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December 21, 2007

Movies About Men, For Women

In his comment to my entry about why I like the sex scene in Latter Days, MohoHawaii noted that he “always thought that there should be a larger market for romance stories that cross the gender divide. The straight female audience is largely untapped as consumers of male-male love stories. This is a potentially huge market, since there are 10 to 20 times as many straight women as there are gay men.”

For whatever reason, I’ve been an enthusiastic part of that market since even before I officially reached adulthood. One of my very first entries on this blog was about my movie-watching habits in the 1980s. I decided as a college freshman that I’d see pretty much any movie back for a “revival” (which was important back in the days before you could easily rent or buy a copy of a movie, making revival houses unnecessary) or anything that was a “classic.” This decision was facilitated by the fact that UA’s student union had a HUGE movie theater in it, and it showed only second-run movies or revivals, for a mere buck-fifty. As I’ve mentioned, the first movie I went to see there was A Clockwork Orange, which I walked out of; the second movie I went to see was La Cage aux Folles, which I loved and my roommate hated.

I made a habit of dragging roommates to movies I really wanted to see, which is how, as a junior, I persuaded my 17-year-old sister (yes, I roomed with my sister--I actually roomed with all three of my sisters at one point or another) to see both Risky Business (had that dreadful R-rating, though in the early 80s ratings weren’t quite such a big deal in the church) and Another Country, which was rated a mere PG but was all about homosexuality at some British public school.

I’m not sure how many teenage Mormon females would be so enthusiastic about a mannered art film exploring the difficulties of conducting a gay love affair at boys' boarding school, difficulties exacerbated because one boy had just hung himself after being caught en flagrante by a headmaster. But my sister and I LOVED it. And really, it’s not so very remarkable that we loved it, because it was an interesting script and beautifully cast, emphasis on beautiful: it featured the very young Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Cary Elwes in their earliest starring roles.

I’ve talked to gay men who shrug when I mention that movie and say, “Oh, it was OK.” I watched it a few years ago when it came out on dvd; it wasn’t as good as I remembered, but I still liked it. And I think I liked it for one of the reasons I liked Latter Days, and that’s the fact that women were not depicted as adversaries in that movie.

Of course, in Another Country, women are not really depicted at all: they don’t really exist. Rupert Everett’s character has a mother we see once or twice; Colin Firth’s character has a girlfriend we never see. But for the most part, women are irrelevant in that movie.

Compare that to something like Maurice, where women are cast in role of adversary or impediment, not very intelligent or worthy ones, either; rather, they are the temptation or social crutch one character succumbs to, leaving the other broken-hearted and alone with his unspeakable, unshakable desires.

Or think of Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which a gay character comes home and crawls into bed. His wife wakes and begins to kiss and caress him, attempting to initiate sex. Furious at having to deny himself what he really wants and engage in sex he doesn’t enjoy, the man makes the sex absolutely brutal, so vicious and violent that by the time he rolls off his wife, she’s wounded and weeping.

Or think of Total Eclipse, a fairly crappy movie hardly anyone saw, where Paul Verlaine is unwilling to commit to a relationship with Arthur Rimbaud (Leo DiCaprio), because “he loves his wife’s body.” But loving his wife’s body doesn’t stop him from becoming so annoyed at the way she’s intellectually inferior to his male lover on the side that he sets her hair on fire.

Or think of Sordid Lives, which has some really lackluster performances (the lead, for example) but some really great ones--it’s how I became a Beth Grant fan. OK, a lot of the female characters in that movie are very sympathetic. But there’s also the dreadful female psychiatrist who’s trying to make Brother Boy straight by forcing him to look at her genitals.

Or think of Wilde, or of Oscar Wilde’s life. Wilde liked his wife, Constance; he felt fondness and affection for her, and doted on her when she was first pregnant. But she didn’t provide the kind of companionship he really wanted. After Wilde meets Robbie Ross, Constance becomes a mere bit player in his life. After Wilde meets Bosie, she’s essentially written out of the action. Wilde’s actions destroy both himself AND his wife, but foremost in his concerns is always Bosie, the person he was in love with, not the person he married.

Or think of Angels in America, and the way Harper is a not-that-bright, not-that-appealing (not-that-believable), depressed, neurotic hindrance that Joe must escape in order to become a more authentic person.

I could go on and on. And the point is not to say that there’s anything necessarily wrong with these movies, because I believe they’re depicting real phenomena. I have no problem believing, for instance, that in England during the time surrounding the Great War, for a gay man who fell in love at university, it was really upsetting, confusing and humiliating when the guy you were in love with--and who claimed to love you back--spurned you in order to marry a woman, which is the story in Maurice. I managed to enjoy the movie perfectly well, even though women were depicted primarily as adversaries as obstacles; it’s just that Maurice is by no means my favorite Merchant Ivory film or favorite Forster novel. (That would be A Room with a View, on both counts.)

Then compare all these movies--one in which women are irrelevant, a bunch in which women are the nasty plot complication--to Latter Days, where women are friends, roommates, mentors, mothers (and not nearly as nasty as the patriarchs), co-workers and even employers, but never discarded spouses or lovers.

Think of it in terms of my all-time favorite gay/transgendered movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The only woman Hedwig has to reject is herself, the person Hansel became in order to please the first husband. After Tommy encounters Hedwig’s angry inch and freaks out, then tries to make it all better by saying, “But I love you,” Hedwig replies, angry and hurt, “Then love the front of me.” It means something very different when an unhappily/incompletely transgendered biological man says that to another man than if a straight woman says it to a gay man.

In Emily Pearson’s essay "Irreconcilable Differences," about her mixed orientation marriage, she notes that watching the play about their marriage by her ex-husband, Steve Fales, felt like “being dismembered by an ice pick.” She also writes about reading a review of the play in which the reviewer noted that

As important as his relationship with his wife is to his story--and as much as his desire to respect her privacy may be commendable--it’s disconcerting how completely she disappears from his ‘Confessions’ between courtship and divorce.”

I was floored. The reviewer had, in one sentence, summed up my entire marriage. I had completely disappeared between our courtship and divorce. Just as my mother, and every other straight woman I knew who had married a gay man, had completely disappeared between courtship and divorce.

I recognize the need for gay men to tell the truth of their stories. I applaud the effort. But I cannot applaud the perpetuation of stories in which the plot is designed from the get-go for women to be adversaries, impediments, that which must be abandoned in order for the man’s real story to unfold. And that is what happens when we act like mixed-orientation marriages are examples of brave, courageous, admirable choices on the part of the men who pursue them. They’re not. They might be understandable choices, and some gay men might make a better go of it than others. I'm not saying they should be forbidden or punished. (From what I've seen, in most cases, the marriage itself and the dreadful aftermath are usually punishment enough.) But they’re not something we should admire--they’re not, in other words, something we should make “politically correct.”*

So I think that’s one reason I like Latter Days more than any gay Mormon man I’ve ever met likes it: it doesn’t denigrate women or women's sexuality. It doesn’t treat straight women as maddening manacles or millstones preventing the main characters’ happiness, or as unfortunate but unavoidable casualties along the course of the main characters’ voyages of discovery. It doesn’t even turn women into irrelevancies the main characters need not worry about. It treats them as people, entitled to respect and esteem, and invested in very real and respectable ways in the main characters’ well-being.

So if someone wants to tap into the potential audience straight women could be for romances about gay men, I think all of that is important to keep in mind.

*That, by the way, is Ben Christensen’s current way of trying to defend the whole business of mixed-orientation marriages: he marvels that his critics somehow missed the fact that he asked, "Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that’s what he chooses to do?"

I didn't miss the question; I spent 7000 words explaining why it's not politically correct, but I'll provide the short answer here: because most marriages between gay men and straight women privilege male well-being at the cost of female well-being. I also noted, "Christensen demands not only the continued right of gay men to marry straight women, but approbation and approval for doing so, and he has received even that." He's not brave enough to do what he wants regardless of what other people think of him; he wants everyone to approve him, and he becomes petulant when they don't.

On his blog, he recently asked if I or other like me would "accuse a woman expressing her right to marry another woman of having an overblown sense of entitlement? No; Holly has said as much. Why then the double standard? Why are some choices more politically correct than others?"

Jesus Christ, why are some people so much poorer at clear reasoning than others?

Some choices are more politically correct than others because some choices are more beneficial to society and individuals, while others are more harmful. Most mixed-orientation marriages are dreadful failures that bring misery and heartache to those involved, including spouses and the children these marriages produce.

Gee? Why wouldn't society offer such marriages its most enthusiastic endorsement? Well, you can only note that for a really long time, the Mormon church did.

That, Ben, is why your choice is less "politically correct" than others. Ain't no double standard there--just the simple awareness that it is unethical for society to promote choices in which the cost of one person's happiness/ comfort/ convenience/ pleasure come at the cost of someone else's suffering. Your marriage might be one of the few exceptions--you and FoxyJ might live your entire lives pleased as punch with your arrangement--but for most people who end up in them, marriages like yours are unnecessary, unmitigated disasters. Because most people in and out of such marriages can see that, they find your defense of mixed-orientation marriages--not just mixed marriages themselves, but your entire defense of them--not only politically incorrect, but naive, foolish and pitiable. Is that really so hard to see?

So Ben, there's no double standard in the fact that people like me are ardent supporters of the right to marry for two people who are fervently in love and who have a clear understanding of what they're offering each other in a marriage, regardless of gender, but aren't so big on the idea of sexually naive dudes blind to their own privilege saying, "I want what everyone else has, just because. Why doesn't everyone approve of me when I do whatever I want?"

You might as well argue that there should be no double-standard about drinking: if it’s OK for adults to drink, why isn’t it OK for 14-year-olds to drink? If it’s OK for a 30-year-old guy to drink four whiskey and sodas during a Friday night at a bar with his friends, why isn’t it politically correct for a 30-year-old pregnant woman to drink three cosmos that same Friday night? Why the double standard? Gee, could it have something to do with the fact that one course of action is far more likely to cause harm than another?

But since someone probably will argue that there should be no law prohibiting teenagers from buying alcohol, or else argue that all drinking should be politically incorrect, let me illustrate the problems with Ben's logic in another example involving marriage. In some states a 16-year-old can marry provided s/he has parental consent; in other states, second cousins can marry. So why shouldn't it be politically correct to marry your 16-year-old second cousin if that's what you choose to do? Why is that any different from marrying your 21-year-old fourth-cousin-once-removed, especially if she's not done with college? She's still younger than average, and you're still related. So why the double standard?

In other words, Ben, just get over the fact that people don't always approve of what you do, and live your live according to your own convictions and preferences, or else make choices that will more easily win you respect.

Posted by Holly at 8:18 PM | Comments (6)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

October 30, 2007

The Ex-Exes from Exodus and the Agency of Gay Men

Yeah, I've been really busy--lots of writing, lots of job stuff. But things have recently calmed down, and yesterday I tried to catch up on a few blogs, which is how I found this post on the ways that women's lives can constitute collateral damage when gay men marry straight women.

There was also a really great BBC radio documentary on this not too long ago, called "The Sex Live of Us: Moving Out." Unfortunately the program is no longer available, but I'm including a link because someday they might put it back on.

After watching the videos on MoHoHawaii, I clicked on a link that led me to YouTube, and found this:

I watch that and wonder, is it more generous to hope that someday something like that happens to all gay men married to straight women--in other words, should I hope that they fall into deep erotic, emotional and intellectual love with someone who loves them back--or more generous to hope that it doesn't--should I hope they stay all their lives in marriages that lack passion and completion, because that doesn't cause disruption or make them admit the contradictions in their lives? For so many reasons, including the fact that I care about honesty and integrity and think falling in love teaches you a hell of a lot about what it means to be human, I feel like I should hope for the former for the men, but then we're back to making the women collateral damage.

But the focus still remains on whether or not gay men should marry straight women, not on whether straight women should marry gay men--because after all gay men have more agency in this matter: by and large men are still in charge of courtship; men still propose; men can hide or reveal their sexual orientation. It would be different if straight women were pursuing and proposing to men they knew were gay; if uncloseted gay men felt pressure to submit to the demands of straight women. But instead, it's all about straight women submitting to the wants and needs of gay men, who may or may not be closeted, who ask their wives to engage in marriages that are thorough shams or marriages in which sex will never play the same role it could in a marriage with complementary orientations.

Just one more way patriarchy stays hard at work for you and the status quo, even when you don't ask it to; one more way your choices can be misogynist even when you think you're the nicest guy in the world!

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

September 11, 2007

Baring Their Chests and Testimonies

I got this link from my friend Troy, who sent it to me with the note "as if missionaries weren't gay enough...."

It's for Mormons Exposed: Men on a Mission, a retailing enterprise promoting a calendar featuring a buff, bare-chested RM (returned missionary) every month. The faq page (an acronym I always read "fag" unless it's capitalized) states that "the calendar celebrates these missionaries' great looks and beautiful bodies, as well as the amazing stories of service of these deeply spiritual men," adding that

Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story - one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity. The fact that twelve young returned missionaries are posing shirtless will certainly raise eyebrows, but may also help to sort out some common misconceptions about Mormons. The shock value of what these traditionally conservative young men have helped to create has the power to build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance.

It also notes that the "This product may be the must-have stocking stuffer of the year, or even be the gag gift of 2008"--or do they mean the "gay gift" of 2008?

You'll see what I mean if you go to the "meet the missionaries" page, click on the little photo of each missionary, then run your cursor over the larger photo that appears on the plaque on the right of the screen: each missionary appears in his shirtless pose! What cracks me up is that they simply removed their shirts and posed in their dress slacks, with their belts still on. But you must check out Matt, who holds is scriptures in his fully-dressed pose, but has his thumb tugging down the waistband of his pants (just a bit of his garments peek out) and his hair coyly disheveled in his shirtless pic.

I shouldn't be so snarky, I know: it's not like most Mormon men know much of anything at all about how to be sexy, since all they're taught for most of their lives is how to repress.

But they do know how to be pompous and white. I must point out that while the twelve young men who posed for the calendar served all over the world--Ukraine, Japan, Mozambique, Argentina, Las Vegas--they're fairly homogeneous in their origins: four are from Utah, two are named Brandon, one is a Matt and one is a Matthew, and they're all white, white, white! Not a Hispanic, Asian, Native American (or, in Mormon-speak, "Lamanite") or African-American (or, in Mormon-speak, "seed of Cain") in the mix. Not one.

If you ask me, that's a pretty serious lapse for an enterprise that claims it wants to "build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance."

They're so entrenched in their own view of who they are that they can't even realize the extent to which WHITENESS is part of the stereotypical ideas about Mormons, and that seems to be one stereotype they have no wish to defy.

(And oh yeah. There's also the "deeply closeted" stereotype. They're not doing much to defy that one, either. Which is why you need to read Troy's essay on embracing queerness.)

Posted by Holly at 9:11 AM | Comments (4)

July 15, 2007

Would Joseph Smith Have Been Cool with the Queers?

I've said this before on my blog, and I'll probably say it again: my friend Troy is awesome. He just sent me a link to his latest editorial in the Salt Lake Trib, in which he offers a "queer eye for Mormons." Here's a highlight:

You can't complain when people don't believe you are Christian if you teach that all other Christian faiths are apostate. That never goes over well at interfaith functions. And remember, "as ye sow, so shall ye reap."

If you continually attack the LGBT community, then karma will eventually come back around to bite. Nobody likes a bully. And Mormons, of all people, know what it's like to be a persecuted minority. Imagine, instead, if the Latter-day Saints were to rally to the defense of the poor, marginalized and oppressed - wow. You could so change the world.

I like to think that Joseph Smith would have been cool with the queers. He, too, lived on the fringe of respectable society. And, like Mitt, he loved this country enough to run for president.

I personally doubt JS would have been cool with the queers--he was thoroughly homosocial but too into promoting a patriarchal power structure built on men's sexual power of women, and sex between men would have complicated that. But I like the other points Troy makes a lot.

Posted by Holly at 9:23 PM | Comments (1)

June 3, 2007

His Big Gay Belgian Wedding

By the way, remember that wedding in Belgium I mentioned attending? I never said who got married, because I wanted to write all about it. And I did write all about it--I wrote a great little piece which I sent off to the NY Times Modern Love column, because it's edited by a friend of mine who asked me several times to write something he could use. So I finally did, and wouldn't you know, it never even got a response.

I'm not going to post here the essay I wrote, but I will post something I didn't send the NY Times: a photo, of me with my dear friend Matthew, one of the grooms. That's right: the wedding I attended was a gay wedding--and not just a commitment ceremony either, but an actual, valid, legal ceremony performed by a government official and recognized by the state, without any nasty judicial challenges or threat of constitutional amendment to render it invalid.

And not only did I attend the ceremony, but I took part in it: I was one of the legal witnesses--in other words, I was one of the "best people."

I'm including a photo of me and Matthew instead of Matthew and his husband because Matthew has already appeared on my blog, so I figure he's fair game. As for the partner, well, I don't want to invade his privacy. But they looked fabulous together and I was very, very happy and proud to be part of their wedding.

View image

Posted by Holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (7)

November 8, 2006

Marriage Manifesto

My friend Troy is awesome. He is not only gay (sexual orientation) but queer (social identity) and after the four panelists had spoken in the Brokeback session at Sunstone (see the intro and the excerpt), I asked him to come up and make a comment, in part because he knew all four women on the panel, and in part because I knew he'd deliver both a queer-positive and a woman-positive message. He gets it: he understands the patriarchy is the basic problem, and claims that one reason he's such a decent, enlightened person is because he has listened to the women in his life. He also doesn't take the "oh, I'm gay and it's such a source of heartache" approach to homosexuality--he acknowledges that people go through that stage, but at some point, he says, embrace your gayness! Love yourself for who you are! Be positive about all the fabulous aspects of gayness, instead of trying to retain as many elements of straightness as you possibly can.

Troy does a radio show in Salt Lake called Now Queer This. He's working a documentary about some brouhaha in southern Utah over legislation to define a marriage as existing only between one man and one woman. He has filmed orthodox Mormons, gays, and polygamists as part of the movie.

Troy gets this as well: alternative marriage is alternative marriage, and so he supports the decriminalization of polygamy. Independent polygamists get it too: many support legalization of gay marriage between consenting adults because they realize that it will pave the way for decriminalization of polygamy among consenting adults. (Which many in the gay community find distressing.) My family, which is well stocked with Mormon Republican lawyers and judges who find both gay marriage and polygamy revolting (one is counter to god's will, and the other is entirely god's will, but not something anyone with any self esteem and a real love for her spouse would ever do if she could possibly avoid it), understand that point as well--and they're really afraid.

And all that is why, at dinner a couple of days after Sunstone ended, Troy and I began discussing how we rather hoped the issue of alternative marriage was forced in Utah, that some federal ruling made both gay marriage AND polygamy legal, not only because it would be legally consistent, but because it would be really, really fun to watch the brethren of the church squirm as they tried to decide what to do about the legacy of polygamy, this horrible embarrassment that is rejected by the church as a practice but embraced as a doctrine.

Unfortunately our position enraged Annabelle, a Mormon feminist who joined us for dinner. Annabelle is devoutly opposed to religious polygyny, as she calls the Mormon flavor of polygamy. She felt that the legalization of polygamy would ensure the repression of women.

Troy and I argued otherwise: make it legal! Shine the light of day on the whole sordid business, and make it less sordid. Insist that all plural marriages be recognized by the legal system, so that any marriage that appears to be coercive, or to involve someone who is underage, can be stopped, and the men in such cases prosecuted.

Which is a way of saying that I fully support the right of all consenting adults to marry whomever they want.

If a gay woman wants to marry a straight man and he wants to marry her, I support their legal right to do so.

If two straight men want to marry one straight woman and she wants to marry them both, I support their legal right to do so.

If two bi-sexual women want to each other, as well as two bi-sexual men who have also married each other, so that all four are married to each of the other three, I support their legal right to do so.

What I don't support--and I believe that both religious polygyny and the rhetoric of Ben Christensen (and very likely his actual marriage) are examples of this--is the invocation of religion, God's will and God's favor in support of marriages that privilege the desires and demands of men over those of women.

And since there's no way to legislate against that particular dimension, I'm left with discussing why I think such patriarchal marriages are back-asswards, foolish and destructive, even though I feel quite strongly that as long as they involve adults of relatively sound mind, they should be legal.

So, Ben et al, there you have it, just as you requested: I acknowledge your right to do as you want, and I support your legal right to marry whomever you want, to work out your sex life as you see fit, and to have as many children as your marriage can produce.

Now please acknowledge my right to find your choices in this regard every bit as foolish, naive, and pigheaded as those of someone who chooses to eat nothing but celery, lettuce, rice cakes, diet soda and laxatives, and is always defending her right to be anorexic.

Acknowledge as well my right to critique a piece published in a magazine I've subscribed to and published in for years, and to call attention to bad logic, poor writing and limited thinking when I see it.

Ben has already acknowledged that he was foolish not to imagine that there could be a feminist critique of his position--not that he acknowledged the validity of my critique, just that he should not have assumed no such critique would ever happen.

It ain't much, but considering the source, it's a start.

Posted by Holly at 10:25 AM | Comments (1)

November 1, 2006

Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the excerpt)

Here are some excerpts from the paper I presented as part of this panel.

As part of my presentation, I pose this question, "why isn't it politically correct for a gay man to venture into the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?," first posed by Ben Christensen (whose temple garments are all in a twist because I claim the right to think he's a self-deceived, selfish gas bag--see the comments on this post) and cite ancient Athenian and Hebrew society (both of which required men who had sex with men to nonetheless marry women) to support my contention that Christensen's basic assumption is flawed. As it happens I am all for opening what has been the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--to gay WOMEN. But Christensen shows little care for the rights and opportunities of women, gay or straight: his concern is with preserving the privileges of MEN, straight or gay. Thus remains a question needing an answer, which is this:

What does it mean for a homophobic, patriarchal, misogynist society to require men to marry women and impregnate them as part of their duties as members of the community?

Why should a gay Mormon man give a damn about women's sexuality, since doctrine created by straight Mormon men doesn't? Consider Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants (a.k.a. the "new and everlasting covenant," a.k.a. polygamy): a man can have an infinite number of wives who belong to him, but no more than one man can belong to a woman, because women are given to men to multiply and replenish the earth. Women's pleasure and subjectivity aren't factors.

I know it can take a while to figure out one's sexual identity, and that people who avoid sexual behavior during their teens, only to marry in their early 20s, might not have a firm handle on their sexual orientation. I've known people who figure out after a decade or two of marriage that maybe they're not straight after all. I know from watching friends go through it that it's profoundly painful. But I also think from observing various marriages and divorces that there's something different happening when men who know ahead of time that they are gay marry women they know are straight. Whether or not these men are seeking some kind of "cure," they still seek to assuage their own suffering and discomfort through means that create profound suffering and discomfort for women, suffering and discomfort women have been trained to believe they should accept. I submit that patriarchy endows men with a sense of entitlement--witness Christensen's resentment that marrying women and fathering children is still the "exclusive territory of straight men"--that blinds them to the real cost of their actions, whereas women are trained, through doctrines like the new and everlasting covenant, to expect that they will not have the exclusive regard or affection of their husbands, that indeed their feelings about their marriages are less important than the patriarch's wielding of authority.

Both Fales and Christensen stress that they informed their wives of their homosexuality before the wedding. They did NOT make this revelation at the start of the courtship; they waited until marriage had been discussed. If a gay man truly wants to be honest and honorable, the real time to make this admission is on the first date, before the woman is in love and has a vision of her future with him. Admitting to a serious girlfriend that you're gay ends the deception, but I doubt it improves the chances for success of any subsequent marriage, given how naively and earnestly hopeful Mormon women are about marriage--and how ignorant they are about sex if they've obeyed the law of chastity.

In his commentary to Christensen's essay, Ron Schow notes that Christensen oversimplifies "his options as either temple marriage or ‘a rampant life of unrestrained queerness.' Obviously," Schow points out, "there are many choices between the two extremes" (139). Christensen ends his essay by relating an epiphany that occurred after a "BYU fireside where they tell you to get married. I'd pretty much tuned out the entire thing," he writes, "because it didn't apply to me, but then I got home, sat on my bed, and had a distinct impression that yes, it did apply to me. Yes, I was gay, but that didn't mean I was excluded from Heavenly Father's desire for his children to marry and have families" (131).

I am glad Christensen had that epiphany--I accept its truthfulness. What I don't accept is his oversimplified and religiously predetermined interpretation, that any marriage he might have must be with a woman for whom he feels little sexual desire. While I acknowledge the right he and his wife have to do as they please, I have the right to find their efforts foolish and destructive rather than admirable. Why should he settle for a partner he doesn't desire? Why should his wife settle for a partner who doesn't truly desire her? The fact that they're willing to doesn't strike me as adequate justification.

I want for these gay men who marry straight women what they seem unable to want for themselves or their wives: to be able to form their families and raise their children with a partner beloved, cherished and desired body and soul, and I think the world will be a better place for me and all other straight women and men when gay women and men have that right.

Posted by Holly at 9:20 AM | Comments (4)

October 30, 2006

Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the introduction)

During the six years I've attended Sunstone, I've noticed that sessions there discussing homosexuality tend to focus on male sexuality, and that discussants, regardless of orientation, are generally male. For the 2006 symposium, I proposed a panel entitled "Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism" in part as a way of calling attention to the fact that homosexuality is an issue that also affects women. Admittedly, my panel did not include lesbian voices, but it seemed artificial to ask a lesbian to comment on the topic just as a way of correcting previous imbalances. I hope future sessions will address the concerns of lesbians, or include their voices.

I thought a lot about the title: I went with widely-recognized references to pop culture to show how common this issue is. I invoked Will and Grace because I want to underscore how genuine, precious and pleasurable my platonic friendships with gay men have been. I invoked Angels in America because it's a Pulitzer-prize winning set of plays featuring an unequal marriage between a closeted gay Mormon man and an unhappy Mormon housewife. (Though I admit I HATE both installments for so many reasons, including the fact that they're full of self-indulgent speeches that go on and on beyond the point of being either narratively or philosophically interesting, and that Kushner is a really shitty fact-checker, and that his female Mormon characters are not at all believable to me--no Mormon woman--no Mormon, PERIOD--would ever complain that it was a bad idea to leave Manhattan and move to DC, because DC is less righteous--hell, DC is overrun with Mormons, and there's a goddamn temple there!) I invoked Brokeback Mountain because it was current and also I really loved it.

That's the stuff before the colon; after the colon we get STRAIGHT WOMEN first, and then GAY MEN, because I wanted to foreground women in all of this. And then we get Mormonism, because it's the spin that complicates the matter.

Mine was not the only session dealing with homosexuality; one reason Dan Wotherspoon was so enthusiastic about the timing of my panel was that 2006 was the 20th anniversary of the publication of Good-bye, I Love You, a memoir by Carol Lynn Pearson, one of Mormondom's most beloved writers, about her temple marriage to a gay man, their divorce, and his death from AIDS. Carol Lynn presented a heartbreaking discussion of the suffering gay Mormons often endure. Her daughter Emily, who also married a gay man (I mention his one-man play here), was one of the panelists in my session. And Carol Lynn's ex-son-in-law also presented some of his more recent work.

My remarks for my part of the panel were drawn in part from material I first grappled with here. Relevant posts are, in order of posting, Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men, The Society of Buggers, Brokeback Mountain, Old Testament Weirdness, It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard, and The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus.

OK. That's all preamble. Tomorrow is Halloween and I'm planning to go that with theme in tomorrow's entry, so check back Wednesday or Thursday for the more substantial account of my remarks at Sunstone, if you're interested--or, if you're not, you know to stay away until the weekend.

Posted by Holly at 10:10 AM | Comments (2)

August 6, 2006

The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus

I promise, one of these days, I really will write about something else. But I keep running into more discussions of this topic, which I feel compelled to share.

Perhaps in reply to Thursday's NY Times article about gay men in straight marriages (which I discussed yesterday), Friday the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about "mixed orientation" marriages, with the optimistic headline, "Mixed-orientation LDS couples count on commitment, work and love to beat the odds." The article's basic message is this: gay men, just admit you're gay before you get married, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

Women, just accept that your husband is gay and will never want you the way he wants men, convince yourself that sex doesn't matter all that much, and you too can have a conventional Mormon marriage!

The couple interviewed for the article are sure of this because they are in the early 20s and have small children, and by gosh and by golly, they're making it work! What's fifty years of denial compared to getting through the first five years of a marriage?

The article acknowledges that most such marriages fail. Still, it discusses the phenomenon in such admiring tones--aren't these kids brave! Aren't they honest and open to challenges!

Let's hope they convince even more gay men to marry straight women, so that others can engage in the same (probably) doomed struggle!

Posted by Holly at 4:09 PM | Comments (23)

August 5, 2006

It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard

I said we'd abandon this topic for a while, and when I said that, I meant it. But two things--or rather, two comments that need attention called to them--happened on the Brokeback Mountain post: 1) Saviour Onassis offered me a proposal of no marriage--check it out! It was so sweet; and 2) Spike provided a link to a timely article from the NY Times. Entitled "When the Beard Is Too Painful to Remove," it is, as Spike notes, "remarkably sympathetic to the gay men who struggle to figure out how to remain in their marriages and families. But not a word on lesbians who might find themselves in a marriage with a man but needing or craving partnerships with women, and not much comment on how the wives-- ‘beards'--the terms is gendered and sounds so derogatory--are supposed to cope."

The article states that

For gay men in heterosexual marriages, even after the status quo becomes unbearable, the pull of domestic life remains powerful. Many are desperate to preserve their marriages-- to continue reaping the emotional and financial support of wives, (emphasis added) and domestic pleasures like tucking children in at night.

And how do such men hope to retain those benefits? The articles cites Stephen McFadden, a social worker who runs support groups for married gay men in Manhattan, in asserting that "these men want to save their marriages.... either by lying, promising their wives they will not have sex with men or persuading them to accept their double lives."

In fact,

Leaving a marriage and setting up housekeeping with a gay partner is not what most married gay men have in mind when they join a support group, according to Stephen McFadden.... Instead, Mr. McFadden and others in the field say, their clients generally start out committed to the opposite goal.

That's insane to me--about like joining a support group for alcoholics and expecting to be told how keep people off your back or bolster your liver function so you can continue drinking, or joining a support group for compulsive gamblers because you want information on how to borrow more money when your credit is already shot and your house is in foreclosure.

The only woman quoted is "Bonnie Kaye, the former wife of a gay man, who runs the Web site www.gayhusbands.com and conducts ‘How to Come Out to Your Wife' workshops. ‘If they're too selfish to leave, I won't work with them,' Ms. Kaye said. ‘If they love their wives, they need to give them their lives back.'"

I'm glad the article let someone say it.

Thanks again, Spike, for providing the link.

Posted by Holly at 5:39 PM | Comments (0)

August 4, 2006

Old Testament Weirdness

In the comments to yesterday's post on Brokeback Mountain, CL Hanson notes that she learned at BYU that "in [Mormon] culture woman is the disposable person." That's something learned in college myself, albeit in a bible lit class, when I read this gruesome story in Judges 19, which I'm going to tell now, and then we're going to take a break from this topic, since it doesn't seem wildly popular. [OK, I lied: there's a followup here.] Plus, I'm almost done with the paper and will have time to write about something else for a while. But here it is, without further ado, one of the grossest stories from the Old Testament:

In Judges 19, we get the story of a Levite from Mount Ephriam whose concubine leaves him in order to return to her parents' house, an activity labeled "playing the whore against him," or valuing her own desires above his. The Levite eventually goes to fetch his concubine, and on their journey home they stop in Gibeah, where the men are "Benjaminites," meaning both that they are of the tribe of Benjamin and that they have sex with other men. The Levite sets up camp in the street of a city, only to be implored by an old man not to lodge there--instead, the old man offers the couple shelter for the night.

Beginning in verse 22, we read

Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. [Note: in case you don't get it, they're using "know" in the biblical sense, this being the bible and all.]

[23] And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.

[24] Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

[25] But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.

[26] Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light.

[27] And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold.

[28] And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place.

[29] And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.

Cutting an ox into twelve parts and sending a piece to each of the twelve tribes was a traditional call to war, but why cut up a perfectly good ox when you've already got a dead--or nearly dead--concubine? Keep in mind, the Levite called the tribes to war over the fact that the Benjaminites had destroyed his property--at stake was the fact that this MAN would have to get a new concubine--rather than over the fact that a woman was raped repeatedly, since he himself threw her out the door to be raped.

The tale is revolting, in its homophobia, its misogyny, its unspeakable violence. It shows that homosexual acts are so abominable that to prevent their occurrence, one should offer one’s virgin daughter to be “humbled,” because in these matters, women’s health and happiness, if not their very lives, are acceptable sacrifices. Gay gang rape is unthinkable, but straight gang rape–hey, if it placates the horny male miscreants outside your door, no problem! The aftermath isn't much better. The other eleven tribes went to war against Benjamin, and killed over 25,000 of its men--only 600 men of Benjamin remained when the battle ended. It looked as though the tribe would die out, because all the men in the other eleven tribes had sworn not to give their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, an oath they could not renounce. But they didn't want to be the eleven Tribes of Israel, so they hatched a plan to provide the Benjaminites with wives: a group of virgins, the daughters of Shiloh, would be celebrating a feast off in a vineyard, and if the Benjaminites rode in, kidnapped the virgins and married them, well, their fathers hadn't broken their oath because they had not "given" their daughters in marriage to Benjamin, only allowed them to be taken.

Marriage and procreation, you see, were both duties and rights of these men, regardless of any sexual conduct they engaged in with other men. The important thing was to keep the tribe going. This is the spiritual and moral legacy we have inherited from the Old Testament, and it still lives on in Mormonism, which is why marriages between straight Mormon women and gay Mormon men still receive such praise.

Posted by Holly at 8:59 AM | Comments (9)

August 2, 2006

Brokeback Mountain

Here's a follow-up to yesterday's post, more on what I want to discuss at Sunstone this year. This is a topic I've already explored on my blog, in entries entitled Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, and The Exclusive Terroritory of Straight Men.

It ain't gonna be pretty, that's for sure.

Over Christmas I went to see Brokeback Mountain with Saviour Onassis while we were both in Arizona for the holidays. I was staying with my sister, who is both a dutiful Mormon who avoids R-rated movies, and a devoted and knowledgeable fan of good cinema. She knew she wouldn't be seeing the movie, but she wanted to hear all about it when I got home. "Is it really as good as they say?" she asked.

"It really is," I said. "Heath Ledger is amazing. He deserves an Oscar." (He was robbed, by the way. So was Jake.) "He reminded me of some of our cousins," I told her. "He does a thoroughly convincing job of playing a taciturn western cowboy."

"I hear both characters have wives," she said.

"Yes," I said. "And that's one of the things I liked about the movie: all the characters are treated with respect and sympathy. The wives aren't the focus of the movie but they're not neglected, either. The situation does incredible damage to the women, but they're not treated as acceptable casualties. Anne Hathaway's personality becomes as brittle as her bleached hair, while Michelle Williams--oh, it's just heartbreaking."

"Well," my sister said emphatically, banging pots around as she emptied her dishwasher, "it's great that they portrayed it well, but the situation itself is not OK. These guys have got to stop marrying women."

"You looking for an argument?" I asked. "I was engaged to a gay man, remember? I don't think gay men should marry straight women, either."

"They've got to stop," she repeated. "They've got to stop hiding behind wives. It's not fair to use women like that."

"I couldn't agree more," I said. "And it's a time-honored practice with a name, in case you didn't know: marrying someone of the opposite sex for the purpose of passing for straight is called ‘having a beard,' and I think there should be no more beards. But I also think that if you want gay men to stop marrying straight women, one good way of helping that happen is to let them marry each other." She made no reply to that--as a Mormon Republican, what could she say?--but she at least nodded.

Posted by Holly at 5:10 PM | Comments (6)

August 1, 2006

The Society of Buggers

The entry below is part of my attempt to shape material for a panel I'm moderating/presenting on at Sunstone next week. The title of the panel is "Will, Grace, and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men, and Mormonism." I can already tell I will have too much to say--I always do--and am worrying about how to cover what's most important. I will be grateful for any suggestions on how to deal with this material.

"The society of buggers has many advantages--if you are a woman," declares Virginia Woolf in her memoir "Old Bloomsbury."

It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one's ease. But it has this drawback--with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow. It is significant of what I had come to desire that I went straight--on almost the next page of my diary indeed--from the dim and discreet rooms of James Strachey [one of her brother's gay classmates] at Cambridge to dine with Lady Ottoline Morrel at Bedford Square. Her rooms, I noted without drawing any inferences, seemed to me instantly full of "lustre and illusion."

Woolf arrives at this conclusion after trying to puzzle out why certain of her brother Thoby's university classmates, who would visit the home she kept with Thoby and their sister Vanessa, were simultaneously brilliant and boring, gifted and barren, why certain "young men [made] one feel that one could not honestly be anything? The answer to all my questions was, obviously--as you will have guessed--that there was no physical attraction between us."

Although this lack of physical attraction makes certain things impossible, it makes others things possible--the advantages already mentioned, for instance. But learning to accept--not merely tolerate--the sexuality of others allows Woolf to embrace and experience the world more fully. Woolf relates an anecdote involving a visit from Lytton Strachey, who once proposed marriage to Woolf only to withdraw his offer when it occurred to him that if he married her, he might actually have to kiss her, though he had no intention of ever bedding her. Woolf had been arguing with her brother-in-law Clive Bell, while Clive's wife Vanessa sat on the couch doing needle work.

Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr. Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa's white dress.

"Semen?" he said.

Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.

Woolf declares that as a result of being able to discuss openly, "the whole aspect of life was changed," adding that

there was now nothing that one could not say, nothing that one could not do, at [the home she shared with her siblings]. It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation. It may be true that the loves of buggers are not--at least if one is of the other persuasion--of enthralling interest or paramount importance. But the fact that they can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practiced privately. Thus many customs and beliefs were revised.

I am grateful to Virginia Woolf, her siblings, and Lytton Strachey et al., for helping to revise so many customs and beliefs. I think there are still more customs and beliefs to be revised. One example is gay marriage. I know the gay community is split on the issue of marriage--many believe that heterosexual marriage is an inherently flawed and repressive institution, one that lesbians and gay men would be better off not emulating or participating in, and what's really desirable is a transformation of all romantic and sexual partnerships into something more respectful and equal. I certainly respect that point of view, but until we achieve that transformation, I feel that if consenting adults of legal age want to marry a same-sex partner, they should have the legal right to do so, regardless of whether or not they take advantage of that right. And I feel as well that there are important reasons why those among the straight community should work to make this change.

to be continued

Posted by Holly at 4:38 PM | Comments (6)

January 26, 2006

Church Condemns Homophobia on National Coming Out Day

Here's the bit of satire I promised yesterday. This piece was originally published in The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire, in 2002. I got in a spot of trouble for it--plenty of people couldn't understand why anyone would attack a document claiming that "that the disintegration of the family [caused by things like uppity women and gay people wanting to get married] will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." But I still feel the attitudes I mock here deserve to be mocked.

You can still find the original version on the web if you want to go looking for it. The version below differs slightly from the earlier one: I've changed a sentence in the third paragraph because I am a compulsive fact-checker (that's one reason I had to leave the Mormon church: its facts don't check) and discovered that my original summary of McKinney's defense was incomplete, so I had to fix it.

(Salt Lake City, UT) October 11 was National Coming Out Day, a day on which gays and lesbians admit their sexual identity to themselves and others. In a show of support for the day, the Church issued a statement condemning homophobia. "Homophobia is un-Christlike," a spokesperson for the Church said. "We can't tolerate or condone violence against so-called gays and lesbians, even when they do something so heinous and disgusting as to insist that their perverse desires are actual parts of their eternal, god-given identities."

The spokesperson went on to say, "Remember, these people are sons and daughters of God, and are welcome as members of the church, as long as they do not imagine that they have any right to find happiness and companionship in a relationship with someone of their same sex, as God finds that utterly repugnant. We must do all we can to help these unfortunate people see that they are violating their divine natures, as well as the divine decrees of God, by ever imagining that there is nothing grotesque, obscene and evil about same-sex relationships. And pistol-whipping them and leaving them to die by the side of the road doesn't really help in that mission."

The mention of pistol-whipping was a reference to Matthew Wayne Shepard, a 21-year-old openly gay student at the University of Wyoming. On the night of October 6,1998, Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence on a remote highway in Wyoming, and left to die by several young people, one of whom, Aaron McKinney, was LDS. Shepard died of his injuries on October 12, 1998. McKinney did not deny that he kidnapped, robbed and beat Shepard, or that he pretended to be gay in order to lure Shepard into leaving with him; his defense was that he intended only to kidnap and rob Shepard, not to kill him, but flew into a rage when Shepard "fell" for the gay act and grabbed McKinney's genitals. McKinney was eventually convicted of felony murder. He received visits from home teachers up until the conviction.

Many members of the Church responded with support for the statement. "We shouldn't kill those 'so-called gays and lesbians,' to use a phrase you hear at Church, even though it would do the world a lot of good to get rid of them once and for all," said Marjorie Kimball, 34, of Walnut Creek, California. "Have you ever walked down Castro Street in San Francisco? It's disgusting. But taking a gun and cleaning out the whole area really isn't what God intends, since he can just wait until they all die of AIDS and then send them straight to hell."

Mark Jefferson, 42, of Madison, Wisconsin, stated, "In a really liberal place like Madison, where you can end up being friends with people who are gay or lesbian and kind of grow to care about them before you even know certain things about them, it can be hard to keep in mind how wrong homosexuality really is. It's a good thing we have the Proclamation on the Family up in our house, to remind me 'that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.' It's kind of weird to realize that all the terrorist attacks and the impending war in Iraq are a result of efforts in Hawaii and California and Vermont to legalize gay marriage. But even though these people are bringing about Armageddon, we have to try to forgive them anyway and hope they go straight before it's too late."

Posted by Holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2006

Non-Homophobe Fears Homosexuality Will Hasten Decay of Civilization

A practicing, believing Mormon I've collaborated with on a couple of projects has posted something on his blog about how, although he doesn't think he's a homophobe because he has been friends with gay people and recently drank decaf with a gay man in his own kitchen, still, he's upset about Brokeback Mountain because

there's something about homosexuality that always makes me think of the Roman empire crumbling and stuff like that. It seems to come to a head pretty late in a civilization's decline, By the time it becomes prominent, I think it's equivalent to the bruises you start to see on a piece of overripe fruit. It represents a new, deeper level of decay.

He acknowledges that there are probably

many individuals for whom homosexuality does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homosexuality is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homo vs. hetero). I haven't seen [Brokeback Mountain] yet, but I think depictions like this that get people thinking about homosexuality will cause many to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

He goes on to conclude that

deep down, I'm alarmed. I see more bruises forming on the fruit. I think we're in trouble. To mix in another metaphor, compared to the heterosexual sexual revolution of the '60s, I think the gay movement is like crack cocaine next to pot, in terms of potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things. (emphasis added.)

Before discussing this further, I want to say that I'm sure there are many individuals for whom homophobia does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homophobia is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homophobia vs. tolerance). Having spent 26 years as a practicing Mormon and seen Mormon homophobia in action up close, I think the post by this guy is a perfect example of how religious doctrine that justifies homophobia will cause many people to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

The author of the post I quote here, for instance, probably started out as a two or a three--more tolerant than not. But years of indoctrination into the Mormon church have helped him become an advocate of one of the most dangerous threats to all humanity: ignorant intolerance dressed in the guise of righteous religion.

Reading the post upset me profoundly, because this is someone I work with, and not only is his message homophobic and bigoted, his logic sucks: he feels justified in announcing his conviction that the gay movement is extreme in its "potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things"; he expresses openly his dire fears and grievous worries that acceptance of homosexuality will hasten some sort of dangerous, dreadful moral decay--but he rejects the label of homophobe! And this despite the fact that homophobia means "an irrational fear of homosexuality and homosexuals." Given that he proclaims his uh, righteous fears of homosexuality's threat to virtuous, upstanding society, given how overwrought, paranoid and hyperbolic his fears are (what the hell is he doing invoking the fall of the Roman empire? I thought that had to do with putting an emperor in charge of the government, and with the fact that the Goths sacked the capital.... Then there's the fact that the Greeks accepted homosexuality, and they are, after all, the basis for what we in the Western world call civilization), he seems to fit the definition of a homophobe to a rigid, straight H--OK, he's not a virulent, rampaging homophobe, just a mild, meandering one, looking for rotten fruit in the garden of life, blaming the rot on others--god forbid he consider the possibility that HE and his beliefs are responsible for such things.

How can he fail to see that he is a homophobe? Why is he willing to embrace thoroughly homophobic attitudes, but not the label that goes with them? (I do wonder why people are afraid of being labeled a bigot, but not of actually being one. I also wonder why they aren't afraid to reveal such thoroughly inadequate thinking, so that they end up seeming not only bigoted, but unable to follow clear reason.)

I also found the post profoundly ironic, because one of the projects I worked with him on was The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire modeled on The Onion. And when I wrote for the Sugar Beet, I got in a little trouble for a piece I produced to assuage some of the grief and shame I felt when I learned that Aaron McKinney, one of Matthew Shepard's murderers, had grown up Mormon and received officially sanctioned visits from representatives of the Mormon church up until his conviction--at which time the visits ceased and he got excommunicated, because you can't be a convicted felon and a practicing Mormon, any more than you can be an uncloseted homosexual and a practicing Mormon.

I've had people tell me--make that, I've had Mormons tells me--in all seriousness, that homosexuality is a sin akin to murder--and the treatment McKinney received pretty much demonstrates that, at least in the view of the Mormon church, that's true.

And omigod, it's not attitudes like that that will cause the end of civilization! It's not bigotry and greed and vicious illegal wars and wanton devastation of the environment that will destroy the United States--no, it's the fact that there are people in this country who think it's OK to choose a same-sex relationship.

Good god, that is so FUCKED UP.

I'll post the story from the Sugar Beet tomorrow.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (16)

December 5, 2005

England Legalizes Gay Unions and Retailers Embrace the Power of the Pink Pound

Sixteen days from today, England will allow its first gay marriages to take place. I remember reading in Austen novels about people going to Gretna Green, just over the border in Scotland, and soon realized it was a euphemism for eloping, about like "running off to Vegas. " I don't remember the details, but I learned that Scotland had different marriages laws than England--the bride could be younger, for one thing, and there might not have been this "cooling off" period England requires now.

Couples in England who want to marry as soon as the new law kicks in need to register today, so that they will have waited out a mandatory 15-day opportunity reflect on the question of "Do I REALLY want to vow publicly to live out the rest of my life with this person I've just spent six months planning a wedding with?"

The legalization is having all kinds of ramifications, and I don't mean that it's making right-wing religious wackos emerge from the comfort of their living rooms with pitchforks and picket signs in hand. No, retailers are stepping up to embrace the change, because it's "expected to generate a multimillion-pound economy in wedding ceremonies, receptions and gifts, with businesses keen to cash in on the market."

There are news stories about this all over the web, including this one from The Independent and this one from 365gay.com.

Many stories mention the responses of various churches to the event:

Some religions are getting involved, with the Liberal Judaism sect the first to offer a liturgy for partnership ceremonies, while the Methodist church is currently conducting a review of ways in which it could offer blessing services for same-sex couples.

The Church of England has ruled that clergy should not hold official blessing services for couples, but can pray for them.

That's a funky response from a religion whose beginning was all wrapped up in one man's desire to change marriage laws. It's about like the Mormon church's defense of traditional marriage even though its doctrines claim that polygamy is an unchangeable law of God humanity must submit to if it wants to be redeemed.

This story from Reuter's claims that the union is not a marriage, because "Civil partnership is formed when a couple sign certain documents in an exclusively civil procedure, whereas a marriage becomes binding when partners exchange spoken words in a civil or religious ceremony." All the other stories I've read refer to what gay couples will achieve on December 21 as "marriage."

But the Reuter's article also mentions that "The Church of England has provoked fury among Anglican traditionalists by allowing gay priests to register under the new civil partnership law as long as they remain celibate." You can get married, but can't sleep with your partner? Whatever.

Posted by Holly at 7:11 AM | Comments (1)

September 21, 2005

The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men

There are lots of posts on this topic. They are, in order of posting, Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, the post you're reading right now, The Society of Buggers, Brokeback Mountain, Old Testament Weirdness, It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard, The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus, Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the introduction), Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the excerpt), Marriage Manifesto, The Ex-Exes from Exodus and the Agency of Gay Men, Sex, Misogyny and My Blog Stats, Narcissism and Misogyny, and Really Long Comment, In Which I Disavow the Cow Part.

Let me quote a paragraph from the essay by Ben Christensen in the most recent Dialogue that upset me so.

I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option. In my mind, this kind of thinking is anti-progressive. The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles. We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered "white" and for women to do what was once considered "male"--get an education, have a career, etc. Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?

God, where do you even start with a paragraph like that.

I guess I'll do this sentence by sentence.

"I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option."

I'm not "threatened" by homosexual reparative therapy, and I would never stop anyone who truly wanted to pursue it, provided that person is over 18 and pursues the endeavor willingly. I would add, however, that while I would never "stop" someone from pursuing reparative therapy, neither would I particularly respect a decision to pursue it. There is considerable evidence that while it may convince people not to have gay sex, it doesn't make them straight. And it seems a sign of such self-loathing and desperation, that I can't help feeling the time, effort and money devoted to reparative therapy could be better spent in other ways.

"The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles."

Actually, no, that was not the whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movement. Both of those movements had and continue to have many goals during their long existences. An important goal of the civil rights movement in the 1960s was to pass and enforce legislation that would remove the threat of violence blacks so often lived under. It was not simply about acquiring the right to go to school or keeping a seat on the bus; it was about living without the fear of lynchings and murders. The same goes the feminist movement: there has been a long struggle to force law makers and law enforcement agencies to treat sexual and domestic violence as they crimes they should be.

"We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered ‘white' and for women to do what was once considered ‘male'--get an education, have a career, etc."

Actually, we live in a world where some people think it's OK for blacks to do what is still considered "white" and for women to do what is still considered "male" (interesting that the only examples Christensen cites are the basic human rights of getting an education, seeking meaningful employment) but the fact that it might be "OK" for racial and sexual minorities to pursue the same goals as white men does not mean they have as many opportunities to do so or receive the same rewards for their efforts.

"Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?"

Wow.

Has this guy REALLY never read about the social structure of ancient Greece, where citizens (who were always and only male) routinely had both wives and male lovers? Has he never read The Symposium? Has he never heard the theory that Shakespeare was gay? Has he never heard anything of Oscar Wilde's biography (Wilde married and fathered two children) or read Blanche Dubois' speech about why her young husband shot himself in A Streetcar Named Desire?

It is not accurate to say that marrying a woman and having a family has usually been considered the exclusive territory of straight men, since "straight" and "gay" are relatively new categories. Before that, there were pretty much just men, and even men who had male lovers routinely married women and conceived children for any number of reasons, including a desire to appear respectable, to be "righteous," to appease parents who wanted grandchildren and heirs, or simply because that's what people did.

It's called "having a beard," Ben, trying to appear butch so you can get on in society, and men who wanted to do so have managed to have both wives and male lovers for millennia.

And of course it must be pointed out that one need not enter into a straight marriage to have children. There is such a thing as artificial insemination. Lesbian couples manage to bear children and gay men manage to adopt or father children. One of my friends fathered a child with a cherished friend who was a lesbian; she and her partner have primary custody of the child, but my friend is an involved and dedicated father, and his partner is an active parent as well.

Christensen's comments reveal his factual ignorance, his emotional and spiritual naivete, and a profound sense of entitlement. He tells us he feels he was dealt a bum hand by being gay, but he also feels he should retain the blessings and privileges of white male domination and patriarchy. He should still be head of his narrow little world, in which the civil rights and women's movement are about "education" and "career" and marriage is a "territory."

Having been involved in the struggle to legalize gay marriage since the early 90s, after a lawsuit on the issue was filed in Hawaii (which brought about an alliance between those two historical enemies, the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church) and believing that couples of consensual adults who desired to have a union of love recognized by the state deserved that right regardless of sexual orientation, I was astonished in the late 1990s to meet gays and lesbians who believed that not only was the right to marry something they did not need, but that if acquired, it would harm the gay community. Marriage was so sexist, so patriarchal, so obviously an economic and political proposition designed to support a diseased status quo, that opting into it would not bring equality to gay people but would instead insure that one partner in all marriages--gay or straight--remained submissive while the other was dominant. The better option, they argued, was to pursue non-traditional, egalitarian partnerships, and wait for the straight world to abandon marriage after it recognized how vastly superior these egalitarian gay relationships were.

Christensen's essay supports that argument. Marriage as he sees and practices it is perhaps socially respectable, but it is not ethically respectable. It is born of ignorance and fear rather than wisdom and courage. It is neither generous nor enlightened but is instead a self-serving attempt to claim as many of the privileges and as much of the power that society can possibly offer him. If that is marriage, it is something we should all shun.

Posted by Holly at 7:32 AM | Comments (2)

September 9, 2005

A Happy Marriage with a Good Man

Here's something from "Confessions of a Mormon Boy: An Autobiographical One-Man Play Written, Created and Performed by Steven Fales" (SUNSTONE December 2003). After serving a mission for the Mormon Church, Mr. Fales told his female best friend he was gay, then proposed. She accepted; they married, and stayed married for six years, until his "same sex attraction," to use the Mormon term, put too great a strain on the marriage.

As the divorce got closer, I got confused and scared. I didn't know how to be alone, and I didn't want to give up "hugging time." Emily and I shared a tradition her parents had started. You know how early kids wake up? Well, we would try to sleep in--trying to put off their needs as long as we could. Then, when we couldn't put it off any longer, we'd yet out, "HUGGING TIME!" In our two children would run and jump on the bed. We would then hug and kiss and snuggle--all warm and safe and happy. How many gay men get to experience that? Let alone watch their children being born. Couldn't I give it all up for the sake of hugging time? I was going to fight for hugging time!

I turned it all on Emily. It was her fault! She never wore lingerie! [Never mind that Mormonism has its own ugly underwear faithful members are required to wear.] She wouldn't watch the better-sex videos I ordered from the back of GQ. Emily knew going into this marriage it might come to this. And now that I've finally cracked, she's going to just throw me out?! How dare she watch Will & Grace and laugh when I was trying to change! She had failed me!

He goes on to acknowledge that of course his wife was not responsible for his homosexuality. But that didn't stop him from blaming her for it in the first place.

In Ron Schow's response to Ben Christensen in the recent Dialogue issue, Schow quotes a Mormon man who spent eight years in a temple marriage:

It was only after I came out to my wife that I realized how much she had suffered and endured over the years in asking questions like why didn't I find her desirable or why our sexual relationship never seemed satisfying. Was it a failure on her part? she wondered. She had sadness about feeling alone, confused and hurt in ways that were nearly impossible to articulate.

Having left the church myself (which is very often a part of coming out of the closet) and having watched a score of Mormon men come out of the closet, I am certain it is excruciatingly traumatic and painful. But COME ON! Let's consider the other side of the equation as well: how self-obsessed and blind do you have to be to live with someone for EIGHT YEARS and not notice that you're making her miserable and isolated?

The essay continues:

This young man emphasized the falsity of a prevalent myth: "I saw my struggle with (and against) homosexuality as my own cross to bear. I felt I was the one who was suffering, struggling, trying to make things right. What I failed to recognize was that my wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information."

My wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information.

I HATE IT when people withhold "basic information" from someone else. Someone recently did that to me. It had nothing to do with his being gay, but it did have to do with the situation he was in--and his sense that he could invite me to be intimately involved in his life without making sure I was clear about all the details of his "struggle." I kept issuing general requests for more information, growing more and more ridiculous and more and more desperate the more it was withheld. Finally I hit upon precisely the right question to ask, and he was honest enough to give me a direct answer. It made all the difference in the world to know exactly what I was dealing with.

Mormon women are stupidly hopeful and will do all kinds of things to achieve a "happy marriage" with a "good man," whatever those things mean. I did not marry a gay Mormon man, but I did become engaged to one, Matthew, in 1988, after we both fell in love at first sight. The story has a reasonably happy ending: he had enough integrity and wisdom that he simply could not permit himself to marry me, knowing that however much he loved me, he would never lose his attraction to men. But it took four years of my wheedling and prodding and begging to extract that confession from him; before that, he kept insisting that his refusal to marry me had nothing to do with sexual orientation, that it was because I wasn't the right woman for him. Given how much I loved him, the whole thing was absolutely torture for me.

But somehow we worked through it. And still Matthew and I love each other deeply and will until we die, if not beyond that, and we remain committed, devoted friends. And I believe that one reason we are still friends is because he would not marry me; he would not permit himself to disrupt my life with what he knew in his heart was essentially a selfish act.

I don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the church victimizes gay men, on whom there is intense pressure to marry and father children. But I also don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the men who uphold and benefit from patriarchy--and as long as men wield the priesthood in the Mormon church they do benefit from patriarchy, even when they're gay--victimize women, not only politically but personally, inside the arena of relationships and sex.

Sex sex sex! That's going to be one of the dominant topics for the next few weeks. The discussions of sex will probably be frequent and full. I just can't promise they'll be the least bit titillating, given that they'll always involve Mormons.

Posted by Holly at 6:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2005

Mormon Social Taboos

Tuesday evening I got home from work and found a load of mail, including two cd's of original (and spectacularly good) music from Wayne, and the Fall 2005 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This is one of the primary publications of liberal Mormonism, and I've subscribed (and published in it) for years. I sat down to my dinner and watched part of a movie, took care of some teaching stuff, had a bath. Then I picked up the issue of Dialogue and checked the table of contents, and found this:

GETTING OUT/STAYING IN: ONE MORMON STRAIGHT/GAY MARRIAGE

Getting Out by Ben Christensen 121

Homosexual Attraction and LDS Marriage Decisions by Ron Schow 133

Thoughts of a Therapist by Marybeth Raynes 143

Staying In by Ben Christensen 148

I gave the section a cursory scan--that was about all I could bear--then went to bed. I fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep for an hour, got up and read Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun for a class I'm teaching on war literature (because after the Dialogue thing, I needed something cheerful and lighthearted), tried to medicate myself into oblivion, eventually succeeded.

Wednesday morning I got up and reread the whole section carefully.

Here is what Ben Christensen, a 24-year-old gay Mormon married to a woman by whom he has fathered a nine-month-old daughter, has to say about the fact that he can't mention to his friends that he "can't stop thinking about this guy in religion class":" "It ticks me off that Mormon social taboos force me to lie about who I am."

Mormon social taboos.

That's what's to blame for the fact that he can't discuss his same sex attraction: Mormon social taboos.

Not Mormon doctrine. Mormon social taboos.

Nothing wrong with the doctrine--which says that homosexual behavior is a sin; no, it's just Mormon social taboos.

If you're not Mormon, you have no idea how big this issue is. Many religions venerate celibacy; many other religions tolerate it. Not Mormonism. Celibacy is unnatural; sex before marriage is, according to some leaders in the church (and one of my friends from college, one of the very few people whom I will never again speak to), a sin akin to MURDER (that's right: sex before marriage is the moral equivalent of killing someone in cold blood); and the entire reason we are sent to earth is to get bodies, have sex, and create children. So there's some room in many other religions for reconciling religious faith and homosexuality by choosing celibacy, but almost none in Mormonism--at least, not if you want to be respectable and happy.

Christensen writes of his engagement to Jessie,