is again in an arresting drag outfit, indigo shading into violet. He rises from the ground, at first with his back to the camera, but he quickly turns, anxious in his beauty. Crowds of people, some in white, some in black, surround him; some of those dressed in black reach out as if to caress or encourage, some of those in white shove or paw him, but most are busy yelling at each other as he slowly walks forward, finally reaching a point beyond the crowd; as he does, the shot switches to a distant and unfocused one that slowly pulls back in to his face. The music climaxes and stops, and we hear the angry arguments behind, but the shot lingers on Yang’s face: uncomfortable, anxious, defiant, the lips moving slightly, the eyes going back and forth uncertainly and then—just a couple of seconds before the scene ends, it all smooths out. Yang’s mouth is set, his eyes steady, his brows un-knotted. A peaceful, self-assured dignity closes the scene.

Credits

The credits play over a final, narrative-less scene. Yang is dressed in a luxuriant robe, apparently an open-breasted version of the shenyi (a traditional Chinese robe for men), silver and turquoise in color with what looks like a tea-green obi (a Japanese garment that’s a little reminiscent of a corset), seated alone in the room from the red scene, now with the encroaching wall removed. He rises, gesturing with the magnificent trailing sleeves that had at first appeared to be a gown; as if in response, six figures from the green scene—one in each color: red, purple, blue, orange, yellow, and green—file in. When they have all taken their positions, mirroring the arrangement of the family from the beginning, Yang sits down again in the center, and the legend For the LGBTQIA+ Community appears on the screen.

This is one of the most powerful and visually captivating short videos I’ve ever seen. I rank it with the music videos for Hunger or Spectrum by Florence + the Machine. I recommend it to anyone with a taste for dance or design, or anyone who cares about LGBT issues. Or really, anybody who’s open to watching it. Hats off to Eugene Lee Yang for a beautiful piece of art.

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Five Quick Takes

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Readers may have noticed I’m posting more often; I’m trying to adjust to the schedule and volume Patheos is going to want from me (two or three posts a week at five hundred words minimum). No fixed date yet for the change-over, but I did want to suggest to my Patreon sponsors (thank you for your support!) that now might be a good time if you want to make adjustments to your pledges, since supporting three or four posts a month at $X is quite a different thing from supporting a dozen posts a month at the same rate.

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I’ve heard about the clash between the Jesuit school that won’t fire a gay-married teacher and the Indianapolis archdiocese that won’t let the school call itself Catholic so long as it perseveres in its refusal. My initial impression is ‘unimpressed with the archdiocese,’ but I’m waiting to weigh in until I have more facts at my disposal. For the present, I’ll say only that the archdiocese seems to have a better case, canon-law-wise, than it is being given credit for in some quarters; and that I am not mollified by this.

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Yours truly with the inimitable Grant Hartley, whose workshop on queer culture for Christians was a delight.

Revoice’s second year continues to release its effects into me. On the positive side of things, Johanna Finegan’s excellent keynote is now available on YouTube, Eve Tushnet’s excellent workshop on celibacy has been posted on her blog, and I bought three copies of Lead Them Home’s excellent book Guiding Families of LGBT+ Loved Ones and gave one to my pastor.

On the more melancholy side, a number of friends of mine left the Side B community shortly after the conference, and that’s been hard for us. It’s always a little gloomy to see a fellow laborer leave the field you’re in, even if you’re confident they will continue to do good work.

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Today is the memorial of SS John Fisher and Thomas More: Fisher was the sole dissenting voice among the English bishops, imprisoned and eventually martyred, for refusing to sign the Act of Supremacy; Sir Thomas More, martyred on similar grounds, was actually executed on 6 July, but I think they slated the two together to give Fisher a little more notice.

The film A Man For All Seasons was my introduction to St Thomas More, and his story was a major element in my initial opening to Catholicism; I encountered it at a time when I believed that sincere, consistent Catholics went to hell, and it was mighty hard to maintain that belief in the face of his obvious devotion to Christ. Who could forget that simple and magnificent last confession: ‘I die the king’s good servant; but God’s first.’ I nearly took him as my patron saint for Confirmation—St Joan and St John of the Cross were strong contenders as well, and they remain part of my little family of favorite intercessors.

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Tomorrow being Corpus Christi and also my parish’s picnic, I made cupcakes in honor of the Real Presence: red velvet—first time making them!—for the Precious Blood, with white frosting to represent the Host, and silver foil wrappers for the chalice (I couldn’t find golden ones). I also have some white and red sprinkles, with which to make white cross designs on the frosting, and to dot them with red spots of blood as if they were Eucharistic miracles, because Catholicism is just that metal.

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Caution: Contents Toxic, Under High Pressure

Lilith, checked in her monotonous gabble by the radiant vision who let in the sun’s new light, stared at it with old and blinking eyes. She saw the shape of the woman; and did not know beatitude, however young. She supposed this also to be in need of something other than the Omnipotence. She said, separating with difficulty words hardly distinguishable from gabble: ‘I can help you.’

‘That’s kind of you,’ Pauline answered, ‘but I haven’t come to you for myself.’

‘I can help anyone,’ the old woman said, carefully enunciating the lie.

Pauline answered again: ‘Adela Hunt wants you.’ She could and would say no more …

The other said, in a little shriek of alarm, such as an old woman pretending youth might have used for girlish fun, ‘I won’t go out, you know. She must come here.’

—Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell

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After my last, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t make a note of some Christian individuals and organizations that I would warn fellow LGBTQ people against. Not all of them profess the ex-gay label; it has lost a great deal of its selling power. But this does not mean that their practices have changed or that their goals are different.

The ex-gay movement has certainly changed since it began the 1970s; by the mid-2000s, it was increasingly clear that those who had left were not just quitters, but had recognized that orientation change was not a realistic goal and that attempts to effect it were doing at least as much harm as good; but this led largely, not to a frank admission of failure and apology for hurts caused, but to a quiet decision to redefine what the goal was. Heterosexual attraction, which could not be achieved, was shelved, in favor of heterosexual self-concept, which could. It couldn’t be honestly achieved, but it could be achieved, and it still can: the substitution of what straight, American evangelicals find normal and comfortable for the natural outlook and self-expression of people outside that category, this was the new and improved goal. And while there are some die-hard proponents of SOCE even today, the heteronormative identity redefinition folks (I shall call them HIRs) are the present face of the ex-gay movement that persists. Many of those on the non-exhaustive list below are HIRs rather than self-professed ex-gay groups; this does not greatly move me.

In fairness—yes, even to destructive ex-gay drivel—I am not saying that every person involved in these movements is individually a bad person, or that nobody gets anything out of these programs. I’ve said more than once that I got a great deal from my first therapist despite the fact that he was a pretty bad therapist. But that is not a defense of bad therapy. The good aspects of these groups can be gotten better, and more safely, elsewhere; and they help give a veneer of plausibility to practices that are deeply toxic and harmful.

The American College of Pediatricians—what a reassuring, professional-sounding name. Too bad they only have one employee, inflate their membership numbers by more than double, aren’t the peer-accepted American Academy of Pediatrics, and have been accused of misrepresenting scientific research by the National Institute of Health and of being a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their principal work is in promoting conversion therapy and opposing gay couples’ legal right to adopt; neither of which sounds to me the layman like they constitute pediatrics per se, and both of which are opposed right back by the AAP.

Brothers On a Road Less Traveled is how People Can Change decided to rebrand themselves when it turned out people could not change. PCC [1] is a relative newcomer to the ex-gay scene, founded in 2000; its best-known thing is Journey Into Manhood (boy they did not think that name through), which claims to provide the groundwork for men to become heterosexual ‘over time.’ One of the group’s co-founders, David Matheson, an early protégé of Joseph Nicolosi (see NARTH below), left PCC early this year, stating that he now identifies as gay.

Courage International does not technically promote orientation change, but they promote the hell out of other groups that do, like NARTH (see below), so yeah, they get a spot on the list. The group was founded in 1980 by Fr John Harvey, and operates on a twelve-step model derived from Alcoholics Anonymous. Fr Harvey has been quoted as saying that there are no homosexually oriented people, only heterosexuals with a homosexual tendency (because that’s a useful and necessary distinction in any way at all). The leadership remains more than a little yikes-y, to my mind; Courage helped organize a conference before the synod in Rome in 2015, for which one of the speakers was Cardinal Sarah—as in, the same Cardinal Sarah who compared gay people to Nazis and called trans people Satanic.

Desert Stream Ministries, also known as Living Waters, was founded by Andrew Comiskey, some time before he became a Vineyard pastor in 1981. He has authored multiple books, in which he says that homosexual relationships are demonic and that homosexuality ‘defiles God’s very image’. The organization has remained in operation to this day, surviving not only Comiskey’s controversial decision to embrace Catholicism in 2011, but a blog post from the previous year, in which he rejoiced that there had been no media coverage of the revelation that a member of their staff had abused a teenage boy who came to DSM for help. This was not quite true; a family had sued DSM in 1998 for a similar case of child abuse, and the LA Times had covered that.

Equipped to Love is the organization behind the self-styled CHANGED Movement—it’s not an acronym as far as I can tell, and no, I don’t know why they’re yelling—associated with Bethel Church in Redding, California. Bethel’s worship band has apparently drawn a great deal of notice nationwide, kind of like Hillsong, and their ex-gay drivel has come along for the ride. They offer #OnceGay stories, links to groups like DSM (above) and RHN (below), and of course, merch! Mostly books, but they’ve got some tees as well, including one trendy one in that gotta-have-it sans-serif font. This seems to be the newest group of the bunch, so I’m guessing we’ll start seeing the fallout from ETL and CHANGED begin in earnest in ten or fifteen years.

Although Exodus International was shuttered in 2013 by its president Alan Chambers, Exodus Global Alliance, the worldwide network supporting ex-gay organizations around the world, continues to operate. Not every group in this list is affiliation with EGA, but any group that is linked with EGA can be relied upon to be an ex-gay organization.

Genesis Counseling is headed by the notorious Joe Dallas, who not only practices and promotes conversion therapy, but has been an energetic contributor to the kulturkampf against ‘the homosexual agenda,’ [2] authoring three books (two family-centered and one apologetics-oriented) on that subject. He is a featured speaker at Focus on the Family’s ex-gay conference ‘Love Won Out.’

Homosexuals Anonymous is just what it sounds like, another twelve-step group. Also begun in 1980, one of its founding leaders, Colin Cook, stepped down only six years later due to having been found to have had sex with at least a dozen of his male patients—this, after having been defrocked in the Seventh-day Adventist Church for having had relations with another man in his church in 1974. Nonetheless, HA continues to operate to this day, including the active involvement of Cook, and it held an ex-gay conference in Kenya in 2009, just five years before Uganda tried to pass a bill instituting the death penalty for homosexual behavior.

JIFGA, the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness, was a clumsy attempt to evade the 2015 court order closing JONAH, Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing—clumsy enough that JIFGA too was ordered to shut down this very month, and its founders, Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk, forbidden by the court to serve in the leadership of any non-profit in the future. JONAH was specifically ordered to close on grounds of violating the state of New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, for claiming to be able to change sexual orientation. The group’s practices were considered bizarre even in the ex-gay world, including counselors ordering patients to strip naked and touch their genitals during counseling sessions, or having them beat up effigies of their mothers, who were blamed for their sons’ homosexual feelings. Jewish organizations such as the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America had already publicly repudiated JONAH as early as 2012. Whether this, too, will reëmerge in yet another shape remains to be seen.

Joel 2:25 comes to us from Texas, and aims for ‘far more than sexual sobriety and abstinence’ (these being, for the record, what Scripture actually enjoins upon us); rather, it seeks ‘healing of emotional wounds and relational brokenness,’ standard evangelical coding for heterosexuality, heteronormative identity and behavior, and marriage. The group states that a life of unrepentant sexual sin—a term which appears to include disagreements about what sexual sin consists in, though I admit I’m not sure—inevitably results in damnation.

NARTH. Oh, NARTH. The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, now calling itself the ‘Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity’ (uh huh) or ATCSI, was the 1992 love-child of Joseph Nicolosi and Charles Socarides. Nicolosi, until his death in 2017, was the figurehead of the organization. They’ve been peddling the farther-and-smother theory of homosexuality for close to thirty years now, and getting less credible as they do it. Their status providing continuing education credits for therapists in California was revoked in 2011 for non-payment of dues to the California Board of Behavioral Scientists, and their non-profit status was revoked by the IRS in 2012 for non-filement of the required paperwork for several years.

North Star, a Mormon group, is a little ambiguous. They certainly were involved in promoting conversion therapy, via links to PCC and JONAH (see above), but they seem to have stepped back from this; one of the group’s leaders renounced ties to PCC in 2015. They haven’t earned their way off the watch list, in my judgment, but perhaps they could.

PATH, or Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality, is a worldwide network of groups supporting ex-gay programs and conversion therapy, with a frightening number of affiliates. Many of the groups on this list are members of PATH (or were before being shut down for fraud). It was founded by one Richard Cohen, who also founded the International Healing Foundation (which closed in 2015), got expelled from the American Counselors Association for promoting conversion therapy, and is not a licensed therapist in the first place.

Restoration Path is the rebranded name of the infamous ex-gay group Love In Action. LIA was one of the first ex-gay organizations; one of its founders, John Evans, abandoned the organization and the ex-gay movement after a close friend of his committed suicide over his sexuality. John Smid was a member of the group’s leadership for over twenty years, finally leaving in 2008 and stating publicly that he didn’t think he had ever encountered a single genuine instance of orientation change. LIA was also embroiled in a legal battle with the state of Tennessee in 2005, due to one of their ‘Refuge’ camps there operating unlicensed mental health living facilities, including dispensing medications without qualifications to do so. The suit was settled the next year, and the Refuge program closed down the year after that. The renaming took place in 2012.

The Restored Hope Network took on the mantle of Exodus International, beginning shortly before the latter closed its doors; RHN’s founders felt that Exodus was not sufficiently opposed to homosexuality. James Dobson, Albert Mohler, and (a little odd in such company, but only a little) Christopher West are on their Board of References, whatever the hell that is. RHN promotes the same theories and techniques that Exodus did, though with a definite air of doubling down; they feature Anne Paulk, for example, the ex-wife of John Paulk, who left Exodus and returned to ‘the lifestyle’ in 2013, making a formal apology to the gay community at large for having ever been involved in promoting ex-gay therapy.

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[1] As funny as it looks, I’m not going to take the time to write out BORLT instead of PCC, even as an acronym.

[2] Why do so many people hate Taco Tuesday?

Are "Celibate Gays" Really Gay?

Dryden also ‘meant’ by wit the essential gift of the poet. He defined this gift as … ‘propriety of thoughts and words.’ … This definition would commit us to the consequence, ‘Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper.’ It may also be asserted almost safely that no human being, when using the word wit to talk with and not talking about the word wit, has ever meant by it anything of the sort. Nor does Dryden himself anywhere make the slightest use of this definition …

We might tax our brains for a long time to explain how a man of Dryden’s stature could have said anything so false to all actual usage, so useless, and so unsupported, if we did not realize its tactical function. He is thinking neither about what the word actually meant nor about what it could, in the interests of clarity and precision and general utility, be made to mean. It is a valuable vogue-word. Therefore a strong point in the critical battle. He wants to deny the enemy the use of it.

—C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words

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Yes.

Freelance journalist Brandon Ambrosino tweeted up a storm about ex-gay organizations a day or two ago, and concluded with a shot at self-identified celibate gays, stating in no uncertain terms that anyone who abstains from gay sex due to traditionalist moral or religious beliefs doesn't even qualify as gay. As he put it, ‘Gayness is more than gay sex, but it can’t be less’ (I think I recall that correctly). I'm not at all sure why he came after me and my friends [1]. Perhaps he had us on the brain because Revoice just took place, I don't know. Regardless, he did it—and seemed more than a little thin-skinned about it: anyone who wishes can go to his Twitter feed and look it up, but I can’t, because he blocked me and several other people who, in his words, came for him and got bitchy.

Anyway. I actually don't want to just rag on Mr Ambrosino for a whole post: partly because I have no intention of obeying a guy who’s not my dom, partly because I've liked a lot of other things he's written, but chiefly because I do think I understand where he’s coming from. Ex-gay organizations have taken to rebranding and moving the goal-posts a hell of a lot in the last fifteen years or so, as it became irrevocably clear that orientation change does not work, but many of them remained unwilling to really face up to the facts. Some ex-gay people have even appropriated the Side B label, notwithstanding the fact that Side B’s salient characteristics are rejecting SOCE and embracing LGBTQ identity and culture. [2]

Further still, some people’s experience of Side B has been toxic for a variety of reasons. A lot of my own attempts at chastity as a Side B person were shot through with problems that could easily have wrecked my mind, if I hadn’t had the help of guides much wiser than myself. Defensiveness and suspicion toward celibate gay identity are perfectly understandable in these circumstances.

But that doesn’t make this gatekeeping definition of gayness a sound one. I believe it’s not only a poor use of language, but actually damaging to the community it’s ostensibly meant to serve, for a great many reasons. I will list just seven.

1. It’s not how anybody actually uses the word. Okay, ‘anybody’ is an overstatement. There is an ideologically driven minority among gay people who do insist that the word be used to indicate beliefs as well as orientation; and thirty or forty years ago, that meaning was much commoner currency. Nonetheless, it isn’t how the majority of people use the word now. It normally indicates orientation, experience, and self-identity, none of which depend on having sex to exist. That is how we know we’re gay before trying gay sex, after all.

There is one other group, however, who habitually use this definition. This leads me into a second and bigger issue …

2. It endorses a definition of gayness originally designed by homphobes to justify and maintain homophobic practices. Now, the origin of a term or definition is not the only thing that determines its value, but it is one of them. And, well, in this case, it's a doozy.

I mentioned ex-gay practices above, which I endured personally. The definition expressed by Ambrosino is the exact same one drafted and used by ex-gay organizations like the Restored Hope Network to this day, because it’s one of the things that helps them move the goalposts. You’re ‘not gay anymore’ because you stop having gay sex, which they can then sell with all the appeal of orientation change—a bait-and-switch change of identity. It downright encourages ambiguous, deceitful language and thought patterns, both with oneself and others. It’s arguably the most basic tool in the ex-gay box. Insisting on gay sex as a qualifier for gay identity gives ex-gay groups more room to maneuver and ammunition to do it with, not less.

3. It erases ace and demi identities. Asexual, aromantic, demisexual, and demiromantic identities all have queer expressions (indeed, insofar as they depart from the het norm, they’re queer by definition). An asexual but homoromantic woman is every bit as entitled to call herself a lesbian as a sexually active polyamorous lesbian is. [3] Under a you-must-be-open-to-gay-sex definition, grey identities are implicitly excluded.

4. It forces people who are still navigating their own feelings into a false dichotomy. This is especially true of teens, I think, who have the most navigating to do and the most at stake in doing it; but it’d certainly apply to, e.g., the heterosexually married Christian man in his thirties who’s finally facing up to the fact that his feelings about his best guy friend are erotic, not just affectionate. A person who’s told that they have to have gay sex (or at least be open to it) in order to ‘really’ be gay is being given an ultimatum about their feelings and identity, and maybe being asked to choose between deeply held religious convictions and powerful instinctive and emotional desires—being asked to call one of those things false and insignificant, when they aren’t ready to do that. What good does that do to anyone? Why is a choice like that necessary? They should not be compelled by others to choose what part of themselves to lie about.

This is normally what Side B is saying to fellow traditional Christians. In this case, we find ourselves saying it to fellow LGBTQ people. The dichotomy is artificial either way.

5. It erases Side B Christians who support gay civil rights, including those of us who’ve been traumatized by SOCE. Okay. In the name of not pulling a bait-and-switch myself, I’ll say frankly here that there are Side B people who don’t support complete political equality between, e.g., gay and straight marriages. [4] But a lot of us do support full political equality, and have paid for that belief among our families, friends, and churches. Furthermore, a lot of us are ex-ex-gays, survivors of conversion therapy. We rejected that stuff because it’s unnecessary, wrongheaded, and toxic. We learned that the hard way—which, if I may be a bit tart, is more than can be said of Mr Ambrosino. We paid for our identities. Having those identities invalidated again, by members of the very community we’ve been vilified for asserting, is a blow upon a bruise.

6. It adds an ideological modifier onto an identity more defined by experience than by behavior. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that every LGBTQ person’s experience is the same. But the shared thread among them is the experience of being othered, excluded, demeaned, treated as less than, on the basis of our attractions or gender expression. We all experience that, in our fears while we're closeted and in our lives when we leave it. That unites lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people, and everyone else in the community, not sexual activity.

Really it couldn’t be sex that united the gay community, not just because (for a variety of reasons) some of us never have any, but because our sexual acts and experiences are so radically different. An act of gay sex usually contains none of the same ingredients as an act of lesbian sex; in that way, each resembles heterosexual sex more than the other. This is, of course, a ridiculous line of reasoning, but that’s kinda why I don’t take this view.

7. It drives an unnecessary wedge between LGBTQ people during a time when anti-gay sentiment appears to be rising rather than falling. Infighting is dull and wasteful at the best of times. When you have a homophobic administration elected by a right-wing portion of the populace, it’s dangerous. And sure, the media distorts things and my own consumption of media is kinda random; but I’ve been seeing a lot more stories about homophobic violence lately, including a couple of nasty scares even at Pride events. This is not a smart time to be fractious.

When Side B people speak up for ourselves and the LGBTQ community as a whole, that is precisely what we’re doing: speaking up for ourselves, and for the LGBTQ community as a whole. If you think we don't get targeted for harassment and hatred because our families or our churches know we're 'the good gays,' you're wrong. We are endangered when the gay community is endangered, and vice versa. Homophobes don’t generally care that (most) Side B people are attempting celibate lives; they care that we’re gay. That’s the thing they hate. That is why, for example, an institution like the Catholic Church can be at one and the same time welcoming on paper, full of homosexually active clergy, and riddled with homophobia in its attitudes, rhetoric, and policies. They’re targeting the identity, the rallying point for the community: often as not, they’re prepared to ignore the sex.

Want to deprive your enemies of a word? Fine. But know who they really are first. You might learn something.

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[1] At any rate, many of my friends can truthfully claim celibacy. I admire celibacy, and I consider celibacy and monogamous heterosexual marriage the only two intrinsically licit sexual states; but, phrased gently, it would be generous at the expense of accuracy to describe me as chaste, and I'm certainly not going to marry a woman. [5]

[2] With qualifications? Sure. But then again, St Augustine embraced Neo-Platonism with qualifications, St Thomas Aquinas embraced Aristotle with qualifications, St Edith Stein embraced Phenomenology with qualifications. That doesn’t make any of them not part of those traditions: it just means they’re a different part of the tradition.

[3] Yes, she might well add the qualifier ace lesbian at her discretion. But that’s exactly what it is: a qualifier, added at her discretion, not a contradiction.

[4] I’m not crazy about this fact. But I don’t want to be accused of pinkwashing a movement that is pretty diverse in certain ways, including some ways that a lot gay people would find objectionable. All the same, I don’t consider it a very damning criticism of the Side B community, since there are outliers in the gay community, like Milo Yiannopoulos or Jack Donovan, that most LGBTQ people find objectionable, too.

[5] Phrased less gently, I’m kind of a whorebag.

Sometimes You Really Need a F***ing Break From This Stuff

CW: Sexual abuse, homophobic imagery

It has been a grueling few days.

The day before yesterday, I went with a friend of mine to the Waterfront Marriott in Baltimore. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is meeting there, and my friend was asked at the last minute to help provide music for the Mass; I went along to look after my friend's baby during the evening Mass. Being surrounded by bishops was itself something of a trial for both of us: my friend had been horribly mistreated while working for the Archdiocese, badly enough to need therapy (and badly enough that the Archdiocese footed the bill for said therapy). For myself, the revolting, myopic conduct of the bishops over the sex abuse crisis had me seriously wondering whether I'd get hauled out of the hotel if I just spat in one of their faces. (I didn't, so I guess we'll never know.)

Yesterday, I went to the same place with a different friend, the lovely and talented Eve Tushnet. The Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests held a press conference outside the hotel that evening, and she and I went in support. SNAP had apparently sent a letter to Cardinal DiNardo, the current president of the USCCB, asking him to come out and meet them. Neither he nor any representative of the episcopal conference was in evidence. The little group, about half a dozen people, read stories of their own experiences of abuse; the one that hurt the most to hear was from a man singled out and groomed by a priest whom his family adored, until one night when he and the priest were having dinner alone together. The young man was excited to have such an important, attentive friend. Then the priest drove them to a secluded area and assaulted him. After some groping, the young man told the priest to stop. Eventually the cleric complied, telling him angrily that 'I thought you were ready for my special attention,' and that he was a disappointment to God.

I tried to take today slow and easy, to detox from all this. And then, for no reason, in a group devoted to discussing Aquinas, this:

The Nazi Party imprisoned, tortured, and killed gay men. And yes, some of the early Nazis were gay; that is, until Hitler betrayed them, having them murdered en masse on the Night of the Long Knives, up to and including the man who had been maybe his only real friend, Ernst Roehm. But sure, we're a bunch of fucking Nazis because we put a rainbow on something.

I am sick to death of all of this.

I can't write any more right now. Pray for me, and for the people who behave this way.

Revoice 2019: A Brief Retrospective

And O! such joy I saw my Lady wear

When to that shining heav’n she entered in,

The planet’s self grew brighter yet with her;

And if the star laughed and was changed, what then

Was I, whom am but flesh, and ticklish

To touch of change, and all the moods of men?

As in a fish-pond still and clear, the fish

Draw to some dropped-in morsel as it goes,

Hoping it may provide a dainty dish,

So I saw splendors draw to us in droves,

Full many a thousand, and from each was heard:

‘Lo, here is one that shall increase our loves!’

—Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

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I was at Revoice 2019 [1] from Wednesday till this morning. My mom came this year, and she really enjoyed it. Saturday was technically the last day, but since our flight didn’t leave till Sunday and a lot of people hang around anyway, I stayed and observed Pentecost in St Louis, in the beautiful basilica cathedral.

It always feels huge, being at gay Christian events. There’s a weight that comes off you when you’re among people you don’t have to defend yourself to. A weight you forget you’re even carrying most of the time, and you wonder sometimes why you feel hunched and aching; and then you get to a place like Revoice, and suddenly you can stand up straight again.

Just like last year, the workshops were great: even better, a lot of the ones that I loved last year were given again this year so I know other people got to profit from them, and a lot of the ones I missed last year due to scheduling conflicts were also given again this year and I got to go to them this time. I probably enjoyed Eve Tushnet’s workshop on healthy celibacy the most, closely seconded by Ty Wyss’s on intimacy as an antidote to sexual shame; I also went to the lovely and talented Grant Hartley’s talk on redemptive aspects of queer culture, and Raw Low’s on how to protect your witness from being coöpted by heteronormative Christians. I’m looking forward to them all being posted on YouTube so I can rewatch them.

Both Ty and Eve touched, perhaps accidentally, on some things that I really profited from last year, at the workshop on recovering from spiritual abuse given by David Gill and Sara Collins—for instance, Eve’s incredibly succinct and clear summary of spiritual abuse: ‘People can try to make you obey in ways that are about them and not about Christ.’

But the thing I’ve been especially ruminating on, since I heard it, was something from Ty’s talk. The ways he spoke about experiencing and understand shame lay partly on a gradient: shame tends to tell us that we are either Not Enough, or else Too Much (or sometimes both). He gave the example from his own life of his coming out: that same week, his parents went to church and got saved; which, yay, but it also sent the message: You’re so Too Much that we had to call on the God of the universe to be able to deal with our own son. But shame is far more diverse than that of course, and he laid out a sort of sample phrase for understanding how it operates in our own lives (using Too Much and Not Enough as prompts more than as rigid categories): ‘Shame tells me that I am _____.’

I thought about it for a minute, trying a phrase or two that were true enough but didn’t really resonate emotionally. Then it came to me: Shame tells me that I am on probation. Screw up too much, and you’re done.

Especially when I believed in sola fide, I was abjectly terrified that I wasn’t good enough for God. My experience of sola fide was toxic because the way the doctrine was articulated to me was that, while you’re saved by faith alone, genuine faith produces good works—which trapped me in the inescapable prison of wondering whether my works were good enough to prove my faith was genuine. I gaslit myself for a decade, doubting every thought, word, and deed as perhaps being (how could I ever tell?) the secretly rotten fruit of hypocrisy.

Catholicism, which offered me a means of placing even the most mixed motives under the influence of grace, saved my faith and probably my life; yet Catholic culture too provides lots of space for scrupulosity, self-righteousness, and fear, and a greater multitude of methods by which to seem to oneself to be earning celestial approval. The mechanics of Catholicism, just as such, aren’t enough. Without the matured and patient wisdom of many guides, living and dead, I would probably have wound up merely in a larger prison—one defined by the concrete acts of confession and penance, instead of the bottomless chasm of whether I were sincere, but a prison all the same. And I’m neither surprised nor angry nor scornful that others, finding themselves in such a prison, have chosen to break out of it. Who wouldn’t? If God sounds like a jailer, why would you want to go to heaven?

Thus far, most of my attempts at reconciling my sexuality with my faith have had a strong element of shame in them. Not, for a long time now, shame about the bare facts of who I am and what kinds of relationships and sex I long for. But shame of a different and more calculating kind, a shame rooted in that idea of being on probation with God. The God that shame depicts for us doesn’t love us; he wants something from us—a performance. Which, given a moment’s thought, is ridiculous. As if he needed anything! Or as if a parent would evaluate their child’s drawings and decide whether to keep the child based (however gently and reasonably) on an increase of skill!

I haven’t altogether worked out where to go from here. But simply to name the problem seems like progress.

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1 For those who don’t know, Revoice is a nationwide conference founded for Side B Christians (queer-identifying Christians who subscribe to a traditional sexual ethic), to provide support and fellowship and increase visibility. It first met last year.