?MeToo

Should I jump on the wagon at this point? Is it a good time to announce publicly that forty-five years ago, when I was seventeen, the Rev. NAME HERE, the pastor of SPECIFY CONGREGATION Lutheran Church in Indiana, father of four, capped off nine months of “counselling” by jacking me off in the front seat of his car, and encouraging me to reciprocate--though I was too petrified to do more than grope him hesitantly without opening his fly, when he took my hand and planted it on his crotch?

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.