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Q UEERING THE CH URCH

permitted the outlets of confession through organised religion, and he is reduced at the end of the episode to talking to God directly in a private anguished prayer. In a bout of insomnia following the funeral and a series of encounters in his mind with the dead Marc, David slips out of bed and onto his knees in supplication before God in a desperate attempt to ease his trauma. His invocation runs as follows:

‘Please, God. Help me. Take this pain away. Please fill this loneliness with your love. Help me, God, please, help me.’ David’s faith by means of religion has been eroded by the attack on his sexuality using Scripture. No longer suppressing his inverted homophobia he is beginning to exorcise it, first by having attacked one of the anti-gay protestors at the funeral, and subsequently by his direct communication with God without intermediaries who have been tainted by the appropriation by their religion of the pathologising of sex.

David seeks a suffusion of his sexuality with his spirituality.

David’s sexuality is emergent throughout season one, characterised principally by his internalised homophobia. Throughout the series, too, David’s faith has emerged from the closet of the institution into something more personal and individual. As a schoolboy David was involved in institutional Christianity, first as an altar boy and later as president of the Youth Ministry (as revealed in ‘An Open

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Book’, 1:5). When we meet him as a 31-year-old adult he has emerged further embedded in the institution (as a deacon) but has taken on the more socially committed pastoral role of feeding the poor (‘The Room’, 1:6). The Church, for David, is the principal closet.

He can hide behind its heteronormative drives and yet be driven further into the closet because of them. Even when he comes out to Nate, he still wishes it to remain a secret in church. Even when he comes out to his mother, it is the patriarchal Church that remains in the dark about his sexuality. David’s self-stigmatised ‘secret differentness’ (Goffman 1990: 102) spatialises into defined categories his social identity, as well as opening up a space between his competing drives of sexuality and spirituality.

Nowhere is the Church as closet more in evidence than when David looks out from a St Bartholomew’s van on its street mission to feed the poor and sees two men walking hand in hand outside a West Hollywood gay club (‘The Room’, 1:6). In response to David’s stare they begin kissing passionately and deliberately. Their aggressive reaction to David becomes clear only when the camera cuts back to David and we see his head framed by the van window. The camera pulls back to reveal the name of his church written on the door underneath the window. The gay kiss is a taunt at the Church (as represented by the van, a church on wheels) as well as at David –

ironically, for though he is gay, he can only respond with a shocked stare from within his perambulatory ‘church closet’. As Sedgwick says,

‘closetedness is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence’ (1990: 3). David’s silence is even more resonant because of his Protestantism. Had he been born Catholic, David would have been able to engage in the practice of confession, with sex as ‘a privileged theme’ (Foucault 1998: 61). The Protestant Churches’ denial of the godly iconicity of the priest means that David cannot talk about or confess his homosexuality other than internally and therefore in silence. The reformed Church, thus, could be seen to have widened the closet considerably. Its adoption of post-Enlightenment medical and psychiatric theories that nominated homosexuality as a condition turned it into a heteronormative institution, as it rejected its new binaristic ‘other’ sexuality. St Bartholomew’s church thus operates through a culture of silence. The accusation against Father Jack first comes in the form of a fax to the deacons saying ‘Father Jack is gay’.

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threat circling the Church, though they have not yet penetrated its environs. And so the Church constructs around itself a closet for its own protection. The homosexual who operates within it has to remain doubly closeted, by both Church and himself. Foucault’s ‘do not appear if you do not want to disappear’ maxim (1998: 84) was never more true than in episode 13 (‘Knock, Knock’, 1:13).

Other than in season one, Father Jack only ever appears again outside St Bartholomew’s preaching in the Fisher funeral home for specific services (‘The Invisible Woman’, 2:5; ‘Someone Else’s Eyes’, 2:9). In the first he is invited by Ruth to offer what turns out to be an ‘inspiring’ eulogy (Condon 2002: 188) for Emily Previn (Christine Estabrook), who died without friends and family. In the second he turns up to eulogise at the funeral of Dwight Edgar Garrison, who died when hit by a metal lunchbox dropped by a construction worker from a building site. He appears here for a contested funeral, at which the deceased had left specific instructions to be buried with his first wife, much to the chagrin of his living second wife (Dina Meyer). On both occasions he is officiating at funerals for the non-nuclear, the outsiders, those who do not fit into the archetypal model of family. In the Fisher funeral home he has none of the trappings of the Church. There is no raised pulpit, no Christian iconography, no flags. Separated from his Church and his lay phalange of deacons, he preaches non-denominational, liberal humanism. This is very similar to the snippets of sermons heard in St Stephen’s in West Hollywood with the inscription near the door ‘Everyone welcome’.

One can surmise that St Stephen’s is an affiliate of the UFMCC

(Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches) given its post-denominational appearance and doctrinal diversity, as no Scripture is preached (Goss 2002: 33), and its outreach to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered communities. Officiating at the service is a woman priest (Mary-Pat Green) in a clear sign of this particular church’s desire for inclusiveness (‘Familia’, 1:4). The priest being a woman is an equal act of emasculating phallocentrist Christianity. Two rainbow flags are clearly visible, one standing beside a pulpit that is not used and another draped over the choir stalls. The unmistakeable sign of the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the church also deals a blow to established religion. The inference that the woman priest might also be lesbian is a double blow to phallocentrist doctrine. This brief scene in St Stephen’s contests and 169

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stands in opposition to the masculinist heteronormativity of services at St Bartholomew’s. The sermon is a rethinking of original sin, not as of Eve as the fallen woman, but of assuming that God lies. We return briefly in season two for another sermon of ‘God loves us just the way we are’ while the camera pans away from the priest and focuses largely on the congregation of mixed races and same-sex couples (‘In the Game’, 2:1). This is the Christian environment to which David aspires, in which his sexuality and spirituality can be not only embraced under the one roof but also celebrated as neo-orthodoxies.

Interestingly, too, the American flag makes a brief appearance in one frame, while the rainbow flags are conspicuous by their absence.

Perhaps this is suggestive of a further embrace of sexuality and spirituality with nationality. But it might also be read as a sign of a neo-conservative ‘post-gay’ Church ‘remade into a straight image’

(Goss 2002: 73), or of gay sexuality being reined in by a heterosexist

‘civic détente’ (Johnston 1979: 281).

Previously on prime-time US television the Church as a profession has not featured in terms of gay representation (see Tropiano 2002). ABC pulled an episode of the drama series
Nothing
Sacred
in 1998 that featured a gay priest with AIDS. In the theatre, however, Terence McNally’s 1998 play
Corpus Christi
, first performed under waves of protests, threats and a fatwa against its author, received extensive media coverage. The play is set in a Texas high school and features a Christ-like figure who has erotic relationships with his disciples. It is the most-cited theatrical queering of Christ to date. The only other media representation of the Church and homosexuality has been in news reports and documentaries about the clerical sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church throughout America. By the time season two (2002) was aired the issue of same-sex marriages which to an extent drove the storyline of the Church in season one, had made headline news and had crossed over from an issue of Christian doctrine to one of civil law and civil rights. Apart from the brief scenes in St Stephen’s, issues of civil rights and Christianity remain poles apart in representation. These scenes offer an alternative Church to forces of conservatism in both Church and political institutions, and present to us liberal humanism as a form of queering of the Church.

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organised religion towards individual faith – as seen in David’s private prayer. One further form of queering of the Scriptures appears in season one. The featured dead body is that of gang-banger Paco (Jacob Vargas), whom David animates in his imagination after an encounter with a homophobic driver in a parking lot during which Keith reacted violently, using his civic authority as a policeman to protect and bolster his civil right to be gay (‘Familia’, 1:4). David, on the other hand, stood back without any intervention, while using Keith’s violent reaction as an excuse to berate him for being out of control, thus transferring his own internalised anger at the homophobia onto Keith as an act of displacement. Later, while working on Paco’s body David’s internal monologue places in Paco’s mouth a quotation from the Bible (John 18: 25) that recounts how Peter denies being a disciple of Jesus. This is a form of double queering, as it not only displaces Scripture from its exponents (priests) to a gangster (but one who possesses a strict moral code), but also equates a spiritual disciple with a community of sexuality.

Throughout season one, David’s struggle to negotiate a path between sexuality and spirituality leads him to rush headlong into a series of encounters with dangerous mind- and body-altering experiences, such as taking Ecstasy (‘Life’s Too Short’, 1:9) and having unprotected sex (‘The Trip’, 1:11). This might be read as a form of self-loathing based on a death wish (the suppression of sexuality can be achieved only by the erasure of the self). In queer theology, the modern pathologising of unprotected sex in a world of AIDS is a heterosexual construction based as much on fear of anal sex as of AIDS. For a queer Christian, however, according to Goss (2002: 75–79), a post-eighties gay man’s equation of sex and death is complicated by both cocaine and AZT, by a desire for a game of Russian roulette and a sense of immortality for having survived AIDS. The sexual act, therefore, provides a moment of spirituality at the point of the utmost vulnerability and trust. David’s encounter with unprotected sex, though, does not provide him with spirituality but a deepening of his internalised homophobia constructed as a death wish (see Foucault 1998: 156). His experience with a male prostitute, Brad (Blake Adams), on a trip to Las Vegas also provides him with an opportunity to seek salvation through his own personal saviour – Keith (‘The Trip’, 1:11).

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When David turns to a prostitute to escape the heteronormativity of his profession and the culture that surrounds it, he has lost all the patriarchs in his life. The Church provides no iconographic representation of Christ in pictorial form, and through the quasi-transubstantiated priest (Father Jack) has rendered Christ as asexual.

With his own father dead, and the paternalistic community of deacons hovering over issues of his own sexuality, David reads Keith as the only person in his life with a moral authority. Keith does not do drugs, and has no casual sex partners (until season three, of course).

He attends church regularly and becomes angry at injustice. He protects the vulnerable against homophobia and domestic violence, and he is made to suffer for it. His rage against injustice (which society around him reads as loss of control) causes him to lose his job. He becomes a martyr crucified for his convictions. And on top of all this David worships him because he is a double minority, both black and gay, in a blue-collar job with a divinely constructed body. When we first meet him wrapping a Christmas gift for David the camera pans over his physique, capturing his police weapon in the process (‘Pilot’, 1:1). When Claire first encounters him it is to his physicality that she is drawn. Throughout their encounters David is caught observing Keith as a physical icon through glances. And in St Stephen’s the camera avoids the priest altogether and all religious iconography (after a swift establishing shot), and views Keith as David sees him (‘In the Game’, 2:1). At the moment of communion with God, as we experience the visual absence of the patriarch of the Church, David looks at Keith, but Keith shares the frame with his new boyfriend and David’s icon falls from grace. David’s relationship with Keith mirrors his own relationship with Christ as his sexuality and spirituality struggle for supremacy. His glance at Keith in this sequence replicates the moment in St Bart’s when he knowingly interprets the stained-glass window. As the Church swiftly disappears from the narrative, David’s homo-devotionalism to Keith goes through as turbulent a process as that of the progression of his sexuality.