The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (46 page)

That is why the coming-out process is often especially volatile: it involves the painful irony of self-identification with the very sexual identity that has been culturally
demonized. That’s why there’s so much self-hatred among gays and lesbians. The coming-out process must address the fact that the self has been artificially split off from self-consciousness, at least a self-consciousness that is socially supported. This accounts for why the homosexual ego is coerced into epistemic and ethical isolation, or the proverbial “closet.” In the closet, one must subordinate one’s “natural sexuality” to society’s accepted sexual norms, to its entrenched mores. So the Bible should help Christians liberate the sexual urge from artificially imposed restrictions and repressions. In the case of homosexuals, such restrictions and repressions are fueled by heterosexist values, but these values, I believe, can be critiqued by an appeal to a progressive sexual ethic, an enlightened biblical hermeneutic, and a humane theological tradition. How can black homosexuals use the Bible for sexual healing? They can do as all Christians should do: express their sexuality in the context and pursuit of a right relationship with God, which is the predicate of all sexual ethics.

But critics who seek to proof-text their opposition to homosexuality often neglect to interpret such biblical passages in their larger theological meaning. For instance, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is more about underscoring the necessity for hospitality to strangers than it is about homosexual perversion. In essence, the larger pericopes in which biblical texts are contained are either neglected, severed from their interpretive frameworks through theological ax grinding, or subject to hermeneutical myopia. Hence the practice of biblical interpretation reinforces the heterosexist culture from which the theological repression of sexual difference has emerged. What’s fascinating about black Christian appeals to the Bible to justify suppression of homosexuality is that such appeals are quite similar to those made by whites to justify slavery. Then again, that was already a familiar hermeneutical move in black religious circles, since it had been employed to justify theological strictures against the ecclesial expression of female authority. Those of us promulgating a theology of homoeroticism must engage in hermeneutical warfare and interpretive battle, not only with the text but also with the heterosexist presuppositions that shaped the biblical narratives and their subsequent mainstream interpretation.

Finally, I think that Jesus states the bottom line when he says that all of the law and prophets were contained in his summary of the ethical aim of Christian belief. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

That means that we must embrace and affirm all brothers and sisters regardless of where we stand on the mysteries of sexual identity. Too often we have focused on a subsidiary accounting of sexual identity and thrust it into primary consideration to determine legitimate standing within the religious community. Being in right relationship with God and our neighbor is the crucial factor in our Christian existence. Once that issue is settled, then sexual orientation becomes subsidiary.
Sacred orientation is more important than sexual orientation. When the Bible is read through that liberating lens and through the prism of self-acceptance in light of God’s offer of the gift of love and affirmation, it can be read as a source of sexual healing for homosexuals.

One of the most crucial issues a liberating interpretation of the Bible can address is the culture of dishonesty that smothers alternative sexualities. Gays and lesbians, as well as all other-sexed people, often have had to deny to themselves they were homosexual. They denied their sexuality to others who might have perceived it even before they did, a perception that might have caused them great discomfort. They often have had to stay in an epistemological closet, a theological closet, a sociological closet, and to some degree, even a biological closet, because they didn’t want to suffer the consequences of coming out. The culture of deceit imposed on gays and lesbians has to be relieved by the church’s open affirmation of their legitimacy, so that they don’t have a distorted consciousness and a bruised conscience about their own sexuality. In the final analysis, we are liberated into self acceptance by a loving and forgiving God.

Okay. You are going to change everybody’s mind.

We can hope.

Well, I think so. You’ve already largely answered my next question, but I’m going to ask it in case there is something you want to add. How do we reread the Bible as a guide to promoting complete and healthy homosexual relationships?

As I’ve stated, in order to skillfully interpret the Bible, we’ve got to get at the social, political, and ideological history of the time during which its constitutive texts emerged. By so doing, we get a sense of the philosophical reflections on race, gender, culture, class, and of course, sexuality as well, that penetrated the discursive frames and theological views of the Bible. Some of these reflections were egalitarian, but many more were authoritarian. Then, too, we’ve got to acknowledge that the culture in which we live shapes our self-understanding, as well as our understanding of our relationship to the Bible, and what role it should play in regulating our intellectual and moral lives. Our cultural situations even affect how we think we are capable of transforming our self-understanding through a new interpretation, perhaps even radical reinterpretation, of the Bible in light of the moral aspirations that we learn to claim as legitimate components of our individual and collective identities.

But it’s equally important to understand there are multiple textualities within revelation’s household. Of course, the Bible is the crucial, significant, and central text that shines on other texts interpreted in its light, and within the circumference of its ethical imagination. But a crucial implication of revelation is the belief in the
variegated modalities through which it is articulated, which means that God speaks and is revealed to us in a number of ways. Even though the Bible is the hermeneutical ground of all textualities and modalities of revelation, it is not the exclusive or exhaustive medium of revelation. I think fundamental Christians in particular fail to comprehend this point, or at least they strongly disagree with this theological belief and interpretive principle. As a result, there is often in such circles a species of bibliolatry, or worship of the Bible. In my view, we should only worship the God who inspired the Bible. Bibliolatry is a way to foreclose wrestling with the complex demand of responsible assessment of the contradictory data of human experience in light of religious belief. Bibliolatry resolves all complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and so on.

Other Christians believe that we can’t worship the Bible on the premise that God continues to speak. When we close the Bible, we have neither shut God’s mouth nor closed God’s mind. The radical openness of the mouth and mind of God means there is ongoing revelation in our times. It means that God is still speaking to us. That means that we have scriptural-like, biblical-like revelations that need to be taken seriously. The backdrop of such critical reflection is the understanding that the Bible is, besides a book of faith, also a book of history. It is a text that belongs to time and circumstance. Even though it claims to mediate eternal truth—a claim I take seriously—its medium is birthed in contingency. God’s word is true, but the means by which we know it are limited, finite, and fallible. That means we’ve got to confront the historical conditions of biblical production. We’ve got to ask the questions: Why were all the books in the Bible written by men? Why was the canon largely shaped by masculinist sensibilities? In many ways, the canon reflects a patriarchal code rearticulated as theological necessity. In truth, historical contingency has been recapitulated as transcendental inevitability. Those of us believers who are skeptical, even suspicious of human claims of divine revelation, also believe that God continues to speak to liberated—and liberating—people.

Therefore, in spite of occasional biblical crankiness about (alternative) sexualities, one can conceive of the biblical worldview as an interpretive canvas on which to sketch a liberating ethical intentionality. We must account for the manner in which writers smuggled their biases into the biblical text, even as the biblical landscape accommodated the social perspectives and cultural norms of societies that shaped its construction. We must also take the risk of reinterpretation and posit the principle of extended canonicity. I think we have to appeal to the extrabiblical textualities—of experience, suffering, and oppression—that shape the lives of believers and affect the modalities and anatomy of revelation. It is extrabiblical revelation because it is not contained in the Bible, but the Bible is contained in the believer’s arc of experience. But blacks, women, gays, lesbians, and other minorities have to risk reinterpreting the words of the Bible in light of the Word—to whom the text points and who legitimates the experience of these minorities.

That covers the Bible, but what about the Qu’ran and other sacred Scriptures?

Sure, the same applies to the Qu’ran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah, and other holy texts by which religious believers abide. And what I say is significant for all religious communities, whether they believe God speaks through Moses or Muhammad.

I wrote a story years ago about a black man who was rescued by Jesus, and they made love. So basically, it was very erotic, with brown skin to brown skin. What is your reaction to that type of story?

I think that there’s space in our fantasy lives for the fusion of autonomous human eroticisms and divinely ordered sexual identities, especially as we struggle to imagine the dynamic and complex nature of our relationship to God. We have to remember that the intimate relation between believers and God is deeply and profoundly erotic at points, a perception that is reinforced in biblical texts and in theological and religious literature of all sorts throughout the ages. It makes sense that erotic communion is the analogical predicate for the intimate relation between the divine and the human. After all, we start with what we know—intimate human communion—and analogize to what we imagine—God’s identity. Since erotic relations that take place in the context of a committed relationship is one of the most profound unions on earth, it is the basis for understanding the intensity of God’s presence.

I think that whether it’s your story or the story I read once, I think, in the book,
Spirituality for Ministry
, by Urban T. Holmes, more than twenty years ago—where some nuns were either fantasizing about making love to Jesus or dreaming about him in a sexual fashion—the notion of erotic engagements with God appear to be honored by sacred precedent. Communion with God takes multiple forms. I don’t think we can, in an a priori fashion, determine any sexual orientation per se as off-limits when it comes to understanding our relationship to God. It’s important in this context to view our erotic relations in a metaphoric vein, that is, as attempts to analogize the highest moment of human ecstasy in regard to the ecstatic communion with God. Penetration of the flesh, among other erotic gestures, becomes a vehicle for a realized spiritual communion. I think all forms of edifying, nondestructive erotic play can ultimately become true grist for the mill of our sexual imaginations and express true hunger for God.

Let me ask you this then: I shared this story with a friend of mine, and he was offended. He called it blasphemy and he didn’t want to touch the story; he didn’t want to finish it. It was almost as if he were being contaminated or getting the evil spirit from the story itself, almost like he was afraid of it. What do you think about that?

Beliefs or fantasies that are radically dissimilar to our normal beliefs, behavior, and identity are certainly dangerous. They’re taboo. They are contaminating, but perhaps in a good sense. It conjures for me the title of Mary Douglas’s magisterial work,
Purity and Danger.
In some religious communities, the sexual relation is never to be thought of in relationship to God; the purity of God’s identity is not to be enmeshed in the passionate, erotic communion. And yet God creates human beings with sexual organs and orientations. I think it is very dangerous and disturbing for many of us to imagine a different sexual order than the one that supports and governs our everyday existence. Plus, let’s face it, we often fear what we don’t understand. Or as Stevie Wonder phrased it, “when you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer”—but he added a key phrase that the dominant society should take to heart: “Superstition ain’t the way.” We could replace superstition with hate, fear, intolerance, bigotry, and the like. America once feared blacks and oppressed us and, when forced to accept us, discovered either that we weren’t so different or that we presented a valuable difference that the nation eventually learned to embrace. The inability to embrace sexual difference says more about a culture or tradition that strangles innovation and creativity in our relationships to one another and to God, than it says about the sinful character of the fantasy or imagination that might offend us. Beliefs and passions that fall outside of the norm often bring terror, perhaps even the terror of self-recognition, which may be the ultimate terror. The possibility that the very thing I despise may represent a suppressed fantasy is all the more cause to outlaw that fantasy.

How important is fantasy to our sexuality?

I think fantasy is extraordinarily important to sexuality. Fantasy draws from the collective or individual expressions of one’s historically shaped erotic and sexual desire. Fantasy is the projection of a possible erotic or sexual engagement with another human being or entity that is driven by our socially constructed and biologically driven conception of what is desirable. So fantasy, in one sense, is indivisible from the political and historical contexts in which our identities are shaped. We learn to desire the things we’re taught to believe are desirable. Sometimes desire cuts across the grain of the socially sanctioned and “appropriate” fantasy. Certain fantasies are ruled as legitimate and others as illegitimate and, unsurprisingly, the rules follow a broadly patriarchal and heterosexist vein. It’s just fine for young men to want to make love to young women at the appropriate age, but it’s reprehensible for men and women to gravitate to their own gender, regardless of age. This notion falls into the realm of permissible fantasy. Permissible fantasy is an index of the sexual relations that may not be explicitly or overtly encouraged, but are nonetheless tolerated because they fall within the realm of heterosexual erotic identity. I’m thinking here, for example, of illicit sex between a married man and a woman. Even though there is a taboo to such sex, it causes nothing like the fear or revulsion of homosexual relations. In fact, the notion of a same-sex union is so profoundly offensive that its very existence is thought to be the mark of perversion, while adultery is viewed as a “sin.” At that
level, homoerotic fantasy cuts across the socially constructed object of desire and becomes a subversive political gesture in a heterosexist universe.