Since the passage of Prop 8 in California, I have seen both the beauty of our community and its savage tendencies.
Neither beauty nor savage tendencies are unique to the gay community. These antagonistic traits are inherrent in the human condition.
I have seen, coast to coast, a community that has oft sought to disguise its disadvantaged condition in the brief joys of the latest drug high, the instant gratification of one-night promiscuity, or the self-callousness of faux vanity, awaken from its self-delusion, and galvanize in purpose and meaning to broadcast from the streets, in democratic resilience, in stubborn protest, its collective grief.
Beauty is revealed, first, in comprehending that the pain that life's injustices cause is too great for you to remain silent.
Joy.
I have seen the savageness of our community. I have personally expressed it. At one message board that I frequent, I wondered aloud why I should not hurl my anger towards African-Americans. Others in our community have expressed pointed racial hatred towards African-Americans because they voted so overwhelmingly in favor of Prop 8.
This is unbecoming of our community, which has proudly declared to the world that our community is the most heterogenous on earth. We have rightly celebrated the diversity of the GLBT community. We are not white, nor black, nor latino, nor Asian, nor Christian, nor Jew, nor Muslim, nor Hindu.
Our community was birthed by all communities, by all peoples, by all creeds, by all nations -- all tribes come together as one.
There is no room for racism among gays. This is true, not merely because racism is wrong, but it is true because gay has no racial roots. We are not the mothers and fathers of our own community. We are the children of all communities. Today, we stand orphaned.
When I was a child, I was a very devout Catholic. I was not merely one who went to mass on Sunday out of a duty to keep the Sabath, I went to mass feeling great joy in my heart. I wanted to be there. I wanted to receive communion. I wanted to be in communion with the body of Christ.
I wanted to be in communion. Isn't that what this is all about?
In my late teens, that began to change. I knew, by then, that I was gay. The AIDS pandemic and the resulting panic was reaching its peak. TV preachers like Jerry Falwell were declaring that AIDS was God's punishment against homosexuals.
For the first time, I heard the Bible quoted on the topic. Homosexuality, said the TV evangelists, was not merely a sin, but God himself declared it an abomination.
It's odd. As a Catholic at that time I couldn't recall such talk during mass. Most of the homilies the priests delivered were on topics that weren't particularly disagreeable: doing for the poor, judge not lest ye be judged, forgiveness, and so on. So, this talk of homosexuality as an abomination struck me as odd. But I had to see for myself.
There it was.
Leviticus 20:13: If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death...
It was true, not only did God consider homosexuality an abomination, God wanted me dead.
I suspect that I did what many gay men did when they heard that quote: I didn't bother. I didn't question. I just decided that God wasn't for me. I pretended for the next fifteen years that I was an atheist. I guess, I decided to kill God before God could kill me. If he was unreal, he could not hurt me.
But personal journeys are convoluted. Though I dropped out of high school, I would go back to school, and earn admission to a Catholic university, Loyola University in New Orleans. While there I insisted that I was an atheist. I'd take the requisite religious studies courses and feign disinterest.
The strangest thing occurred there. The instructors in the religious studies department seemed to be even less convinced about God and the authenticity of the Bible than I was. That healthy skepticism opened my eyes. I was now forced to be skeptical about my own beliefs (but was atheism a belief or a pretension for me?).
I began believing that God didn't want me dead. I began believing that God had a place in his communion for me.
This is the failure of the Gay community. When confronted with religion and morality, we turned our backs on religion and morality and trumpeted relativistic shibboleths: "That's your morality!" We played skeptics: "Prove there is a God!" We argued law: "The First amendment says..."
Yes, the principles of the constitution should succeed. Yes, it's true, no one should be able to force their morality, their religion, their understanding of God on others. But that misses the point. What we failed to do was outline the morality of our cause.
First it is tempting to say that for all of his time on earth Jesus never bothered to address homosexuality, thus it must not have been too important to him. This may be a good point, but it only makes the case in the negative.
It is also correct to point out that those passages in Leviticus were written in a specific historical and cultural context. One of the most well known forms of homosexuality in that time was not egalitarian relationships, but as a form of domination and abuse. If the story of Sodom is to be interpreted sexually, then it would be about a form of rape. It was not, in that time, uncommon for members of those societies to show their dominance of foreigners by raping the males. But even then, that's the negative case.
It is also proper to show that Jesus himself took the story of Sodom to be one of a lack of hospitality (Matthew 10:11-15). In Ezekiel (16:49), it is stated that the guilt of Sodom was "she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy." This is, again, the negative case.
There is a positive case to be made for equality of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.
In Galatians 5:14, Paul writes "The entire law is summed up in a single command: "Love your neighbor as yourself."
The sentiment was expressed by no less a Christian authority that Jesus himself (Matthew 22:37-40), "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
What is it about being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered that keeps one from upholding the great command-- to love? And to heterosexuals in the opposition I ask, what of any of these commands are you staking claim to when you deny equality to gays and lesbians?
Matthew 25:45 says, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." After the Prop 8 vote, after the lies and the distortions, after the discrimination and the hatred, are not we gays among the least of these? If you have not given equality to gays and lesbians, then you have not given equality to Jesus.
But the Bible goes further than that. There is actual same sex love recorded favorably in the Bible.
In 1 Samuel 18, it says, "When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul... Then Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt."
The next line in the story isn't that Jonathan and David had sex. Neither is the next line that David wore the robe that Jonathan gave him. But we clearly have same sex love, a same sex union, a covenant (not unlike a marriage), the giving of gifts (not unlike a wedding gift), and then what appears to be a consummation, Jonathan seeming to offer his nude body to David.
To further make the point that this was more than any friendship, in chapter 20 Jonathan and David kiss and weep together until "David exceeds", and in 2 Samuel, David confesses that Jonathan's "love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." Traditionalists not only deny that this is a sexual relationship, they deny that it is romantic, despite its similarity with other warrior-love stories of that era that are universally held to be homosexual romances such as Satyricon, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
People opposed to gay civil rights loathe comparisons between our struggle and previous civil rights struggles for African-Americans, Latinos, or women. Their defense is the Bible. When confronted with the fact that the Bible was used to deny the rights of others in the past they merely cite their refrain that this time, it is different.
Well, to those who defend anti-gay bigotry with that solitary word "different," I'd like to bring in the words of the man I was named for, Robert F Kennedy who said:
"These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows.
"But we can perhaps remember - even if only for a time - that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek - as we do - nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can."
[emphasis mine]
Beauty must shatter our savage tendencies.