“Private Lives” by Stefan Ulstein, Christianity Today, July 10, 1987. “AIDS and God’s Mercy” by Joel Belz, World, June 22, 1987. “Gays and God’s Love: Compulsions and Affirmations” by Louie Crew, Christianity and Crisis, March 17, 1986.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
American fundamentalists used to say it was a sin to go to the movies. Now Pat Robertson purveys them on his Christian Broadcasting Network and magazines like Christianity Today feature movie reviews. In his review of “two excellent new films” (Waiting for the Moon and 84 Charing Cross Road), Ulstein, who teaches English at Bellevue (WA) Christian School, is glad to report exceptions to Hollywood’s trend to have “cameras follow their subjects into the shower and boudoir with tedious predictability”. Waiting for the Moon is a version of the lesbian relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, “Lovey” and “Pussy” to each other. Ulstein, however, speaks only of their “alleged lesbianism”. What he found so moving was the “mutual support” between the two women: “One of the finest scenes in the film consists of Stein and Toklas, sitting in the garden one balmy afternoon, editing and proofreading a manuscript together”. The fact that we are not shown in graphic genital detail that their relationship was lesbian – though there are beautiful, subtle clues – allows Ulstein and CT to overlook the obvious. The basic human quality to their lesbian partnership, shared in heterosexual pairings, comes through to the very core of our common experience. Ulstein senses it but doesn’t seem to know what it is. (After viewing the film, Through the Shadowlands – on the love between C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman – at the eastern connECtion87, a lesbian conferee wondered if a heterosexual group would be as moved by a film about a same-sex couple as the gay and lesbian group was moved by a film about a heterosexual couple.)
It’s ironic that what Ulstein calls Hollywood’s “intruding peeping Tom” approach is exactly that of preachers and the fundamentalist press. So long as the focus is not on genitalia the sexual dimension is missed – even denied, when it’s common knowledge. Probably most CT readers aren’t prepared to recognize in the portrayal of “mutual support” between Stein and Toklas the very essence of same-sex love relationship. In the Winter 1986 issue of REVIEW, I criticized John Stott’s genitally-fixated “Homosexual ‘Marriage’” (CT, November 22, 1985): “But isn’t he aware that most [gay and lesbian] couple contact is non-genital (e.g., a warm smile at breakfast, sharing household chores, nursing each other through illness?” These are the sorts of scenes that moved Ulstein. CT editor emeritus Harold Lindsell then wrote me: “My question to you, wholly apart from such things a [sic] ‘warm smile over the breakfast table’, [sic] ‘sharing household chores’, and ‘nursing one another [sic] through illness’, is this: With how many men have you had oral and/or anal sex across the years.” [sic]
World is a new Christian Right weekly tabloid “To help lay Christians apply the Bible to their understanding of and response to everyday current events”. Editor Joel Belz writes of “:the gentleness of AIDS” – a notion surely unintelligible to anyone with even an elementary knowledge4 of devastating illness or an ability to empathize at all with the terminally ill and their loved ones. Inexplicably, Belz calls AIDS “a passive rather than an active attack on the body” and an aaact “of God’s mercy … because [AIDS stops] us from proceeding in a harmful direction”. With the pretension, effrontery and wayward logic of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, Belz speaks on behalf of God: “ ‘All right, watch this. … Until you listen to me, it’s your job – not mine anymore – to make yourself immune to other harmful illnesses’.” Belz thinks God’s message is: Homosexuality is sin – so die! No matter that such a message is biblically, theologically and medically illiterate, hypocritical and cruel; World subscribers will eat it up and pay for more of the same. Does Belz know God’s message on the 18 people crushed under the Tower of Siloam? Did their families get the message? Does he know God’s message on the 18 children who will die from hunger in the next 60 seconds? Do the next 18 children get the message? And what is God’s message to lesbians, the only sexual group not coming down with AIDS?
Louie Crew teaches English in Hong Kong. He’s the founder of the lesbian and gay Episcopal caucus, Integrity. When teaching years ago in rural Georgia, he says he “used to wonder why my brightest black students needed to say ‘Black is beautiful’.” He learned why, when, “in time they took the trouble to educate me, after I shut up and listened”. It’s sad that heterosexual Christians usually don’t shut up and listen when gay and lesbian Christians are willing to describe their own experience. Crew’s musings give us well-phrased witness that deserves to be heard. “A heterosexual who tries to imagine the specifics of homosexual desire misses the point. Try instead to imagine remaining overwhelmingly and involuntarily heterosexual, but in a different world, in a world which makes heterosex illicit and allows only homosex”. He regrets that “a few people will think that I say that we should approve all gay behavior as unconditionally as I say that we should approve all gay people. Such persons should ask what they have at stake in wanting a gay activist to look stupid!” Well said. Christians who don’t want to be confused with Christians holding to certain ideas and lifestyles seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge a similarly wide range of ideas and lifestyles among homosexuals. To them, “homos are homos”. Crew sees “how fiercely ironic [it is] that a gay Christian can have clandestine sex several times in one Sunday after church with far less risk than the person takes if he introduces as spouse at the parish coffee hour a gay lover of many years”. Such attitudes contribute to a promiscuity on the part of some fundamentalists that outdistances even some non-Christians’ promiscuity. Crew concludes with praise – quite properly not of his homosexuality but of his God: “Throughout history God has continued to extend the boundaries, to love people whom the religious officially exclude. Joy to the world indeed”.