No. Maybe not. (Though, of course, I nearly just did.)
Revelations of heinous abuse and harrassment now feature as nearly
a staple of the daily news--a sports doctor abusing literally hundreds of girls
and young women; the media hack who is now, unbelievably, President of the
United States bragging that as a television star he could grab women "by the
pussy" when so inclined; serial-abusing Roman Catholic priests still given the
benefit of the doubt, in 2018, for fuck’s sake, by the Vatican.
Lumped together with these stories, as though without
distinction, come the disclosures of more ambiguous encounters, often long past:
trysts followed by continued flirtatious correspondence; encounters between
high-profile photographers and male models who now, years later, are shocked--retroactively
shocked--that photo shoots for ad
campaigns built around ripped, oiled abs exposed down to within millimeters of
genitalia had anything to do with ambient sexual tension between model and
photographer. One of the most
progressive members of the U.S. Senate pushed to resign by his Democratic
colleagues mostly over some jokes made in admittedly bad taste.
A few years ago, I took a seminary course on theories of sex
and gender applied to pastoral practice. It reminded me that, as sexually
disenfranchised as cisgendered queer white men often are, we can still
sometimes benefit from enormous social and cultural privilege. As we struggle
to claim a place in the world, it’s easy for us to think of sexual expression
as instrinsically liberatory. We don’t always remember that for much of the
human race, it’s a regime of control and repression.
Still, here goes. I’m worried about how our innate and probably irreduceable ambivalence
toward our sexuality is getting projected onto an Other. I worry about how
genuinely progressive activism that promotes agency and empowerment is getting
eclipsed, as we focus more and more on granting retribution to victims and
survivors. I worry very deeply about how heterosexist the discourse is
becoming--even when the scandal du jour occasionally features a prominent man
hitting on men. In short, I’m afraid that #MeToo runs a risk of turning
out badly for sexual minorities.
Sex is messy and confusing. It involves layers of ourselves
way beyond our conscious awareness. It can throw us off balance, which makes
it a powerful force in our lives--and when it goes well, transformational in a
positive sense; but potentially, and for disempowered individuals and groups all
too often, very negatively as well. Most of us feel at least a little
ambivalent about the choices we’ve made. Consent is often ambiguous, because
we’re almost never wholly present to ourselves in sex, much less wholly capable
of representing ourselves to each other. More people remain uneasy with their
own sexuality than the supposed permissiveness of our culture would ever let
on. In the current moment, what stands between us and an ever-receding ideal of
unproblematic, no-fault, no-regrets sex is the figure of the perp onto whom we
project our anxieties and rage.
Queers have been here before: this is where we came in.
I heard decades ago that my perp had died of a heart attack.
Amazingly, he’s left no trail on the internet. I’m sure I wasn’t the only
teenage boy he “counselled.” I wish I could ask him, “What were you thinking?
Did you actually imagine you acted in good faith?” I suspect that if he could
answer honestly, I’d encounter a confused, frustrated man whose interactions
with me were riddled by self-delusions understandable enough in someone who’d
gone through seminary in the late 1950’s, and who surely suffered his own
entrapment in a world not of his making. I’d tell him about the insidious
resemblance of what I needed from him to what he offered. It wasn’t the sex but
the muddled deception that did most of the damage.
My first sexual experience with another man was tainted by
betrayal and confusion. Yet I felt little or no conscious guilt over
it--amazingly enough, since at the time humping my mattress was enough to send
me into spasms of remorse. You could say I dissociated. It took me years
afterwards to trust my own desire enough to have sex again without spiralling
into self-doubt. But I suspect that however my first time might have unfolded, and
with whom, it wouldn’t have gone well.
Was I a helpless victim? No. I was a hugely repressed gay
teenager in a conservative Midwestern city who desperately needed to have sex
with another man. I couldn’t possibly have admitted that to myself at the time.
But I’d already spent two years mooning over Pastor’s compact, muscular build
and curly black hair-- hanging around the door of his office every Sunday, borrowing
books in hope of attracting his special attention. Like the protagonist of Call Me By Your Name, I knew what I was
doing, and had no idea what I was doing. I had a considerable degree of agency.
I wish I’d exercised it differently, but I didn’t, and I wish the Rev. Mr. Perp
hadn’t taken advantage of my vulnerability.
I wasn’t permanently scarred. It was a bad start, but not a
cataclysm that divided my life into Before Abuse and After Abuse. It took years
to sort it out. It left me with a lifelong suspicion of the claims of religious
leaders to authority. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. It impressed on me the
self-deception people are capable of, in exploiting others while claiming (and
perhaps imagining) they’re acting for someone’s good, That left me resolved
always to examine my own motives as a teacher and a spiritual companion. I’m
absolutely positive that that’s a good thing.
