IF MY HEART WERE A HOUSE YOU'D BE FROM A BROKEN HOME BY NOW: The Mountain Goats, redux. I'll catch up with myself in the next post. (Really!)


All Hail West Texas: Yes, I know I already talked about this disc. I have a lot of feelings, okay?

This is an album about the American experience as, above all else, transience. Post-office boxes in towns we don't live in anymore. I wonder how much this contributes to our obsession with marriage--cf. Andrew Cherlin on European obsession with birthrates rather than marriage, for example. Home is anywhere you hang your head. Home is anywhere you hang my effigy.

The standard, effective guitar chords often serve in place of rhyme--a way of making simplicity seem more than sincerism. The chords make the songs rhyme in your heart, if you're an American raised on the "three chords and a hope" of rock'n'roll.

"Blues in Dallas" is a 25-cent hymn on a jukebox heard from the bottom of a bottle. "Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/If I don't see you there/I will run/a comb through my hair/and I will wait./I will wait./I will wait."

"And night... night comes to Texas." (last song on this album, quiet, shaky)

Tallahassee: "Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector"--this is the exact kind of expressionist metaphor which will always work for me. Art is more real, in our experience of life, than the raw experience itself.

"And I hand you a drink of the lovely little thing/On which our survival depends./People say friends don't destroy one another./What do they know about friends?"

I got really into Elvis Costello because of his lyrics. I don't know if that can happen with the MG (this is how it really happened for me) but maybe if I quote the lyrics enough you can find out for yourself.

"The House that Dripped Blood": the whole first verse is amazing, and that killing harmonica whine at the end just makes it. Dostoevsky had a spider the size of a marriage; this song has a mosquito.

"the cellar door is an open throat"

"dig up the laughing photographs"--wow, this really is a horror movie of a song. I bet this house has laughing windows, too.

And then that IV needle of a harmonica, which carries you all the way into the vein.

I hope I've already made clear what I think of "No Children." It's like getting punched in the face by all the girlfriends you never even got the chance to disappoint. It's what dripped into Loki's face all those years in the cave with Sigyn. It's like if the present and future and subjunctive tense ganged up on the past and beat it up in an alley and stole its lunch money--and then spent the money proving it right.

Oh hey, I seem to have crossed "This Year" with "Old College Try" even though they're basically opposites. Story of my life! "Things will shortly get completely out of hand." Wow, the contrast between the easy chords and bass and synth/organ here vs. the brutal, hope-in-a-hopeless-world lyrics really hit me in a part of my 1980s day-glo heart which will always be badly bruised. Fans of Diamanda Galas's poppier, more fluorescent songs might like this.

"Oceanographer's Choice": Disorienting, bitter, catchy, poppy, self-lacerating. Are we totally sure this isn't an '80s MTV hit with the synth stripped out? ...Seriously, not sure I could love this more unless it somehow incorporated the Reagan-era "it's happy hour in America!" day-glo swizzle-stick aesthetic.

"And night comes to Tallahassee." (not the last song, but ferocious and vengeful)

"THERE ARE BAD TIMES JUST AROUND THE CORNER." The Twilight Struggle proved to be a bit of a just-before-dawn Struggle, but if you ignore everything explicitly about Communism (...I know) this is a really great bracer. Everybody dies eventually; you might as well die ornery. There's no duty to retreat.

LIKE THOSE OTHER STICKY VALENTINES: A lot of people seem to view the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a symbolic victory. I think that's right in many ways. But at the same time I think it's something else; how do we know the difference between a symbolic act and a sentimental act?

I know part of my distaste for the celebrations of his death (beyond the basic fact that celebrating even the death of Hitler is very different from celebrating victory in World War II) was because it seemed to make war into sentiment. Mothers die in Iraq but we feel very good! That's an attitude which can only exist in the absence of the draft.

Anyway, since I'm constantly defending symbolic politics I thought I should note how easily it can serve as the vehicle for saccharine fantasy; vengeance fantasy, in this case.

DECADENCE AND THE A.M.E. CHURCH: A few thoughts, not a review, about Passing Strange. It's the story of a young black man from LA who seeks himself, or meaning, or something, through Amsterdam and West Berlin and finally home. ETA: It's at the Studio Theater through August 8.

1. I loved this! I loved it well beyond reason. I loved it in part because it really connected with the audience Friday night. I get that it's easy to be cynical about whitefolk toe-tappin' at musicals about black identity. But that isn't what happened here. What happened was more like when I went to see Marlon Riggs's film Black Is/Black Ain't, and at the end credits we heard the opening strains of "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing"... and the whole theater, black and white and read all over, started to sing.

If this city is your heart then this play will take you home.

2. The insistent decadent aesthetic was amazing! I don't know if I've ever seen such a complete assimilation of decadence to the American experience, which is so often presented as sincerist, outside a specifically gay narrative... with one exception. The fact that the exception is Invisible Man should tell you how thrilled I was by the way this play and this production negotiated the ways in which masks melt into the skin, culture can but can't be rejected (one of the characters makes the point I made somewhat idiotically here!), and America is an absent but inescapable parent.

I loved that even the complacency and hypocrisy of the mainstream black church was presented as a possible vehicle for becoming "real." It didn't work for the narrator, but I genuinely didn't feel like the play blamed Mr. Franklin (the PK, who uh... maybe I think plays the organ, if you see what I'm sayin' here) for being a halfway house rather than a home for the narrator. There was just a lot of generosity in this script. Everyone's masks were honored even though the show also acknowledged the genuine poignancy and power of the rhetoric of "realism."

It's really fascinating to compare this play to Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, which I also saw at the Studio. Christianity is a named thing here, a live option in a certain sense, which it never is for Stoppard's characters. And yet the specific form of Christianity is kind of intriguing: Words like identity, meaning, and love are very much central to the Christian possibility, but words like sin, grace, redemption, forgiveness, and salvation are totally absent. That's in no way a criticism of the show! I mean it says so much and works so well.

3. Oh Lord, the pastiches were so perfect! This is a musical, so yeah okay it gets sentimental in the end. But before then, the pastiches of bougie church life ("Baptist Fashion Show") and '79/'82 punk (wow I don't even know which song this was, but the lyrics "I'm a business motherfucker" probably help you remember it!) and '80s West German punk style are just so loving and forgiving.

4. Rock 'n' Roll is much more cross-generational than this play. There is no next generation here. There is no pregnancy, no child, no humiliation as our own rebellions are deployed against what we really do think is now our greater wisdom as adults! There's no need to show what it feels like to grow up.

And yet unchosen obligation is still the throbbing heart of this show. When it gets sentimental, which believe me, it jumps into with all its musical-theater gross Grizabella make-it-cute heart... even so it's at least sentimental about unchosen loves. In fact, the play is adamant that the most blunt forces in love are most powerful, love without understanding, mother and son beyond any kind of intellectual or even intelligible connection. She is his and at last he is hers and and no one can tell anybody why. Motherhood is handcuffs locked on both ends. (There's no mention of the protagonist's father. I honestly didn't notice this until at least the intermission, even though it's my actual job. I think that speaks to a level of realism in the play itself; it isn't playing to the skybox.)

But yeah, I kind of missed the depiction of what might happen to this guy, with his complex relationship with unchosen obligations in general and parenthood in particular, if he became a parent. Why is this play so contracepted? Aren't there more interesting stories to be told in the unchosen future?

But let us proclaim proudly that we are hypocrites, that we will stop at nothing, not even hypocrisy, in our struggle to take control of our lives.
--some manifesto or whatever

I am obviously always going to prefer surrendering control to taking it, and in general I don't think it will be hard for longtime readers to discern which bits of this manifesto I think are self-comforting relativism and which I think are necessary defenses of complicity (see here for a gnomic utterance!). But I liked this line a lot. Better a hypocrite than a heretic.

Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong.
--I feel like people have been trying to make me read Muriel Spark for years. This thing, quoted in Commonweal from Spark's novel Memento Mori, has finally succeeded.

SHE APPEARS COMPOSED/WELL, SHE IS, I SUPPOSE/WHO CAN REALLY TELL? Oh hi there! I'm not super excited about debating transgendered identity issues on this blog, because it seems like it could easily become Well-Meaning Cisgendered Hour. And I'm gay enough to kind of desperately dislike the thing where cute married Catholics debate our actual personal lives. Basically no matter how humble and philosophically open the participants are, they also always come across as self-absorbed. So while I'm reading every email I get about the Jay Prosser posts, and will reply to them (bc email seems even more tentative and one-squid's-opinion than an already-tentative public post), I probably won't post them if they are taking issue with transgendered identity. It's just... not my place, I think, to do that kind of "dancing with myself" dialogue.

On another tentacle, though, a reader did bring up a point I think other people might also have wondered about. And since he's batting me around because of one of my personal hobbyhorses, rather than e.g. Prosser, I shall reply!

Thus, my anonyreader:

The one question I do feel competent to raise about your take is that I *think* that in stuff you've written elsewhere (e.g. against "sincerism") you've expressed considerable skepticism about the accuracy or presumptive validity of people's self-understanding, raised the possibility they may be unreliable narrators of their own lives etc. (And even if we "come to ourselves" in the Church and then authentically and reliably recognize who we always truly were, it won't necessarily be fully consistent with our best preconversion guesses of what that might be, right? So if we didn't really know what it would be like until we got there, maybe it's a good thing we just got dunked in water w/ no scalpels involved?) So I would wonder what's different or special about someone's sense of their "experienced sex" (when at apparent variance with the anatomy they seem to have) that would make it privileged and reliable and a basis for undergoing surgery or similar intervention, rather than simply a particular and admittedly peculiar instance of the sort of persistent self-deception we know humans are sometimes prone to. ...

And my reply:

Thanks!

No, I think a) my anti-sincerism shtik is a stance, a caution, a reaction against certain kinds of "you can only ever speak in one genre" therapeutic stuff. And transgendered people, perhaps because they're under so much pressure to conform their narratives to a really rigid psychoanalysis-influenced pattern, tend IME to be pretty aware of the possibilities of different genres and different levels of irony, sincerity, self-revelation and self-protection. I should probably be more clear, in general, that the anti-sincerism thing isn't anti-the possibility of self-knowledge--I was a philosophy major!--but more about expression.

and b) therefore, I'm actually not especially skeptical of people's ability to assess their own identities/experiences unless there's a fairly clear conflict with something else I believe more firmly. I think people should be humbly open to reinterpretation, but I don't, I think, approach most people's self-accounts with too much of a hermeneutic of suspicion...! Probably especially not when said people are neither coming from a privileged position [...] nor, like, teenagers.

This post about objections to my Commonweal piece on Gay Catholic Whatnot might also be relevant.

"UNDERGRADUATES ARE THE MOST SINCERE SHOPPERS THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN." Apparently my AmCon piece about Georgetown is now available to subscribers as a PDF here. I... uh... am not a subscriber, so I have exactly no idea what's in this piece. Does it even contain the sentence in the title of this post? I don't know. Anyway, there's probably something about The Exorcist, and my high school drama, and the arduous process of constructing an identity.

I tapped her on the blogwatch and said, "Do you have a beau?"
She looked at me and smiled and said she did not know...

Camassia: A correction, re: sincerism! And a post about revenge and divergent views of authority.

Sean Collins: "Is it too much to ask for horror art to inflict emotional damage?"

(I think I'd also add a category for horror art which provokes teshuvah/repentance. Some horror I've seen and loved does neither for me--Suspiria is amazing, just incredible art, but I don't think it "traumatized" me in the way Sean means, nor did it provoke any change in my behavior. But a lot of other movies--Vertigo, obviously, but also Ringu and Barton Fink--seem to me to have the potential to provoke a change in self-understanding which wreaks itself through the emotions, but beyond them, into actions.* Anyway, yeah, I get behind Sean's cri de coeur!)

(*If you think you hear a faint echo of my disagreement with Sean about the ending of Eyes Wide Shut, you're right. On the other hand, I think Sean could have easily rebutted my points in that disagreement by saying that the movie itself has the capacity to provoke teshuvah, whether or not Tom Cruise's character actually ends up there. I think that's true, and it's a very strong point against that aspect of my criticism of the movie.)

Also, this comic sounds like it might echo intriguingly against "Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden," which is the only Eudora Welty story I really love.

VJ Morton has a huge raft of reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival. I've added at least three movies to my Netflix "save" queue on his recommendation, and will be keeping my eye out to see if any of them open in theaters down here.

BOUGIE WOOGIE BABY: Additions and corrections to my most recent sincerism post.

Addition #1) I forgot to mention that the Misery essay Camassia links to sounds terrific (haven't had a chance to read it yet) and very much gets at what I'm trying to do when I say that genre fiction can be more realistic than realism if your perspective is not that of the majority.

Addition #2) She's also put up a really smart post exploring a) whether I'm just defending the cool pose, which I do think isn't true though I can see where she's getting that; and b) adding a bit of historical context.

Correction #1: As usual I was carried away by my rhetoric! I think it's wrong to say that "...Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa." I'll defend some degree of Spriggishness because I will always defend the bourgeoisie! I don't want to join them, but I do realize that they are the people who make the world work, and the fact that I don't share that vocation shouldn't lead me to denigrate it. Besides which, my "LaBeijan" formulation suggests that Sophia herself may be found nestled comfortably within one subculture, which of course is not what I believe.

It would be more accurate to say that Christian translation should serve Truth at all times, and thus should introduce new and startling terms to both the Spriggish and LaBeijan dictionaries. And yet it's worth noting that in most cases the minority/subcultural denizen will have a sharper understanding of the majority perspective than vice versa (and will get less credit for it). But yeah, Christ must radically reshape all of our perspectives, and we must accept no existing culture as sufficient.

Correction #2: Because I am a product of all the same cultural forces I decry, I twice used "choose" when I should've said something else. In the parenthetical "(I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my 'self'?)" I think "chose" should be "accepted" or "developed" or some other verb implying both unchosen elements and the work I did to shape those elements. (There are certain styles of leadership I can't pull off, and I had to learn not to try them.)

And in the same paragraph, in the sentence, "It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent," "choose" should be replaced with "embrace." I think that implies a greater degree of recognition rather than maximization of utils.

IN WHICH I STILL DON'T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! ...I've gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia's here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly:

Just a quick question in reply to your recent "sincerism" posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think one could use your definition of sincerism ("requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions," which entails wrongheaded "assumptions about our ability to know ourselves") to diagnose a gay identity as a symptom of sincerism or subservience to the sincerist ideal. Would love to hear your thoughts on this question.

And where and how does a Christian identity fit into your arguments against sincerism? What would a Christian apology for irony look like? Might be interesting to try on the following proposition for size: Protestantism serves the sincerist ideal; Catholicism does not.

Am feeling very sincerist myself as I sort through Gay Christian Whatnot. But I agree with you that the sincerist ideal is a mess.

I think it makes the most sense to reply to both at once. What follows will be so scattershot, it'll make a blunderbuss look like a laser. But I never promised you a precision garden!

From stupid through cute and maybe eventually ending up in worthwhile, let's proceed with our education, one and all....

1) I would never have cited journalism as a sincerist profession! But then my genealogy of the profession looks like "Journalism in Tennessee" --> SOMETHING ELSE AWESOME TK --> the New York Post. I suspect that there are other valid genealogies!

2) Maybe helpful: My problem is not with sincerity. I've seen women at the pregnancy center do amazing work through transparent personal sincerity. (It may be relevant to Camassia's comments that the woman I'm especially thinking of here is black? But I've also seen white women make amazing impacts, forging incredible connections with women who clearly wanted a sincere and heartfelt woman to talk to. In my own counseling, I try to shift between more heartfelt and self-revealing talk as vs. more complicit and nudge-wink talk based on what the client seems to be open to. More on cultures and subcultures, and leadership, in a bit.) My beef is with the attitude that sincerity is always better than other modes of self-presentation. And this I think is a desperately American form of crudeness and anti-aesthetic, democratic/majoritarian well-meaning callowness. More on this in what follows.

3) Camassia's point about anti-sincere strategies serving minority communities in their internal communiques against outside understanding or this-bridge-called-my-back-building is fantastic. I never would've thought of that, actually, and I really take to heart her defense of translation even though I think I still partly disagree.

Some things need to be universally translatable, like the Gospel. But does everything need to translate? Can we preserve some turf where the translator is still a traitor, and if you want to learn the language you'd better be ready to go native?

And what does it mean to be a Christian if your answer to those questions--like mine is, right now--is "no" and "yes"?

I'm not sure, and I think Camassia and Miss Ogilvy are both on to something supremely important. All I can really say in response is that I suspect that sincerism, like boboism ("bourgeois bohemianism"), attempts to assimilate the minority into the majority and translate in that direction--whereas Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.

I am open to accusations that this contrapposto stance simply reflects my own need to shore up my bohemian self-image. (She said, with a hipshot grin.)

4) I'm tempted to second Miss Ogilvy by saying that the Protestant denigration of "repetitive prayer" is a sincerist stance. I'm not sure if that's true really, because believe me, Protestantism is something I understand about as much as I understand the higher math. But here's something I wrote about repetitive prayer. Confession seems to work (for me, anyway?) somewhat similarly, in that the practice is so humiliating that it makes it unnecessary to dig the awl of self-scrutiny too far in: If I weren't really sorry I WOULDN'T BE HERE, ZOMG.

I think Miss O's suggestion that coming out is an inherently sincerist act is totally fascinating, since of course the gay subculture has traditionally (!) been one of the least sincerist, and yet I totally take her point about how coming out to oneself feels. Anyone have comments? I am at a loss!

5) I can think of two main categories of experience which prompted me to articulate why I think sincerism so often provokes bien-pensant stupidity on one hand, and cruelty-with-the-tweezers on the other. I have a hard time talking about sincerism because I find it much easier to point at than to define, and therefore it's easy to pat myself on the back for identifying examples. There's a way in which rationalism, for all its obvious falsehoods, is humbler than prudence, which requires so much trust in one's own perceptions. (Even if the examples are taken from my own life, there's still a showiness in the decision to display them in the light of my current better judgment.)

But here are the experiences. First, when I've been in a leadership position I've dealt with women (always women... I'm going to say this is cultural, and the guys would've framed their objections to my leadership this way if they'd thought it would win them masculinity points) who thought that the mask of command, as such, was inauthentic. Presenting a different persona when in leadership meant lying.

I think this is wrong on both rationalist grounds (I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my "self"?) and, obviously, aesthetic grounds. Leadership is an aesthetic act. It isn't rationalist, because there's always another syllogism, or an alternative premise, you can pose against the syllogism which would require of you something you don't want to do in the service of someone or Someone you don't love. It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent.

So um yeah. I will, if necessary, pay for your trust by sharing some deep dark painful secret--but I'll respect you a lot less in the morning. I should be able to lead you without groveling for your pitying endorsement of my perspective.

b) I've several times tried to "relate" on a deep dark authentic level with someone going through a kind of suffering I can't share. I've tried to ask How You're Doing. I've tried to Be Real.

In no case has this ever been the right thing to do.

I get that people with much more sophisticated senses of how to be in the world (like Camassia) understand that what you do, when you're dealing with another person's desperation, is listen and be there and try to roll with what they give you, and not push. I don't think any of that is sincerism, even though it's sincere. But I do think sincerism is what I believed when I thought it was right to press my fingers against other people's bruises. I didn't think I was really acting as their friend unless I poked. I could not have been more wrong.

So that's where I'm coming from, on this question.

6) I'm not sure I want to overphilosophize here, since really I'm not sure what exactly sincerism is--like I said, it's easier to point at than to anatomize. But I am tempted to argue that sincerism is a part or a result of two philosophical tendencies I abhor anyway. ("You want a second opinion? Okay, you're ugly!")

a) My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

b) And on a deeper level, I really think sincerism is a subset of the Heideggerian fetish for authenticity and commitment. In this worldview, on the top level, Truth is found within--it's self-expression. I know that there is no philosophy without some level of self-trust. A radical skeptic can purchase bread, even though he knows it might be a hallucination, but he can never practice philosophy, because Sophia is nothing if she isn't real. (Even Derrida ETA 9/28 DESCARTES!!! "knew that he existed, and that he spoke French"!) But it is possible to distinguish between a philosophy of expressing the God within and a philosophy in which the self strives to recognize and love the God without--a philosophy in which recognition takes the place of expression, and submission is another word for love.

On the lower level, of course, "my real true deep self" becomes simply whatever my culture/subculture/biology/some complex interaction of all three tells me to value. That's one reason Heidegger's Rector's Address (which I used to be able to quote, as a party trick) is actually a valid conclusion from his premises. The naivete of sincerism is that it assumes that the self expressed will come pre-tamed.

Miss Manners knows better.

AGAINST SINCERITY. Jendi Reiter has my back! With bonus poetry, "How to Fail a Personality Test."

me vs. sincerity here (and sexily here)

AGAINST SAFEWORDS: I note that "safe, sane, and consensual" is an extraordinarily sincerist credo; its assumptions about our ability to know ourselves, and its assumption that self-knowledge and self-ownership form the core of morality, are basically my exact problems with the sincerist ideal.

Not to mention that s/s/c = three things vocation isn't.

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on "sincerism" and why it's no fun. So a couple times here I've growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which... is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes.

Sincerism means--probably among other things--requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I also oppose in most cases!), exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another's secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can't cash.

Think of it as American newspapers' claim to "objectivity," by which we mean mainstream conformity, vs. European newspapers' tabloid partisanship. Think of it as realism vs. "genre."

Sincerity, as a mode, has its good points. If anything, I think I tend to be much more sincere than I should be! The world does not care about the sparklyhearts authenticity of my feelings; nor does it really need every idea chewed into obviousness and pablum. But there are times when withholding sincerity from another person is prideful and/or cruel. If they need you to say, blatantly and without regard for your own self-image, "I love you," or, "I think you're amazing," you should do that. You don't always have to disclaim it or quote it ("I've known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and anything you do is all right by me--can I borrow the car?") or make them work for it.

But here are just a few of the many problems with sincerism.

* It's a genre which thinks it's the whole of art; it's a perspective which won't acknowledge its contingency. If I speak in aphorisms or jokes or provocations, I am actually conveying something about both myself and my view of the truth, just as much as if I *~*bared my heart*~*.

* It's the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that "realism" and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they're the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made. To take the boringly obvious example, if I want to talk about Gay Catholic Whatnot, I need to somehow entice or bully straight people (and non-Catholics, for that matter) into learning my language; I can't convey what I need to say in theirs. And I strongly suspect this is also true of other kinds of privilege, which is why Invisible Man is one of the greatest American artworks ever created.

It's never joking all the way down.

* Sincerism is the opposite of camp. Camp, as far as I can tell, only works if the thing parodied has some real emotional and personal resonance. Camp is never loveless or rationalist. Sincerism divides the world into "serious" and "oh but you don't really mean that"... when our actual hearts and lives are much more conflicted, complex, and complicit than that.

If I can think of more to say, I'll say it; and I do apologize for the deeply sincerist nature of this post! It's a Mobius strip of ridiculous.

#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.

SINCERITY IS WHAT COMES AFTER INNOCENCE BUT WELL BEFORE CHASTITY.