Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  The first message of explicit negativity I heard towards being gay came from my religious beliefs as I entered my teenage years in an Evangelical church. The teaching was that something growing within me (which was me) was disgusting and must be kept quiet, cured, squashed, punished … anything would do. Reading my Bible I would fear opening the scorching pages of Romans 1 or 1 Corinthians 6. These brief passages shine with a terrible light for a gay person, until we look at what they aim to illumine rather than at the light itself. Just as we can now see clearly the inadequacy of St Paul’s teaching on women or slavery and excuse his historical limitations, so we need not blame him for his lack of understanding of the concept of same-sex love. He was looking through a window at first-century Rome and Corinth with first-century Jewish eyes from a perspective of religious and cultural separation that had lasted for centuries. It is virtually impossible that he could have seen gay couples in faithful, committed partnerships, and it is certain that he saw all kinds of orgiastic, abusive behaviour that would often have been linked to pagan rites and beliefs. What else could he have written in his situation?

  When I became a Catholic the teaching on homosexuality remained the same, although being unmarried now became a respectable, even glamorous option. Priests, nuns and monks were all able to live safely without being asked, ‘Why aren’t you married?’ or ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ I even considered the priesthood myself, partly to avoid having to answer honestly such terrifying questions. Yet I remained a musician, accepting the Church’s prohibition, buried under my work, avoiding ‘occasions of sin’, destroying certain friendships before there was any chance of them developing into anything intimate – in many ways a happy yet somehow shrunken life.

  It was when reading Pope John Paul II’s book Love and Responsibility, published in 1960 when he was an auxiliary bishop in Kraków, that I first began to think again about this issue. You cannot offer such a radiant vision of love and human relationships to your readers and then exclude those who happen to have ‘green eyes’. Once you have affirmed, as he did controversially and courageously for a Catholic bishop of his time, the sacredness of the human body and its self-gift in the sexual act, you have opened a floodgate of recognition for all who have both bodies to reverence and ‘selves’ to give.

  ‘It is not good for the man to be alone,’ said God in the opening chapters of the Bible and of human history – the one blemish in an otherwise unblemished world, where everything was ‘very good’. Such an affirmation of companionship at the beginning of time is fresh and inspiring still. Combined with new discoveries about sexual orientation in the natural world, it opens up a radical challenge to previously confident assessments of the morality of gay relationships. To share a life of intimacy with another is the way the vast majority of men and women, regardless of their gender preference, are meant to live whole and holy lives. Such relationships are about more than making babies. They are about making love, because to do so is to be fully human, with sensitive, ‘musical’ hearts attuned to vibrations that animals may hear but only men and women can hold. Celibacy is of value only as an affirmation of what is renounced – the best given up freely because it is the best gift one can give. If celibacy is not rare, and a totally free donation, it has the whiff of something slightly perverse about it – literally, ‘contrary to nature’.

  We are subject to natural law as part of creation, but we are also able to contemplate it and relish it. It is the great epiphany of reality: what is actually there, not what we would like to be there, or what our forebears have told us is there. It can be full of surprises and it has no favourites. The one who confidently claims natural law as an ally in arguing for the sanctity of life might end up finding it an annoying foe in a discussion on homosexuality. When the world in which we live tells a different story from what we were taught, we eventually have to break free. It isn’t so much that law changes, but that the Church (from St Paul onwards) simply has not had the vocabulary to discuss an issue it neither named nor understood. (The idea that a person could actually be homosexual, rather than a badly behaved heterosexual, has been accepted by the Catholic Church only in the past thirty years or so.) Law is living and flexible: always growing, adapting, changing shape; never abandoning its roots but never rigid either. Christ not only boiled theology down to the simple statement ‘God is love’, he also distilled the complex religious laws of his time to love of that same God and of neighbour as oneself. The spiritual liberty and simplicity resulting from this new, unified vision led, in theory at least, to the breaking down of the divisive barriers between men and women, slave and free person, Jew and Gentile. It is tragic that it took Christians at least 1900 years even to begin to explore or live this freedom in practice. The prison gates were open but we remained inside, either cowering in the corner or standing with arms outstretched, blocking the exit. Both responses came from fear, and both were betrayals of the Christian message.

  Ultimately the only real argument against homosexual equality is a belief that God has told us it is wrong. All the other reasons given (destruction of the family, seduction of the young, unnatural behaviour, a genetic disorder like alcoholism) are attempts to find a common, secular currency to barter for what is an a priori, religious judgement. But the coins are fake and are being rendered obsolete by common sense and daily experience. Actually I believe that the religious arguments are wrong too, and that, as with slavery, the churches will have to re-evaluate their teaching on this issue. That will probably take decades, but in the meantime the churches cannot expect gay, non-Christians in a secular world to abstain from sexual relationships from their teenage years up to the end of their lives. They cannot exclude those same people from either marriage or a formal, legal commitment and then complain that such relationships are unstable. Straight couples are no strangers to marital collapse, even with the cement of children and society’s affirmation to encourage them to hold firm, so why should we expect even higher standards from gays?

  To use ‘musical’ as a euphemism for homosexual is rather flattering when you think about it. It suggests a sensitivity, a creativity, an ability to attune to beauty. Of course it was originally an ironic, snide use of the term. A real man might whistle at work, or bawl a song in the pub after work, but to be touched or moved by music below the surface seemed weak, lacking in the moral fibre of that tough, tearless type that was the male ideal. It is not an accident that music and the arts were always a tolerant environment for gay men. It was a world where an appreciation of the ‘feminine’ was not seen as weakness, and where strength did not have to manifest itself in violence and coarseness. (It also became a safe place for gay people to hide and to flourish among like-minded friends in the years – not that long ago – when blackmail and prison were an ever-possible threat.)

  Perhaps we can go even further. The modern performing artist is really a direct descendant of the village entertainer, found in the earliest human communities. This person, at least while on stage, was an outsider, someone disguised or different, looked on with admiration and envy, or even fear and discomfort, as he transported his audience to realms of fantasy, amusement or glamour, away from the mundane and humdrum. The entertainment involved could be singing, dancing, acting, conjuring, storytelling … a whole host of different things. It was the perfect place to indulge a sense of the extravagant and exuberant, as well as offering ideal camouflage. A mask, a costume, an affecting melody, a graceful leap were all perfect alibis for those whose affections danced to a different tune – a Scheherazade- like escape from the 1001 knights in the community ready to pronounce and enact the death sentence. If the gay artist could hold the audience captive he might avoid being captured himself. This is not to suggest that gay people are inherently more sensitive or artistic than straights, but everyone draws on a central emotional core in the act of creativity, and when the normal outlet of intimacy is blocked, the heart will find alternative ways to express itself, sometimes with enormous intensity.


  Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing impatience with the lying and loneliness of the closet, and gay people have found a new vocabulary of love and confidence. They want to commit themselves to each other in mature, stable partnerships or marriages. The eccentric bachelor uncles and spinster aunts are not content any more to be guests at other people’s homes; they want to host parties with their own families – and what fun parties they turn out to be. The floodgates are open, but we find that the water is good; we can swim, we needn’t fear, we can embrace and be embraced by the waves. People are realising increasingly that their best friends, their children’s best friends, their neighbours and colleagues, their politicians and admired public figures are gay. Gay liberation will have arrived when, as a term and concept, it has become archaic. That will be the point when understanding and tolerance have been transformed into the familiarity of friendship – the love that has no need to speak its name.

  In earlier times …

  Same-sex marriage is still a problem for many and an abomination for some. Aside from the moral issues relating to prohibitive religious texts there is an uneasy sense for many that it is a change from the way things have always been done, that somehow one of humanity’s treasures is in danger of being devalued. Has marriage always meant something that is now to be unmeant? I don’t think so because …

  In earlier times, indeed for most of recorded human history, marriages were arranged to continue a bloodline, to obtain the neighbouring farm, to curry favour with an enemy. Money was the principal motivation, and the lack of a dowry for a woman often meant the inability to marry.

  In earlier times for male monarchs teenagers were the preferred spouse. The first wife of Richard II (1367–1400) was sixteen when they married and his second wife was only seven. These were sacramental marriages when the Catholic Church had full control of such matters at the height of Christendom’s power.

  In earlier times people had lots of children because they needed to, for financial reasons and because so many of them died in infancy.

  In earlier times life expectancy for adults was low and to be married for twenty years was a lifetime. You had children, then you died.

  In earlier times marriage presupposed that women were weak, without rights, without education, without jobs and without choice of spouse. Indeed, the word ‘husband’ implies someone in charge. It’s derived from Old Norse húsbóndi, ‘master of a house’, and the original sense of the verb was to till or cultivate the land.

  So when someone claims that gay marriage is an abuse of language, or at least a change in the way marriage is understood, they are right.

  Sodom and Gomorrah: straight, upside down, inside out

  There are two stories about Sodom and Gomorrah in the first book of the Bible. Here I’m talking about the other one, not the one about homosexuality (which is not actually about homosexuality anyway) but the wonderful, semi-comic bargaining exchange between Abraham and God. One can almost see the third-rate actor warming to his role as he tries all his persuasive skills to change the mind of the Boss: ‘If I may be so bold … if I will not anger my Lord’, an eye rolled towards the audience.

  The Cities of the Plain are to be destroyed. ‘If there are fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten good men there, will you spare it?’ pleads Abraham, as if reducing his merchandise in some cosmic clearance sale. His wheedling is to no avail. No good men could be found (perhaps they should have tried women) and the Boss orders fire and brimstone, sufficient for full destruction. A Hiroshima moment.

  It’s a nightmare passage for the fundamentalist. Surely this conversation cannot literally have happened like this? It makes sense only as both a parable and as an early step in the learning curve from a primitive understanding of God as vengeful to an eye-opening (soul-opening) view of God as compassionate and therefore as approachable – a view now commonplace in the three religions that claim Abraham as father. At least this ‘tyrant’ will engage in a conversation. Maybe next time we can persuade him …

  But then there is another parable. In St Luke’s Gospel another Jewish teacher unfolds another outrageous tale. ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?’ Wait a minute. Abraham was hoping that ten goodies would produce a merciful change of heart. Jesus is claiming that God’s heart is already so merciful that rescuing one baddie is worth risking the safety of the ninety-nine goodies. This is Sodom upside-down.

  But in our times the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has been reversed in a different, darker way: Sodom inside out. In Auschwitz God appeared to destroy the good men while keeping intact the city and the evildoers – at least for far too long. This monstrous injustice and suffering has sown doubt in the hearts not just of fundamentalists but of all human beings of faith and none. Elie Wiesel famously dug deep into this mystery in his book Night:

  Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing … And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

  Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’ And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’

  Such a story deserves a period of silence after it, but permit me a short coda. Archbishop Desmond Tutu had his own Abrahamic moment during one of the regular angry arguments in the Anglican Communion about the issue of homosexuality when he claimed he would rather go to Hell than worship a homophobic God. I was impressed and began to wonder whether, instead of bargaining, Abraham should simply have said to God, ‘If you won’t spare Sodom then I’m going down there right now and you can destroy me along with them if you wish.’

  When God in our stories and parables begins behaving with compassion, there’s a good chance we will do so too because we will finally have heard the still small voice above the fire of human vengeance and the earthquake of human cruelty (1 Kings 19:11–13).

  Abortion: can I go there?

  Dr Kermit Gosnell, a former abortion provider, is serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole plus thirty years. He was accused of performing illegal abortions, killing live (sometimes screaming) babies by inserting a pair of scissors into the back of their necks. When police raided his premises they found unimaginable levels of filth with severed body parts in milk jugs, in orange-juice cartons and even in cat-food containers. Women had been left bleeding on blankets, medical equipment was outdated, untested and encrusted with dust … oh, and a flea-ridden cat was found wandering around from room to room.

  When this case was in the news I was asked accusingly by a couple of people why I’d not made any comment on this case, either in my blog or on Twitter. They suggested that the lack of sufficient coverage or interest in the press was the result of a ‘liberal’ conspiracy. Indeed, I had heard nothing about Gosnell and I thought it was surprising that something so luridly sensational and so macabre (morality aside) had not become daily front-page news, but I didn’t think that social media was the place to discuss such a sensitive and complex topic. ‘So write something about it on your blog and about abortion in general,’ challenged one person. So I did.

  I am not a journalist and I spend only a few minutes a day reading the news but as one accuser’s anger with me rose I began to get a glimpse why, as unspeakable and evil as this story was, some people in the media wanted to speak less rather than more about it. Furthermore, it is not impossible that legal justice itself could have been affected by letting abusive protestors appear to win their case. ‘I told you so’ is never an easy argument by which to b
e influenced, and when truth stares us in the face we can still turn away.

  About twenty-five years ago I read about some pro-life activists and researchers in America (I wish I could remember the name of the organisation) who had begun to wonder why their cause was so unsuccessful. Why was abortion legal in virtually all the developed countries of the world? Why did otherwise reasonable, kind, decent, compassionate, hard-working doctors still refer women for terminations? And, more to the point, why did those women not see that what they were doing was taking the life of an unborn human being, their own child? In the course of their study they made some interesting discoveries. Women did know what was going on when they sought to end their pregnancies, but a more powerful instinct kicked in: to keep the child was seen subconsciously as some sort of suicide. Having an abortion was like an extreme kind of self-defence; the foetus seemed to them an aggressor threatening to take away their life. These researchers realised that the old style of pro-life activism – accusing, morally absolutist, aiming to shock, aiming to shame – was ineffective, even counter-productive, because it ignored a deeper psychological truth about the mind as well as the body of a pregnant woman. When self-defence is involved reason rarely matters.

  Of course, abortion is not just a medical issue. It touches on sex and on religion, both potatoes of the hotter variety. Most, though not all, of those who oppose all abortions do so from a religious viewpoint. They believe that the foetus has an immortal soul from the first moment of its conception and thus deliberately to destroy that life is murder. I think that without religious faith it is hard to accept a zygote as equivalent in value to a fully formed child. I understand that a non-religious person is going to see a scale of development in the nine months of pregnancy just as, in law, there is a scale of seriousness and culpability in criminal acts.