On April 25th at 7:00 p.m., I arrived at the Hasted-Hunt Gallery in New York City’s gay ghetto, Chelsea, where a robust reception for the youthful participants of Soulforce’s Equality Ride was being held. The Equality Riders, some of whom have been the victims of hate crimes and expelled from Christian colleges because of their sexual orientation, are a bold band of young activists who have traveled across the country visiting some of the most virulent hotbeds of religious conservatism, Christian universities, to help end religious-based discrimination. Among the sixteen universities that the 33 riders visited on their journey, from March 5 through April 26, were Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
Sponsored by Soulforce, an organization that seeks “to stop spiritual violence against GLBT people,” the Equality Ride is the brainchild of Jacob Reitan, who is also one of its charismatic leaders. While an undergraduate at Northwestern, Reitan had gone to a gay bar one night, where he met a student from Wheaton College. He asked the student what it was like being gay at a college notorious for its harsh conservatism and anti-gay policies. But the student confessed that he was not out because it would put him in jeopardy of expulsion. When Reitan gasped at the horrible unfairness of it all, the student said he thought it was a good policy because homosexuality “is a sin.” That evening, he promised the closeted teen that he would return with a van full of GLBT students to rally against the school’s oppressive policies. He kept his promise, arriving on April 21st. It was for kids like the Wheaton boy that they went on the road with their peace-loving message. And there’s no doubt that they have provided a worthy education to their homophobic peers. They read them letters by closeted gay teens; they told their stories about the violence endured by those like Equality Rider Pam Diesel, who was the victim of a hate crime; they performed a skit in which they reversed roles and made homosexuality the norm and heterosexuality the aberration, asking straight students how it would make them feel; and peaceably approached people who presumably despised them, asking if they’d break bread with their group. Based on the principle of nonviolent resistance practiced by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and modeled on the Freedom Rides of the 1960’s, the Equality Riders’ movement is built around six foundational goals: to support closeted students who suffer from the policies of these institutions; to create a forum where GLBT issues can be discussed and debated without fear of reprisal; to open a dialogue with administrators at colleges and military academies with anti-gay policies and show them the suffering caused by such policies; to raise public awareness about the harm these bans inflict on GLBT people; to highlight the moral equality of the same-sex community; and to renew the spirits of the Equality Riders themselves. While I’m in awe of their ambitious agenda and find their collective attempt to dissolve the us-them dichotomy brave and admirable, I can’t quite convince my legs to make the leap onto their bandwagon. My first thought is that in style and rhetoric they resemble the Mattachine Society of the 1950’s, whose strategy was to suppress or conceal their queer differences by blending into mainstream society. But then Stonewall came along and the Sexual Revolution and everything that’s happened since then, which is what makes it odd that it’s still necessary to affect the styles of the 50’s to get through to some people. Indeed I find their politics a little frightening for what they reveal about just how far-reaching the Christian Right’s cultural influence really is. In their appeal to conservative Christian colleges, I see how thoroughly the religious Right has infiltrated queer politics and sensibilities. The best the Equality Riders could hope for at these institutions would be nothing akin to the vision of the gay liberationists who preceded us, who imagined a multicolored new world that embraced and celebrated difference. Doubtless that world of acceptance and equality has made real progress over the decades; yet always there is this ravenous conservatism, what Alfred Kinsey called “the forces of chastity,” that want to paint over our rainbow of differences at the behest of their simplistic and monochromatic world view. As much as I admire these young men and women and acknowledge their commitment and courage, I see severe limits to their political project. While appealing to the common humanity of fellow Christians, their movement implies that they should be accepted and welcomed by virtue of their Christian faith. But what about the rest of us? Who will be the new queer outcasts once the fundamentalists have embraced these tame, domesticated gays of Christ? The problem is not that religion and Christianity don’t embrace gays and lesbians; the problem is that Christianity and religion have this self-proclaimed power to say what’s good and righteous and to use words like “evil” and “sin” to castigate people they don’t happen to like. Until that power is gone, there will always be scapegoats and outcasts and queers.
