Why Be "Gay"?

If the rock you’ve been living under doesn’t get good WiFi, you might not know that the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission put out a statement on gender and sexual identity called the Nashville Statement.  Article 7 states: “WE DENY that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” In my previous post I discussed why I think this rejection of gay identity is partly predicated on misunderstanding the relevant terms. 

In this post I present a series of quotations from Side-B Christians (Christians who hold to a traditional sexual ethic and identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual) who discuss why they insist on the term “gay” to describe themselves. Consider it a florilegium, or the literary equivalent of a clip show. 

Enjoy.

“A lot of the ‘don't identify as gay’ stuff seems to me to be an attempt to gloss over real differences in experience, to pretend that homosexuality makes no important difference in one’s life path as a Christian in contemporary society. That seems to me to be an effort to understand gay difference and gay experience as banal.”

-Eve Tushnet 

“Claiming the label ‘celibate gay Christian’ means, for me, recognizing my homosexual orientation as a kind of ‘thorn in the flesh.’ When the apostle Paul used that phrase in his correspondence with the Corinthian church, he made clear that his ‘thorn’ was indeed an unwelcome source of pain (2 Corinthians 12:7). But he also made clear that it had become the very occasion for his experience of the power of the risen Christ and, therefore, a paradoxical site of grace (2 Corinthians 12:8). Paul, I think, would have had no qualms about labeling himself a ‘thorn-pricked Christian’—not because he recognized his thorn as a good thing, in and of itself, but because it had become for him the means by which he encountered the power of Christ. Likewise, living with an unchanged homosexual orientation may be for many of us the means by which we discover new depths of grace, as well as new vocations of service to others.”

-Wesley Hill

“The central locus of my identity, which shapes all other aspects of it, is Christ. But no one, upon honest self-reflection, can realistically claim that this entirely does away with all other aspects of one’s identity. Christ is the foundation which shows how other aspects of my identity can and cannot be expressed, but other aspects of who I am do say something significant about me.”

-Joshua Gonnerman

“‘Because I'm gay’ I've been sexually drawn to women; but also, ‘because I'm gay’ I’ve felt intense difference from those around me, felt recognition and a sort of exhilaration when I found writers and musicians and artists who described queer experience, felt a need to be of service to women, and been a part of various communities which shaped me. Collapsing all of these elements of my ‘gay experience’ into wanting to have gay sex seems to me to be a misunderstanding of eros—and a willful erasure of every possible element of gay experience which might form part of a positive path toward Christ and conversion. It seems like a demand that the path from the gay community to Christ must be a path of rejection rather than reunderstanding. 

“Christianity has always confronted specific communities which were held together by elements which seemed inimical to the Gospel. One major response has been to identify the ‘unknown gods’ in those communities, the places where their own self-understandings indicated a longing for Christ. The community could then be baptized rather than rejected or destroyed.”

-Eve Tushnet