Gender Jamboree, Part Two

I heard the squeak of the questing beast,

where it scratched itself in the blank between

the queen’s substance and the queen.

—Charles Williams, ‘The Coming of Palomides’

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Go here for Part One.

CW: genital injury, suicide

The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, Domenico Zampieri, 1646 (source).

Gotta love Adam's 'What?' shrug.

So! God made mankind in his image, male and female, and that’s normally pretty straightforward, but in a small minority of cases we find male and female characteristics mixed; we call this physiology intersex. Accurate estimates of how many people are intersex are difficult to find, as the subject isn’t well-studied, but an estimate of about 1% seems to be a safe generalization from studies that have been done to date, making it only a little less common than red hair.1

Ironically, this knowledge was actually a little more common until a hundred or so years ago. The twentieth century saw an extensive use of surgery on intersex newborns, modifying or eliminating their unusual characteristics; when these surgeries had yet to be developed, and most babies were delivered at home and by midwives, it was familiar enough to them to deliver the occasional intersex baby. Legal cases right down to the eighteenth century make occasional mention of intersex people.

Nor has intersexuality been wholly unknown to the Church. Although there are few references to the phenomenon in Catholic history, they are mentioned in passing (under the title androgynes) by St Augustine, and Gratian, the foremost canon lawyer of the Middle Ages, discusses them briefly. Those canonists who addressed the subject stated that if one sex could be determined to be predominant in an intersex person, that person should be treated as being of that sex (up to and including that a principally male intersex person could be validly ordained2), while allowing that there might be cases in which it was impossible to judge for certain which sex predominated in a person’s body. At least one cleric at that time gave the opinion that, in cases where someone’s physiology was evenly mixed, they were to be given the choice, under irrevocable oath (no pressure), of which was their sex.

However, to the best of my knowledge, only canon law has directly addressed intersexuality to date, and it’s done so rarely. Theological reflection on what defines male and female is not the same thing, though the two are related. St John Paul II’s extensive meditation on male and female in Theology of the Body may, after adequate unpacking, speak to the question; but even understanding, let alone unpacking, that tome is going to be the work of generations. And in the meantime, the sciences do have something more to say, which theology needs to operate upon. (Like any science, theology operates upon facts: the differentia of theology is that some, though not all, of those facts are provided by God’s revelation. The rest are derived from observation and inference, the same place we get most facts.)

The surgical ‘correction’ of intersexuality has come under fire. Initially developed in the 1950s, it was thought at the time that it would be easier for the child to develop as whichever gender they were raised, and that a confused identity would be avoided if the confusing body were adjusted. Nor was the practice even limited to intersex children. Anatomically typical male children who exhibited a micropenis,3 or whose genitals were irreparably damaged in infancy, in some cases received vaginoplasty and were raised as girls.

One notorious and particularly tragic case was that of David Reimer, born in 1965. His penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision4 a little before the age of two. His parents took the advice of Dr John Money (I swear I did not make his name up), a pioneer and advocate of performing sex reassignment in infancy, on the grounds that infants healed much more easily and completely and that surgeries of this kind would be less traumatic if they could not be remembered. Their son was surgically reconstructed as a girl, and raised in a thoroughly female environment. The much-crowed-over success of the procedure, accompanied by some very weird follow-up creepiness from Dr Money, lasted until he was 13. Reimer had never felt like a girl, he had become suicidally depressed, and he told his parents he would kill himself if forced to see Money again. The next year his parents told him the truth about his history, on the advice of his psychiatrist. Reimer then shed his feminine identity and began living as a boy again, seeking multiple medical interventions to restore his physical masculinity, including hormone treatment, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty. He went public with his story late in 1997.

That story came to an end just over six years later. His relationship with his parents, naturally enough, remained difficult, and he struggled with unemployment; his twin brother died of an overdose in 2002; and in 2004, his wife of over thirteen years asked for a separation. Two days later Reimer shot himself in the head.

A superficially similar, if somewhat happier, case is that of Christiane Völling, born in 1959, who in 2011 became the first intersex person to win a suit for damages over non-consensual sex reassignment surgery. Born with XX chromosomes, her phenotype was unclear at birth: she had ambiguous genitals but was assigned and raised male (an unusual decision at the time, since, to use a very crude phrase, it was considered ‘easier to dig a hole than build a pole’), and experienced a relatively early, vigorous, masculine puberty. Völling was found to have an undeveloped but complete set of female reproductive organs during an appendectomy at age 14; she was told only that she was ‘60% female,’ which caused her severe psychological distress. Her female reproductive organs were removed four years later, despite the fact that the full details of her diagnosis had been withheld from her in the name of protecting her mental health. She continued for some time after that to live as a man, but eventually transitioned into life as a woman. She was awarded €100,000, nearly forty years later, for receiving an unnecessary surgery without being able to give informed consent.

Source.

So cases like these are clear-cut evidence of original biology over imposed sociology, right? Proof that no matter what you do to a person’s body through surgery, you can’t make a man into a woman or vice versa, and that trying to only makes them miserable. Right? Well … hang on. Before we can address that, we need to talk about gender dysphoria.5

Gender dysphoria is the distress a person feels due to their physical sex characteristics not matching their inner sense of gender identity. Most people who identify as transgender experience gender dysphoria, and vice versa, but the two aren’t the same thing. Reimer and Völling exemplify both the experience itself, and the therapeutic and medical steps generally taken to address it; the difference is that they were identifying with sexual characteristics that had been excised from them, whereas gender dysphoria is generally used to talk about people whose bodies have developed normally but whose identity or sense of self is in conflict with their bodies. And the thing is, both transgender identity and the dysphoria that typically accompanies it appear to be just as persistent—just as deeply rooted and intractable to all psychotherapy and socialization—as the gender identities that Reimer and Völling display.

This doesn’t mean that trans identities are therefore automatically valid and unquestionable, no. What it does mean is that our analysis isn’t finished yet. I'll discuss dysphoria and identity further in my next.

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1That the intersex minority is a small one is not, philosophically speaking, significant. What makes intersex bodies important to the discussion is that they exist at all, not how common they are.

2The canonists did say that intersex men could not be licitly ordained, due to canonical requirements forbidding the ordination of men with physical deformities. However, requirements of this kind could in principle be changed (as, e.g., the Church can and occasionally does relax the Roman ban on ordaining married men).

3A micropenis is a penis that is at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean. It is not a health risk, although it can be caused by growth hormone deficiency, androgen insensitivity, and certain other conditions, as well as by intersexuality.

4The late circumcision was an attempt to treat phimosis, a condition in which the foreskin is too constricting and impedes penile function. Treating phimosis is not generally considered necessary until after the age of three.

5Though it appears in current DSM manuals, this term is controversial in some circles, as some people consider it pathologizing and stigmatory. I can’t really get into that discussion right now; the thing that the term ‘gender dysphoria’ is talking about does exist, and the term is already in use, so, with apologies to any readers who are bothered by it, it’s the term I’ll use for the present.

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.

"Stop Crying."

His feet among the tulips, his hands brush the roses and the lilies.

‘This is love,’ he says, laying his fingers on my throat,

Forcing me down to bow.

‘I know it hurts, I know it’s harsh,

I know it feels nothing like any loves you know,

But you have to trust me,’

As I writhe and gasp and my eyes blur:

‘This is what real love is.’

The thorns scrape on my skin

And I cannot feel my knees or my wrists.

‘This is love. Stop crying.’

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The New York Times ran a profile of gay priests recently, with the tagline: ‘It is not a closet. It is a cage.’ The response to it from a number of spokesmen for Catholicism, via blogs and social media has been, shall we say, cool. Jennifer Fitz (of whom I had not heard before, but I gather that she is a generally and justly respected blogger in conservative Catholic circles) wrote a reply that has been shared a good deal.

I’ve been reading about your plight in the New York Times. So let’s go ahead and clear something up right now: Most Catholics don’t give a rip who it is you’re not having sex with. We know that abstinence is hard. Those of us practicing NFP probably don’t have a ton of sympathy for you, because at least you aren’t obliged to spend all night lying in bed next to the person you’re not having sex with, but when we can get over ourselves, sure, we get it. … Also, when you took your vows, the whole ‘celibacy’ thing wasn’t exactly foisted on you by surprise. … Those of us doing the Catholic thing know very well what it’s like to wrestle with temptation. Honestly we don’t give a crap about your tormented coming-out story, because we know it’s a distraction. Satan wants to keep you constantly looking inward, gazing at your story of shame and pity … You don’t have to be part of the angst-obsessed intelligentsia who show off how erudite they are by daring say in the NYT words that make 6th grade boys snicker. You could just be a Catholic. … I know it’s a struggle. I know this because everyone struggles with their vocations. That’s how life is. Come struggle with us.

In a similar vein, Fr Thomas Petri OP of the Dominican House of Studies down in DC, which I’ve had the pleasure of visiting more than once, had the following to say on Twitter:

I have no patience for priests who ‘come out’ as gay and insist that the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. We serve them. Period. … The last thing the faithful need are priests who make their sexuality their primary identity. ‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination, which makes your authentic self a person in persona Christi in the service of the people of God. If you can’t live that way, if you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality ‘a thing’ in this equation, then be a man, be noble, and as our Holy Father Pope Francis says: leave the priesthood. … A Father cannot help his children if he’s a broken distracted mess of a man requiring them to pick him up and set him aright.

Let’s take a second look at those responses, in the context of the aforementioned New York Times piece. The NYT:

Gregory Greiten was 17 years old when the priests organized the game. … Leaders asked each boy what he would rather be: burned over 90 percent of his body, paraplgeic, or gay. Each chose to be scorched or paralyzed. Not one uttered the word ‘gay.’ They called the game the Game of Life. The lesson stuck. Seven years later, he climbed up into his seminary dorm window and dangled one leg over the edge. ‘I really am gay,’ Father Greiten, now a priest near Milwaukee, remembered telling himself for the first time. ‘It was like a death sentence.’ … Many priests have held the most painful stories among themselves for decades: The seminarian who died by suicide, and the matches from a gay bar found afterward in his room. The priest friends who died of AIDS. The feeling of coming home to an empty rectory every night.
… Father Greiten decided it was time to end his silence. At Sunday Mass, during Advent, he told his suburban parish he was gay, and celibate. They leapt to their feet in applause. … His archbishop, Jerome E. Listecki of Milwaukee, issued a statement saying that he wished Father Greiten had not gone public. Letters poured in calling him ‘satanic,’ ‘gay filth,’ and a ‘monster’ who sodomized children.

And Mrs Fitz:

Most Catholics don’t give a rip … We know that abstinence is hard. Those of us practicing NFP probably don’t have a ton of sympathy for you, because at least you aren’t obliged to spend all night lying in bed next to the person you’re not having sex with … But same-sex attraction? Yawn. … We don’t give a crap about your tormented coming-out story …

Concluding with the valediction:

Your Real Catholic Friends

Returning to half a dozen selections from the NYT:

Father Bob Bussen … was outed about 12 years ago after he held Mass for the LGBTQ community. ‘Life in the closet is worse than scapegoating,’ he said. ‘It is not a closet. It is a cage.’
Today, training for the priesthood in the United States usually starts in or after college. But until about 1980, the Church often recruited boys to start in ninth grade—teenagers still in the throes of puberty.
‘My family does not know that I struggle with this. I’ve never told them. I believe the Church’s teaching on marriage, sexuality—just trying to understand what it means for me. It may sound kind of strange. I feel like, what I struggle with, I hope I can help other Catholics not lose their faith.’ [From a gay priest who asked not to be identified]
‘This is not the whole story of who I am. But if you don’t want to know this about me, do you really want to know me? It’s a question I’d invite the people of God to ponder.’ — Father Steve Wolf
All priests must wrestle with their vows of celibacy, and the few priests who are publicly out make clear they are chaste.
‘Why stay? It is an amazing life. I am fascinated with the depth and sincerity of parishioners, the immense generosity. The negativity out there doesn’t match what is in my daily life, when I see the goodness of people. I tune into that, because it sustains me.’ — Father Michael Shanahan

And returning to Fr Petri:

I have no patience for priests who … insist that the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. … ‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination … If you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality ‘a thing’ in this equation, then be a man … : leave the priesthood.

I would have hoped no thoughtful Catholic could write anything so callous. My cold comfort is that maybe people like Mrs Fitz and Fr Petri who are making these unfeeling remarks didn’t actually read the article with any serious attention; their scorn, ignorance, and cruelty may be far less deliberately malicious than they appear. And it does afford some small encouragement to think that there may be less deliberate malice in the world than a glance would suggest.

But let’s analyze the outlook these reactions represent.

First, Mrs Fitz and Fr Petri both display a startling inattention to what this New York Times article was actually about. It wasn’t about gay sex. Yes, the article does deal frankly with the fact that not all priests observe the vow of celibacy that they made; but—as intrinsically important and wrong as that infidelity is—it isn’t the point. Nor does any one of the priests in question, named or anonymous, make any complaint whatever about celibacy. That isn’t what they’re focusing on, still less what they’re objecting to. They say in so many words that it is being forced to keep silent about their orientation that is painful, isolating, and (in some cases at least) deeply damaging. The cultural demand of secrecy, not the canonical demand of celibacy, is what they are talking about.

Second, the confident assurances Mrs Fitz gives that married lay Catholics like herself entirely understand the difficulties of celibate gay priests. These assurances are so astonishingly off-base that, for me (and I dare say for many other gay people), they completely wreck her credibility. Comparing the temporary difficulty of being unable to have sex with your spouse, with a hopeless dread of one’s own sexuality that’s so severe it leads some men to consider suicide, is worse than insensitive; it is revolting. Speaking for my own adolescence—and I was spared more than many gay teens—there were mornings when I woke up, and the first thing I felt was bitter disappointment that God hadn’t killed me in my sleep. Because then I wouldn’t have to face another day of being gay, and dealing with the ceaseless torment of being caught between my deepest desires and my deepest convictions. And Mrs Fitz has the gall to answer that, not only with a yawn, but with the statement that she and those like her, who say in so many words that they care nothing about these years of agony, are our real friends.

[I'd usually put a picture here for spacing, but suicide pictures are creepy as fuck, so no.]

More exactly, it probably never occurred to her that these years of agony exist. How should it? Straight people don’t usually have to deal with the doubt, self-hatred, and anxiety that gay people do. And she’s already said she neither intends nor wants to listen to us about those things: she’s already decided what is and isn’t important in our lives. What we feel, think, or say doesn’t matter.

I take this to be the fruit of a deeper and equally misguided idea: that, because we each have a cross to bear, therefore everyone’s cross is equally heavy, or at least that my neighbor’s cross is as heavy for him as mine is for me. What this would amount to in practice, would be that nobody really suffers more than anybody else, at least not proportionately. And somehow, a theoretical equality of suffering always seems to open the sluice-gates for those who want to tell others to stop complaining: if I’m enduring my suffering, and yours can’t really be worse than mine, then I don’t have to be any more compassionate to you than I feel like the world in general is to me. That's not the truth. Our crosses are tailor-made and, therefore, undemocratic in the highest degree; so that pity, courtesy, humility, generosity, solidarity, and gratitude would have a place to flourish.

Nor do Mrs Fitz or Fr Petri once touch on the fact that so much of the pain of being gay in the Catholic Church comes not from inside us, but from outside. Christian culture in America frequently treats us as legitimate targets for everything from tasteless jokes to scapegoating for terrorist attacks. And Catholic subculture is not an exception. No matter how emphatically or how often Catholics talk about intrinsic human dignity and the importance of avoiding bigotry and being mindful of the difference between a person and their actions, we’ve seen you talk on Facebook about how agents of the gay agenda are trying to corrupt schoolchildren. We’ve heard your chuckling remarks about faggots when you thought no outsiders were listening. Look at the example the NYT article opened with. What do you think it does to a person, to be told that everyone you know would rather be paralyzed than simply happen to be gay? To be told that just feeling attraction to other boys instead of girls is as bad as, worse than, being tortured with fire over your entire body?

Maybe they think that rehearsing the point that ‘You are more than your sexuality’ is what’s called for here. I would like to assure them that LGBTQ people are in fact very well aware of this. We did not need well-meaning heterosexuals to obtain this information. Like Fr Wolf said in the article, of course this doesn’t exhaust who we are; but when fellow believers can’t stand to hear about it at all, when the mere mention prompts lectures and even rebukes, that sends a message too.

Think for a moment, straight reader. Maybe you don’t think of yourself as bringing up your sexuality all that often. Maybe you aren’t dating anybody currently; maybe you prefer to be private about your personal life. But if you did want to talk about an ex, would you hesitate to do so because of how others might react? Would you try to think of neutral language you could use to disguise your former partner’s gender? Would you be ashamed or scared to comment, just conversationally, that a member of the opposite sex is attractive? Would you feel the need to disguise your natural, spontaneous sympathy with art or entertainment that depicts heterosexual relationships? Would you be frightened to tell your coworkers, your friends, your own family that you had a crush on somebody?

It’s this that starts to reveal why so many of us find the closet suffocating. ‘Coming out’ and ‘not coming out’ aren’t the options presented to LGBTQ people, priests or otherwise: the options we’re presented with are ‘coming out’ and ‘staying in.’ And staying in is quite a different thing: it is actively concealing, avoiding, minimizing, and distorting all discussion of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. How can anyone be expected to develop a healthy sense of self or normal, mature relationships while at the same time gagging one whole side of their character? Some people do manage to thrive even under those conditions, thank God; but I do not believe that we should be imposing those conditions, even as cultural standards. And maybe sexual orientation shouldn’t be that important, considered in a vacuum. But human beings don’t live in a vacuum. We can’t.

If Catholics truly want to support us in our lives of faith, they need to be prepared to hear about the actual content of those lives. The solidarity that Mrs Fitz and Catholics like her seem prepared to offer, will have nothing to do with that uncomfortable, unattractive, alien content; it will not be challenged to consider the privileges it enjoys which some do not, nor be called upon to make a deliberate effort to imaginatively empathize. That kind of ‘real friendship’ is worthless.

Fr Petri’s categorical objection to priests sharing their trials with parishioners was disquieting as well. Priests devote themselves to the service of God and the laity, yes; but priests are not supermen, and every Christian needs the support of other Christians, including those whose state in life is unlike his own. Would any Catholic seriously propose that a priest cannot learn from the holiness of the stay-at-home mother of six, the teenage girl with untreatable leukemia, the grandfather who just hit his seventeenth anniversary of sobriety? This desire to segregate the clergy from the laity is, precisely, clericalism: a snobbishness that sees in the laity only children to tend, and not brothers and sisters who may far outstrip their fathers, and who, in any case, have their own gifts from the Holy Ghost which were given to them for the good of the Body—including the good of priests. (St Catherine of Siena, a Dominican sister, remonstrated with the Apostolic See until it returned to the apostolic city.) Holiness does not only move ‘downward’ through the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Nor should priests who serve a God conceived in the womb of an unwedded peasant girl, living in a backwater of an unimportant province of a long-dead empire, expect it to.

Not that any of the priests in the NYT article actually said that the laity needed to be available as a support network for priests. Unless the mere mention that a priest is gay places such a colossal emotional burden on the laity, that it implicitly constitutes a priest abdicating his pastoral responsibility. Personally, I don’t think gay people are quite that defined by our sexuality; I think many laymen get it, and are willing to struggle alongside us, like real Catholic friends.

But this caste-like idea of superiority aside, such hostility to priests sharing their struggles (or their peace) is still misguided. Priests who seem unapproachable will not be approached; priests who seem inimitable will not be imitated. Catholics can rattle on all we like about needing people to model chastity, but without concrete examples of, for instance, gay chastity, the idea won’t land. Without the context that makes the model inspiring, it won’t inspire. How are young Catholics who begin to recognize their own attraction to the same sex supposed to recognize also that they could have a future, if the only people that they know have that same desire are people who have abandoned the Catholic faith?

I venture to add that, for some people, a veneer of perfection can be repellent rather than attractive: in the naïve it can provoke despair (‘How could I ever be like that?’), while in the cynical, it prompts suspicion (‘What’s he hiding?’). An authentic person is far more attractive, allowing the former to overcome his shyness and the latter to give trust a chance.

Chris Damian confronted another problem with this approach, one that is equal parts moral and practical.

Any priest who asserts that we both need greater transparency in the Church and also condemns those opening up about their particular experiences of sexual integration, is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. … This creates the present situation of hierarchical schizophrenia in responding to the Church’s crises. How can we expect the clergy to be honest about what is happening in their parishes when we expect them to dance carefully around what is happening within themselves?

This doesn’t mean that every gay priest must come out, which Damian acknowledges. It is certainly a personal decision. But it does mean that automatic rebuke for coming out is nonsensical. He goes on:

The laity want more honesty and transparency from priests. But over the last several decades, many in Church leadership have actively worked against this. … Father Petri is participating in the very practices that have perpetuated our crises: he is a priest in authority ridiculing other priests for being honest. Rather than resolving the problem, he is perpetuating it. I suspect that Father Petri means no ill will, but malice is not required to create harm. … The fact that Father Petri misses that the article is directed toward those like him and, instead, claims that the article makes demands on the laity demonstrates the manipulative blindness of a bureaucrat.

One thing the Church needs as a prerequisite to the reform she so badly requires today is unflinching honesty. And you cannot simultaneously encourage and punish the same quality. If you reward dissimulation, secrecy, and bald-faced lies about same-sex attraction, which isn't even a sin, how on earth is anyone supposed to find the courage to be sincere, forthcoming, and accurate about sins and crimes?

The toxicity of the closet, and of the priestly culture of hush that it’s interwoven with, is something I don’t believe most Catholics have faced, not because they’re completely heartless, but because they don’t want to; and I suspect they don’t want to because they are afraid that if they think about the closet simply in terms of what LGBTQ people want and need, it will threaten their faith. And not many Catholics are ever in the mood to have their faith threatened, especially right now, when threats to the credibility of the whole hierarchy are daily features of the news. But that’s not good enough. Not facing problems doesn’t make them go away. And castigating gay people—even when we go out of our way to affirm our orthodoxy and our chastity—for asking to be known and loved as we are, does less than nothing to confront the sins, or heal the wounds, of deceitfulness and corruption that the Church is in the throes of.

Do you want to show us genuine friendship, Catholic? Genuine love, support, and affection, of the kind that every person (gay or straight) needs to thrive as a Christian, as a human?

Then listen to us. Talk with us. Pray with us. Laugh with us, eat with us, weep with us. Go to art galleries with us, invite us to your eight-year-old’s birthday party, watch cheesy fifties sci-fi movies with us, have us over for poker night. Do the normal stuff that life consists in, and include us in it; and let us tell you what’s on our hearts when that’s what we need. Because, now and again, every one of us needs that.

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What Is Side B Anyway?

And the Church must be forever building, and always decaying, and always being restored.
For every ill deed in the past we suffer the consequence:
For sloth, for avarice, gluttony, neglect of the word of GOD,
For pride, for lechery, treachery, for every act of sin.
And of all that was done that was good, you have the inheritance.
For good and ill deeds belong to a man alone, when he stands alone on the other side of death,
But here upon earth you have the reward of the the good and ill that was done by those who have gone before you.
And all that is ill you may repair if you walk together in humble repentance, expiating the sins of your fathers;
And all that was good you must fight to keep with hearts as devoted as those of your fathers who fought to gain it.
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;
For this is the law of life ... 

—T. S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock'

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Given the response a number of people have had to the Q Christian Fellowship’s announcement about representatives of Side B at their upcoming conference, I thought it might be as well to outline what, exactly, Side B is and what its implications are (with a hat tip to the Liturgical Queer, who inspired me). I haven’t done this before, for the rather silly but simple reason that it never occurred to me. This is partly because I’d thought it was clearer than, apparently, it is.

For one thing, a lot of people think that Side B is just ex-gay thought, but without its guarantees of successful orientation change. This isn’t the case at all. Side B was formed as a response to, and a rejection of, ex-gay thought, just like Side A was. It’s true that Side B takes a traditional ethical viewpoint, in contrast to Side A; but in general the origin, culture, and identity of Side B bear more resemblance to Side A than they do to anything out of Exodus or NARTH.

For another, a lot of people think that Side B Christians want to convert everyone to Side B beliefs. I’ll concede that we are very eager to convert our own churches to Side B beliefs: which largely means, getting them to treat us with the love, respect, and solidarity they profess (to a great extent falsely) to have for us. But, while I’m certain there are individuals who consider it their mission to convert Side A people to a Side B viewpoint, I can’t actually think of any. Most of us are—or more accurately, would be, considering the suspicion of our heterosexual brethren—perfectly willing to live and let live, not because the truth doesn’t matter (it does) but because it is neither our business nor particularly effective to go around browbeating people with your beliefs. Within a given church, since it’s a community defined by belief, it may make sense to have such discussions, but that’s quite different.

Now, I don’t want to paint Side B with too broad a brush; there’s a diversity of views, to be sure. The essential parameters are these:

- a traditional sexual ethic (i.e., sex belongs in a one-man, one-woman marriage)

- rejection of ex-gay practices and narratives

That’s it.

This obviously leaves a lot of space for what a given Side B person might think. Like I said, there are different versions of Side B, just as there are different versions of being gay in general. A Side A transman might believe firmly in monogamy, where a secular lesbian might think there’s nothing wrong with sleeping with a different person every night. Are they both right? No. Are they both queer? Yes. Likewise here: I think what I’ve laid out is typical of Side B, but there are many skeins in the rich tapestry of the community.

Some representative areas where Side B and Side A can work together include:

1. Refugee and asylum sponsorship, advocacy, and work. There are still a lot of places in the world, especially in Africa and Asia, where is it dangerous to be LGBT. I’m talking about everything from socially approved harassment to execution by stoning. The worst places include: Chechnya, part of the Russian Federation, in which men reputed to be gay are currently being shut in concentration camps; Iran, which executes adult men for homosexual behavior, but only requires 74 lashes for underage males; Nigeria, in which, if you get caught, you’d better hope it’s in the south and you merely have to languish in prison for a decade or so, because in the north they just kill you; Tanzania, which recently embarked on a large-scale anti-gay witch hunt; Saudi Arabia, which allows anything from an arbitrarily long imprisonment to flogging to castration to execution, and accents that last one for repeat offenders; Somalia, which allows the death penalty, but is at least chaotic enough that you can hope they forget to bother; and Uganda, which narrowly avoided instituting the death penalty in 2013 and settled for life imprisonment. Keep in mind, these are just some of the places in the world where your life and liberty could be endangered if you come out, or get outed by someone else, because everyone including the government will come after you. We know only too well that even ostensibly gay-friendly places like, say, Orlando can suddenly become scenes of horror and tragedy.

Getting LGBT people out of these countries and into safer parts of the world should be a no-brainer to everybody. It’s certainly a no-brainer to Side B. Rainbow Railroad is one organization I know of that does this. This of course goes hand in hand with our next point.

2. Supporting national and international legal reforms. This includes advocating legally classifying anti-gay crimes as hate crimes, for example, or supporting efforts to make gender identity and sexual orientation protected categories with respect to things like housing, employment, and access to public goods and facilities. Sodomy laws were of course struck down in the US as of Lawrence vs Texas, but they still stand in other places, and extending aid to those who are working to repeal them in other countries definitely qualifies.

I’d add supporting LGBT civil unions on an international basis, too. Some Side B folks do support civil gay marriage, since they consider their beliefs about marriage strictly religious. Some others, myself included, can’t unhesitatingly endorse gay marriage per se, but I think I’m right in guessing that an overwhelming majority of us are in favor of civil unions at the least. ‘Found family’ is one of the things that’s always laid at the heart of the gay movement, especially due to the fraught relationships so many of us have with our biological families; civil unions are a legal way of recognizing that. Adoption is in a distinct but analogous position here, and a Side B person can definitely support gay adoption (I certainly do).

3. Combating false and demeaning stereotypes about LGBT people, especially those that prevail among Christians. An example would be some of the more prejudiced reactions to the recent resurgence of scandal in the Catholic Church: calls for total bans on same-sex attracted men being admitted to seminaries were widespread, and remain a cause célèbre among many conservative or traditionalist Catholics. One individual, a rare instance of an uncloseted man with SSA (his preferred term), wrote an article published in First Things titled ‘Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests,’ asserting that chastity is disproportionately hard for homosexual men as such, and that we are accordingly unsuitable for such a demanding vocation. He adduced his own experiences struggling with chastity, and slipping into hookup culture at times, in support of his argument. The problem with these claims is not just that they’re detrimental to gay people (though they certainly are), but that they’re a bad reading of the evidence.

Traditional Christian culture, Catholic and evangelical alike, punishes not only homosexual acts, but homoerotic feelings, and deviations from quite rigid gender norms—a friend of mine, for example, was told that in order to be confirmed at his Anglican parish, he had to not only cut off all contact with his LGBT friends, but dress and speak differently (and this man was married to a woman). Moreover, while hookups can be treated as discrete, individual sins that can be repented and forgiven, anything that would humanize gay sex, like placing it in the context of a loving relationship, is typically treated as a more serious violation of chastity because it’s ‘living in sin’ instead of merely sinning. Without, quite, saying that the distinction has no value, I will point out that in this case, it makes hookups more appealing, not less: they satisfying both the craving of sexual lust for physical release, but also the intense psychological need that homosexual release should be a sordid and animalistic thing, without sincere affection or loyalty. A chastely celibate partnership between two uncloseted gay men is more of a threat to that identity than any number of anonymous blowjobs in a back room.

This is only one example of damaging preconceptions about LGBT people, and of how the shame and repression they inculcate can easily turn what was a calumny into a self-fulfilling prophecy. On wholly Side B premises with a thoroughgoing commitment to the most rigorous interpretations of Catholic sexual ethics, there is no reason to presuppose that a gay person is any less fit than a straight one to serve as a Catholic institution’s teacher, organist, secretary, youth minister, therapist, nurse, or priest. Each one of us must be examined not on our orientation, but on our merits—which is exactly what these positions call for anyway. Besides, given the incessant lectures we receive about how we shouldn’t reduce ourselves to our sexuality (from confessors and pastors, fellow parishioners, and total strangers in Christian media), it’d be nice if other people would stop doing it to us.

4. Demanding clarity from churches about how LGBT Christians can and can’t serve in them, along with the relevant circumstances and the justification. This alone is going to turn up a lot of homophobic subsoil. Vague assurances of ‘welcome’ are no match for a lived experience of exclusion, heteronormativity, and gaslighting. Churchclarity.org, which I discovered through Twitter, is a great example of an effort to get churches to move from generalized affirmations of love to a concrete explanation of what their love is going to look like—which empowers LGBT believers of all sorts of convictions to make an informed choice about going to this or that church.

What Churchclarity is doing, however, is (and professes to be) just one part of this. If, for example, a given church won’t hire LGBT employees or won’t ordain LGBT Christians because they believe they’re more prone to sexual misconduct, that’s a deeply problematic justification for a stance that is admittedly clear. My own Catholic tradition is particularly frustrating on this point: her teaching that homosexual persons, like all persons, are to be treated with ‘respect, compassion, and sensitivity’ is in theory straightforward; but then she goes and ruins it with a bunch of well-actually-ing about what does and doesn’t count as prejudice and unjust treatment. As a Side B person, I strongly advocate for reform in the Catholic Church’s attitudes and policies, and especially for an examination of the extent to which her pastoral habits have been formed by discredited psychological theories of homosexuality. (The ex-gay claims and personal licentiousness of Msgr. Anatrella, recently disgraced along similar lines to ex-Cardinal McCarrick, spring to mind, given his former influence with the Vatican.)

Calling every congregation, parish, diocese, synod, presbytery, and communion to implement policies that actually promote the dignity and well-being they claim to desire for LGBT believers is what’s at stake here. A church that wants to call itself Side B in its doctrine needs to put its money where its mouth is and prove that it doesn’t discriminate against homosexually attracted believers simply because of their attractions—by doing things like employing and ordaining qualified gay Christians, and treating our gifts as being just as valuable as those of straight brothers and sisters by allowing us to exercise them for the good of the body. If your policies demand that LGBT believers, even the ones who are in complete theological agreement with you and live out the chastity they confess, must assume the roles of dependent recipients of your gifts and never more, then whatever your stated beliefs, your behavior is homophobic. And it’s wrong.

5. Attending to medical and social issues that confront LGBT people. People think of HIV here, which isn’t totally false (especially when you had a creep like Martin Shkreli on the loose), though it is recycling a trope that wasn’t entirely true even in the 1980s. But of course, even with Truvada and other godsend medical advances, HIV is still an issue in the gay community. Similar half-truths abound with respect to suicide and substance abuse.

A more pertinent example would be homelessness among LGBT young people: studies over the last twenty years suggest that anywhere from 11 to 40% of homeless youth are LGBT (as opposed to around 3% of the general populace), and that domestic abuse or family expulsion are leading factors here. It is sad and infuriating to think that a minister should need to tell the parents among his flock not to savage, molest, or evict their children for their sexuality or gender identity; sadder and more infuriating that many do not. Drawing attention to this societal travesty, and urging believers of whatever convictions to open their homes and hearts to young people who need to get off the street, are fundamental responsibilities of Christian compassion.

6. Defending the legitimacy of LGBT terminology and identities for Christians. It still leaves me baffled that so many Christians have a problem with words like ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian,’ especially since so few of them have a problem with the word ‘straight’ (or ‘bisexual,’ for some reason). Saying I’m gay is not a theological, political, philosophical, or moral statement. It is not an assertion about my sexual activity or lack thereof. It is not an assertion that this is the most important part of who I am, any more than any other I’m statement is such an assertion (I’m an American, I’m a teacher, I’m a nerd …). It’s just using the normal adjective that most speakers of English use to denote a guy who likes guys the way most guys like women.

That said, I personally am prepared to take it a step further and say that queer identities are not incompatible with even a robustly Side B Catholicism. Because what is identity? A lot of things. There are ontological identities like ‘rational agent,’ but when most people talk about their identity I’m prepared to bet they don’t have ontology in mind. Sense of self would be a closer synonym: a narrative of experiences, principles, relationships, ideas, and so forth that we find deeply important. Given that our sexual orientation has a profound impact on our experiences, emotions, and relationships, I see no reason to exclude it from identity in this sense.

And even beyond this, when we look at how groups of people work, we find that group identities are forged by shared experience and especially shared suffering. The early Christians, who were frequently persecuted in fact and could be persecuted at any moment in theory, are an example: the letter to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse are eminent examples of a kind of resistance literature, books that reminded the addresses of who they were, of the solidarity of the Church, of their purpose and their hope—in a word, of their identity. In a very different way, blackness in the US can be regarded as a social identity, forged primarily through suffering and chronic social injustice: ‘black’ isn’t an ethnic group the way Swedish or Korean are ethnic groups, but the shared historical experience of black people in the United States, regardless of their diverse ancestry, created a common identity that reflects a common history.

In the same way, LGBT people in general know what it’s like to grow up different, confused, maybe scared, often mocked or excluded, because of our attractions. We know what it is to realize that what we’re feeling for other boys is what they’re feeling for girls—the chasm that opens up in an instant between us and them, between us and the future we were raised to anticipate. We know collectively what it is like to live and move in a world that was designed by, and caters to, people whose relationships are to a large extent radically different from ours, even when we share their convictions.

These six points are general, exemplary categories, not an exhaustive list or some sort of authoritative confession. But I hope they help clarify for our more hostile or skittish Side A sisters and brothers why we are, precisely, sisters and brothers, both as Christians and as queer family; and that they rouse and spur our heterosexual fellow believers to treat us better.

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