The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (45 page)

The standard religious response has been: “Of course we have the same desires, but we fight them and put them in proper perspective.” That’s partly true. The desire is certainly fought. Why, you can see the strain of erotic repression on unmade-up faces, in long dresses that hide flesh, and in the desexualized carriage of bodies (notice the burden is largely on the women) in the most theologically rigid of orthodox black churches. But that’s just the point: mere repression is not the proper perspective. We’ve got to find a mean between sexual annihilation and erotic excess. Otherwise, the erotic practices of church members will continue to be stuck in silence and confusion.

Neither are there many sermons that assail ministers for exploiting women. To be sure, there are women who think they were put on earth to please the pastor. For them, embracing his flesh is like embracing a little bit of heaven. Pastors should study their books on transference and help spread light on this fallacy. Of course, there are just as many women who simply get in heat over a man who can talk, especially if they’ve dealt with men for whom saying hello in the morning is an effort. So let’s not romanticize the put-upon, helpless female who’s charmed by the wiles of the slick, Elmer Gantry–like, minister-as-omnicompetent-stud-andstand-in-for-God.

Too often, though, there are women who come to the minister seeking a helping hand who get two instead. Plus some lips, legs, arms—well, you get the picture. The black church is simply running over with brilliant, beautiful black women of every age, hue, and station. Pecan publicists. Ebony lawyers. Caramel doctors. Mocha engineers. Beige clerks. Bronze businesswomen. Brown housewives. Redbone realtors. Yellow laborers. Coffee teachers. Blueblack administrators. Copper maids. Ivory tellers. Chocolate judges. Tan students. Often these women are sexually pursued by the church’s spiritual head, so to speak.

This fact makes it especially hard to endure the chiding of black preachers, veiled in prophetic language, launched at the sexual outlaws of black pop culture. In reality, the great Martin Luther King Jr. is the patron saint of the sexual unconscious of many black ministers, but for all the wrong reasons. For most of the time he lived in the glare of international fame, King, as is well known, carried on affairs with many women. He wasn’t proud of it. He confessed his guilt. He said he’d try to do better. But he just couldn’t give it up. Plus, he was away from home for 28 days of most months. Lest too many critics aiming to bring King down a notch or two for his moral failings get any ideas, bear in mind that he spent that
kind of time away from his wife and children, under enormous stress and at great peril to his life, leading the war against racial inequality.

Many black ministers have absorbed King’s erotic habits, and those of many white and black ministers before and after him. But they have matched neither his sacrifice nor his achievements. Not that such factors excuse King’s behavior. But they do help us understand the social pressures that shaped King’s erotic choices. One must remember, too, the ecology of erotic expression for civil rights workers. The wife of a famous civil rights leader once told me civil rights workers often went to towns where their presence reviled whites and upset many complacent blacks. She said it was natural that they sexually fed off of each other within their tight circles of sympathy and like-minded perspective. That squares as well with King’s comment that a lot of his philandering was a release from the extraordinary pressures he faced. That’s probably a large part of the story, though it can’t be the complete story. King’s behavior apparently predates his fame. His philandering was a complex matter.

In some senses, King’s erotic indiscretions were the expression of a Casanova complex, pure and simple. That complex is especially present in famous men whose success is a gateway to erotic escapades. Indeed, their fame itself is eroticized. Their success is both the capital and the commodity of sex. It procures sexual intimacy and is the gift procured by (female) sexual surrender. Then, too, for black men there is a tug-of-war occurring on the psychosexual battlefield. Black men occupy a symbolic status as studs. That stereotype is one of the few that black men refuse to resist. They embrace it almost in defiance of its obvious falseness, as an inside joke. (How many times did King tell white audiences that blacks wanted to be their brothers, not their brothers-in-law, even as white women flaunted themselves before him? King was even set to marry a white woman when he was in seminary, but she was sent away, and King was warned by a mentor that he would never be able to be a black leader with a white wife.)

There is also a specific psychology of the ministerial Casanova. He believes he merits sexual pleasure because of his sacrificial leadership of the church community. Ironically, he sees the erotic realm as an arena of fulfillment because it is forbidden, a forbiddance that he makes a living preaching to others. (Yes, the cliché is certainly true that “That which is denied becomes popular.”) But erotic forbiddance is a trap. The very energy exerted against erotic adventure becomes a measure for ministerial integrity. It becomes the very force the minister must resist if he is to be erotically honest. Erotic desire both induces guilt in the minister and is his reward for preaching passionately about the need for the denial of erotic exploitation! Self-delusion and self-centeredness mingle in this arena of sexual desire.

All of this sets up an erotic gamesmanship between minister and the potential—often willing—object of his erotic desire. One of the rules of the game is, “Let’s see if I can get him to fall, to act against what he proclaims as truth.” This is more than simply a case of Jezebel out to seduce the minister. It is a case of erotic desire
being expressed in a way that reflects the unequal relation between male leaders and female followers.

Many ministers who travel on the revival circuit—delivering sermons and giving a lift to the sagging spirits of churches across the nation—too often settle into comfortable habits of sexual exploitation. Their regimen of erotic enjoyment gets locked in early in their careers. They travel to churches, preach the gospel, meet a woman or women, have sex, return home, go back the next year and do the same. Even ministers who stay in place can roam their congregations, or the congregations of their peers, in search of erotic adventure. What it comes down to is that the Martin Luther King Jrs., and the Snoop Doggy Doggs of black culture all want the same thing. The Snoops are up front about it. Most of us in the black church aren’t.

The same erotic dishonesty applies to another sexual identity: homosexuality. The notorious homophobia of the black church just doesn’t square with the numerous same-sex unions taking place, from the pulpit to the pew. One of the most painful scenarios of black church life is repeated Sunday after Sunday with little notice or collective outrage. A black minister will preach a sermon railing against sexual ills, especially homosexuality. At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sing, and to sign, his theological death sentence. His presence at the end of such a sermon symbolizes a silent endorsement of the preacher’s message. Ironically, the presence of his gay Christian body at the highest moment of worship also negates the preacher’s attempt to censure his presence, to erase his body, to deny his legitimacy as a child of God. Too often, the homosexual dimension of eroticism remains cloaked in taboo or blanketed in theological attack. As a result, the black church, an institution that has been at the heart of black emancipation, refuses to unlock the oppressive closet for gays and lesbians.

One of the most vicious effects of the closet is that some of the loudest protesters against gays and lesbians in the black church are secretly homosexual. In fact, many, many preachers who rail against homosexuality are themselves gay. Much like the anti-Semitic Jew, the homophobic gay or lesbian Christian secures his or her legitimacy in the church by denouncing the group of which he or she is a member, in this case an almost universally despised sexual identity. On the surface, such an act of self-hatred is easy. But it comes at a high cost. Homophobic rituals of self-hatred alienate the gay or lesbian believer from his or her body in an ugly version of erotic Cartesianism: splitting the religious mind from the homosexual body as a condition of Christian identity. This erotic Cartesianism is encouraged when Christians mindlessly repeat about gays and lesbians, “we love the sinner but we hate the sin.” A rough translation is “we love you but we hate what you do.” Well, that mantra worked with racists: we could despise what racist whites did while refusing to despise white folk themselves, or whiteness per se. (Of course, there were many blacks who blurred that distinction and hated white
folk as well as they pleased.) But with gay and lesbian identity, to hate what they do is to hate who they are. Gays and lesbians are how they have sex. (I’m certainly not reducing gay or lesbian identity to sexual acts. I’m simply suggesting that the sign of homosexual difference, and hence the basis of their social identification, is tied to the role of the sex act in their lives.)

The black church must develop a theology of homoeroticism, a theology of queerness. (Well, if we want to be absolutely campy, we might term it a theology for
Afriqueermericans
.) After all, if any group understands what it means to be thought of as queer, as strange, as unnatural, as evil, it’s black folk. A theology of queerness uses the raw material of black social alienation to build bridges between gay and lesbian and straight black church members. The deeply entrenched cultural and theological bias against gays and lesbians contradicts the love ethic at the heart of black Christianity. Virulent homophobia mars the ministry of the black church by forcing some of our leading lights into secret and often selfdestructive sexual habits. James Cleveland, considered the greatest gospel artist of the contemporary black church, died several years ago, it is rumored, from AIDS. Aside from embarrassed whispers and unseemly gossip, the black church still hasn’t openly talked about it. Perhaps if gay and lesbian black church members could come out of their closets, they could leave behind as well the destructive erotic habits that threaten their lives.

The black church should affirm the legitimacy of homoerotic desire by sanctioning healthy unions between consenting gay and lesbian adults. After all, promiscuity, not preference, eats away at the fabric of our erotic integrity. Are gays and lesbians who remain faithful to their partners committing a greater sin than married heterosexuals who commit adultery? The ridiculousness of such a proposition calls for a radical rethinking of our black Christian theology of sexuality.

Central to the doctrine of Incarnation in the black church is the belief that God identified with the most despised members of our society by becoming the most despised member of our society. Sunday after Sunday, black ministers invite us to imagine God as, say, a hobo, or a homeless person. Well, imagine God as gay. Imagine God as lesbian. Is the gay or lesbian body of God to be rejected? Better still, isn’t God’s love capable of redeeming a gay or lesbian person? The traditional black theological answer has been yes, if that person is willing to “give up” his or her sin—in this case, being gay or lesbian—and turn to God. But a more faithful interpretation of a black theology of love and liberation asserts that God takes on the very identity that is despised or scorned—being black, say, or being poor, or being a woman—to prove its worthiness as a vehicle for redemption. We don’t have to stop being black to be saved. We don’t have to stop being women to be saved. We don’t have to stop being poor to be saved. And we don’t have to stop being gay or lesbian to be saved. Black Christians, who have been despised and oppressed for much of our existence, should be wary of extending that oppression to our lesbian sisters and gay brothers.

The black church continues to occupy the center of black culture. Although most black folk have never officially joined its ranks, the influence of the black church spreads far beyond its numbers. The black church raised up priests to administer healing to wounded spirits in slavery. It produced prophets to declare the judgment of God against racial injustice. The black church has been at the forefront of every major social, political, and moral movement in black culture. It remains our most precious institution. It has the opportunity to lead again, by focusing the black erotic body in its loving, liberating lens. A daughter of the black community, Jocelyn Elders, attempted to bring the sharp insight and collective wisdom of our tradition to a nation unwilling to ponder its self-destructive sexual habits. Let’s hope that her advice won’t be lost on those closer to home. Like Marvin Gaye, black churches and communities need sexual healing. If we get healed, we might just be able to help spread that health beyond our borders.

Please elaborate on your theology of homoeroticism.

What I mean by theology of homoeroticism is a theology that is grounded in the biblical admonition to acknowledge sexuality as a crucial function of human identity, and as a symbol of the interpenetration of the divine and the human, signifying a fusion of planes. Since we are grounding our sexual ethics in a theology that speaks poignantly to human experience, it is natural to turn to the Bible to justify, legitimate, or sanction our beliefs. I believe that there is theological and biblical space for the articulation of a homoerotic instinct, homosocial ideas, and a homosexual identity. People who happen to be same-sex identified can certainly find support within our churches.

Furthermore, I sought, in my notion of a theology of homoeroticism, to underscore an implicitly homoerotic moment within the ecclesiastical order of black Christendom. Think, for instance, of men claiming to love Jesus standing on their feet in fully enthralled ecstasy, emoting about their connection to a God who became flesh and dwelled among us, as a man. For men to publicly proclaim their intense, unsurpassed love for a God who became a man leaves the door open for homoerotic identification and communion within the liturgy of the black ecclesial universe. In short, the black church provides space for men and women to love their own gender in erotic ways with biblical and theological sanction. My conception of the theology of homoeroticism is an attempt to develop a theologically sound and biblically justified relationship of love that is the underlying ethic within any sensual order, regardless of one’s orientation, whether it is bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, gay, lesbian, or heterosexual. The prevailing ethic in any sexuality ought to always highlight the precise function of love in the adjudication of competing erotic claims. Whenever there is a contest between destructive incarnations of lust and righteous expressions of erotic communion, love promotes the latter. That doesn’t mean that lust or fantasy cannot embody an ethically justifiable sexual urge. But it does mean that we have to pay attention to how a relationship of justice is exercised within the context of a sexual ethic. Sexual relations are related to the theological and moral ideals to which we subscribe.

When I think about homosexuality or any sexual identity, the prevailing idea is not simply satisfaction of the erotic drive and the sexual urge, but the manner in which the human being is recognized as the center of one’s sexual ethic. Corporeal identity, theologically speaking, should exist in relationship to the divine order that prescribes human activity. A homoerotic theology is an acknowledgment that there are legitimate means to express same-sexuality, and the fantasies and erotic desires that grow from it. It also holds that there’s a way of theologically asserting love as the predicate of such unions, since love ought to be the central principle of any sexual orientation. The question should be, regardless of orientation: How does this relationship enable the flourishing of an ethic of selfconcern and other-regard? If that basic test is met within a sexual ethic, then the content of one’s sexual identity should not be dictated by traditional theological proscriptions of homoerotic union. Even in the black church we can affirm the sexual legitimacy of brothers and sisters who do not meet the heterosexual norm, and still support them as fellow members of a religious community.

A theology of homoeroticism points to the effort to embody the full expression of God’s sexual gifts to us, and to find legitimate theological support for the articulation of a broad erotic order within the context of our religious beliefs. If we can’t do it there then we can’t do it anywhere. Sex and salvation should be seen as neither mutually exclusive nor identical. However, they are often mutually reinforcing, since sexual union within a religious ethic is often a symbol of God’s care and love for the other. Erotic unions at their best engender the salvific
function of intimate contact between God and believer, a relationship often pictured as one between a lover and his beloved. In that light, a believer’s sexual identity should be fully supported within an ecclesial context that embraces the erotic as a symbol of divine presence and affirmation.

A theology of homoeroticism combats recalcitrant prejudice against alternative sexualities—prejudices, by the way, that parallel bigotry against the black body in Western thought and culture. That makes it even more painful to observe the failure of the black church to embrace the full range of sexual identities that have been mobilized and manifested within our communities. In so doing, we have mimicked the sexual bigotry that has bedeviled us. I suppose such behavior is to be expected, since we have failed to be just and fair with gender relations in the black church. If the gendered character of heterosexual ethics has presented a profound challenge to the black church, God knows that homosexuality and homoeroticism present a formidable challenge. That’s even the case for theologies of liberation that have been promulgated and, in limited form, adapted in the black church.

Of course, we can account for such resistance to a liberating sexual ethic by tracing it to the schism between body and soul that many black believers adapted in the face of feeling that they had to defend themselves against a charge of sexual profligacy, perversion, and impurity. Thus the black church bought into the division of the body and soul that the white church foisted on us to justify its psychic, moral, and material investments in chattel slavery and racial hegemony. The white church justified its assault on black humanity and its evil experiment in slavery by saying, “at least we’re taking care of their souls,” a goal they sought to achieve by containing and controlling the black body. In the minds of white Christians, the black body was a savage body. In a white Christian prism, the ethical end, the moral telos, of slavery was the social, psychic, and theological subordination of the African savage to European Christianity. This ideological matrix provided the crass ethical utilitarianism for European-American Christianity’s justification of slavocracy: “As long as we’re addressing their soul’s salvation, we can do what we will to their bodies.” But this theological schizophrenia that rested on the artificial division of body and soul was more Greek than Hebraic, since the latter insists on the essential unity of corporeal and spiritual identity. Such theological schizophrenia introduced into our culture some vicious beliefs that have negatively impacted our racial self-perceptions, not only as subjects of our own sexuality but also as objects of the criminalization of our sexuality by white culture. The black church hasn’t done a good job of resisting the worst elements of theological schizophrenia, leading us to suppress alternative, unconventional, and transgressive sexualities in the black church and beyond.

So that almost leads directly to my next question: Do you think that black homosexuals can use the Bible for sexual healing? If yes, how, and what kind of healing?

Black homosexuals can definitely use the Bible for sexual healing. They can do so because the biblical texts are a reflection of historical struggles with enlightened revelation. God has placed on the hearts and minds of human beings beliefs about how we should live our lives, even though such beliefs are fallible since they are mediated by the human voice and cognition. The Scriptures reflect the attempt of human beings to wrestle with divine revelation within the context of our particular histories, given cultures and local traditions. In interpreting biblical texts, we must always pay attention to what biblical scholars call the
Sitz im Leben
—the historical context within which scriptural revelations emerged.

Consequently, we must always be on the lookout for the political hermeneutic of a biblical text. What I mean by political hermeneutic is that the horizon of interpretation is always shaded by the social order in which readers and hearers discover themselves. We must remember that the Bible was compiled over the course of a few centuries. That means that there are an incredibly diverse array of identities, intentions, ethical limits, and political philosophies articulated within the discursive and theological perimeters that shape the interpretation of the Bible and God’s revelation. Even though some of us think of the Bible as the inspired word of God—the transcendental truth of eternity mediated through written revelation—we must not forget the critical role of the amanuensis. Whether it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or the scribes of the Pentateuch, or one of the ostensible authors in the JEDP documentary hypothesis, the truth is, they were secretaries—or as Mary J. Blige might say, and I’ll pronounce this phonetically, seckuh-taries! And secretaries can get stuff wrong, sometimes by mistake! They can leave the i’s undotted, the t’s uncrossed, or they may occasionally impose on a document their own beliefs or shades of their own meaning.

Remember that Paul says at one point in the Scriptures—and I’m paraphrasing—“Now this is what God says, and this is what I’m telling you.” So he at least tried to gesture toward a hermeneutical ethic that acknowledged the implicit human character that shapes the record of God’s inspiration. He at least tried to distinguish between human interpolations and divine revelation—a notion that is fraught with peril, to be sure, since providence and revelation are concepts often manipulated by religious elites or those with claims to esoteric knowledge. Moreover, Paul metaphorically suggested the human limitations of comprehending divine revelation and the fallibility of interpreting God’s word when he declared, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”

I note all of this as a backdrop to saying, yes, as with any of us, I think gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, and all other-sexed black Christians can certainly turn to the Bible for sexual healing. After all, this is the great book of love that points to the appropriate ethical etiquette for our sexual behavior. As such, it points back to God. The mores, folkways, and moral traditions that shape us inevitably impinge on our consciousness and color our understanding of what we should do and how we should behave. Conscience is the product of a historical encounter with ethical ideals. One’s conscience is always shaped by the culture
in which one is reared. Therefore our beliefs about the Bible, about ethical behavior, about good and bad, and about how we should adhere to certain principles are unavoidably shaped by the political and social and moral contexts we inherit and create. Depending on how it has been deployed and interpreted, the Bible has been both the Ur-text and Err-text of black ethical existence. It has been the great, grand narrative thread that has been weaved throughout the collective history of African American people and through the individual consciousness of millions of blacks, even if they didn’t officially join the church. “The Book” has been the dominant interpretive touchstone for the ethical behavior of African people in America and other parts of the black diaspora.

Black homosexuals can turn to the Bible for sexual healing, just as many of us heterosexuals have, because it tells us that God loves us, that God created us in God’s image, and that we should learn to accept ourselves as we are. Of course, I realize that the process of self-acceptance is an index of our evolving spiritual maturity. It takes profound spiritual and moral wisdom to claim with our own lives on full theological display that what God made is good. We can make such a claim despite the critical modifications introduced into Christian thought through Augustinian themes of original sin and the ethical miasma that was its consequence in “the fall.” We must accentuate the positive dimensions of human identity and self-conception as the admittedly distorted reflection of the
imago dei
. Still, we can affirm our re-created goodness through discourses of redemption open to
all
human beings. There is no asterisk in the biblical promise of redemption that excludes homosexuals. We have to reclaim the primordial goodness of God that ultimately took human form in Jesus. As they say in Christian circles, God didn’t make any junk, and that means that whomever God has made, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is a good person.

I realize there are debates about biological determinism versus social construction in sexuality. I know there’s a dispute about whether gay and lesbian sexuality, indeed all sexualities, reflect an inherent predisposition biologically implanted in the human genetic code that regulates sexual orientation, or if sexual identity is the result of human choice. I happen to believe that gays and lesbians can no more get up tomorrow morning and be heterosexual than heterosexuals can get up tomorrow morning and be gay or lesbian. I’m not gainsaying the fluidity of sexual identity, the elasticity of erotic urges, the changeability of passionate proclivities, or the broad continuum of sensual engagements and stimuli. And I’m not suggesting that biological urges are not socially constructed. After all, even homosexuals who grow up in a culture where their identity and self-perception is shaped in the crucible of heterosexism, internalize the belief that it is a sin or an unbearable stigma to be gay or lesbian. Thus they often suppress their sexual desires and erotic urges, whether they are conceived to be “natural” or constructed.