JESUS CAMP: So, a few scattered thoughts on Decadence and Catholicism, now that I've finally finished it.

If you're interested in its subject, you should read it! I enjoyed Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture more, partly b/c Roden quotes more than Hanson does and therefore gets out of the way more, and partly b/c I just think e.g. Gerard Hopkins and Eliza Kearney are more talented than John Gray and--yeah, I'll say it--Verlaine. Although I do want to read Ronald Firbank now. Anyway yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in this book.

It does have its deficiencies. Hanson is often overly abstract for my taste. Quote more, bubbitz less. I disagree with some of his interpretations of Wilde's work, and think he's being overly defensive in response to (what I agree are) overly Catholic-apologetic readings of Wilde.

Hanson sometimes writes like two specific kinds of undergraduate: the Objectivist who thinks people only ever act out of self-interest (in Hanson's case, "pleasure"), and the *~*edgy*~* pomo for whom pursuit of truth is only interesting if it can be cast as an especially complex form of lying. Both of those stances allow Hanson to achieve some real insights, about e.g. the pleasures of shame or sacrifice and the ways in which confessions can serve to conceal the self as much as reveal it, but when he gets too insistent I find I have limited patience. If shame is only another shade of self-indulgence then personal choice and pleasure are valorized to an extent I find banal. ...Also, the epilogue is intermittently petulant. I'm sorry John Paul II was more popular than you.

But I didn't expect an orthodox perspective when I opened this book, so really, I got exactly what I came for, and I'm grateful for that. Again, if you're interested in the decadents or in the erotics of Catholicism, you should read this.

HE WALKED DOWN PICCADILLY/WITH A POPPY AND A LILY: Lovely photo of Wilde's grave. (Scroll down.) Santo subito!

Via Rattus.

HOW NOW, SWORN VOW?: (sorry....) Round four of the grand discussion of reviving vowed friendship! For round one you can check out my Inside Catholic column, "Romoeroticism" (and my review of Alan Bray's groundbreaking, beautiful book, The Friend); for round two, my comments here and here (the latter post is not specifically about friendship, but about other aspects of reactions to my IC piece); for round three, a series of posts and reader emails starting here; and now you get three more reader emails, posted without comment but all very much worth your time.

Thanks so much to everyone who has written, and I very much still welcome your comments on all of this! I have a couple of critical links I need to truffle up, and a bit more to post about godparents and godsisters, but not tonight.

These are posted in reverse chronological order, earliest last.

reader #1:

I do not know what to think of your idea, but it is quite intriguing. I do agree that our modern idea of kinship is overly narrow - - if we can create legal fictions to account for adoption of children by parents, then surely we can create all sorts of legal fictions to accomodate realities that do not exactly correspond to the biological or natural family. Could [same-sex marriage] or domestic partnerhip laws be characterized as legal fictions? Perhaps that is one way to look at them, though I am sure that both Andrew Sullivan and the Family Research Council would scream bloody murder at the idea for very different reasons.

As for your commenter, Mr 8 or 9, I was struck by how his view that [same-sex attraction] is so radically disordered that it taints everything that it touches is very similar to Martin Luther's view of human nature being incurvatus in se - - even if one does good things, such acts not only corrupt and not only of no value, but such acts only increase one's blameworthiness the more good acts one does! Compound that with an Augustinian slant on eternal salvation, one can see how a person with SSA - - especially a young man with SSA with an overactive libido and an overwhelming emotional desire to be love and to love - - could be driven to despair if confronted by a Mr. 8 or 9 in a position of moral authority. Surely, then, such a person would conclude that he was damned, given the way that sexual orientation colors a significant amount of human interaction with the world. If he's effective in for penny as much as for a pound, he might as well go for the whole pound while he is at it. . . . Southern Decadence here he comes! This is an example of the damage that zealous "defenders of the magisterium" and "defenders of the family" can wreak on people who find themselves with SSA and little or no OSA of no fault of their own. Thinking of C.S. Lewis's famous comparison of the prig and the prostitute, surely that irritiating mediocrity Bishop Gene Robinson is a better role model for SSAs than a counselor who thinks like Mr. 8 or 9.

reader #2:

My initial response to the suggestion that we revive vowed friendship is, "Yes, obviously." It's madness that marriage is the only meaningful public mode of intimacy that our society allows. It just leaves so much of the psychological landscape... nameless.

As the very last person to be actually interested in undertaking a vowed friendship (I'm a married white male who considers his wife his best friend and who has no significant male friendships to speak of), I nonetheless had much the same reaction to the idea of vowed friendship that you did. The world of vowed friendships is the one that really resonates with me. And this for many reasons, including, but not limited to...

1. The world of vowed friendship almost automatically has a saner view of marriage. After all, in practice, there's a lot of overlap between eros and philia. The marital relationship has a lot to do with being friends and co-workers, but with those aspects of the relationship consumed in public discourse on the one hand by silence and on the other by the equation of worthwhile work with money-making, marriage is left only with its distinctives -- sex and childbearing. Oh... except not those either since the Birth Control Revolution. A robust theology of friendship accompanied by a meaningful liturgical corollary would go a long way towards giving us a way to think sanely about marriage.

2. The Catholic Church says that homosexuality is wrong only insofar as sodomy is wrong. That means that the Church ought to decry the condemnation of homosexuality as a culture/genre/predisposition (and especially the condemnation of chaste same-sex love) as error. The Church has not done this in an open way (though, I would argue, it has done so in an implicit way), and I would really like to see that happen. It would appeal to my sense of justice, and it would seem to me that the Church was striking a really startling blow against modern heresies -- both pro- and anti-homosexual.

and

3. I'm down with pretty much anything folks did in the Middle Ages so long as it doesn't involve gruesome death.

However... but... and also... I still see merit in some of the arguments you speak against.

You are correct to say that the potential for misuse is no reason to avoid doing something that is inherently good to do. However, the potential for misuse may mean that we have to do that inherently good thing in an extremely cautious manner. Thus, the Tridentine mass is good, and Benedict XVI has always spoken out in favor of it, but he nonetheless has been cautious in his efforts to bring it back into common usage because of its mistreatment by the St. Pius X Society and others (as well as the unfavorable reputation it has with a certain generation of bishops).

Just so, I think that much groundwork must be laid both theologically and politically before the vowed-friendship rite may be meaningfully restored. Were it simply released to the many winds within the Church, it would be tossed about and treated ill. It would be taken by the press and the public at large as a concession by the Church to the gay marriage movement rather than as a ressourcement coming out of Catholic tradition. And many Catholic faithful (though men and women of great faith) would be unsophisticated and uninformed enough to suffer great scandal. More to the point, though, I think the vowed-friendship in its true form (and not as a surrogate for gay marriage) would be short-lived and little used.

I would suggest that what the Church needs is a point man in the form of a (conservative) bishop who truly and deeply understands the need for a theological understanding of friendship to let his own flock be a liturgical laboratory. After a few years of sermons and letters (maybe a nationally-distributed book) on the subject, perhaps he could hand-pick a few well-respected pairs of friends to help resurrect the rite on a very small scale. And so on and so on... little by little.

Basically, as with all rites, the community comes first. The soil must be ready for the seed.

But again, I agree with your basic point. The vowed friendship and a theology of friendship underlying it is something the Church (and the society in general) need... I would go so far as to say "desperately need." My only concern is cultural and political logistics.

Thanks for getting people talking about this issue. Here's hoping the conversation is... preparing the soil (?)

reader #3:

I'm one of those who has a problem with the formalized vow. I remember some time ago a discussion about this on the Courage email list, prompted by David Morrison. At that time and still today, I had no worries about the temptation and scandal issues. It was the idea of exclusivity that bothered me. For me, the Christian ideal is that one loves (agape) everyone equally. Not equally badly, of course, but perfectly, which would mean equally. Now, we do have special loves -- parent/child, spousal, friendships. These, in my view, are concessions to an imperfect nature -- 'we can't love everyone the same'. Of these, only spousal love is formalized in Christianity, and I would say it's the eros that is formalized. And I think that's a good thing -- I don't think we need to formalize any more of these concessions.

David's point, if I recall, was that the special loves are not concessions, but opportunities (for us lowly humans to practically -- my addition) practice God's love. We then learn from these opportunities to be more loving to others. The way I see it, yes, the fact that, say, I have aging parents to care for helps me to empathize more with others and love other aged parents better. But should it be that way? Isn't that so evolutionary biology. Shouldn't I love these other people anyway. After all, even the Gentiles do the same...

So I don't like the exclusivity.

Then there's the cultural issue. How much of the need for formalized avowed friendship arises from the lack of such relationships in the West? Would this be using a religious institution to address a cultural deficit?

Now, promoting unformalized (they may be avowed or not) friendships I of course applaud wholeheartedly. If people want to live together, or apart, in groups of any number, or anything it between, I think that's fine. Have a deeper and wider set of friends, like (simplistically) we have in another cultures. Strain not to send your parents to a nursing home. Enjoy living with an extended family. Etc.

But, I tell you, it's a tough go here in North America because the entire lifestyle is not attuned to it. I see everyday fellow immigrants astonishingly quickly absorbed by Western ways. In fact, I see it even when I go back home to Ethiopia among the (slowly) 'rising middle classes'. They work more, spend more, save more, and with much less time, retreat into their nuclear families in Western style.

Rob me, strip me,
Virgin ruthless,
Cleanse me of every love,
Spare none.

--"Little Seal-Skin," Eliza Keary

I dreamt about this poem last night (/this morning, as I'm mostly nocturnal). I would like to say that this was a classier dream than the one in which Blair and Serena switched bodies... but I fear it really wasn't!

SONG FOR A FUTURE GENERATION: OK, my thoughts on many different issues raised in response to my "Romoeroticism" piece.

"Beauty is an encroachment upon autonomy." (C. Paglia): It's been instructive to me that 90% of the comments I've received on the piece have been about this idea of vowed same-sex friendship, since, to be perfectly honest, that was a last-minute addition! And perhaps an ill-timed one, see below. I do have a lot to say about vowed friendship.

But maybe the other elements of my "Romoeroticism" piece are more fruitful, even though I have less to say about them. I think there's an immense amount of work yet to be done on how Catholicism's insistence on sexual difference may make the Church more attractive to gay people; I think Miss Ogilvy is right to suggest that talking about "gay as a genre" would illuminate in some way the difficulties of our current cultural moment and the possibilities for transcending them. And yet I have nothing left to say about that! HELP ME OUT, PEOPLE. Yes?

You can go your own way...: And, although in what follows I will be primarily talking about vowed friendships, I'd also challenge us to consider how we can foster friendships and extended forms of kinship outside of the formal vow. Can we make it culturally normal to take a leave from work because your friend needs you? Can we honor and respect godsiblinghood in the public sphere, giving that relationship the kind of weight and acknowledgment we give to blood kinship?

In Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, And Good for America, Jonathan Rauch lists off a bunch of cultural markers of the importance of marriage: When you're married, people ask after your spouse, and you're expected to know how your spouse is doing. Your family treats your spouse as part of their family: holiday photos, concerned questions, understanding that your obligations to the spouse and her family may conflict with your obligations to your family of origin. Your boss and your coworkers understand that the pictures on your desk represent ties of love and obligation, as deep as any human ties we know. Breaking up with your spouse is a tragedy, a publicly-acknowledged heartbreak. You're not expected to mourn that loss alone, just as you're not expected to bear the burdens of caring for and serving your spouse with no social support.

The thing is... these markers of kinship were not always restricted to marriage. (And, as I said before, in some communities in America today they are still not all restricted to marriage.) If marriage is the only form of kinship we recognize, all other loves will be treated as lesser, as purely private. When only marriage counts, should we be surprised that marriage is overburdened? Should we be surprised that Americans report far fewer close relationships than in the past? You get more of what you honor; we've withdrawn from any form of public honor for nonmarital chosen kinship.

Forget the vow thing for a moment and ask yourself whether there are things you can change in your own life--in your role as boss or coworker, in the questions you ask your children, in the invitations you extend for family gatherings, in the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice pride or time or money for another person--which would support and strengthen your own friendships and those of the people you love. If you can think of any way to make devoted friendship more normal... maybe do that thing, you know? Even if you disagree with me on everything else.

"Steady, Eddie...": But now, vows, since I do actually want to talk about them!

I think I messed up, in writing about this concept first for a piece about Gay Catholic Whatnot. In my own personal head, this was never an exclusively gay concept, though I think it should be obvious why it would be especially interesting to gay Catholics. But I thought at least as much about the many elderly women who make their homes, in their widowhood, with their best friends. A lot of families have these friendship pairs; a lot of families continue to care for the woman who is unrelated by blood, even after her blood-relation best friend dies. These are the "Aunties" who aren't really Grandma's sister. A formal vow might not matter to most of them; to some, however, it might seem as beautiful an acknowledgment of lifelong loyalty as it does to me.

Then there are veterans; then there are "straight" men who have virtually no way of articulating love for another man. I know that straight guys aren't allowed to talk about beauty and gay stuff like that!--but maybe that's also something we can change in our culture. It certainly isn't a good feature of contemporary American life.

One thing I really like about the possibility of renewing this tradition is precisely that it would offer so much solidarity, so much common recognition, between disparate groups. I won't denigrate my own concerns: Even if vowed friendship comes to be a "chaste gay thing," it will still be shockingly beautiful and entirely worthy of honor. But I hope these vows actually offer an expansion of our vocabulary of love and kinship for everyone.

If I am astonishingly lucky, and this form of kinship is in fact renewed, I strongly suspect it will take several different forms. I would argue that the basics should still involve the Eucharist, a pledge of mutual loyalty and loving care, a promise to care for one another's families, and a promise that the longest-surviving friend will arrange for Masses to be said for the souls of both friends. (Friendship always exists in the shadow of death, because it does not produce children. That's one reason the art of friendship is death-haunted from Augustine to the Weakerthans. And it's one reason that some form of fruitfulness and union beyond death should be a part of vowed friendship.) But other features of traditional friendship vows, such as living together, will vary. I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if men's friendships end up with somewhat different norms than women's, though I couldn't predict how, and I'd also be relatively unsurprised if they end up looking basically the same.

I know I keep saying this, but again I want to emphasize that this is lab research in theology: As with any tradition, you can't control it; you can only attempt, with rhetoric and the example of your life, to guide the river. I don't know how friendship will look in a hundred years, or even how it should look. I can rule things out, but I can't set up an ideal model. All I can do is suggest things we might try.

Thorns of the Mystical Rose: I do want to address one strain of argumentation I've noticed, which is basically to point out ways in which intense, devoted friendships (whether vowed or not) can be dangerous if you are attracted to your friend but cannot marry her. Because yeah: That's a danger. There are many friendships in which the best response is greater distance, a cooling-off.

But I absolutely do not believe that is true of all such relationships. Here are three angles of approach to that question (and I know I'm not disposing of every possible argument here, but I hope I'm at least giving food for thought):

1) All manner of pious practices can be misused, can become covers for sin. And yet at the Easter Mass I still got a plenary indulgence, you know? Cat'licks are always arguing that danger is not an argument against beautiful devotion--that the misuse doesn't crowd out the use.

2) I am quite sure that a friendship vowed and sealed publicly in the Eucharist, in front of family and friends who know that these two friends have pledged fidelity not only to one another but to the Gospel and to Jesus Christ, is more likely to be chaste than a friendship which is purely private, often treated by others as trivial, and granted no religious significance.

3) If unintended--and explicitly disclaimed!--consequences can argue against a pious practice, may I please deploy that reasoning against the pious practice of stating that the Catholic Church offers no way of honoring same-sex love? Because the unintended consequence of that act is atheism, when it isn't self-destruction.

So maybe we should accept that what we do and say can be misused and misunderstood, but it might still be worth doing and saying. She said, with a hint of acid.

No humility without humiliation: If you do want to make vows of same-sex friendship, I suspect you are in for a much harder time than Robin Darling Young had--especially if you're gay (whether or not your friend is gay also, and whether or not you're even attracted to her!). You will need to explain yourself, at tedious length I'd guess, to priests upon priests. You will need to figure out some way of introducing your friend which makes it clear both that she is part of your heart's landscape and that the two of you are not sexually active. I can say from experience that the whole "I'm gay but chaste because of my religion" conversation is humiliating and awkward and you feel like an ass.

All of this is good for your own spiritual life, and also necessary to prevent scandal. But you should be prepared. Public love has public consequences.

And we have not yet developed a beautiful public language. You can be a pioneer!

Call it what you want, you've got a home here: So why is it worth it? Why would anyone bother with the dilemmas, both old (spouse vs. friend is a theme the old ballads knew well) and new ("I dance around in a gay, gay way, but I'm not gay!")? Why bother with the humiliation? And in my case, why bother with the argument?

Well... for me it's easy. I mean, first of all, on the lower level, the conversation around gay stuff in the Church can get so stifling and polarized! I desperately want to let in some oxygen, give people some sense that our contemporary battles and jargon are not the sum total of Catholic faith, good God. But there's also something more.

For years and years I've seen the beauty of friendship. I've seen this unacknowledged, barely-supported love turn the water of our culture into wine. And then, not only did I find a way of honoring that love--so much more than that! I found a way of exalting it. To draw the strong wine of friendship into the Body and Blood of the Eucharist... it's breathtaking. You know, you can all but hear Alan Bray catching his breath when he first sees the tomb of two devoted men friends... and years later, reading his book, I reacted the same way. There's a feeling when your heart finds its home, and that home is so much more than you ever dreamed.

How could I not want to shout this from the rooftops?

#8 or 9, I've lost count: anonyreader: The last in today's series of replies to my "Romoeroticism" piece. I'll do a longish post in which I hope to give a better sense of what I'm going for here, but maybe not for another several hours--I may want to sleep on it a bit before the final (for today) roundup. Thanks to everyone who has written in!

This email, I note, was entitled, "Is 'Romoeroticism' Synonymous with 'Homo-eroto-schism?'" To which one can only say, "Well, no!"

Dear Ms. Tushnet,

I hope you will forgive my belated response to your article "Romoeroticism" but I needed time to digest what it was you were saying and insure that I understood you properly. My preparation may yet be inadequate but I trust that you will point it out to me should you find it so.

Your proposal, that the Church begin again to formally recognize chaste, same-sex friendships seems to be ignorant of the culture the Church now finds herself surrounded by. Everything has become sexualized to such a degree that a formally innocuous phrase like "come and see" now contains implications of the most indecent nature (forgive me). In the wake of a scandal where the sexual exploitation of adolescents was passed over with a wink and a nod, does it seem prudent to formally reinvigorate a custom from the past which, in the present culture, might be misunderstood as a wink and a nod to same-sex sexual activity?

Further, it seems to me that your attempt to discover licit, even sanctified, expressions same-sex desire fails to address the concession to utter depravity made by so many an apologist. Attempts to find precedents in stories such as that of David and Jonathan has, time and again, been utterly rejected with assertions that there can be no valid parallel drawn between that experience and the experience of two same-sex attracted men. Is it surprising, in the current climate, that even the Catholic Church seems to have nothing to offer beyond the frail hope that one's same-sex desires may cease? How does one escape the charge that one is simply reading justification for one's appetites into Tradition, Scripture or what have you?

To the question "Is there anything in my love and desire that the Catholic Church can respect?" the only answer I can arrive at honestly is "No." Even without sex, there is lust. Even without lust there is scandal. The occurrence of same-sex desire may not itself be a sin, but its every expression, both genital and affectionate, is. Chastity, properly understood, seems to imply the absence of same-sex desire. Therefore, in the midst of it, such an individual is caught in the paradox of learning not to love so that he or she may learn to love.

Eve says: I did say I'd post all critical emails. But I do think this position, in which cooking a bowl of soup for a sick lady becomes sinful if I think the sick lady is hot ("its every expression"), is untenable and forces us to reject an astonishing amount of beauty and love. I don't think it is necessary.

I do think the changed culture, and the increased possibility of scandal, are real issues. I'll address them in the roundup post... soon. Later today.

#8: another possibly-anonyreader?:

I read this piece (and your blogpost), and the comments with interest but also a good deal of confusion.

When I began to read the blogpost, I thought at first that you were recommending "vowed friendship" simply as a way of binding friends together. But as I read further, and read the piece at Inside Catholic, it seemed clearer that you were talking about a substitute for marriage, of a kind that would, I think, appeal mainly to SSA people, no matter what the original purpose of such vows might have been.

You seem to recognise this risk, and ask whether it matters, on the grounds that that chaste gay Catholics need an affirmation of their loves and family lives. I can see why this would be important to gay people, but I suspect that instituting or re-instituting such ceremonies would cause bewilderment among Catholics of whatever sexual orientation.

Straight people (esp. men, I suspect) would fear to try it with members of their own sex on the grounds that it might make them seem gay. Straight women might like the idea but not understand why such "best friendship" had to be exclusive. Straight men and women friends would fear it might be threatening to their spouses or potential spouses. Gay people would, I think, be sorely tempted to treat it as a marriage in every sense, including the physical. This temptation would be particularly powerful for the young and inexperienced, who might also reasonably ask "we're allowed every other expression of our love, why not the physical as well?"

You mention people like David Morrison and his partner, who live a chaste life together, but such couples are in a special position. Mr Morrison and his partner were once lovers. They have already found some form of sexual fulfillment together, in so far as homosexual sex can provide this type of fulfillment (and I suspect the Church would say that it cannot do so, or only in a limited sense). Two young SSA persons who exchanged best-friend vows would not have such a history behind them and find it very difficult to refrain from seeking sexual intimacy, esp. if they lived together, as you suggest such couples should.

I think the best hope for an SSA person who wishes to share his/her life in chaste friendship with someone of similar tendencies (or not of such tendencies? you aren't quite clear about this) would be some form of "domestic partnership" arrangement. This would not, of course, provide the public and vowed commitment you long for, but it would help to solve the loneliness problem and give some legal structure to chaste gay friendships.

I suspect that the Church simply is not going to yield on its view that homosexual love (if not chaste in both body and heart) is "objectively disordered", and thus not a thing to be celebrated by public vows of friendship, however chaste in intention. Sigh. I remember that when I was younger I used to search history, scripture, and anywhere else I could think of for some legitimate way out of the Church's restrictions on both pre and post-marital heterosexual activity. I couldn't find any. I realise that you aren't trying to do anything of the sort regarding SSA love, but I suspect you won't be any luckier than I was, just the same. Marriage is a sufficiently grave matter that the Church is unlikely to compromise regarding anything that looks like marriage, or could be mistaken for marriage, for fear of "scandalizing" the faithful.

Eve says: Yeah, I think this email hits on real issues, esp. cultural barriers (if a practice is taken up by gay people, will it become unattractive and/or embarrassing for heterosexual same-sex friends to do it?) and the potential for scandal. I think my upcoming post will make it clear that this is not "gay marriage lite," but in the end, really these questions of how can only be answered by individual people taking up this practice, renewing and reshaping it. If they want to, then the tradition will grapple with its accompanying problems; if they don't, we'll move on to other possibilities and other questions.

Super-quick clarification: While living together was one traditional part of English friendship vows, I wouldn't say vowed friends "should" live together; I think that's a matter for discernment, and often it just won't work for any number of reasons both practical and spiritual. Again, I don't think a renewed tradition would look the same as the earlier forms of that tradition....

#7: a... possibly-anonyreader?:

Eve, a question. (Well, upon re-reading this is more of a monologue) A lot of your talk about vowed same sex friendship seems to be very similar to my idea of the best friend. (I hate that particular usage, but it is the only phrase in current parlance that even comes close to the concept.) When I say best friend, I am referring to what Cicero talked about when he discussed friendship. If you haven’t read his On Friendship, you absolutely ought to.

I have a best friend, Ben, who is almost completely unlike me. But we were best friends literally days after we met, very much in the “unchosen” way you speak of. We have never taken any formal vows, but I would drop everything I am doing and fly to Florida (where he lives) to help him if needed. Our friendship is one of mutually held commitments and duties that we both take very seriously.

So, I am wondering if this is the kind of thing you are talking about, except with the addition of sexual attraction as a complicating factor, something to be transcended that I don’t have to worry about. Ben is really the only person I am comfortable describing as my “friend”, though I use the term more loosely with my close acquaintances to avoid hurt feelings. But I simply don’t have the depth of bond with those other people as I do with Ben, even though we only see each other at best once a year.

It is a different relationship than I have with my wife. And yet, somewhat similar. It’s hard to describe. It may just be that I have difficulty forming emotional attachments with people (which is true, my wife and Ben are the only people I would say that I am so attached to) but I don’t see a friend as merely someone with whom to hang out and have fun, watch the ball game, etc. It’s not even shared interests or political ideas. It is a shared commitment very similar to marriage, but without the sex or even the desire for it. It is a sort of mutual defense treaty, but deeper because you really want to put yourself out to help the other person. It’s not a burden. This seems to share some data points with what you are describing, though I get the impression that the vowed same sex friends might live together like siblings. Correct? Or is that simply a possible but not necessary variation?

This note is already too long, so I’ll shut up. I could talk about this kind of friendship for tens of thousands of words. However, you should definitely read Cicero’s thoughts on the subject! I think I see very much what you are saying, but slantwise. I think there are one or two elements that I am still failing to grasp, but it seems to me to be very similar to the concept of the non-Paris Hilton best friendship. I can see how some people would take this as simply “same sex marriage lite” and an unnecessary and troubling near occasion of sin, but I don’t think that is at all what you are driving at. And I'm not sure why the vows are necessary. However, there is something out there other than neanderthal beer buddies or frustrated suppressed longing.

Eve says: Yes, this is quite in line with my own thinking, as I hope will become clear when I do the final post in this series (for today). I hope that post will also give some sense of why the vows themselves are important to me, even though I also think we really need to give more honor to friendship when no formal vows have been taken.

#6: anonyreader:

I'd like to offer this meditation-response on your article, "Sublimity Now!", with some [relevance to "Romoeroticism"]. I am sorry that this is entirely too long and completely out of season. So feel free to edit as needed. ...

--------------------------------------------------

Eve Tushnet's description of the bonfire scene at the beginning of the article "Sublimity Now!" reminded me of the great hymn of Pentecost, Veni Sancte Spiritus. "Come Holy Spirit and supernaturally send forth a ray of your light."* Tushnet observes that the sublimity of the bonfire implies danger and perhaps a tantalizing lack of control. Beauty, in the quotation she provides from Edmund Burke, implies that the awesome and fearsome nature of the sublime often turns people towards the beauty that is within their reach and control. Perhaps the sublimity of the bonfire represents the tongues of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The call of discipleship that flows from the burning, uncompromising tongues of Confirmation and Pentecost lasts well beyond the bishop's blessing of the last confirmand and the Ite of Pentecost Sunday Mass.

The concept of sublimity and the sacred resonates with my own experiences. So many times I will turn my face from the searing bonfire of the Holy Spirit and follow after the five watt bulb of flirting with some hottie. Yet even he will eventually wrinkle and lose his "beauty" and quick wit. And so will I, sans wit. And so will we all. The tungsten filaments of human light fizzle out quickly but the intense bonfire of of the Holy Spirit climbs even brighter. Brighter it glows, despite the times I have desperately wanted to reject sanctification for a few desperate minutes of screwing.

The Veni Sancte Spiritus petitions the Holy Spirit to correct the faults of Christians. "Bend what is rigid, warm what is chilled, [and] set straight what has gone astray."* Like our first parents who took the quince and ran with it, we paint masks to protect our faces from the heavenly rays that search the entire body and leave no lust, no desire unturned. It is a war between the choir loft and the pew: the words of the cleansing Spirit unmistakably flow over the congregation on Pentecost morning. But many in the pews deflect the searing and uncompromising Flame with crudely shaped Attic masks that protrude frozen lips shaped for shouting. "Teh gays!" these dramatists often cry outside Mass, as their masks slip slightly to reflect the loneliness we all partake of time after time. We queers know pain. Yet we busily paint our masks as well. We desperately deflect the cleansing Fire, and curse those who salt our wounds and bathe us with pity rather than compassion.

The Veni Sancte Spiritus ends with the following stanza: "Give us a virtuous reward, give us a graceful death. Give us joy everlasting."* It would be so nice to dance around the bonfire with a chaste lover, trampling our masks underfoot. The Flame tans our faces with Spiritual rays; the Flames occasionally leap to show the inadequacies of the beloved. We bruise our bare toes with misplaced dance steps.
Fumbled words trip up our intellectual pretensions. The tongues of fire protect us against settling for sex to mask our inadequacies. Discipleship is only a degree higher.

As Tushnet states in "Sublimity Now!", "an encounter with the sublime can teach us the white-hot passion of submission."

Shouldn't we queers search a lifetime for the fascination of the Flame living within another person, and reciprocating that Flame with mind and emotion transformed?

#5: Miss Ogilvy again (see below):

It seems to me that to win over the naysayers, you really ought to emphasize the "gay is a genre" point: how, for example, might the historical shifts in understanding sexuality speak to the question of renewing same-sex friendship-blessing? One could make a case that renewing this tradition would encourage skepticism about our culture's primary way of understanding "the tangle of experiences we've decided to call being gay" (as you put it in a post about Lillian Faderman). Chaste same-sex vowed friendship would be a way, not just of redeeming particular instances of same-sex attraction, but of changing (restoring?) the meaning of sexuality.

Eve says: Oh, this is so fascinating! I wish I had something useful to say about it! I know that gay is a genre but have a hard time cashing out what I mean by that. So if any of you all have thoughts on this question, I would really, really love to hear them!

#3: Miss Ogilvy:

...But for now, on to "Romoeroticism" (my reaction is kind of lengthy). [Also, by way of identification: I'm also SSA, female, and a recent adult convert (well, grad student convert, which isn't quite adult) to Christianity. I'm still trying to figure out the ethics of same-sex love.]

One of the comments-boxers accuses you of “trying to see the world through the prism of same-sex attraction.” But I wonder if it might be more accurate to say that you’re simply noticing ways in which Catholicism enables celibate same-sex attracted Catholics to receive God’s love corporeally. Let me flesh this out (pun intended).

As I was reading “Romoeroticism,” I kept thinking of Rowan Williams’ essay “The Body’s Grace.” For Williams, the question of embodiment is central to the problem of same-sex sexual ethics. In sex one learns that her body can be the cause of happiness to herself and to another person, and, as Williams puts it, “The life of the Christian community has as its rationale - if not invariably its practical reality - the task of teaching us this: so ordering our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy.” And the problem of embodiment, of knowing ourselves to be desired, doesn’t go away for the single person:

All those taking up the single vocation – whether or not they are, in the disagreeable clinical idiom, genitally intact – must know something about desiring and being desired if their single vocation is not to be sterile and evasive. Their decision (as risky as the commitment to sexual fidelity) is to see if they can find themselves, their bodily selves, in a life dependent simply upon trust in the generous delight of God - that other who, by definition, cannot want us to supply deficiencies in the bliss of a divine ego, but whose whole life is a “being-for,” a movement of gift.

I’ve thus often bristled at the fact that so much of the Biblical picture-language for God’s love focuses on heterosexual marriage. How can I understand the tenor of divine love when my experience excludes me completely from the vehicle of these metaphors?

I think you’ve come up with an awesome solution in the way you look at Mary and the Church and Dante’s Beatrice.

That said, I have a couple of questions re: your desire to renew the practices of same-sex friendship blessing:

I take it that in your view one of the main reasons for recovering this tradition is to sublimate same-sex desire. But what if we saw the chief end of such friendships differently, focusing instead on its material and social benefits? In that case, what would you make of the possibility of a vowed, lifelong, liturgically-blessed friendship between a gay man and a gay woman? Or between a gay woman and a straight woman? Or between two straight women or two straight men? I know I would find a lifelong vow of sexless yet intimate friendship much easier to undertake with a gay or straight man – and maybe even with a straight woman – than with another lesbian: it would be heartache to live with a beautiful woman who also loved women and to remain chaste.

The “Romoeroticism” project implies that we can isolate the sex in same-sex relationships and call it wrong, while seeing the rest of the relationship as fine (the comment-boxers noticed this). I want to think carefully about what makes this sort of theological move possible. At first blush it seems silly – if the friendship structurally resembles marriage (sharing finances, caring for the friend’s aging parents), what makes having sex so bad? Is it simply a question of procreative potential?

The English poet W.H. Auden, a gay convert to Christianity, has an interesting take re: question-cluster #2. In a letter to Wendell Stacy Johnson in the early 50s, he writes: “Have you seen the C of E report on homosexuality? In its wish to be fair, it falls into the odd position of declaring that only the act is sinful which is, of course, heretical and, from a practical point of view, ineffective. Nobody, where there is mutual consent and pleasure, can possibly feel an act is wrong: if it is, the reason must lie in the personal relationship which desires the acts.” But from your comments in the Romo-thread, it seems like you imagine that personal relationships which become vowed friendships probably won't include desire for sexual acts (I note your example of the eroticism w/ your striking, brilliant friend that pointed toward education, not sex). I get this - maybe it would help your argument if you talked about the (hopefully communal) discernment process that would lie behind such vowed friendships. On your chaste model, it would be important to partner w/ people w/ whom shared eros very obviously didn't point toward sex.

Eve says: Hmmm, first of all, I'm so glad the Beatrice stuff made sense to you! Second, I think possibly my basic vision of how vowed friendship could work will be a bit clearer in a moment when I've posted my next installment of wiggy ponderings on the subject.

Third... I find both Williams's and Auden's quotes here very odd indeed, especially the latter! The act of sex makes a difference because our bodies make a difference. (And I would argue that some form of iconicity--la difference--is primary in the Christian vision of sex, and procreation is secondary.) I genuinely don't understand his argument w/r/t "Nobody, where there is mutual consent and pleasure, can possibly feel an act is wrong: if it is, the reason must lie in the personal relationship which desires the acts." I can consent to and take pleasure in all kinds of acts with another person which in fact I should sublimate and express in another way. This seems so obvious that I think I must be misunderstanding! If so, please just ignore all this, as I don't mean to waste your time with unhelpful ranting. (I can give examples and analogies if needed, though I'm trying to avoid that since analogies, as I've said, generally beg their questions in this kind of discussion.)

I... see your point, re communal discernment of a vocation to a specific vowed friendship, since it's easy to fool ourselves and assume that the sacrifice we want to make is the sacrifice God wants. And yet every fiber of my being revolts against the idea of trying to explain my love to a parish committee! In fact, there seems a danger of "sincerism" there, if we believe and require that love can be fully articulated and brought under the sway of juried evidence and common sense. I am unwilling to recommend specific forms of communal discernment to everyone, though I will recommend getting outside perspectives from people you trust. I know that's very individualist--you are most likely to trust the people who will give you the answer you already want!--but I don't see a better alternative. More on the necessary humiliations involved in renewing vowed friendship in a moment. But I wanted to say that you make an important and difficult point here.

And finally, I highly recommend Miss O's blog to anyone interested in Gay Christian Whatnot! I will link it in my blogroll forthwith.

#2, Philomena:

I've been a lurking follower of your blog for some time now, and am just emerging from the shadows to comment on the comments on "Romoeroticism" at InsideCatholic (don't really feeling like fighting it out amongst the commenters at the moment, but wanted to offer a positive review anyhow).

I loved the piece for the same reason I enjoy all your writing: intellectually rigorous without being pedantic, orthodox beliefs which you don't feel the need to constantly apologize for, lovely prose, and (last but not least, as they say) for the experiences and reflections that I identify with. In this piece particularly, I immediately recognized the feeling you talk about, a yearning which is essentially unfulfilled but which seeks to be fulfilled through God, something which is deeply associated with the body but not reducible to physical urges and desires. Though my own tendencies don't generally run in the direction of SSA, I find that your writing often touches that chord of recognition in me. Maybe it's just a function of being young and reared on the same sort of critical/theoretical/philosophical language, like the post-modern tendency to find sexual motivations for everything. It gets silly, but that kind of thing is rooted in a real experience, the thread of eros (the longing, that is) that runs through a lot of everyday life.

But the comments at InsideCatholic puzzle me because so many of them just seem to be missing the point completely. They're either a) identifying eros with lust and/or , which I'm pretty sure is not theologically sound, or b) wanting the "bottom line" of whether or not you're saying homosexuality is sinful. Or both. None of the contentious commenters seem to be really engaging with the spiritual reality that you're describing, and instead are telling you what you're "really saying" and then going from there (I'm trying really, really hard not to be snarky right now!). I'm forced to think that the problem is a lack of recognition, because surely everyone has felt that formless longing at some point in their lives; they're just not identifying their experience as being the same as what you're talking about, since yours is attached to SSA and theirs is presumably attached to something else.

If they did recognize it, then they wouldn't be gabbing on about how God told them personally to be fruitful and multiply and how if there's a sexual shading to adult friendship it renders the relationship poisonous and how we all just need to read our Bibles really. Instead, they would actually maybe be able to sympathize with gay people, who currently (and quite understandably) feel frustrated by the amazing unhelpful stuff they're saying.

Internet comment threads are where the influence of the Tower of Babel really becomes clear. We're all speaking the same language, even using the same words, but we mean rather different and specific things by them. The only way to define them is with more words, which leads to the same problem. The only way to escape it is to make a leap of understanding and identification not strictly intellectual in nature; my theory is, there used to be a bridge there, so we didn't have to jump.

Sorry for the long and somewhat rambling email. I should really stop reading comment threads, cause they always make me want to hit something.

Eve says: Well first, thanks for the very kind words! And yeah, I think there is a point at which prudence becomes safety-fetishism... which is not the Catholic way. (Or not the only Catholic way!) I understand why many of the IC commenters thought I was imprudent, but I still disagree with where they draw that line. More on this in a bit.

RESPONSES TO "ROMOEROTICISM": Post #1, anonyreader. (this is a repost--accidentally posted it in a messed-up form earlier, which I hope nobody noticed! And it's actually about my Commonweal piece, but I thought it was apropos.)

I have just read your essay or reflections on Homosexuality & the Church in Commonweal. I liked your voice - but I ended up feeling confused...

I remembered once, many years ago, I had my little niece visiting me - she was only three, four or five years old - don't remember exactly and I was out of the church at that time, and we were talking about God and I think I said Where is God? - and she pointed her finger towards the heaven - and I smiled and said No, she is down there pointing towards the ground. She looked at me bewildered first and then giggling....

I think I did it because I had just discovered how different it would have felt for me If our creed had been talking about the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit - very estranging....

I know what Fatherly love is and I know the thrust in the Father - but the metaphor of relationship is not gendered? Being a son is not different from being a daughter? I hope not! To love God with all my heart - is loving a You/ a Thou -

Relating to the Word, the Son, The Christ, Jesus - and loving Jesus - How is that for a man and a woman? Is it a gendered face or is it Compassion, Lovingkindness in eyes - in a bodylanguage which still is not a masculine body? Just Human? Or is it not? Like when we don't differentiate between he and she in our prose and let he be both? - because for me there is a difference reading he and/or she....

I am a man who is longing for another man - a thou embodied in a male body - still my love is for a thou. Some men and women fall in love with another man or woman with the same personality profile - some fall in love with someone who has another personality profile then their own - no matter if they are hetero- or homosexual...

But then there is the question of energy - that prototypes of Man and Woman even though they conceal all differences in those categories - they help molding the feeling of wholeness - for most gendered people - and this is based on the man longing for a woman and a woman longing for a man... maybe... and that's why children have to protect those bounded categories. We have all kinds of labels for lesbians and gays - and people identify with those roles, even though they might know that they are more than that identity. Some of those roles seems to me to be somewhat not autentic to the self...

I think there is a problem with the dicotomy of Man and Woman - if we don't ask what kind of man and what kind of woman - and I don't mean a real man and not a real man/ a real woman and not a real woman - or a good woman or a bad woman. I think polytheistic religions may have more opportunities for personal fullfillment through prototypes than we have through Jesus and Mary....

These are just some impulsive reflections... I would like very much to read what you think about these things.

Eve says: I do think our longings are often, though not always, very strongly gendered. That's where I was going with the "Beatrice" passage in the IC piece. This doesn't require rigid gender roles, but a more subtle sense that Woman and Man have some iconic reality. There's a very lovely thing in Thomas a Kempis's Reflections on the Passion of Christ where he reworks the Song of Songs as a hymn to the Christ crucified, which is deeply attentive to the body, very much attuned to the sublime aspect of the flesh; you might appreciate that. I've found praying the Anima Christi is also very striking.

PUBLIC LIVES IN PRIVATE PLACES: More thoughts on vowed friendship. My Inside Catholic piece was advocacy; this is the place where I complicate that advocacy.

This is where my head is at right now, when I think about renewing the Christian tradition of vowed same-sex friendship. I'm very open to criticism, especially critics who have alternative ideas for how to honor the loves I want to honor. But even if you're basically like, "Don't go that way!" rather than "Follow me!", I want and need to hear from you. My email's on the sidebar.

Maybe the first, necessary thing to say is that renewal is never rewind. There is simply no chance that vowed same-sex friendships in (say) 2055 will look the way they did in 1655. "With the inevitable forward march of progress/comes new ways of hiding things/and new things to hide." One thing I loved about Alan Bray's The Friend was its awareness of tensions, its ability to acknowledge conflicts without feeling the need to resolve them. This seems like a basic fact about any real, important tradition: It will serve both bad and good ends. You will not be able to harness it fully to any philosophy. It will always be messy and human and novelistic.

And so I am not suggesting that a renewal of vowed same-sex friendship would "solve our problems." Instead I'm suggesting that it might shift our problems, so that we moved from less-Catholic problems to more-Catholic problems.

Or to put it yet another way, even if I get everything I want from this idea, there will still be deep ethical problems with same-sex vowed friendships (just as there are deep ethical problems with Catholic marriage today, and there always have been). My goal is not to solve problems but to suggest that we might change them. If you think there are better ways to change our problems, email me!!! I promise to post all emails critical of this position.

PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT: The one thing I most want to emphasize is that the Eucharist seals these vows. The Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. These vows might have some kind of fifteenth-generation-xerox possibility in the absence of the Catholic faith, but they gain their depth and meaning and hope from Christ's Body.

Having said that, I should note that my very last point is about generally Protestant communities and how they've maintained a sense of the family of baptism which most American Catholics have simply discarded. The Eucharist is at the heart of everything I care about with these friendships, but I'd be remiss if I didn't note that suffering and solidarity can create a kind of Protestant love-feast as well.

GIRLS DON'T WANT BOYS, GIRLS WANT CARS AND MONEY: The tradition Alan Bray describes grew up in a culture where women were unequal, and where we were separated from men by a vast gulf of social status and poetic/theological imagery. The tradition he describes was purely same-sex, and drew its power from metaphors both of marriage and of siblinghood, suggesting chosen kinship without sex. The tradition he describes defined the friend against the "sodomite," and had no place for what we now would call "gay identity"--a lady could contract a sexually-transmitted disease from her ladyfriend and perhaps never consider herself implicated in the usual Romans condemnation-passage.

We now live in a world where, as Bray himself describes, chosen kinship has been narrowed, filed down to marriage-and-nothing-else. Possibly this narrowing of kinship fuels the gay-marriage movement. (If you're a "conservative Catholic" and you've warred against my "Romoeroticism" piece, maybe consider this?) We now live in a world of "sexual orientation," of "homosexuality," of women working outside the home, and of women's theoretical equality.

(Have women ever been "equal" in any interesting sense? I suppose it depends on what you consider interesting. Women have never been equivalent to men in any poetic sense. Women have never--as far as I know--been equal to men in any societal-power sense. If I were a man, I would ask God why I was not a woman, for precisely these reasons.)

So: Can there be vowed same-sex friendship in a context so radically--at least in theory!--divorced from Bray's context?

I think there are reasons to believe we can still renew this practice.

First, traditions adapt to fill new needs. We clearly have new needs. There are actual, existing same-sex couples in which one or both partner chooses to become chaste. Some of these couples are raising children. We need some way of honoring their love; otherwise we say, "Split up," and that is wrong.

This is why I think vowed friendship, while I would recommend it to everyone!, will be most attractive to gay people. We are the ones who need it.

I realize that if gay people take this on as a way of understanding our loves, it will be culturally harder for straight people to do the same. This is one of the new tensions and new problems I noted above. I'm not sure how to address it. I want y'all ladies to be able to make sisterhood vows without your husbands getting wiggy; and yet I want, also, for a gay man to be able to introduce his "vowed friend" to his family, and for them to understand that this means more than a boyfriend, and different than a friend.

(Parenthetically, I'll say that I think there are strong reasons to follow tradition in restricting vowed friendships to same-sex pairs, even today when supposedly we're all equal. Men and women aren't similarly situated; tradition is a strong guide; regardless of sexual orientation, there's a point to distinguishing between relationships between two men, relationships between two women, and relationships between a man and a woman. I can expand on this if people want, since I know it's another point of tension! Mostly though, I'm a "trad," I believe in sex differences [that would be how I come to like ladies, yo], and so I like structures which preserve the sense of difference.)

Second, traditions exist to fill old needs, even when we've forgotten how to address those needs. Veterans still have comrades. Straight men who need other men have virtually no way to articulate that need in terms our culture can understand. Vowed friendship between comrades would a) not preclude marriage and b) even more importantly, let the community--not necessarily the law, I don't care about that right now--acknowledge that these are men who have an unchosen but inescapable tie to one another.

(For another point of tension: I know that now that we have ladies in the military, the relevant veteran-to-veteran links may cross the sex line. I genuinely don't know how to deal with that.)

Third, traditions reflect minority practice, not just majority. I've been struck, from the elementary-school playground to the pregnancy center, with how much more important godparenthood and godsiblinghood is to DC's black communities than to the white communities in which I was raised. We hear a lot about how black people are supposedly more "homophobic" than white, but we hear nothing about how much more open many black communities are to an expansive notion of kinship. I know this is a generosity born of necessity; but if all our communities worked the way black communities do, we'd already have a better framework for understanding Alan Bray's description of premodern English kinship. "Gossip" is short for "godsibling," yet the intimacy and responsibility of godsiblinghood is something I've only found in DC's black communities.

These ties are real and exist in America now. If you don't see them, it doesn't mean they've gone away. Maybe they can be harnessed to handle all our needs.

DOWN ON MY KNEES--I WANT TO TAKE YOU THERE: It was genuinely odd reading the reactions to my "Romoeroticism" piece. Maybe the weirdest thing, for me, was the recurrence of the idea of "struggle." People seemed to think I'd bared my heart, shown y'all my hardest fight. This is just not true, and I think maybe it's important to say that.

There are at least three reasons why maybe you shouldn't assume that a gay Catholic's gayness is her *~*struggle*~*.

First, please don't cover my face with your heart. Other people's impersonal sympathy can really become a sticky blanket you just want to throw off. I don't mean at all to denigrate the compassion and prayers people promised in the IC comments. It's just that you all might be over-reading me, you know?

If I don't say something is the big hard awful struggle of my life, maybe it isn't. Maybe I need your prayers more for something else. Maybe your compassion has some element of unintentional refusal to listen.

I think the thing many gay Catholics--even and especially those of us who do attempt fidelity to Church teaching--find most frustrating is simply that no one really listens. People project a lot of interpretations onto us and ignore the ways we challenge those projections. So I'm "self-hating," or I'm "struggling," and neither one of those descriptions really sounds like my actual life.

Second, there might be a better metaphor. I'd use the metaphor of surrender. I'm not struggling against a thing; I'm surrendering to a Person.

Now, I've noted before that I like femme metaphors better than butch ones! So there may well be gay Catholics for whom the "struggle" metaphor sounds more like how they feel day-to-day, and I'm not meaning to say my metaphor is better. I'm just saying my metaphor is mine, and it helps me understand how to live as a gay Catholic who is basically grateful and joyful. Other people will have other metaphors. All I want is for straight Catholics to let us pick our own metaphors, rather than assuming it's the one they've heard most often.

And third, let my heart rest here. Let me choose metaphors which suggest that it is in the Catholic Church, in the Mass, in the sacraments, where I truly find my place in the world. Let me say that this isn't where I struggle. It's where I "feel like... home."

"ROMOEROTICISM": My take on the collision of Corpus Christi and Gay Pride, at Inside Catholic....

“'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'": And now I come to the thing I care about most: songs.

For it seems to me that there is one way in which the gay-marriage movement deserves the adjective “Orwellian.” It is designed to make any sense of the uniqueness of heterosexual eros unspeakable, and ultimately unthinkable.

There are boring practical reasons to have a separate and specific language for describing sex between men and women. I talked about that stuff here and here. The task of marriage is to make intercourse fruitful rather than devastating, since it has such great potential to be either.

But there are also ways in which heterosexuality is uniquely beautiful, and our language of marriage developed to recognize this, too. Here’s one way to get the quick thrill of encountering a foreign belief system: Check out the Mattachine Society’s 1953 brief against gay marriage. Mattachine was one of the first gay-rights organizations in this country; and yet here, the writers sound not even like John Paul II but more like Paul VI. I don’t think I would wax this rhapsodic about the sanctity of motherhood! [EDITED: Well, I should re-read things before I link them; this is fascinating in its way, but less unpredictable than I'd remembered. Thoroughly skippable. Ah well.]

There’s something uniquely lovely about bringing together the two halves of humanity; about bridging la difference; about moving He and She past mutual incomprehension and suspicion, into harmony. (This is of course related to procreation, but separate from and prior to it. That’s why JPII roots his “theology of the body” in Adam and Eve’s couplehood in Eden--before they had children.)

There’s something uniquely lovely about recognizing the sexual Other as one’s home.

(I’d suggest that there’s also something uniquely lovely about homosexual love, insofar as through love, one’s sexual… compatriot? likeness? whatever is not “self” nor “Other” but “similar”… becomes an Other. Eros is the complete union of two beings who nonetheless remain distinct, remain Other to one another; this is why heterosexual union is such a frequent Jewish and Christian symbol for the union of God and Israel or humankind. My experience of lesbian love is that it tends to draw out and heighten the ways in which the beloved is Other, or even transform her into Other, so that she can be the target of love. This is perhaps a rebuttal to the criticism that homosexuality is narcissism. Nonetheless, it is clearly a different form of eros than the heterosexual form, in which metaphysical Otherness is iconically represented by physical, sexual difference.)

And yet now, if you try to talk about “the halves of humanity,” or anything at all which might be unique to heterosexual eros, you’re a bigot. This is a new development. There have been cultures--I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--which honored some forms of homosexual relationships, while still considering marriage to be something separate.

I don’t know if that’s a path our conflictedly-Christianized culture can take. Still, it would be more accurate and more poetic than the moralistic, bourgeois denial of heterosexual uniqueness which fires the rhetoric of the gay-marriage movement.

To glory in adversity is not hard for the man who loves, for this is to glory in the cross of the Lord.
--The Imitation of Christ; and in related news....