Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship edited by Robert E. Goss and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart (Harrington Park, 1997), 290 pp.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
he editors say their book is about “the Lavender Tribe,” i.e. “transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, a person with AIDS, or one who loves any of us”. This ostensibly inclusive bunch — notice the exclusion of most folk, including most people with AIDS — is busy building its ghetto. As Camille Paglia has remarked: “They’re not out of the closet. They’ve made a bigger closet for themselves”. The writers are Tribe members from what the editors call “the spectrum of sexual orientations … from many [?] hemispheres … and religious viewpoints,” e.g. Wiccan, Buddhist, Jewish and contorted (“Queered?”) Christian theology. A Metropolitan Community Church minister boasts that his enthusiasm for “love, whatever flavor” ranges to “everything from proceeding down gold mylar ‘aisles’ through fog machines in a candle-lit sanctuary to recessing to Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding.'” What range? Any view that’s not part of the Tribe’s party line is dismissed with contempt.
These “snapshots” are underexposed to biblical truth and common sense and they’re overexposed to postmodernism and Queer Theory. The authors are obsessed with Queering this and Queering that. There are chapters on “Queering Procreative Privilege,” “Queering Up the Breeder’s Bible,” “The Transforming Power of Queer Love” and statements such as “Jesus Queered the Jewish household” and “lesbian, gay, transgendered, and bisexual people Queer the pitch of the theological tradition.” But what the book presents proves Paglia’s point: “Queer theory is pathetic.”
“Queer folk are leading the way out of the paradigm of transactional relationships,” exults an MCC minister. Though he complains that “the theocratic thought police … seek to eradicate all forms of relationship except their own,” he himself trashes “the old structures,” insisting that they “do not work.” According to a Roman Catholic journal editor (she’s also in MCC): “It can be no accident that both Hebrew and Christian writers found the metaphor of marriage an appropriate one for the relationship between God and his chosen people [for] … at the heart of the metaphor is an understanding of marriage very close to slavery.” In “Variety is the Spice of Life: Doing it Our Ways,” a Roman Catholic women-church theologian urges taking “leadership in breaking the two-by-two pattern.” She supports the choices of those who “find three or four a more congenial pattern.” She’s topped by a Jewish UC-Berkeley grad student who celebrates “sex clubs” as spaces for “sacred spiritual moments of tribal convocation” and the “construct[ed] social formations that eschew conformity in favor of liberation [for] nonmonogamous couples, sexualized friendship networks, … trios, groups”. He warns that family values are being imported “from HetAmeriKa into the Queer nation,” horrified that it’s “possible — even likely — to mistake the local Queer paper [in Tulsa] for a Christian Right publication.” To a Duke University feminist/ethicist, such “emphasis on monogamy … urges gays to mimic heterosexual relational structures.” Not to be out-Queered, she argues that “gay male communal sex could function as a model for Christians.” She rationalizes that “sex in these worlds is not anonymous, since [and here she quotes a gay male friend] ‘Even though I may not know his name, … he’s part of our world; that’s all I need to know.”‘ According to her, this multiple partner sex “is far from promiscuous or indiscriminate since partners are chosen precisely because they belong inside that community, and because they show physical signs (such as taste in clothes, food, music) of participating in that world.” Oh.
The head of EroSpirit (a former Jesuit) reports that an MCC men’s retreat — “Arousing the Genitals of Christ” was the theme — “birthed” his Mystical Body Monastery. One of 12 men who now live together “generating erotic energy within and for the body of Christ,” they all share in “erotic massages” at least weekly. During these sessions “the Great Alleluia occurs when the sexual feelings and the breath feelings intensify to such a degree that we become one with the vibration. … In this mystical orgasmic state, the monk often cannot tell if he has an erection or not, nor can he tell if he has ejaculated or not.” He gives a hint of the “hundred different ways” the masseur “pleasure[s] the jade stalk … the places of love, the heart and the genitals.” Something called “the big draw … out the top of the head … deepens and lengthens the Great Alleluia.” The Episcopal chaplain at UCLA writes of his sexual “com[ing] out inside” when, at 28 and in The Body Electric School founded by the former Jesuit, he and 25 other men were massaged. The leader’s instruction: “Open your hearts and genitals, say yes to life and love”. Then, “as the warm oil was spread along the sixth chakra,” he says, “I found myself drenched in painful sensations of pleasure”. When it was over he “saw Siva; Kuan-yin, the boddhisatta of compassion; and a smiling Chinese dragon dancing with Jesus and my old bishop.”
A few chapters are mercifully light on Queer Theory: a rabbi’s chapter on gay and lesbian union ceremonies, a pastoral theologian’s on partners living with HIV/AIDS, a minister’s on the loss of her lesbian relationship, and a Bible teacher’s chapter on Paul (spoiled by some overreaching comments to the effect that “Paul probably was a repressed homosexual” and “supports a veritable sociological ‘zoo’ of domestic arrangements!”). But for the most part, this book’s Queerer-than-thou self- righteousness sadly fails those who, in Stevie Smith’s words, are “much further out than … thought/ And not waving but drowning.”