A Workshop Presentation for the Western ConnECtion2002 at Chapman University in Orange, California, July 26, 2002
Half a hundred summer connECtions have come and gone since that first one in 1980. My keynote address that summer was entitled: “Getting Close: Steps Toward Intimacy.” I said: “I am going to begin with a neglected passage from Ecclesiastes 4.” And I read this Scripture: “Then I looked again at all the injustice that goes on in this world. The oppressed were crying, and no one would help them. No one would help them because their oppressors had power on their side. … Here is one who lives alone. This person has no children, no sister or brother, yet this person is always working, never satisfied with the income. For whom is this person working so hard and denying self any pleasure? This is useless, too – and a miserable way to live. Two are better-off than one, because together they can work more effectively. If one of them falls down, the other can help the person up. But if someone is alone and falls, it’s just too bad, because there is no one to help. If it is cold, two can sleep together and stay warm, but how can you keep warm by yourself? Two can resist an attack that would defeat one alone.” [Ecclesiastes 1:1 and 4:8-12]
Those old lines are poignant. And even with the intervening millennia and all the cultural changes from the ancient Middle East to the advent of Western romance from the Middle Ages and all the shifts of modern egalitarian society – they’re still true. But we must not forget that the teacher of Ecclesiastes recognized that, whether in work or wisdom or pleasure or anything else – it’s worthless unless it’s related to the worship and will of God. That’s still true, too.
What I’d like us to begin to think through in this workshop is the integration of sex and the worship and will of God. The aim is to help you move toward a Christ-centered partnership of sexual intimacy.
Before we launch into this, I’d like to remind us of the reality voiced by Dorothy Day so succinctly: “Sex-life fell with the Fall.” So let’s not kid ourselves when it comes to the slippery seductions of sex.
As the teacher of Ecclesiastes recognized – we have a basic need for very personal, intimate connection with another person – what we’d call today psychosexual intimacy. But as we see in the Bible and throughout human history, we’re fallen people. The word for this? Sinners. We’re not sinners because we’re sexual. But we’re just as prone to sin in sex as in anything else. Why? Because sin is pervasive. Sin is persistent. Sin perverts everything – even our very best intentions. So we must put ourselves on notice that we’re in danger of sin’s perverting our efforts toward sexual intimacy. Sexuality can be a good because it is a gift of God. But sexuality can be a means of evil because God does not withhold it from fallen humanity.
So we must learn to deal with the power of sexuality with a strength of maturity that is its match. And for that, we must be firmly committed to what is right. If we’re not committed to what is right, we’ll be overrun with all the unintended consequences of a misused sexuality.
For Christians, the only sex ethic is the basic Christian ethic. And that is agapic love. That’s the tallest of ethical orders. Agapic love strives wisely for the welfare of the other person in such a way as to refuse to indulge merely self-serving motives. This is our calling in everything we do that impacts other people. But because of the unusual strength of the sex drive and the ease with which we all deceive ourselves into rationalizing, the living out of agapic love in the area of sexuality is especially challenging. And so a rigorously enforced self-denial, to which we’re all called as Christians, is more necessary in sexuality than in most other areas of life.
What I’m going to present today has as much to do with an informed psychological perspective as it has to do with an informed biblical perspective. What I’ll be sharing with you is what I’ve shared with my psychotherapy clients – whether gay or straight, Christian or non-Christian – for over 30 years. And it works.
What is sexual intimacy? What is it not? Sexual intimacy is not mere genital nerve-ending stimulation of strangers, self or spouse. Sexual intimacy is the achievement of the deepest possible union between two individuals – whether the pair is homosexual or heterosexual. Sexual intimacy is an achievement. It’s psychosexual and physical. It requires familiarity. And crucially: It is absolutely dependent upon a covenant commitment to a self-giving love that wisely seeks the welfare of the other person as much as one’s own.
These days, and especially as gay people, we’re up against many impediments to the achievement of sexual intimacy. These impediments are actually anti-sexual. So we need to gain a rare, informed and intuitive insight. We need to become alert to all these anti-sexual impediments. We need to become armed against them. Otherwise, we’ll have a much more difficult time trying to achieve what we really do need.
So: What are these anti-sexual impediments we’re up against?
Firstly, we’re up against a cultural history that impedes the achievement of sexual intimacy.
What we’re up against as gay people is not unlike what black folk have been up against.
Harvard University’s Orlando Patterson shows that slavery tended to deprive his male black ancestors of the ability to be husbands and fathers. As has been established, on George Washington’s plantation, for example, “only one-sixth of the slaves lived together as man and wife, and two-thirds of those who considered themselves married lived apart from their spouses.” [Brenda Stevenson] An analysis of census data shows that in 1880, for example, single parenthood was two to three times more common among blacks than whites. Slavery’s systemic negative effects reach all the way to our own day, when, for example, more than half of black children live in single-mother households.
The historical impediments to stable gay relationship have parallels in the long history against marriage for black couples. These days, bipartisan politicians, religionists of the Right, and even self-styled lesbigayt leaders fight against same-sex marriage to much the same bad effect. By intent and in effect, churches, society-at-large, and lesbigayt leaders are separating gay sex from family life. Some argue that gayness is too sick and sinful to grant it the rights of marriage and others argue that gayness is too radically special to saddle it with the constraints of marriage. Both arguments entail what Oscar Levant generously called “a smattering of ignorance.” In reality, whether one is gay or straight, one’s need for the achievement of sexual intimacy is essentially the same and the way to achievement is essentially the same as well.
Now we can’t have it both ways. If hostility to homosexuality has been and remains an historic reality, then that hostility must be understood to have had and continue to have its debilitating and disabling effects. And the consequences are imbedded in the minds of the individual homosexuals as well as in the interpersonal life of the same-sex pair. That’s some of what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy. Moreover, there’s more to this that gets reinforced in everyday pop culture.
We live in a sex-negative society in general as well as a same-sex-negative society in particular. And that sex-negativity continues to be fostered by parents, preachers, peers, pornographers and both pop culture and lesbigayt subculture. How? By continuing to separate sexuality from the familial and the familiar. Sex is seen as dirty. Who, for example, feels comfortable talking about sex within the family? We’re not comfortable thinking of our father’s erection and ejaculation and our mother’s lubricating – and yet here we are as the evidence that that actually happened. There’s basically one word for each body part – except for the genitals. There’s a long list of euphemisms for genitals. When did you ever see a movie sex scene involving two people married to each other for even a few years? Or married to each other – period?
This notion of the “dirtiness” of sex sets up an incest taboo – not what anthropologists mean, but a notion that sex does not belong within the family. The popular notion is that sex, to be “hot,” must be novel and virtually anonymous – the opposite of intimacy. When we have an orgasm prompted by a virtual stranger or by pornography, we’re behaviorally reinforcing an association between sex and anonymity. How can we expect to integrate genital acts and sexual intimacy into an ongoing, familial relationship if that’s the way we train ourselves? And people call this counter-productive behavior “sexual liberation.”
As MTV’s Dr. Drew Pinsky notes, for example, what passes for “sexual liberation” in pop culture is “pathetic.” He rightly diagnoses the so-called “sexually liberated” characters on “Sex and the City” as “pathetic.” He says: “They’re not liberated. They’re sick.” And one can say the same about those “liberated” characters in “Queer as Folk.” Contemporary sexual mores are pathological. That’s only some of what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy.
Also, we’re up against the fact that the lesbigayt liberation movement came out of the most culturally disruptive decade in the history of American mores – the 1960s. And it did so without having had any previous history of stability. During The Sixties – which sociologists understand had a “test run” in The Roaring Twenties – the most fundamental lessons of history in terms of sexual tradition and mores, were overturned. And notwithstanding some long overdue correctives that came along with that, the damage done then is with us still.
And for serious Christians who happen to be same-sex oriented, we’re up against even more. For, called to be radically counter-cultural, we’re up against the pedestrian pathology of assumptions in the secular lesbigayt movement as well as the homophobia of churches. And both can be defensively internalized to the impeding of a healthy integration of sexuality and commitment to Christ. Even in the minds and manners of gay men and lesbians at an Evangelicals Concerned conference. That’s what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy.
Misconceptions about sex are rampant in our society today. Pop culture’s absolutized relativism and its cynicism about right and wrong are but two of these underlying dysfunctional world and life views. It’s assumed that there is no right and wrong when it comes to sex – except, of course, for politically correct concerns about gender roles, sexual harassment and the notion that “Thou shalt not be judgmental.” The media hysteria over gay sex between a few Catholic priests and some gay adolescents – what they erroneously call “pedophilia” – assumes that celibacy or chastity are impossible and/or stupid. That’s the endorsing assumption in the pop culture of urbane America. What else drove “40 Days and 40 Nights” – the movie? And when David Letterman mentioned that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston had dated for nine months before having sex, his audience hooted and gasped in disbelief. That’s some more of what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy.
Even with the AIDS epidemic still bearing down upon us, The Village Voice reports with breathless glee that Guilliani is gone and the back rooms and bare-backing are back and orgies are drawing droves of twenty-somethings who pay 20 bucks a piece and pass the looks inspection at the door. There’s a sense of entitlement to promiscuity, drugs of so-called “sextasy,” and careless genitalizing in the gay scene. Even an AmFAR community liaison admits: “The condom code was instituted for an emergency, like a flood or fire. It isn’t viable. Acknowledging that is crucial.” [Candida Scott Piel] Gay author Eric Rofes says we’re in “a post-Madonna moment,” a time when fetish is entertainment and politics. He raves that “the sexual right has lost this battle. People are doing what they want to do.” That’s some more of what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy.
Last week I received a solicitation from a syndicated gay sex columnist called Woody Woodward. He wanted me to run his column, “Tips for Getting Timber,” in Record and Review. He’s evidently never read me. His sample column was on “House Sex Party Etiquette.” His inquirer asked three questions about a “sex party” he’d attended with “40 nude guys just walking around and getting it on with whomever they wanted,” as he put it. Question #1: “Should you say anything to the host if he’s being unnecessarily mean to the people he won’t let in to the party?” (Though he dispensed with his clothes at the door, he didn’t dispense with his concerns for political correctness.) Question #2: “What’s the proper way of rejecting guys at a ‘play party?’ As I was walking around the apartment there were a lot of guys that I didn’t want.” Question #3: “How do you tell someone who won’t leave you alone to leave you alone? I was being fucked in a sling and this guy kept tapping me on the shoulder asking if he could be next. I’m like, ‘dude, can’t you see I’m busy here?’ But he was relentless and kept asking. Finally, I just said ‘fine, but the line forms at the rear.’” He signs “The courteous whore.” Woody replies: “You forgot question #4: ‘Who should I beat up for not inviting woody?”
Notice that both the inquirer and the wooden-headed advice columnist bought into the fantasy of a “sex party,” even though all three of the questions demonstrated that the actual party was no such thing.
Woody assures us that his “Tips for Getting Timber” column is vetted by “a gay psychologist and a board-certified MD with a large gay practice.” They don’t see the woods for the timber! So beware! You can’t trust just any pro-gay counselor to deliver what you need. That’s even more of what we’re up against in trying to achieve sexual intimacy.
Having taken note of some of what we’re up against, let’s look at what it takes to screen successfully for sexual intimacy.
Here’s what I have to suggest after more than three decades of what has been possibly the largest gay psychotherapy practice ever. I’m not aiming to give you “tips for getting timber.” I’m aiming to give you an intuitive understanding of what it takes to build a lasting love on a firm foundation. The need is not for what Woody calls “timber.” The need is not for sticks and stones. If you think you just need to “get your rocks off,” you’ll never get to the bed rock of sexual intimacy. The need is for deep, mutual, abiding, intimate union between two individuals who experience and achieve the matchless match with each other.
So dating or courtship, is then the means to this end. Dating is no end in itself. You’ll meet a stranger. You’ll at first find him or her fascinating. But any stranger will get stranger before becoming more familiar. So what is needed is clarity. That’s the purpose of dating.
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three absolutely necessary requirements for success in sexual partnership. The purpose of dating – the screening process – is to discover if the stranger who becomes stranger before becoming more familiar can be the right person. And only one who meets these three criteria can possibly be the right person. Each of you must pass this three-part test. Here are the three absolutely necessary requirements for a matchless match of sexual intimacy.
Mutual, involuntary fascination with the otherness of each other. That’s what you experience as sexy. There must be a match.
Shared values. That’s what’s held to be really important to each of you. There must be a match.
The will and skill of each partner to be a true team player. That’s the match that’s needed for the work over the long haul.
Now unfortunately, most guys screen only in terms of the first leg of this three-legged stool for sexual intimacy. But without all three legs, the thing really won’t be able to stand up. Here, for example, is the syndicated stupidity of another gay columnist. Writing on “When Running Around Turns Into a Ring on the Finger” – a curious passivity – he rhapsodizes: “He was in his late 20s, tall, slender, muscular. We met briefly, at the gym. As I got into my car I thought, ‘You know, there are guys you wanna fuck and there are guys you want to marry. This guy, I wanna fucking marry.” [Michael Alvear] We’re not using the same three legs.
Sexual attraction is, of course, involuntary. It’s a conditioned, imprinted, experience. It’s set at a very early age. And it cannot be changed. That means it’ll last. The sexual attraction will remain.
Sexual attraction is directed toward a persona who is perceived to be fascinatingly other from one’s own sense of self. So don’t expect to look into a mirror and see sexiness. But don’t extrapolate from what you see in the mirror to what you think others will see in their you. That naïve mistake is what gets in the way of most gay men. And it’s what sends them out to seek affirmation and refutation of their own sense of self through all sorts of self-sabotaging, superficial sex that does the other person no favor either.
Though it’s normal to be told “no,” you – your own experienced version of yourself – cannot be rejected by anyone else. Isn’t that a relief? The guy who says “no” cannot even see your you. Your you is in your brain – not in his. And the you in his brain is either a persona he’s been imprinted to or not. So check it out. If he’s not imprinted to his you, check out. You’re wasting your time with someone who was never imprinted to what he sees when he sees his you. And the person who is imprinted to his you is not going to trip over the you in your brain. He cannot see that you. He does, however, trip over his own sense of unsexy self – no matter how sexy you find your him. So, simply show up. Relax. He brings with him, a sense of a sexy you along with a sense of an unsexy him. What a relief!
There are, then, no homosexuals – if by “homosexual” you mean a sexual attraction to men in general. There are only “Richardsexuals” or “Larrysexuals” or “Seanosexuals.” It’s all very specific. So, if you are a Sean, there is nothing you need to do to make yourself appear sexy to a Seanosexual. If you are a Larry, and you want to appear sexy to a Seanosexual, forget it! This fact is freeing. All you need do is show up.
Now notice I’m speaking here mainly of men because men are primarily turned-on by sight – so it’s, of course, a more immediate awareness than in the case of women. Women, too, are imprinted to others they experience as fascinatingly different from themselves, but it’s not such a visually-mediated turn-on. Thus, it can take longer to come to awareness.
Moving on to the second leg of the stool for a matchless match: Shared Values. What’s really a big deal to one partner must be a big deal to the other partner too. Now note that values are not mere interests – unless one eats, drinks and sleeps stamp collecting or Cher or Cho. In that case, that’s a value, not an interest. For serious Christians, this is especially important when it comes to the attempt to share your life in sexual intimacy with a person for whom living for Christ is either a matter of indifference or even contempt.
Moving on to the third leg of the stool for a matchless match: The Will and the Skill for Team Playing. Since we’re conditioned to fall into infatuation with someone we see as fascinatingly different from ourselves, it’s only natural that manifestations of this alien persona show up as potential difficulties. What drives you crazy in ways you want can drive you crazy in ways you can’t stand. For example: you’re organized and neat while she’s a messy free spirit; you’re chirpy and chipper while he’s the strong, silent type. That’s when we need the willingness and the ability to work through the inevitable challenges that arise from putting together the very different people we are.
The big question for each partner must always be “What’s in this for us?” rather than “What’s in this for me?” The big concern must never be: “Am I getting my needs met?” The big concern must always be: “Are we getting our needs met?” And, queens, that’s not the royal “we.”
Successful relationship requires the skills of constructive communication and compromise. For successful relationship, you cannot afford to consult only yourself about things. You simply must compromise with each other. And you have to carry your own burdens as well as help to carry the other person’s.
Many people don’t have the willingness to do any of this hard work. So they cannot be a partner in successful relationship for sexual intimacy. Some people have a willingness to be a team player but they have little or no skill. Where there’s a will, the skill can be learned if you find the right lessons. But be forewarned and forearmed: there’s plenty of bad advice out there. Don’t put up with it. Get the skill that’s needed. Without the will, though, forget it!
To reach the rarified heights of true sexual intimacy, each of you must be willing “to give more than you hope to receive,” as Yale’s Miroslav Volf puts it. He asks: “Is love a raw deal?” He responds: “From the perspective of contractual relations it is. But love has its own rewards. Remember that Jesus said it is more blessed to give than to receive. The return that I get when I practice self-giving love is not more to me, but more to us – more to the beauty of our common love.”
One last necessary word on reality. It’s from C. S. Lewis. He said: “To love is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly be broken. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers, all the perturbations of love, is hell.”
So you want to achieve sexual intimacy? You want a matchless match? It’s not easy. But nothing worthwhile is easy. And it is very worthwhile. A matchless match can be achieved if it’s approached wisely and lovingly – though only together. It’ll take an intelligent and disciplined beginning to make it work in the long run. But the work makes it possible to play.