On Watching Boy Erased

Some weeks after its commercial release in November, I saw 

Boy Erased, the film based on Garrard Conley's memoir of a mercifully short brush with the ex-gay movement and "conversion therapy." Mercifully short, because Conley (whose character is given a different name in the film) manages to extricate himself partway through the two-week intake program that for some participants is the initial gateway to months if not years of more of the same.

I was glad I saw the film, but I found it incredibly painful to watch. Conley's story of the spiritual abuse he suffered at the hands of others--his pious fundamentalist parents, the repressed and constricted souls who staffed the program, the unqualified charlatan who led it (and who later himself came out in real life)--is markedly different from my own experience. But it left me feeling utterly identified with him, and viscerally wanting to rip a page out of a Bible every day, wad it up, and set it on fire as a YouTube clip, from Genesis through to the last page of Revelation.

Reenforcing my reaction to the film the following week was the New York Times' story about a gay Roman Catholic layman who brought his San Diego parish back from the brink of shutdown, and who has now resigned his position as its lay leader after a campaign of homophobic slurs from within the congregation he rescued.

I'm heartily weary of feeling an all-consuming, reactive rage around such bullshit. I'm tired of bigots hijacking a religious tradition I know from my own experience also contains life-giving treasures of all-inclusive, self-transcending love. I'm utterly exhausted by trying, as best I can, to see such people as misguided rather than as malicious, to remember that they're capable of change, no matter how oblivious they remain to the suffering they inflict. I feel like I've been on this treadmill since I embraced my queer identity over forty years ago. 

Fifteen years of nearly total alienation from Christianity didn't really fix the problem. Nor did reclaiming my Christian roots twenty years ago, on my own terms, with a healthy, skeptical detachment from many aspects of the tradition.

If I look deeply at my own experience of homophobia, both as inflicted on me over the years, and the deeply internalized shame and repression I suffered as an adolescent and young adult, I begin to get why neither walking away from Christianity, nor returning to it, has entirely freed me from the defensive rage I still feel, after all these years. 

The fact is, I don't think Christianity itself is the source of most of this crap. If it were, adherents of other religions wouldn't be so readily capable of equally bloody-minded homophobia. If religion per se were the root of the problem, atheists and agnostics would be uniformly queer-positive. Christianity offers a convenient rationalization for fears and hostiiities around sexuality, and around sexual diversity, that are disturbingly close to universal. 

But if Christianity weren't there, in this culture, to provide a powerful, transcendent rationalization, then Judaism or Islam or Vedic Hinduism or much of Buddhism would be waiting right around the corner to take up the slack. Or if it came to that, older and more reductionst strains of Freudian psychoanalysis, or classical Marxist-Leninism, could serve very nicely. Or some versions of evolutionary theory, or genetics.

It is an absolute truth that absolute truth claims suck. But absolute truth claims aren't what mature, authentic spirituality is about. Deep Christianity, like deep Buddhism, deep Judaism, deep Islam, deep Hinduism, come down to this: that the richness of our life is an unfathomable Mystery, to which the appropriate response is gratitude, wonder, and a willingness to be endlessly surprised. That the only appropriate use of sacred writings is one that finds in them an incentive to love more fully, more profoundly, more indiscriminately. Homophobia that wraps itself in the cloak of faith is just unregenerate hatred in very bad drag.

All that said--I suspect that as long as I live, there will still be days I want to crumple up a fucking Bible, page by page.

A wise man saying wise things about a very problematic book:

https://store.cac.org/products/what-do-we-do-with-the-bible?