In May, I published an essay that was said to be my last post on homosexuality and the Orthodox Church. I seem to have lied. This essay will be the last one. I have already published an essay on sex in general. It’s called “A Pebble in My Shoe.” It’s probably a good idea to look that one up and read it before this one.
I will not write about women’s sexuality since it seems to be lot different than men’s (Other than that women should be allowed every kind of freedom). You can see it in that women often report going through a “lesbian phase,” whereas men seldom report a “gay phase.” Maybe this has to do with women’s history of oppression and the resulting humility required to admit a period of same-sex love, or to understand that sexual attraction is less tied to gender than was once thought. But maybe that’s wrong. I don’t know. Better for me not to discuss it.
Anyway, I believe that most men experience sexual attraction as something not strictly tied to gender, even though they may not say it out loud. I’ll call this large group #1. Then, among them, there are a small number attracted only to men. I’ll call us 10 percent and identify us as #2. I picked 10 percent because I once heard that gay men make up 10 percent of the total male population. I know 10 percent is rather high, but I’m only using it for convenience. Then there is another segment of men only attracted to women. I’ll call them #3 and assign them 10 percent too, but only for convenience. Just that 2 and 3 are both really small compared to 1.
For 3’s it is quite easy. If you’re attracted only to women, it’s pretty easy to think your desires mesh with the rules thought to have existed from time immemorial. A lot of thinking is not required. You simply wonder why number 2s don’t understand themselves to be sinful. They should automatically become monks. Forget the fact that there is hardly a sane monastic community around today. And that number 2s have no choice but to want that kind of ascetical life. Also ignored is the fact that marriage has changed a lot in the last 2,000 years. Today it is generally a bond between two equals, the center of whose partnership is the sex act that becomes holy to them. In the past it was ALWAYS polygamous (just look at the top couple tiers of a traditional iconostasis, and the people we supposedly emulate on display there.
The man was always in charge, and marriage was mainly a way to protect men from women’s scary sexuality, and to ensure the legitimacy of the man’s children. The modern sacrament bears almost no resemblance to this. But the 3s marriages fit, so they must be eternal. 3s and some 1s are also the ones who claim friends among the gays who remain celibate as they agree that this is certainly the Church’s teaching. I doubt the existence of these people because asking to meet them ALWAYS ends the conversation. Not sometimes but always. I think that what it really is about is that these folks think they know a celibate gay person, but don’t speak to him openly about it, as that would be dangerous to him or it would at least be an invasion of the right to privacy that no one else has. Or as I also suspect, that such people simply don’t exist, and their “friends” are just lying. Maybe that is why it is always a conversation-ender.
2s and 3s have always been around. I think 1s, for those who are extremely honest, aspire to be number 3, or imagine themselves hard to be 3s. These people, along with real 3s, want to discuss homosexuality, but it’s too early to do so. When a good time is, they won’t say. Just that it’s eternally too early. They are the same ones supposedly protecting their many gay friends who have chosen to be celibate, according to what is presented as the Church’s eternal teaching. I think they fear that their gay friends would continue to be asked to leave, and they don’t want to be bearers of that bad news. Better things stay ambiguous.
I think there are couple reasons that sexuality is hard to talk about. One is that sex is a moving target. By that I mean that what has come to be called the sex act is always transcended in favor of deeper and subtler forms of intimacy. This is why lovey-dovey old people are so ridiculous, and it why the Dirty Old Man is such a powerful archetype.
The other reason is the belief that the Orthodox Church has always had all the answers, so much so that it can be regarded as a kind of rule book. This is a lie. It ignores the teaching of Christ in John 16: 12-14. Where he says there are many things left to teach them, and that that will be the job of the “Spirit of Truth.”
We should be left with a lot of questions more than any answers. That we aren’t is a really bad sign, but reason so many evangelical heretics are storming in is that they have such a distorted view of the Church. Everything was always decided there. That’s what Tradition means to them. That everything has been decided. You just need to look deep enough. This is a Great Lie, but it is the skewed view of so many of the evangelical bullies (heretics are always bullies, they always come in like they own the place). And the weird thing is, they get away with it. One of the reasons is that genuine Christians are afraid of them.
It is a lie propagated by the evangelical heretics (Arians, really) who are now taking over the Church, with the encouragement of FRS Schmemman, Meyendorff, and Hopko, who had a very naive view of them. They are generally looking for a church that is a rule book for behavior. And they insist on finding that in the fathers, services, icons, and Tradition. They have so much more to thump in the Orthodox Church than they did before in their “nondenominational,” Assembly of God, or Baptist churches. Not just the Bible.
It’s probably too late to avoid their takeover of the OCA. They have not yet taken on the Greeks, but they soon will. And the Greeks are not ready for them. Again, they have deadly, naive view of them.
What has happened is revolutionary and very simple: sex has become separated from procreation. That’s all. Thanks to the Pill, sex no longer requires fertility for women. Women at long last can be seen as intelligent and capable as men. And children are not the inevitable outcome of sex (as they have been for all of recorded history). And gay men (what I’m calling number 2) are also having sex not tied to procreation. Before they would get married in order to have some children, then have one or more boys on the side.
Now things are different. Sex is, for the first time in history, removed from child-bearing. There are many implications. For one thing, the nuclear family has arisen. There was never anything like it before. The nuclear family—which has never existed before in the history of the world—is about man and woman as approximately equal partners, making all decisions jointly, with the sex act at the center of their relationship, validating it. They have approximately two children (see birth control), and this nuclear family lives in its own house. There has never been any sort of marriage like this.
But because it “works” according to the traditional liturgical model, 3s and couple of the other numbers are allowed to think it has always been thus— including the bizarre belief that marriage has always been about their nuclear family. This is frankly untrue. It also ignores the words of Christ in John 16: 12-13, as I said before.
It’s sobering to look at the example of Dr. Elizabeth Moberly, who was, for a while, one of the big stars of the anti-gay movement, and who has lately got thrown under the bus. She screamed that if gay folks would simply develop good relationships with people of the same sex, they’d be instantly “cured.“ Her fame for a while extended past the Orthodox Church (She was a spiritual daughter of Fr. Lev Gillet, who wrote under the pseudonym, “A Monk of the Eastern Church”). The throwing of her under the bus came when it was discovered that her Ph.D was in a wildly different field than was needed, and that her method just didn’t work. At that point, the church’s eternal teaching became that homosexuals were required to be monastic (before that, the eternal teaching was that God could change a homosexual into a heterosexual, if he’d only, gosh darn it, develop healthy relationships with same sex). Now she has simply disappeared. For a long time, she was the darling of the late Fr. Hopko and of Dr. Rossi. Later on they preached (loudly) that change was not possible, and that anyone who said so (including Dr. Moberly) should be ignored. Homosexuals were supposed to be monks. THAT was the Church’s eternal teaching. Ignore what I said before.
So, folks who are anti-homosexual usually quote the small handful of verses found in the Bible, conveniently ignoring the much larger number of verses telling them to take care of the unfortunate.
But, regardless, organized religion has become the religious aspect of conservatism. It’s likely only to get worse. All people of good will (gays and women among them) should flee organized religion, the Orthodox Church included. We will lead our lives outside the institution, while having as our models within the church St. Isaac of Syria, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Maria Skobstva, St Mark of Ephesus, and many others. In doing so, we will stand as a witness to those still inside for whom change is always a bad thing. This is a lie we must all bear witness to.
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