Good Gays, Bad Gays: Gay Love and the Play Book of Churches of Main Street USA

These days, people are afraid of Ellen. And her love.

Let me back up. People are afraid of Ellen. Ellen Degeneres.

Yes, that Ellen. The one with the talk show, who laughs at anything with uproarious delight, raises money for victims of Hurricane Katrina. America’s gal pal. The BFF we all wish we had had in high school, particularly us gay men. The one without a mean-girl bone in her body, whose humor is never at anybody else’s expense, who makes a place for everybody at her table.

That Ellen. And her love.

It’s the love thing that’s the problem. First of all, she talks about it, not in a showy or combative way, but as if it’s just there, a fact, as solid as the table she limbos over every afternoon on her show. What’s talked about might exist, and that’s an intolerable thought to those who don’t want gay love to exist.

It’s the love. Not Ellen. It’s Ellen, America’s gal pal, claiming that her love counts, that it’s love just like George’s love for Martha or Laura and Rob Petrie’s love for each other.

Love is the problem. It’s the problem the love police handle constantly these days. The religious right, people who profess a religion centered on the claim that love is what it’s all about, the path to heaven, the very nature of God: they seem to be spending an amazing amount of time these days fighting love.

The love of others, that is to say, their own being divinely sanctioned and stamped with ecclesial approval. The love of others they want—need—to keep in subordinate positions. One wonders how they find the time to love, these love police of the religious right—to love as their religion enjoins them to do. How can those fixated on 24-7 policing of others’ love have time left over to keep love alive in their own relationships?

The problem with love, the kind of love Ellen has for Portia, is that it trumps the rabid need of right-wing movements in church and society to reduce being gay to sex—to reduce gay human beings to something instrumental and sordid, something useful in games over which those being used have no control, games played for political goals that go far beyond controlling sexual morality.

As long as we can get a majority of people to think sex (in all the lurid manifestations we plant in people’s minds) when they think of gay and lesbian human beings, we can continue playing those games with impunity, no matter how many people are hurt by them. But when people begin to think love, to see faces of people they love (BFFs, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters) when the words “gay” or “lesbian” pop up, the game is over.

When people think love as they see a gay or lesbian person, they will also inevitably end up thinking hate when they see the faces of many key players of right-wing politics in church and society. And they’ll wonder how those committed to increasing love in the world and its families could, for so long now, have sought to effect precisely the opposite in so many human lives and the lives of so many families.

When I think of playing games with other people’s lives, I can’t help thinking of the churches. Throughout these blog postings, I keep (broken record, one-song repertoire) calling the churches to accountability.

I keep calling on church members to take responsibility for the manifold ways in which hate dresses as love in church rhetoric, to examine not the words but the effects of the words. It’s there that we find whether love or hate is at work, in the effect our statements and creeds and books of discipline have.

Do the words churches speak engender respect for LGBT persons? Do they foster a desire on the part of church members to get to know LGBT persons? Do they lead to a commitment by congregations to hear real-life stories of real-life LGBT human beings?

Do they lead to an attempt on the part of churches to understand the love manifest in gay lives, even when that love differs from the kind of love we take for granted as normative?

If what the churches say (and do) doesn’t lead to these embodiments of love, then perhaps the churches need to ask themselves if they are, in fact, involved in something other than love, when it comes to the gay community today. In particular, perhaps the churches need to examine whether they are involved in the same noxious game-playing with gay lives that is now being exposed as hate masquerading as love in many political circles.

Readers of my blog may have concluded that I think the churches of Main Street USA don’t include many gay members. I don’t think that this is the case, at all. In fact, I think the churches of the radical middle are full of gay members.

But those gay members are bound by both spoken and unspoken rules in many churches to keep their presence hidden, to disguise themselves, to become different people than who they are the rest of the week, once they walk through the church door. The price they pay for “inclusion” in the Christian community and its institutions is to comport themselves on church premises as good gays, rather than bad gays.

If my previous postings have given the impression that I think churches don’t want gay members, let me correct that impression. Many churches of Main Street USA would stop functioning immediately if they expelled their LGBT members. Gays are everywhere in the church: singing in the choir and directing it; teaching Sunday School; ushering and organizing hospitality ministries and ministry to the sick and shut-in; playing the organ. Gays are everywhere in the churches: standing in the pulpit preaching on Sunday, and at the altar celebrating the eucharist.

It’s not gays the churches of the radical middle don’t want—not precisely. It’s bad gays that they want to keep at bay. The good gays, the ones that are everywhere, but silent, hidden, apologetic, meek and mild: these the churches want, need, can’t do without.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way, working in church institutions. I’ve learned it teaching and doing academic administrative work in church-affiliated colleges and universities.

Before I set forth on my vocational path, I had never dreamt of myself as a bad gay. I was quite decidedly good. My whole self-image depended on being the good small-town Sunday-School boy of Main Street USA whom I was raised to be. Heck (I couldn't say "hell"), I wasn't even sure I was gay. It was probably just a phase I was going through. I'd outgrow it when I met the right woman, sat down to a table spread with tea and sympathy.

I was deferential, mild-mannered, intent on pleasing others, constantly fearful of hurting the feelings of others. I was also closeted, tormented by self-doubt and guilt about the inclination of a love that I really could not deny in my heart of hearts. I lived in a state of constant debilitating panic about being exposed.

I was a good gay. I was the kind of gay churches of Main Street USA, and their institutions, want and need.

As I’ve noted in previous postings, a number of pivotal life experiences, beginning with my brother’s death in 1991, catapulted me into a different universe altogether, right as I was offered tenure by the Catholic university at which I had taught for seven years in New Orleans when my brother died.

After this life-changing event, I was still willing to play the game church institutions dictated that I play—the don’t ask, don’t tell game. I was still willing to be the good gay, but with one crucial new proviso: I would not lie, dissimulate, live in fear, give signals that I was not equal to my colleagues. This decision, a resolute one, one that I believed to be inspired by the Spirit who calls us to live in love and truth, was one I carried into my first disastrous job experience as a bad gay, when I turned down the offer of tenure and took a job at another institution.

This experience happened at a Catholic college in North Carolina. I won’t slog through all the sordid details of my reception there in this posting. I’ve written about them elsewhere.

What I want to home in on here is the written-unwritten game book governing gay lives in church institutions in Main Street USA. At the Catholic college in North Carolina, after I had received a one-year terminal contract on the heels of a glowing evaluation, and had not been given any reason for the termination (or any written copy of the evaluation), I resigned. I did so rather than allow myself to be humiliated any further.

When this happened, a recent graduate of the college whom I had taught, a theology major with a sharp intellect and a distinguished career in the college (he has subsequently come out as a gay man), came for a visit. We did not discuss the issue of sexual orientation and the key role it played in what had happened to me at the college. Don’t ask, don’t tell required that we, well, not ask and not tell, either one of us.

Even so, my former student said something extremely illuminating, which I have thought about constantly over the years as I have sought to dissect and deal with the good-gay, bad-gay play rules in church institutions. My student told me, “You know, when you arrived here, the good old boys were out to do you in from the moment you set foot on the campus. Without saying a word, you gave a signal that you wouldn’t take any b.s. from them. You did your job, you excelled, you stood on your merits. And they hated that, and hated you for it.”

I had become a bad gay. And I didn’t even see it happening. All I did was insist on my right to be respected for the work I did, for who I was, for my integrity, for my excellence in teaching, scholarship, community service, and service to the college.

That was too much for the good old boys’ network in this Catholic-affiliated college of Main Street USA to handle. It was too much for the leaders of the United Methodist university in Florida who fired me last year (without providing any evaluation of my work at all) to handle. When gay people insist on being equal, when we insist on making sexual orientation irrelevant to our right to be at the table, we become (I have learned through painful experience) threats to those who absolutely have to see us differently, in order to use us in political games they need to play with our lives to benefit themselves.

Good gays are non-assertive, hidden, willing to let ourselves be used as doormats. I know. I have lived in that posture. It’s not a happy place to live.

Bad gays can be assertive without even trying to be. We can be tagged as assertive when we insist on what everyone else takes for granted in the church-related workplace—the simple right to be who we are, unapologetically, within all rubrics of professional decorum governing our particular vocations. When we are public about our identity, when we claim our lives and insist that they are lives and not lifestyles, we become extreme threats to the churches and church institutions of Main Street USA. We become uncontrollable.

And that is something the churches of the radical middle will not permit. They and their institutions cannot permit this, because the next step in the process of our emergence from oppression is to claim that our love counts, that it is equal to the love of heterosexual persons.

The next step is to claim that it is love, period, our gay love.

And this is, in the rule books of the churches of the radical middle (and in the institutions these churches sponsor), an intolerable step for gay people to take. It is so for all kinds of reasons, about which I plan to write in further postings on this theme.

But it is so for one central, critical reason I want to note here, a reason that has everything to do with the credibility of churches today: when gay people’s love is accepted as love, period, then what the churches do and say to gay brothers and sisters today in the name of love will eventually be revealed to be hate. Hate masquerading as love.

The churches cannot have this hate unmasked. That is, they can’t do so, and continue doing business as usual.

This is the serious, key, intolerable threat that the mere presence of gay people—bad gays who are bad simply because we refuse to apologize and hide—poses to the churches of Main Street USA today. This is why we must be driven from the table.