IGF CultureWatch

First published in the Chicago Free Press on January 4, 2006.

The Vatican's new Instruction barring gay men from training for the priesthood is a farrago of unjustified assumptions, begged questions, circular reasoning, illogical arguments, stolen concepts and confused metaphors with no basis in either Catholic doctrine or current psychology.

The nerve of the new Instruction in paragraph 4 reads:

The candidate to the ordained ministry, therefore, must reach affective maturity. Such maturity will allow him to relate correctly to both men and women...

"Affective maturity" is not defined but since "affective" refers to feelings or emotions the term refers to emotional maturity.

Then paragraphs 8 and 9 state that:

those who ... present deep-seated homosexual tendencies ... find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.

So although the Instruction evades saying so explicitly, gay men are barred from priesthood training because they are thought to have immature sexual feelings.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Catholic tradition or doctrine supports the idea that homosexual desire constitutes any sort of immaturity. Catholic doctrine and tradition had always held that homosexual behavior was sinful but it never argued that that sin was the result of a psychosexual immaturity.

So where does this idea come from? The answer is: Freud.

Starting with an apriori assumption of a natural "procreative instinct," Freud developed a fanciful, Rube Goldberg-like theory of psychosexual development in which a male infant passes through narcissistic oral, anal and phallic stages, reaches an Oedipal desire to have sex with his mother, then fearing castration by his jealous father transfers his love to another woman, thus progressing to a glorious heterosexuality.

Men are homosexual, Freud thought, when this progression is inhibited-Freud never explains how-and the child is fixated at some preliminary stage of development: blocked at a narcissistic stage, or fails to negotiate the Oedipal phase, or fears castration by a woman's vagina, etc.

However bizarre all this seems, the result was that homosexuals were viewed as psychosexually immature. In his 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud wrote that homosexuals "have failed to accomplish some part of normal sexual development." And in his 1935 Letter to an American Mother Freud wrote, "We consider (homosexuality) to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development."

Commentaries on the Instructions distributed by the Catholic news agency Zenit spell out the rationale in even more obviously Freudian terms.

If the Catholic Church now adopts Freud's early 20th-century view that homosexual desire constitutes psychosexual immaturity, then what argument could it have offered before 1900 for barring gay men from the priesthood? The answer is: none whatsoever. So either forbidding (celibate) gay men to enter seminaries is a novel doctrine or else the church has always officially forbidden (celibate) gay men but never had any rationale for it.

Worse yet for the church, Freudian ideology, particularly with regard to sex, is now entirely discredited, added to the junk heap of pseudo-science along with astrology, phrenology, N-rays, phlogiston, etc. Few psychiatrists and psychoanalysts now take it seriously. And no other theory supports the idea that gays are psychosexually immature. So the church is left without an intellectually respectable basis for the view it has just adopted.

And there are further problems with the Instruction. It claims that gay men cannot "relate correctly to both men and women" and that only heterosexual men can develop "a true sense of spiritual fatherhood toward the Church community."

But where has church teaching ever spelled out why or how priests are supposed to relate to men and women differently? So if a priest with an erotic inclination toward women is able to relate equally to men and women-say, with loving, pastoral concern-despite his erotic desire for one rather than the other, it follows logically that a priest with an erotic inclination toward men should be able to do the same. So the church's argument fails.

And since the requisite "fatherhood" is spiritual, not sexual, there is no reason why gay men cannot fulfill that role. One has only to look around to find numerous gay men successfully performing the non-sexual child-rearing and mentoring tasks of actual fatherhood for their adoptive or foster children. So the church is left without a valid argument for its demand.

The Instruction notes the requirement that a priest "should seek to reflect in himself, as far as possible, the human perfection which shines forth in the incarnate Son of God." But this would exclude gay men only if Jesus' perfection included heterosexuality. But there is not a word of biblical evidence that Jesus had any specific sexual orientation. So the church's argument fails.

Finally, paragraph 11 states explicitly that:

in responding to the call of God, the man (candidate priest) offers himself freely to him in love.

It is hardly frivolous to observe that so long as the Catholic Church conceives of its god as male, a gay man will be more readily able than a heterosexual man to make this affective offering with wholehearted, unconflicted commitment.

In a 1980 essay entitled "The Boys on the Beach," conservative writer Midge Decter described the gay men who summered at Fire Island in the 1960s:

No households of wives and children requiring security; no entailments of school bills, doctor and dentist bills; no lifetime of acquiring the goods needed for family welfare and the goods desired for family entertainment, with a margin left over for that greatest of all heterosexual entailments, the Future: no such households burdened the overwhelmingly vast majority of homosexuals.

Homosexuality, argued Decter, is a flight from adult responsibility. Heterosexual men who accept their share of the burden to raise the next generation feel "mocked," especially by gay men, because male "homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment." Being gay, she concluded, means "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence."

From early on in Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar-contending film by director Ang Lee, I found myself thinking about Decter's essay.

The basic story is by now familiar: two young men, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), meet and fall in love in 1963 while tending sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. Subsequently, they each get married and have kids but get together a couple of times a year to go "fishing," the euphemism they give their wives for the periodic renewal of their affair. The story ends in 1983.

There's much to admire in this film. Ennis and Jack bust stereotypes of gay men. They aren't effeminate. When they meet, they are modern "cowboys" who live on profanity, fighting, country music, beer, and hard work for low pay. Yet their masculinity is also not the posed hyper-masculinity of leather, Levi, and uniform fetish scenes.

There's no mention of Stonewall, Harvey Milk, or even San Francisco. It's a welcome corrective to the urban-centered study of gay life in America.

For the most part we do not see sensationalized homophobia. That would be too easy. Instead, we see the everyday contempt for gays that still suffuses life in much of the country. Disdain for homosexuals mostly comes to Ennis and Jack in the sneers of others and in their own shame.

Still, the film-or more precisely, the gay reaction to it-offers some support for the hoary notion that homosexuality is "taking oneself out of the tides of ordinary mortal existence." Critics have rushed to praise Brokeback Mountain as a universal love story. Perhaps that's true, but it's not the whole story.

It's almost never mentioned that their affair is juxtaposed to the consequences of neglecting life's obligations. The first time Ennis and Jack have sex they shirk their responsibility to watch the flock. That night, a sheep is killed by a wolf; the aftermath is graphically depicted. A large portion of the flock is ultimately lost while they frolic.

More importantly, in their occasional fishing retreats, Ennis and Jack leave behind families. They are adulterers. This doesn't seem so terrible in the case of Jack, whose cartoonish wife is obsessed with her career and her press-on nails. But in the case of Ennis the result is poignant. Rushing out of the house to meet Jack, Ennis bodily passes off his two daughters to his wife (Michelle Williams), who stoically bears the burden left by a homosexual fleeing his entrapment. Eventually they divorce.

The film speaks powerfully to the sense of lost love and opportunity every closeted gay person must feel. "Heartbreaking" is not too strong a word to describe the loss this film confronts us with. But it's difficult to buy the widespread idea that the love between Jack and Ennis is an unvarnished good thing made tragic only by a homophobic world.

Part of the reason is that the love story itself is a bit strained. Hollywood delights in acting of the stumbling-and-mumbling sort (think James Dean and Marlon Brando) because it is thought to convey authenticity. Ledger in particular nails this style. But the spare dialogue between Jack and Ennis puts a lot of interpretive pressure on the meaningful glances they exchange.

Their sexual intimacy seems contrived. The sex-full of wrestling and snorting-is the kind that a person who's neither gay nor a cowboy imagines gay cowboys must have.

But the deeper reason their love doesn't completely register is that every time they go off together one is left wondering, what about the kids? What Ennis and Jack experience as an exhilarating liberation from the mundane and the stifling is for their families an abandonment. Ennis at least talks about living up to his familial obligations, but in truth he's checked out of them almost from the start.

For these reasons, I couldn't quite join in the symphony of sniffles I heard in the theater at the undeniably sad end of the film.

Yes, the world around Ennis and Jack channeled them into unhappy heterosexual lives. All concerned-including their families-would have been better off if that hadn't happened. By itself, that's a powerful argument against homophobia.

I don't have good answers to the problems confronting Ennis and Jack in their time and circumstance. I only have more questions than are currently being asked. Once families have been formed, do the interests of those families count for anything at all? Do we think Ennis and Jack have no obligation except to fulfill their own deepest desires? Do we really believe that the only tragedy in the film is the thwarted love of these two men? Why is nobody in the gay community even considering the moral complexity Brokeback Mountain presents?

Which brings us back to Midge Decter. Much that's happened in the past quarter-century has thoroughly discredited her view of homosexuality as escapism. She was wrong about gays even then, and she's more wrong now. But you would not know that from the sentimental and myopic reaction to this film, which sees in a multi-layered calamity only a beautiful but doomed gay romance.