“Authority wants to replace the world with itself.“1
I.
Animals (including humans) are not machines, but we are, like the turtles in the 2024 film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger, miraculous or surprising creatures. That’s not, in this essay, a theological observation; it’s a scientific one.
In “Turtles All the Way Up,” an essay published in The New York Review of Books, Jessica Riskin, a professor of history at Stanford, offers readers an intellectual history of free will and determinism. For Riskin, free will is a philosophical question and determinism is a Christian theology. Believing in determinism “doesn’t necessarily make you a scientific rationalist,” Riskin contends, “in some contexts, it might mean you’re a Calvinist.”
In her essay, determinism is figured by stackable turtles “all the way down.” These are the turtles of the ideology of infinite regress. As we will see, the living, breathing turtles Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands represent Riskin’s preferred scientific rationalism.
But if free will is for philosophy and determinism (or the rejection of miracles or surprise) is for theology, might the miraculous be for science?
The turtles that interest me live in Conclave (if you have not seen the film, I will tell you when to stop reading). In and through these Catholic turtles, I define the miraculous—or what surprises—as an observable material reality. Miracles are biological truths.2
But first, we turn to Riskin’s essay. She introduces us to the stackable, ideological turtles of Protestantism and the living, breathing turtles Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands.
II.
Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism takes the form of a critical review of Robert Sapolsky’s book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). Sapolsky believes that animals, including humans, do not possess free will and that evolutionary mechanisms determine every aspect of animal behavior. Summarizing Sapolsky’s view, Riskin writes, “Not only are we ‘not captains of our ships . . . our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.”
Sapolsky grounds his determinism in a fantastical tale about the world resting on a stack of turtles “all the way down.” It is “ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there,” Sapolsky writes, “there’s a turtle floating in the air.” In other words, the world is the product of “deterministic causes” rather than miraculous ones.
The irony is, as Riskin points out, “the original miracle deniers were Protestants” (Atheists, clutch your pearls!). Sapolsky’s supposed scientific determinism “remains what it has been from the beginning,” Riskin argues, “a [Christian] theology.”
To illustrate her point, Riskin asks us to take a quiz:
Which of the following passages were written by [Sapolsky] and which by [Calvin]?
“The power of free will is not to be considered in any of those desires which proceed more from instinct than mental deliberation.”
“From this it is erroneously inferred. . . .that there is some power of free will.”
“You are privileged . . . with myths of freely willed choices.”
“Whatever happens in the universe was destined to happen.”3
III.
Before Sapolsky and Pierre-Simon Laplace, the nineteenth-century French “originator of modern scientific determinism,” wrote anything, an older, well-established tradition of Christian theological determinism existed. Along with Calvin, William Paley is a representative of this older tradition.
From Paley, we get the idea that organisms are akin to watches. And if we find a watch on the ground, we naturally infer that it has a maker and belongs to someone.
Riskin wonders what we might think about the watch if it “yelped and scuttled away, as many living things do when you stumble over them?” But Paley “relied on a peculiar notion of living things as passive, inert”—like a watch. What surprises Riskin is that “modern biology largely absorbed Paley’s model of organisms.”
Paley, an Anglican priest, was an incredibly influential intellectual for Charles Darwin. However, Riskin observes that Darwin “became less religious over the course of his life.” He took “a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution.”
Darwin’s followers did not follow suit. The idea that a “divine” force operates behind material reality became scientific dogma. Riskin points out that it was biologist Ernst Mayr who, in 1988, argued that “birds and other animals are no more purposeful than computers.”
Sapolsky’s argument is similar to Mayr’s. Animals are akin to “AI.”4
IV.
Riskin concludes her essay by introducing us to a second group of turtles. She reminds us that Darwin described tortoises living on the Galápagos Islands (Riskin notes that all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises). Darwin observed these turtles creating and following paths leading up to the freshwater holes from the island’s lower region.
Darwin’s turtles incarnate Riskin’s scientific rationalism. Turtles and other “living beings [behave] with purpose, agency, and meaning; indeed, reclaiming those capacities from a divine creator. It’s turtles all the way up.”
Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism brings us back up to earth and to observable, living turtles. With these turtles in mind, I risk a riff on Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism. The turtles that interest me live in the Vatican, specifically in the Vatican of the 2024 film Conclave.
Spoiler Alert: I can’t explain the turtles in Conclave without revealing essential details of the film, including its surprise ending.
Film still, Conclave (Focus Features, 2024)
V.
Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals and overseer of the Conclave, the election of a new pope, notices Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) crouching near the edge of a fountain within the Apostolic Palace. Turtles are swimming in the waters and moving all around him. The following dialogue ensues:
Lawrence: The Holy Father’s turtles. He was very fond of them. A gift from Angola.
Benitez: I thought I was imagining them. I love them. They’re so clever.
Lawrence: Well, here they keep escaping and being run over.
Earlier in the film, we learn that Cardinal Lawrence desires to escape the Vatican due to a crisis of faith. He confides in his friend, a fellow cardinal and progressive candidate for the papacy, Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), sharing that he had discussed his lack of faith in God with the Holy Father and offered to resign as Dean of the College of Cardinals.
The Pope rejected Lawrence’s resignation. Instead, he offered enigmatic encouragement, telling Lawrence that “some were chosen to be shepherds, and some to manage the farm.” Without evidence, Cardinal Lawrence interprets the Pope’s message to mean that he is called to be a manager rather than a shepherd.
Lawrence’s interpretation of the Pope’s message is immediately called into question by Cardinal Bellini. He shares that the Holy Father confided in him that he, too, had lost faith—but not in God. The Pope had lost faith in the Church.
So, if leaving the Vatican will crush him, as Lawrence unconsciously suggests that it will (what escapes the Vatican gets run over), and if managing the College of Cardinals is not what he wants to do with his life, then what is possible for him, a supposedly faithless man, to do in and with the Vatican? It is an open question.
In a sermon given to the College of Cardinals before the Conclave begins, we learn that open-mindedness—being open to surprise—is something Lawrence values. He preaches that certainty is the enemy of unity:
In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.
Like the turtles living within the walls of the Vatican, faith is a living object:
Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.
Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on.5
While Lawrence’s sermon startles most of his fellow cardinals, the Pope’s turtles astonish Benitez. As their conversation implies, Benitez doubts the existence of the turtles swimming and moving before his eyes. “I thought I was imagining them.” It is not until Cardinal Lawrence confirms their existence that Benitez accepts that the turtles he sees are real animals living within the walls of the Vatican.
The turtles swimming and moving around Benitez are not of the stackable variety; they do not exist in a fantastical ideological tale in his mind. Like the faith Lawrence spoke of in his sermon to the Sacred College, the turtles before Benitez’s eyes live and breathe.
The turtles, gifts from Angola, an African nation, may symbolize the theological foundations of the Catholic Church. Augustine was from Algeria, and Tertullian hailed from Tunisia.
They may also recall the late Pope’s love of creatures that evade ecclesial obsequiousness. As Lawrence notes, the Catholic turtles have a habit of escaping from the Vatican (only to be crushed by human carelessness and indifference).
Even those turtles that do not travel beyond the confines of the Papal Palace nonetheless travel well beyond their “proper place.” We last see a turtle in the Pauline Chapel, walking across the marble floor right after the cardinals have chosen the new Pope.
VI.
When Cardinal Benitez arrives at the Vatican, everyone is astonished by his presence. We discover that the Holy Father covertly appointed Benitez as a cardinal. Secrecy was necessary because Benitez’s assignment, leading the Christian community in Afghanistan, a predominantly conservative Muslim country, was a dangerous one.
The danger inherent in his assignment is amplified in the film by acts of terrorism in Rome. As the cardinals are voting for the next pope, a bomb explodes near the Sistine Chapel with such force it shatters several of the chapel’s windows—debris and shards of glass rain down on the cardinals.
Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a traditionalist and Italian contender for the papacy, exploits the chaos and fear resulting from the explosion to argue against open-mindedness (which he defines as relativism) within the Church:
Here! Here we see the result of the doctrine of relativism so beloved of our liberal brothers! A relativism that sees all faiths and passing fancies accorded equal weight, so that now, when we look around us, we see the homeland of the Holy Roman Catholic Church dotted with the mosques and minarets of Muhammad! . . .
We tolerate Islam in our land, but they revile us in theirs! . . . And now they are literally at our walls and we do nothing! How long will we persist in this weakness. . . ? What we need now is a leader who will accept that we are once more facing a religious war!
Speaking in Spanish, Cardinal Benitez calmly addresses Tedesco’s anger and fear. He asks, “My brother Cardinal, with respect, what do you know about war?” He continues,
I carried out my ministry in the Congo, in Baghdad and Kabul. I have seen the lines of the dead and wounded, Christian and Muslim. When you say “we have to fight”—what is it you think we’re fighting?
You think it’s those deluded men who have carried out these terrible acts today. No my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here…inside each and every one of us, if you give into hate now, if we speak of “sides” instead of speaking for every man and woman. . . .
We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But these things are not the Church. The Church is not a tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.
What happens next is that the College of Cardinals overwhelmingly elects Benitez as the next Pontiff. Lawrence also uncovers another secret about Benitez: his body is intersex, possessing a penis, ovaries, and a uterus.
Benitez tells Lawrence that when he realized he had female reproductive organs, he submitted his resignation to the Holy Father, but it was turned down. Here is their conversation:
Lawrence: He knew?
Benitez: Yes. He knew.
Lawrence: And he thought it was acceptable for you to continue as an ordained minister?
Benitez: I would assume so. After all, he made me a cardinal in pectore in full knowledge of who I am.
We considered surgery to have what you might regard as the “female” parts of my body removed. But the night before I was due to fly I realized I was mistaken.
I was who I had always been. It seemed to me more of a sin to correct His handiwork than to leave my body as it was.
Lawrence: Then you. . . you are still. . . ?
Benitez: I am what God made me. And perhaps it is my difference that will make me useful. I think again of your sermon. I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.
Lawrence is in the Pauline Chapel, contemplating what it means to exist between the world’s certainties, when he spots a small turtle walking across the marble floor. He approaches it and gently picks it up. As he places it back in the pond, he hears the roar of voices celebrating the white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel.
In this way, the film explicitly connects Benitez to the turtles he discovered living within the Vatican Palace. It is well known that there are intersex turtles all over the world.
As gifts from Angola, the turtles may recall the theological origins of the Catholic Church, but they are not pious symbols of obedience to ecclesial tradition. The turtles embody surprise, change, and transformation.
VII.
In “Turtles All the Way Up,” Riskin does not specify what she means by the miraculous. However, it is reasonable to assume that denying the possibility of a miracle means rejecting the potential for surprise. But Catholic turtles make it clear: surprise is a biological truth.
As the film suggests, neither Benitez’s nor Lawrence’s future is determined. Lawrence does leave the Vatican, but it is unclear what his departure signifies. What if he realized that the Holy Father was right about him: far from being a Church manager, he is more like a shepherd of turtles?
Moreover, Benitez trusts Lawrence. He voted for Lawrence to be the next Pope. And Lawrence responds to Benitez’s trust in him with faithful curiosity. And it’s a good thing, too, as the film implies that if Benitez were to return to his post in Afghanistan, his identity as a Catholic cardinal now exposed, he would be crushed.
But we do not know if Benitez’s intuition is correct. Will his difference prove useful to the Church?
What happens next?
To echo Benitez’s response to Tedesco, the Church is what happens next. And what happens next, the turtles remind us, is not preordained. If we are to be surprised by it, we must be able to accept the bodies before our eyes.
Mary breastfeeding Jesus, Basilica di Santa Chiara, Napoli, Italy.
I.
I.1
Kiki and Herb encourage us to crucify Jesus. Let’s sing along:1
I.2
“Banging In The Nails” is a compelling performance of a queer critique of religion. The object of Kiki and Herb’s critique is Catholic piety, represented by “the Nazi pope,” the late Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger). What it means to crucify Jesus, to bang in the nails, to put the crown of thorns on his head, and so forth, becomes more apparent in the context of Ratzinger’s legacy.
[T]he proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase (emphasis mine).
In addition to placing the blame of “violent reactions” on homosexuals for insisting on being treated with dignity and respect, Ratzinger also advises us, homosexuals “who seek to follow the Lord,” to carry our crosses:
What, then, are homosexual persons to do who seek to follow the Lord? Fundamentally, they are called to enact the will of God in their life by joining whatever sufferings and difficulties they experience in virtue of their condition to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross. That Cross, for the believer, is a fruitful sacrifice since from that death come life and redemption. While any call to carry the cross or to understand a Christian’s suffering in this way will predictably be met with bitter ridicule by some, it should be remembered that this is the way to eternal life for all who follow Christ.
Ratzinger wants homosexuals to conspire with Rome and crucify our desires. He believes that murdering same-sex desires is a “fruitful sacrifice.”
Kiki and Herb perform an alternative to Ratzinger’s theology. They crucify Rome’s Jesus instead of same-sex desire.
Crucifying Rome’s Jesus, we free ourselves from the reign of Roman terror on homosexual persons. We free ourselves to take pleasure in our “condition.” We free ourselves to think for ourselves, to think about how it feels like to us to be subjects of same-sex desire. “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, banging in the nails,” we also potentially free ourselves to think about what we can do with Jesus now, now that we have executed Rome’s Jesus.
1.3
Traditional gay theology is a helpful resource for resurrecting Jesus, for giving Jesus a new, gayer life(style). In “What Is Traditional Gay Theology(, Now)?,” I argue that gay Christian theology is the discipline of recognizing, describing, and unfolding the implications of identifications with devalued femininity (i.e., gay identifications) within the Christianmythos.
The Gospel of Matthew is one source of the Christian mythos. It is in this text that we discover a spirituality of gay identification.
I.4
The reading of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew pursued in this essay is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Il vangelo secondo Matteo).2 In the film’s opening scene, Mary’s face confronts us (first image below). She is looking directly at her fiancé, Joseph. For this reading, the significant aspect of this scene is Mary’s simple black head covering.
The black head covering is worn by a group of women witnessing three men entering Jerusalem (second image below). These men have come to search for “the child who has been born the king of the Jews” (Matt 2:1-2).
Jesus, too, is clothed in a simple black head covering. At the end of John’s sermon against the attitudes of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the face of Jesus fills the screen (third image). The style of Jesus’ head covering (fourth image) and the specific presentation of Jesus’ face (see, again, third image), as if he is looking back at Mary, return us to the film’s opening scene, stylistically linking Jesus to Mary and Mary to Jesus.
Pasolini connects Mary and Jesus in the context of Jesus’ baptism, an event in which the Spirit of God is the central figure (3:16-17). Pasolini’s aesthetic inspires curiosity about how Mary, Jesus, and the Spirit are textually intertwined in the Gospel of Matthew.3
I.5
The Greek grammar of Matthew 1 (see below) links Mary and the Spirit to each other and a tradition of maternal rebellion and survival. Ek, ex (ἐχ/ἐξ) mark the spot, if you will.4
Specifically, in Matthew’s gospel, Mary is a figure of the Spiritof God. Matthew defines the Spirit in and through Mary, described in and through a tradition of maternal rebellion and survival.5
Matthew inextricably links Jesus Messiah to the maternal figure, Mary/Spirit (1:16, 18, 20). Jesus Messiah embodies Mary/Spirit, a cunning/rebellious and virtuous/conventional spiritual life within the tradition that privileges the Father in the (his)story of redemption. In Jesus Messiah, gay identification bursts into the world as a messianic practice or politics.
II.
II.1
Matthew is not the obvious choice for those interested in Mary’s significance in Jesus’ life. The Gospel of Luke, far more than Matthew, dwells on Mary’s role in Jesus’ story. Indeed, Luke’s gospel concerns motherhood—and that is the problem.
In The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narrative in the New Testament (2003), the late Theodore Jennings, Jr. observes that, in Luke, there is “an episode particular to itself that undermines the importance of biological motherhood, including, by implication, the role of Mary” (184, emphasis mine). Jennings refers to Luke 11:27-28: “As he said this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that you suckled!’ But [Jesus] said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it.’”
Jennings argues that “Luke . . . undermines [Mary’s] role insofar as it is based on biological grounds . . . . Her place in the narrative as one who is honored is not as “mother” but as believer, which corresponds precisely with the intention of Jesus’s saying [elsewhere, namely Luke 8:19-21]” (184-185).
Luke undermines the dignity of (biological) motherhood, recategorizing Mary as a “believer.” Matthew, Jennings argues, undermines the dignity of “human fatherhood,” prohibiting the practice of calling anyone father:
Jesus’ program for his disciples clearly entails the abolition of distinctions among them and thus the abolition of hierarchical relationships. In this connection [Matt 23:8-12], Jesus prohibits calling anyone “father” and thus prohibits the recognition of the claims of paternity and so of authority on the part of any human being, including biological fathers . . . . The saying attributed to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel clearly undermines human fatherhood . . . (184, emphasis mine).6
Matthew’s critique of (biological) fatherhood is apparent in the gospel’s genealogy (1:1-17). Matthew’s genealogy connects Mary to a tradition of maternal rebellion and survival, a movement within the dominant tradition emphasizing the normative place of the Father in the (his)story of redemption.
II.2
Matthew 1:16 is a significant piece of Matthew’s critique of normative fatherhood/manhood: “and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of [ex] whom is Jesus.” The Greek preposition ex in Matthew 1:16 connects Mary to a historic movement of maternal rebellion and survival:
1:3: “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah ek tēs Tamar;
1:5: Salmon the father of Boaz ek tēs Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed ek tēs Ruth;
1:6: “David was the father of Solomon ek tēs tou Uriah.”
The ek of Matthew 1:16 also connects Mary and Jesus, and so links Jesus to a tradition of maternal rebellion and survival. 1:16 begins just like verses 3, 5, and 6, with a male name, in this case, Joseph. However, the typical de egennēsen ton (he begat), followed by the name(s) of his son(s) and then of the mother, does not come after Joseph’s name. Verse 16 does not read like this: Joseph the father of Jesus by Mary. It reads like this: Joseph is the man (or husband) of Mary, of whom is Jesus.
Joseph’s name is followed not by the name of his son(s) but rather by the name of hissocial role relative to Mary. Joseph is Mary’s husband.
The disruption of the typical formula begets unexpected results. Following Mary’s name, the formula proceeds predictably, the main difference being its feminine gendering: Marias ex hēs egennēthē Iēsous (Mary who begat Jesus). Notice that Mary’s name is in the place where we usually find the name of the father. The name of her son, Jesus, follows her name. The feminine hēs makes it clear that Jesus is Mary’s son.
Notice also that the designation Messiah is in the place where we typically find the mother’s name: Marias ex hēs egennēthē Iēsousho legomenos Christos (Mary, who begat Jesus, the one called the Messiah). In this way, Matthew links the messianic role to the maternal role.7
II.3
The maternal role in Matthew 1 is quite scandalous. Matthew 1:18, the first verse of the narrative about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, emphasizes just that point: “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from [ek] the Holy Spirit.”
Mary’s pregnancy occurs before she “lived” with Joseph. The genealogy does not shy away from Mary’s erotic rebellion. It amplifies it, literally connecting her to other queer women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah.”
Anna Case-Winters makes several observations in her excellent theological commentary on Matthew that highlight the oddness of the inclusion of women in Matthew’s genealogy:
There is no question that the Gospel of Matthew is written in a patriarchal context and reflects the patriarchal view of the secondary status of women and children . . . . In contrast to the society in which women were largely invisible, in the Gospel of Matthew, women have high visibility both in Jesus’ life and in the ministry of Jesus. . . . The genealogy, though patrilineal, breaks the traditional patriarchal pattern ‘was the father’ with the inclusion of five women in the line. . . . There are other extraordinary things about this genealogy. One of the most striking is the inclusion of the names of women. Luke’s genealogy does not include any women, not even Mary. Including women, as Matthew does, in a genealogy that is traced down through the male line is uncommon.8
In his An Ethic of Queer Sex: Principles and Improvisations (2013), Jennings helpfully situates Mary within a specific queer lineage (esp. 98-101). “In this line of remarkable women (which concludes with Mary),” Jennings observes, “there is a strange priority given to women who are sexually disreputable . . .” (100).
Tamar is one of those “remarkable” and “sexually disreputable” women. She is unwilling to let the men in her life shirk their responsibility to her, even if that means she must play the role of a prostitute (Genesis 38).
Rahab is, like many sex workers, observant and seems to grasp how the upcoming “street skirmish” is going to go. She shrewdly takes sides in the battle, saving her entire family from destruction (Joshua 2:1-22, 6:1-27).
Ruth, furthermore, refuses to abandon another woman for the sake of security in the arms of a man. Moreover, Ruth seduces her kinsman, “brazenly [taking] the sexual initiative in chapter 3” (Ruth 1:16-17; 3).9
Finally, Bathsheba, “Uriah’s wife,” a woman who, like Mary, is erotically tarnished, but, unlike Mary, is punished (by God), nonetheless remains with David and produces another son, Solomon (2 Samuel 11-12). Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder points out that we often forget “Bathsheba’s role in securing the kingdom for her son, Solomon” (see 1 Kings 1:11-31).10
II.4
It is clear why Mary belongs on the same list as a woman like Tamar. She becomes pregnant by untraditional means. However, Tamar, for example, is erotically rebellious, but she is also a conventional woman. She takes bold, untraditional action to safeguard traditionalfamily values.
Mary seems to play no active role in her own story. Her future depends on Joseph’s (good)will. If that is true, then her connection to queer women like Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah” is not entirely justified.
Mary’s story requires a queer(er) analysis. To make sense of the connection between Mary and women like Tamar in Matthew’s genealogy, we may interpret the angel’s speech in Joseph’s dream as an expression of Mary’s defiance of Joseph’s will to dismiss her.
III.
III.1
Before dreaming, Joseph concludes that Mary has been disloyal to him. So, he decides to send her away. His resolve to do so discreetly, rather than publicly, earns him the title of “just man” (1:19). Satisfied with his plan, he falls asleep and begins to dream.11
An angel appears in Joseph’s dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their injustices” (Matthew 1:20-21).
There are at least two ways of reading the angel’s speech in Joseph’s dream. We may read the speech literally, supposing it is a divine message delivered to Joseph. One problem with that interpretation of Joseph’s dream is that it deprives Mary of agency. If Mary is a passive recipient of God’s/Jospeh’s will, why is she linked to women who make bold choices in their stories?
We may also read Joseph’s dream psychoanalytically. Reading the dream in a psychoanalytically informed way clarifies the more obvious details of the text, especially Mary’s relationship to a tradition of maternal rebellion and survival. It also aligns Matthew’s witness with Luke’s by giving Mary a voice.
III.2
In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud observes that “the dream-work cannot create speeches.” According to Freud, the speeches (and conversations) we hear in our dreams “have really been made or heard.”12
Yet, the dream work does a lot with the speeches and conversations we have actually heard. For example, what appears as a single speech in a dream is often an effect of the dream work. The dream work “drags [fragments of speeches] out of their context . . . incorporating some portions and rejecting others. . . often [abandoning] the meaning the words originally had in the dream-thoughts and give[s] them a fresh one.”13
Speeches may undergo editing and even recontextualization in dreams, but the dream does not create them. I want to use the Freudian idea that “whatever stands out markedly in dreams as a speech can be traced back to real speeches which have been spoken or heard by the dreamer” to make sense of the angel’s speech in Joseph’s dream.14
III.3
The angel in Joseph’s dream gives a speech to Joseph. Freud describes speeches in dreams as having an acoustic and a motor aspect.15 The angel meets those criteria, speaking and (dis)appearing in Joseph’s dream. What is not clear is who actually gave the angel’s speech to Joseph.
One possibility is that Joseph gave the speech to himself. In that case, the speech functions in the dream as a reminder of the disturbing object of his desire, namely Mary. Again, the problem with this interpretation is that it deprives Mary of agency.
It is easy to understand why Mary belongs on a list of erotically suspect women, but they are also fierce women. They manifestly do not wait for men to make choices for them.
It is more plausible that Mary gave Joseph the speech he heard in his dream. We may rigorously speculate that the dream work’s redemption of Mary, transforming her into an angelic figure, enables Joseph to listen to what he finds disturbing: Mary’s defiance of his will to dismiss her, discreetly ruin her future, and sabotage the redemptive will of God.16
Mary insists on Joseph’s fidelity, and he ultimately offers it to her (1:24-25). Although, we should not imagine that it was easy for him to change his mind about Mary (and Jesus). Notice that when the Gentile magi arrive to pay homage to the “child who has been born king of the Jews,” they find “the child with Mary his mother” (2:2, 11). Joseph is textually absent at this critical moment in his son’s life.
Joseph’s redemption is the first miracle associated with Jesus’ birth, and his redemption is consequential. Joseph becomes Jesus’ real dad because of Mary and by adoption (not by biology/nature). Jesus becomes a “son of David,” and so he becomes the real “Messiah, son of David, the son of Abraham,” because of Mary and by adoption (1:20).17
III.4
Matthew explicitly links Mary to a tradition of feminine rebellion and survival. Matthew unambiguously identifies Jesus with her (1:16). Thus, Jesus Messiah is of the Marian tradition of feminine dissidence and conventionality and within the dominant tradition privileging the Father in the (his)story of redemption.
Jesus is also of the Spirit (1:18, 20). What is the character of their relationship? The answer to that question is related to the character of Mary’s relationship to the Spirit.
IV.
IV.1
Matthew describes Mary’s baby as “of [ek] the Holy Spirit” (1:18, 19). Some readers may be inclined to heterosexualize the Spirit’s relationship with Mary and credit the Spirit with somehow inseminating her. However, in New Testament literature, the Spirit is associated with the feminine/maternal role. Consider, for example, Romans 8.
IV.2
Paul believes the Spirit dwells in the Roman Christians (8:9). If the Spirit of God dwells in them, then it follows that the Spirit of Christ dwells in them, too. Paul connects the Spirit and Christ in his theology.
In an earlier letter, Second Corinthians, Paul clearly defines the relationship between the Spirit and Christ: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (3:17). “The Lord” refers to Jesus Messiah, to the one who, Paul claims in 3:14, removes the veil that blocks recognition of him as Messiah. Notice that Paul collapses the distinction between the Spirit and Christ: “The Lord is the Spirit.”
Paul makes a similar argument in Romans 8. For Paul, believers are pregnant with a pregnant Spirit. The spiritual life refers to the Spirit’s pregnancy developing within believers. Believers, now pregnant with Spirit/Messiah, “groan inwardly” as Spirit/Messiah grows within them (8:23).
In the interim, between pregnancy and birth, the Spirit parents believers. The Spirit “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (8:14). The Spirit “helps us in our weakness” (8:26). The Spirit “intercedes” for believers (8:27).
The eschatological hope is for the Spirit to birth Christ within believers. The birth of Christ within believers finally conforms them “to the image of [Christ] . . . the firstborn in a large family” and thereby fully realizes their adoption as children of God (8:29).
For Paul, the Spirit is like Mary. The Spirit is like a woman unnaturally pregnant with Jesus Messiah and a fierce protector, supporter, and teacher of her children.
IV.3
In Matthew, the Spirit is also like Mary. Just as Matthew 1:16 defines Jesus as Mary’s son, so Matthew 3:16-17 explicitly defines Jesus as the Spirit’s son: “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove (hōsei peristeran) and alighting on him. And a voice (hē phōnē) from (ek) heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'”
Ek appears in 3:17 but does not function here as in Matthew’s genealogy. More important in this context is the voice’s declaration, “This is my son.”
The fact that the voice’s identity is initially unclear strengthens the temptation to read God the Father into this text as the identity of the voice in 3:17. Matthew’s grammar, style, and theology, in addition to themes in biblical literature more broadly, connect the Spirit of God in 3:16 to the voice of 3:17.
The grammar of the Greek text connects the Spirit and the voice. Matthew describes the Spirit’s behavior as dove-like (hōsei peristeran) in 3:16. Dove is gendered feminine in Greek (hē peristera). The voice, hē phōnē, of 3:17 is also gendered feminine.
There is also a stylistic symmetry between 3:16 and 3:17. The Spirit and the voice are from heaven. The voice, like the dove-like Spirit, descends from or comes down from heaven.
The dove-like Spirit calls attention to biblical themes especially relevant to this reading of Matthew, maternal themes like birth and rebirth. The Spirit flying above the waters of Jesus’ baptism is reminiscent of the avian Spirit hovering over the waters of the formless earth at the birth of creation (Genesis 1:2). The dove-like Spirit also reminds us of the flood’s aftermath when Noah sent out a dove to find dry ground to begin rebuilding the earth (8:8-9).18
The dove-like Spirit recalls the circumstances of Jesus’ birth in Luke. The young Jesus is presented before the Lord in the temple in Jerusalem, and his parents sacrifice two doves there (Luke 2:24). Finally, the dove-like Spirit calls to mind the character of Jesus’ reforming messianic politics in Matthew. Jesus overturns “the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves” (21:12, see section VI for 10:16b).
Up to this point, the emphasis in Matthew’s narrative has been on the presence of the dove-like Spirit in Jesus’ life. Jesus is of the Spirit (Matthew 1:18, 20). John the Baptist testifies, “He [i.e., the Messiah] will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (3:11; see also 12:18). The Spirit will soon lead Jesus into the wilderness (4:1). God the Father does not explicitly appear in the Gospel of Matthew until 5:16.
Theologically, Matthew does not give God the Father a voice. The Father observes, listens, judges, wills, and saves—but the Spirit does the talking in Matthew (see also Romans 8:26-27, 1 Corinthians 12:3). Communication is the role of the Spirit.19
As Jesus sends his disciples “like sheep into the midst of wolves,” he advises them not to worry about “how you are to speak or what you are to say” (10:16, 19). They will be given the required words, “for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (19).
For all these reasons, we are justified in identifying the voice of 3:17 with the Spirit of 3:16. At Jesus’ baptism, it is the Spirit of God, and not God the Father, who declares, “[Jesus] is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (3:17).20
The Spirit, like Mary, is Jesus’ mother.
IV.4
Does Matthew’s Jesus have two mothers? No, as Matthew makes it impossible to de-link Mary, Jesus, and the Spirit.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is not the Spirit’s son by adoption; he is internal to the Spirit (1:18, 20). Jesus is also not Mary’s son by adoption; he is internal to Mary (1:16). Jesus is not of two wombs.
Jesus is of the maternal figure. He is of Mary/Spirit. She is his at once erotically rebellious and conventional mother.
IV.5
The radical emphasis on the Mother/Son relationship highlights how thoroughgoing is Matthew’s critique of (biological) fatherhood. It raises the question of God the Father’s relationship to Jesus.
One of Freud’s patients reports that his “Nanya” told him that Joseph was “like” a father to Jesus, and God was his “real father.”21 His Nayna is wrong about Joseph and right about God.
God/Joseph is the real Father of Jesus—not naturally, but through (the advocacy of) the Spirit/Mary.22 We typically describe this kind of parent-child bond in terms of adoption.
V.
V.1
Matthew inextricably links Jesus to a non-standard, feminine or maternal politics. Thus, we should expect Jesus’ messianism, aligned in Matthew 1:16 with the maternal role, to swerve to some degree from the dominant culture’s understanding of legitimate messianism. We should expect, that is, Jesus to incarnate a resistant relationship to the culture of normative masculinity also represented in the genealogy—and of which Jesus is, by the advocacy of the Spirit through Joseph by adoption, connected as a “Son of David.”
V.2
The significance of Jesus’ specific messianism is highlighted by Rosemary Radford Ruether. She asks, “Can a male savior save women?”23
Jennings responds to Ruether’s question, arguing that Jesus Messiah is relevant to women because he enters into solidarity with them. Jesus “becomes the one who shares the attributes traditionally associated with women.”24
For Jennings, Jesus shares “the attributes traditionally associated with women” because he represents a third gender. He is androgynous, in some sense male/masculine and female/feminine.
I argue elsewhere that theories of androgyny tend to collapse the distinction between sex and gender. Theories of androgyny tend, that is, to confuse social realities (gender) with biology/genetics (sex), unintentionally naturalizing the normative sex/gender/race/class regime they are attempting to resist.25 Thus, an androgynous Jesus cannot save women.
V.3
Our answer to Ruether’s question builds on the specific character of Jesus’ non-standard messianism, defined in and through his identification with a devalued feminine or maternal figure, namely his mother, Mary/Spirit. She is a maternal figure who is simultaneously rebellious and conventional. Matthew identifies Jesus with her; thus, his messianism is of her: at once dissident and ordinary.
VI.
VI.1
Jesus describes his spirited messianic politics just as he is sending his disciples back into their traditional religious world “like sheep into the midst of wolves.” Jesus authorizes them to drive out “unclean spirits . . . and to cure every disease and every sickness” (10:1, 5, 16).
The success of their mission depends on embodying the proper spiritual logic. The disciples must be like him, like his mother. They must “be wise (phronimoi) as serpents (hoi opheis) and innocent (akeraioi) as doves (hai peristerai)” (10:16b, 17:5).26
Jesus teaches the disciples to be dove-like, virtuous/conventional/socially valuable.27 He also encourages them to be snake-like, clever minds/rebellious/socially disturbing.
The disciples are not to be like Satan, a poisonous snake, a sickening force in the world (Genesis 3:1; Revelation 12:9; Matthew 7:10). They are to be like Jesus, like his mother, like the bronze snake of Numbers 21: they are to rise up and heal the afflicted.28
The bronze snake of Numbers 21 nicely illustrates the harmony of the terms of Jesus’ messianic politics. So do the hai peristerai of Matthew 10:16b.
VI.2
Hē peristera refers to “a bird of the family Columbidae [frequently] glossed as either a pigeon or dove (but the use of the latter term in preference to the former suggests a difference that cannot precisely be determined from usage in our texts). . . .”29
From a scientific standpoint, there is no difference between a dove and a pigeon. However, the (ancient) social meanings of the dove and the pigeon diverge: pigeons represent what is socially insignificant/disturbing, and doves represent what is socially significant/valued.
However, pigeons are like doves. They are simple, peaceful, and often colorful birds. Their cooing sounds are soothing. They are not aggressive or harmful animals.
Pigeons often live near or with humans. The unhoused sleep in, for example, church porticos, parks, and under bridges—the same spaces pigeons typically occupy and make their homes.
The unhoused often seek food in tourist areas and entertainment districts. Pigeons also frequent these zones of local commerce.
Local governments in the U.S. often treat the two populations in identical ways.30 They control pigeons and the unhoused by making it illegal or difficult to feed them, decreasing support for safe housing, spiking various surfaces, blasting loud music or harsh sounds in, for example, the church portico, and chasing them out of public spaces, like parks and popular tourist destinations.
Pigeons are called “flying rats” and “trash animals” for a reason. Pigeons, like the unhoused and snakes, are socially disturbing. Pigeons disturb us because they shit on our secular and religious values, like piety, law and order, wealth, and so on.
VI.3
Jesus shits on the temple in Matthew 21:12-17. “Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves” (21:12).
Jesus disturbs the status quo and liberates the “doves” from the prison of respectability. The reason for the disturbance is simple and innocent. By shiting on respectability, Jesus empowers the “blind and the lame” to enter the temple and be healed by him (21:14).
Like the bronze snake, the pigeon illustrates the equipoise of the terms of Jesus’ messianism. Like the bronze snake lifted up in the desert, the pigeon hovers in the air, a figure of rebellion and survival, a figure of Jesus’ anti-social messianic politics.
VI.4
Women, in particular, find Jesus’ anti-social spirituality appealing. In Matthew, “[m]any women were there [at Jesus’ crucifixion], looking on from a distance; they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (27:55).
At the end of his life, Jesus only has mothers and sisters. Likewise, at the beginning of his resurrected life, only women are present to greet him. Women are the first to preach the resurrection of the dead (Matthew 28:1-10).
Jesus’ female disciples answer Ruether’s question about the relevance of a male savior for women. Jesus can save women because while he is a male, his messianism is not essentially about males. His messianism is a queer form of masculinity (gendered feminine because it is departs from normative masculinity), rebellious and conventional, and anyone who finds it persuasive may adopt it as their lifestyle.
It was with the birth of the hegemonic Catholic Church . . . that seems finally to have precipitated the consolidation of rabbinic Judaism as Jewish orthodoxy, with all its rivals, including the so-called Jewish Christianities, apparently largely vanquished. It was then that Judaism and Christianity finally emerged from the womb as genuinely independent children of Rebecca. As Rosemary Radford Ruether put it a quarter of a century ago, “the fourth century is the first century for Christianity and Judaism” (6).31
It was not until the fourth century and the rise of the power of “the orthodox Church and the Rabbis to declare people heretics” that the two children of Rebecca, intertwined siblings in her womb, emerged as two distinct religions (15, see Genesis 25:21-34).
Boyarin observes that while there were differences between the two as early as the second-century (Matthew was written written sometime between 70-107 CE), “the border between [them] was so fuzzy that one could hardly say precisely at what point one stopped and the other began” (11, emphasis mine). Differences between “rabbinic and Christian Judaism” begin to emerge and harden in response to the experience of martyrdom, specifically to the question of whether to avoid or seek death for the sake of one’s faith. Tricksters and martyrs are the main characters of this drama.
VII.2
Tricksters represent attempts to escape martyrdom through cunning or wit. They are explicitly gendered feminine. Martyrs represent a spirit of “manfully provoking death” (52). Theirs is considered a virtuous response to martyrdom. Martyrs are explicitly gendered masculine (48ff).
The gendering of tricksters and martyrs potentially expresses a broader cultural dynamic between the victorious Romans and the subjugated Greeks. The gendering of cunning as feminine and virtue as masculine may demonstrate “the Greek tradition of cunning, metis, as a value, versus the Roman supreme value of virtus is at play here” (63-64). In patristic sources, for example, Clement (i.e., Greece) represents the trickster option, while Tertullian (i.e., Rome) represents the martyr option.
Both rabbinic and patristic sources initially keep the options open; they do not, that is, conclude that one response to martyrdom is better than the other. However, as the debate unfolds, “Christian textuality seems bound to answer the question,” baptizing, if you will, the martyr (i.e., Roman) option (66, emphasis mine).
VII.3
At first glance, it would appear that “Christian textuality” means siding with Rome, with Empire/dominant masculinity. However, the ideal martyr, for both Jews and Christians, was defined in and through femininity, specifically through the virgin female.
It is in and through female virginity that the Rabbis and Fathers construct a dissident masculinity. They imagine Rome as a rapacious or lusty male (as feminine because, in the ancient world, women are thought to be susceptible to all sorts of pleasures). In identifying with the female virgin, the Rabbis and Fathers are disidentifying with Roman “masculinity.”
Boyarin observes that male Christian writers are often former, influential Roman “pagans” (79-80). They have power, prestige, and wealth they are willing to give up to become and remain Christians. The female virgin enables male Christians to reframe their defiant femininity as virtuous masculinity. Giving up their life is an assertion of their masculinity, the means by which they preserve their virginity (i.e., faithfulness).
For the Rabbis, Rome has a double meaning. It signifies pagan Romans and Christians. Rome is both a religious heresy and a secular power, two whores tempting Jews to abandon their virginity (i.e., faith). The female virgin enables male Jews to reframe their defiant femininity as virtuous masculinity, just as she did for male Christians. In resisting Romans and Christians, they preserve their virginity (i.e., faithfulness) in the brothel.
VII.4
The Rabbis and Fathers construct their dissident masculinity by using a definition of female as feminine. The virgin martyr is the ideal female (i.e., a dead/voiceless woman).
The male categorization of females as virgins plays out in different ways for Christian women and Jewish women. The virginity of Christian women is flexible; it can be expressed by abstaining from sex or by entering into marriage.
Whereas the Rabbis left the question of how to live faithfully in an ethos hostile to queer faith open, rabbinic textuality decides the question of virginity. Jewish women cannot die virgins. Their virginity is for their husbands.
There is no escape from (Roman-like) male domination for either Jewish or Christian women. Christian women can, however, choose to abstain from family life. There is no such freedom for Jewish women, as the Rabbis were more in agreement with Rome regarding the importance of the biological family.
Identification with female/femininity/virginity enables the Rabbis and Fathers to construct a dissident, anti-Roman male/masculinity. However, the Rabbis and Fathers purchase their valorization at the expense of actual women, leaving women with little to no freedom to decide for themselves how to live faithfully in a world hostile to queer faith and to women (of faith) in particular.
Boyarin’s rigorous textual/historical description/grounding of Reuther’s provocation allows us to retranslate the meaning of Jewish and Christian difference in terms of gender: it is the difference between two, non-standard males/masculinities built upon the ideal female as virgin, both of which subjugate women.
VII.5
Matthew’s gospel is part of this rabbinic and (Jewish) Christian tradition, which defines how to live faithfully in a world hostile to queer faith. Like the Rabbis, Matthew does not take sides on “martyrdom.” Matthew’s Jesus teaches his disciples to avoid persecution: “When they persecute you in one town, flee [pheugō] to the next . . . ” (Matthew 10:23). Matthew’s Jesus also demands that they “take up the cross and follow” him (10:38).
Matthew’s gospel does not take sides in the broader cultural debate. It does not choose between Greek and Roman values, between cunning and virtue. The messianism of Matthew’s Jesus recombines them, describing faithful living in a hostile environment in terms of cunning and virtue, trickster and martyr, snake and dove.
VII.6
Like the Rabbis and Fathers, Matthew builds an anti-phallic, anti-Roman, or counter-masculinity in and through the virgin. However, Matthew’s virgin differs in two significant ways from that of the Rabbis and Fathers.
Unlike the Rabbis and Fathers, Matthew describes a dissident masculinity in and through the virgin maternal figure. Matthew defines the gender-neutral Spirit in and through Mary. Matthew describes Mary in and through a tradition/lifestyle of erotic maternal virginity.
Matthew’s maternal figure, Mary/Spirit, may refer to actual women, but it is not essentially about women. By defining dissident masculinity in and through the virgin maternal figure, Matthew avoids circumscribing bodies and pleasures. Matthew does not tell us in advance what bodies and pleasures are of Jesus, of Mary/Spirit.
Matthew defines Mary/Spirit’s virginity by linking her to women who are manifestly not virgins; they are all mothers by unconventional means. This makes perfect sense of Mary’s virginity if she is a figure of the Spirit. Matthew emphasizes rebellious sexual desire as a characteristic of the Mary/Spirit by making the point that Mary/Spirit’s son is not a product of male agency/power/rule.
Matthew is especially clear that biology/nature cannot save us (Matthew 3:7-10, 19:10-12).32 In the (Jewish) Christian imagination, Jesus Messiah’s birth is the only birth of ultimate significance to us.
Jesus is internal to Mary/Spirit. She is responsible for birthing him in us, fully realizing our adoption as children of God.
The displacement of salvific pregnancy onto the figure of Spirit/Mary frees women and men to decide for themselves what their bodies are for now that they are pregnant with Jesus by the Holy Spirit. It frees spirited women and men for pleasure, including sexual pleasure, because the body is no longer reducible to a temple/economy/piety of biological/natural reproduction.
The freedom to faithfully choose what to do with their bodies may account for why ancient women found Jesus’ messianic masculinity to be lifesaving. It may account for why women continue to follow Jesus today.
Unlike the Rabbis and Fathers, Matthew crucifies Rome’s Jesus instead of desire for a pleasurable faith and faithful pleasures. The Mary/Spirit is Matthew’s hammer. By singing along with Matthew, we potentially rise to new life, reorienting our relationships to one another, male and female, and to the world.
VII.7
In Matthew’s gospel, Mary is a figure of the Spirit, and Jesus Messiah is of her, of a tradition of maternal rebellion and conventionality, snake-like cunning and dove-like virtue, queer reproductivity and virginity. Our description of the Spirit in Matthew avoids the problems related to trinitarian definition/personhood outlined by Linn Marie Tonstad in God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2017), and it clarifies what it means for us to believe in Jesus today.33
Matthew prioritizes the Spirit/Son relationship, thereby deprioritizing the overtermined relationship between Father/Son. In prioritizing the Spirit/Son relationship, Matthew does not overpersonalize either the Spirit or the Son, creating a new disciplinary identity of womanhood, motherhood, or humanity. The Spirit is a feminine figure, a proxy identity for dissident or queer masculinity. Jesus Messiah is the embodiment of her in the world of Roman masculinity.
In prioritizing the Spirit/Son relationship, Matthew does not “castrate” the Father/Son relationship, creating a “vagina dentata.” Mary/Spirit is not an anti-male or anti-masculine woman. She is a rebellious and conventional figure of queer masculinity that anyone who finds it persuasive may embody.
Finally, Matthew does not, as Tonstad does, abstract the Spirit. The Spirit is defined in and through a specificsocial struggle for dignity and survival, and so it is defined in the terms of that struggle, in the gendered terms that organize life in the (ancient) world. The Spirit is a figure of resistance to Roman male domination, whether secular or religious.
If we are of Jesus, Mary/Spirit is our mother, too. We are pregnant with her and groan inwardly as she gives birth to Jesus in us. Our hope is to fully realize our adoption as the children of God by being like Jesus, the incarnation of Mary/Spirit in the world, the desecration of Roman orthodoxy.
NOTES:
This essay is a reconceived version of my final dissertation chapter, “Messianic Politics.” I thank David M. Halperin for sharing with me the recording of Kiki and Herb performing “Banging In The Nails.” It was recorded by an unnamed source. ↩︎
Pasolini was a gay man. He was also interested in Saint Paul. See hisSaint Paul: A Screen Play, trans. Elizabeth Castelli (2014 [1977]). ↩︎
I do not pursue Pasolini’s “reading” of Jesus further because I focus on building my own based on Matthew’s text. ↩︎
I do not mean that a person named Matthew wrote the gospel under that name. I have chosen this convention for the sake of clarity and convenience. Citations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted. ↩︎
Jennings qualifies Matthew’s critique of fatherhood. It is, more specifically, a critique of human fatherhood. See note 16 below. ↩︎
Ek/ex is a common preposition in Matthew (e.g., 2:6, 3:9, 3:16, 5:37), yet it functions uniquely in Matthew 1. Here, its usage attunes us to a particular lineage, connecting queer women, to Mary, to the Spirit, to Jesus. Ek/ex in Matthew 1 prepares us to read the Gospel for this scandalous memory. It teaches us to be on the lookout for other kinds of queer feminine connections in Matthew’s gospel. ↩︎
A very different, compressed version of II.4 was originally published in my essay, “‘Saint Hillary.’ On Unserious Activism,” in Taking It to the Streets: Public Theologies of Activism and Resistance, ed. Jennifer Baldwin (New York: Lexington Books, 2019): 101-113. See, esp., 106-107. ↩︎
Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), 418, emphasis is original. All citations of Freud’s work below are from the Standard Edition. ↩︎
In Greek, angel (ho angelos) is gendered masculine. My interpretation fits this detail, as Matthew resituates Mary in the father’s/man’s place. This is a reasonable reading because grammatical conventions do not describe what we more commonly understand as sex and/or gender (comportment). In other words, the fact that the word angel is gendered masculine in Greek does not necessarily mean that the angel character is imagined as male/having a penis. Textual context always determines what is (im)possible for one’s reading of it. ↩︎
This is consistent with the message of John the Baptist (Matthew 3:7-10). Moreover, as one of Freud’s patients understood, an emphasis on motherhood is a critique of fatherhood as such. In From the History of An Infantile Neurosis, Freud observes that his patient’s “sexual researches . . . gained something from what he was told about the sacred story . . . . He now heard that Mary was called the Mother of God . . . . [A]s a result of what he was told, he was bewildered as to who Christ’s father really was. He was inclined to think Joseph. . .but his Nanya said that Joseph was only ‘like’ a father and that his real father was God . . . . He understood this much: if the question was one that could be argued about at all, then the relation between father and son could not be such an intimate one as he had always imagined it to be” (65, emphasis mine). ↩︎
Freud often comments on the connection of water to birth. For example, in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud observes: “Birth is almost invariably represented [in dreams] by something which has a connection to water: one either falls into water or climbs out of it, one rescues someone from water or is rescued by someone—that is to say, the relation is of mother to child” (153, emphasis original). Freud further argues that the dreamer does not know this because they know that “all terrestrial animals” evolved from “aquatic creatures” or because they know that they started out in “amniotic fluid,” but rather because they have been taught the myth of the stork (160). “He is told in his nursery that the stork brings babies . . . from the water” (160). The stork myth (i.e., an adult lie) is problematic because it “contributes much to making children feel lonely and to developing their independence” (318). In The Future of An Illusion, Freud extends his analysis to the sphere of religion: “The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. . . . We have been convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth . . . and not to withhold from [children] a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level” (44-45). Religious doctrine and the stork are weirdly intertwined here because of what is at stake in the so-called innocent lies adults tell their children about sexuality. Soon, the child discovers the role of the father in their birth, traumatically disrupting their seamless relationship with their first love, the mother. They are now dependent on their rival, the father, for protection: “The father himself constitutes a danger for the child, perhaps because of his its earlier relationship with its mother. Thus it fears him no less than it longs for and admires him. . . .The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult’s reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge—a reaction that is precisely the formation of religion” (24, emphasis original). Matthew’s emphasis on the Mother/Son relationship may also turn out to be a critique of religion. The ritual of baptism, for example, may teach us to take the Father/Son relationship less seriously. ↩︎
This is further justification for aligning the angel with the Spirit/Mary. See note 14 above. ↩︎
A voice “from the cloud” repeats this declaration at Jesus’ transfiguration, adding the command, “Listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5). See VI.1. ↩︎
Lyrics from Taylor Swift’s song, “Marjorie”, perfectly translate 10:16b: “Never be so kind / You forget to be clever / Never be so clever / You forget to be kind.” ↩︎
In Gustave Flaubert’s tale, A Simple Heart ([1877] 2005), Félicité is self-effacing, long-suffering, dutiful, and so forth (i.e., a simple heart). Her parrot, Loulou, becomes the love of her life. Upon Loulou’s death, she has him stuffed, and she installs him in her room. “When she went to church, she would sit gazing at the picture of the Holy Spirit and it struck her that it looked rather like her parrott. The resemblance was even more striking in an Epinal colour print depicting Our Lord’s baptism. The dove had wings of crimson and a body of emerald-green and it looked for all the world like Loulou” (34-35). ↩︎
See “hē peristera” in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, ed. Fredrick William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), emphasis mine. ↩︎
Matthew 19:10-12 is a unique saying about eunuchs, connected to Isaiah 56:4-7. See Jennings, The Man Jesus Loved, 105-154, for commentary on this unique saying. ↩︎
Wedding dress designed by John Galliano, worn by Gwen Stefani, 2002
“Certainly, to talk about monogamy is to talk about virtually everything that might matter. . . . Monogamy is a kind of moral nexus, a keyhole through we can spy on our preoccupations.” – Adam Phillips, Monogamy, ii.
“Nothing defeats us like success. It is always more baffling—more essentially ironic—than failure.” — Adam Phillips, Monogamy, #47.
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” — Paul of Tarsus, Romans 13:8
I.
I am no apologist for monogamy.
Yet, most people desire it for themselves. And most people, even those for whom it seems to be working out well, don’t seem to love monogamy. I think that is interesting.
Most people don’t love monogamy, but yet they still believe in it. So, it is worth asking: What promises to make loving monogamy promising?
My answer is irony. Irony is the key to loving monogamy. Or so I will now argue.
Monogamy is a sacred cultural norm, but as Adam Phillips, in a fascinating interview regarding his book, Monogamy(1996), observes, “the flawed relationship, or the relationship that doesn’t work, gets all the press.” We have a lot of interest in relational failure.
What we don’t have, according to Phillips, “is . . . very good language for celebrating good relationships. There’s a sense in which the good monogamous relationship . . . doesn’t have very good language to describe it. I think that is interesting.”
In the aforementioned interview, Phillips searches for good enough language to describe “what makes relationships between people work.”
I think what makes relationships work between people is extremely mysterious. I mean, we used to call it chemistry. And if it weren’t so silly, I’d want to go back to using words like that. Something really quite mysterious and unpredictable happens between people.
The “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of relationships between people is likely what inspires us to lean on the language of faith to describe relationships that work, as the “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of those relationships likely calls forth our, to use Julia Kristeva’s idea for my own purposes, “incredible need to believe.”
“Believing in monogamy,” Phillips writes, “is not unlike believing in God” (Monogamy, #1).
II.
Mechthild of Magdeburg offers us one interesting example of what it is like to believe in God. In Flowing Light of the Godhead (written between 1250-1280 CE), Mechthild seeks sex with God. Advised instead “to refresh [herself] in love” by bowing “down to the small Child in the lap of the eternal virgin,” she refuses (see Book I, §44).
Mechthild refuses to accept the blessed child as a proxy for her Lover/God. “That is child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby,” she asserts. “I am a full-grown bride. I want to go to my Lover” (§44).
She is warned about how dangerous is such a direct approach to God: “Oh, Lady, if you go there / We shall go completely blind / The Godhead is so blazing hot” (§44). So warned, she goes directly to God.
Upon meeting her Lover, Mechthild is encouraged to take off all of her clothes. What follows is a kind of anticipatory silence between them. She discreetly alludes to what happens next: “What happens to her then—she knows— / And that is fine with me” (§44).
Mechthild and God enjoy a quickie. “[T]his cannot last long,” she observes. And they depart from one another “inseparably” (§44).
The brief sexual meeting of Mechthild and God is described as taking place in secret: “When two lovers meet secretly / They must often part from one another inseparably” (§44). In seeking sexual intimacy with God through contemplation (the 13th-century virtual world?), the Beguine mystic secretly escapes her existing relationship to the world, including to the Church.
Mechthild’s theology is interesting because she explicitly includes sexual pleasure as a feature of what it is like to believe in God. “And about pleasure we are all mystics.” Or so Phillips argues. “We are all terrified of suffering too much of it. For some people the best solution to this is infidelity, for others monogamy. To each [their] own asceticism” (#71).
Mechthild’s asceticism is, I think, a form of infidelity. Infidelity, however, is not always what we think it is. In escaping her existing relationship to the world of people, she reveals the one with whom she is actually doing monogamy. She desires God. Infidelity is always intertwined with monogamy.
Infidelity, moreover, is not always as dangerous as we think it is. “People have relationships,” Phillips contends, “not because they want to feel safe—though they often think they do—but because they want to find out what the danger is. This is where infidelity can let people down” (#34).
Mechthild, warned about the danger of rawdogging God, ends up proving herself right: there is, in fact, no danger in having sex with God. Prior to hooking up with God, she argues: “A fish in water does not drown. / A bird in the air does not plummet. / Gold in fire does not perish. . . . / How, then, am I to resist my nature? / I must go from all things to God / Who is my Father by nature” (§44). Sex with God is, for Mechthild, the safest sex imaginable because it is sex with her very nature.
Her “nature” begins to take on meaning when she refuses the blessed Child. Her desire to go directly to God is about far more than an unwillingness to allow Jesus to fuck up her relationship with God. “Child’s love,” notice, is defined in parental, specifically maternal, terms. It is “child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby.” In refusing the blessed Child, Mechthild is refusing toidentify with the maternal figure of her love story. So “utterly formed to [God’s] nature, / not the slightest thing,” however, “can come between [her] and [God, her Father by nature]” (§44). Mechthild radically identifies with God the Father.
The meaning of her “nature” is also signified by the easy interchability of the main roles in her love story, Lover and beloved. Mechthild clearly defines God as the Lover of her story. Yet, she is the one who is obsessed with God. She is the one who knocks down the door to God’s bedchamber. She is the one who insists on sex with God. In this story, Mechthild is the Lover, or God (i.e., the subject of erôs)—and God is the beloved, or Mechthild (i.e., the love-object).
Sex with God is the safest sex one can think of because God is, at least in Book I, §44 of Flowing Light, Mechthild (and vice versa). Sex with God is the safest sex, the safest incest one can think of because it is not unlike masturbaton. “My sexual relationship with myself,” Phillips observes, “is a study in monogamy” (#60).
“The virtue of monogamy,” Phillips contends, “is the ease with which it can turn sex into masturbation [which Phillips also describes as “safe incest”]; the vice of monogamy is that it gives you nothing else. . . . The only truly monogamous relationship is the one we have with ourselves” (#101).
Believing in God is not unlike the incredible need to believe in ourselves.
Nonetheless, most people are not as faithful to God as is Mechthild. “Why,” wonders Phillips, “do we, at least apparently, [continue to] have sex with other people, why include them at all?” (#101). What is the danger?
III.
David M. Halperin identifies a surprising feature of sex that may account for why we want to include, apparently, other people in our sex lives. The danger of sex with an-other person is the promise of love.
In “What Is Sex For?” (2016), Halperin tries to make sense of why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You” (2011) is “blaring” from a gay bathhouse in Hanoi. To that end, he turns to Aristotle, specifically to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, chapter 22 of part 2.
According to Halperin, Aristotle argues “that it is in the nature of erotic desire itself to seek—in and through sex, customarily—the experience of being loved. Love is the telos of erotic desire. It is not love that aims at sex as its goal or that seeks to express itself through the act of sex. It is sex that aims at love” (19, emphasis original).
To the subject of erôs, to the one inhabited by erotic desire (rather than by lust or by appetite), sex is, customarily, a means to love. I initially read Halperin’s summary of Aristotle to mean that sex mediates between erotic desire (or passion) and love: erotic desire, through sex, seeks love.
My initial reading of Halperin’s summary of Aristotle was a promising mis-reading, as it provoked thought about the space between erotic desire and love. However, as the last sentence of the summary above indicates, erotic desire is taking the form of sex in Aristotle’s argument. Erotic desire = sex.
Halperin goes on to significantly complicate Aristotle’s already subtle sexual logic. For example, he wonders if sex does, in fact, naturally seek love? Does erotic desire naturally seek what is beyond itself? Halperin does not directly answer that question in “What Is Sex For?,” but he does answer it in an earlier work, How To Be Gay (2012).
Sex, however, is not the subject of How To Be Gay. Erotic desire customarily, but not always, takes the form of sex. It can take other, cultural, forms. Erotic desire can take the form of an obsession with interior design or with feminine figures, like Joan Crawford. Halperin explores the cultural vicissitudes of erotic desire in How To Be Gay.
The lesson of How To Be Gay is that erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek love. Mechthild’s example teaches us the same lesson, but in a different erotic sphere: sex does not naturally seek love-objects: objects beyond the confines of its exacting criteria.
Erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek what is beyond itself. Its love-objects are always underwhelming. So, if what we want is to somehow love the objects of our desire, then we must learn to do something with our erotic desire.
If what we want is a loving monogamy, then we must learn to ironize sex.
IV.
In How To Be Gay, traditional gay male culture teaches its disciples how to re-direct erotic desire through irony, specifically through camp irony, to its love-objects. Describing camp irony may give us an example of how to ironize sex, of how to think of sex in terms of irony.
To that end, we may consult a promising section of How To Be Gay. Notice how camp and intimacy are intimately intertwined in the lengthy citation below. Moreover, camp and intimacy are linked in the context of explaining the lasting character of a monogamous relationship:
Many years ago I asked a friend of mine in Boston, who had been living with the same boyfriend for a very long time, if it had ever occurred to them to want to get married. “Oh, no,” he said with a laugh, “we’d have terrible fights over who got to wear the wedding dress.” That witticism, if it had been directed against someone other than oneself, or against someone other than the person one loved, would have registered as merely demeaning in its implicit demotion of a man from the noble rank of male dignity to the lower rank of female triviality. And it would be doubly demeaning in the context of gay male love: since male homosexuality sees in masculinity an essential erotic value, to portray oneself or one’s partner as characterized by feminine identification to public mockery, would be to depreciate oneself or one’s boyfriend as a sexual object and vehicle of sexual fantasy.
. . . .
Leo Bersani conveys powerfully the sense of gay chagrin at the ineluctable failure of gay masculinity by citing “the classic put-down: the butch number swaggering into a bar in a leather get-up opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home where the first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austin, gets you into bed and—well, you know the rest.”
Or in the unlikely event that, even after getting you into bed, he still managed to keep up butch appearances, all your remaining illusions would be shattered—according to the lead character of Armistead Maupin’s Tale of The City (1978)—when you eventually excused yourself to use his bathroom and discovered his supply of personal cosmetics.
. . . .
It is in this context that my friend’s remark about his boyfriend and himself coveting the wedding dress reveals its true significance. To utter it is to know oneself and one’s love-object as unworthy of the serious consideration that is masculine dignity’s due. It is to disclaim the presence to masculine authenticity, and the erotic credit that accrues to it, and to refuse in camp fashion to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame. At the same time, it insists that such inauthenticity is not incompatible with gay love. . . . On the contrary, it demonstrates that inauthenticity is not fatal to love, that seriousness does not have to prevail over irony in order for love to thrive and to endure.
To see through one’s own erotic illusions without withdrawing from one’s love-object its worthiness to be loved, to disclaim one’s entitlement to respect while continuing to assert it, to love and be loved without endowing one’s love with dignity; this is the possibility that traditional gay male culture holds out to its adherents. The supreme wisdom consists in living one’s life knowingly as melodrama—understanding full well (if not necessarily explicitly) that melodrama signifies both a degraded genre of literary discourse and a debased pragmatic genre of emotional expression: a despised, feminized, laughable, trivial style of expressing one’s feelings.
No wonder my friends from Boston could build a lasting relationship together while the gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites thrive on the business of gay romantics, who prefer their own illusions, their fantasies of love, to actual people—people who, after all, cannot sustain those illusions, not at least for very long. That last remark is hardly intended as a put-down of those who frequent the baths . . . ; it’s just a reminder of what those unique gay male institutions are for. Which is not to help us live happily ever after, but to enable us to crowd as many anti-social thrills as possible into the moment and to provide us with a structured communal space in which to . . . discharge our romantic fantasies—without doing ourselves or our partners any lasting harm.
To live one’s life as melodrama, to do so knowingly and deliberately, is not of course to refuse to take it seriously—as any gay Joan Crawford fan . . . can tell you. But it is to accept the inauthenticity at the core of romantic love, to understand romantic love as a social institution, an ideology, a role, a performance, a social genre, while still, self-consciously and undeceivedly, succumbing to it.
In short, it is to do what is otherwise culturally impossible—impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony (291-294).
Participation in gay male culture enables the boyfriends from Boston to do what would otherwise be impossible, “impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony.” By putting on, if you will, a wedding dress, the boyfriends from Boston reveal their identification with a particular form of irony, with a particular fashion style, namely camp.
“Camp fashion,” as Halperin defines it above, is a refusal “to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame.” The specific object of its refusal is seriousness. Camp refuses to take masculinity seriously, as something other than a role, an ideology, a melodramatic performance. And at the same time, camp does not dismiss the erotic value of masculinity simply because it is a performance. To the contrary, camp enables one to “self-consciously and undeceivedly” enjoy it—and even to “[succumb] to it.”
It is camp fashion, camp irony, that enables the boyfriends from Boston to live their lives “knowingly as melodrama,” to embody both passion and irony at once—and it promises to make their relationship promising or lasting.
The couple’s participation in camp culture is contrasted in the citation above with gay male participation in sexual institutions like “gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites.” All those gay male romantics wandering the halls of the baths, clothed only in simple white towels, indicate that there is nothing essentially ironic about (gay male) sex.
That is why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You,” blaring from a bathhouse in Hanoi, is so interesting. Like the wedding dress, the song alerts us to the (probable) presence of gay male culture. “[I]t is probable,” Halperin writes in “What Is Sex For?,” “that at least some bathhouse patrons, especially those of us who go often, have a further purpose in returning to those venues again and again . . . . Could we be in search of something that sex promises but does not, by itself, offer us . . . ,” namely “someone like you”?
Sex “promises” something that it cannot, “by itself,” deliver—and the (probable) presence of gay male culture reveals what sex requires to get to love: irony. Subjects of erôs must learn to “see through” their erotic illusions. Seeing through their erotic illusions, they are enabled to enjoy the “butch number” or the hot sex while also refusing to withdraw from the other person, on account of the sound of their voice, their obsession with Jane Austen, or their personal cosmetics (on account of their failure to perfectly live up to the exacting demands of erotic desire), their worthiness to be loved.
V.
We now recognize camp as an erotic style, a way of combining what is serious and unserious, sacred and profane, passionate and ironic. But we are trying to describe the erotic style appropriate to sex. Describing how camp camps—how, that is, camp manages to combine traditionally opposed, unequal social values—will help us more precisely define the erotic style appropriate to our sex lives.
What camp does is teach us how to demean erotic desire. “Gay may culture,” Halperin writes in How To Be Gay, “has . . . elaborated a distinctive, dissident perspective on romantic love [i.e., erotic desire], which straight people often regard as cynical. . . ” (294). Straight people regard it as cynical because “its irony . . . seems to them to undermine the seriousness and sincerity of love, and thereby demean it” (294, emphasis mine).
“Camp doesn’t preach;” Halperin observes, “it demeans” (191). It demeans the serious, the sacred, the masculine. In other words, camp sets erotic desire free; it breaks “the romantic monopoly on it,” making it “more widely available” for “social uses,” ending “the antagonism between love [i.e., erotic desire] and society, between love [i.e., erotic desire] and friendship, between the happy couple and the community.” It is this “camp sensibility” that, “at their wisest, gay male love [i.e., erotic] relationships exemplify and embody” (295).
Camp demeans erotic desire in a cultural context. In our sexual relationships, fucking is a word that registers something other than respectul, self-edifying coitus. In the sexual sphere, it seems promising to ironize erotic desire by fucking it.
By fucking erotic desire, the subjects of erôs, at least those who participate in gay male culture, are enabled to “see through” their erotic illusions, to see through what is taken as deadly serious, and to recognize it as a role that can be “undeceivedly” enjoyed. The aim is to end antagonisms (e.g., between the sacred and the profane, self and other), to make love (or friendship) with an-other a promising possibility.
VI.
The reason why fucking or demeaning erotic desire matters is latent in the idea of what it promises to make promising: the end of antagonisms, love of/friendship with an-other one. Fucking erotic desire (e.g., masculinity, the Sacred, monogamy, etc.) is a means of democratizing it (or, as Halperin also argues, desublimating it [294]). Fucking erotic desire is the erotic fashion of embodying what are traditionally opposed, unequal social values (e.g., fidelity and infidelity).
Again, a simple social practice, one we may playfully describe as drinking erotic desire, may help us to more clearly define what is at stake in fucking it: democracy or love.
In “Small Town Boy: Neil Bartlett Learns How to Be Gay” (2007), Halperin highlights power inequalities between differently aged gay men. The social practice proposed as a means of negotiating power disparities between said men is, now citing Bartlett, “that man buying his younger boyfriend (slightly embarrassed, but happily drunk) another drink.”
Bartlett cannot think the seemingly simple, everyday practice of an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink without remembering “that man,” Oscar Wilde: “I remember the bizarre twisting of mythologies [i.e., romantic illusions] Wilde used to justify his adoration of young men,” Bartlett writes, “the mixing of a pastiche of Classical pederasty with a missionary zeal for the ‘criminal classes,’ the sense that they, not the boys he left sleeping in [his home in] Chelsea, were his true sons . . . .” Remembering this history, “[o]ur history,” according to Bartlett, “becomes a way of understanding and exploring the change in our [present day] culture [i.e., of writing a history of the present], not simply of reading it as an ‘end.’”
From Bartlett’s perspective, an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink “is not,” Halperin observes, “necessarily a mere recapitulation of archaic and unchanging forms of social hierarchy, upper-class sexual privilege and working-class sexual prostitution.” It is, at least potentially, now again citing Bartlett, “a new kind of relationship, an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men . . . .”
“Differences in age and wealth,” Halperin writes, “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who are asymmetrically situated according to conventional class hierarchies but are brought into approximate equality by the reciprocal exchanges of contemporary gay male life.”
Sex—well, at least understood from within the logic of Adele’s “Someone Like You”—may not be unlike that drink between an older man and his younger boyfriend (perhaps they are sitting at bar while Whitney Houston’s hit song, “How Will I Know?,” plays in the background?). That drink “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who” occupy differently valued social categories and by bringing them “into approximate equality.” Sex, like that drink, may become, to use Bartlett’s terms, “an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men.”
VII.
Monogamy/marriage can’t, as Phillips argues, be an affair—but it is possible that fucking sex may re-make it into a matter “of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men,” two different women, two different people (#83).
Loving monogamy is not unlike dis-believing in God.
Un-faithfulness to God is not what we learn from Mechthild’s example. In Flowing Light, at least Book I, §44, we walk in on Mechthild masturbating; we witness Mechthild’s incredible need to believe in herself. She is both the subject and object of erotic desire.
Mechthild, however, is different from other subjects of erôs, such as the “romantics” we encountered in the lengthy citation from How To Be Gay. Romantics are constantly disappointed when their love-objects, recognized as distinct objects in the world, fail to conform to their erotic illusions. Mechthild is her own love-object.
Mechthild does not admit any space between her and her love-object. There is no room to hope for irony in Mechthild’s erotic life. She is “so utterly formed to [God’s] nature” that “not the slightest thing can be between [her] and [God, her Father by nature].”
Mechthild and gay male romantics do share one thing in common. They look up to the heavens. This is where fidelity can sometimes let people down.
Mechchild’s love story may prove promising, however, for the idea that God, the word par excellence for the deadly serious, the seriously masculine, the Sacred, wholeness/health, etc, isdtf.
The promise of a fuckable God, of a fuckable monogamy, a monogamy we learn to take im-personally or un-seriously, is what God’s fuckablity makes promising: a lasting, loving relationship with an-other, or a loving monogamy. Fucking God, we, at least potentially, empower an-other one, a different one, to excite us.
Significantly, fucking God does not come naturally to us. It is something we must learn to do. The irony is that being a participant in gay male culture is not unlike being a member of the Church. Halperin hints at this in How To Be Gay. The epigraph of the book, Albert Mollegen’s summary of Augustine’s theology, reads: “Let the Christians baptize and the pagans beget.”
Gay male culture, notunlike Christianity, entails enculturation. It is not a birthright. Gay male culture, not unlike monogamy, is unnatural. As such, anyone who finds it persuasive may participate in it. Which makes sense, as gay male culture, not unlike Christianity, not unlike monogamy, is an education in how to love who and what you erotically desire.
One, final irony: if a loving monogamy is what is desired, “it may be heterosexuals, nowadays . . . who need gay male culture more than gay men do themselves” (How To Be Gay, 456).
