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."

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that.

Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them "Washingtonians" when they're not from 'round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But how long can you sleep with an enemy who doesn't even know he's the enemy?

This is nearly perfect summer reading: just intelligent enough to give savor to its lurid, trashy elements. (Bram's narrator bashes the New York Post, but this book reminded me more of that tabloid than of any other literary production.) I enjoyed it until the very end, when its suspense turned into melodrama via a too-neat (though well-foreshadowed) resolution.

Here I reviewed Bram's Exiles in America, a much better book. Gossip did hit on one of the major themes of that book: the stark, sociologically-inflected differences between how a couple looks from the inside and how it looks from the outside. Exiles takes as its epigraph Robert Frost's line (from memory, too lazy to look up, sorry) that marriage is "a type of friendship recognized by the police." Gossip shares that sensibility, though the nature of marriage itself isn't at issue in this book the way it is in Exiles.

I'll note that while the leftists in Gossip were recognizable human types, the right-wingers resembled exactly zero right-wingers I've ever met. But I'm willing to posit that I have not met a representative sample. It didn't keep me from enjoying the novel until it was over, at which point I did start to feel a bit curdled.

Kings, episodes 6 - 10: I reviewed previous episodes of this "It's about King David only alternate-universe only we're not going to tell you any of that because we don't want you to watch this show, apparently" NBC drama here. The first ten episodes are up at IMDB.com.

In the later episodes, some things are better: The David actor is growing on me. "Chapter One" is tense and intriguingly meta-narrative-y; the final twists of "Javelin" left me wanting to know what happens next. They've continued to pepper the show with lines and speeches which come from within a monarchist worldview, which fascinates me! This is one reason I like the Saul-figure's ruthless action at the end of "Brotherhood." It feels alien, old, simultaneously human and eldritch: personal.

The romance between the king's aide and the guardsman is both endearing comic relief and poignant character shading.

Other things, though... not so much. All the other younger actors still bother me, especially the Jonathan one. It would kill you to move your face? Express an unspoken emotion or an internal conflict, now and then?

During "Pilgrimage," in which various nonmarital sex scandals threaten, I found myself saying out loud, "Why is it so easy to make liberalism sound saccharine?" Whenever the series touches the intersection of sex and publicity it tends to sound contemporary-bien-pensant rather than alien-monarchist.

I still really, really hate what they're doing with the David/Jonathan relationship. They've chosen to prettify David (in "Chapter One," the Saul-figure does to show-David what the Biblical David did to Bathsheba's husband, so the show's David remains an overperfect farmboy with no need for penitence) and make Jonathan a conflictedly-gay conflictedly-villainous waffler with an obvious redemption arc in sight. I hate every one of these changes! ...There's also still little sense of God as a moral force rather than merely a source of power, although I admit we're getting subtle outlines of God's commandments as the series progresses. I wish David, rather than Silas (=Saul), had become the focus of God's moral attention earlier on--I get why they're doing it this way, but again, it makes David look cute rather than astonishing.

I should maybe note that I can't be rational about the "Sabbath Queen" episode because it depicts a family dealing with a critically-ill daughter. I have no idea if that episode is good or not, and I don't plan to watch it again.

Batman: The Animated Series, all seasons. I hate Batman comics; I loved this series!

Batman as a genre tends toward sickly child-abuse storylines and exploitive portrayals of mental illness. (I know why you'd mine mental illness for metaphors, and that can really work; I just want it to be completely cartoony, or much more realistic, or unruly genius... not the Uncanny Valley into which a lot of Batman stuff falls for me.) In comics which purport to be Serious Business, I really cannot handle that stuff. For the most part, this show didn't hit those buttons for me, although there were occasional moments when the bottom dropped out and I couldn't help but remember that Arkham Asylum is scary because we're supposed to fear "the weak and the wounded."

But the thing I loved about this series--the reason I Netflix'd it, and the thing on which it completely delivered--was its look. This is a hot, gorgeous show. It's all angular and expressionist and deco and... basically honey for the bears, where I'm concerned. It's dark and spooky-fun and stupidly beautiful.

I loved basically any show with Harley Quinn. I was expecting to like her and ended up adoring her. She's having so much fun! "Harley's Holiday" might be my favorite of those, although the one with the Joker Fish, which I think is her first or second appearance, is also adorable, as is "Harley and Ivy." I liked Poison Ivy's eps generally as well. I love that they paired the clown and the femme fatale, and kept both of them recognizably noir-girl types!

I think you'll know immediately whether this show is for you, since as I said, its look is its main appeal. (At least for me.) Most of the special features are commentary tracks, which I love!--the most fun for me were the ones for the first episode, where they laughed at how dark the coloring is (it's really startling), and for "Critters," which is apparently one of the most reviled episodes of the series. I liked it! And I liked it even more after the commentary track. I think they actually avoided the problems of making a dark deco Batman fight a giant chicken, you know? It's an incredibly creepy chicken! On the other hand, it's part of a weird run of episodes where Batman fights dumb stuff--there's a dinosaur in the previous episode, and later we get gorilla-villains. ...Speaking of villains who don't work for me, I hated all things Ras al-Ghul except for the one which is really a Jonah Hex episode.

The later discs are a "revamped" version. Og like: I think they use a lot more red in the revamp? Not sure. If I'm right, it made the show even hotter; if I'm wrong, something else made it look extra spectacular. Og no like: People's faces mostly became more masklike, whiter and more acutely-angled, and I missed the curves.

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll didn't get placed in a timely fashion. I've decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on whether or not to include the bits specific to this production, but ended up keeping them in, since this was not only the best Stoppard I've seen by far but the best Studio Theatre production I've seen by far. I want you guys to know that they can really knock it out of the park.
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Now that Europe’s “short 20th century,” 1914 – 1989, is over, everyone’s fighting over who gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet empire. How much to Gorbachev, how much to Reagan, how much to John Paul II?

Into this reverse-ostrakon of historical popularity, Tom Stoppard has thrown an unexpected name: the Great God Pan.

His play Rock ’n’ Roll, in an intimate production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre through June 21, dramatizes the clash between the “cultural Left” and the more strictly political Left in the last half of the Cold War. Yet all the play’s oppositions--culture vs. politics, eros vs. reason, soul vs. matter--are embodied in the complex relationships between finely-drawn, resonant characters. The sentimentality which sometimes mars Stoppard’s work is absent. It’s a comedy, and a love song, but its joys and reconciliations are hard-won.

Studio’s actors are completely engaging, and the small theater space makes everything immediate: You can smell the joss-sticks. It is weird sitting quietly, occasionally clapping, as the actors explore the ecstatic release of a great guitar riff. There’s no way around that, given the bourgeois nature of just about any American audience who would come to see a Stoppard play. But the play is good enough to overcome our habitual complacence.

The first scene presents Great Pan in the unlikely form of Syd Barrett, crouching on a stoned hippie teen girl’s garden wall. We then set up the tension which will define the play: It is 1968 and Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. In Cambridge, half-feral British Communist Max is growling at half-dissident Czech Jan, as Jan decamps for home: “I said, ‘You. I’ll take you,’ because you were serious and you knew your Marx… and at the first flutter of a Czech flag you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.” Max does offer the self-consciously ironic machismo of apologizing to Jan “about the tanks.”

Max is a bitter-ender: “Why do people go on as if there’s a danger we might forget Communism’s crimes, when the danger is we’ll forget its achievements?” He feels piercingly the humiliation of his position:

I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he’s fascinated by me. He’s never met a Communist before. I’m like the last white rhino.

(One of the many subtle touches in this play is the way Max’s rationalism lands him in cruelly absurd situations.) His materialism gives no quarter to fuzzy-headed talk of “inspiration” or “soul”: The meat is all there is. This belief gets one of the funniest smackdowns in a very funny play, when his wife’s student Lenka says he believes a human is a “pinball machine which thinks it’s in love.” But Max also gets one of the play’s most wrenching lines, after his wife accuses him and his materialism of collaboration with the cancer which is killing her.

Max is the sort of man who says, “A worker’s state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work.” Max’s marriage lasts until his wife’s death. He’s the Communist bourgeois.

Jan, meanwhile, just wants to listen to his records. His return to Czechoslovakia is something of a road-not-taken for Stoppard: As the playwright explains, “He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.” Back behind the Iron Curtain, Jan spends his time playing rock music, maneuvering around the police, and arguing against politics. The cops force all his employers to fire him, then arrest him for being a “parasite”--in a pointed callback to an earlier scene in which Jan praised British freedoms, and Max snapped that in England “everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.”

Here again materialism matters, though the play doesn’t hammer it home. A cop can hit you in the face. A cop can bash in your head. A cop can control the meat. If, as the anti-Nazi resistance song says, “Thoughts are free,” it is only because there is something irreducible, a soul which can’t be destroyed by hitting it.

This is part of the importance of the recurring pagan metaphors. As Eleanor, Max’s wife, translates Sappho for a student: “Eros is amachanon, he’s spirit as opposed to machinery, Sappho is making the distinction. He’s not naughty, he’s--what? Uncontrollable. Uncageable.”

At first Jan and Ferdinand are sharply opposed in their ways of existing under totalitarianism. Jan accuses Ferdinand of “moral exhibitionism” for his constant petitions and protests. Jan argues that his rock musicians--preeminently the Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe--have found a deeper form of rebellion against tyranny:

FERDINAND: Who’s got the best chance of getting Husak’s attention--Havel or the Plastic People of the Universe?
JAN: The Plastics.

At first Ferdinand is exasperated. After he meets the Plastics’ impresario in prison, however, he comes to Jan with convert’s fervor:

FERDINAND: He explained about the hair. The tempter says, “Cut your hair just a little, and we’ll let you play.” Then the tempter says, “Just change the name of the band and you can play.” And after that, “Just leave out this one song”…. It is better not to start by cutting your hair, Jirous said--no, it is necessary. Then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country. Why couldn’t you have explained this?

This play is passionate about the transformative power of music--the moral force of joy. But it is not naïve. Stoppard hints that perhaps rock’s transformative power is not the same in the liberated West as in the repressed Eastern Bloc: Although Jan’s line, fairly early in the play that “the Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics” gets a laugh, by the play’s end the primary representative of Western rock is the aging Syd Barrett, shambling through the eternal present of late-stage drug addiction. And one of the sharpest exchanges in the play is this one, toward the very end:

MAX: There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day…. What happened to it?
JAN: If pornography was available, the poetry would have sold like poetry in the West.

The last time the gods are mentioned, Lenka is in Cambridge, as a student of her own reads from Plutarch: “…and Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore--Great Pan is dead!” The play ends in the Czech Republic, because it has to, because the joy of liberation depends on who’s liberated from what. It’s possible to read the play’s gentle ending as a statement that the time of the gods has passed, and we are now in a time of humanity. But even this is a much too reductive reading of a play which is, like the ecstatic soul, irreducible.

Even requited, such love would be foolish, messy and brief. Unless it changed Bill's politics. That fantasy was back, larger than before, giving value to lust, turning sex with a Republican from a self-betrayal to a good deed, a moral rescue. Bill went against his best interests by seeing me. Maybe he wanted to be changed.

But what if love changed me? Could it rearrange and corrupt my identity? Oddly enough, that scenario wasn't frightening, but produced a nasty thrill. As if I were bored with who I was and enjoyed the impossible notion of becoming someone new.
--Christopher Bram, Gossip

CAMILLA'S HAIR, SOAKED WITH BLOOD. Winners and runners-up in a contest to design a new cover for The Secret History. I like the top three (i.e. all the winners except Lucy Pritchett) and, among the runners-up, Pat Tierney, Harriet Beesley, Frida Delin, Helen Ashcroft, and Sara Mulvanny in about that order. I'd also totally buy the Rachel Lewis one, just because it's what the book's paperback cover would've been in 1967. (I admit Ashcroft's isn't that good unless you've already read the book. Otherwise it looks like a generic drunk-memoir cover, when I assume she was actually referring to the scene with the glass in Camilla's foot, or else the... is it a mirror?... that one of the twins breaks late in the game.)

Via Helen Rittelmeyer.

DAY JOB FOLLIES: Now, at MarriageDebate: "Everyone's Marriage Is Queer," the recession vs. men, reasons people give for cohabiting, searching for one's sperm donor father, and Russians pretending to be happy.

And mooooooore! Remember that you, yes you, can send me links.

Outside, in a little courtyard on the roof, in the rain, a small group of musicians were playing on home-made guitars. Jenkins explained that if Treece was interested in the breakdown of class boundaries the guitarist in the group was actually the Earl of... (he named a prominent scion of the English nobility) and the group was called the Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense Skiffle Group. "It would be," said Treece.
--Eating People Is Wrong

"INSECURITY CAMERAS": My review of the Czech avant-garde photo exhibit at the National Gallery of Art....

PASHERNATE LOVE: Camassia has a pretty fascinating response to my "Romoeroticism" column.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: BURGER TIME! I pretty much never cook meat, but this week the fever came upon me.

I used ground beef, jalapenos, salt, freshly-ground pepper, a couple different kinds of rolls (mealhada, and then today something where I don't know its name), butter, cinnamon, cayenne, cumin, ground ginger, dried thyme, and Port Salut cheese.

What I did: I'd never actually made my own patties before. First I sliced the rolls in half lengthwise and put them cut-side-down in the toaster oven, letting the yummy breadcrumbs fall onto the cutting board. Then I finely diced a jalapeno. Then, at last, I grabbed a big handful of ground beef and began working it.

I'd thought I could just make a big flat patty with a depression in the center (to help it cook). This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. So I ended up doing what all the recipes had told me to do, and making a much rounder patty with a depressed center (your "sort of like the American electorate!" joke there). I got the jalapeno all worked into the meat. Then it went into the pan, on high. I don't have a grill, or even a grill pan, so I just put it in a flat nonstick and hoped for the best. I spiced it with (in about this order) cumin and/or thyme, salt, ginger, and a bit of cinnamon. Once it was really sizzling I started toasting the roll halves.

I let this thing cook for a while--much longer than I had in the past. I was worried about the smoke alarm, and while I never saw or even really smelled smoke, I could feel it catching in my throat. Nonetheless, I turned the burgers without making the alarm sound. I let the burgers cook just as much on the other side while I sliced up some Port Salut. Then I turned them one last time, ground some pepper over them and added the sliced cheese and a bit of cayenne, and buttered the bottom halves of the rolls.

The result: stupidly delicious. Seriously, this was amazing. I'd never been really satisfied with home-cooked burgers before, because I hadn't let them cook quite long enough. When you can grill a burger it's fine to worry about whether the inside will still be a deep pink, because you're guaranteed a caramelized outside crust. But in a saute pan you've got to be much more patient.

The herbs, spices, and jalapeno didn't overwhelm the burger at all. The Port Salut was... melty and yummy, a rich but nonaggressive taste. I'd almost call it a hyper-cheddar.

I don't plan to do this often, but for Independence Day week it was pretty swift.

"I have never felt like this before," Louis pressed on. "Passion has happened to me before; I'm a man, after all. But generally I preferred to ignore it, to get on with my work." This was true enough; it had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity; that he was at the root of things.
--Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong

SHE NEEDS YOU/MORE THAN SHE LOVES YOU: An email in response to my post about tradition and iconicity:

First, you suggest that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona out of an impersonal thing (like a place or an institution) so that individual human beings might truly love it. But it seems to me that this position reduces love to an exclusively inter-personal phenomenon. I will accept that love cannot exist apart from the relationship between persons, but consider that (theologically) the act of God's creation is sometimes described as an overflowing of the Love within the Trinity. Thus, God loves rocks and trees though they are impersonal.

Might we not say that human love of institutions, places, etc. result from a similar overflowing. A Frenchman does not first love France, but rather his family, and then, later, his love overflows into the place that made his family possible, and the institutions that gave it shape. Under this scheme, tradition does not create a persona but rather forms a shifting network of channels into which love may overflow. Love allows us to see the beauty of the beloved even where it is concealed from plain sight. Just so, loving the beloved allows us to love what the beloved loves, and to love what brought the beloved into being, and to love a thousand other things as well. And as love overflows, so do we become privy to ever more beauty.

And tradition, by binding people together and to institutions, customs, foods, ways, stories, etc. etc. makes the flow of love from one thing to the next easier and more regular. But I think you miss something if you say a French person loves France more fully as personified rather than as experienced.

Secondly, I would like to make a distinction... you mention the Church as one of the "fictive women" alongside Marianne and Israel. The Church, however, must be distinguished because the Church is in some sense a real Being with an existence distinct (if not independent) from its constitutent parts. France is the people of France and their ways, land, and all the things to which the people of France are bound. The Church, however, is the Union between God and man, which is a Unity in the image of the Unity between the Persons of God. And just as the three Persons of God make up a single Being Who is not merely three Persons existing in a certain relationship to one another, so the Church is a single (eschatological) Being. Consider that Marianne (a fiction) is the symbol of France, but the symbol of the Church is Mary.

That being said, the Church is a Unity as well as being a truly human institution (that is the mystery of the Incarnation, right?) and thus is formed by tradition as any other human institution. I think this actually lends support to my "overflow" model of tradition, since the idea that tradition builds up the Church into a persona would set up two parallel and conflicting symbologies -- one of Marianne and one of Mary.

so yeah, that's awesome.

Some quick responses: I really do believe love is "an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon." I'm not sure how to defend this belief--I've tried a couple of paragraphs and deleted all of them--but actually I don't think my interlocutor is really disagreeing here, he's just pointing out that tradition might be explained without rejecting that basic belief.

I'm still not sure he's right, though. If I love France as an overflowing of my love for my family, can I ever serve France when that would damage my family? Can I have some ideal of France with which my family members would disagree?

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother. I've been convinced of a vision of America which is very different from the vision of ditto embraced by my family. Can we really negotiate these conflicting and shifting loyalties without personifying nationhood--and even, sometimes, putting those personified nations above other forms of personal loyalty?

I very much agree with the distinction between the Church and "Marianne." In fact, I generally think that Christianity (like Judaism) cuts the Gordian knot of philosophy by presenting an object of love Who is simultaneously a moral arbiter.

You don't have to be blogwatching, but it helps...

Holy Whapping provides awesome Philip Neri/celebrity-cardboard-cutout action! Via Sparrow Fallen.

In other weird saint news, yesterday was the feast of Saints Processus and Martinian, patrons of wardens, jailers, and prison police. (That's because St. Paul converted them when he was imprisoned, and they suffered martyrdom proclaiming the Gospel their prisoner taught them.) Today is the feast of St. Thomas, but I think you can find the Caravaggio painting by yourself.

Overlawyered turns ten! For all your corporate-collusion-with-government-regulation needs!

My column at Inside Catholic has provoked much comments-boxing. For the moment I feel no further desire to box, but I thought I'd point it out. And I really will talk about problems and tensions with renewing the Catholic tradition of vowed friendship... either later tonight, or on Sunday. They, uh, won't be the same problems these commenters seem to batten on.

And the current Commonweal has a really good, basic piece on religious abuse at Guantanamo. I don't think it's online yet.

I WAS WRONG. "Gypsy Presents: 'Waiting for Gorgo'" is my favorite MST3K riff.

So far.

The dead woman whom I adore keeps her distance. ...

Where is the cocoon of noise and need?
I am an uneaten meal, a full glass.
--Anna Harrison, "Need," in the current Commonweal. You really, really should read the whole poem.

As other lifestyles become more acceptable, you must choose whether to get married and whether to have children. You develop your own sense of self by continually examining your situation, reflecting on it, and deciding whether to alter your behavior as a result. People pay attention to their experiences and make changes in their lives if they are not satisfied. They want to continue to grow and change throughout adulthood.
--Andrew Cherlin, Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today

Notice how the last two sentences say exactly opposite things! Throughout this book (which is generally good), Cherlin uses "grow and change" to mean "place preexisting wants and personality traits above role and obligation." It's kind of obvious that sticking it out, placing role and obligation first, might change you more--challenge you more, certainly.

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

LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend. The first thing to say is that I love this book. It's a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman.

I could not love this book more if it were made out of chocolate and shaped like Sophia Loren, with a cameo by Iron Man.

But now that I've got that out of my system: This is such a heartfelt book, and such a humble one. Alisdair MacIntyre rabbits on about how some virtues are necessary products of certain practices (like, chess isn't chess if you cheat); this book demonstrates how history as a practice can inculcate, or reflect, or strengthen, a genuinely spiritual humility. Bray can be wry, he can be pointed, but he's always ready to submit his preferred conclusions to the uncertainty of the evidence. This is basically the opposite of a polemic; it's a complication.

Okay... there are some twitches. Bray frequently, but super-briefly, falls into a utilitarian-universalism, where the *~*real*~* purpose of Christianity is friendship/reconciliation/social order. (To put the three terms in order from most awesome to least.) This is a complete anomaly from someone who generally goes out of his way to acknowledge alternate readings. It's a misunderstanding of tradition-in-general and English-Christianity-in-particular, since few robust traditions are simple enough to have one "real" purpose, one "central" concept. A tradition builds persona (see below!) precisely by being much more complex than this.

And Bray does have occasional fits of rhetorical Protestantism. I don't have any idea whether that reflects his actual beliefs--for all I know he was as Catholic as Morrissey when he wrote this book. But at least twice, to take the most notable example, he writes that a vowed same-sex friendship might be considered "more Christian" because it did not require the gatekeeping approval of a priest. I totally agree with him that a Christian pledge of love does not become less Christian in the absence of a dogcollar, but that isn't what he says; if you turn what he does say inside-out, like a glove, it imples that sacraments which require a priest are less Christian than those which don't. I doubt Bray himself would really argue that the Eucharist is less Christian than marriage! So I read this as a verbal tic, signifying a genuine defensiveness about the ability of the laity to sanctify their lives and loyalties, but not meant to be read too literally.

Speaking of the Eucharist, I love how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.

Similarly, you can't read this book and then attend an ordinary American Mass without wanting to cry at the loss of the Kiss of Peace. The "handshake of peace" is a horrifying sign of how far we have come from the world of Bray's book.

This is not "weaponized" history. I think it does provide hope and succour for those of us who wish to create a fruitful, joyous, and sublime way of life for contemporary gay Catholics; but I'll talk tomorrow about some of the tensions and cautions this book outlines for that project. Bray's own position I think will be clear to anyone who reads the afterword, but even there, he speaks with the bone-deep humility of a historian who has fallen deeply in love with his subjects and will, therefore, respect their memory by not getting in the way. He doesn't put his own heart over their faces.

This book overlaps, at the very end, with the very beginning of Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. It made me want to re-read Roden, to play the two off against one another.

I'll close by saying that he's a terrific stylist. I especially love his trick of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger!

SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL... BUT I GOT WISE/SHE'S THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE!: Some exceptionally scattered thoughts on tradition and conservatism. These are propositions for discussion, not settled beliefs of mine. [I'll add links to older posts later, and remove this parenthesis.]

1. There's a difference in kind between a stereotype and a role. Actually, this one I'm fairly sure of; I'm just not sure how to cash out what that difference in kind really looks like. I've been using gender stereotypes vs. gender roles as a possible way into this question.

One possibility is that stereotypes are abstractions, character descriptions, whereas roles are characters. The Hysterical Woman is a cruel and insipid caricature; Eddie Monsoon is a wonderful monster. (Similarly for The Prude vs. Saffy Monsoon.)

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. I do think a preexisting personal representation of the role being somehow approached by our actions is part of the difference. That's what the saints are for. They break the conventions in keeping the Commandments, in Chesterton's very nice phrase, and thereby expand the possibilities for the rest of us. They show us new roles. Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, these aren't stereotypes.

This of course doesn't help you when you can't find precedent for what you perceive as your vocation. And since I believe very strongly that vocation isn't a choice, I am still searching for other, more illuminating ways to cash out the difference between stereotype and role.

2. One way to tell that something is a tradition is if it can't be defended by reason alone. I've already written that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona--to simultaneously give a place or institution an ethos, and give it a personality, making it a possible object of love. (Specifically, at least in the contexts where I've encountered traditional institutions, the institution becomes a fictive woman. It would be shockingly cheap [and cheaply shocking] to wonder if Germany's problem wasn't the idea of the Fatherland--but is there anything to be salvaged from this idea that fictive womanhood is better for us than fictive manhood?)

Anyway, putting gender questions aside, this definition of tradition should immediately show you the many points on which it is vulnerable.

a) Fictive womanhood is fictive. (Long cat is loooooooong!) There is no actual, individual, percept-rich "America" or "Marianne" or "Israel" or "Church." Reason-alone will always sever the cords of language and longing which held together shadow and substance... making it impossible for us to argue that the imperceptible (the persona) should be considered the substance, not the shadow.

b) Fictive womanhood is a fantastic alibi! This is why Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is simultaneously so central to my understanding of tradition's role, and so troubling. If we agree that tradition makes France an ethos and a beloved, must we agree that Marie Antoinette is the personification of that persona? Or to bring this down to the twentieth century: If tradition, then figurehead--whether monarch or dictator?

This is the darker side (the back!) of my post about how tradition gives grace to our necessary subordinations and submissions: Tradition, of course, can give graceful cover to our unnecessary subordinations as well.

c) Cultures lack an architecture. There is no science--and precious little art!--by which we can tell which elements of tradition are load-bearing. In any particular case, I can argue rationally that this element can be removed without destroying the iconic resonance, the persona, of our tradition. And in fact, I can always point to many, many cases in which prior rejections of traditional elements did not fatally damage what we now consider to be the nature of that tradition. This is both a strength of tradition--its ability to adapt, to recreate a cultural persona as adeptly as you and I recreate our own public faces when we undergo severe personal change, remaining recognizable to our friends despite the massive internal damage and recovery--and, in a rationalist age, a weakness. No individual fort can be defended, even though the attackers insist they're on our side.

d) Finally... how can you prove that your beloved should be loved? This is one of the very few questions where I can't think of a medieval Christian philosopher who has really provided a hard-and-fast, cash-value answer... which is a point in favor of medieval Christian philosophers. Never use an argument when a stained-glass window would suffice.

AMY WINEHOUSE SINGS "BEAT IT."