I have an ongoing love affair with the Bible. The Bible moves me and shapes me. In its restful bosom, its disturbing questions, and its challenging climaxes, I meet God. Its stories whisper to me of my own life as a gay man: mysteries of identity, dynamics of power, hiddenness, visibility. The Bible possesses authority for me because it gives me life.
(I write from my particularity as one Western, white, gay male Christian. I'm happy if my comments speak to other people. But I speak only for myself.)
It still disturbs me when advocates of compulsory heterosexuality accuse me of not believing the Bible. But I have discovered--as have racial and economic minorities and feminists before me--that those with power always try to force their interpretation on those without. So I minimize skirmishes over proof texts. Instead, I direct my energy toward finding life in the sacred words.
For me, life-sustaining Bible reading involves several considerations in addition to studying historical and literary aspects of the texts. Among these are: (1) drawing upon personal experience, (2) reading in light of my social context, (3) responding to an interpretative community, and (4) opening to the Holy Spirit.
Feminist scholars, such as Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, taught me to pay attention to my own experience. My unique way of living attunes me to dynamics overlooked by the predominant culture. As I read the Bible, I respect the reactions of my body, mind, and spirit. (Do I become happy, tense, sad, or calm as I read?) I note similarities and differences with my social and sexual situation, paraphrasing texts from a gay perspective.
Predominant culture imposes its norms on the Bible. One group which works to "change" homosexuals into heterosexuals encourages people with unquenched same-sex attractions to claim the heterosexuality of Jesus to cover their own "broken" sexuality. Nowhere does the Bible say that Jesus was heterosexual. This group simply asserts it.
Because I know the fulfillment--rather than the social guilt--of loving another man, I am willing to consider what such an organization won't. Scripture doesn't tell me whether Jesus was gay or not. But, as former Jesuit John McNeill points out, Jesus hung out with a lot of unmarried folks, such as Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And their culture valued marriage and procreation even more highly than ours does. In many non-Western cultures, men readily express affection to one another physically. That scandalizes the homophobic West. (Did the New Revised Standard Version translate John 13:23 "reclining next to him" because it couldn't handle a disciple reclining "in Jesus' bosom"?) Gay men, out of our experience, now lead the Western church in acknowledging physical affection between Jesus and the disciple whom he loved.
Gospel dynamics also reveal themselves in my social situation. For example, like Satan tempting Jesus, the predominant church challenges me to prove that I am a child of God. "If you are a child of God," I am told, "change your gay nature" (like a stone into bread). "Call upon God for power to sustain purposeless celibacy" (like jumping off the temple for no good reason). Finally, "We'll give you riches, power--even ordination--if you fall down and worship our heterosexuality as the ultimate truth for humankind" (compare Matthew 4:1-10). Like Jesus, I must claim my experience of God's love in the face of demonic counter propositions.
But what of limits to personal experience? My interpretations must be tested in a faith community. The institutional church traditionally claimed this authority. Today, sexual-minority Christians, my local congregation, and other people on the margins constitute the community I am interpretatively accountable to. While their discernment is valuable, I must chiefly take responsibility for the justice of my interpretation. Gustavo Gutierrez wrote that "to know God is to do justice." My primary accountability must be to those for whom my interpretation may enhance life or cause oppression. (We who are gay white men, must remember this in particular, because we may forget that our white privilege is is not erased, even when, by coming out, we lose traditional male privilege. If our efforts at justice only gain us a "club card" at the expense of other oppressed groups we are no better than those who oppress us.)
Early in the sexual-minority struggle within the churches, we looked critically at traditional "clobber" texts. For example, we noted the focus in the Sodom and Gomorrah story on inhospitality rather than on homosexuality. I used the example of Lot offering his daughters to the rapists as evidence of the Sodomites' heterosexuality and of the radical demands of hospitality in Lot's culture (Gen. 19:8). My community held me accountable to women and to the way that my interpretation ignored and almost normalized abuse. In response to that challenge, I pressed beyond surface arguments about the nature of the Sodomites' sin. Now this story warns me how social structures impose insidious hierarchies through which minorities may sacrifice each other in our desperate attempts to resist the assaults of the dominant powers. (I have also written a more recent interpretation of Sodom.)
Meditation and prayer initially broke the oppressive power of social structures and opened me to the love of God. Opening myself to the Holy Spirit still undergirds my Bible study. The most astute applications of scripture to my life and social or political situation come, ironically, when I still the noise of living and culture. In a quiet place, I relax and meditate, reading and re-reading the text, praying that the Holy Spirit will move my spirit.
Reading the Bible from a gay perspective, I repeatedly find my story in its pages. For example, as a gay white man, I face an invisibility dilemma. While society may oppress me with "straight" assumptions or for suspect "homo" behavior, I alone can confirm my label. Such a confirmation poses its own risks. Coming out as a gay man is a spiritual journey much like that of Jesus.
I travel on the boundary between clear identities--"in but not of the world." Jesus likewise traversed the boundary. Through much of his life, his identity did not fall clearly into one category. People continually asked who he was and the source of his authority. At times he forbade those who recognized his true identity to reveal it (Matt. 8:4; 9:30). Other times he was less reticent (Mark 5:19). Usually, he responded enigmatically to inquiries (Matt. 11:2-4; Mark 11:28-29; John 6:42-48).
I understand the quandary. Labels limit identity. Am I single? Coupled? Homosexual? Gay? Queer? Words focus society's interaction with me. Our high school's vocational agriculture teacher once provided a spontaneous sex education lecture to the effect that individuals are "men men, women women, women men, or men women." (I think he would have placed me in the third category.) For me, gender definitions are ambiguous. Heterosexist culture says I am not a "real man." Gay men bear, in the popular mind, a largely feminine identity ("sissy," "fairy","queen"). In gay circles, masculine and feminine occupy a broader, sometimes fuzzier, spectrum. (A bearded body builder wearing a dress fits nowhere easily in a dualistic paradigm.)
Juggling language is crucial to gay identity just as it is for Jesus. Jesus skillfully manipulates efforts to label him. He asks Peter, "Who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:29). When Pilate asks whether he is a king, Jesus responds, "You have said so" (Mark 15:2). Like a sexual minority person negotiating probing questions, Jesus keeps definitions and categories fluid. Through "evasions," he reveals more truly who he is than he would with "acceptable" answers.
Most importantly, Jesus claims authority to redefine the terms and control his own destiny. When Peter confesses Jesus as Messiah, Jesus redefines the role as taking up the cross (Mark 8:29-31). Yet Jesus approaches even death as an act of power. "No one takes [my life] from me," he says, "but I lay it down of my own accord . . . and I have power to take it up again" (John 10:18). Refusing to submit to victmization by political and religious powers, he seizes his own death and makes it life-giving for those who follow after.
Coming out of the closet represented just such an act of power for me. I negotiated the process carefully to maximize my own initiative and frustrate the dominant society's attempts to victimize me. As I "laid down" my straight identity and died to the world, I "took up" a new life possessing empowering integrity.
Many friends who have AIDS or are HIV-positive similarly seize life despite society's conviction that only death lurks within them. They repudiate victimization. Like Christ traveling to Jerusalem, they transfigure their journeys to foster life in themselves and in us who live in their company.
I take courage in the scriptures' reflections of my own life and of the lives of sexual minority people around me. Having been bruised by those who wield the Bible, I am sometimes tempted to leave it behind. But then I read its verses out of my gay context, and I respond to the temptation as Peter did: "To whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).