“'It's not about
the sex.' I said. I was sitting on the sofa in our living room. My
wife and Matt (name changed) my one Latter-day Saint friend who knew
what was going on in our home, could not seem to understand this
concept.
'Come on, it really
is just about the sex,' said Matt as my wife nodded in full agreement
with him. At this point we had been discussing the matter for quite
some time, and my patience was short.
'Last I checked,
neither of you have dealt with this issue, so unless you have been
hiding your own same-sex attraction,' I said, 'I really do not think
you are in a position to lecture me on what this is really
about!'”(1)
Thus
begins Tyler Moore's account of his journey through same-sex
attraction. This
conversation, taking place
when he was on the verge of divorcing his wife, contains one of the
biggest realizations I've ever had:
Homosexuality
is not, and never was, about sex.
In
this valuable and vital insight, I hope to reveal
a new side of homosexuality which, considering the current state of
society, might never have been
considered. For all reading
this, I hope to bring a
greater sense of compassion through
understanding. For all my
Latter-day Saint or Christian
friends who
believe in traditional marriage,
I hope that these
insights
will help you as you
balance your beliefs in traditional marriage and family with
compassion for the
LGBT community. At
the same time, I hope to drive home a point that will help each of us
to see ourselves and those that we love the most with new, clearer
eyes.
Sexualization,
repression, liberation
“Sexualization: To make something sexual in character or quality.”
- Wikipedia (2)
We
live in a time and place of history that, for all its advantages,
comes with immense disadvantages in
other areas.
This is most readily
apparent in the way we've
been conditioned to relate with others.
Sex
and romance defines
our
societal discourse on
human
connection, and where
sexual and romantic love are placed as the highest achievable form of
human love. Whether this is true
or not is up to individual interpretation, but that it's
a nearly universal belief is beyond question.
As society began defining love in terms of sex, a new pattern of
defining people emerged with it: by their sexuality. It's out of this
pattern of thought that “heterosexual” and “homosexual” and
their synonyms have arisen.
To
think that exist
people in terms of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” or “gay”
and “straight” is one of the most commonly accepted lies
currently in existance,
a false dichotomy that has been responsible for a great deal of
unnecessary pain. The division it creates is entirely unnatural and
seeks to reduce the breadth, depth and intensity of human feeling and
relating into the limited
form of sex. Though
homosexuality has been a part of human experience since the
beginning, to define people by whether or not they experience it is
an invention of Victorian sexual ethics to replace the vacuum created
by secularization and the resultant removal of medieval Christian
ideals from public
discourse. As Michael W.
Hannon observes:
“Contrary to our cultural preconceptions and the lies of what
has come to be called “orientation essentialism,” “straight”
and “gay” are not ageless absolutes...[they are] a conceptual
scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. It is a history that
began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that
will likely end much sooner than most people think.....
Michel
Foucault...details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History
of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a
class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of
the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside
it. This European neologism was used in a way that would have struck
previous generations as a plain category mistake, designating not
actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil
“heterosexual.”deep
Psychiatrists and legislators of the mid- to late-1800s,
Foucault recounts, rejected the classical convention in which the
“perpetrator” of sodomitical acts was “nothing more than the
juridical subject of them.” With secular society rendering
classical religious beliefs publicly illegitimate, pseudoscience
stepped in and replaced religion as the moral foundation for venereal
norms. To achieve secular sexual social stability, the medical
experts crafted what Foucault describes as 'a natural order of
disorder.''The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage,' 'a type of life,' 'a morphology,' Foucault writes. This perverted psychiatric identity, elevated to the status of a mutant “life form” in order to safeguard polite society against its disgusting depravities, swallowed up the entire character of the afflicted: “Nothing that went into [the homosexual’s] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle(3).”
In other words, beginning in the 19th century, the West began defining people in terms of sexuality, to make sexuality not just a class of actions, as Foucault states, but as “the insidious and indefinitely active principle governing their existance.” We came to view others' actions, thoughts and beliefs as being informed and governed by sexual inclination.
As the defining heterosexual/homosexual binary was accepted into the collective consciousness beginning in the 1930's, the reaction to it was both natural and inevitable: a wave of backlash, condemnation and ostracism of anyone or anything suspected of “being homosexual.” In doing so, religious and national leadership adopted heterosexuality as the sexual norm and sought to repress “homosexuality” and “homosexuals,” buying into this lie wholesale. Unfortunately, the process of sexualization that had begun in the preceding centuries had come to pervade our entire cultural thought surrounding the human experience, so much so that the repression sought by cultural and religious authorities had many terrible, if unintended consequences.
It was an unfortunate misunderstanding of the time to believe that homosexuality as an internal experience or feeling was chosen. Almost anyone who knows the experience of homosexuality knows otherwise. Yet, even with this truth, those who experienced sexualities out of variation with normal “heterosexuality” found themselves pushed to the fringe of society and badly mistreated, as exemplified by Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt of the 1950's. Homosexuals were often disowned by their families. These conditions of repression finally erupted into the Stonewall Riots of the late 1960's, helping fuel the “sexual liberation” and galvanizing the LGBT community from a few ragtag groups into the politically powerful and influential machine that it is today(4.)
It's my observation that what is manifesting as LGBT furor are echoes of this painful past. What I see when I see the LGBT community in their current state is a deep longing for acceptance and love. Their desire to have their lifestyles and relationships accepted culturally and legally is a reaction to this long history of rejection, and when they see religious communities declaring their opposition to gay marriage, they react poorly because they interpret it as more personal rejection. I've not been involved enough in the LGBT community to know a lot of stories, but I know enough to know that even now, there are LGBT individuals within religious or conservative segments of society that are often kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families when they confide their homosexuality or transgenderism. If that still happens now in our liberalized society, the rejection and ostracism must have been much greater in the conservative 50's and earlier.
Though I don't believe marriage should be redefined and don't agree with the broad LGBT approach, I can also see that it is fueled, not by outright rebellion against God nor hatred of religious people (though those certainly manifest sometimes) but by a deep-seated starvation for acceptance.
Breaking the Cycle
Unfortunately, the broad LGBT movement in their goals is just as their repressors, rooted in this false heterosexual/homosexual binary. Though conservatives may call for repression and LGBT's may call for liberation, they both depend on this false dichotomy for validation. The time has come for this overly simplistic sexualized thinking to be purged from our societal discourse.
One of the unfortunate victims of sexualized thinking is our Christian ideals of chastity. For many believers, these ideals are not rooted in the love of God, others, and life, but rather in fear: a fear of sexuality, a fear of sin, a fear of deviance. Rather than teaching us to bridle our passions that our connections with others may be filled with love, our fear causes an obsessive, rules-based approach to chastity, and a fear-based engagement with those who don't choose it.
Let me make it firmly clear: My issue is not with Christian morality. I love Christian morality. I believe and love the teachings of chastity, but not for what it prevents, but what it enables. We may think that chastity is all about preventing the inappropriate use of sexuality, but that is like saying the ultimate purpose of budgeting is preventing monetary loss. True in a sense, but not the core. Just like true budgeting is an investment that enables us to get what we truly want, chastity is also an investment. Because I govern my thoughts through a deeply internalized lens of chastity in my relationships with others, I experience a deep and pure love that I would never be able to experience through sex.
This has been especially prominent in my relationships with men. The love I feel for men is incredibly deep, and has only become more so the more dedicated I've become to true principles of chastity.
Sexualization, by its definition, would destroy that love. Whether exhibited by a lustful homosexual or a stern and suspicious church man, sexualized thinking would turn any exhibition of tenderness, affection or need for another man into a sexual act, and their acceptance or rejection of that tenderness and affection based on their sexualized judgments independent of the actual motivation.
In many ways, this sexualization process has become so extreme in our society that for many, sex and romance has become the sole legitimate expression of passion and feeling between individuals, and thus why the LGBT movement screams for homosexual relationships to be legitimized. Though deeper for some more than most, the need of a man for other men, and of a woman for other women, is a primal human drive. If someone is conditioned to believe that the only legitimate way to express that primal desire is through sex, wouldn't you blame them for being upset when they're told they shouldn't?
Consider the following, from Steve Bearman:
“Every story of “true love” in the cultural mythology implies that relationships are built on sex, that sex consummates love, that feeling sexual feelings is the same as being in love. Directly and indirectly, we are handed sexuality as the one vehicle through which it might still be possible to express and experience essential aspects of our humanness that have been slowly and systematically conditioned out of us.
Sex was, and is, presented as the road to real intimacy, complete closeness, as the arena in which it is okay to openly love, to be tender and vulnerable and yet remain safe, to not feel so deeply alone. Sex is the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves overflowing passion. Pleasure and desire, vitality and excitement, seemingly left behind somewhere we can’t even remember, again become imaginable(5).”
Tenderness, affection, intimacy, the highest expressions of love...where these do not relate to sex, romance, marriage and family, they have been tied to the anvil of sexual deviancy and thrown over the side of the good ship Zion. I speak of very personal experience here...I bristled whenever I heard homosexuality condemned, cautioned against, or explained away as a challenge to be overcome or a tendency to be resisted, because I had been conditioned to understand that that which I was being told to overcome, resist and cast away was the deep, tender part of me to which my homosexuality is intrinsically tied.
It has been such a blessing to release myself of the weight of sexualization. The awe and wonder I feel for the male form, the feelings I have for loved male friends, the desire and drive to form loving relationships with many of them....these things are no longer dependent on sexual drives for validity, and thus are freed from expectations both religious and secular. I feel free and unweighted as a little child.
It is only until we as a people can learn to release our obsession with sex and accept the validity of a broad range of human feeling and experience that our preaching the Law of Chastity will gain any traction.
And it is only in releasing our obsession with sex that the true beauty of brotherhood and sisterhood will return from the shadows into which they have been sexualized and repressed.
Sources:
1) “Being My True
Self.” Moore, Tyler. Voices of
hope: latter-day Saint perspectives on same-gender attraction: an
anthology of of gospel teachings and personal essay. Ty Mansfield,
editor. Deseret Book, copyright 2011.
Thank you for giving clarity and focus to my own feelings.
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