The Golden Ass

This week, I read Capitalism and Gay Identity (see LINK, HERE if you're interested in reading the whole thing), by John D'Emilio (*pictured here on your left).

A basic summary:

In the face of homophobia and systematic oppression, and in a context in which more gays and lesbians were left to discover and explore their sexual desires in isolation and invisibility, myths were constructed to to help narrate their identity and history as part of a quest for liberation. D'Emilio refers to the primary one as the "myth of the 'eternal homosexual', in which "it was empowering to assert that 'we are everywhere.'" Partly as an effort to "demystify" gay history and identity, this essay purposefully challenges that and, instead, tells the alternative story that, in comparison to the partnership in the family unit of Puritan New England that was necessary for survival, the individual autonomy afforded by the wage labor of the growing and spreading of capitalist system of the mid 19th century made possible a growing subculture of gay and lesbian life (especially) in the big cities, where people with homosexual desires could communally support one another in ways that the older family unit had supported others, both economically and emotionally (particularly in more rural areas). (Don't miss here the tension between rural and urban life that lives on today in our political antagonisms)

What Puritans referred to as "unnatural desires" are documented, their incidences appear to be rare and, not to mention, to render impossible their way of life, literally their only means for survival. There did seem to be a difference between those who "explored" "unnatural desires" and then moved away from it when rebuked by religious leadership, as compared to those who "persisted" in it. But, overall, D'Emilio indicates that, not only did the growth of capitalism increase the ACTUAL numbers of gay people, it also made gay IDENTITY a thing in the first place, by making possible the formation of communities and clubs where such an identity could and did make sense. In any case, my main takeaway here is that a gay man is telling us that there was no such thing as an individual "identifying as" "gay" prior to the growth and reign of our capitalism. And, not only that, but D'Emilio is telling us this AS PART OF HIS QUEST FOR LIBERATION. He notes that capitalism served as a two-sided coin for gays and lesbians. Though the increased visibility and voice granted to "homosexuals" by capitalism resulted in purposeful and larger efforts to silence and oppress them (such as "urban vice squads that invaded private homes" and police "sweeps of gay male bars"), capitalism was also the very thing that made their way of life possible. The YMCA that served as a site for "socialized" child rearing or fellowship was also a place where gay men met one another.

"Claims made by gays and nongays that sexual orientation is fixed at an early age, that large numbers of visible gay men and lesbians in society, the media, and the schools will have no influence on the sexual identities of the young, are wrong. Capitalism has created the material conditions for homosexual desire to express itself as a central component of some individuals' lives; now, our political movements are changing consciousness, creating the ideological conditions that make it easier for people to make that choice."

D'Emilio explores that and how capitalism has a "contradictory" relationship to the family. It extracted "the material basis of the nuclear family by taking away the economic functions that cemented the ties between family members." The goods and services we need for survival that were previously produced in the family were exported to a capitalism whose territory was steadily growing, thus wreaking the forces that kept men and women in the family. "On the other hand, the ideology of capitalist society has enshrined the family as the source of love, affection, and emotional security, the place where our need for stable, intimate human relationships is satisfied."

In other words:

"Materially, capitalism weakens the bonds that once kept families together so that their members experience a growing instability in the place they have come to expect happiness and emotional security. Thus, while capitalism has knocked the material foundations away from family life, lesbians, gay men, and heterosexual feminists have become the scapegoats for the social instability of the system."

D'Emilio thus points to the "socialized" institutions and organizations that become the sites of child rearing, education, production, labor, and fellowship in a capitalist system as signs, at one and the same time, of the instability of "traditional" family life in a capitalist system AND of OPPORTUNITIES for the BUILDING of emotional intimacy and communal economic support in an otherwise less stable capitalist system.

"Gay men and lesbians exist on social terrain beyond the boundaries of the heterosexual nuclear family. Our communities have formed in that social space. Our survival and liberation depend on our ability to defend and expand that terrain, not just for ourselves but for everyone. That means, in part, support for issues that broaden the opportunities for living outside traditional heterosexual family units: issues like the availability of abortion and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, affirmative action for people of color and for women, publicly funded daycare and other essential social services, decent welfare payments, full employment, the rights of people - in other words, programs and issues that provide a material basis for personal autonomy."

D'Emilio is then explicit and pulls no punches: "To be sure, this argument confirms the worst fears and most rabid rhetoric of our political opponents." By "our" there, he's referring to gays and lesbians. The "fears" he's referring to are "that capitalism has led to the separation of sexuality from procreation," that "it's expression has increasingly entered the realm of choice," and the affirmation of "sexual expression as a form of play." "The rights of young people are especially critical. The acceptance of children as dependents, as belonging to parents, is so deeply ingrained that we can scarcely imagine what it would mean to treat them as autonomous human beings, particularly in the realm of expression and choice. Yet until that happens, gay liberation will remain out of reach."

"Lesbians and homosexuals most clearly embody the potential of this split [between sexual expression as being governed by reproductive imperatives as compared to entering the realm of choice]...Our movement may have been begun as the struggle of a 'minority,' but what we should now be trying to 'liberate' is an aspect of the personal lives of all people - sexual expression."

All too briefly and incompletely, I've found myself having a number of fairly strong reactions to this essay:

1. Apparently all progressives aren't Marxists. Such scapegoating by conservatives is: a. an ideological puff of wind, and b. a trauma response of the body in the face of a sensed threat to the survival of both their very bodies and of what they care about. As D'Emilio says it:

"On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for lesbians and gay male identity to develop. On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia."

2. I confess that I SENSE in my body that same threat and fear. I want to affirm "sexual expression as a form of play, positive and life-enhancing." But, I don't want to do that at the expense of "nature." I am very wary of the modern urge to a biological foundationalism, but that is precisely because I want to affirm a teleological understanding of how the body functions.

3. I tended to dismiss the ideological rantings of my conservative friends against the progressives' relationship to the family as empty puffs of wind. This was partly because they misappropriate their anxiety as being towards "Marxism" (or whatever). Also partly because I tended to assume that God's command to "multiply" wasn't an imposition of controlling rule from above but a descriptor; humans aren't going anywhere unless they destroy themselves. But, this essay brings to a head real tensions. It's true that my ideologically minded conservative friend is mischaracterizing "the left" when he says they take abortion to be "an inherent good," because no one who goes to get an abortion really WANTS to do so, and nor do they throw a party afterwards. But, I can understand how that would come across to conservatives as nearly irrelevant if "liberation" means that the standard image of how social bonds are formed and emotional intimacy is developed is essentially an image of kids with no "natural" parents (which is different from "it takes a village"). Like, I really grieve that my nieces' Dad is dead. And, I don't view that as an illegitimated grief. I suspect that anyone whose parents have ever gotten a divorce can probably identify with this grief or concern (and I get that D'Emilo is critiquing the source of that grief).

4. My desire to affirm a "teleological understanding of how the body functions" is not absolute or totalizing. I ALSO want to affirm that we don't and can't know as much as we think we can if we simply and only characterize those who the Puritans noted to have "persisted" in their "unnatural desires" after public rebuke as "aberrant," or if we mock them as idiotically, pridefully, and selfishly having "chosen" the impossible. I don't want to pretend I know more than I do. Because I don't. I take biological foundationalism to be not only different from "natural law" but also dangerous. And, I take it to be not only dangerous but most predominantly undifferentiated from likely a confused image or understanding OF "natural law." In other words, when I see someone mocking LGTBQ+ people and echoing sentiments along the lines of "the body's biology at birth doesn't lie," I want to remind them that such a view of "biology" is actually not only quite new (relatively speaking, in our history) but was by necessity the rejection of the very teleology I want to affirm.

5. Though I like that D'Emilio "demystifies" "gay identity" by tying it to the contingencies of the history of our capitalism, I also like that he shows absolutely no interest in trying to explain away in any fundamental way the source and root of homosexual desires, or even of sexual desires in general. This is part of what I mean by #4.

5a. This essay - along with a newfound grace enough to be more honest with myself and others - brought to mind a particular memory of a "homosexual behavior" I engaged in when I was 4. I had almost completely forgotten about it. When we were "caught," I experienced brief shame and moved on. I did not "persist" in the exploration. It has not haunted me since. I would like to assume that's because I haven't had such desires since that time. After all, it wasn't even my idea (I want to tell myself). But, what if the powerful force of shame was what really locked that memory away into a relatively and inaccessibly dark vault of actual desire of some sort? I have to confess that this question struck me with some force as I read this essay. I don't experience those desires now in any meaningful or significant way, but I have had enough blind spots in my soul illuminated to know that this doesn't mean I know the answer to the question that so struck me.

6. Given the real tensions that come to a head in and because of this essay, and given the mysterious nature of their ultimate source, I feel the essay guides Christians into a place where the Lord's prayer itself can lead us to pray The Lord's Prayer specifically in the context of what this essay makes clear is a REAL CONFLICT between "gay identity" and "family values," between John D'Emilio and Jerry Falwell Jr (btw how is his way of handling this conflict working out for him?). Where this conflict LIVES IN OUR BODIES, we can embrace the truth of that conflict, confess it, and ask for God's healing and direction. Of course, this means the letting go of our "grasp" - to use a bodily metaphor - on ideological means and ends. It means we can let go of controlled outcomes. We can instead submit ourselves before a horizon whose end we can't fully see. That horizon is the veil of the Temple of Creation, the veil between what we can and can't know, see, hear, or touch.

7. Where capitalism renders extremely unstable the traditional family source of economic and emotional security, we can pray, "Give us this day the bread of the presence that cannot run out." We can pray the same for those we perceive as our ideological "enemies," btw (and what would acting on and submitting our bodies and actions to that prayer mean and look like!?). Where, in our real anxieties and fears, we have given our allegiance to a history of "urban vice squads" and "witch hunts" against "the gays" that carries on into the present, we can pray, "Forgive us our trespasses." Where we perceive those who set themselves up as "enemies" to have gone on the attack against what we - and and many Christians would say rightly - hold dear (with essays precisely like this one) in ways that (we sense) threaten and hurt us, we can pray, "As we forgive those who trespass against us."

Of course, this would mean entering into and submitting to a posture of vulnerability rather than compulsive attack from a posture of power - which is Jesus' third temptation in the wilderness, one of the ones we pray about in the Lord's Prayer! And, this would also mean tending to and caring about being in harmonious relationship in the first place with those in our lives who have experienced or do experience "homosexual desires" - rather than, under ideological pretense (or perhaps while covering over our own shame?), excluding and exiling them from our presence and our lives. Rather than making them disappear.

My best friend when I was four, the one whose idea it was - you might be wondering what ever came of him? As he grew up, he came into a difficult life of drug addiction. He ended up committing suicide. If I remember right, around the time we turned 30. And, a mutual friend who grew up across the street from him? He "came out of the closet" a few years ago or so. I have to wonder if the history and present of how the church has related to the LGTBQ+ community, in which all of us who "identify" as "straight" Christians are complicit, contributed to the way his life went and, especially, the way it ended. I also have to wonder if, now that he has disappeared, it's what we really want?

What might it look like for straight Christians to name, own, and confess our fears and anxieties about LGTBQ+ people and to thus confess and repent of harm done to them? Would that make a shared life together more possible and harmonious? What would it look like, and how might it be accomplished? Is that even what we really want?