Angel, page 8
“If I’m invited to the party.”
“You are.”
“I never understood why it’s supposed to be less like animals to have sex only for procreation. I mean, isn’t that exactly what animals do? They go into heat, they have sex, make new little animals and go back about their business. That’s being like animals. Being like a human is having sex because it feels good.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“I mean, why should you have to justify giving someone pleasure? Shouldn’t you have to justify giving someone pain? Like these people who go around bashing gays because they’re good Christians—that’s fine. That’s good. But heaven forbid you give a guy an orgasm. That’s evil.”
“Why are you always arguing with me over things other people say? I’m not the representative for everyone who calls himself a Christian.”
“I’m not arguing with you. I’m asking you why.”
“But you’re not asking me my opinion. You’re asking me why different people think what they do.”
“But in your church, aren’t people expecting that a Christian church means certain things? They’re not expecting you to get up and give a sermon praising fucking.”
“I’m not anti-sex. I like sex.”
“Me too.”
“But I do think it should be in a committed relationship. I think you should love the person or at least have intimacy. I’m not talking about religion. I just think it’s better for life. Don’t you?”
“If you can find that. I haven’t found that yet.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
“I’m not exactly a catch.”
“What are you talking about? You’re crazy.”
“Maybe.”
“A one-night stand, maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s kind of self-indulgent.”
“Have you done that? Had a one-night stand?”
“A couple times. It was fun in the moment, but afterwards it seemed pointless to me. You’re not focusing on the other person, because you don’t even know her. You’re focusing on yourself. If you go around just having sex because it feels good to you—you’re not connecting to anybody. You might as well be masturbating.”
“I’d love to hear you say that in church.”
“I’d word it differently.”
“You’d kind of have to.”
“My personal feeling about why the church tries to promote sex only within marriage is that ideally it preserves the real life-affirming kind of sexuality. It’s not just about sensation and your own pleasure, it’s about connecting to someone else on a deep and serious level. Maybe churches are clumsy in how they express that sometimes.”
“Clumsy, like saying only straight people can have that.”
“Yeah, clumsy like that.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“Believe what?”
“Leviticus 18:22.”
“Oh, that again.”
“You think two men can have ‘life-affirming’ sex?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course they can.”
“Why? Don’t you have the same Bible as everybody else?”
“I do. There are a lot of different translations, but putting that aside…. My Bible tells me, in the New Testament, that Jesus Christ came with a New Covenant. That is why gentile men don’t need to be circumcised to be Christians….”
“Are you?”
“Am I?”
“Circumcised.”
“You’re easily distracted.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t keep a kosher diet, right? You can mix cotton and linen. That’s all Leviticus. It’s the rules on how to be a good Jew. We keep the Old Testament to understand our tradition and heritage. To understand the context of Jesus’s life and teaching. But no Christian follows all of the Jewish laws in the Old Testament, as far as I know. There may be some sect somewhere, but….”
“So it’s only a sin for Jews to have gay sex?”
Paul laughed. “Well, I guess you could put it that way.”
“Too bad for Abe Cohen,” Ian said. “If the Bible says that, then why are so many churches anti-gay?”
“It’s from culture and tradition. There is a lot of the Old Testament that is worth holding onto. Churches try to pass along the best of the traditions. So there is a lot of interpretation in that. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“So what is that? Like, believe whatever you want?”
“No. Different churches have their own traditions. They’re not just making it up as they go along. They’ve decided that certain things are important. The church where you grew up—they were very focused on the fight between good and evil, right? A struggle to avoid temptation and sin.”
“Yeah.”
“So that is their tradition, and they focus on passages of the Old Testament that support that tradition. This idea that you need to be vigilant all the time to avoid sin, it’s always struck me as having an underlying idea that sin is appealing. That people naturally want to sin. I am inclined to go the other way. I think people naturally want to be good, but life gets complicated and sometimes people make bad choices, hard choices.”
“What’s that got to do with sex?”
“Well, it’s…. Most people don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t think most people want to harm other people. It’s not a tempting kind of sin. So it helps support a tradition of a constant battle against sin if you focus on pleasurable things that are sinful. That’s why those kinds of religions focus a lot on sex and abstinence. The more Evangelical churches tend to be more strongly opposed to homosexuality, premarital sex, that sort of thing. That’s just my opinion, but I think that’s why.”
“What about your tradition? What does your church say about gays?”
“We’re against discrimination, but we’re not allowed to perform gay weddings, and the church won’t ordain anyone who is openly gay.”
“Why won’t they ordain someone who’s gay?”
Why wouldn’t they? Paul didn’t have a good answer. “I guess they think it’s a bad example,” he said.
“So it’s, like, we want to be open and welcoming to you, even though we think you’re a dirty sinner?”
Somehow the conversation was getting away from Paul. “I think our position is evolving,” he said. “Society changes and the church changes too.”
“But that’s not what you believe,” said Ian. “You don’t think it’s a sin.”
“No.”
“You think there’s a New Covenant. But your church says it is a sin, and you think that’s okay because it’s their tradition?”
“That’s the position they took on the issue.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
Paul moved the phone from one ear to another, buying a moment to come up with a response. “I don’t think it’s a contradiction, theologically, for a church to take that position,” he said.
“Well, it’s a good thing you only have one toilet in the church-office bathroom, or you’d shit yourself trying to make up your mind which to sit on.”
“What?”
“You’re like a politician. You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth. ‘It’s not, theologically, a contradiction’? If you think it’s not a sin, and someone else says it is, then they’re wrong. You can’t just say, ‘I don’t think it’s a sin, but if you do, hey, that’s cool’. It is or it isn’t. ‘We want to be welcoming and open to you, but a gay minister would be a bad example’. What is that?”
“I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying.”
“What do you preach on the subject—you personally?”
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“It never came up.”
“It never came up? What is that? You just wait for things to come up? I thought you were the minister.”
Paul was used to having the final say on questions of faith and religion. He wasn’t expecting an argument from Ian, and it stung. He had been showing off, confident in his authority in this area. He wanted Ian to be impressed. Now Paul wanted to backtrack and reword his statements to make Ian understand what he meant. But he couldn’t, because Ian had understood perfectly well. He saw right through it. Not only was Paul’s position a bunch of contradictory mumbo jumbo, it revealed a flaw in his personality. Ian was right: Paul wanted to please everybody. It was one of the reasons his sermons had become so unmemorable. There was nothing remotely controversial in them. There was nothing to make people think in new ways. At least the fire and brimstone church of Ian’s youth had had some fire.
“Are you still there?” Ian asked.
“Yeah, I’m still here. I’m just thinking.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just a sensitive subject for me.”
“I’m… I’m not a hypocrite.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I think you just did.”
“No, I don’t think you’re a hypocrite.”
“I represent the church,” Paul said, trying not to sound hurt, “but I don’t agree with all of their positions on the issue. You’re right. The church would like to have it both ways and make everyone comfortable. I think they’re going the right way, affirming that we shouldn’t discriminate and trying to encourage an open dialogue. But I’m not talking out of both sides of my mouth. I’m just trying to explain what I think, and what the church says. That’s all.”
“I get that,” Ian said. “I really wasn’t saying you’re a hypocrite.”
“It’s a relationship with a church, like a friendship. You don’t stop speaking because you disagree on something. Say I’m a Republican and you’re a Democrat, I’m not going to say ‘let’s call the whole thing off’.”
“You’re a Republican?”
“Uh-oh. Maybe we should leave the politics for another night?”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
When they had finished their conversation, Paul went to his computer and looked up everything the church council had written on the issue of homosexuality. It was all well wordsmithed by some committee, designed to please everyone and offend no one. The more he read, the less clear he was on what it was trying to say. There were long passages discussing official openness to gays, laying out a commitment to nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation. Churches were to actively welcome gay members and also to understand that homosexuality made many people uncomfortable. They were not to do anything that could be perceived as “promoting a gay lifestyle,” and yet they were not to do anything that might promote homophobia. They were to welcome openly gay couples yet not perform any kind of ceremony to acknowledge a same-sex union. In all of this tight-rope walking, one thing was unclear—how was a member of the faith supposed to feel about gays. Was a gay relationship a sacred union or a sinful aberration? Were gays just like us in every way, or was there something wrong with them?
The only thing unequivocal in the literature was this: the church would not tolerate an openly gay minister. After a preamble about the “frailties of the human condition” and the “pressures of society” that ministers faced, it stated clearly: “practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”
Reading the passage sent chills down Paul’s spine. “Incompatible with Christian teaching.” They were words he had never tripped over before. He must have read the material in the past, and it had seemed reasonable enough to him at the time. Now he was taking it all personally—and he was afraid. The church had always been his life. Who would he be if the church rejected him? Who would he be if he was not a minister?
“Frailty.” Wasn’t that a strange way to describe risking everything in the name of love?
“Incompatible with Christian teaching.” That was the most revealing passage of all. With all of the kind language about the “mysteries of human sexuality” and homosexuals being “equally deserving of God’s love,” it all came down to this. A gay relationship was not a blessed union of souls. That was why there could be no weddings. It was a “frailty of the human condition,” a sinful act, a weakness to be tolerated out of compassion, though “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
The next morning, Paul picked Ian up at his apartment as usual. The morning sun illuminated Ian’s face with a warm glow. His beauty made Paul especially nervous. Ian apologized again for the argument on the telephone.
“Don’t apologize,” Paul said. “You should say what you think. Anyway, you were right.”
“I don’t know,” Ian said. “I think maybe you were right about not expecting a church to be perfect. People aren’t perfect, right? A church is just people.”
In his office that day, Paul wrote a sermon about his disagreement with the church’s statement on homosexuality. It was truly inspired, passionate and soaring in places. The main theme was that no one was beyond Christ’s love and that the union of any two souls was truly blessed. After several hours writing and revising and then reading and re-reading, Paul was sure it was perfect. Then he deleted the document. He would never be brave enough to deliver it.
Pretty
“Now this sculpture by streams, or by gradual weathering, is the finishing work by which Nature brings her mountain forms into the state in which she intends us generally to observe and love them. The violent convulsion or disruption by which she first raises and separates the masses may frequently be intended to produce impressions of terror rather than of beauty; but the laws which are in constant operation on all noble and enduring scenery, must assuredly be intended to produce results grateful to men.”
—John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Volume IV
One of the benefits of talking with Ian on the telephone was that Paul could not see his face. Freed from the distraction of his beauty, Paul was able to be himself. What must that be like, he wondered, to be beautiful—to have that just be a fact about you—you’re left-handed, you’re tall, you’re beautiful. When Ian looked in the mirror in the morning, an objectively attractive face looked back. It was a question, of course, that would be laughable to speak out loud. “What is it like to be beautiful?” But it remained an undercurrent in Paul’s thoughts—an issue calling out to be addressed.
Finally, one night they were in their respective homes, each watching the movie Titanic while discussing the action over the telephone. Paul had the subtitles on and the volume on mute. He was lying on his side on the futon as he held the phone to his free ear.
“You see the priest there, praying with the people on the deck?” Ian asked. “That’s you, right? I mean that would be you if you were on the Titanic. You’d be praying with people.”
“Sure,” Paul said as he propped himself up on his elbow to get a better view of the set. “What else could you do? It would be good to have something you could do.”
“I wouldn’t be anybody,” Ian said sounding a little petulant. “I’d be, like, a random steerage passenger.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“I wouldn’t have anything to do but drown.”
“Well, I think the priest drowns too,” Paul said. “Leonardo DiCaprio is a steerage passenger. He’s the star of the film.”
“I wouldn’t be the star, I’d be one of those guys running around with the rats.”
“You could be the star. You have the leading-man looks.”
“God, I don’t have leading-man looks.”
He couldn’t possibly believe he was ugly. “You do have a mirror in your house, right?” Paul asked.
“George Clooney has leading-man looks,” Ian said. “Me, I’m just….”
“What?”
“Well, ‘pretty’ is always the word that people use.”
Well, of course, Paul thought. It was the right word. The softness and the delicate vulnerability of Ian’s face ignited the same protective instincts he’d felt when attracted to a woman. But it was not the feminine aspects that excited Paul. Prettiness in a woman was perfectly ordinary, expected, and therefore not intriguing. It was the combination of the delicate prettiness with a masculine energy—his angular shapes, the deep voice, his confident stance: yin and yang in one form. Masculine prettiness fascinated.
“That’s not bad, is it?” Paul asked.
“Not if you’re a little girl.”
“They probably mean it as a compliment.”
“It’s not very serious. Handsome is serious. Pretty means, ‘Well, he’s nice to look at, but I think I’ll have a conversation with someone else’.”
“They wouldn’t say that if they knew you.”
“The kids at school would laugh and say, ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’”
“Kids always tease you about something. There are worse things you could have been picked on for than being too good-looking.”
“What did they tease you for?”
“Me? Everything. You wouldn’t know it now because I’m such a trendsetter, but I was a total nerd in school.”
“Were you the teacher’s pet?”
“No, just a nerd. I’d sit in the back of the room and sneak peeks at the Bible during class. That’s what kind of nerd I was.”
“That is pretty nerdy, Paul. But kind of cute. They were teasing me for being a fag.”
“Don’t use that word,” Paul said, sitting up. “I don’t like it.”
“It’s the truth.”
“But I don’t like that word. I don’t like it when black people call themselves ‘niggers’ either.”
“You like queer better?”
Paul shook his head. “Come on, they weren’t teasing you for that,” he said. “They couldn’t possibly have known that. You couldn’t have known that yet.”
“I knew.”
“Really? As a kid in school?”
“I think I always knew.”
“I’m sure the kids didn’t. That can’t be what they meant. You’re not feminine. You’re just….”
“Pretty?”
“Yeah… but I mean it as a compliment.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“No one would know if you didn’t tell them. The girls must have been crazy about you in high school,” Paul said.
