Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: A Booknote

This is a booknote I've been meaning to share with all of you for some days now. I call it a "booknote" rather than a review of this book deliberately: I'm not really seeking to comment on the book as a whole, but to share with you some reflections (perhaps idiosyncratic ones, at that) that struck me as I read Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (NY: Grove Press, 2011) recently.

Academy of American Poets Celebrates Gay Pride

In celebration of gay pride, the Academy of American Poets' Poetry.org website offers a webpage full of rich resources for reading about the lives of gay poets, as well as reading poems about love written by LGBT poets.  Unimaginable, in my childhood or even young manhood, to come across such riches as these for gay human beings and those who want to understand the experience of gay persons, openly displayed by such a prestigious group.

We have come a long way towards humanity.  We still have far, far to go.

The Ladies of Llangollen: On the Continued Need to Reclaim Gay History and Celebrate Gay Lives

A reader whose insights I value very much wrote me several days ago to ask about Elizabeth Mavor’s book The Ladies of Llangollen (London: Joseph, 1971), which I mentioned in response to a comment about a posting here recently.  Because at least one reader has expressed an interest in knowing more about the book, I thought I’d share a few reflections, now that I’ve finished it.

First, a disclaimer: I read this book, in part, because of an eccentric interest of mine that few readers would share.  And that means that I read parts of it sketchily, since my focus was on finding references that provide information about my particular interest.  That interest has to do with the family of one of the two ladies of Llangollen, the Ponsonbys.

A Reader Writes: Cute Androgynous Lesbians and Post-Gay America

A reader, colkoch, has just left a valuable, sharp observation about my posting re: Rachel Maddow and "post-gay" America. Colkoch writes,

The problem I have with this article of Widner's is that Maddow and DeGeneres and all the other 'cute' androgynous lesbians is not about gay, it's about 'cute' androgynous lesbians.

The issue of GLBT rights is about the G, much more so than the L. Suburban society may be accepting the L but it is sure not accepting the G. I've maintained for decades that the biggest fundamental mistake the gay community made was separating into two gender camps. I've also maintained that it was the undercurrent of misogyny within the male community which really pushed the separation.

Kudos to Maddow, but the fact she's an out Lesbian means zilch when it comes to gay men.

And I agree, completely. For a variety of reasons, gay women have entree that gay men lack. Gay women don't threaten the central gender norms that, for so many in the mainstream carry such weight, that to question these norms is to court cultural disruption.

There's a strong assumption of male superiority running through our culture, and of the need for men to be men in stereotypical ways. By our very existence, we gay men butt up against those assumptions, in which those in the cultural mainstream have invested everything, and which churches of the right tell them they may not question, because gender roles and gender division are assigned by nature and revelation.

Because women are regarded as peripheral to the power structures we regard as central to our society, what women do is seen as less important than what men do. Women being intimate with each other? Just a sideline to the real games of power and influence, male games--and a titillating one, at that, for straight men, since female-female intimacy reinforces their fantasies of absolute control over all creation.

The male-dominant perspective also regards lesbians as women aspiring to be men, which is not altogether bad, in the eyes of heterosexist males. Gay men, on the other hand, are thought to be letting down the side in the most atrocious way possible, by aspiring to be women.

I agree completely with colkoch, too, about the need for solidarity between gay men and lesbians, and about the fact that this solidarity is often not there--as she says, primarily because of the misogyny of some gay men. Last night, I just finished John McNeill's new book Sex As God Intended. I'll probably post something substantive about that book soon.

But for now, I want to note that he points out the need for both the gay male and the lesbian perspective as corrections of the prevailing homophobia and feminophobia of our culture. In his view, there is a divine plan for a new cultural consciousness that will correct those toxic ways of viewing the world and allocating power, and both gay men and lesbians are an integral part of that plan.

Only One Table: The Justice and Mercy Linkage Again

A dear reader has contacted me to ask if I can include more gaiety and levity in my postings.

Well, not really: (s)he asked for more humor.

As dear readers may have begun to suspect, humor is not my strong suit. Alas. I take after my mother’s family, who are gloomy, eremitical, reading-and-thinking people, rather than talkers and laughers. My brother Philip is far more like my father’s family, who have keen, sharp wits and a rapier-like ability to imitate with devastating success.

My father's family are readers, too (and writers), but far less inclined to brood over slings and arrows, much more stoical, inclined to shrug their shoulders at the price we all must pay, and head back into the fray.

So all my jokes are borrowed. I do recall one I read not long ago on the Internet—I think, on the wonderful Clerical Whispers blog, to which this blog is linked. This is my rendition of it, perhaps flawed by poor memory.

Ms. Sue De Nimm, the following grotesque attempt at jocular gaiety is for you:

An Irishwoman dies and goes to heaven. She arrives at the gates of St. Peter, and Peter tells her, “All you must do to enter the gates is spell a word.” She presents herself and asks to be assigned her word. Peter asks her to spell “love.” She does so and waltzes through the pearly gates.

A year later, Peter is tired and asks her to do sentry duty at the gates on a particular day. As she stands there, who should come sauntering up but her husband.

She asks how things have been with him. He peers through the gates and sees her family all gathered eating a feast. He asks how he can get in.

She tells him he must only spell a word, but meanwhile, she’d like to know about the past year without her.

“Oh, it was a grand year,” he tells her. Soon after you died, I married my young assistant and we went on a cruise around the world. That’s why I’m here now. The ship got caught in a storm, and I drowned.”

“But how about that word, so I can enter?” “Ah, yes,” she replies. “Spell Czechoslovakia.”

And I hope I myself have spelled it right.

And now for my usual ponderous reflections . . . . As I was saying day before yesterday, my understanding of the Jewish and Christian scriptures is that they couple justice and mercy. We cannot practice mercy without giving justice. We do not love in a vacuum. We love others, specific others with the specific burden and contour of their unique humanity.

As Gustavo Gutierrez says somewhere, one of the greatest injustices Christianity has ever done is to tell us we can love the sinner but hate the sin. Gutierrez notes that this attempt to separate some dirty (in our judgment) aspect of the humanity of another from her real, total humanity inevitably allows us to worm our way out of the obligation to love that person—just as she is, warts and all, in her full, entire human nature.

As my story in the same posting reflecting on mercy and justice notes, most Christians have no problem at all with being told to love. It is when a careful, justice-oriented analysis of their particular socio-economic world tells them who needs their love, that they (we) balk.

Justice spells out for us who and how we must love, if our love is to have any real meaning in the real world in which real people live.

These meditations are framed against the backdrop of an article I read recently on the website of the Florida United Methodist conference at www.flumc.info/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000045/004577.htm. The article, which is by Sarah Alsgaard, reports on two Florida United Methodist clergy who recently attended a conference on justice ministry. One of the clergypersons is quoted as observing that the United Methodist church has done an exemplary job at mercy ministry, but now needs to turn its attention to justice ministry.

The uncoupling of justice and mercy strikes me as dangerous. When we believe that we are merciful, that we are living mercy, but we do no justice-centered analysis of how we treat others who are denied justice, right in our midst, we deceive ourselves. We remain content that we are good, merciful people . . .

While right outside our doors, at our gates, stand people begging for our mercy, whom we do not see, because we do not recognize their claims to our justice.

As dear readers of my blog know, I have a “thing” these days with Methodists, and, in particular, with Florida Methodists, after dismal experiences of injustice Steve and I experienced at

since the churches in the United States—which are long on the rhetoric of mercy, but often very short on talk about justice—need (I suggest) to hear more about the indissoluble biblical link between justice and mercy.

A link I find mentioned today in the HRC (Human Rights Campaign) newsletter “HRC Religion and Faith News” e-newsletter for 9 April at www.hrc.org/issues/religion/8180.htm#resources.

The newsletter reports on a new book by Tony Campolo entitled Red Letter Christians: A Citizen’s Guide to Faith and Politics. The book notice says that Campolo is an evangelical Christian who wants to find a way of discipleship not dominated by religious right talking points. Campolo proposes that Christians become Red Letter Christians—that is, that they take seriously the actual words of Jesus (which often appear in red print in bibles), rather than a culturally determined canon within the canon spoonfed to believers by neo-conservatives.

If we do this, Campolo concludes, we will arrive at the conclusion that “justice for gays and lesbians should be on the political front burner for Red Letter Christian . . . because it is impossible to tell people we love them if we deny them the basic rights we enjoy.”

“It is impossible to tell people we love them if we deny them the basic rights we enjoy”: churches, are you listening? You do not have the luxury of claiming that you engage in ministries of mercy when you trample on the human rights of LGBT persons.

The unjust are never merciful.

The Sounds of Silence

“I have never heard a sermon that offered wisdom as to how a gay man should live his life in a faithful Christian manner. All I have heard is silence, or when there was something other than silence, the words have been condemning" ~ Rev. Paul Capetz.

Presbyterian News Service for Jan. 28 carries an interesting article by Duane Sweep, entitled "Twin Cities' Presbytery Restores Capetz' Ordination (www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2008/08063.htm).

The story concerns a Presbyterian (PC USA) minister Paul Capetz, who renounced his ordination in 2000 after the PC USA added to its Book of Discipline a 1997 statement requiring ordained ministers to practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and woman or chastity in singleness.”

As many commentators noted at the time the policy was implemented, it was primarily aimed at lesbian and gay ministers living with partners--that is, lesbian-gay ministers who potentially might reveal their sexual orientation to the public, rather than living silent, closeted lives. Commentators in the Presbyterian church and other churches that have adopted similar policies note that they tend to be used almost exclusively to weed out openly gay-lesbian ministers. Straight (or straight-identifying) ministers who are unmarried are not normally subjected to such stringent scrutiny re: their "celibacy" as are lesbian-gay ones.

Capetz recently decided to ask for reinstatement to ordination, on the ground that the implied "vow of celibacy" that the PC USA requires of non-married clergy represents a theology of "works righteousness" antithetical to Reformed theology. His appeal was upheld on Jan. 26 by the presbytery of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

What strikes me in Capetz's testimony to the presbytery, as reported in the article cited above, is the pronounced theme of calling and witness running through it. Capetz reports that it was the church which, from childhood forward, nurtured his life of faith. It was within the church that, as a young man, he discovered a strong sense of vocation, a calling to follow in Jesus's footsteps and minister to his flock.

And it was the same church--the church that had nurtured him and provided a context within which he heard the calling to ministry--that then attacked him when he sought to integrate the experience of being gay with his vocation. It was that church that told him to live in silence about his very personhood, or incur penalties.

It is out of this painful exclusion that Capetz addresses his experience (and that of other openly gay-lesbian believers) in the church: either silence or condemnation; either the injunction (tacit or spoken) to remain hidden, defined the shameful member of the family who is never spoken of, or direct assaults on his personhood, from the very community that nurtured his faith and vocation.

Capetz's testimony strikes me powerfully, because his story could be mine. It is also the story of countless other LGBT members of Christian communities around the world, whose entire experience of grace and vocation is framed by our natures, by who we are, by what we have experienced as LGBT children of God. We experience the divine as LGBT persons. We cannot experience God in any other way. To ask us to deny our natures or pretend to be who we are not is to ask us to forfeit the experience of a God who comes to each person just as that person is....We experience God through the mediating structures of our own personhood, of our personalities, predispositions, our unique way of being in the world.

The ultimate cruelty of the churches' assault on us as LGBT persons--specifically and precisely because we are LGBT--is the churches' denial that we lead graced lives. In telling us that our nature is malformed, or that our love is inauthentic, the churches tell us that we have no witness of grace to offer the Christian community.

Yet the powerful testimony of LGBT Christians everywhere--there is a veritable cloud of witnesses--repudiates the validity of the church's judgment of us. Not only can we live lives of grace, vocational lives within the Christian community, we do live such lives.

To their shame, the churches are unable to recognize this. The loss is surely the churches' loss. In behaving so savagely, by excluding LGBT members who refuse to live in quiet shame, not only do churches undercut their claims to be church: the family of God in which everyone is welcome. In behaving thus, the churches also diminish the significance of their many ministries to heal, make whole, right the wrongs of society.

The churches cannot stand to claim for love, inclusion, healing, and justice, when they conspicuously deny those ideals by their shameful treatment of their gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members.

Silence is never an adequate response to persons in need of love, affirmation, and healing. The Jewish and Christian scriptures show prophets and holy people, as well as Jesus, consistently reaching out to anyone in need, to speak words of healing and consolation. God is forever speaking....

A church that employs silence as a way of avoiding speaking words of healing and blessing to one group of human beings can hardly speak effective words of healing and blessing to others. Silence is an indefensible response on the part of churches to anyone in need.

Between silence and condemnation: this is not a place in which human beings can live and thrive.