OVER THE LAST 25 years or so, there has been an amazing proliferation of thinking, writing, and publishing in the area of same-sex relations and religion. This work runs the gamut from highly specialized academic texts to run-of-the-mill scholarly articles, confessional memoirs, edgy pieces in magazines such as White Crane, and everything in between. One prevailing theme characterizes this massive output: it adopts a defiantly positive attitude with respect to the interface of same-sex desire and religion. Queer scholars and writers now rarely insist on defining religion as a uniformly oppressive force; instead, they prefer to examine the unexpected richness found in the encounter.
Such a remarkable growth is due in large measure to the broader phenomenon of the emergence of sexuality and gender studies in the academy. There have been two further influences, I would suggest. The first is the sustained and critical engagement with scripture, while the second, at least for gay male scholars, is the fact that so many of us have emerged from within a religious tradition. The very earliest work came from queer biblical scholars who wanted (were forced?) to refute the traditionally homophobic texts found in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. We spent a great deal of time doing that, and some have now suggested that enough is enough; we’ve played the exegetical game. One can say only so much about the story of Sodom as a text on hospitality. What’s more, several of us have come from within religious traditions and institutions, and this helps explain much about why we want to bridge religion and queer desire. This certainly is true in my case.
I was raised Catholic, and from early on decided that I wanted to be a priest. At the young and impressionable age of thirteen, I entered seminary with a religious order dedicated to Eucharistic devotion. Those were happy years for me. In seminary, I not only acquired a first-rate education, but I also developed a particular affinity for the richness and texture of religious ritual and practice. While nothing of a sexual nature happened during those years, I was slowly learning the meaning of same-sex desire. The all-male environment of the study hall, dormitory, and chapel structured my erotic and religious imagination. I learned that it was possible to yearn for other males—to want to be with them, to feel comfortable and at home with them—while at the same time preparing for the vowed life of a priest. From my earliest adolescence, therefore, religion and eroticism were not viewed as competing forces, but as complementary desires, a perspective no doubt finely honed by the inherently homosocial and homoerotic nature of Catholic culture.
Years later, when I was entering adulthood at the age of eighteen, I fell in love with a fellow seminarian who left after only a few months. Our relationship was close but platonic, yet his unexpected departure threw everything that I thought I knew about myself and my vocation into a tailspin. Feeling stranded and unsure of myself—I was, after all, still relatively immature sexually, having been in the closed environment of the seminary since a young age—I chose to leave in turn. There then began a period of uncertainty. I eventually entered college, choosing religious studies for my graduate work. Religion now became an intellectual and an academic commitment, a means of earning a living, even though I remained deeply conscious of its continuing emotional attraction. Parallel with this, I came out as a gay man.
I had always read broadly in gay literature, and I now started stumbling upon writers and fellow scholars who were writing about what it meant to be gay and religious or spiritual. I read even more avidly, and discovered, much to my pleasure, that they were speaking to things that I had always felt intuitively about my sexuality and my lingering religious feelings. For me, being gay was not only about difference, it was above all a gift—a grace, to use more traditional religious language. Here were fellow travelers, religious for the most part, who challenged me to try to understand and define my sexual desires for other men as possible venues of spiritual insight. They were saying that religion need not always be a source of hatred and violence for queer people. In itself, this was a liberating perspective.
Contrary to many queer folk of my generation, I have never felt that religion was a source of oppression or that I somehow had to reject it in order to complete myself. I started reflecting and writing about what it meant to be a believing gay man, drawing heavily from my Catholic background. Strangely enough, though perhaps not surprisingly, it was this very background that provided me with the language and imagery I needed to put my faith and my sexual identity into a holistic perspective. The two books that I wrote (noted in accompanying bio) in relatively rapid succession speak to this intellectual quest, the latter focusing more on the framing of my emerging same-sex desires in the context of a youthful devotion to Catholic saints.
Yet the calling to the priesthood never left me. Increasingly, I found myself at odds with the teachings and positions of the Catholic Church on sexual matters. Concurrently, Anglican friends and colleagues began inviting me to attend services. I discovered in a very natural and gradual way that I was comfortable with this tradition, and that there was something right and proper about women and lesbians and gay men celebrating at the altar. I also liked the idea of a church that is not afraid of tackling these issues in an open, forthright manner. The Anglican Church makes ordination a very real possibility for me as a gay man, and I have now embarked on studies which will, if all goes well, bring me to the priesthood in three years.
A significant part of my spiritual journey to this point has been my involvement with the gay men’s group of the American Academy of Religion (the AAR). It may sound paradoxical that a strictly scholarly organization should become a source of religious integration at a personal level, but I have never believed in the strict separation between one’s intellectual and one’s spiritual quest. What the gay men’s group has created and made possible, above all, is a generous and open atmosphere of reflection and positive exchange where I and others can share our work about queer religious lives, our own or those of others. We come to this as rigorous scholars and academics, of course, but also as queer people for whom religion matters, and matters very much indeed. We profess a variety of religious choices—or none at all—but our common purpose has been to understand religion as a positive forum for the expression of same-sex desire, specifically gay male desire. The work of the group has been cutting-edge in many respects, and this has often set the mark for research and scholarship in the field.
If one were to attempt an overview of gay male studies in religion, four general thematic approaches would emerge from our survey. The first is what I will call the assertive: it holds that there is no contradiction between being gay and religious. Not only has this fundamental approach been characteristic of my own work, but it is the starting premise for that of several, if not all, of my colleagues. We have deliberately left the “homosexuality-as-sin” paradigm behind us. Not only is this paradigm unproductive; it is fundamentally demeaning and oppressive. The second uncovers and reaffirms the continued presence and contributions of gay men in religious history: the historical. We look beyond, under, and through historical fact to discern the vitality and lingering aura of the queer religious touch. The third looks critically to religion as a source of same-sex desire: the subversive. From this insider’s viewpoint, it is the shape, color, and texture of the religious experience itself that holds the key to understanding and appreciating the dynamics of the erotic. Religious hunger and sexual hunger, in other words, are cut from the same cloth. A fourth—the flipside of the third—turns to gay culture as a legitimate source of religious insight and experience: the cultural. What gay people choose to do and create in their lives—their rituals, values, beliefs, relationships, and communities—can be transformed into inspired (and inspiring) sources of religious or spiritual identity and belonging. Rather often, this is expressed through the creation of culturally alternative lifestyles and communities.
I long ago discerned in my own life that there was nothing sinful or wrong about being gay, about desiring other males. Yes, the church in which I was raised condemned my choice, but I instinctively knew that its shrillness only masked its own uncertainty and vulnerability. With time, I have come to see and believe this with ever more clarity, as have many others. I turned to another religious tradition to give flesh to my longstanding hope of the priesthood, because I know that my gayness is, in part, why I am called: not in spite of it, but because of it. I have written about the gay presence in history, and I have explored the thin, porous line between the sacred and the erotic, between same-sex desire and religious longing. Whether it be me and my saints and holy figures, or other gay men and theirs, I have sought to understand and decipher the push and pull of the sacred, and its claims on our erotic lives. I even suggested somewhere that cruising and strip bars could be understood as sites for an encounter with the spirit, and I have rather indulgently read holiness into my own transitory bodily yearnings. I have done all this both as scholar and as believer, for the twain always meet; they cannot do anything else, unless I want to inflict harm on both.
In all religious traditions, a pilgrimage is a rather exceptional experience. Basically a rite of passage, it is meant to express devotion. People can undertake a pilgrimage for a variety of reasons: thanksgiving, repentance, intercession, enlightenment. The classic pilgrimage is an arduous journey in which something is given up, whether comfort, security, or status. In the pilgrimage, everyone is equal. Most importantly, the journey of the pilgrim is an intensely transformative affair. There should be a before, and a radically different after. It is the journey itself, rather than the moment of arrival, that constitutes the core experience of the pilgrimage, and that ultimately transforms the pilgrim into a fundamentally different person.
For the queer community, the image of a pilgrimage is, I would suggest, a particularly apt one. Apart from its religious overtones, it resonates with the idea of change and metamorphosis. Since the heady days of Stonewall, and through the ravages of the age of AIDS, we have moved ever forward. The last bastion for us to claim has been that of religion, and, despite the homophobic ring of its continued assaults, we have slowly pierced the barricades. In this effort, the role and place of queer scholars of religion has been paramount, for it is they who challenged us to see religion differently—not with the eyes of indifference and fear, but with the confident pose of the inspired critic. They have helped us to see ourselves in religion, rather than standing forever outside of it.
My own personal pilgrimage as a gay man has been part and parcel of this larger, more magnificent queer pilgrimage. I would also like to believe that my work as a scholar of religion has helped my fellow pilgrims move ever more resolutely forward, perhaps providing them at critical moments with a dash of transformative insight. Certainly, I have sought to reclaim our religious lives and our religious past, partly as a way of redeeming and reclaiming my own. I hope to continue to do so, both as a gay scholar and as a gay priest.
