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April 18, 2009

An Anonymous Group That May or May Not Be....

You've probably already seen this--it's on all the cool blogs. But to ensure that all three dozen people who check my blog with some frequency see it at least once, I'm posting it too.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Posted by holly at 6:40 AM | Comments (0)

February 6, 2009

Let's Don't Divorce Them

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

Posted by holly at 3:53 PM | Comments (3)

December 3, 2008

Prop 8: The Musical

All the cool blogs are embedding this video, so I figured I'd jump on the bandwagon too.

I heard that the South Park dudes are planning a Broadway musical on gay Mormons and marriage, but until that comes out next spring, this can whet your appetite

Posted by holly at 3:50 PM | Comments (3)

November 18, 2008

A Couple of Things About Queer Rights Discourse I Would Like to See Changed

I've been to a couple of rallies protesting the passage of Prop 8 lately, and I have realized that I HATE signs that read something like "I'm straight but I don't hate" or Straight but not Narrow." Can't you just carry a sign arguing for gay and queer rights? Or even a sign like this? Do you have to somehow announce your A) straightness and B) broadmindedness in a way that suggests you're actually really afraid someone might think you're (gasp!) gay?

Second, I always feel vaguely disreputable and uncomfortable when people argue for the validity of gay rights on the grounds that sexual orientation is not a choice. This doesn't mean I reject the compelling scientific and personal evidence supporting the claim that sexual orientation is not a choice. I believe it's not a choice. I just think it should be respected as a choice, because even if orientation isn't a choice, deciding to pursue a relationship with someone of the same sex IS a choice--a completely legitimate choice, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't see why someone shouldn't be able to CHOOSE a same-sex partner, for any reason whatsoever. I think doing so should be about the same as becoming a poet or a vegan or a tuba player: OK, not choices most people make, but entirely respectable nonetheless.

Within the purview of the US government and constitution, why shouldn't it be completely legal and acceptable for someone to CHOOSE a same-sex partner? Don't tell me it's because God finds it objectionable, even if he told you so himself, because he tends to complain about different things to different people. Furthermore, whether or not he approves of something doesn't always seem to have much impact on its legality. For instance, he's told Mormons that he objects to booze and coffee and tobacco, but they're all still legal, even in Utah. He told Jehovah's Witnesses that he objects to patriotism and birthday parties, and they're legal. He told Christian Scientists that he objects to flu shots and surgery, and they're legal. He told Catholics he doesn't approve of birth control, but it's still legal (at least for the time being). He told everyone he doesn't approve of greed and selfish disregard for the plight of the needy and the poor, but they're still legal--hell, they're revered, at least by Wall Street and the Republican party.

Now, I realize that choosing a same-sex partner and being able to marry that same-sex partner you've chosen aren't exactly the same thing--right now, you can do the former but not the latter, except in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But they're also not that different. And marriage, like any and all institutions, has evolved throughout its existence. It has had different gradations and types, some of which we don't like to think about, especially the weird kind God apparently thought were perfectly OK at some point, like concubinage or polygamy. We could still have those if we hadn't decided we wanted higher standards than ones God insisted on. So why can't we have higher standards for equality in marriage now? After all, God is a really slow learner. It's up to us to set the right example for him.

And so, I AFFIRM THE RIGHT TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AS A CHOICE ANY ADULT SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MAKE IN ANY STATE IN THIS COUNTRY.

Posted by holly at 8:01 PM | Comments (3)

November 10, 2008

Why I Love Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann is often considered a partisan hack, because he mercilessly mocks stupid conservatives like Bill O'Reilly. And recently Ben Affleck did a bang-up job of doing a send-up of him on Saturday Night Live, and made him look ridiculous. But I dig him. He's tall, and has that prematurely gray thing working for him in really attractive ways. And, every so often, he says something like this, about why our country needs to embrace gay marriage:

Posted by holly at 8:17 PM | Comments (4)

October 8, 2008

Please Congratulate Me Now

So, there have been several reasons I haven't blogged all that much lately, or have posted really short entries when I do blog. One is that I'm as obsessed as anyone else about the election, and I've been doing things I don't normally do, like watching debates and volunteering at a political campaign. (I refuse to go door-to-door, even for Obama, having already done that for the Mormons, so they've mostly stuck me with data entry. Fun. Not. But it's for a good cause.) Another is that I moved 2,000 miles across the country. (One of these days, I'll write about that.)

And another is that I've been working on a book.

And guess what: I just finished it--or at least, I finished a respectable draft, just now. It's 1:48 right now; I wrote the last sentence at 1:43.

Now I get to go back and revise and polish it, all 278 pages, which I don't mind because revising is my favorite part of writing, believe it or not. And my agent has to sell it, which could be tough--I'm sure the general financial crisis has hurt publishing as well. But it feels really cool that I had a goal and I accomplished it, and I also like this book. I hope an editor at some big publishing house will like it too. Who knows? Maybe it will sell well enough that someone might be willing to publish the two that are languishing in folders on my computer, folders I haven't touched in months.

The book, by the way, is the story of my relationships with gay men--in particular, it's the story of how I ended up being the witness at the gay wedding of my ex-fiance.

I hope you'll be hearing a lot more about this in the future.

Posted by holly at 1:57 PM | Comments (10)

September 6, 2008

Underestimating Conservatives

In 2003, as preparations for the inevitable war intensified, I decided to do something I’d never done before: I decided to march in a protest. Marching and chanting aren’t really my style; I prefer to protest by writing. But this was important, and I wanted to do something extra. So I made arrangements to head to Phoenix for the long weekend of Presidents’ Day.

When my mother asked me about my plans for the long weekend, I told her I was going to visit friends. I didn’t tell her why I had asked these friends if I could stay with them for a few days, because I knew it would upset her. I did tell the friends about my plans.

These were people I’d known since I was an undergrad. At one time H, the husband, had been more liberal than I was. But he got more conservative as he aged, while I got more progressive. By 2003, he’d given up driving small fuel efficient cars and drove a giant truck on his hour-long commute to the prestigious hospital where he worked as a doctor. He and his family made no effort to conserve water, even though they lived in a particularly water-deprived region of the Phoenix area. And he supported the war--although more cautiously than a lot of people. But he still thought it was the right thing to do.

The night after the protest, H, his wife and I went to dinner. He told a story about going home teaching to some inactive guy. The man wasn’t there when the home teachers arrived, but the guy’s roommate was. He was pleasant to the home teachers, but said there was no reason for them to come back, because the guy had realized that he wasn’t welcome at the Mormon church. One of the home teachers kept saying, “That doesn’t sound right. We welcome everyone. Our doors are always open. We invite people back, and we mean it.”

The clueless home teacher’s partner was writhing in embarrassment, and tried his best to cut the visit short. In the car, he said to his hapless companion, “Didn’t you realize?! The guy is gay! That was his partner we were talking to! He can’t come to church because he’s gay!”

Brother Clueless was mortified, and at first suggested that they return, so he could explain to the guy that he just hadn’t realized that they were gay. The less idiotic one said that would only compound the embarrassment, that they should just act differently when they returned, or else not return at all.

Given that H had told--and laughed at--a story that underscored how backwards and clueless Mormons were about homosexuality, and given that he had made it clear that he understood that gay people truly aren’t welcome in the Mormon church, no matter how many official church statements are issued claiming otherwise, I thought he would be agree with me when I said I just didn’t see what the big deal was, that being gay was a perfectly acceptable thing to be, that gay partnerships could be every bit as respectable and ethical as straight ones.

But H said, “I don’t actually believe that. I do believe that homosexuality is evil, that acting on gay desire is a sin.”

I sat dumbfounded for a moment; finally I said, “You really think that someone’s choice of a sexual partner is automatically a more important indicator of a person’s moral character than things like, say, how honest and kind they are?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Really.”

He said, “Yes. I think that fornication is a sin akin to murder.”

I said, “You really think that having sex with someone you’re not married to is as bad as willfully ending another person’s life.”

He said, “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s as bad in its own way, yes."

And I thought, wow, I really underestimated this guy. I didn’t realize just what a prick he’d turned into. (I have to wonder if he thinks Bristol Palin’s fornication is a sin akin to murder, or if he’ll let her off the hook for any number of reasons, like Bill O’Rielly and others.)

Our contact decreased considerably after that. There was occasional email but little else. And then, in 2004, as we prepared for another presidential election, I read something about the horrific trauma and suffering the war had brought to the Iraqi people, about the fact that we don’t even count how many of them we kill.

So I sent it to H, along with a note saying something like, “Here are the results of the war you supported. Do you still support it?”

In response I got a note in which he told me, “You have underestimated me. I take no pleasure in dead Iraqis.”

Boy oh boy did I ever underestimate him. It had never occurred to me, in my wildest dreams, that he might take pleasure in dead Iraqis. I had mistakenly believed that he’d be SAD about the senseless, painful deaths, the brutal suffering.

I told him that, and I ended the friendship.

I’ve confronted lately a number of ways in which I’ve underestimated other conservatives. I’m trying to decide what to do about it.

Posted by holly at 4:40 PM | Comments (4)

August 23, 2008

Sponge + Starfish = Scallop?

I've been a little behind in my Spongebob SquarePants viewing.... OK, years behind. I have not managed to keep up with every last episode, though I watch it when I can: at the chiropractor's, the dentist, my sister's house. Recently, while hanging with my nieces and nephews, I saw an interesting episode called Rock-a-bye Bivalve, in which Spongebob and Patrick adopt a parentless baby scallop.

When Patrick and Spongebob first become parents, everything is great. They enjoy spending time with the little scallop, and take it out to play. They're so caught up in the joy of parenthood that they don't even realize how jarring they are to others. Out on a bike with their scallop one day, they pass a mommy and daddy fish pushing a baby fish in a stroller. The fish look at Patrick and Spongebob, and over their heads, in a bubble, in pictograms, you see the confused question, "Square yellow sponge + starfish = scallop?"

Problems develop when the pair goes to decide who will be mother and who will be father to the little scallop. Patrick thinks at first that he should be the mother, because he has more experience with diapers--he still wear them himself--but Spongebob points out that Patrick can't be the mom because he never wears a shirt. So Patrick acquires a suit, tie and a briefcase, and goes off to work.

And that's where trouble sets in. As the mom, Spongebob spends all day every day trying to vacuum, iron, cook, comfort the baby and do about eight other things, all at once. Patrick keeps promising to help, but never does.

Eventually Patrick fails to show up one evening until very, very late. Spongebob meets him at the door in a pink nightgown with curlers on his head. He's very angry at having been forced to stay home alone and work all day, without any sort of interaction with other creatures who have mastered speech and rational thought. Patrick thinks he shouldn't be forced to assume equal responsibility for the scallop, because after all he works all day, and besides, he changed a diaper--once.

You can find outraged critiques on the web, claiming that the episode advocates homosexuality. Maybe.... But what I find more interesting is that even though Spongebob and Patrick are both male, they adopt traditional heteronormative gender roles within the partnership. And it's the fact that those roles are inherently unfair and oppressive that puts a strain on their relationship and makes them, together as partners, bad parents--not the fact that they are both male (as well as different species).

If an episode of Spongebob can underscore in 15 minutes that the real problem in all of these discussions of marriage and family is patriarchy, why is that so hard for others to see?

Posted by holly at 10:06 AM | Comments (3)

August 21, 2008

God Fought the Law, and the Law Won

I’ve been thinking, ever since I wrote a response to that dreadfully illogical, dishonest, hypocritical document published by the church to explain its opposition to gay marriage, about struggles framed as a battle between the forces of god and the forces of who or whatever.

The thing is, god so often loses.

Several apt examples drawn from Mormon history:

1. God could not keep his people safe in Ohio, Missouri or Illinois. Mormons were persecuted, raped and murdered--and God couldn’t or didn’t stop it.

2. God could not make Utah sufficiently self-reliant that the church could exist without the trade and support of the US federal government, resulting in a showdown between the US government and the church over polygamy.

3. God could not influence the hearts and minds of the rest of the country enough that people would allow Utah to become a US state unless the church renounced polygamy.

Or look at Jewish history. God couldn’t or didn’t do much about the destruction of the temple, the diaspora, or the holocaust.

Or look at Catholic history. If it was the one true church, God should have been able to do something to stop Martin Luther and John Calvin. He should have been able to prevent the accession of truly immoral popes like the various Medicis and Borgias.

Mormons believe that god is omnipotent, but I’d like to see some serious evidence of that. When you look at what god actually manages to do, how good he is at furthering his agenda, the claim of omnipotence seems like the pathetic blustering braggadocio of a schoolyard bully. Seriously: according to Mormon scripture, God’s work and glory is “to bring to pass the eternal life of man,” a state that requires people to become Mormon. But when you look at how long the Mormon church has been around, and how few people actually join the Mormon church, well, the numbers show that god is pretty damn lousy at achieving his work and his glory.

Truth be told, god is a big fucking prurient loser. The only way to argue otherwise is to look at history after it happens, and decide AFTER the fact that whatever happened was god’s will. The civil rights movement? Oh, despite the resistance to it among christians, that was actually god’s will. The defeat of Nazi Germany? Well, despite the fact that it took a really long time and almost didn’t happen, and despite the fact that the Nazis’ victims numbered in the MILLIONS, it was actually god’s will that that happen. God didn’t have particularly strong feelings about other genocides, however. Cambodia, for instance--he wasn’t too anxious one way or the other about that one. And he stayed pretty neutral in Vietnam, sorta like the Red Cross, except without the part where he actually dispensed aid and comfort. Even now he ignores Africa as much as all the G8 Nations--the suffering of that entire continent isn't something he will ask his followers to redress, 'cause it doesn't involve his major obsession: letting white guys police how other people approach sex and relationships. And the conflict in Palestine/Israel seems to have him stymied, too. Especially given all he did to create that particular problem, you’d think he’d work a little harder to solve it--at least, he’d work harder if he wasn’t A) so feeble and B) such an asshole.

God is going to lose the battle over gay marriage, which is as it should be: god should lose any battle where his edicts and decrees are in opposition to the full development of human potential for love, compassion, intelligence and wisdom. Recognizing gay relationships by allowing homosexuals to marry is a positive step in developing that potential.

Now, there are some people who will say that because I am in favor of gay marriage, I am a tool of Satan. But that’s like calling me a servant of Voldemort or an agent of the Cylon Empire. Satan is a metaphor for evil, not an actual person. DUH.

And in return, I say that people who are opposed to gay marriage are not tools of Satan--they are just tools.

Opposing gay marriage makes people stupid, embarrassingly so. It requires them to resort to illogic and fear in order to fight something that isn’t going to hurt them. Which isn’t to say that opponents of gay marriage won’t have to change when it's finally accepted across the globe: they will be forced to join those who have seen the light and admit that the earth is round, that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around, that other races are not genetically inferior to whites, that slavery is not a divinely sanctioned institution, that kings do not rule by divine decree. And that will indeed be painful for those who resist, but in that good way that maturing spiritually, emotionally and intellectually always is.

Not only that, but opposing gay marriage and taking the Lord’s name in vain by saying that he opposes it too just helps to show what a pathetic loser the god these bigots worship really is. You think they’d learn the lesson of the face-off between Jehovah and Ba’al and find themselves a god who can actually get something done. But no. They’re content to worship the puny, inept idol they’ve created in their own image, confident that one day, he’ll show up and reward them for being as small-minded, bigoted and cruel as he is. Whereas they’ve got their reward all along: they are as much like their nasty loser god as its possible to be.

Posted by holly at 10:24 AM | Comments (5)

August 20, 2008

The Corporate World Discovers the Benefits of Being Gay Friendly

If trends like this continue in the business world (and let's pray they do), eventually the religious world will follow, and realize that you won't be successful in the world at large if you're homophobic.

Posted by holly at 9:03 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2008

Church Fears Another Marriage Showdown

In a comment on my recent summary of Sunstone, Chris Bigelow asked me to respond to this document from the COJCOLDS, justifying its attack on gay marriage. So I’ve done just that.

The document begins

Marriage is sacred, ordained of God from before the foundation of the world. After Creating Adam and Eve, the Lord God pronounced them husband and wife, of which Adam said, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Jesus Christ cited Adam’s declaration when he affirmed the divine origins of the marriage covenant: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.”

First of all, I must point out that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, that it begins with existent human institutions and argues backwards to explain their creation.

Given the fact that the church cites as a historical fact a made-up story used to explain the origins of the world, it's hard to take any of their arguments seriously.

It's also hard to respect any of their arguments, given the way they cherry-pick their scriptures: after all, Jesus also said that in the next life, people are neither married nor given in marriage (Matthew 22:30). And he also questioned the primacy of biological family relationships (Mark 3:33).

The document goes on to state, “In 1995, ‘The Family: A Proclamation to the World’ declared the following unchanging truths regarding marriage,” before listing a bunch of entirely subjective opinions regarding marriage, as a way to threaten and bully people who advocate for greater equality and justice for all human beings. The Proclamation makes many assumptions and assertions about how this or that must be the case because it supports this or that in the Mormon "Plan of Salvation." However, the plan of salvation is bullshit and has neither basis in fact nor any logic except that of a narcissistic fear of change. It allows human beings the comforting but false belief that the next life will be an extension of this one, and that personalities and relationships will make the transition to the next life intact.

The document further states,

Marriage is not primarily a contract between individuals to ratify their affections and provide for mutual obligations. Rather, marriage and family are vital instruments for rearing children and teaching them to become responsible adults.

Historically, marriage had little to do with affection and everything to do with rearing children. Women were often little more than beasts of burden or brood mares. This is still the case in far too many parts of the world. (See Afghanistan.)

While governments did not invent marriage, throughout the ages governments of all types have recognized and affirmed marriage as an essential institution in preserving social stability and perpetuating life itself. Hence, regardless of whether marriages were performed as a religious rite or a civil ceremony, married couples in almost every culture have been granted special privileges aimed primarily at sustaining their relationship and promoting the environment in which children are reared. A husband and a wife do not receive these privileges to elevate them above any other two people who may share a residence or social tie, but rather in order to preserve, protect, and defend the all-important institutions of marriage and family.

An important fact here is that "the couple" might have received privileges, but the conveying of them upon "the couple" almost always resulted in a loss of privilege for the woman. Don't forget the English law of coverture, which states that "a husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." Women lost the right to control their own property or persons, ownership of which passed to the husband upon marriage. Husbands had the right to beat, be unfaithful to, and in some cases, even sell their wives. Marriage was primarily about patriarchy, about men's rights and privileges, about the way property and status were conveyed from one generation of men to the next.

The ignorance demonstrated by this document is profound, but not surprising, given its source.

It is true that some couples who marry will not have children, either by choice or because of infertility, but the special status of marriage is nonetheless closely linked to the inherent powers and responsibilities of procreation, and to the inherent differences between the genders. Co-habitation under any guise or title is not a sufficient reason for defining new forms of marriage.

This is not historically true. "Common-law marriage" is recognized by many societies.

High rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births have resulted in an exceptionally large number of single parents in American society. Many of these single parents have raised exemplary children; nevertheless, extensive studies have shown that in general a husband and wife united in a loving, committed marriage provide the optimal environment for children to be protected, nurtured, and raised. This is not only because of the substantial personal resources that two parents can bring to bear on raising a child, but because of the differing strengths that a father and a mother, by virtue of their gender, bring to the task.

The church's hypocrisy here is profound. Can it forget or ignore how families were constituted under polygamy? Most households who followed that "divine law" resulted in homes in which women were, for all intents and purposes, single mothers for most of the year. And certainly that one male role model, divided among six or ten or 22 wives, did not provide much in the way of "personal resources" or the "differing strengths" that two parents in one home bring to the task of raising children.

In contrast, those who would impose same-sex marriage on American society have chosen a different course. Advocates have taken their case to the state courts, asking judges to remake the institution of marriage that society has accepted and depended upon for millennia.

As I said, Mormons are afraid of change and narcissistically rewrite all of history to support their view of themselves. The institution of marriage has changed significantly throughout its existence in western society.

In sum, there is very strong agreement across America on what marriage is. As the people of California themselves recognized when they voted on this issue just eight years ago, traditional marriage is essential to society as a whole, and especially to its children. Because this question strikes at the very heart of the family, because it is one of the great moral issues of our time, and because it has the potential for great impact upon the family, the Church is speaking out on this issue, and asking members to get involved.

The people of America once felt that getting rid of slavery, allowing women to vote, giving black Americans access to decent education, and permitting inter-racial marriage, would undermine the family and all of society. They realized eventually that these were actually positive changes.

Those who favor homosexual marriage contend that “tolerance” demands that they be given the same right to marry as heterosexual couples. But this appeal for “tolerance” advocates a very different meaning and outcome than that word has meant throughout most of American history and a different meaning than is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Savior taught a much higher concept, that of love. “Love thy neighbor,” He admonished. Jesus loved the sinner even while decrying the sin, as evidenced in the case of the woman taken in adultery: treating her kindly, but exhorting her to “sin no more.” Tolerance as a gospel principle means love and forgiveness of one another, not “tolerating” transgression.

Jesus also preferred hanging out with sexual sinners and prostitutes to hanging out with the pious and judgmental. He did not “tolerate” but condemned those who focused too much on rigid adherence to formulaic approaches to morality.

Legalizing same-sex marriage will affect a wide spectrum of government activities and policies. Once a state government declares that same-sex unions are a civil right, those governments almost certainly will enforce a wide variety of other policies intended to ensure that there is no discrimination against same-sex couples. This may well place “church and state on a collision course.”

Oh my god! This is hysterical coming from an institution that had to abandon its concept of marriage in order to preserve its existence!

Given that God had to back down in a confrontation between him and the government of the United States, it's easy to see why the church is so fucking afraid of the game of chicken that looms ahead over the prospect of gay marriage. God is going to lose on this one too, and the church is going to lose face.

Many of these examples have already become the legal reality in several nations of the European Union, and the European Parliament has recommended that laws guaranteeing and protecting the rights of same-sex couples be made uniform across the EU. Thus, if same-sex marriage becomes a recognized civil right, there will be substantial conflicts with religious freedom. And in some important areas, religious freedom may be diminished.

Plenty of so-called “religious freedoms” are diminished when in conflict from the state–like the right of a 58-year-old man to marry and knock up a pair of 14-year-old girls. I don't feel this is a bad thing.

Possible restrictions on religious freedom are not the only societal implications of legalizing same-sex marriage. Perhaps the most common argument that proponents of same-sex marriage make is that it is essentially harmless and will not affect the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage in any way. “It won’t affect you, so why should you care?’ is the common refrain. While it may be true that allowing single-sex unions will not immediately and directly affect all existing marriages,

thank god they at least acknowledged this.

the real question is how it will affect society as a whole over time, including the rising generation and future generations. The experience of the few European countries that already have legalized same-sex marriage suggests that any dilution of the traditional definition of marriage will further erode the already weakened stability of marriages and family generally.

What? Provide some evidence for this. This document claims earlier that the US has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and there are all these initiatives to “protect” traditional marriage. How is it then the case that European countries are experiencing this terrible weakening of the family?

Aside from the very serious consequence of undermining and diluting the sacred nature of marriage between a man and a woman, there are many practical implications in the sphere of public policy that will be of deep concern to parents and society as a whole. These are critical to understanding the seriousness of the overall issue of same-sex marriage.

When a man and a woman marry with the intention of forming a new family, their success in that endeavor depends on their willingness to renounce the single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment and to sacrifice their time and means to the nurturing and rearing of their children. Marriage is fundamentally an unselfish act: legally protected because only a male and female together can create new life, and because the rearing of children requires a life-long commitment, which marriage is intended to provide.

OK, this is really dicey, so let’s dissect it: Marriage is an unselfish act because A) a man and a woman do it, and B) when a man and a woman get married, then they have sex, and C) when a man and a woman have sex, they often conceive children, and D) having children requires someone (almost always a woman) to set aside her previously “single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment and to sacrifice [her] time and means to the nurturing and rearing of [her] children.”

I don’t know very many women who have EVER had a “single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment,” and those I know have not had children when they married.

Nor does it take a lifetime to rear a child. Plenty of Mormon women have no children at home by the time they turn 50 at the latest.

Societal recognition of same-sex marriage cannot be justified simply on the grounds that it provides self-fulfillment to its partners, for it is not the purpose of government to provide legal protection to every possible way in which individuals may pursue fulfillment. By definition, all same-sex unions are infertile, and two individuals of the same gender, whatever their affections, can never form a marriage devoted to raising their own mutual offspring.

Recognition is not sought for same-sex marriage because it provides self-fulfillment of its partners, but because same-sex marriage involves commitment and sacrifice. What gay people want the rest of the world to recognize is NOT their selfishness but their commitment to their partners, the mutual enrichment and support, and the ways in which this primary relationship augments their other relationships.

It is true that some same-sex couples will obtain guardianship over children--through prior heterosexual relationships, through adoption in the states where this is permitted, or by artificial insemination. Despite that, the all-important question of public policy must be: what environment is best for the child and for the rising generation? Traditional marriage provides a solid and well-established social identity to children. It increases the likelihood that they will be able to form a clear gender identity, with sexuality closely linked to both love and procreation. By contrast, the legalization of same-sex marriage likely will erode the social identity, gender development, and moral character of children. Is it really wise for society to pursue such a radical experiment without taking into account its long-term consequences for children?

Well, I suppose there the church is speaking from experience, given how crappy its own experiment with radical restructuring of marriage turned out: as I said, God lost the fight in the US on polygamy, and the state won. But its hypocritical failure to mention any of that is reprehensible.

And why is marriage really the only place where this argument about what’s best for children gets invoked by the church? To paraphrase Parker’s argument, what is best for children in terms of warfare? What is best for children in terms of environmental policy? What is best for children in terms of how we structure our educational system? What is best for children in terms of how we train and pay our teachers?

But even in this one arena, I don’t feel that the church’s argument is truly sound. The children of gay parents I’ve met who are most confused and angry are those whose family was destroyed because one parent tried but failed to make a straight marriage work, because s/he wasn’t straight. I have met adults who were raised by same-sex couples, and they’re OK.

As just one example of how children will be adversely affected, the establishment of same-sex marriage as a civil right will inevitably require mandatory changes in school curricula. When the state says that same-sex unions are equivalent to heterosexual marriages, the curriculum of public schools will have to support this claim. Beginning with elementary school, children will be taught that marriage can be defined as a relation between any two adults and that consensual sexual relations are morally neutral. Classroom instruction on sex education in secondary schools can be expected to equate homosexual intimacy with heterosexual relations. These developments will create serious clashes between the agenda of the secular school system and the right of parents to teach their children traditional standards of morality.

Oh good grief. Is there really much attention to divorce in school curricula? It’s a reality of human relationships, but we don’t take time in school to define it.

Parents manage to teach their kids that evolution didn’t happen and that god created the world in six days, despite what kids are told in school.

This is bullshit.

Finally, throughout history the family has served as an essential bulwark of individual liberty.

What? They argue that marriage is NOT selfish, that it’s NOT about the individual, and here they argue that it IS.

The walls of a home provide a defense against detrimental social influences and the sometimes overreaching powers of government. In the absence of abuse or neglect, government does not have the right to intervene in the rearing and moral education of children in the home. Strong families are thus vital for political freedom. But when governments presume to redefine the nature of marriage, issuing regulations to ensure public acceptance of non-traditional unions, they have moved a step closer to intervening in the sacred sphere of domestic life. The consequences of crossing this line are many and unpredictable, but likely would include an increase in the power and reach of the state toward whatever ends it seeks to pursue.

Again, these statements are laughable in light of the church’s refusal to admit that is already once redefined marriage to fit the state’s definition--and fighting tooth and nail to defend the definition that was imposed on them.

What a bunch of lousy scare-mongers. “Oh! This is the first step towards a totalitarian government!” Yeah, right. Whereas allowing an administration to dishonestly pursue a war of aggression--that’s no real threat to our civil liberties.

To hell with those nasty old men in Utah obsessed with defining everyone else’s sex life. Let them put their own houses in order and do something about the abuse and unhappiness so rife in Mormondom.

Posted by holly at 2:49 PM | Comments (5)

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 the 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 others 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 (7)

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 (9)

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

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, who knows about his attraction to men, that

Difficulties arose fairly quickly.... It bothered Jessie that she was usually more interested in kissing than I was. This bothered me too, but I didn't know what to do about it. I definitely loved her, and out of that love an attraction was growing, but to be honest it was nothing compared to the strong desire I had for men. But then it's not accurate to even compare the two feelings. My attraction to Jessie, the drive that made me want to hold her in my arms and feel her body next to mine, came entirely from my heart. On the other hand, the drive that made me want to feel a man's body next to mine was purely a libido thing. I've never allowed a physical attraction to a man to become any more than just that. Apples and oranges.

He marries Jessie for a variety of reasons, one of which is that "God told [him] to." Another is that he feels his only two alternatives are a conventional, monogamous straight Mormon marriage on the one hand and "[running] off to San Francisco and [embracing] a rampant life of unrestrained queerness" on the other.

A year later, at the ripe old age of 25, he is able to critique his earlier essay and the responses to it, by writing

Critiquing my essay, a friend asked, "Can you really separate love and sex so easily? I can't." I discarded his concern, believing I had a deeper understanding of love and sex. After all, he writes novels about missionaries who fornicate and teenaged boys who make out with cow udders. For me, the distinction between love and sex was clear. As I've become more honest with myself, though, I see that Marybeth states my dilemma more accurately when she says that people in my situation choose "between a deep love and erotic attachment plus love." This choice is a good deal more difficult than the over-simplified choice I thought I was making. By choosing heterosexual marriage, I've denied myself the experience of loving someone I am naturally attracted to and my wife the experience of loving someone who is naturally attracted to her.

Glad he figured that out eventually.

Aside from a few lines of dialogue in which Jessie reassures the author that she still wants to marry him despite the fact that he is gay, we never get to hear from her.

Ron Schow and Marybeth Raynes, the two respondents, are very respectful of the deliberate choices Ben Christensen is making at the same time they underscore the challenges and difficulties he is setting himself up for. Perhaps I might respect those choices more myself if I hadn't heard it all before, some of it almost verbatim. I'll never forget being told by the love of my life, "Look, I'm not really gay, and I still want to marry a woman. It's just that I prefer sex with men to sex with women." I could think of no response to that statement.

I'm grateful for my two closest friends on earth, both of whom are gay (formerly Mormon) men, and I'm also grateful that neither of them married me.

I'm not done.

Posted by holly at 8:08 AM | Comments (2)

August 12, 2005

Answering My Own Question

The church's approach to homosexuality is to "hate sin but love the sinner." For a long time that was my approach to the church: I hated the sexism, the racism, the homophobia of the church; I hated its smug certainty, its foolish and self-defeating attempts to stifle creativity and questioning; I hated its more illogical and vicious doctrines; I hated and I still hate the Book of Mormon, which lacks the linguistic beauty, the human diversity and the spiritual complexity of the Bible. But I told myself that I loved the church: Loved the community, loved the heritage of sacrifice and striving, loved the hymns, loved the habits of discipline and self-control I was taught to cultivate. The problem, I eventually had to acknowledge, was that the church simply would not let me love the sinner while hating the sin: I had to love the sin as well; in fact, I had to convince myself that the sins were not sins at all, but were instead God's righteous decrees, and that by not loving them, I was the sinner.

And trips to Utah are traumatic because there, I encounter people who want--oh so generously, oh so magnanimously!--to help me see how I've sinned against God's righteous decrees, and bring me back to a fold I cannot survive in.

I am never able to attend all the sessions I want to attend at Sunstone, but there are so many I just want to run from. No--I don't want to run from them, because that implies genuine horror and fear, whereas what I feel is mostly heartsick fatigue. It's fine that other people want to continue to debate the historicity of the Book of Mormon; I just don't want anywhere near such a discussion. It's fine that others want to plumb the depths of Joseph Smith's psyche, but I don't give a shit about the guy! I feel about such discussions the way Catherine Morland, heroine of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, feels about history:

I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence on every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all; it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs; the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.

For one of the panels I was on this year, I needed the text of Boyd K. Packer's "Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council" in May, 1993, in which he discusses the dangers posed by "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals." I admit this was the first time I bothered to track down the actual text of the infamous talk, and I was vexed and wearied by his glib trivialization of the feminist movement as "relatively new," given that one of the most important feminist texts ever written, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in 1792, almost 40 years before the Book of Mormon; that the Seneca Falls convention on women's rights was held in 1848, two years before Utah was organized as a territory; that the women's rights movement was referred to as the "feminist movement" in newspapers worldwide in the 1890s; and that women were finally given the right to vote in this country in 1920, not because it simply occurred to Congress that it was a good thing to do, but because many women agitated and demonstrated tirelessly, demanding this fundamental right.

Instead of talking about what should actually be done to improve the lives of women in the church and in the world, Mormons have to pretend that feminism is a new and therefore illegitimate phenomenon, simply because Mr. Packer assumed its existence could not predate by much his notice of it. How very vexing. How very wearying.

And I don't want to deal with that, but I still have to, simply as part of doing my research for presentations on what I do want to deal with: discussions of the NOW, of how Mormonism made me into the person I am today. I don't love the sinner any more: I don't love the church. But I also don't hate it. I simply accept that it has affected my life in on-going ways, not all of them negative, despite my conviction that so many of the church's doctrines and practices are profoundly immoral.

The contribution to Sunstone I'm proudest of was a panel I organized for the 2004 symposium, entitled "Mormonism as Praxis" (reprinted in SUNSTONE December 2004), inspired by Karen Armstrong's discussion in The Spiral Staircase of the difference between orthopraxy (right behavior) and orthodoxy (right thought). Armstrong convincingly cites the argument that in many religions, orthodoxy and doctrine are of little significance--what matters is behaving rightly, cultivating behaviors that change us for the better, regardless of what we believe. This argument was so revolutionary and astonishing to me when I encountered it in March 2004 that I needed to explore it further.

Remarkably, once I abandoned the idea that orthodoxy--that troublesome, unswallowable bone in my throat--mattered at all, I felt more at liberty to celebrate and embrace those practices inherited from Mormonism that truly have enriched my spiritual life. The five panelists, including me, considered the special benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely Mormon manner. (I talked about keeping a journal.) The panel was what I hoped it would be: a positive and validating experience for any audience. Active Mormons were able to affirm those practices that reinforce their faith, while people who were no longer active or believing Mormons could acknowledge and remember what was valuable about their training as Mormons. The idea was to celebrate the ways in which Mormonism inculcates and encourages behaviors that truly do make us better people, regardless of belief.

That's what I want to do at Sunstone--and I keep going because I'm able to. But I still have to confront all the people who are horrified by and angry at me because I reject orthodoxy, and who resist my self-definition: people in Utah always want to call me an ex-Mormon. But I refuse that label. I'm not an ex. I'm a post-Mormon or a cultural Mormon.

And all of that really is a kind of psychic assault, and dealing with it wearies and vexes me, and makes me heartsick, and tired.

Perhaps I should be pleased that it takes me only a month to recover from that, instead of three or four.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)