The black church must develop a theology of homoeroticism, a theology of queerness. (Well, if we want to be absolutely campy, we might term it a theology for Afriqueermericans.) After all, if any group understands what it means to be thought of as queer, as strange, as unnatural, as evil, it’s black folk. A theology of queerness uses the raw material of black social alienation to build bridges between gay and lesbian and straight black church members. The deeply entrenched cultural and theological bias against gays and lesbians contradicts the love ethic at the heart of black Christianity. Virulent homophobia mars the ministry of the black church by forcing some of our leading lights into secret and often selfdestructive sexual habits. James Cleveland, considered the greatest gospel artist of the contemporary black church, died several years ago, it is rumored, from AIDS. Aside from embarrassed whispers and unseemly gossip, the black church still hasn’t openly talked about it. Perhaps if gay and lesbian black church members could come out of their closets, they could leave behind as well the destructive erotic habits that threaten their lives.
The black church should affirm the legitimacy of homoerotic desire by sanctioning healthy unions between consenting gay and lesbian adults. After all, promiscuity, not preference, eats away at the fabric of our erotic integrity. Are gays and lesbians who remain faithful to their partners committing a greater sin than married heterosexuals who commit adultery? The ridiculousness of such a proposition calls for a radical rethinking of our black Christian theology of sexuality.
Central to the doctrine of Incarnation in the black church is the belief that God identified with the most despised members of our society by becoming the most despised member of our society. Sunday after Sunday, black ministers invite us to imagine God as, say, a hobo, or a homeless person. Well, imagine God as gay. Imagine God as lesbian. Is the gay or lesbian body of God to be rejected? Better still, isn’t God’s love capable of redeeming a gay or lesbian person? The traditional black theological answer has been yes, if that person is willing to “give up” his or her sin—in this case, being gay or lesbian—and turn to God. But a more faithful interpretation of a black theology of love and liberation asserts that God takes on the very identity that is despised or scorned—being black, say, or being poor, or being a woman—to prove its worthiness as a vehicle for redemption. We don’t have to stop being black to be saved. We don’t have to stop being women to be saved. We don’t have to stop being poor to be saved. And we don’t have to stop being gay or lesbian to be saved. Black Christians, who have been despised and oppressed for much of our existence, should be wary of extending that oppression to our lesbian sisters and gay brothers.
The black church continues to occupy the center of black culture. Although most black folk have never officially joined its ranks, the influence of the black church spreads far beyond its numbers. The black church raised up priests to administer healing to wounded spirits in slavery. It produced prophets to declare the judgment of God against racial injustice. The black church has been at the forefront of every major social, political, and moral movement in black culture. It remains our most precious institution. It has the opportunity to lead again, by focusing the black erotic body in its loving, liberating lens. A daughter of the black community, Jocelyn Elders, attempted to bring the sharp insight and collective wisdom of our tradition to a nation unwilling to ponder its self-destructive sexual habits. Let’s hope that her advice won’t be lost on those closer to home. Like Marvin Gaye, black churches and communities need sexual healing. If we get healed, we might just be able to help spread that health beyond our borders.
Nineteen
HOMOTEXTUALITIES: THEBIBLE, SEXUALETHICS, AND THE THEOLOGY OF HOMOEROTICISM
The issue of homosexuality has reaped a whirlwind of controversy and acrimonious debate in most Christian communities. I believe that one of the explanations for black homophobia is the realization that if heterosexuality—the supposed “normal” sexuality— has been demonized in the West for centuries, then surely black homosexuality will only up the ante of black oppression. Thus, ironically enough, blacks identify with mainstream sexual values—the very mainstream that has censored and castigated black heterosexuality—when they practice homophobia. I am not arguing that homophobia has no homegrown black varieties; I am simply suggesting that such homophobia allows blacks to forge solidarity with a culture that has excluded them. Thus one form of bigotry is traded for another. In this interview, conducted by the very sharp cultural critic and gay activist Kheven LaGrone, I argue that lesbians, bisexuals, gays, transgender, and all other-sexed people have a right to the “tree of life,” and that they can find theological and biblical support for their religious and sexual existence. Although I have written elsewhere about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and other-sexuality, I have never been as extensive, analytical, wide-ranging, or as daring in discussing the subject as I am in this interview, a tribute to the provocative questions posed to me by LaGrone.
Please elaborate on your theology of homoeroticism.
What I mean by theology of homoeroticism is a theology that is grounded in the biblical admonition to acknowledge sexuality as a crucial function of human identity, and as a symbol of the interpenetration of the divine and the human, signifying a fusion of planes. Since we are grounding our sexual ethics in a theology that speaks poignantly to human experience, it is natural to turn to the Bible to justify, legitimate, or sanction our beliefs. I believe that there is theological and biblical space for the articulation of a homoerotic instinct, homosocial ideas, and a homosexual identity. People who happen to be same-sex identified can certainly find support within our churches.
Furthermore, I sought, in my notion of a theology of homoeroticism, to underscore an implicitly homoerotic moment within the ecclesiastical order of black Christendom. Think, for instance, of men claiming to love Jesus standing on their feet in fully enthralled ecstasy, emoting about their connection to a God who became flesh and dwelled among us, as a man. For men to publicly proclaim their intense, unsurpassed love for a God who became a man leaves the door open for homoerotic identification and communion within the liturgy of the black ecclesial universe. In short, the black church provides space for men and women to love their own gender in erotic ways with biblical and theological sanction. My conception of the theology of homoeroticism is an attempt to develop a theologically sound and biblically justified relationship of love that is the underlying ethic within any sensual order, regardless of one’s orientation, whether it is bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, gay, lesbian, or heterosexual. The prevailing ethic in any sexuality ought to always highlight the precise function of love in the adjudication of competing erotic claims. Whenever there is a contest between destructive incarnations of lust and righteous expressions of erotic communion, love promotes the latter. That doesn’t mean that lust or fantasy cannot embody an ethically justifiable sexual urge. But it does mean that we have to pay attention to how a relationship of justice is exercised within the context of a sexual ethic. Sexual relations are related to the theological and moral ideals to which we subscribe.
When I think about homosexuality or any sexual identity, the prevailing idea is not simply satisfaction of the erotic drive and the sexual urge, but the manner in which the human being is recognized as the center of one’s sexual ethic. Corporeal identity, theologically speaking, should exist in relationship to the divine order that prescribes human activity. A homoerotic theology is an acknowledgment that there are legitimate means to express same-sexuality, and the fantasies and erotic desires that grow from it. It also holds that there’s a way of theologically asserting love as the predicate of such unions, since love ought to be the central principle of any sexual orientation. The question should be, regardless of orientation: How does this relationship enable the flourishing of an ethic of selfconcern and other-regard? If that basic test is met within a sexual ethic, then the content of one’s sexual identity should not be dictated by traditional theological proscript
ions of homoerotic union. Even in the black church we can affirm the sexual legitimacy of brothers and sisters who do not meet the heterosexual norm, and still support them as fellow members of a religious community.
A theology of homoeroticism points to the effort to embody the full expression of God’s sexual gifts to us, and to find legitimate theological support for the articulation of a broad erotic order within the context of our religious beliefs. If we can’t do it there then we can’t do it anywhere. Sex and salvation should be seen as neither mutually exclusive nor identical. However, they are often mutually reinforcing, since sexual union within a religious ethic is often a symbol of God’s care and love for the other. Erotic unions at their best engender the salvific function of intimate contact between God and believer, a relationship often pictured as one between a lover and his beloved. In that light, a believer’s sexual identity should be fully supported within an ecclesial context that embraces the erotic as a symbol of divine presence and affirmation.
A theology of homoeroticism combats recalcitrant prejudice against alternative sexualities—prejudices, by the way, that parallel bigotry against the black body in Western thought and culture. That makes it even more painful to observe the failure of the black church to embrace the full range of sexual identities that have been mobilized and manifested within our communities. In so doing, we have mimicked the sexual bigotry that has bedeviled us. I suppose such behavior is to be expected, since we have failed to be just and fair with gender relations in the black church. If the gendered character of heterosexual ethics has presented a profound challenge to the black church, God knows that homosexuality and homoeroticism present a formidable challenge. That’s even the case for theologies of liberation that have been promulgated and, in limited form, adapted in the black church.
Of course, we can account for such resistance to a liberating sexual ethic by tracing it to the schism between body and soul that many black believers adapted in the face of feeling that they had to defend themselves against a charge of sexual profligacy, perversion, and impurity. Thus the black church bought into the division of the body and soul that the white church foisted on us to justify its psychic, moral, and material investments in chattel slavery and racial hegemony. The white church justified its assault on black humanity and its evil experiment in slavery by saying, “at least we’re taking care of their souls,” a goal they sought to achieve by containing and controlling the black body. In the minds of white Christians, the black body was a savage body. In a white Christian prism, the ethical end, the moral telos, of slavery was the social, psychic, and theological subordination of the African savage to European Christianity. This ideological matrix provided the crass ethical utilitarianism for European-American Christianity’s justification of slavocracy: “As long as we’re addressing their soul’s salvation, we can do what we will to their bodies.” But this theological schizophrenia that rested on the artificial division of body and soul was more Greek than Hebraic, since the latter insists on the essential unity of corporeal and spiritual identity. Such theological schizophrenia introduced into our culture some vicious beliefs that have negatively impacted our racial self-perceptions, not only as subjects of our own sexuality but also as objects of the criminalization of our sexuality by white culture. The black church hasn’t done a good job of resisting the worst elements of theological schizophrenia, leading us to suppress alternative, unconventional, and transgressive sexualities in the black church and beyond.
So that almost leads directly to my next question: Do you think that black homosexuals can use the Bible for sexual healing? If yes, how, and what kind of healing?
Black homosexuals can definitely use the Bible for sexual healing. They can do so because the biblical texts are a reflection of historical struggles with enlightened revelation. God has placed on the hearts and minds of human beings beliefs about how we should live our lives, even though such beliefs are fallible since they are mediated by the human voice and cognition. The Scriptures reflect the attempt of human beings to wrestle with divine revelation within the context of our particular histories, given cultures and local traditions. In interpreting biblical texts, we must always pay attention to what biblical scholars call the Sitz im Leben—the historical context within which scriptural revelations emerged.
Consequently, we must always be on the lookout for the political hermeneutic of a biblical text. What I mean by political hermeneutic is that the horizon of interpretation is always shaded by the social order in which readers and hearers discover themselves. We must remember that the Bible was compiled over the course of a few centuries. That means that there are an incredibly diverse array of identities, intentions, ethical limits, and political philosophies articulated within the discursive and theological perimeters that shape the interpretation of the Bible and God’s revelation. Even though some of us think of the Bible as the inspired word of God—the transcendental truth of eternity mediated through written revelation—we must not forget the critical role of the amanuensis. Whether it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or the scribes of the Pentateuch, or one of the ostensible authors in the JEDP documentary hypothesis, the truth is, they were secretaries—or as Mary J. Blige might say, and I’ll pronounce this phonetically, seckuh-taries! And secretaries can get stuff wrong, sometimes by mistake! They can leave the i’s undotted, the t’s uncrossed, or they may occasionally impose on a document their own beliefs or shades of their own meaning.
Remember that Paul says at one point in the Scriptures—and I’m paraphrasing—“Now this is what God says, and this is what I’m telling you.” So he at least tried to gesture toward a hermeneutical ethic that acknowledged the implicit human character that shapes the record of God’s inspiration. He at least tried to distinguish between human interpolations and divine revelation—a notion that is fraught with peril, to be sure, since providence and revelation are concepts often manipulated by religious elites or those with claims to esoteric knowledge. Moreover, Paul metaphorically suggested the human limitations of comprehending divine revelation and the fallibility of interpreting God’s word when he declared, “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.”
I note all of this as a backdrop to saying, yes, as with any of us, I think gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual, and all other-sexed black Christians can certainly turn to the Bible for sexual healing. After all, this is the great book of love that points to the appropriate ethical etiquette for our sexual behavior. As such, it points back to God. The mores, folkways, and moral traditions that shape us inevitably impinge on our consciousness and color our understanding of what we should do and how we should behave. Conscience is the product of a historical encounter with ethical ideals. One’s conscience is always shaped by the culture in which one is reared. Therefore our beliefs about the Bible, about ethical behavior, about good and bad, and about how we should adhere to certain principles are unavoidably shaped by the political and social and moral contexts we inherit and create. Depending on how it has been deployed and interpreted, the Bible has been both the Ur-text and Err-text of black ethical existence. It has been the great, grand narrative thread that has been weaved throughout the collective history of African American people and through the individual consciousness of millions of blacks, even if they didn’t officially join the church. “The Book” has been the dominant interpretive touchstone for the ethical behavior of African people in America and other parts of the black diaspora.
Black homosexuals can turn to the Bible for sexual healing, just as many of us heterosexuals have, because it tells us that God loves us, that God created us in God’s image, and that we should learn to accept ourselves as we are. Of course, I realize that the process of self-acceptance is an index of our evolving spiritual maturity. It takes profound spiritual and moral wisdom to claim with our own lives on full theological display that what God made is good. We can make such a claim despite the critical modifications introduced into Christian thought through Augustinian the
mes of original sin and the ethical miasma that was its consequence in “the fall.” We must accentuate the positive dimensions of human identity and self-conception as the admittedly distorted reflection of the imago dei. Still, we can affirm our re-created goodness through discourses of redemption open to all human beings. There is no asterisk in the biblical promise of redemption that excludes homosexuals. We have to reclaim the primordial goodness of God that ultimately took human form in Jesus. As they say in Christian circles, God didn’t make any junk, and that means that whomever God has made, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is a good person.
I realize there are debates about biological determinism versus social construction in sexuality. I know there’s a dispute about whether gay and lesbian sexuality, indeed all sexualities, reflect an inherent predisposition biologically implanted in the human genetic code that regulates sexual orientation, or if sexual identity is the result of human choice. I happen to believe that gays and lesbians can no more get up tomorrow morning and be heterosexual than heterosexuals can get up tomorrow morning and be gay or lesbian. I’m not gainsaying the fluidity of sexual identity, the elasticity of erotic urges, the changeability of passionate proclivities, or the broad continuum of sensual engagements and stimuli. And I’m not suggesting that biological urges are not socially constructed. After all, even homosexuals who grow up in a culture where their identity and self-perception is shaped in the crucible of heterosexism, internalize the belief that it is a sin or an unbearable stigma to be gay or lesbian. Thus they often suppress their sexual desires and erotic urges, whether they are conceived to be “natural” or constructed.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 39
