Slouching towards Gaytheism

Christianity and Queer Survival in America

W. C. Harris

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781438451138
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Slouching towards Gaytheism brings together two intellectual traditions—the New Atheism and queer theory—and moves beyond them to offer a new voice for gay Americans and atheists alike. Examining the continued vehemence of homophobia in cultural and political debate regarding queer equality, this unabashed polemic insists that the needs met by religion might be met—more safely and less toxically—by forms of community that do not harass and malign gay and lesbian Americans or impede collective social progress. W. C. Harris argues that compromises with traditional religion, no matter how enlightened or well intentioned, will ultimately leave heteronormativity alive and well. He explores a range of recent movements, such as Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, reparative "ex-gay" therapy, Christian purity culture, and attempts by liberal Christians to reconcile religion with homosexuality, and shows how these proposed solutions are either inadequate or positively dangerous. According to the author, the time has come for "gaytheism": leaving religion behind in order to preserve queer dignity, rights, and lives.

ONE

“THE END OF THE RAINBOW, MY POT OF GOLD”

The Queer Erotics of Purity Balls and Christian Abstinence Culture

As a gay man who has managed to skirt most of the weddings he’s been invited to—a boycott against not just marriage’s legal and political exclusion of queers but the economic inequities embodied and maintained by the purchase of wedding gifts—I was initially surprised to discover the extent of father-daughter fetishizing in and beyond the world of purity balls. Of course, I had little reason to be surprised. Certain reactionary heteronormative ideals are hypostatized in any wedding ceremony, though perhaps in religious ceremonies more so than in civil ones. The father giving away the bride, the father-daughter dance, and the now less common tradition of the bride’s family paying for the wedding (a modern version of the dowry)—all these features underscore the transition of a woman from her parents’ household to her own. To put it less nicely, what’s being enacted is the handing off of the bride, an exchange of the bride-as-property between two men—the father and the groom.¹ This late in the day, such observations are far from newsworthy. In the essays “Thinking Sex” (1984) and “The Traffic in Women” (1975), Gayle Rubin radicalized Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on women’s historic status as property. Influenced by Rubin’s work, innumerable historians, social scientists, and feminist, Marxist, and queer critics have mapped out these and corollary ideas. This chapter examines how the purity ball sexualizes the father-daughter “couple,” already a particular aspect of mainstream heterosexual marriage culture, and turns that pairing into the linchpin of conservative Christian marriage subculture. It also analyzes how the disproportionate cultural burden placed on this relationship produces a claustral, incongruous marriage of giddy eroticism and ascetic zealotry. Having examined father-daughter purity balls, this chapter turns next to what appears to be a blind spot in such ceremonies but is amply addressed by Christian purity literature: the purity movement as it targets young men. Specifically, I discuss how Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker’s Every Young Man’s Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation (2002), one of the more popular Christian purity advice manuals for young men, tries to corral male sexuality and how the forces it summons to accomplish that end—(homo)phobia and (homo)eroticism—alternately enforce and problematize that project.²

As merely one of the numerous Christian purity manuals published over the past decade or so, Every Young Man’s Battle is one book in a series created by Arterburn, founder of New Life Ministries (formerly New Life Treatment Centers) and host of the radio show New Life Live. The spate of companion volumes by Arterburn, Stoeker, and their purity-shepherding surrogates include Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time and Every Man’s Marriage: An Every Man’s Guide to Winning the Heart of a Woman, both by Arterburn and Stoeker; Every Heart Restored: A Woman’s Guide to Healing in the Wake of a Husband’s Sexual Sin, by Stoeker and his wife Brenda; Every Young Man, God’s Man: Confident, Courageous, and Completely His and Every Day for Every Man: 365 Readings for Those Engaged in the Battle, both by Arterburn and Kenny Luck; Every Woman’s Battle: Discovering God’s Plan for Sexual and Emotional Fulfillment, by Shannon Ethridge; and Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World, by Ethridge and Arterburn. Many of these titles come with companion workbooks and guides for talking to one’s children about sexual purity. For use as a lens to investigate Christian purity culture as it might be experienced by gay men, Every Young Man’s Battle seems optimal for a number of reasons: while a significant majority of purity manuals address a young female audience, Every Young Man’s Battle is exemplary of those that target young men. Another factor is the mini-empire Arterburn has managed to build over the past twenty-two years, geared toward issues of sexual purity and fidelity for an evangelical constituency. In addition to offering workshops based on the Battle series, New Life Ministries oversees a network of 840 counselors nationwide, runs Christian drug and alcohol rehab programs and treatment centers for women and girls with eating disorders, and hosts conferences annually drawing attendees in the hundreds of thousands. Finally, Arterburn’s series seems best to represent the religious content, ideological underpinnings, risible techniques, and—most importantly—the queer erotics that are my focus. By “queer erotics” I mean the unintentional eroticism of purity subculture, impulses both beyond its control and of its own creation that seem to undermine the declared ends of Christian purity culture and create spaces for queer desires (in the sense of gay and more generally nonnormative) to inhabit, stow away, burgeon, and perhaps obstruct hegemonic regimes of identity, desire, and personhood.

Composed in 1949 by Bobby Burke with lyrics by Horace Gerlach, the song “Daddy’s Little Girl” was repeatedly recorded by various groups and artists throughout the 1950s and 1960s. After the Mills Brothers’ initial recording in 1950, Al Martino’s 1967 version proved the most popular, reaching #2 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Chart. Michael Bolton released his own version as recently as 2005. A success in its own right, the song’s longevity has been enhanced through its popularity as a song for the father-and-bride dance at wedding receptions. What makes the song and its association with this staple of heterosexual culture more disquieting is the barely veiled subtext of its lyrics. Even if mainstream wedding ceremonies do not feature the bride’s father handing over a purity ring to the groom as proof of her virginity, any reception at which the bride and her father dance to “Daddy’s Little Girl” says, or implies, much the same thing. The song’s lyrics offer much for analysis, especially from the vantages of Marxist, feminist, and queer theory. The first line makes explicit how concerns typical of these perspectives are yoked together in this moment: “You’re the end of the rainbow, my pot of gold, / You’re daddy’s little girl to have and hold.” However one might describe conventional parent-child intimacy—as supportive, pedagogical, protective—here it becomes claustrophobic, infantilizing, and sexualized. By mirroring the marriage vows between bride and groom, the phrase “to have and to hold” suggests that the bride has been married to her father till now. Referring to a daughter as “the end of the rainbow” both installs a frankly oedipalized heterosexuality as the cultural telos and locates that telos safely beyond the reach of homosexuality. The line also exposes heterosexuality’s simultaneously acquisitive and solipsistic nature, its drive for extension and replication. Further, the overdetermined desire for the bride, sexualized cynosure of both father and groom, daddy and darling, lends itself to a genocidal reading of the “end of the rainbow.” The fantasy embedded here of the symbolic erasure or actual destruction of gays and lesbians is what Eve Sedgwick describes as “the phobic … trajectory toward imagining a time after the homosexual,” “the hygienic Western fantasy of a world without any more homosexuals in it” (128, 127). Calling a daughter her father’s “pot of gold” and “a precious gem” underscores the centrality of marriage to capitalism and recalls the cross-cultural misogynist tradition by which women’s virginity possesses cultural and monetary value, even if such value accrues to her father and subsequently her husband rather than to herself. Furthermore, the song associates daughters with two American holidays that are at once Christian and capitalist (“you’re the spirit of Christmas,” “the Easter bunny to mommy and me”)—Christmas and Easter being occasions marked as much as by shopping and chocolate consumption as by rituals commemorating the birth and resurrection of Christ.

By comparison, the rituals enacted in purity balls state overtly the same core ideas, literalizing the commitment to virginity for the most part only symbolized in mainstream weddings by the white wedding dress. Cementing a conservative arc for female life, the purity ball amalgamates structural elements of proms with those of weddings. Nancy Gibbs, writing for Time in 2008, describes one such event held by Randy and Lisa Wilson in Colorado Springs and attended by father-daughter “couples” with the daughters “rang[ing] in age from college down to … 4-year[s]-old” (par. 1). “Kneeling beneath raised swords” meant to symbolize the father’s pledge to protect his daughter’s chastity, the girl vows to abstain from premarital sex and accepts a purity ring representing this pledge. This is the same ring that her father will take off and hand to her groom at her wedding, crudely literalizing the “traffic in women.” The fathers recite a promise “‘before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the areas of purity,’ to practice fidelity, shun pornography and walk with honor through a ‘culture of chaos’ and by doing so guide their daughters as well” (par. 5). Though written in 1998 at the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the vows remain relevant for the Wilsons as well as for others, like Stephen Arterburn, who view mainstream culture as a morass of pornography and permissiveness that potentially threatens all youth and all marriages. Along with the obvious phallicism of the raised sword, such ceremonies typically include a “21st century version of a chastity belt”: the girls receive a locket, and their fathers get the key to that locket (Gibbs and Johnson par. 3). Next to the wedding-like vows, the purity ball’s prom-inspired elements may seem comparatively harmless. Father-daughter dances have existed for quite some time as an element of wedding receptions and as middle school social activities. Yet whether the Wilsons’ innovation has been to introduce a chastity pledge into such events or, rather, to make explicit a subtext that had long been lurking there, father-daughter dances become irredeemably creepy when promises surrounding the integrity of a girl’s hymen are involved.

According to Gibbs, purity balls are a growing phenomenon: “The Abstinence Clearinghouse estimates there were more than 4,000 purity events across the country [in 2007], with programs aimed at boys now growing even faster” (par. 6).³ Purity balls focus almost exclusively on young women, their fathers, and an atavistic estimation for virginity.⁴ Comparable events for young men and boys are less common but usually involve a pledge to help young women remain pure by not pressuring them to have sex. This is scarcely the same promise female attendees are making. An industry that does focus on both male and female teenagers, if still not quite equally, is the abstinence movement, a necessary apparatus for keeping the ideal of purity within reach. First federally funded in 1999 under President Clinton, abstinence-only programming received increased spending under George W. Bush. After an initial budget of $50 million under Clinton in 1999, President Bush sought to award these programs over five times as much in 2005, or $270 million, an amount Congress cut back to $168 million. This brought the running total of expenditures to $900 million in five years. At the same time, abstinence initiatives have met some roadblocks despite support from political and evangelical conservatives. Early on, three states turned down the funds because of the strings attached: not discussing safe sex or homosexuality.⁵ By 2008 more than half the states refused federal funds. The same period saw a cycle of actual or attempted cuts and increases. Although the federal budget reduced abstinence education funding by $14.2 million in 2009, a measure in the House proposed restoring $50 million to such programs the following year. President Obama’s 2011 budget proposed eliminating abstinence-only educational spending and redirecting it to “a pregnancy-prevention initiative [to] finance programs that have been shown in scientific studies to be effective”—the implication being that abstinence-only programs, despite protests from abstinence advocates who cite their own favored studies, have not been scientifically proven to be effective (Lewin par. 6).⁶

The moment of abstinence education’s greatest public prominence, however, may have been the congressional reports and hearings in 2004 and 2008 unmasking the wealth of misinformation and bald-faced lies that such programs presented to children and teenagers as facts.⁷ Some of the more outlandish mistruths revealed in the 2004 report by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) were that “HIV … can be spread via sweat or tears,” that “condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time,” that “abortion can lead to sterility and suicide,” and that “half the gay male teenagers in the United States have already tested positive for the AIDS virus” (Connolly pars. 6, 1). These falsehoods aim to scare gay, protogay, and curious children and teens away from same-sex bodies, terrifying them into remaining in the erotic, psychological, and social closet. Eleven out of thirteen abstinence programs investigated grossly inflated condom failure rates and mentioned gay sex solely as a surefire path to HIV infection. The lies were thus homophobic and increased the likelihood that, when abstinent teens eventually did have sex, it would inevitably be unsafe. More striking than the six years and repeated debunkings it took to curtail federal funding of such manifest nonsense is the way abstinence-only curricula marginalize gay sexuality by discouraging condom use and the discussion of safer sex practices. As Abbie Kopf writes on Change.org, the abstinence-only mantra of no sex before marriage ignores the fact that “some youth are not allowed to get married. For adolescent gays, these sex-ed classes aren’t only a complete waste of time but a tacit acknowledgment that gay relationships aren’t valid or acceptable…. [T]he ACLU reports that most [programs] ‘address same-sex behavior only within the context of promiscuity and disease.’ In fact, some curricula go as far as to say that HIV and AIDS are simply the results of the (sinful and dirty!) homosexual ‘lifestyle’” (par. 3). While certainly guilty of misleading teens in general, abstinence-only classes enact the erasure of queer teens in particular.⁸ This erasure goes deeper, however, than repression; as this chapter suggests, purity culture may also have, despite itself, protective or generative repercussions that shield queers in ways at ideological odds with the official homophobic, heteronormative project.

Purity culture easily embraces abstinence education, invisible or pathologized queers, and quasi-romantic father-daughter coupling. Pledging to purity may backfire in any number of ways, of course. Straight teens coddled in the purity movement may lapse, have sex, get pregnant, or contract sexually transmitted diseases including HIV. Purity culture thus needs compulsive masturbating straights and oversexed, disease-ridden fags as much as, if not more than, it needs abstinence education for its catalyst and propulsive nucleus. Yet to pin these fixations on conservatives alone is unfair; they saturate the culture at large. What abstinence programs and queer exclusion do, and what the purity ball crystallizes in the fetish of the daddy-daughter “couple,” is subtend and nourish that cynosure of heteronormative culture across the political and religious spectrum: the married couple. The religious Right’s notable addition has been to position fathers as sexual guardians. Theirs is not a generic, prefeminist model of fathers shielding their daughters from young male libidos but a frantic eroticizing of the father-daughter relationship, placing filial affection and eroticism in such close proximity. When filial eroticism threatens to become a substitute for parent-child affection, the fervor of embattled fundamentalism, fueled by McCarthy-era gender roles, creates a volatile mixture of puritanical zeal and patriarchal consolidation. The ultimate and most tragic victims are not simply the daughters and the fathers but the sons and mothers, as well as young gays and lesbians, who have been excluded from the picture. All are held in thrall to the wounding agenda of purity and abstinence culture, although it is difficult to know whether they will ultimately be more damaged by the mandated, misdirected erotic energies or by the dehumanizing interdiction of the elemental, healthy human desire for sex. Here, abstinence culture exemplifies Tim Dean’s assertion that “purity may be considered as an enemy of the intellect” (5). “Sexual adventurousness,” Dean continues, “gives birth to other forms of adventurousness—political, cultural, intellectual,” and it’s precisely this sort of adventurousness, autonomy, and self-nourishment that the stifling parameters of purity balls and abstinence education seem designed to extinguish (5).⁹

If purity balls focus on controlling female sexuality, purity culture seeks to co-opt human sexuality as a whole. The tactics for corralling young male sexuality in particular, however, fail to erase straight or gay eroticism entirely and tend to engage both in surprisingly visceral ways. One of the more popular male abstinence guides is Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker’s Every Young Man’s Battle: Strategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation (2002). With his wife Shannon Etheridge, Arterburn has spawned an entire line of books for young and adult men and women along with workbooks for church group discussion. Before turning to how Arterburn and Stoeker address homosexuality, it’s worth noting some of the rhetoric used in counseling male teens on purity. While enraging, ridiculous, and infuriatingly backward to anyone with a marginally realistic attitude toward sex, Arterburn and Stoeker’s advice seems counterproductively erotic in both content and style. Although it would be next to impossible for Every Young Man’s Battle to extol sexual purity without talking about sex, one is likely to be surprised at just how much sex gets talked about. Erotic accounts of spirituality are nothing new; think Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God,” Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations, or the vision of St. Teresa of Ávila immortalized in marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Yet when sex migrates from metaphor to sweaty, throbbing reality as it has for present-day abstinence advocates, the relationship between eros and spirituality, between body and mind, appears radically less stable. The technologies of mediation and management Battle assembles in its fight against sexual desire are calculated to extinguish human happiness and fulfillment under any auspices other than church and spouse, the prescribed outlets of proper social interaction and sexual pleasure. More striking, and more relevant to my project, is Battle’s attempt, on the one hand, to corral all sex that is not vaginal-insertive, heterosexual intercourse with an opposite-sex spouse and, on the other hand, its sexualizing of God, spirituality, and purity itself. Even though much of the time Arterburn and Stoeker seem to target a putatively straight male audience, their ideal for heterosexuality both obliquely and directly invokes a world that gay teens—or anyone with a less than truncated view of sexuality—are likely to find inhospitable.

There are both practical as well as ideological reasons for Battle’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Where Gays Lie
• 1. “The End of the Rainbow, My Pot of Gold”: The Queer Erotics of Purity Balls and Christian Abstinence Culture
• 2. Breeding Fraternities: Ex-Gay Ministries, Barebacking, and Alternative Models of Relation
• 3. Jesus Needs Gays, Yes He Does: Gay Religion, Queer Spirituality, and the Recalcitrance of Ideology
• 4. Slouching towards Gaytheism: Gay Suicide, “It Gets Better,” and Religion’s Stranglehold on Queer Survival
• Conclusion: Before the Cock Crows
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover