Gay Marriage and the Generational Shift.

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Most high school seniors support further restrictions on abortion, but are twice as likely as adults to support legal recognition of gay marriages. Those findings come from a highly regarded national poll by researchers at Hamilton College and Zogby International. It's further evidence that (1) we'll win the gay marriage fight in time, and (2) abortion and gay legal equality are not linked concepts except in the minds of certain activists.

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Anti-Gay Conspiracy Theories: The Latest.

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The anti-gay right's latest bit of dangerous nonsense gets dissected by Jon Rowe over at Positive Liberty. At issue: a new book by David Kupelian titled The Marketing of Evil. In the section on gay rights, Kupelian suggests that the gay movement is following a "master plan" that was spelled out in a book by gay PR strategists back in 1990. That long-since out of print work is After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s, by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.

The funny thing is, while After the Ball was a smart book about using the mainstream media to counter negative stereotypes and promote honest representations of gay lives, it was dismissed by many self-styled progressive gay activists at the time as a "sell out" that advocated "assimilation" and substituted a "marketing strategy" for radical, grass-roots coalition building on the left. That right-wing conspiracy buffs think it was some sort of master plan would actually be funny if it weren't so hateful.

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01/1/06 - 01/7/06

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Anti-AIDS or Anti-Sex?

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I don't get this protest. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles is decrying this Viagra ad. "What are you doing on New Year's Eve?" a smiling gray-haired man asks in a full-pager that ran in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 29. The text reads: "Fact: Viagra can help guys with all degrees of erectile dysfunction-from mild to severe."

"Not only does sending this reckless message contribute to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, but it is also part of a pattern of irresponsible direct-to-consumer advertising by the drug industry," said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS group.

Either they're anti-sex on New Year's Eve, or just reflexively anti the drug industry (or the Wall Street Journal, or capitalism, or fun, or...). I'm sure Viagra is misused, by gays and others, as a party drug. But it has also enabled up to millions of older men to enjoy sexual relations again. The AIDS activists merely seem churlish.

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All Brokeback, All the Time…

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I'm not going to keep posting what are likely to be gazillions of interesting pieces on the film, but here are two before I sign off.

Gene Shalit's pan calls the film "wildly overpraised" and labels Jack Twist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a "sexual predator." What's the Today show got against this movie, anyway? Actually, Shalit has written supportively about his gay son, but clearly he still has issues with what gay men do under the covers. (Here's a link to view his review.)

On a more positive note, New York Daily News columnist Jack Mathews writes:

Like "Curb Your Enthusiasm's" Larry David, who voiced his tongue-in-cheek objections to "Brokeback" in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, I felt that "cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat" to make me watch a pair of range riders steam up a pup tent.

But I've now seen the movie three times (twice with my wife, if you have to know) and it is one of the most devastating Hollywood love stories of all time.

No word on whether Larry David was ever lassoed into the theater, though.
-- Stephen Miller

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Roundup: Still More ‘Brokeback’ Yet Again…

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Dale Carpenter's newly posted critique of Brokeback Mountain has provoked spirited debate in gay papers where it's been publshed. My own supportive views toward the film have already been stated, but here are some other interesting takes.

Guest blogger Ross Douthat of the Atlantic, on Andrew Sullivan's site, has positive things to say but also argues that:

The straight men are all either strutting oafs, bitter bigots like Jack Twist's father, or "nice-guy" weaklings like Alma's second husband, whose well-meaning effeminacy contrasts sharply with Ennis's rugged manliness. Jack and Ennis are the only "real men" in the story, and their love is associated with the high country and the vision of paradise it offers-a world of natural beauty and perfect freedom, of wrestling matches and campfires and naked plunges into crystal rivers-and a world with no girls allowed. Civilization is women and babies and debts and fathers-in-law and bosses; freedom is the natural world, and the erotic company of men. It's an old idea of the pre-Christian world come round again-not that gay men are real men too; but that real men are gay.

Blogger Tim Hulsey is critical of some of the critics, observing that:

David Letterman in particular has conducted a one-man crusade against the "gay cowboy movie," and Nathan Lane famously performed a minstrel-show Broadway parody of Brokeback on the Today show.

That the openly gay Lane would attack the film is less surprising than it would seem: I suspect that gay men who have adopted an ironic "camp" sensibility as a personal defense mechanism will prove especially resistant to the film. When I saw Brokeback in D.C.'s Dupont Circle, one young gay man heckled the screen, Rocky Horror style. He sounded like the sort of fellow who was beaten throughout high school, and who learned that a withering wit can be the best defense of the powerless. In a strange way, he seemed to belong on the screen with Jack and Ennis.

And finally, this piece by a gay escort is surprisingly sad, as he predicts a rise in his clientele:

Students graduate, soldiers return to citizenry, and so the one-shot lovers must say goodbye. And like Jack and Ennis, many of my clients went on to pass year after wistful year in a life nature never truly intended. Until something happened. ...

Ostensible business trips to the coast will be scheduled, where men like me lie in wait. After the second or third time a man trucks back home to International Falls from the multiplex, and then maybe the gay bar, in Duluth, the family computer's potential to track down his bible camp paramour may prove too tempting. Men will take risks after seeing this film.

Which may, I suppose, lead back to Carpenter's concerns about hurt wives and abandoned kids (or alternatively, liberated souls now free to love). But whatever your response, a film that provokes reactions this strong is a force to be reckoned with, I reckon.

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Twisted Lives, Bad Law.

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Yet another religious conservative exposed. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive! Yes, Pastor Latham is a sad hypocrite (or at least a lost soul mired in fear and self-loathing ). But why should anyone be subjected to a night in jail (prior to release on bail) and face up to a year in prison just for asking another male to join him in his hotel room for sex?

I guess trying to engage a prostitute is the alleged "crime," but I don't think it's routine for males soliciting sex from females (even if they turn out to be plainclothed cops) to face such draconian treatment. Welcome to supposedly post-sodomy law America!

And yes, I realize that Pastor Latham no doubt supported anti-prostitution and anti-sodomy laws, too.

More: The arrest occurred outside a gay resort, as noted in more detail in the posted comments.

Update and clarification: From the AP account, it seems the matter isn't about allegedly soliciting a male prostitute, just soliciting oral sex to occur in a hotel room. Welcome to Oklahoma, where apparently the Supreme Court's Lawrence ruling (voiding sodomy laws) doesn't hold.

Pastor Latham, a member of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee, claims the police are lying about the sex request. If that defense doesn't seem plausible, will his lawyers rely on Lawrence? Stay tuned.

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Gay Marriage, Less Welfare.

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A report on how same-sex marriage would be economically advantageous to New Hampshire, by the Institute for Gay & Lesbian Strategic Studies, finds that "savings from means-tested public benefit programs" would come to $400,000 annually. The report doesn't go into details, but it seems the explanation is that with marriage (as opposed to shacking up), household incomes are viewed by the state as combined, making it more difficult to qualify for public assistance benefits.

Part of the value of marriage is that it legalizes a relationship of mutual support, so those who might individually fall on hard times have a partner they can lean on. And that's a good thing. As long as couples actually do get married, which requires a hefty dose of internalized social expectation in addition to legal equality.

More: Readers provide context regarding the New Hampshire marriage fight, in our posted comments.

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The Vatican Stumbles Again

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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.

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Brokeback and Straight Neurosis.

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TV's Larry David won't be seeing Brokeback Mountain. He says, in fact,

cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat, and even then I would make every effort to close my eyes and cover my ears.

But rest assured, some of his best friends are gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Meanwhile, in Britain's The Guardian, John Patterson remarks that the American western "has always throbbed with latent homoeroticism." And that Brokeback

wouldn't be in the least controversial...were America not unimaginably neurotic and puritanical about sex, straight or gay, in the first place.

He could call Larry David as his first witness.

More: Stephen Hunter, the Washington Post's movie critic, presents a similar examination in a piece titled Out in the West: Reexamining A Genre Saddled With Subtext."

More Recent Postings
12/25/05 - 12/31/05

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