On Behalf of Our Fathers

This week following Father's Day, I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

Each of us has his own story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been over sixty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was eight. I've spent most of my adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him. Like reverse-engineering an onion one layer at a time, from the inside out. 

So it was a huge grace when, over a decade ago now, I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that had ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exericse at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, the Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. But notably, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next. 

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died over half a century ago. I'm sometimes still bemused that a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest felt an unhesitating impulse to borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who over the span of several years had given me more of what one would hope to get from a father than most others in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not only that my appropriation of the prayer might offend some, because I don't have a right to it by heritage. 

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow at Easton Mountain in upstate New York. Standing before this symbol of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. 

In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible. Giving thanks with my own orgasm, my own ejaculation splashing onto the charred wooden column which at that moment offered reassurance of the connection between us.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father, and on behalf of my father, changed nothing of that, and changed everything.

GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.

BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.

MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

In Gratuitous Praise

 Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Cloister of Norwich Cathedral

After spinning my wheels forever, I've taken the plunge into self-publishing the novel I started writing over twenty years ago. Palmetto Publishing will distribute The Ram in the Thicket: A Novel of Medieval Norwich, in print-on-demand and e-book formats. I'm hoping some independent brick-and-mortar stores might also take it up. 

What does an historical novel have to do with this blog? First of all, it's about people struggling for spiritual integrity in a complex, flawed world; about the triumph of love over dogma; and about the survival of oppressed minorities in the face of abusive power. And there's a thread of homoerotic attachment between two of the supporting characters. (But don't get your hopes up for a steamy sex scene.)

I'm a retired professor of medieval literature. So I'm used to writing books that nobody reads and that don't make any money.  I'll be happy if my story gets into the hands of a few hundred people. I'll be delighted if it reaches more. 

Ahead of the book launch, I've just published the first instalment of my new Substack--Imagining the World of Julian of Norwich. I'll post further pieces there about the story's historical background, along with reflections on the essential role of imagination in all knowledge of the past.

I hope you'll follow this link to my Substack. If you do, please consider leaving a comment there, and please consider subscribing. It's free, and there won't be a quiz.  If you know someone who might also be interested, please share the link.

Enshrining the Household Gods

Yesterday, our seasonal arrival at the "summer place." There's enormous privilege in having two homes, one in a city I've always loved, and one in a place imbued with its own green magic.

Unpacking takes only an hour or two after our long-habitual transitions. But most important this morning was setting up the garden shrine dedicated to God Knows Who. 

Placing the statue of Ganesh on the grid of a few loose bricks. The stones for the Four Directions. The bronze cross I salvaged from a house that was about to be demolished. The Shiva Lingam. 

God Knows Why I'm paying reverence here to God Knows Who. 

What I do know: when I'm lighting a cone of incense or a cube of camphor in one of the little unglazed clay lamps, I come into a state of integration. When I ring the brass temple bell that a beloved brother gifted to me last summer, my mind, my heart, my cock, my soul all work together in this little act of reverence toward the One Who Hears. I'm whole. I'm present. I'm comforted.

All I Need to Know

It's raining. Slowly and steadily. We need it--it's been a dry two weeks at a time when leaves need water to burgeon. And all I can say is, thank you, God.

Does it depend on what we mean by God? I don't think so. Maybe it depends on Who we mean by God. And the answer that I believe is wired into our souls is, who we mean, is You. That's all I know, and all I need to know.

A You who has a thousand names, but no name comprehends Him/Her/Them. Who is beyond our limited notions of human self. But who envelops us, completely. The Womb of Creation. The Sacred Staff of Life's Longing for Itself. The Luminous Void from which all things arise. If those metaphors speak to you. And if they don't, go out and find the ones that do.

It's Just a Penis

Partway through Captain Fantastic (2016, dir. Matt Ross), off-the-grid anarchist/socialist father Ben (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his six kids have emerged from their isolated, utopian life in the deep wilderness of Washington state, to drive to his wife's distant funeral in a repurposed school bus. After an overnight at a campground, he stands nude in the door of the bus with his morning coffee, to the shock of an elderly couple passing by.

"It's just a penis," he says in response. "Every human male has one."

But to be fair, it's not just a penis. It's Viggo Mortensen's penis.

Leaving that significant objection aside, "It's just a penis" is worth contemplating.

Feminist theory in the '80's and '90's was deeply influenced by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His work is hugely and willfully cryptic, but here's somethig he said that's worth thinking about, especially if you're a queer man trying to live authentically in your erotic body--and at the same time putting as much space as you can between yourself and the toxic bullshit of the manosphere. (Jake Hawley, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, yes. I'm talking about you, and all your too-numerous friends.)

So here goes: the Phallus is not the penis.

For Lacan, the Phallus is a construct, not anatomy. It's conceptual. It signifies power, mastery, self-containment, sufficiency. It's the guardian of the patriarchal order. In other words, it's everything the manosphere dudes wanna believe about themselves.

Lacan sometimes calls it "The Name of the Father." With capital letters to make it scarier. (Thank you, Judith Butler, for that line.) 

But it can only do its job if you don't see it for what it really is--a hollow idea that bears very little relation to the vulnerable life you live in your body. 

It's a little like Toto pulling aside the curtain, and Oz, the Great and Powerful, turns out to be a bumbling old guy who's trying to hold it together. Or as Lacan liked to say, the Phallus has to remain veiled in order to maintain its authority.

Otherwise, what lurks behind the idea of the Phallus turns out to be just a penis. An organ that refuses to live up to the insane expectations that toxic masculinity places on it--sometimes by veiled implication, sometimes by smarmy, explicit frat-house boasting. (Which brings to mind a certain Access Hollywood tape.) 

It doesn't get hard on demand. Or at all. Or gets hard when you least want it to. It leaks, sometimes at seriously inappropriate moments. It's always changing. (Just look closely at your own for five minutes if you need to be convinced.) In short--it's not the reliable source of masculine authority that patriarchy needs it to be in order to go on convincing everybody to fall in line. 

As I see it, that's why queer men's sexuality is such a threat to the "dominant fiction" (thank you, Kaja Silverman, for that phrase) that guys should rule the world. Maybe it's why, in the first flush of gay liberation, in 1971, Charles Shively  called cocksucking an act of revolution. Maybe it's also part of why the the right has pivoted to transphobia as its go-to strategy for whipping up moral panic. If a trans woman can declare that the penis she was born with doesn't define her; if a trans man can lay claim to the penis nestled at the top of his mangina--then patriarchy is, indeed, not long for this world. 

And to those of us who identify as cis-gendered gay or bi or otherwise queer men, I say: love your penis. As it is, not as you think it ought to be. It's a source of joy. It's also a reminder that our lives are precious, unpredictable, and transitory. Celebrate your penis. Look after your penis. It's not a tool. It's not a weapon. It's the exposed tip of your heart. It's the wand of your soul. It's your ladder to heaven. It's your antenna transmitting its messages to your brothers, and receiving theirs. It's the key to your inner temple. It's your taproot into the earth. It's the wish-fulfilling jewel between your legs.

This, too, is an act of revolution.

Photo by Andrew Graham

In the Octave of Easter

The Resurrection of Christ, Graydon Parrish

Sanctifier of our flesh, risen from the tomb, the forces of shame and repression scatter before you. Sacred Cock of Jesus, be for us the ladder that connects earth to heaven. 

Jesus and the Beloved

In homage to Terence McNally, Theodore Jennings, and Anthony Oliveira 

And with a prayer for the deliverance of the innocents being rounded up, without due process, off the streets of the United States by the agents of a tyrant

Asleep on his chest after the dinner they’ve shared with the others, the boy doesn’t really understand what’s about to happen, any more than the rest of them. They all imagine that somehow he’ll wave his hand and the fundamentalist thugs who are coming for him will drop to the ground. Or all but one of them: the one who’s betrayed him to the authorities knows well enough that they won’t. 

His heart aches for this innocent, who’s too young to lose his first love–much less to the brutal death that's to come. His desire to spare him such anguish almost swamps the fear he feels for himself. But it’s all in motion now, and the shit’s about to hit the fan. Even if he wanted to flee, there's no chance left of escaping the net they’ve cast around him for days. He’s staked everything on blind faith that somewhere--beyond the cold, calculated brutality of those who hate him, beyond the limits of imagination--some good can come of surrender to suffering at the hands of Power for the sake of Love. 

He loves them all; has loved them to the end. This boy who slipped into his bed the first night he stayed in the house of the lad’s older sisters. The hairy, thick-chested fishermen he picked up on the shore of the lake. The one everybody still labels as a sellout to the Occupation. Even the politically correct zealot who's already revealed his whereabouts to the Temple mafia. 

In the flush of the wine, he’s behaved tonight like an outrageous, theatrical queen: passing bread and wine around the table and telling them all that he’d feed them his body and blood if he could; halfway through the meal, stripping off his robe and washing their feet like a half-naked slave in a bathhouse, his erection tenting the towel around his waist while he cradled his beloved's ankle in his hand. But he still means all of it. 

Nudging the boy awake, rousing the others from where they sit, some of them slumped and dozing, some of them gripped by silent, half-comprehending dread, he tells them, time to move on. Time to meet what’s coming next.

A Morning Practice

As you awake, connect with your breath. Lay the heel of your hand against the front of your scrotum, where your penis emerges from it. Curl your fingers over your scrotum. With the tips of your fingers, gently explore your perineum and inner thighs. Contract your perineum as you exhale, and feel the contractions with your fingertips.

You are cultivating your yin masculine energy: the soft, yielding, vulnerable energy that complements the hard, active, assertive yang energy of your erect penis. 

Yin and yang are not opposites of each other. They are complements of each other. They are present in all phenomena. Their presence in your sexuality is one manifestation of this--a specific experience of something universal.

As you continue, gently grasp the tip of your penis with the fingertips of your other hand: your thumb on top of your glans, your middle finger exploring your sulcus--the furrow that starts just below your meatus. Stay forward of your frenulum. Focus on the softness here, the pliability that remains even when the magic wand that is your phallus is rock hard. 

This too is the place of your yin masculine. 

This stimulation will not cause you to ejaculate. Be aware that the goal here is not ejaculation.  You can continue this for twenty minutes, breathing, exploring, massaging. 

This is a place of lucid dreaming. This is a place of masculine wisdom and compassion. This is a treasure at the heart of your treasure.

Letting Go of Shame, Opening the Heart: On the Healing Power of Queer Men's Ritual

I was delighted to sit down a while back with Body Electric instructor and podcast host Craig Cullinane for a conversation about my take on the bigger, freer life we all deserve. Craig is energetic, thoughtful, and a great interviewer. 

You can watch and listen here.

Along the way, we talk for a while about a ritual close to my heart: the Lingam Puja that I first developed fifteen years ago at Easton Mountain in upstate New York. And about the one-on-one guidance I offer on the Path of Phallic Awareness.

Holy? Or Hot as Fuck?

The answer of course can be--I'll go as far as saying should be--"Both."

But what makes it so difficult to hold the two together in practice? Everything in our culture and personal history that keeps them apart can rear its head when we're in the bedroom with a lover. Or lovers. Or alone in our solosexual pleasure.

How do you hold them together? Or maybe holding them together doesn't feel intuitive to you. But the bottom line: what is an erotic spiritual practice? What is an erotic spiritual practice that can work for you?

Throughout history and across cultures, mystics have used the language of erotic union to describe their longing for and communion with God. Generations of mystics have used the language of the Song of Songs to imagine themselves having sex with God. Lord Krishna splits himself into dozens of identical manifestations in order to give his cowgirl devotees the experience of unique bliss in moonlit dalliance with him. If we’re blessed, the best sexual experiences of our lives are also among the most intensely spiritual. 

We miss out if we leave to chance something so important to our growth. The practice of erotic spirituality deserves our conscious and focused attention. 

Take inventory. Be honest with yourself about your wounds. Even if you’ve been out for years, you may feel that your sexual life and your connection to Spirit have a great gulf fixed between them. Explore that disconnect. Sit with it, push back against it.

Pray or meditate naked. Staying in touch with your body-with your erotic body–is an excellent way to turn up the volume on whatever keeps you from bringing flesh together with spirit–and to celebrate their connection. 

Breathe! Do it deeply and intentionally. Think of it as pleasure. Imagine that the air you take in is itself an erotic force, penetrating you with each breath. 

Relinquish the Goal. Orgasm and ejaculation are gorgeous. But learn to cultivate longing and subtle pleasure for its own sake. How does it impact your emotional and spiritual state if you choose to remain aroused without immediate release? If you have issues around getting an erection, or ejaculation isn't an option for you, it's all the more reason to stay grounded in the moment and cultivate what's available.

Practice Queer Midrash. Reimagine the sacred narratives of the tradition(s) that speak to you–a practice that Jewish biblical study calls midrash. The stories of Ruth and Naomi, of David and Jonathan, of the centurion and his “boy” in Luke 7:1-10 are ripe for retelling in celebration of same-sex desire. Photographers John Dugdale and Oscar Wolfman offer rich visual resources for a practice of queer midrash. Anthony Oliveira's Dayspring is a kaleidoscopic retelling of the Gospels from the point of view of the Beloved Disciple.

Find--and create--erotic community No matter where or with whom you find your erotic fulfilment, treat your partners like the beloved of God. Hope for the same in return..

Stop “chasing the dragon.” Peak experiences don’t happen all the time. If we try to repeat them at will, we can get caught up in a cycle that’s closer to addiction than openness to Spirit.

Create seasonal ritual. It can be enormously healing to affirm the integration of your sexuality with Nature’s larger rhythms. Create for yourself an erotic ritual in celebration of the Summer or Winter Solstice, of the Spring or Fall Equinox, of the Cross-Quarters that fall halfway between them. The ever-amazing Annie Sprinkle's website has a thousand suggestions for sexy things you can do in and with nature. 

At the Cross-Quarter

Not the Solstice--the point at which darkness most fully covers the earth. Not the Equinox, when day stands balanced with night. The point when the transition from light to dark begins to accelerate, and from day to day we start to perceive it it more dramatically.

In 2025, a reminder that however dark the world, light and warmth and new life inevitably return. 

It's a season to foster connection. To shelter hope and not be daunted. To keep joy alive. Allive within us. Alive among us. This in itself is an act of resistance to forces of cruelty, indifference, corruption, and greed.

On Ritual Authenticity

 The fourth and last instalment in a manifesto. My posts to Anchorhold have always had a utopian slant. I've always shared thoughts here about a longed-for social formation: where our queer spiritual lives can find expression and supprot in conditions of full visibility and community.

Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences. 

4. A Dodgy Road Through the Middle of the Red Sea

So, in sum--what do gay/bi/+ men's rituals need to embody, for them to offer us, for our liberation and growth? For one thing: a shameless self-awareness that we're making this up as we go along. New Age parashamanism (see the second post of this series, two before this one) often gets tangled up in its own insecurities about standing outside the mainstream of our secular, individualistic culture. 

Laying claim to lines of oral transmission from hidden traditions, in order to mystify one's own authority, is a defensive strategy: "I received this teaching while channeling a five-thousand-year-old Celtic druid named Shebugarictorix." So is making pseudo-scientific claims about a ritual: "Applying this crystal to your third eye will cure your migraines." Or else, talking the meaning of a ritual to death, instead of trusting that it can speak for itself.

In short, parashamanism defends itself from the disenchantments of modern skepticism by projecting a fantasy of wholeness, power, and unquestioning acceptance. That fantasy is especially dangerous when it refuses to consider the role the parashaman's own internal issues get projected into the ritual work–and so lay some very questionable countertransferences onto client-participants.

 

So what sets queer men's authentic ritual work apart from all this? I'd say just this: good queer ritual doesn't give into anxiety about its marginal status in a skeptical modernist world, but instead takes it as a given and embraces it. And beyond embracing it: takes it as grounds for self-reflection and deeper awareness. Our sense of irony, our ability to hold two attitudes toward what we're doing at once--these are the resources that keep good queer ritual honest. Our liminal experience of the world--not standing inside the mainstream, but not standing completely apart from it either, our constant crossing of borders--turns out to be our greatest gift for keeping ritual honest. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: our liminal status isn't just a condition of what we do. We need to incorporate it explicitly into the rituals we create together.

That's pretty abstract, so let me offer an example. Queer men's retreats often feature a communal altar, with an invitation for participants to bring their own sacred objects to add to it. The very act of doing that acknowledges that we're coming together for a limited time, and then we'll pick up our objects and separate again. But what if we deliberately heighten that awareness by making our altar-building the focus of an opening sharing circle, where each man speaks about the object he's brought, then takes it to the altar, rings a bell, and bows to the altar he's helping to create, with his object, with his words, with his actions? What if the last sharing circle of the gathering does the reverse, with each man talking about his experience of the gathering, then going up to the altar and removing his object, so that taking the altar apart again embodies the lesson of our intermittent community?

A second point: let's be honest in our ritual practice that our sexual desire for other men is foundational to the intermittent communities we create. That doesn't mean that our rituals have to incorporate orgies. But we need rituals that embody our awareness of erotic desire as the force that causes us to come together in the first place. On the one hand, using ritual as an excuse for group sex can pretty quickly tip over into all the perils of parashamanism I've reviewed. But if we're too squeamish about spontaneous erotic expression being part of our rituals, maybe we've internalized the antiierotic and homophobic attitudes of mainstream culture.

Again, an example to make this less abstract: we can set up an emblem of male homoeroticism as the focal point of a ritual; or else create that emblem in the ritual itself.

A third point: queer camp is always about celebrating the Trickster incongruities of our lives. This is what radical drag has always been about. It's central to Radical Faerie culture. It's the genius of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And yet another example: the humour of some of the panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, side by side with grief, loss, and the longing for healing. There are hundreds of examples of this in the Quilt. One of my favorites depicts a man on a piano bench doing a high kick in platform heels with the caption, "Is this art? No! It's Fred Abrams!"

Fourth, and finally: we borrow, when we need to, from established spiritual traditions--none of which have served us particularly well on their own terms. The spiritual abuse many of us have suffered from our traditions of origin often leads to total alienation from them. Sometimes, that's the healthiest response available to us, at least for the time being. But it means we also leave behind what was life-giving in them. Sometimes, we have to go back through the wreckage to find what can still serve us, on our own terms. 

Sometimes, we have to borrow what calls to us from traditions that aren't our own--also on our own terms. Eclectic appropriation of borrowed religious traditions always involves questions of colonialism and power differentials. But at the same time, there's no such thing as a self-contained "pure"  tradition that hasn't already incorporated its own cross-cultural borrowings. 

Queer culture's genius for undercutting itself means we can reimagine the ways we pick and chose and repurpose what we find in different traditions. In the ritual actions we cobble together from different sources, we embrace a tradition and distance ourselves from it at the same time. This too, is our radical drag of the soul. Auntie may not approve of what we've done with the Dior gown we found at the back of her closet. But we know we look fabulous in it.

A case in point: there's an episode in the story of the Exodus that can serve us really well. As the Hebrew slaves take off for destinations unknown, at the command of a weird-ass god who won't even show his face, they carry with them the jewelry the Egyptians have handed over in an uncharacteristic moment of generosity. Maybe what we piece together from one tradition and another is our way of carrying off loot from the Egyptians. To borrow a provocative assertion by José Estaban Muñoz, "we are not yet queer." Meaning that we're still on our way, like a bunch of escaped slaves heading through the Red Sea, and then on into the wilderness. 

We still don't fully know what a concrete ritual community of queer men might look like: what rites it might devise; what golden calves might prove in the end an ill-advised experiment; what detours through the wilderness it might find itself taking. Sometimes the voices of established spiritual traditions have been prophets calling us out of bondage in Egypt. At least as often, they've been instead the armies of Pharaoh we have to flee. Sometimes, they've just been the Red Sea that we have to cross. A genuinely queer riff on Exodus can begin by recognizing that at one time or another, they're capable of being all three.