By happenstance (Providence!), I attend what is, demographically and aesthetically but not officially or politically or programmatically (although more on this in a moment), a gay church.
(We will, in about 2000 words, get around to the flag.)
During my hopefully early mid-life crisis a few years ago, I decided to start attending church again, something I hadn’t done since I left home at eighteen. It was that or dye my hair blonde, and my stylist said he wouldn’t do it (“I’m not telling you you can’t, but I won’t”). So I joined a couple of church-going (straight) friends Sunday morning at their smells-and-bells Anglo-Catholic episcopal parish.
If you know Christian denominational stereotypes, well, they apply here. Episcopal churches, north and south, are for people with money, and this one indeed has a huge endowment and a small, wealthy, pedigreed-and-degreed congregation, mostly old, mostly white. Anglo-Catholic churches are ones that, while being Episcopalian/Anglican and thus to my mind obviously Protestant, enjoy pretending flamingly otherwise.
My church has almost no members who were raised Episcopalian—the congregation is half former evangelicals who wanted something politically liberal but liturgically ‘traditional’ (meaning, elaborate, with Psalms sung in Latin to early modern Italian arrangements, and uncharismatic priests giving ten-minute pseudo-erudite homilies—as far from possible as their own, I mean our own, low-church tradition of hour-long speechifying that mingles hellfire and Powerpoint, and unmusically emotive contemporary worship music), half former Catholics who hated aspects of Rome’s political conservatism and theological authoritarianism, but also post-Vatican II guitar masses.
I didn’t pick the church (the idea of church-shopping feels as much like religion as the idea of dating does like the erotic; in both cases the whole point is lost when approached through consumer choice—you put yourself in a state of deliberate receptivity and then hear what calls to you. Or maybe this is just Bottoming as a Way of Life) and there are things about it that sit imperfectly with me—but this is not really the venue, and I don’t think there is any, for me to be working out my theological line; people should speak about God and religion if not with reverence than at least with embarrassment, careful both of canned expressions and the lure of directness—but it’s certainly a good fit in that it’s also stereotypically gay. Maybe forty percent of the congregation are gay men. It has been gay since at least the 70s, and was gayer then, before AIDS killed many parishioners.
There’s no explaining, really, why something X is a Y thing. Someone could diligently try to connect seventeenth-century Western African traditions to Dragon Ball Z and flaming hot cheetos, or anal sex to Kylie Minogue and terrible blonde dye decisions, but there’s surely a lot of contingency connecting blacks and gays to these cultural forms they happen to participate in. For connecting gay men to the style and aesthetics of ‘Catholicism’ even in its more-Catholic-than-Rome-but-obviously-also-less form of Anglo-Catholicism, there’s also a certain political risk to playing with stereotyping explanations.
Lately the clerico-fascists—who somehow have an in at the New York Times?—have been drawing on the resources of queer theory and pop-cultural gay Step-n-Fetchit routines (the piece here, by the First Things/Compact guy’s wife, is titled after the routines straight Bill Haider did as the mincing gay character Stefan on SNL, “New York’s Hottest Club….”) to tell us the Roman Catholic Church is gay/queer, actually, is radical, cool, transgressive, edgy, home to exciting marginal energies… and not, you know l’infame, the homophobic Whore of Babylon, and other things that in my gay Protestant Jacobinism I know it to be.
Catholicism has become for a certain set of intellectuals something like Islam was for leftist intellectuals of a previous generation, a way of epat-ing the bourgeois by LARPing around with a sulfurous colorful illiberal faith to replace their exhausted economy of political gesture—and this was a move already tired in the late 70s and early 80s when Tel Quel did it by becoming l’Infini and embracing the ‘return to the religious’ and post-secularism, or indeed when the interwar generation with Eliot—another faggy mid-Southerner become Anglo-Catholic cringelord—did it, or when the post-revolutionary romantic generation with Chateaubriand were moping about the churchbells melted down to cannons by the atheists. I would at least like to be the earliest adopter of a new deceit, a new sort of dupe.
The worst expression of the perspective by which Catholicism is ‘gay/queer’—glibly Yassifying away its historical role as a persecutor of gay men—is, by the way, Stephen Adubato, who gave me one of the few podcast invitations I’ve turned down, and who seems to combine the worst of contemporary gay taste with the worst of post-liberal conservative politics, writing essays, for instance, about how White Lotus is “subtly counter-cultural,” that is, unwoke and thus good-for-the-right
Chaste gay conservatives, like leftist queers in academia and journalism, have figured out a way to replace both politics and criticism—and fucking—with the over-interpretation of their favorite culture industry products as Important Reminders about the truth of their own ideologies. I grew up in an evangelical culture where youth pastors attempted to convince us that The Matrix was about Jesus (and English teachers that Whitman’s rhapsodies about hot dead soldiers looking like the dead Christ were models of piety) so these readings, whether practiced by conservatives on ‘based’ Lana or Jack Halberstam on queer Spongebob, can only strike me as pathetically lame and, again, nothing new (I should note that The Matrix being retrospectively cast by its creators as a trans allegory—after their apprenticeship with a sissifying Hollywood dominatrix—shows that such lameness is not only what outsider commentators practice on cultural products, but part of the latter’s very making; the cringe is baked in).
At the risk of sounding thus like “historically homophobic institutions are Mother; the Inquisition, what a slay”—or of making cheap jokes about men in dresses—I’ll say that there is something gay of course about the sensory aspect of a high liturgical service, its baroque ostentation, but also something gay in the queer sense articulated by Bersani and Edelman of a service in which members look to the altar rather than each other, speak lines from a common text rather than give ‘personal testimony’ (or shout ‘Amen!’ when moved) and, in the post-service coffee hour or in other gathers, rarely talk directly about their ‘faith life.’ There is a bit of what Bersani called the “impersonal intimacy” of anonymous sex.
What’s ascetic and withdrawn is as ‘gay’ as what’s over-the-top—and both are relatedly means of protecting the possibility of an ‘authentic’ personal self from too-straightforward, too stupidly and dangerously earnest, expression. The terms of my evangelical growing-up and its insistent demands for the public revelation of intimate detail don’t apply here; there is a way, amid outward conformity, of remaining not closeted but rather at a certain possibly ironic distance from one’s own performance, and of protecting one’s tender (self-)strangeness—telling to oneself, as it were, The Dancer from the Dance.
But more importantly, perhaps, than how a gay experience might be connected to the church’s style, is the historical fact that once it was known to be gay, gays who wanted to go to a particular kind of gay church with other gay men started to go there to meet them. There are other sorts of gay churches, like the Metropolitan Community Church, that were created by and for gays, politically and explicitly; and there are ‘welcoming’ churches, now, all over. I appreciate—and I think, from what I’ve heard from them, most of the older gay congregants also appreciate—however being at a church that is quite gay but not having to thematize itself, to itself or to the world, as a gay church. Something that is full of gay people without representing itself actively as such—the way most of my gay friendships or romantic partnerships have not been, on the level of our mutual talk, about our being gay.
In the 70s Integrity—the Episcopal equivalent of the Catholic-gay group Dignity, which of course had much less success!—began a long doctrinal struggle within the Episcopal church, one that contributed to eventual schisms, for the integration of gays. Luckily that’s, at least in the US, over now, such that going to an Episcopal church, and this one in particular, feels like, well, going to church, and not taking a stance or joining an ongoing battle.
Part of the pleasure of going to my own church is knowing that, since so many other out gay men—many of them couples—have found a home there, that I can ‘be myself’ (e.g., talk about and bring my boyfriend) and, what’s been really delicious, make gay friends in their 70s and 80s who can induct me into such pleasures as baroque opera, antique furniture collecting, and church gossip. Activities which, again, are to some extent enjoyable insofar as they signify a membership in an intergenerational tradition of gay male life, but which I wouldn’t do if I didn’t also—primarily—enjoy them (I was going to say no one, for example, has gay sex and thinks in the middle of it how great that they’re doing to the same thing our queer comrades and forefathers did, but then, Tim Dean has a nauseating passage in Unlimited Intimacies where he talks about how cool it would be to get the same strain of AIDS that Foucault had… there is nothing so retarded a queer theorist hasn’t said it!).
No one would go to church—or any sort of organization—I suppose, self-consciously for such a reason; I don’t think sociability is the sort of thing that survives being foregrounded (who has ever said “I am here to make friends”?). But then, I once had the misfortune of attending a ‘young adults’ meeting for the twenty-odd members of the congregation in their 20s and 30s, and was horrified as the millennial white woman curate asked us to say why we attend church. God knows what sort of answers she was expecting and what she meant to do with them, but several people in a row said they came out of a sense of being “atomized” in our “modern society.”
A sadly pseudo-sociological way of saying “I’m lonely,” but y’all this is church, not God’s Best Friend Race. At least pretend to think you’re here for religion! If only because, if your actual purpose is to meet friends, then saying so openly is the thing most likely to make you look like an unfriendable loser. Our fundamental human loneliness, however much it might appear universal, is not good ground for connecting with others, just as our supposed need for meaning (whatever that is) is not good ground for belief in some specific thing.
If the consumer-minded search for a church or a man divert us from the practice of considered openness that lets us have a genuine encounter, so too does the apparently thoughtful identification of one’s ‘real need’ (connection, purpose, meaning) actually preclude satisfying it—because that ‘need’ appears to us rightly only ever in a particular, concrete site, moment, or person, to which we owe, at least, the tribute of pretending that our interest is really in them, and not in the fulfillment of our predetermined criteria or soothing of existential lack. In between the latter two—the shopping list and Man’s Quest for Meaning—is just the capacity to be interested in something/one, to be struck curiously by their irreplaceable and unexpected particularity.
That is what I take having a libido in the Freudo-Laplanchian (or Freudo-Jungian) extended sense, to be. One could figure it as receptivity (Derrida has his great essay “Heidegger’s Ear” on receptivity to the calling friend as the ungrounded grounds of our existence; I have dreamed of writing “Heidegger’s Asshole”) or, as Freud does, as the extension of pseudopodia from our amoebal narcissism out into the world. And these delicate jellied little arms of longing are blocked whenever we—in what is surely but not necessarily a well-meaning effort—try to leap out ahead of them with our calculating gaze or grand thematizing …
… not that, unfortunately, we can ever do without consumerist consideration of what ‘our needs’ are, or a certain awareness of ourselves as needing to be in relation to whatever the sonorous vacuities Meaning, Purpose, Lack, etc. conceal—and receptivity can be itself turned into a set of criteria to be worked upon by our instrumental rationality, or a topic of empty philosophizing—how do we manage rightly to move among the three: the technic machinations of the self-interested ego, the grandiloquent abstractions of second-hand Reason, and the vulnerably fleeting moment of desire for some particular other not yet fully subsumed by the former two? Beats me!
The motions by which ‘the authentic’ relating of our libido to its object briefly flutters between our self-undermining efforts to instrumentalize or intellectualize it are too delicate to be registered on my psychic seismograph.
But the point of all this, which is now thoroughly mislaid—unless the foregoing will end up being somehow the same thing as what follows—was to say something about an incident at church last summer in which the same well-meaning straight progressive lady curate brought herself, and the Pride Flag, into a conflict with the (implicit? unthematized? apolitical? normal?) gayness of the church.
It was June 2022—Pride month in what was, for whatever post-Trump, post-BLM, post-Covid reason, the PROUDEST month ever, with its multiple hideous new Pride flags flying from all sorts of official and corporate institutions. I found this all rather tiring, but I reject both
1) the now generation-old queer-left seething about Pride (are they still doing Shame?) expressed most cogently (that is with the most compacted stupidity) by Against Equality back when I was in college, when they were whining about how being accepted by banks, the military, etc., is either not going to solve all the world’s problems (duh!) or actually pernicious (because it’s better to stay marginal and victimized, to remain abject cannon fodder for leftist causes—that’s where vulnerable people will be safe, how dare they want acceptance and legal rights!)
as well as 2) the newer conservative gay LGB-without-the-T Spencer Klavan Aunt Tom routine that loudly distances itself from the appropriated symbols of gay identity and historical struggle not out of any desire to protect what’s valuable about the latter two, but out of only a wish to selfishly enjoy their gains (gay marriage, increased social acceptance—although if you ever listen to the utterly retarded American Mind podcast you can hear the other, straight, members, who all perform, like Klavan, a lazy drag-king’s out-of-the-box masculinity made of beards cigars and whisky, rolling their eyes whenever he says something gay) while ‘reigning in the excesses’ (wishing away queers who make them uncomfortable)
1 and 2 hate Pride because it frames gays as a consumer demographic rather than as part of a revolutionary political coalition of damaged losers or as ‘virtually normal’ men who managed to make themselves visible just long enough to get AIDS drugs and gay marriage and can now disappear again into the majority, vanishing like German-Americans into whiteness.
Now I don’t want to be visible all the time either, and I don’t gayness to be strictly apolitical, or control of how we appear in the world to be in the hands of marketers. But much of the left and the right’s hostility to Pride—the cringe of which I also feel!—appears like nothing less than a wish that gay men didn’t exist, and could be melted down into a Queer Left Sexual Minoritarian Assemblage or Straight-Enough Normalcy. Actually, both of those things are projects of normalcy—a ‘new normal’ in which we’re all self-identifying queer subjects exploring our plastic genders, and an ‘old normal’ in which men, damn it, are men. What place is there, really, in either of these for gays, except as dubiously tolerated tokens?
Part of what I want to articulate—if not here and now, somewhere soon—is that refusing the critiques of 1 and 2, there can still be a kind of Pride, a kind of gay visibility and specificity, that is not articulated on the terms of some broader agenda of normalization, some project of making the future properly Queer or Straight-Presenting, some way of being a minority that is not about disappearing into the universalist logics of Sex-Gender Liberation or Traditional Roles, without being either merely a demographic served and serving Capital.
I’m off-track again—the spirals of the dialectic are more of a dizzy scribble. I was saying that the curate, well she hung a Pride flag, one of the ugly new ones, in the garden, and kept mentioning in her sermons how important it was to honor our LGBTQ+ heritage. Ironically, the church was one of the last in the diocese to have a woman priest (her) because its traditionalist old queens had fought for years to keep them out. One could say in her favor that she might have thought she was doing a bit of placating fan-service, or that it is genuinely so important to uplift queer voices or whatever (the Zoomers at church seemed quite happy with all this LGBTQ+ buzz—many of them are straight queers, including a male/female couple who are both they/thems. Pra-ay for us!).
And certainly if gays were being excluded in the church, if the battles begun in the 70s were still happening, that might be very well and even brave, instead of a bit of moral grandstanding by a straight person and a distraction from the God stuff. But the curate was really baffled when, mid-way through the month, two of the gay parishioners who were to have their wedding at the church asked her to take the flag down for it. “Okay… but it’s going back up right after!”
The guys wanted to have, after all, a normal gay wedding, not a gay-themed gay wedding. We don’t have whatever the inter-racial relationship flag would be (and it’s perhaps interesting/telling/something that there isn’t one) hanging over mixed-race weddings (which this also was, and which I guess mine—which may well be there too—will also be), even though of course the latter are the product of a historical Civil Rights struggle, were once massively controversial and illegal. We accept that that victory has been won and we come to notice less the mixed-race-ness of mixed couples (though in the past several years surely their psychic-social salience has increased as we have been made, to our inestimable benefit, so aware of race). We do not interpret their existence as a victory lap, a triumph in which racism, vanquished and enchained, is lead humiliated through the streets.
Some of what rightly irks even the lost souls among 1 and 2 I mentioned earlier about Pride is the sense that we—gays—have lost control over the conditions of our visibility. We don’t get to turn on and off whether a given event, site, etc., is gay-themed rather than just being factually gay. And indeed many things are now gay-themed while being not-gay, or anti-gay.
It’s tempting to wish for the flag to disappear entirely, at least from places where it has nothing to do but be a marketing tool or emblem of an institution’s supposed goodness (this same imperative to express conformity to the collective good has after all been one of the engines of homophobic oppression—straight people now falling over themselves to show their allegiance to Pride would have been just as desperate a generation or two ago to drive gays out of public life and indeed into camps, jail, death. I do not trust straight people’s—or anyone’s—need for goodness) or to be, like the non-existent Miscegenation Banner, an empty reactivation of a safely concluded political struggle (of course the new Pride flags work as well to add on to that struggle for gay rights a series of other novel ones—many of which, like the battle to ‘protect trans kids,’ I in fact hope will be lost!).
There is along these lines a new quietist strain in queer theory, revalorizing opacity and the closet—in which I myself have participated. But this is wrong. For one thing, we need the flag, or something like it, not only to rally under when we are attacked, but as something about which we can say to someone like the curate that it should be taken down—as a means by which to control the conditions of what I’m calling gay-thematization (and over which to exclude some people from making decisions about it). Moreover, we need the flag—that is, we need collective identity—to fly over something we choose to fly it over; because if it doesn’t, then our identities, and indeed our colonized self-understandings, serve only as resources for the normalizing, universalizing and fundamentally antiminoritarian projects of the cultural left, conservative right, and consumer nexus.
I don’t feel a step closer to my desired non-retarded identity politics, much less to proving that it (alone?) can save liberalism, but I begin and continue in the hope that my most ordinary resentment, here/thus gnawing itself and other resentments (not least of those gays type 1 and 2), participates, through a particular course of garrulously meandering learned stupidity, in a version of the ‘rough play’ of ironic public self-presentation Jeffrey Israel theorizes as essential to keeping collective identities rightly alive in a tolerant, plural society, and might think open other possibilities generalizable to ‘identity’ more broadly. Seething towards tomorrow!
This missive makes my heart go pitter-patter. Yet should you continue to corral us gays into one of two binary camps, I'm going to start calling you the "they/them of the intellectual identitarian crowd."
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men!"
My visceral reaction to the phrase "Bottoming as a Way of Life" makes me wonder why the stigma always sticks to the bottom. All tea, no shade, some of my best friends are bottoms! But as a vers queen it does seem to portray a certain lack of imagination to call yourself an exclusive bottom, or an exclusive top for that matter, except if it’s because of some medical thing honey I don’t know your life. Anyway, perhaps that’s why, even though I may be Christ-curious, I’m not quite ready to just submit to Sky Daddy. If this is not too impertinent a question, what would you say is the top/vers/bottom/side breakdown of the congregation?