Tag Archives: queer

Marco d’Oggiono, The Young Christ, c. 1490-91
25.4 x 18.6 cm, oil on beech
Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid

I.1

Traditional gay male Christian theology is a post-Stonewall (1969) theological movement that unapologetically embraces gay male difference from straightness as a legitimate starting point for Christian theological reflection.³ Traditional gay theologians define gay male difference by looking to history, to the pre-Stonewall/pre-gay-liberation era, specifically to the theory of androgyny.⁴

The tradition of defining (male) homosexuality as a form of androgyny extends back to at least the 1950s. Homosexual activist Henry Hay, for example, refers to homosexuals as an “androgynous minority.” Androgyny generally signifies a “third gender,” a gender at once male/masculine and female/feminine.

In traditional gay theologies, theories of androgyny are intended to explain gay male feminine identification (i.e., gay identification).⁵ They are interpretations of the atypical gendering of gay men as, in some sense, both male/masculine and female/feminine. In what follows, theories of androgyny are figured by the Androgyne.

We begin our exploration of traditional gay theology by discerning the meaning of the Androgyne in these theologies. We will discover that the Androgyne is not only the privileged figure of gay male difference, it is also an interpretation of the sexed/gendered nature of God and Jesus. The Androgyne, as a figure of Jesus, is a figure of redeemed humanity.

As a figure of redeemed humanity, the Androgyne is the norm by which the political character of formalized gay male life, or gay subculture, is judged. Let us suppose gay men are perceived as failing to live up to the exacting sexed/gendered criteria of the Androgyne (e.g., acting too much like normative men). Gay subculture is defined as hell on earth, and the gay Church becomes the subject of redemption. Now let us suppose that gay men are thought to meet the Androgyne’s particular sexed/gendered criteria (e.g., getting the balance between maleness and femaleness just right). Gay subculture is defined as heaven on earth, and the Church becomes the object of redemption.

We continue our exploration of traditional gay theologies by attending to the role gay male subculture plays in them. We will find that gay subculture is disparaged by most gay theologians as a figure of anti-androgynous being. It is, in theological terms, a figure of unredeemed humanity.

Gary David Comstock, in Gay Theology Without Apology (1993), complicates the traditional assessment of gay male subculture as, in a sense, a “fallen” culture. Comstock does not grow weary of gay subculture. It is a reliable source of support for his ministry within the United Church of Christ. In his view, the church is a figure of anti-androgynous being or, in the language of theology, of fallen humanity.

I.2

Animating this exploration of traditional gay male Christian theologies is a desire for more of it, for more theological reflection premised on gay male difference. Unfortunately, traditional gay theology is all but dead. And it is so, I argue, because the Androgyne is a flawed interpretation of gay male difference.⁶

The Androgyne is an inadequate reading of gayness for the following reasons:

• The Androgyne is an overgeneralization of what it is intended to describe: gay male feminine identification. It cannot account for either gay men who do not desire to feminine identify or gay men who define gayness by other means. It cannot account for the diversity of gay male life. Yet, it functions as an identity, a social norm, and so it functions as a figure of disciplinary power in gay male life.
• The Androgyne is not especially good news for women or people of color. The Androgyne, at least in traditional gay male theologies, tends to collapse the difference between sex and gender, confusing social realities with biology/genetics. It tends to figure the naturalization of a normative male social logic, the very logic it wants to resist. The complications multiply when we recognize that sex/gender is also raced, and race is also sex/gendered.
• Finally, as a flawed theory of gayness, the Androgyne cannot give us the world we desire, a gayer world, a world, in the words of Denton Welch, of “more freedom and loveliness.”⁷

I.3

The future of traditional gay male Christian theology depends, I think, on a reinterpretation of gay identification. I reinterpret the meaning of gay identification by building on the queer scholarship of David M. Halperin, especially How To Be Gay (2012).

The choice of Halperin’s queer scholarship to make sense of gay identification is entirely understandable, as How To Be Gay in particular is a thorough, systematic study of the logic and politics of gay identification. How much I cite Halperin may strike one as a less compelling feature of this essay.

Yet, discerning gay difference, what it feels like to be gay, is something we do with other gay men—because gayness is not an entirely personal story. Thus, speaking in as many gay voices as is tolerable/practicable is the proper method for this project.

Nonetheless, my reading of How To Be Gay is truncated. There is no substitute for reading the book. If the idea that “gay is something you do” or that gayness is “not a state or condition” but rather a “mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos: in short, a practice” is interesting to you, then you will want to read How To Be Gay in its entirety (13).

Echoing the voices of other gay men is also meant to correct an additional weakness of traditional gay male Christian theologies. It is striking how little gay theologians feature the voices/experiences of other gay men. I liberally cite gay male theologians.⁸

Featuring the voices of gay men, almost exclusively, may be interpreted as a weakness of this project. I think Mark Jordan is correct:

The false sameness implied by a category like ‘sodomy’ or ‘homosexuality’ is useful for dehumanizing condemnations, but not for careful analysis. If lesbians and gay men must now band together in self-defense, that does not mean that they can be honestly conceived in a single category.⁹

Jordan opts to focus on “male-male desires and actions.” He attends to male-male desires “as much to mark the limits of [his] own experience as to contest a false generalization.”¹⁰

Finally, I believe that “careful analysis” is gay. Consider, for example, D.A. Miller’s contention that “close reading . . . has fallen into total dereliction. . . .”¹¹ For Miller, close reading is “humbled, futile, ‘minoritized.’” Close reading is, in a sense, shameful reading. Miller, however, goes through with his shame, allowing close reading to be what it is: “an almost infantile desire to be close, period, as close as one can get, without literal plagiarism, to merging with the mother-text.”¹²

I.4

It is in and through careful attention to the mother-text, especially but not exclusively How To Be Gay, that I begin to make distinctions between and among different forms of gayness. For example, the history of homosexuality out of gender inversion is, in How To Be Gay, offered as an explanation for a fact of gay male life: not all gay men desire to identify with femininity. We must acknowledge that gay identification is not (and cannot be) an explanation of all forms of gayness

Next, I elaborate on Halperin’s technical and detailed descriptions of gay male culture in “Small Town Boy: Neil Bartlett Learns How to Be Gay” (2007) and in How To Be Gay. I identify and highlight an important distinction in Halperin’s descriptions of gay male life: one between gay-authored gay culture (i.e., gay identity), premised on gay male identification with other gay men, and gay subculture, the distinctive feature of which is gay identification with devalued femininity.

I focus my reading of How To Be Gay on the practice of gay identification. Gay identification is, as we will discover, a cultural practice, and one that is not essentially about gay men. Thus, it is not an identity. Gay identification is something that, in principle, anyone can do. Moreover, we will learn that gay identification with devalued femininity is not the same thing as identification with actual women. Devalued femininity refers to masculinist figures of femininity that almost no one wants to love and that act as proxy identities for a dissident masculinity, a gay masculinity.

Halperin’s description of gay identification avoids the pitfalls of the Androgyne by passing three tests:

• The solidarity test: gay identification is consistent with the political goals of feminism and anti-racism, winning space between sex and gender.
• The gay community test: gay identification constructively accounts for other forms of gayness. It does not presume to define all forms of gayness.
• The good news test: gay identification is good news for all; that is, it is something that, in principle, anyone, male or female, gay or otherwise, can practice.

Passing those three tests, gay identification qualifies as an appropriate social norm. It can adequately regulate our conduct or politics.

I.5

The reinterpretation of gay identification brings us to the important question. Well, it’s the important question if what we want is a future for gay theological reflection, for theological reflection premised on gay difference: What does traditional gay male (Christian) theology mean now?

Now, gay theology is reflection on gay identification with devalued femininity within a religious mythos. Thus, the subject of gay Christian theology is recognizing, describing, and unfolding the implications of gay identifications within the Christian mythos.

But first, we attend to traditional gay male Christian theologies. We now focus our efforts on discerning the meaning of the Androgyne in these theologies.

II.

II.1

The Androgyne first appears in traditional gay Christian theology in Loving Women, Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (1974), co-edited by William R. Johnson and lesbian-feminist theologian Sally Gearhart. It is a collection of historically significant essays, including several authored by the editors, that outline the history of the struggle for gay inclusion within the U.S. Church. It constitutes the beginning of traditional gay theology.

Androgyny is a prominent feature of Johnson’s contribution to Loving Women, Loving Men, “The Good News of Gay Liberation” (90-117). Johnson asserts that same-sex sex is not what defines gay and lesbian difference. According to Johnson, being gay and lesbian “involves acceptance of the androgynous . . . nature of human life” (112). Johnson argues that “[t]he emergence of Gay consciousness has enabled us to understand that our uniqueness lies in the fullness of our feminine/masculine personhood” (112).

“Feminine/masculine personhood” is also a signifier of bi-sexuality. Johnson argues that “[b]isexuality, which may well be the most natural sexual orientation, is reflective of the androgynous nature of human life” (112). We may have sexual identities, primary feelings for one sex, but we are, according to Johnson, essentially bisexual: capable of loving men and women in an “integrated and complete way” (112).

Acceptance of our androgynous nature enables us to understand that “God is, in fact, androgynous . . . ” (113). The goal of gay advocacy in the church is to declare this truth. “Feminists and Gay people in the church are calling the church,” Johnson asserts, “to the urgent task of dealing with the theological . . . consequences of affirming an androgynous God, revealed in an androgynous Christ to androgynous women and men” (113).

II.2

John E. Fortunato alludes to the androgynous God in AIDS: The Spiritual Dilemma (1987). Explaining his use of both masculine and feminine pronouns for God, he asserts, “If God is not the totality both of masculinity and femininity—anima and animus—we are all in trouble” (5). Although Fortunato does not use the term Androgyne, he, like Sally Gearhart before him, imagines God as the “the totality both of masculinity and femininity.”¹³

God (as Androgyne) is a figure of wholeness for Fortunato. Hence his distrust, expressed in his earlier work, Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians (1983), of what he calls “the myth.”

“The myth” is, for Fortunato, a figure of the separated heterosexual ego, and so of a heterosexual “society of system and structures” (25). “The myth” blocks the ego’s natural pathway toward transcendence. It gives rise to “mythologization, the construction of a society of systems and structures aimed at” sustaining the idea that the ego is separated from (the androgynous) God (i.e., “the totality both of masculinity and femininity”) (25).

Jesus, according to Fortunato, invites us to love what is beyond ego. The political project is (accepting) exile, stepping out of the myth, and embracing transcendence or androgynous wholeness.

John J. McNeill embraces androgyny in Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Lovers, Families, and Friends (1988). In this text, McNeill returns to and elaborates on the themes and terms he introduced in The Church and the Homosexual (1976). In Taking a Chance, he builds on a Jungian insight regarding a supposed heightened religious sensitivity among gay men and lesbians:

One of the special insights of the Gospels that gay and lesbian experience has given us is an extraordinary sense of the mature fullness of the person of Christ. Christ transcended all heterosexist role models of his day. Lesbians and gays can be particularly sensitive to this androgynous fullness, and thus can be extraordinarily free to realize that fullness in their lives (204-205).

J. Michael Clark’s theory of androgyny stands out in this tradition because it is well-defined. In Gay Being, Divine Presence: Essays in Gay Spirituality (1987), Clark introduces the themes and terms he unfolds throughout his theological career.

Clark initiates his theological project by exploring Jung’s concept of “primordial image” (5). Clark contends that “[p]enetrating these archetypal or mythic dimensions of gay being can subsequently deepen the psychic richness of work in gay spirituality” (5).

The image of the womb is, for Clark, significant. The “womb archetypally” is “anything enwrapping or surrounding, such as a city, a ‘gay ghetto,’ or a gay bar . . . . The gay bar may in fact be the most highly mythological institution in the gay subculture” (7).

When the gay male enters the bar, he reenters the womb. There he “heroically” unites “life, death, and rebirth by consciously penetrating the dark, unconscious world of bar time and reemerging to rejoin the dayworld activities . . . ” (7). In fact, by entering the bar, or the Underworld, “the Ego is turned upside down” (8).

Other attractive bodies threaten the ego, which is then dissolved “in the frenzy of drugs, alcohol, dance, and orgasm” (8). Yet, the ego reemerges from the Underworld “differently self-known . . . the gay male becomes a mythical or spiritual balancer of night and day . . . transcends oppositions” (9).¹⁴

Transcendence in Clark’s theology is characterized as “the internalization and acceptance of, rather than an opposition to, the Anima or feminine attributes, enabling a self-conscious, generative creativity . . . an internal balance in the gay male suggests the other archetype, the homosexual Androgyne” (10).

Clark further contends that an “androgynous spirituality could facilitate liaisons with other marginalized persons [e.g., lesbian women, Native Americans, etc.] which might in turn heal the wounds of our environment and our relationships. Such a spirituality could thus potentially reconcile polarized opposites and re-engender a balanced, creative tension of these” (46).

Theologically, Clark is at least open to Rosemary Radford Ruether’s suggestion that Jesus is bisexual: one who resists gender dualism (21-22).¹⁵ In A Place to Start: Toward An Unapologetic Gay Liberation Theology (1989), Clark argues:

Gay men and lesbians, in particular, as those people defined as intermediate, as between and therefore as threatening to rigid polarization, need to insist in our theologizing that neither God, nor people, nor genders and gender roles, nor sexuality, need be dichotomized at all. Both/and is possible (63).

II.3

Gary David Comstock does not explicitly mention androgyny in Gay Theology Without Apology (1993), but his understanding of gay difference is influenced by it. “To survive and flourish,” Comstock argues, “the relationships of gay men often transcend or dismiss the rigidity and insularity of established categories” (5). Comstock defines what it means to “transcend or dismiss” norms in and through several stories.

Comstock relocates to San Francisco and forms a household of five people of incredibly diverse backgrounds and circumstances. This household is possible because of “the unplanned outcome of the unusual interactions of street life and nightlife in the gay ghetto at that time. We thought of ourselves as ‘sisters’ . . . [what is] usually considered masculine relaxed . . . [what is] usually thought of as feminine . . . affirmed” (18).

One way Comstock affirms the feminine is by wearing a ball gown (one of his gay male friends just so happened to have several to share) to a party:

With excitement and nervousness we all went [to the party] in dresses—not to mock or imitate women but to stop mocking ourselves, to stop worshipping the trappings and security of divisions that precisely define maleness and femaleness. We came alive . . . we had so much fun that the demons fled (18).

Comstock theologically affirms the “feminine” in and through identification with the abject biblical figure of Vashti (49). Queen Vashti’s story is related in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Esther 1:1-22. Comstock is especially moved by verses 1-12, condensed here: “On the seventh day [of the banquet], when the king [Ahasuerus] was merry with wine, he commanded . . . [that Queen Vashti come] before the [him], wearing the royal crown, in order to show her beauty; for she was fair to behold. But Queen Vashti refused to come at the King’s command . . . .”

Vashti refuses the summons of patriarchy; she is our example. In refusing patriarchal rigidity, one discovers a deeply relational God. (127ff). Jesus becomes a friend and not a master (98). We become friends with one another (138).

Richard Cleaver’s liberation theology is informed by a theory of androgyny. In Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology (1995), Cleaver writes, “[Sally Gearhart] comes up with a new understanding of the [Genesis] stories . . . : ‘An accurate translation of the Hebrew word for god (Elohim) in the first Genesis narrative (1:27) posits her/him as an androgynous (a gynandrous) being, having both sexes complete within her/him’” (65-66).¹⁶ Cleaver contends Gerhart is, at least on this point, “in solidly orthodox company” (66).

Cleaver bridges the insight that God is the Androgyne “with the situation of lesbians and gay men” by citing, again, Gearhart: “In this light, it is not the Lesbian or the Gay man who is ‘unnatural’ but rather the heterosexual person” (66).¹⁷ The lesbian and gay man are natural because they, like Jesus, recognize that “loving human relations take priority over everything else” (49). The political goal is “to make the categories [i.e., heterosexuality and homosexuality] irrelevant” (100, emphasis mine).

The influence of the Androgyne begins to emerge in Robert Goss’s first major work, Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto (1993). Gay/Lesbian politics is one of both resistance and insurrection; it is directed at sharp distinctions between gender and sexual identity. “Same-sex genital practice threatens notions of masculinity and femininity upon which gender roles are constructed and differentiated,” Goss argues. “Gay and lesbian sexual practices generate gay and lesbian identities” (2-3).

Gay and lesbian identities are formed in relation to “heterosocial definitions” and represent a “counterpractice that deconstructs the rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity and social constructions based upon these definitions” (3). “Gay and lesbian discourse,” Goss writes, “challenges the negative heterosexist definitions of ourselves; it transgresses those social definitions to produce our own discursive practice” (28).

Goss develops his understanding of “our own discursive practice” in Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (2002). In this text, Goss builds on Mark Jordan’s description of Catholic clerical “effeminacy” to develop his own “female masculinity [also ‘(fe)masculinity’] . . . a gender crossing at odds with current hetero-masculinist ideologies” (37). “Female masculinity” refers to the kinds of femininity men can perform when men identify with females/femininity. “I accept my ‘butch’ masculinity,” Goss writes, “and my (fe)masculinity . . . ” (Queering Christ, 54).

Jesus is the model for transgressive discursive practice in Jesus Acted Up and Queering Christ. “Jesus basileia message and praxis,” Goss argues, “signified the political transformation of his society into a radically egalitarian, new age, where sexual, social, religious and political distinctions would be irrelevant” (Jesus Acted Up, 73, Queering Christ, 155 emphasis mine).¹⁸

II.4

The Androgyne defines gay male (Christian) difference in traditional gay theologies. It is an interpretation of the atypical gendering of gay men as both male/masculine and female/feminine. Moreover, the Androgyne is the hermeneutical frame through which gay male Christian theologians interpret the Christian mythos. The Androgyne figures the sexed/gendered nature of God and of Jesus. As a figure of Jesus, the Androgyne represents redeemed human nature.

As a figure of ideal or redeemed humanity, the Androgyne is also a social norm. It regulates, therefore, how we are to embody gayness or what it means to be (un)redeemed human beings. Gay male subculture represents the politics of (un)redeemed gayness in traditional gay theologies. Our task now is to reread gay theologies, this time to understand the role gay male subculture plays in them.

III.

III.1

Johnson and Gearhart loosely associate gay subculture with militancy in Loving Woman, Loving Men. “‘Gay,’ though it had not the militancy that it has in 1974,” Johnson and Gearhart assert, “did have meaning ten years ago beyond its own subculture” (2). Later, in their telling of the history of the struggle for inclusion within the Church, “The Gay Movement In The Church,” they include a cautionary tale about said militancy (67-88).

In 1970, Johnson, and a fellow student at the Pacific School of Religion, Nick Benton, sought ordination as ministers in the United Church of Christ (UCC). Benton is described as academically gifted. However, his pathway to ordination is, according to Johnson and Gearhart, “complicated by [Benton’s] militant political posture” (69). Benton eventually withdrew from the ordination process and the UCC, “declaring the denomination hopelessly sexist” (69).

Johnson’s successful completion of the ordination process, making him the first openly gay male ordained in the history of Christendom, is contrasted with Benton’s failure to complete the same process. Johnson, like Benton, is described as academically accomplished. Johnson is also described as “well respected” and someone with an “admirable record of service to the church.” Significantly, Johnson is “not politically militant.” He is “an almost embarrassingly ideal candidate for ordination” (69, emphasis mine).

What it means to be either “militant” or “not militant” is not precisely defined by Johnson and Gearhart. However, Benton’s assessment of the UCC as “hopelessly sexist” is entirely consistent with Gearhart’s theological evaluation of the wider church in her essay, “The Miracle of Lesbianism” (118-152).

“We realize that no matter how hard we work to alter it,” Gearhart argues, “the church to be the church must continue its dehumanizing practices. It is the enemy of feminism and the enemy of woman. For the church to ‘become’ what it must in order to be humanized (womanized, Lesbianized), it will first of all have to commit to unequivocal suicide” (145, emphasis original).

Theologically, we must, according to Gearhart, begin again, “razing [the theological edifice] to the ground . . . . A womanization, a Lesbianization of theology is not a reformist move to incorporate a woman’s point of view.’ It is an absolute and uncompromising denial of what has gone before” (142, emphasis original).

Gearhart forcefully argues that for a woman to find “the ‘man’ inside herself,” normative masculinity must die (124). She is clear that the theological and political goal for women is not to man/masculine-identify; it is to woman/feminine identify (143).

Johnson is equally clear that gay men face a very different social and ecclesial reality. He observes that while gay male Christians will be viewed with some suspicion for affirming “those qualities considered feminine—emotion, sensitivity, and cooperativeness, men in our society can never fully lose male privilege . . . . Accepting the responsibility for enlightening the church may lose us some privileges, but we will not starve,” as we can always find work outside of the church (97, 96, emphasis mine). Gay men have much greater freedom than do (lesbian) women to work within the church because, it would seem, our maleness/masculinity is softened/reformed. It is not entirely erased.

I speculate that Johnson’s theory of androgyny does not do for Benton what it does for Johnson because Johnson has access to what Benton does not. Johnson has access to a degree of (tolerance for) normative masculinity.

Johnson and Gearhart loosely associate early gay male subculture with militancy, signifying, it would seem, hostility to androgynous being. Most gay male Christian theologians will follow in this tradition, characterizing gay male subculture as anti-Androgyne.

III.2

Fortunato defines gay subculture in terms of his understanding of myth, as a “minimyth,” as heterosexual society in miniature. One response to “the gay predicament,” to being “blocked from integration within the mythic system” is, according to Fortunato in Embracing the Exile (1983), denying the inherent exclusion of gays from American society (a nexus of mythical systems that “heterosexuals use to allay their angst” and that are “off-limits to homosexuals” [39]). Denying their inherent exclusion from the fabric of American society, gays embrace a problematic “minimyth”: “They run from [the exile] for a while, escaping into some part of the strange, wonderful, and convoluted minimyth that the gay subculture offers” (39).

Fortunato defines post-Stonewall gay subculture as a miniature version of “the myth,” of heterosexual society (25). He proposes a radical exile: a marginal existence relative to the myth. The political goal is to persuade those trapped within the myth to embrace exilic existence, a life of progressive, androgynous wholeness in God (126-127).

McNeill reverses Fortunato’s mythic logic. “Every culture must provide a set of ‘mythic’ truths, a belief system,” McNeil argues in Taking a Chance on God (1988), “that touches every member of society, drawing them together into a whole by giving them a group identity, providing some form of trusting relationship between the individual and a benign universe” (17, emphasis mine). What makes a myth (and religion) pathological is constriction or its failure to touch “on every member of society.”

The gay Christian community, according to McNeill, teaches the dominant society, founded on a type of “minimyth,” a myth that does not embrace the androgynous fullness expressed in Christ, how to love again. What McNeill advocates for is the loss of a pathological self: a self that is unable to unfold itself, unable, that is, to love what is beyond itself.

With Fortunato, McNeill rejects the “so-called gay life-style,” by which he means gay subculture, as related to something other than love (135). AIDS, McNeill argues, helps bring “love out of the closet.” AIDS brings “those involved in loving, committed relationships” out of the closet (135).

Cleaver follows McNeill in embracing a view of androgyny that signifies an ever-expanding connectedness with all people. In Know My Name (1995), Cleaver argues that instead of looking for gay and lesbian relationships in the Bible, “we must look for stories of people breaking out of the slavery of social and personal relations patterned by gender or class or race or any other category that divides people and allows one group to keep another from self-determination” (27).

By gender, Cleaver means “the system of social meaning that our society attaches to the biological categories of male and female . . . [and] woven into a structure of oppression we call ‘patriarchy’” (27). Gay men and lesbians are not oppressed because of “sexuality,” but rather because our sexual practices do not conform to normative gender codes (50).

Cleaver acknowledges that he thinks outside the “metropolitan centers of gay life” (viii). Although he thinks outside the everyday experience of formalized gay male life, Cleaver believes urban gay centers are “shortcuts” (35). The movement “for liberation” has been reduced “to a system of commercialized products and institutions—bars, publications, gyms, fashions, cruises” (35). We have defined gayness as a lifestyle “rather than as membership in an oppressed class” (35). We are, Cleaver thinks, setting ourselves up for political defeat (36, 113).

Following Gearhart, Cleaver argues that we, those made in the image of the androgynous God, are drawn to one another. Salvation is not personal. We cannot do the work from home (76). Cleaver writes:

The power of loving where it is forbidden—the power of extending love across boundaries, the power of offering love where we are not supposed to—is a countersign of the narrow society that forbids such loving. Drawing ever-tighter boundaries around the universe of acceptable recipients of our love is the hallmark of the godless society . . . reordered toward production . . . . We know something else too, having so much practice at blocking our loving impulses: love dammed up is all the stronger when set free (81, 83).

Cleaver’s liberative project requires us to become “flaming queens” (144). “The vanguard of the Stonewall Rebellion . . . were flamers . . . . The flamers show us what we can accomplish when we are fairies down to the feet . . . . Their example is profoundly Christian” (ibid). “The vanguard of the Stonewall Rebellion,” that is, turn their passion into legitimate political action.

Gay subculture is, for Cleaver, a betrayal of the legacy of Stonewall. The Stonewall movement is connected with androgynous being, the overcoming of all boundaries separating people from one another, rather than to a commodified, separatist lifestyle or gay subculture.

III.3

Early Clark does not share in the negative evaluation of gay subculture. Remember that for the Clark of Gay Being, Divine Presence (1987), the gay bar, the “gay ghetto,” is a figure of the womb, a space of androgynous trans-formation.

Clark does, however, nuance his assessment of gay (male) subculture in A Place To Start (1989). Clark, riffing on Fortunato’s concept of “minimyth,” argues that gay subculture is “shaped by, in reaction to, heterosexism and homophobia” (27). It is not entirely free from the effects of the myth. Thus, our gay theologizing cannot simply be informed by gay subculture (i.e., gay being/sexuality); it must also be informed by the “‘prophetic-liberating’ themes of steadfast love, of justice, of love for neighbor, of a God who favors the outcast . . . ” (i.e., divine presence/spirituality) (27). Yet, Clark continues to contend that gay men, even “within a frequently ghettoized subculture,” challenge gender roles “in sex and elsewhere, through our clothing, mannerisms, and ‘camp’” (141).

Clark’s understanding of gay subculture changes in the 1990s, starting with A Defiant Celebration: Theological Ethics and Gay Sexuality (1990), a sexual ethics informed by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Clark offers a sexual ethics that falls between “sexually compulsive acting out” (i.e., total immersion in gay male subculture) and “disappearing into the suburbs with our lovers” (i.e., total disengagement from gay male subculture). In Defiant Celebration, Clark is trying to chart a pathway between promiscuity and monogamy (9).

The theology of Carter Heyward informs Clark’s sexual ethics. “Our sexuality,” Heyward contends, “is our desire to participate in making love, making justice, in the world; our drive toward one another; our movement in love; our progression of our sense of being bonded together in life and death.”¹⁹ Normative/redeemed sexuality is deeply relational.

Sex for the sake of sex is, according to Clark, a patriarchal practice, rooted in deep anxiety about one’s masculinity. Citing Arthur Evans, Clark argues that “the great majority of gay men are acutely anxiety-ridden about their masculinity . . . . Among such gay men there is often an extreme hostility to feminine-identified [Clark adds “or androgynous”] men” (27).²⁰ The “great majority of gay men” are, according to Clark, prone to resist androgynous being, or sexuality that is an expression of both pleasure (or masculinity) and deep relationality (or femininity).

Clark’s sexual practice is an object of his theological reflection. He explains his interest in S/M in A Lavender Cosmic Pilgrim: Further Ruminations on Gay Spirituality, Theology, and Sexuality (1990). He argues that S/M enables him both to reclaim his “battered masculinity” and to redefine his masculinity (69, 75).

In his Theologizing Gay: Fragments of Liberation Activity (1991), Clark returns to S/M and familiar themes. In this book, we learn that leather sex, “at least symbolically, takes gay distinctiveness a further, definite step away from heteroassimiliation” (16). While promiscuity is a figure of heteropatriarchal enculturation, multi-partner leather sex is described as, at least ideally, “truly mutual, and utterly unabusive . . . . [It] offers models for equality and respect, for the integration of gay sexuality and spiritual transcendence . . . ” (19).

From the standpoint of S/M, Clark re-defines gay subculture as “a hetero-construction which gay men have simply accepted and then acted out in the extreme (at least pre-AIDS), from bathhouses to orgies, etc.,” a culture that lives on in the era of safe-sex (48-49). The primary difference, for Clark, between the appropriateness of (exploring) leather sex with multiple partners and the inappropriateness of promiscuity is that the former, as Clark understands it, comports well with Heyward’s assessment of deeply relational sexuality.

In Beyond Our Ghettos: Gay Theology in Ecological Perspective (1993), Clark circles back to Fortunato and McNeill by imagining a progressive transformation of the (hetero-patriarchal) ego. For Clark, who is now HIV positive, gay subculture is ego. Its weakness is showcased by its failure to protect “us from homophobic antigay violence or from AIDS” (x, 93). Even so, Clark continues to believe that gay subcultural practices, rightly understood, may help us to construct a gay eco-theological viewpoint:

One resonance [of theology premised on radical immanence] for urbanized gay men in particular is that sunbathing, bicycling, exercising and bodybuilding, even the body sweat of dancing—once we get past the encultured sexual subtexts and learn to embrace them and value them as things in themselves—these begin to open us to . . . earthly embodied immanence of the divine in all things . . . (51).

Any hope for the redemption of gay subculture vanishes with the publication of Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows (1997). Defying the Darkness means resisting gay subculture. Clark now claims that he is “queer.”

By queer Clark means no-saying to “anything and everything that denies the fullness of life to gay men and lesbians or to those living with HIV/AIDS” (6).²¹ HIV/AIDS is, for Clark, not so easily understood as merely a natural evil. “[I]t is extremely difficult to separate [HIV/AIDS] from human acts of responsibility or hatred” (41). What this means, pointedly, is that we cannot separate HIV/AIDS from “social/relational entanglements—either from the ways in which any of us might have contributed to exposing ourselves or others to HIV . . . ” (41).

HIV/AIDS becomes a sign, for Clark, of the irresponsible decadence of gay subculture:

Tragically, HIV/AIDS becomes a powerful sign . . . of the extent to which we gay men have been willing to wound one another with our phallic weapons—from protesting bathhouse closings a decade ago, to advocating multiple sexual encounters as the monolithic qualification of liberated gay identity, to failing to support what too often become undervalued and consequently broken relationships (49).²²

Clark begins his theological career by radically embracing gay subculture as a spiritual space, a womb, of androgynous transformation. He later nuances his position, acknowledging that gay subculture is not entirely immune from patriarchal influences. Ultimately, he rejects gay subculture as a culture of patriarchal conformity rather than of androgynous transformation.

Goss’s understanding of gay subculture also moves from positive to negative. Goss, in Jesus Acted Up (1993), argues that the “Stonewall Rebellion was the catalyst for the creation of a public gay/lesbian subculture” (45). It is within gay subculture that gay/lesbian aesthetics are shaped. “Current gay/lesbian aesthetics are both innovative and transgressive” (46). And said aesthetics are premised on the liberation of “desire/pleasure” (46). “A visible gay/lesbian community becomes an alternative form of social practice that not only nurtures but also challenges heterosexist social practices” (47).

In Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (2002)—a text often identified as marking the transition from gay theology to queer theology—the term gay subculture drops out of Goss’s analysis entirely. This is not an unexpected development, as Goss more-or-less defines the gay subculture of Jesus Acted Up as “queer culture,” as, in some sense, a subculture within a subculture, one opposed both to “the ghetto” and to “heterosexual signification.”

Goss develops his understanding of what queer culture signifies in Queering Christ. Queer clarifies the difference between gay subculture, a term perhaps too easily confused with the development of post-Stonewall communities pejoratively defined as “ghettos,” and queer culture: the privileged site of androgynous transformation, of “(fe)masculinity.”

III.4

Comstock’s elaboration of gay subculture is unique among traditional gay theologies in that he does not grow weary of it. Gay subculture is, in Comstock’s theology, both a site of androgynous transformation and an indispensable resource for his ministry within the UCC. Comstock’s discontent is directed at the church rather than at gay subculture.

In 1986 Comstock delivers the keynote address for the UCC’s Coalition for Lesbian/Gay Concerns. It is entitled, “Aliens in the Promised Land?” The substance of Comstock’s address is defined by one sentence: “I find that the Church remains the place, or certainly a prominent place, where I am least comfortable as a gay man, the place where I feel defensive and least encouraged to share the most meaningful and intimate parts of my life” (134). What Comstock so powerfully describes in that sentence is how it feels like to be an openly gay man seeking ordination in the UCC in the second decade after the Stonewall rebellion.

Comstock’s description of how it feels to be an openly gay man in the UCC centers on the church’s refusal to cherish gay desire, “the most meaningful and intimate parts” of gay male life. In his address Comstock shares that his home church refused to recommend him for ordination on account of his refusal to keep quiet about gay desire. And even if his church had decided to recommend him for ordination, Comstock observes “that in the 20-year, post-Stonewall history . . . the UCC has ordained only two open lesbians and one openly gay man” (138).

The greatest obstacle to the ordination of openly gay and lesbian people is, according to Comstock, the governing structure of the UCC. While Comstock acknowledges that the UCC has made “very good” national statements regarding gay men and lesbians, he argues that national statements cannot change the homophobic and heterosexist conditions of the local church, the locus of power in the UCC. Comstock concludes that the “[UCC] is a denomination that promises more than what [it] delivers” (137).

In the final pages of “Aliens in the Promised Land?,” Comstock charts a course out of the untenable situation for gay men seeking ordination in the UCC. The way out is, for Comstock, the gay and lesbian community outside of the Church and denomination.

Comstock observes that “the leaders and workers in organizations that serve the [gay] community’s needs are often lesbians and gay men with seminary degrees.” Gay and lesbian people, Comstock recognizes, are doing ministry outside the Church and within “antiviolence projects and AIDS projects . . . counseling services, and efforts to combat racism and sexism . . . ” (141). Thus, he encourages gay men and lesbians to take a risk and to follow Queen Vashti’s example (Esther 1:1-22). Comstock encourages gays and lesbians to reject the summons of oppressive, masculinist authority (i.e., the C/church, denomination, etc.).

Vashti does not, however, make sense of Comstock’s ministry within the church. Comstock, in his Gay Theology Without Apology (1993), begins to move toward Johnson’s theory of androgyny—except that in Gay Theology Without Apology, gay subculture is the ghost of Benton.

Comstock begins his theological narrative in 1983. The HIV/AIDS crisis is in its earliest stages, and Comstock is a volunteer counselor for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City. He is caring for “a very poor Puerto Rican gay man who lived in a single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel . . .” (3). “What I provided was company,” Comstock writes, “I simply dropped by on a regular basis . . . to chat, gossip, be there. I was a steady, undemanding friend [to Estaban]” (3).

Estaban teaches Comstock how to do theology without seeking the approval of the supposed authorities: “Estaban is the model for the unapologetic approach that I take. The ‘gay theology without apology’ that I develop here examines the Bible and Christianity [for the purpose] of fitting them into and changing them according to the particular experiences of lesbian/bisexual/gay people” (4). Several pages later, he makes a similar point, but in the context of his ministry within the church:

My own current participation in the church is predicated on having left it, on finding welcome and nurture in the nonchurched lesbian/gay community, and then on returning, strengthened and confident as a gay man, to try to make a place for myself and other[s] . . . within it. My reliable source of support for doing this remains lesbian and gay men outside of the church; and I often find myself retreating to them . . . (101, emphasis mine).

Comstock seems to have learned a lesson from Esther (Vashti’s replacement): sometimes you have to fit in. “Esther . . . is,” according to Comstock, “an excellent student in the art of becoming lovely and beautiful in the eyes of important men.” In other words, “we cannot refuse, resist, and assert ourselves completely at all times, at every obstacle” (53, 59). Yet, it is the spirit of Vashti/Benton (i.e., gay subculture) that strengthens him as he plays Esther’s game within “the kingdom.”

In 1986 Comstock is on his way out of the UCC, but by 1993 Comstock is participating in the church. The source of authority for his theology and ministry within the church is gay subculture, the gay and lesbian (Christian) community outside the confines of the church. Gay subculture is also a reliable source of support for his ministry within an ecclesial ethos that cannot be relied upon to accept the loves and gifts of gay men (18). Gay men and gay subculture re-form Comstock’s theological analysis (rather than the other way around).

III.5

We may discern two, opposing definitions of contemporary gay male subculture in our reading of traditional gay male Christian theologies:

• Early Clark/Comstock: contemporary gay male subculture is the source of pre-Stonewall androgynous knowledge. It resists the patriarchal Church and enables ecclesial and social transformation/reform.
• Johnson, McNeill, Late Clark, et. al.: contemporary gay male subculture is, like the unreformed Church, anti-Androgyne. It is the gay (male) Christian community (or, more broadly, the gay [male] religious community) that is the locus of pre-Stonewall androgynous knowledge and so of religious and social transformation.²³

It is, however, worth asking: Does the Androgyne make sense of gayness, and does it give us the life that we want? Gay male theologians do not critically assess either the Androgyne or its livability as a social norm, as a politics. They do not ask if the Androgyne delivers what it promises.

I think the Androgyne undermines the fabulous goal and spirit of traditional gay theology: more freedom from patriarchal norms.

IV.

IV.I

The Androgyne represents an interpretation of the atypical gendering of gay male life as both male/masculine and female/feminine. It is intended to make sense of (rather than deny) the normative social logic, both straight and gay, that associates male homosexuality with femininity.

The Androgyne is, however, an overgeneralization (or oversimplification) of the phenomenon it is meant to describe, namely gay male identification with femininity. The Androgyne is, in gay theologies, a universal or meta-explanation of gay difference. However, it cannot constructively explain gay men who deny any relationship to femininity, to gay male difference. It cannot constructively explain gay men who define gayness by some other means than identification with femininity.

The Androgyne cannot constructively account for all forms of gayness, by which I mean it performs a disciplinary function in gay male life. It can only explain other forms of gayness as unredeemed, inhuman forms of desire. Our only option is to “convert” to the Androgyne or . . . ?

IV.2

The Androgyne is not good news for everyone. Johnson, for example, acknowledges that gay men face a social and ecclesial situation dissimilar to the one faced by both lesbians and heterosexual women. Yet, he does not seriously consider how his theory of androgyny may (not) work for women. Let us consider the example of Hillary Clinton.

Hillary switched out skirts (the typical style of a First Lady) for pantsuits in the 1990s when male photographers started taking (or attempting to take) up-the-skirt shots of her. But Hillary’s clothing style(s) did nothing to protect her from the normative male gaze, from normative male thinking about a woman in power. Writing for the New York Times in 1993, Michael Kelly asserts, “While an encompassing compassion is the routine mode of public existence for every First Lady, there are two great differences in the case of Mrs. Clinton: She is serious and she has power.”

One cover of Spy Magazine reveals the sex/gender politics that framed Hillary as a powerful First Lady. According to the cover of Spy Magazine, what Hillary’s fashion style is attempting to hide from public view is her dick. Her adoption of the pantsuit, the suit being the style of men in power, only intensified the idea that she is the one “wearing the pants.”

Throughout the 1990s Hillary is portrayed as “the man.” And it is not a compliment. A masculine white woman is, from a normative male perspective (i.e., the perspective of the dominant culture), a man-hating woman, an emasculating woman, a dominatrix eager to stuff a man’s asshole with her cock.²⁴

Identification with male/masculinity does not do for women what identification with female/femininity does for gay men. It works differently for women because by identification with male/masculine, gay theologians mean identification with actual (normative) males. Gay theologians tend, that is, to collapse the distinction between sex and gender.

The relationship of sex to gender is contested in gender studies. Judith Butler argues that sex is an effect of gender. Gayle Rubin argues that gender is an effect of sex.²⁵ Notice, however, that sex is not a synonym for gender, and gender is not a synonym for sex.

One significant political goal of anti-social politics, a politics of resistance to gender norms, including feminist politics, is to win space between sex and gender, to win space between, for example, female (sex) and femininity (gender). One reason why winning space between sex and gender is a goal of feminism(s) is because femininity is itself a masculinist social construction. So, when the difference between sex and gender is collapsed, the effect is to naturalize a masculinist understanding of women; it is to confuse gender with biology/genetics.

Clark, for example, argues that woman/femininity = moral reasoning, while man/masculinity = sexuality/dominance. In this example, women must man/masculine identify to access their bodies, and men must woman/feminine identify to access moral reasoning. Clark’s androgynous logic does reverse the typical formula that associates women with body and men with rationality—but Clark’s androgyny is unflattering to women and men, and it is manifestly false.²⁶

IV.3

The consequences of collapsing the distinction between sex and gender multiply when we recognize that sex/gender is also raced and race is also sexed/gendered. Collapsing the distinction between sex/gender naturalizes a white male/masculine racist logic.

“The gendering of whiteness as dominant, as global sign of civilization, and therefore as male . . . has its deep roots in ancient genderings of reality,” argues Laurel Schneider in “What Race Is Your Sex?” The sex/gender logic of Androgyne becomes even clearer when its terms are also raced: male = masculine/dominant = white, while female = feminine/submissive = not white male. Schneider describes how what is “not white male” is socially organized according to a white male racist sex/gender/race logic.

“The explicit gendering of race, however, could only emerge,” Schneider notes, “with the invention of race as a universal concept that occurred in the pseudo-science of race theories in the mid-nineteenth century” (153). The nineteenth-century prohibition of slave marriage, barring slaves from both white/heterosexual gender norms and economic uplift, resulted in the racialization of, according to Schneider, “gender all the more, in this case through prohibitions on gender practices for certain races” (157, emphasis original). Schneider observes:

Such prohibitions served further to ‘feminize’ slave men except where they could dominate slave women, and to ‘masculinize’ slave women, except where they could submit to slave or free men. Most of all, such prohibitions helped construct the ‘natural’ rightness of white upper-class sex and gender practices as paradigmatic of true and originary human ideals . . . (157, emphasis original).

The feminization of Black men is, within a white male racist logic, required because Black men are not white, and so they cannot be equal either to white men or to white women. Black men, however, must retain a degree of masculinity to warrant their power over Black women. The masculinization of Black women serves a white male racist logic by both distinguishing Black women from “proper,” white womanhood and by justifying Black and white male domination of Black women.²⁷

Following the logic of androgyny in traditional gay white male theologies, Black women must identify with man/masculinity to claim their full personhood. In so doing, Black women are confirming a white racist (and still socially operative) construction of Black female subjectivity.

The white racist construction of Black men is, you will notice, a form of androgyny. Black men, within the white male racist logic of race/sex/gender, are both masculine (men relative to Black women) and feminine (women relative to white men). By identifying with the figure of the Androgyne, Black men are confirming a white racist (and still socially operative) construction of Black male subjectivity.²⁸

IV.4

Naturalizing gender can also take a second form, namely “exile.” Exile signifies an ideal space, either the gay Church or gay subculture, a space somehow beyond the influence of patriarchal norms.²⁹ However, as the Androgyne in exile indicates, exilic existence is an unhelpful fantasy. It does not save us from the fraught Western politics of sex/gender/race.

Consider, for a moment, the social implications inherent in a fantasy of “exile.” Vashti, you recall from Comstock’s theology, radically refuses patriarchy. Vashti refuses to come at the King’s command. As a consequence, she is displaced as Queen. Vashti, like Benton, is never heard from again. A strategy of exile reinforces the naturalness of normative sex/gender/race politics by tacitly accepting its inevitability.

The Androgyne in traditional gay Christian theologies represents an important effort to resist patriarchal norms in gay male life. The goal and spirit of traditional gay theology are righteous. The Androgyne as a figure of gayness is, however, flawed. It does not give us a gayer world or more freedom from patriarchal norms. It naturalizes the sex/gender terms of patriarchy and is a form of masculinist disciplinary power in gay male life.

IV.5

If what we want is a future for traditional gay male Christian theology, what we require is a reinterpretation of gay male identification with femininity. Our reinterpretation, to avoid the pitfalls of the Androgyne, must pass three tests:

• The good news test: gay identification must be good news for all, that is, something that, in principle, anyone, male or female, can practice.
• The solidarity test: gay identification must be consistent with the political goals of feminism and anti-racism, winning space between sex and gender.
• The gay community test: gay identification must constructively account for other forms of gayness.

Passing those three tests, gay identification qualifies as an appropriate social norm. It can adequately regulate our conduct or politics.

We begin our reassessment of gay identification by making distinctions between and among different forms of gayness. The history of homosexuality out of gender inversion explains a fact of gay male life: not all gay men gay identify.

V.

V.1

“[H]omosexuality, as a distinctive classification of sexual behavior, sexual desire, and sexual subjectivity,” David M. Halperin reminds us in How To Be Gay (2012), “was originally precipitated out of the experience and concept of gender inversion” (43). Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal referred to it as “contrary sexual feeling,” and Arigo Tamassia called it “inversion of the sexual instinct” (43).³⁰

Gender inversion tends to emphasize something like gender trouble, a feeling of disidentification with one’s actual sex, “a transgendered psychological orientation” (43). Thus, same-sex desire “was not the essence but merely a further extension of that basic gender trouble, a more developed [citing Westphal] ‘stage of the pathological phenomenon’” (43).

It is important to recognize that what is medically or psychologically problematic about gender inversion is not same-sex desire as such, but rather the phenomenon or feeling of gender dis-identification. As Halperin notes, nineteenth-century sexologists viewed same-sex desire as problematic or “deviant” but for reasons not reducible to gender inversion. In other words, “[h]omosexual sex might turn out to be bad without turning out to be sick” (44). Same-sex desire may be bad without being sick if one expresses same-sex desire in gender normative ways. 

In the first “Kinsey Report,” Kinsey strictly defined homosexuality as any same-sex sexual contact that resulted in orgasm (46).³¹ Gay men made surprising use of this new concept, “homosexuality,” by putting it to work as a means of distancing themselves from gender inversion, conceiving their sexuality as “entirely compatible, at least in theory” with normative masculinity (46).

“Homosexuality now defined [the gay man],” Halperin observes, “it made him gay through and through—but it also left him completely indistinguishable in every other respect from normal men . . . . To be gay, according to this twentieth-century definition, was to have a sexuality, not a culture” (46, emphasis original).³² Hence the attempt(s) to rid from consciousness “the feminine identifications that had informed and defined much of traditional gay male culture” (50).

Given the rise of 1960s gay male liberation out of gender inversion, it is rather scandalous to inquire about gay male difference or traditional feminine identifications. There is, Halperin contends, something backward about it:

It represents a reversal of previous, long-held convictions . . . . It violates, in particular, the official post-Stonewall creed that gay men are not different from anybody else, that sexual object choice has nothing to do with gender style, that gay sexuality has no relation to femininity, and that homosexuality is a sexual orientation, not a culture or subculture (56-57, emphasis mine).

V.2

It is “the official, post-Stonewall creed that gay men are not different from anybody else” that traditional gay male theology is resisting. Hence the turn to history, to theories of androgyny. Nonetheless, it is sad but true that not all gay men desire to be different from normal men. The history of homosexuality helps us to understand why some gay men do not wish to be different from normal men.

And who can blame them? The cost of difference is very high.

Some gay men, however, do embrace gay male difference from “normal men,” but they do not define that difference in and through feminine identification. They define gay difference in and through identification with other gay men. Halperin, in “Small Town Boy: Neil Bartlett Learns How to Be Gay” (2007), describes this form of gay identification as a feature of gay culture.

VI.

VI.1

In “Small Town Boy,” Halperin elaborates on a “distinguished text,” namely Neil Bartlett’s book, Who Was That Man? A Present for Oscar Wilde (1988) (4).

In 1981 Bartlett moves from a small town in England to London. The move took Bartlett “years.” “That is because,” Halperin observes, “entering the metropolitan gay scene means . . . entering gay life, encountering the full width and breadth of gay culture . . . ceasing to be merely homosexual and learning how to be gay” (5-6).

Halperin describes Bartlett’s move as a process of discovering “new patterns of existence amid the changed conditions of metropolitan queer life. Some of those patterns, Bartlett found, had already been laid down for him . . . the gay life he was learning to lead in London was in fact continuous with the life that had been led there by other gay men . . .” (6).

The life Bartlett learns to lead is “[n]ot completely continuous . . . but continuous to an astonishing degree” with the “life that had been led there by other gay men” (6). Bartlett observes, “What I’ve done . . . is to connect my life to other lives, even buildings and streets, that had an existence prior to mine” (Who Was That Man?, xx).³³

VI.2

Bartlett learns how to be gay by identifying with preexisting forms of gay male life. “Learning how to be gay, becoming who you are,” Halperin observes, “is not about realizing your authentic individual identity but about acceding to a new, relational identity, by recognizing how you resemble and differ from other gay men” (7). Bartlett asserts that “[o]riginality is not a virtue in our culture; the most beautiful and successful men model themselves on other men” (Who Was That Man, 201).³⁴

Gay men come out and, in doing so, come into what preexists them: a gay male world. While we “may be inventing and reinventing ourselves, making our lives up as we go along . . . we never start from scratch” (8). Bartlett writes, “Being predictable is a small price to pay for sharing something, being able to talk” (Who Was That Man?, 204-205).³⁵

And yet, Bartlett is not, according to Halperin, a “naive or happy-go-lucky essentialist. He knew that not all gay men are the same, that we do not necessarily share a life” (9). Nonetheless, Bartlett “was not interested in telling a purely personal story” (8). He “wished to speak not in an individual voice but in as many different gay male voices as he could muster. And he did his best to hear in those voices—to learn to recognize in them—echoes of his own” (11).

VI.3

Learning how to be gay is not easy; it is “only by dint of considerable ingenuity and persistent effort” that Bartlett learns to tell his story within a larger story. Bartlett tells us that he begins “to see [the late 1800s] London as the beginning of [his] own story—and up till then, like a lot of other men, [he’d] seen America and 1970 as the start of everything” (Who Was That Man?, xxi).³⁶

Oscar Wilde in particular figures gayness for Bartlett (12). Significantly, “Bartlett was not,” Halperin argues, “trying to identify a ‘representative’ gay man. Much less was he looking for a role model—let alone a ‘positive image’ of male homosexuality. He was trying to learn his own history. And you cannot always choose your history” (13).

“What a homosexual is,” Halperin writes, “what a gay life is like: that had already been defined—historically, popularly, flamboyantly, authoritatively, canonically, for better or for worse—by the personage of Oscar Wilde” (13-14, emphasis original). Bartlett is asking, “Did he and Wilde share something?” (13-14, emphasis original).

“Bartlett’s project,” Halperin observes, “is nothing less than an attempt to describe gay male subjectivity, to specify what it feels like . . . to be gay, to live a gay life, to be different from straight people, to share a queer existence, to be part of a gay culture” (15). Describing gay male subjectivity means comparing one’s own experiences “against the patterns of feeling revealed by other gay men, past and present, . . . observing both correspondences and differences” (16).

Halperin contends that the “patterns [Bartlett] discovered are not necessary. But neither are they purely accidental. They are contingent—contingent on certain social forms, certain regularities grounded in both an enduring and a shifting cultural logic” (24).

Halperin argues that it “is crucial for us to recognize . . . that whereas our practices may mimic those of our ancestors, the meaning of our practices has not been determined once and for all by them” (25, emphasis mine).³⁷ Bartlett writes, “Our history now becomes a way of understanding and exploring the change in our culture, not simply reading it as an ‘end’” (Who Was That Man?, 221).³⁸

“What Bartlett offers us, in his book on Wilde,” Halperin concludes, “is an extraordinarily subtle and refined demonstration of how to describe gay male culture through exploring one’s identification with other gay men while disidentifying with them at the same time” (34). Bartlett’s model is one that “does not fear but rather embraces ambivalence in the relations of gay men, both past and present, to one another, and that teaches us how to love each other despite our stubborn, inveterate impulses to disidentification . . .” (35).

VI.4

Halperin’s reading of Bartlett introduces us to more complicated meanings of culture and subculture. It also hones our understanding of the practice of gay identification.

Notice that gay identification is always-already a form of dis-identification. It signifies a way of connecting with, in this case, other gay men, both past and present, while also dis-connecting with other gay men at the same time. Identification, for Halperin, does not collapse space between, in this case, differently situated gay men. Bartlett neither desires to be nor does he claim to be Oscar Wilde.

In “Small Town Boy,” Halperin deploys the term gay culture to describe Bartlett’s history of gay identification with other gay men. Gay male culture refers to gay-authored gay culture, to the institutions, habits, and practices gay men re-create in and through identifying with other gay men, both past and present. It is the culture of gay male identity.

Traditional gay theology mirrors gay culture in that the Androgyne is about gay men. Pace traditional gay theologians, the Androgyne figures gay male identity. Nonetheless, most gay theologians take issue with gay culture for its separatism (i.e., for being immune from concern for the larger world), for its conformism (i.e., for too closely mirroring straight culture), and for its gay male centrism (i.e., for being too isolated from the lives and concerns of actual women).

The practice of identification with other gay men delineates the difference between gay male culture and gay male subculture. Gay male feminine identification is the characteristic practice of gay subculture. However, it is because we learn how to identify with devalued femininity from other gay men, at least initially, that the distinction between gay culture and gay subculture is “neither airtight nor absolute” (How To Be Gay, 421).

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Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) in Mommie Dearest (1981), film still.

VII.

VII.1

It is difficult to define gay male subculture. Defining gay subculture is difficult because Halperin, in How To Be Gay (and for the sake of economy), refers to gay male subculture as gay culture. In what follows, gay culture is shorthand for gay male subculture. A second reason defining gay male subculture is difficult is that culture is, itself, a complicated reality to describe.

We may be tempted, according to Halperin, to build a definition of culture “on the part of a [whole] population.” But not all gay men enjoy, for example, Broadway musicals (130).

We may also be tempted to look for a definition of culture by “counting . . . individual preferences.” In this case, the math doesn’t add up. The math doesn’t work because “culture is more than a mass of individuals” (130). In other words, a culture’s defining traits may not stand out in a survey of individual preferences.

Halperin defines culture by focusing on “the pragmatics of discourse (how people interact with one another in concrete social situations) and, more specifically, . . . the pragmatics of genre” (131). The pragmatics of genre explains why Halperin risks an exploration of gay culture.

Culture is, itself, a concept associated with a problematic social history: nationalism, racism, Western imperialism, cultural superiority, and so forth (133). Yet, Halperin argues, “‘culture’ remains our default term for covering the relation between forms and social processes, it is . . . a placeholder for a more general and more precise category . . . for which there is no name—though ‘genre’ comes close, at least at the molecular level” (133, emphasis original).

Halperin describes culture, echoing the work of Ross Chambers, as a multiplicity of genres. Chambers argues that “genres regulate, with varying degrees of rigidity and flexibility, . . . the social appropriateness of discursive behavior . . . .”³⁹ Halperin theorizes that “specific genres of speech and interaction help to endow each community, each subgroup within it, and each culture with its own distinctiveness” (131).

We may be familiar with genre as a literary concept, and Halperin’s use of genre does refer to its literary dimension (his usage of genre encompasses, for example, the literary term’s “regularity and dependability” [132]), but the meaning of genre is not reducible to its literary context. In this context, it refers to the “sphere of social communication, social behavior, and personal interaction—defining appropriate subject matter, forms of interpersonal relationality, and styles of communication” (132).

As is evident from terms like “social behavior,” genres are not only formal but also pragmatic; that is, “they provide people in their daily practices, with concrete means of interacting with one another and negotiating specific social situations—and they instruct them in the rights ways to do so” (132). The pragmatics of genre, the management of expectations related to speech and behavior in specific contexts, gives gay culture its coherence.

VII.2

Yet, it is not the case that gay culture represents a universal principle or essence that all gay men share. Halperin is not interested in “the indeterminate number of individuals who, at any one time and to varying degrees, happen to compose [gay culture]” (133, emphasis original). He repeatedly emphasizes that “it is practices, not people that are the proper object of study” (134, emphasis original).

The emphasis on practices should not be taken to mean that particular people are not responsible for specific practices or cultures. “Cultures do not exist independently of the people who produce them,” Halperin acknowledges (134). However, a culture, shaped as it is by the specific social circumstances of a group of people, takes on a life quite independent of said group. Hence “gay male cultural practices are not all, or even mostly, shared by all members of the gay male population in the United States, let alone the world, while at least some of those practices are shared by many people who are not gay themselves” (134).

“Being homosexual,” Halperin argues, “is . . . neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for participating in gay culture” (135). While homosexual males have an opinion about gay culture, not all homosexual males, as the history of homosexuality out of gender inversion attests, participate in it. “The account of gay culture that I am about to offer here,” Halperin again emphasizes, “refers, accordingly, to genres of discourse, and to genres of social interaction, not to individuals or populations” (135, emphasis original).

Halperin eschews a sociological or an anthropological account of gay culture for “the most traditional method for describing genres—namely, poetics” (137). Halperin relies on poetics, “the social and formal analysis of different kinds of conventions of discourse, that, ever since Aristotle, has given us a systematic anatomy of genres,” to describe gay culture (137, emphasis mine). And “a study of gay male cultural poetics must,” Halperin writes, “concentrate on the definition and articulation of forms as things in their own right” (138, emphasis original).

VII.3

Halperin articulates form’s meaning in and through a description of the practice of gay identification. In How To Be Gay, gay identification refers to the gay male tendency to identify with non-gay, feminine figures. It signifies a “feeling of closeness to, or affinity with, other people—with anything and everything that is not oneself. Identification, too, expresses desire: a desire to bring oneself into relation with someone or something that is different from oneself” (122, emphasis original).

Gay identification with various mainstream, non-gay feminine figures is a creative act, a fashioning of a gayer world—and out of preexisting straight culture. Joan Crawford, for example, is a figure of gay identification, and she is a straight woman. Gay men did not create her cultural image. Her star persona is itself a straight creation.

What figures of gay identification, like Joan Crawford, figure is “something even gayer than gay identity itself” (123, emphasis original). In other words, Joan “wasn’t a gay man, but in certain respects she could somehow express gay desire, what gay men want, better than any gay man could” (122-123, emphasis original).⁴⁰

More specifically, what figures of gay identification, like Joan Crawford, figure is how it feels to be gay (i.e., subjectivity/feeling), and what we can do about it (i.e., politics/aesthetics). Feminine forms, like Joan, are “structures of feeling.”⁴¹ Halperin explains that “[Raymond Williams] . . . formulates the concept of ‘structures of feeling’ to describe a dynamic mode of social formation that mediates between the subject and culture, thereby blending ‘psychology’ and ‘aesthetics’” (7, 459n3).

So, if we want to know about gay difference, about gay feelings and politics—and if we are curious about what that may have to do with people who are not gay males—we have only to attend to “the highly distinctive uses gay men make of straight culture, beginning with the phenomena themselves [e.g., identification with feminine figures], and focus on the details” (125, emphasis mine).

VII.4

Halperin’s description of gay identification with Joan Crawford constitutes the core of How To Be Gay. Significantly, Joan is a form of/figure of devalued femininity. Devalued femininity is, moreover, a proxy identity for gay men. It can serve as a proxy identity because “all feminine forms of embodiment and self-presentation come off in a male dominated society as performative, at least to some degree” (183).⁴²

The implication is that in a male dominated society, masculinity is taken as an essence rather than as a role. So, it is more resistant to reinterpretation and parody. Nonetheless, gay men have a “conscious consciousness” of masculinity as a role because gay men are confronted with the challenge of living in a straight male world.⁴³ Gay men, that is, are careful observers of masculine performances:

[Gay men] are necessarily aware of behaving according to a preexisting social model . . . gay men inevitably come to see what heterosexual culture considers to be a natural and authentic identity—a form of being, an essence, a thing—as a social form: a performance, an act, a role. . . . There is no relation of externality for gay male culture between being and playing a role, between actor and act. They may be distinct, but they are not separate; rather, they constitute each other . . . . Playing a role is the mode of existing in the social world” (197, 199, emphasis original).

That is why a figure like Joan Crawford is so significant for gay culture. “[I]t is through identification with femininity [i.e., feminine figures like Joan]” that gay men can “represent to themselves” a dissident masculinity, a gay male masculinity, a masculinity that is at once serious (i.e., masculine) and unserious (i.e., feminine) (211).⁴⁴

VII.5

At first glance, it may seem like gay identification (with Joan) is a species of androgyny, a means of recombining male/masculine with female/feminine. The difference between androgyny and identification with devalued femininity is clarified by the social logic that necessitates gay subculture or gay identification in the first place.

In a heterosocial world of meaning, equating male same-sex desiring with a feminine role is “intuitive” (335). Gay male practices are, therefore, bound to be understood as gender deviant, “marked as feminine not by reference to women, necessarily, but by forms of dissent from heteronormative masculinity” (335-336).

It is important to recognize that “not everything that fails to qualify as properly masculine, according to the stringent social criteria designed to safeguard the purity of that rare and precious essence, is necessarily feminine” (314). And that’s why “femininity” does not “necessarily [signify] an actual identification with women. However much it may refer to women, which it obviously does, it is not always or essentially about women. It is its own form of gender atypicality, and it has to do specifically with gay men themselves” (318).

The feminine position that gay men inhabit “both reflects and expresses a distinctive situatedness within an entire field of discursive and social practices” (337, emphasis mine). Gay men, that is, “may be gravitating toward certain affective and discursive possibilities that are already present in the larger culture,” and yet “those affective or discursive possibilities may be expressing not an identification with women so much as an attraction to cultural values associated with certain practices that happen to be coded as feminine by generic conventions” (337). Having been freed from “conventional masculinity” by same-sex desire, gay men may “develop atypical gender identities by working out various kinds of dissident relations to the standard value attached to cultural forms” (338-339).

Gay men do, however, share ideological space, the space marked as “feminine,” with actual women. Gay male masculinity refers to what gay culture makes possible within this shared space. “By taking up, while ironically redeeming, the social roles and meaning traditionally assigned to women,” Halperin argues, “gay culture performs a unique, immanent social critique and effects a characteristic but recognizable form of political resistance” (378, emphasis mine).

VII.6

It is precisely gay culture’s “taking up, while ironically redeeming, the social roles and meanings traditionally assigned to women” that brings down upon it the accusation of misogyny (378). “[F]ar from attempting to elevate the position of women, to represent them as dignified, serious, heroic, authoritative, capable, talented, loving, protective, and generally better than men . . . ,” Halperin argues, “traditional gay male culture consistently delights in excessive, grotesque, artificial, undignified, revolting, abject portrayals of femininity, and it seeks its own reflection in them” (379, emphasis mine).

Halperin is not unaware, as even his earlier work demonstrates, that the strategic options available to gay men are different from those available to actual women.⁴⁵ Gay men can “afford” to see themselves in abject portrayals of femininity because “—unlike women—[they] are never in danger of being completely reduced to their social marking or positioning as feminine” (379).

But Halperin does wonder if women may not also benefit from the practice of failing to take the experience of being women too seriously (379). In any case, to women, gay male cultural practices are so very often “not funny” (379).

At the core of this disagreement is a misunderstanding, Halperin contends, of “the political design of gay male culture” (379). Two observations help define the political design of gay male culture. First, gay male identification with devalued feminine figures is not an endorsement of those figures. To the contrary, they are endorsements of the position of disempowerment they represent.

Consider positive examples of women put forward since the onset of second wave feminism—the strong woman, for example: “[O]nce the upstanding, dignified, capable figure of ‘strong’ woman, so dear to feminism, migrates to Hollywood [or to the political stage], she quickly turns into a grotesque monster” (380). We don’t have the “social power to make [positive images] stick” (380). Just ask Hillary Clinton.

Second, acceding to a position of disempowerment is the first stage in a longer, far more complicated process. “If gay male culture embraces the disqualification of femininity,” Halperin argues, “[it] does so in order to challenge and to interrupt some of the most noxious consequences of that disqualification, for gay men if not for women” (381).

Halperin’s analysis of Joan contains almost no references to the biographical details of her actual life. It is not an overstatement to assert that Halperin’s analysis of Joan has nothing to do with Joan Crawford herself, but rather with specific cultural portrayals of her, especially in film. “The target [of gay culture],” Halperin notes, “is the already anti-feminist model of femininity [i.e., the feminine figure] produced by the heteronormative order and promoted by its gender ideology” (382).

Gay male culture takes advantage of the space, more pronounced for gay men than for women, between femininity and its normal referent. And this is the core of its challenge: “By treating feminine identifications as roles instead of essences, as social performances instead of natural conditions, gay culture threatens their dignity as well as their legitimacy . . . ” (382, emphasis mine).

VII.7

Gay identification, as Halperin describes it in How To Be Gay, passes each of the tests defined in IV.5. First, gay identification passes the solidarity test by winning space between sex and gender.

Joan, for example, does not represent actual women. She figures a gay way of feeling and being that is gendered as feminine because it is not normatively masculine. What Joan figures is gay masculinity, a masculinity at once dignified (serious) and abject (unserious).

Gay masculinity is consistent with the politics of feminism because it does not naturalize a patriarchal construction of women. It is also a masculinity women may desire and can, in principle, practice.

Moreover, gay masculinity is a means of resisting the debilitating effects of being sexed/gendered in ways that reinforce white norms. In and through, for example, Joan, gay subculture enables its adherents to claim their difference without purchasing their indignity. As such, gay masculinity is, in principle, available as a resource for differently sexed/gendered/raced subjectivities.

Our reinterpretation of gay identification also passes the gay community test. Joan enables us to claim our dignity without purchasing the shame of others, as gay identification is not an identity. Gay identification is a cultural practice, so its coherence does not depend on the identities of individuals or groups. Gay identification does not presume to define all forms of gayness.

Finally, our reinterpretation of gay identification passes the good news test. Gay subculture is a gay male creation, but it is not essentially about gay men. Anyone may, in principle, identify with, for example, Joan Crawford.

VII.8

Gay identification may, nonetheless, be inherently disagreeable to some, perhaps, many people. It may be as disturbing for (white) men trying to give up some of their dignity as it is for women (and others) trying to achieve greater dignity.

Gay identification may be particularly horrifying to some, perhaps many, women. Gay identification may be read as “casually misogynistic.” Yet, gay identification hardly represents a “panicked determination to eradicate any hint of the feminine in man” (383).

Gay subculture may be a letdown because it does not purport to change the world. We don’t get to choose the social codes (i.e., sex/gender/race) that structure our lives. Resistance, not revolution, is the political goal of gay subculture.

VII.9

Gay identification may disturb, but it definitely avoids the shortcomings of the Androgyne as a figure of gay resistance to normative masculinity. Gay identification is consistent with the goals of feminist and anti-racism politics; it can constructively account for other forms of gayness, and it is something anyone, in principle, can practice.

Gay identification can function as an acceptable, anti-social norm for regulating gay life. And that is good news because in How To Be Gay, gay identification is gay subculture/gay politics.

Halperin, recall, describes culture as “our default term for covering the relationship between forms and social processes; it is not an exact designation so much as a placeholder for a more general and more precise category articulating the formal with the social, for which there is no name . . . ” (133, emphasis mine).

“Structures of feeling,” furthermore, refers to “a dynamic mode of social formation” that both conjoins “psychology and aesthetics” and “mediates between the subject and culture” (459n3). What “mediates between the subject and culture” conveys is the idea that subjectivity (or psychology/inner world/feeling) is inextricably linked to cultural forms (or aesthetics/politics).

Identification, moreover, “seems to be yet another example,” Halperin argues, “of a crude, imprecise placeholder for a more accurate description . . . ” (258). Identification, according to Halperin, “is a way of saying that gay male culture is, somehow, complexly engaged with the figure of Joan Crawford—that some gay men have been . . . emotionally involved with it” (258). “What we may be dealing with in the end,” Halperin contends, “is a specific kind of engagement that somehow mobilizes complex relations of similarity and difference—but without constituting subjects or objects in the usual ways” (259).

Gay identification, we are not wrong to think, is something like a “more general and more precise category” for “covering the relationship between forms [i.e., subjectivity, feelings] and social processes [i.e., politics, aesthetics].” In other words, gay identification is gay subculture/gay politics.

“In a certain sense,” Halperin declares, “homosexuality is culture” (455, emphasis original). “[W]hat is at stake,” Halperin asserts in the final sentence of How To Be Gay, is “culture as a whole” (457).

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Mary breastfeeding Jesus, Basilica di Santa Chiara, Napoli, Italy.

VIII.

VIII.1

What is at stake in our reassessment of gay identification is traditional gay theology as a whole. What does traditional gay male Christian theology mean now that gay identification is its “figure” of gay difference?

Gay theology is now reflection on gay identification within a religious mythos. Thus, gay Christian theology is the discipline of recognizing, describing, and unfolding the implications of gay identifications within the Christian mythos.

The late Theodore Jennings, Jr. defines a religious mythos as “that set of symbols, rituals, narratives, and assertions which, when taken together, announce and mediate the presence of the sacred so as to represent, orient, communicate, and transform existence in the world for a community of persons.”⁴⁶ The religious mythos, notice, encompasses both textual (e.g., interpretation of biblical texts) and non-textual (e.g., rituals) cultural practices.⁴⁷

Gay theology is now a resource for anyone (and not only people of faith) who desires to articulate a dissident, anti-social relationship to the sacred norms and traditions expressed by and in religious mythoi. And we are not without some promising guides. Consider, for example, Mark Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (2000).

VIII.2

Jordan is especially interested in interpreting Catholic “clerical culture.” His project is possible because of contemporary gay subculture. “We may now picture clerical gayness more clearly,” Jordan observes, “because we have detailed analogies to guide us” (145).

“For the first time in more than a millennium,” Jordan writes, “public and well-developed homoerotic subcultures exist in the West. We are particularly familiar with how contemporary American men build gay communities” (145). What said communities help Jordan do is compare the “distorted and fragmentary evidence of American clerical gayness” to more established patterns of gayness (145).

Gay subculture is a guide to an interpretation of clerical gayness, but it cannot fully grasp it on its own.⁴⁸ Jordan argues that gay subculture is not the best term to describe clerical homoeroticism because subculture, for Jordan, implies a degree of separateness from the whole and because the visibility of clerical gayness is of a ghostly kind (i.e., it is manifestly present and not present at the same time).

Significantly, gay subculture necessarily refers to what came before it. “During the long centuries when women and various ethnic minorities were excluded,” Jordan observes, “some homoerotic males could gain access to the machinery of cultural production” (186). Jordan concludes, “They were not a subculture, then, nor even an alternative culture, but a ‘paraculture,’ a universal irony inside dominant culture” (186, emphasis mine).

Paraculture is Jordan’s preferred term for describing clerical gayness. “Instead of a subculture, this kind of [Catholic] homoeroticism is a gay ‘paraculture,'” Jordan writes. “It is not a small, separate component. It conditions or even characterizes the whole” (185). It is also the culture of the Androgyne.

Sontag, Jordan notes, argues that “[t]he androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility” (183)⁴⁹ The Androgyne is used as an interpretive lens, a figure of camp, through which to understand the meaning of “celibate men dressed in brocade who perform stylized domestic ritual” (183).

The Androgyne also defines the fraught dynamic of clerical gayness: “Clerical control over religious art means clerical control over images of two very important bodies, one male and one female: Jesus and Mary. So far as the clerical aesthetic is a camp aesthetic, the representation of the gender of these two bodies should be particularly problematic” (201).

Managing religious art is problematic, in part, because it requires an all too unwieldy balancing act: Mary and/or Jesus must never be too male or too female. Hence “camp is not so much a feature of Catholic clerical culture as its basic predicament” (208).

Jordan is not, in The Silence of Sodom, proposing a universal definition of gayness, a gay identity. He is describing traditional Catholic gay identities, and the logic of androgyny helps explain their character as too tightly bound to a life of submission to the regime of normative masculinity.

Jordan concludes by encouraging us to learn a new language: “Learning to speak about ourselves differently means learning a new language for both our erotic lives and our sacramental ones . . . . It should not be the chatter of a well-managed homosexual identity within or without a tiddly defined Catholicism [or Christendom]” (261, emphasis mine).

VIII.3

Gay theology is now entirely consistent with the goal of learning a new language to describe our erotic desire and our religious mythoi. Gay theology now saves us from talking in circles, from writing “the same few books . . . over and over again” (259).

Gay theology now breaks us free from the bind of the Androgyne, and it offers us a gayer world: unexpected feminine figures in and through which to describe how it feels to be gay nowadays. It gives us a new, queerer vantage point from which to re-describe and understand our respective faith traditions and what we can do with(in) them.

Gay theology also continues to blur the stubborn distinction between gayness and religion, making uncommon language available to us.⁵⁰ Yes, gay theological analysis can make us aware that the term “‘homosexual’ was constructed at least in part out of Catholic materials,” but it can also teach us that gay identification is a religious practice, is a feature of our various religious mythoi (257).

The future of gay theology depends on all of us who are so inclined to take up the task of bringing forth the myriad of meanings and implications of gay identifications (in our respective religious traditions). It is important work because, in a sense, gay identification is theology. Thus, what is at stake is theology as a whole.

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Notes:

1. Mark Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (2002), 259. ↩︎
2. David M. Halperin, How To Be Gay (2012), 448. ↩︎
3. “Gay” as a term signifying both female and male homosexuality was coined in the 1960s. While gay male theologians often include lesbians in their understandings of gayness, their respective theologies make clear that what they are seeking to understand and to think theologically from within is gay white male experience. ↩︎
4. This way of dividing time is helpful for the purpose of clarity, but it is not historically precise. For example, Robert Wood, in Christ and the Homosexual (1960), is aware of the term gay as early as 1959. McNeill (1976) uses terms like homosexual and homosexuality. And theories of androgyny continue to be popular today. ↩︎
5. Gay theologians do contend that logics of androgyny may also help explain lesbian subjectivity. The emphasis, however, is typically on gay male subjectivity. ↩︎
6. My reading and assessment of theories of androgyny is limited to the forms they take in traditional gay male theologies. ↩︎
7. See Denton Welch, The Journals of Denton Welch, ed. Michael De-La-Noy (New York: Dutton, 1986), 6. Also, How To Be Gay, 495n4. ↩︎
8. Laurel Schneider and Carolyn Roncolato criticize gay male theologians for “presuming to speak for all homosexually identified persons.” It is a totally bizarre criticism because time and again, and usually with the first few pages of their respective theologies, every traditional gay male theologian explicitly asserts that they are reflecting from their own, individual perspective. See Schneider and Roncolato, “Queer Theologies,” in Religion Compass 6/1 (2012): 1–13, 5. You will find the expressed commitment of gay male theologians not “to speak for all homosexually identified persons” here: Johnson and Gearhart, eds., Loving Women, Loving Men, x-xi; McNeill, Taking A Chance On God, xvii; Fortunato, Embracing the Exile, xiii; Clark, Gay Being, Divine Presence, 2-3, A Place To Start, 5; Goss, Jesus Acted Up, xv, xix; Cleaver, Know My Name, vii; Comstock, Gay Theology Without Apology, 5. ↩︎
9. Mark Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9. Halperin, moreover, observes: “Whatever else the current and ongoing explorations of lesbian history have to offer us, one of their most startling benefits will be a much-enhanced understanding of the different historicities of female and male homosexuality.” See Halperin, How To Do The History of Homosexuality (2002), 80. ↩︎
10. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom, 9. ↩︎
11. D.A. Miller, Jane Austen or The Secret of Style (2003), 57. ↩︎
12. Miller, Jane Austen, 57. ↩︎
13. See Sally Gearhart, “The Miracle of Lesbianism,” in Loving Women, Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church, eds. Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson (San Francisco: Glide Publications, 1974): 119-152. The citation is from page 135. ↩︎
14. Early Clark’s writing sometimes reminds me of Michael Rumaker’s beautifully written book, A Day and a Night at the Baths (1977). ↩︎
15. Reuther, “The Sexuality of Jesus: What Do the Synoptic Gospels Say?” Christianity In Crisis, 38(8): 134-137. ↩︎
16. Cleaver is citing Gearhart, “Miracle of Lesbianism,” 135. ↩︎
17. “Miracle of Lesbianism,” 127-128. ↩︎
18. Chapter 3 of Jesus Acted Up returns in Queering Christ as chapter 7. ↩︎
19. Carter Heyward, Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (1984), 86. ↩︎
20. Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex-Roles and the Madness of Dionysus (1988), 178-179. ↩︎
21. The primary target of Clark’s critique in this context is Ronald Long, “An Affair of Men: Masculinity and the Dynamics of Gay Sex,” Journal of Men’s Studies 3.1 (August 1994): 21-48. See also Long, “God Through Gay Men’s Eyes: Gay Theology in the Age of AIDS,” in AIDS, God, and Faith, eds. Ronald Long and J. Michael Clark, 1-21 (Las Colinas, TX: Monument Press, 1992), “The Sacrality of Male Beauty and Homosex: A Neglected Factor in the Understanding of Contemporary Gay Life,” in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, eds. Gary David Comstock and Susan E Henking, 266-281 (New York: Continuum, 1997), and Long, Men, Homosexuality and the Gods: An Exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2004). ↩︎
22. It gets worse. See Clark, Doing the Work of Love: Men and Commitment in Same-Sex Couples (Harriman, TN: Men’s Studies Press, 1999). ↩︎
23. This definition is carried into the twenty-first century by Gay Religion (2004), edited by Scott Thuma and Edward R. Gray. In sections I and II of the book, dedicated primarily to institutionalized forms of religious practice, religious institutions are understood by various interviewees as eliminating the need for gay subculture (and its institutions). The gay bar in particular takes on the burden of figuring the horrors of gay subculture (e.g., 17, 38, 58, 76). Furthermore, gay subculture is associated with a “cult” and is described as something of a “relic” (172). Moreover, gay subculture is called upon to explain gay male devotion, which is transformed into an argument for the necessity of welcoming gays into more legitimate meaning-making systems (181-202). The final section of the book is dedicated to a more constructive elaboration of gay subculture and explores the religious themes within “the urban gay ghetto.” The authors refer to “very specialized narrow segments of the gay and lesbian community,” and they seem to mean those who “have learned to live with, accept, and embrace the contradiction [between being gay and religious] in the urban gay ghetto where religion is a small but important part of the scene” (284). The sense of this relationship seems to rest on the presence of explicitly Christian themes, texts, and ideas in gay subcultural performances and/or because gay subcultural practices apparently conform to widely accepted understandings of what counts as religion (e.g.., ritual, transcendence, etc.…) (285-302, 327-336). Significantly, several interviewees explicitly deny a religious dimension to their gay subcultural practices and performances. ↩︎
24. This discussion does raise the question of what Judith Halberstam describes as “female masculinity,” the kind(s) of masculinity available to actual women. As we will see, gay masculinity may be one such type of masculinity women may want to perform. See How To Be Gay, 256, 234 and 501n15; see also Halberstam, Female Masculinity (1998). ↩︎
25. See Halperin, “Sex/Sexuality/Sexual Classification” in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender (2014): 449-486, esp. 450-451. ↩︎
26. In Gay Being, Divine Presence, Clark writes, “Clearly the balancing act of the archetypal gay male Hero, balancing dayworld and nightworld (reason and unreason), masculinity and femininity, are not easy” (10). In this instance, femininity is aligned with the nightworld, with “creative chaos.” Two pages later, Clark aligns femininity with “dayworld morality”: “He must balance. . . nightworld amorality and dayworld morality, masculinity and femininity” (12). ↩︎
27. Ibram X. Kendi carefully follows the history of sex/gender/race in his Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016). ↩︎
28. Certain strands of Black Studies (Afro-Pessimism) and Queer Studies (Negativity) point out the advantages of making just these kinds of identifications. See, for example, Hortense J. Spillers, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) and Lee Edelman, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (2023). ↩︎
29. Early Clark and Goss, and Comstock do not reflect on how the dynamics of sex/gender/race play out in the construction of “gay ghettos” (nor do gay theologians think through the same dynamics in the Church). For one example of a history of gay neighborhood formation that accounts for the fraught Western politics of sex/gender/race, see Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013). ↩︎
30. Easily accessible sources for exploring this history, sources also cited by Halperin, include Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3rd. edition, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1922); and George Chauncey, Jr., “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: The Changing Medical Conceptualization of Female ‘Deviance,’” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-117. ↩︎
31. Halperin does not “want to make a falsely stark or simplistic historical division between an era of inversion followed by an era of homosexuality, as if the two never occurred together, coincided, or were conflated. Nonetheless, I continue to believe it is helpful to distinguish between them . . .” (How To Be Gay, 466n10). Halperin attends to a wider group of terms: effeminacy, sodomy, friendship, inversion, homosexuality, and their distinctions and overlapping histories in How To Do The History Of Homosexuality (2002), 104-137. ↩︎
32. Again, Halperin reminds us that “it was not only after 1969 that gay men learned how to be butch, or that butch styles began to compete with earlier ‘effete’ modes of self-presentation among gay men” (How To Be Gay, 47). ↩︎
33. Cited by Halperin, Small Town Boy, 6. ↩︎
34. Cited by Halperin, 8. ↩︎
35. Cited by Halperin, 8. ↩︎
36. Cited by Halperin, 12. ↩︎
37. The argument Halperin is making here has been made, he reminds us, “along feminist lines” by Teresa de Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking The Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britian (1989). See “Small Town Boy,” 29n14. I offer a brief summary of “The Essence of the Triangle” here (see section 4). ↩︎
38. Cited by Halperin, “Small Town Boy,” 29. ↩︎
39. See Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (2004), esp. 24-25. Cited by Halperin on page 131 of How To Be Gay. While the pragmatics of genre Halperin ultimately adopts is taken from M. A. K. Holliday’s Language as Social Semiotic: The Interpretation of Language and Meaning (1978), situating his thinking in relation to Chambers’s work on witnessing strikes me as particularly moving. It calls our attention to our being haunted by what is obscene, un-timely, and painful (e.g., the fact of AIDS and AIDS related deaths). Moreover, it calls attention to the politics of staging, if you will, to what the dominant culture would like to have out of sight, off stage (Untimely Interventions, 23). So, it is not surprising that Halperin, according to Chambers, advocates “flaunting the haunt [or honte?]” (Untimely Interventions, xxxii). See also How To Be Gay, 480n2 for more on Halperin’s relationship to Chambers, culture and the social pragmatics of genre. ↩︎
40. At this moment in How To Be Gay, Halperin is actually describing Judy Garland. ↩︎
41. See Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feelings,” in Marxism and Literature (1978), 128-135. ↩︎
42. Referring to Ester Newton’s observation in Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America that at least some versions of drag “symbolize that the visible, social, masculine clothing is a costume, which in turn symbolizes that the entire sex-role behavior is a role—an act,” Halperin reminds us that “Newton’s insight has since been elaborated with subtlety and philosophical rigor by Judith Butler” (Mother Camp, 101; How To Be Gay, 489n25). See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); and Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993). ↩︎
43. See also Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Risk, Sex, and Subjectivity (2009), 56-59, for “conscious consciousness.” ↩︎
44. Halperin describes gay male masculinity as gay male femininity in How To Be Gay. In his essay, “What Is Gay Male Femininity?” (2014), Halperin answers: “It is a form of gay masculinity” (207). For the sake of clarity, I use gay male masculinity to describe what is at stake in gay male feminine identifications. ↩︎
45. See David M. Halperin, How To Do The History of Homosexuality, 48-80, esp. 77-80 ↩︎
46. Theodore Jennings, Jr., Introduction to Theology: An Invitation to Reflection on the Christian Mythos (1976), 2. ↩︎
47. Theologians have explored culture’s significance for theological reflection in a variety of ways and to different ends. H. Richard Niebuhr assesses culture’s significance for theology in his now classic text, Christ and Culture (1956). Kathryn Tanner develops a post-modern understanding of culture and explicitly defines Christian theology as reflection on Christian culture or Christian social practices in her Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (1997) (e.g., 79-80, 93). For how Tanner’s understanding of culture is (implicitly) related to (queer) theological reflection, see Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (2008) and Linn Marie Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude (2016). ↩︎
48. In his later work, for example, Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage (2005), Jordan writes, “It has become increasingly hard to sustain the illusion that [contemporary] gay culture is countercultural, rejecting money and commodities fetishism and the uptown idyll . . . .” (36). Jordan may be inclined to define genre as “etiquette,” signifying the transformation of “queer desire” into a congealed identity or “romantic myth.” ↩︎
49. See Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp'” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982): 105-119. ↩︎
50. For one example of blurring this distinction, see Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (2015). ↩︎