Was The Founder Of The Scouting Movement Gay?

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Boy Scouts of America continues to openly exclude gay men and boys from their organization, and so far, the courts have not forced them to change their opinion. (Girls Scouts do not discriminate against lesbian girls and women.)

Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony if the guy who founded scouting had been gay? According to some biographers, he was.

Lord Robert Baden-Powell did not found Boy Scouts of America or Girl Scouts, but he founded the larger scouting movement that began in England and upon which scouting programs worldwide are based.

A lot has been written about Baden-Powell, and a number of his biographers conclude that he was gay.

“The available evidence points inexorably to the conclusion that Baden-Powell was a repressed homosexual,” Tim Jeal wrote in The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden Powell. (Long out of print and available only used, Jeal’s book is now also available as Baden-Powell). And Jeal should know; he is a well-respected British biographer and novelist whose work about David Livingstone was chosen when it was published as one of the best books of the year by editors at the New York Times and The Washington Post. Jeal’s biography of Baden-Powell provides seemingly endless details to support his conclusion that Baden-Powell, who literally wrote the book on scouting, was gay.

Boy Scouts of America, which was founded in 1910, based its program on a book written by Baden-Powell. After returning as a hero from military service in Africa, Baden-Powell found that young English boys were reading the manual on stalking and survival in the wilderness that he had written for his military regiment. He gathered ideas from a few others and rewrote the manual for a nonmilitary audience. The nature skills book was called Scouting for Boys.

To see if his ideas would really work, Baden-Powell brought together 22 boys at a camp on Brownslea Island. The campout off the coast of England was a success; the result was the beginning of the scouting movement. The movement spread quickly and Baden-Powell was labeled as its founder. He was later proclaimed Chief Scout of the World.

Because of the era in which he lived and his desire to destroy as much of his personal correspondence as possible, no one will ever conclude for sure whether Baden-Powell was gay. Biographers have gleaned information from his personal diaries and his surviving correspondence that certainly seems to suggest his taste was not for women.

Among other things, it is known that he enjoyed watching young men swim naked and that he expressed disdain for seeing female nudity. Baden-Powell also had a decades-long friendship with Kenneth McLaren, with whom he served in the military and with whom he shared accommodations as often as he could.

Jeal said he found nothing upon which to conclude that Baden-Powell and McLaren had a physical relationship.

“The facts that I have assembled point to a close and long-standing friendship, which ended after 30 years with a marriage which Baden-Powell could not accept,” Jeal said. “There is no evidence to justify the claim that the friendship between Baden-Powell and McLaren was physical.”

That does not mean that Baden-Powell was straight, however, and Jeal wrote that he believes the Chief Scout was gay. It simply means that the evidence to support a relationship with the man whom Baden-Powell called his “best friend in the world” does not (or no longer) exists. Even Baden-Powell’s way of referring to McLaren suggests a closeness. To Baden-Powell, McLaren was “The Boy.”

“Whether a physical relationship accompanied the deep affection Baden-Powell had for McLaren, it is impossible to determine, though it is clear that ‘The Boy’ occupied a very special place for Baden-Powell emotionally,” according to The Character Factory by Michael Rosenthal, a Harvard graduate who also wrote about Virginia Woolf.

Baden-Powell did get married when he was in his fifties to a woman in her twenties. When he wrote his mother to tell her the news, he did not focus on his fiancs physical beauty.

“Her fault is that she is young, but she has a very old head on her shoulders and is clever and wise and very bright and cheery,” Baden-Powell wrote to his mother.

He said he could not tell if a woman was pretty. “Henrietta Grace had mentioned, in a letter, a girl whom she has heard ‘is said to be pretty,’” Jeal said. “[Baden-Powell] told her wearily in reply that she might be right but that he could not say. ‘I’m no judge,’ he explained.”

In Jeal’s chapter entitled “Men’s Man,” he wrote that biographers who base their decision of whether Baden-Powell was gay on the evidence of a physical relationship with McLaren might be missing the point.

“By confining their attention to one friendship, and by making physical relations the acid test to a homosexual orientation, they missed a more important point,” Jeal said. “Whether a man acts upon a homosexual inclination or not (or even acknowledges his tendency), is not more significant than the effect such a tendency will have upon his life if it is denied.”

“Indeed, a repressed instinct may well affect behavior and thoughts more dramatically than a proclivity actively pursued,” Jeal wrote.

All the evidence about Baden-Powell’s sexual is orientation circumstantial — although voluminous and convincing. The tangible evidence, Baden-Powell himself, died in Kenya in 1941.

It is more important to some, however, that Baden-Powell likely would not have supported the exclusion of gays and lesbians from scouting programs. His own words at the end of his life make that clear. “[Scouting's] aim is to produce healthy, happy, helpful citizens, of both sexes, to eradicate the prevailing narrow self interest, personal, political sectarian and national, and to substitute for it a broader spirit of self-sacrifice and service in the cause of humanity,” Baden-Powell wrote in one of his last communications.

In a final letter to the general public, he wrote a sentence that suggests the dislike he had developed for useless squabbling and exclusion that seems to exist in modern Boy Scouts.

“Looking back on a life of over eighty years, I realize how short life is and how little worth while are anger and political warfare,” he said.

The Symbols Of Our Pride

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At least there’s not a lavender rhinoceros on your bumper.

Sticking on bumpers, hanging around necks and dangling in front of windows are a few of the places you’ll find the symbols of lesbian and gay pride.

There might even be one tattooed on your partner’s arm. Rainbow flags, pink triangles and that odd wishbone-like Greek letter called lambda are the most popular symbols today, but there were many others before them.

And, by the way, what does a lavender rhinoceros have to do with gay pride? Stay tuned.

Because our community has been forced into hiding and secrecy throughout much of time, lots of our history was locked into closets that were never opened. Today, many closet doors are flung open and the symbols of lesbian and gay pride are displayed prominently. We are attempting to reclaim the bits of history that remain — and openly make tomorrow’s history.

The exact reasons we choose to put these symbols on our clothes or cars are usually personal and vary a lot. Some of us do it so other gay people can identify us; others say the symbols notify the world that they are lesbian or gay. Whether most people recognize the symbols is not clear, but most gay people do — and our staunchest enemies do, too.

“Whether the general populace recognizes the rainbow flag or other queer symbols for what they are, the two primary camps in the struggle for queer civil rights certainly do,” one man wrote in an internet post.

 Perhaps more people know the origin of the pink triangle than any other symbol. During World War II, Nazis herded gays and many others into concentration camps along with Jews. Gay men were forced to wear downward-pointing pink triangles on their sleeves. Other colors and configurations denoted other prisoners.

Red triangles marked political prisoners; green labeled habitual criminals. Jehovah’s Witnesses, emigrants and others each got their own color, too. Black triangles labeled vagrants and antisocials, the category into which most sources report lesbians were placed. A yellow triangle pointing upward marked a Jew.

But gay men were the most mistreated of the prisoners, many say. “The fate of homosexuals in the concentration camps can only be described as ghastly,” Eugen Kogon, who was a political prisoner of the Nazis for six years, said in his book The Theory and Practice of Hell. “[They were] the lowest caste in camp… Theirs was an incluble predicament and virtually all of them perished.”

A pink triangle over a yellow one forming a Star of David marked the people who were even lower than the lowest in camp, gay Jews.

Because Nazi records of concentration camps are incomplete and often falsified, there is no reliable way to know how many gays and lesbians may have died in German death camps.

The gay and lesbian community began using the symbol as a sign of pride in the 1970s to upturn their oppression. Claiming a symbol once used to label gays for prison and death as a symbol of pride is a way of overcoming the scars of oppression that the symbol once represented, according to the reasoning behind the symbols use.

The other symbols of our pride don’t carry with them the baggage the triangle bears.

 Lambda is an “officially” recognized symbol of pride. In 1970, the Gay Activists Alliance chose the Greek letter, which looks like a lowercase “y” flipped upside down, as the symbol for the gay movement. The International Gay Rights Congress adopted it in 1974.

It is not known for sure why lambda was chosen. In physics, lambda signifies change; that may be the reason. Others say it was because in ancient Greece it symbolized reconciliation and justice. Whatever the case, in the seventies, the lambda was the symbol of choice, if there was one, for the lesbian and gay community. The word “lambda” is still sometimes a code word for the whole gay, lesbian and bisexual community.

The lambda and the triangles seem to be going out of style these days, though, and a more colorful symbol is in. Rainbow flags, in many versions, hang from windows, adhere to bumpers and even wave down from flagpoles. The six-striped flag would be even more colorful, but a flag manufacturer changed the form of the symbol fated to become associated nationwide with gay and lesbian pride.

The flag dates back farther than many know. It was first stitched together by its designer, Gilbert Baker, and a group of thirty volunteers who hand-dyed and assembled two large flags for the 1978 San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day Parade.

The rainbow flag had eight stripes then, and each had a meaning: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony and violet for spirit.

When Baker tried to get the flags mass-produced, he was informed that hot pink fabric was not commercially available, so Baker’s flag became seven-striped. In 1979, turquoise was removed and today’s six-stripe version was born. The flag is now recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.

Some people like the flag because the rainbow is a Biblical symbol; others like it because rainbows appear in nature.

“When I see a lambda or pink triangle in the sky, I might change my mind,” one gay man said.

 Today, the rainbow flag may be the symbol of choice, but the pink triangle, lambda and many others are still around, too. Triangular rainbow flags and lambdas superimposed on rainbow backgrounds are common. Texas-shaped rainbow flags are also gaining popularity. Freedom rings and even rainbow-colored coasters and candles are among jewelry and other items inspired by these three signs of pride.

Historically, lots of symbols have been used to represent the gay and lesbian community. These symbols are as diverse as the times and the people from which they came.

Earlier this century, before red power ties became common in the corporate world, a red tie worn by a man might have indicated he was gay.

In 1955, the five-year-old Mattachine Society, a gay group, used harlequin diamonds as their symbol. The icon presented four diamonds placed in a pattern to form a larger diamond. Before that, the ancient Chinese yin and yang, featuring black and white interlocking commas forming a circle was associated with lesbians and gays. In 1933, a flag bearing that symbol flew over the International Commission for Sexual Education, according to the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.

That flag predates the rainbow banner by decades, but, of course, even it was not the first pride symbol. In ancient Crete, the labrys, a two-edged ax, was a symbol of feminine strength and eventually lesbianism.

No one knows for sure how far back signs of lesbian and gay pride go, and there are dozens of other known symbols that are not mentioned here. In 1974, Bernie Toal and Tom Morganti, Boston gay rights activists, began a campaign in the media using a lavender rhinoceros as the symbol for gay people. They placed placards on subways for three months beginning in December 1974.

They intended a longer campaign, but since they didn’t qualify for the public service rate for subway advertising, they had to pay more than three times that amount for the commercial rate (seven dollars). They finally decided to spend their time focusing on something else.

According to the Alyson Almanac, Toal said, “The rhino is much a maligned and misunderstood animal and, in actuality, a gentle creature — but don’t cross him or her.”

So what does a lavender rhinoceros have to do with the signs of our pride? Well, fortunately, not very much.

Roger Streitmatter: The Rise Of The Gay Press

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Every issue of most gay and lesbian publications is something of a miracle. A small staff with a low budget and a tight deadline manages to pull together a good publication — often at the very last minute. But have you ever wondered where it all began? Who came up with the idea of publication especially for lesbian women or gay men? How did it evolve into what it is today?

Lisa Ben was a secretary who didn’t have much to do. Her boss told her to look busy anyway. She decided to occupy herself by typing a newsletter called Vice Versa. Only twelve copies were made, but it was the beginning of the gay and lesbian press in the United States.

“If anyone came around, I had to zip it into my briefcase quick,” Ben said in a published interview years later.

In 1947, Vice Versa, subtitled “America’s Gayest Magazine” was first distributed. Its creator’s name never appeared on its pages. (Actually, Lisa Ben is a pseudonym the anonymous author made by rearranging the letters in “lesbian,” but this pen name never appeared in the newsletter either.)

Vice Versa, the earliest known lesbian publication, only lasted nine issues. The twelve copies and the less than 20 pages of each issue broke new ground, though.

There were lots of magazines on newsstands, “yet, there is one kind of publication which would, I am sure, have great appeal to a definite group,” Ben wrote in the first issue.

“Hence the appearance of Vice Versa, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the ironbound rules of Convention,” she wrote.

Six copies of that groundbreaking publication were created at one time using carbon paper, then the pages were retyped to create another set. Most of the copies were handed out at the If Club in Los Angeles; three of the first issue were mailed to friends. The mailing stopped when someone alerted the author that what she was writing could be considered obscene and should not be mailed.

It was 1958 before the U. S. Supreme Court decided that it was not illegal to mail gay and lesbian material. It took a four year legal battle to win this fight for something most groups took for granted.

A lot happened in the time between the hand-typed pages of Vice Versa in the forties and the glossy magazine Out in the 1990s. This emerging media both reported happening and became an invaluable part of the rise of the gay and lesbian movement.

“Written and edited by the same women and men who organized and marched in the picket lines, the publications of the mid-1960s articulated the political philosophy that fueled the new defiance,” Roger Streitmatter, a journalism professor at American University, wrote in his 1995 book Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America. “The publications of the era directed this dramatic change from conforming to the dictates of society to building a national gay community with values often in conflict with those of heterosexual America — and proudly so.”

The evolution of the lesbian and gay media has not been a simple one nor has it been without obstacles. As Streitmatter writes, what was in the 1950s a “love that dare not speak its name” became militant in the Stonewall Rebellion of the 1960s. In the 1970s, the gay and lesbian press played a role in transforming the riot at the Stonewall Inn from a “moment,” into a “movement”– a movement toward gay and lesbian liberation.

Beginning in the seventies, the religious and political right sprang up to derail the gay and lesbian movement but they were largely unsuccessful. The whole story comes to a screeching halt, though, in the early 1980s when a “cancer” is discover among gay men. What later became known as AIDS killed a generation of leaders and the women of the community came forward to lead the movement. In the 1990s, gay and lesbian issues come to the forefront and the gay and lesbian press moved toward the mainstream with publications like Out that look like mainstream publications.

From typewritten pages in 1947 to the glossy professionally designed pages of 1998, the lesbian and gay press has come a long way.

If a secretary trying to look busy can become a pioneer in our community’s media, what can we accomplish?

Marc Adams: The Preacher’s Son

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Marc Adams grew up in a household where Jerry Falwell was considered a liberal, but this preacher’s son is now on a two-person crusade to expose discrimination against lesbian and gay youth in this country’s fundamentalist schools and try to help the victims.

“I must speak for the gay and lesbian youth whose lives are being damaged, ruined and sometimes ended by religious educational institutions that expel them for suspicion of homosexual activity,” Adams said. “They have no voice and in many cases wind up like me, believing that there is a righteous punishment for being gay.”

Adams has written a book called The Preacher’s Son, which he calls “224 pages Jerry Falwell doesn’t want you to read.” In it, he talks about being raised as the son of a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and about struggling with his sexual orientation from a young age. He tells of the abuses he suffered in the name of God at the hands of his parents and his college.

Adams’ parents ruled the house by what they believed was God’s law. The family owned a TV, but the children were only allowed to watch certain programs. His parents would not even let the children watch all of televangelist Jerry Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour.” The music was fine, but Falwell, who most consider as ultra-conservative, preached sermons that Adams’ parents considered too liberal.

“In my parents’ house, we were to keep ourselves from being contaminated by the rest of the world,” Adams said. “That meant depriving ourselves anything considered worldly.”

Some episodes of Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, Grizzly Adams and Wild Kingdom were about the only other acceptable programs.

“Questioning the authority of the Bible or the authority of our parents was rebellion,” he said. “We were often reminded how the Bible gave approval for parents to stone rebellious children.”

When Adams was 3 years old, his father was carrying him past some equipment used to pave streets. Adams reached out, touched the grease, then wiped it on his father’s clothes. Adams said he saw the intense anger in his father’s eyes as his father dropped him on the ground. Two years later, Adams his father spinning him violently by the ankles until his mother stopped it.

Remember, Adams’ father was a preacher.

By high school, Adams was so desperate to escape his oppressive family that he entered an accelerated program and graduated a year early. At age 16, he was off to Liberty Bible College, Jerry Falwell’s school.

Since Adams wanted to major in television and advertising, his parents said they couldn’t support him. (That field was too worldly.) But he went anyway. While it was an improvement over his home situation, he saw friends and acquaintances forced to leave because they were suspected or known to be gay. Discrimination was everywhere at what would become Liberty University.

Adams knew his story needed to be told, so with his partner he created Window Books and published The Preacher’s Son. Now, using the book (and a book of poetry Adams has written) to raise money and as a tool to create interest, they travel the country speaking to whoever will listen about discrimination against lesbian and gay youth at religious schools.

The crusades that shaped America’s early history were often by groups of people intent on bringing Christianity to the often already spiritual Native Americans. Adams and his partner, a group of two, are now trying to help show the truth about life to gay and lesbian youth who have been the victims of lies from a religion that persecutes them.

“All across the United States, teenagers are being kicked out of their schools and universities,” Adams said. In many cases, he said, the students are given the choice of entering a counseling program to “cure” them of their homosexuality and staying in school or calling their parents and coming out. He calls this harassment of gay students a “hate crime.”

“They have to go home and face their parents and their siblings and friends,” he said. “I have seen the humiliation, fear and loss of self-worth in the eyes of these kids – my friends. I have wept the tears for those who felt there was no room for them in this life.”

But now, with the help of the groups he encounters along his trek around the country, he is sending a copy of his brochure about “hate crimes” at religious educational institutions entitled “What About Love?” to every religious school in the country. The envelopes are hand-addressed and he encourages those to whom he speaks to take a few envelopes, add postage, and mail them.

Little by little, his crusade is making a difference.

“For several months now, I’ve been in contact with current gay students at Liberty University,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how relieved they are to know they aren’t the only ones.”

“An entirely new world of life and opportunity is now in their vision.”

The Lesbian Conductor Of The Gay Men’s Chorus

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There aren’t many female choral conductors, but Kathleen McGuire long ago managed to break into the male dominated field. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is what the Australian-born lesbian is now conducting: McGuire is the first-ever female conductor of the historic San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

“I once met an airline pilot in a bar who was a woman. And we thought, ‘What are the odds that a woman conductor and a woman airline pilot would meet in a bar, since there were only about five female conductors in Australia and maybe ten female airline pilots?’” McGuire says. “We decided the chances were very small.”

McGuire, who finished her doctorate in orchestral conducting at the University of Colorado shortly before taking the job last August, is well-qualified for the position with the chorus and has impressive conducting experience in Australia, England and the U.S. She also knew how gay chorus groups work since she had been conducting the Rainbow Chorus in Fort Collins, Colorado while working on her doctorate.

But how likely was she to get a job conducting the nation’s oldest gay men’s chorus? She applied, and so did eighteen other qualified conductors. She was among the final three invited to an in-person audition with the chorus.

No one in the chorus seemed to mind that the group’s fifth conductor in its 22-year history could be a woman. “They had apparently already dealt with that before I came along,” she says in her Australian accent softened by her time in England and the U.S. “I did say to them, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’”

After she was chosen, the San Francisco community didn’t seem to mind either. “For the most part, they’ve been extremely supportive. We’ve only had one member of the public complain and they said they’d be coming to the concerts anyway,” she says.

The 30-something conductor says things may be changing in the gay mecca. “The large gay population in San Francisco is predominately male,” she says. “The women, who usually still make less money, tend to live in the East Bay where the housing is more affordable.” A new community center is being built, however, that organizers hope will help unify the community, and McGuire’s position with the chorus can’t hurt either.

With that new hope for unity comes a new direction for the chorus, too. While most of the audience has been other gay men, McGuire hopes to build a more diverse following for the group. To do that, she is making sure the chorus improves musically by exposing them a variety of musical styles, including classical, pop, show tunes and folk music. That makes the chorus more versatile and better musicians. “And if we can exhibit gay pride through the music, all the better,” she says.

Personally, McGuire is settling in to the city by the bay nicely. To her surprise, California has some varieties of Australian trees that remind her of her home country. She and her partner like water sports, too, which makes them even more at home among the Californians.

Philosophically, McGuire says she feels compelled to do the best she can and to lead others to do their best. “I believe if you have a talent, you have a responsibility to use it to the best of your ability,” she says.

Who would have thought that an Australian woman would take the helm at an American gay male institution? McGuire says her position with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is proof that anyone can do anything they want.

“I would encourage women to set their goals and go for them – and do it with conviction – because at the end of the day you’ll like yourself more,” she says. “It makes for a more meaningful life.”

Peter Nardi: The Cultural Impact Of AIDS

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While AIDS is far from over, its stranglehold on the gay and lesbian community is loosening. After two decades of HIV and the illness it causes, Peter Nardi says it’s time to look at the impact the virus has had on the evolution of the gay community — and the world.

“Consider, for example, how the media — from newspapers to TV — had to deal with discussing unsafe sex, bodily fluids, same-sex sexuality and gay people in a way it never had to before,” Nardi said in an interview. “This type of discussion points out how HIV and AIDS does not narrowly affect only certain segments of the population, but that it has and will continue to have profound effects on the society as a whole.”

Nardi, who co-edited In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS with John Gagnon and the late Martin Levine, also noted that the legal system has had to create new laws and new interpretations of old ones to accommodate changing definitions of disability, discrimination and inheritance.

“By talking about these things, people might realize that HIV is everyone’s problem since, in its social form, their lives will be effected by it,” he says.

Nardi, a sociology professor at Pitzer College near Los Angeles, has long been active in gay politics and has been doing gay-related research for about 15 years. When the health of Martin Levine, the co-organizer with John Gagnon of the conference on which In Changing Times is based, began to fail, Nardi was asked to edit the conference papers and prepare them for publication. He had already agreed to write a paper on interpersonal relationships for the book.

It is difficult to determine exactly what impact the virus has had on the world. For example, one of the points of Nardi’s chapter is that it may not have been true, as some have suggested, that gay men were more likely to enter into relationships as a result of AIDS in the 1980s. The percentage of gay men in couples was 40 to 60 percent before the AIDS years, and the number remains about the same today, according to Nardi.

While that is an example of something AIDS may not have impacted, it has effected other aspects of the community.

“Even if HIV may not have caused more people to couple, it probably did heighten the importance of those who were coupled on the need to establish legal connections — to inherit after the death of a partner and to ensure the right to visit in hospitals,” Nardi says. “Who knows, maybe the current debate about gay and lesbians marrying and raising children is due in part to the impact of HIV on our lives.”

Another reason it is hard to determine HIV’s cultural impact on the gay and lesbian community is because the community is a difficult one about which to generalize.

“I’m not sure there is such a monolithic and unified gay culture,” Nardi says. “If you mean gay movements, HIV saw the emergence of ACT UP and the mobilization of activists who wanted change in everything from the media to the way drugs were approved by the FDA. The media watchdog organization, GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), also grew out of the AIDS activist movements.”

Nardi does not believe that AIDS slowed the development of the lesbian and gay community.

“The immediate response to AIDS by gay people in the early 80s … demonstrates that some infrastructure of gay organization was already in place,” he says. “Remember, gay neighborhoods, such as Castro, West Hollywood, Christopher Street and Montrose were in existence, so HIV only heightened the importance of community organization, mobilization, and communications. In many ways, HIV strengthened what was in place and pushed it forward.”

This benefit does not make up for the thousands of deaths attributed to the disease, however.

“Communities organize and strengthen when forces of oppression exert themselves. If not AIDS, then maybe the conservative Reagan years, the rise of the religious right or the anti-gay propositions on the ballots would have had the same effect,” Nardi says. “The tragedy is that so many activists and potential activists died in the prime of their lives, so the numbers and voices were minimized.”

Nardi says he believes AIDS will someday be a disease locked in the past, but he does not speculate on how long it will take to end the pandemic.

“I’m 50 years old. My estimated life expectancy as an HIV negative man is 72. Will it take 22 more years?” Nardi wonders aloud. “It’s already been over 16 years and I never would have guessed it would take this long when I first heard about AIDS in 1982.”

Mark Jordan: Talking About Sodomy

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Mark Jordan is the author of The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. As the title suggests, Jordan tackles a controversial and weighty task — trying to discount the term “sodomy” as a category people use to condemn gay and lesbian people by unmasking it as a late-in-coming invention. As Jordan and I sat on the patio of a small coffeeshop and discussed lesbian and gay Christian theology, we managed to raise the eyebrows of at least one worker who may have been surprised to hear two gay men discussing Christianity while he was taking out the trash.

Gip Plaster: Is it possible to be lesbian or gay and Christian?

Mark Jordan: If by Christian you mean a real Christian — that is, someone who responds to the revelation God made in Jesus — then the answer is emphatically “yes.” There are dozens of definitions of “lesbian” or “gay,” and ten times that many definitions of “Christian.” So the question will quickly come down — as often in theology — to a discussion of who gets to set the definitions. I think there is difference between asking, “Can I be a Christian and gay?” and asking “Can I be a Catholic and gay?” or “Can I be a Methodist and gay?”

Gip Plaster: Do you think we should reject the teachings of the denominations in which we grew up?

Mark Jordan: At their best, denominations show us different versions of Christian truth. But their emphases may be important reminders of things we would rather forget. Lesbian and gay Christians have been tempted to live as if we didn’t need any of those old patterns for our lives because we judged that our denominations were wrong on the issue of homosexuality. Now, though, we have to ask ourselves, “How do we live outside the closet as homosexual Christians? How is being a gay Christian different from being gay secular or gay Buddhist?” The traditional wisdom of our denominations can be very helpful in taking up those questions.

Gip Plaster: What do you think about groups like Metropolitan Community Church, the mostly lesbian and gay denomination founded by Troy Perry in 1968?

Mark Jordan: Part of the genius of MCC is the genius of peacekeeping — of not fighting over details of the incarnation or what exactly happens to the bread in the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper. I don’t know how long that delicate peace can continue. Certain questions are hard for Christians to avoid. For example, does the authority go to the individual, to the majority of the community, to certain officials in the community, to some doctrinal statement? Similar questions have divided Christians for two thousand years, and no group has succeeded in postponing them for long. Of course, I would prefer that we did keep peace in the Christian household–not just for lesbian and gay reasons, but for ecumenical reasons. Christian quarreling is always ugly.

Gip Plaster: Are we doing Christianity more good by staying in Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian and other mainline churches or do we do more good by leaving them in favor of MCC and gay denominational groups like Dignity in the Catholic Church and the Methodist group Affirmation?

Mark Jordan: That is the most urgent question. And it’s one that a gay or lesbian Christian can only answer individually, in prayer. Great spiritual discernment is required in this prayer. You need to ask yourself, for example, how angry you are and how much you are suffering. There is no point walking out Sunday after Sunday from your congregation either crying or raging. You can’t worship. And it may be, moreover, that certain denominations cannot be reformed. God may mean for them to disappear.

Gip Plaster: In general, Christians seem to have sort of strange — and inaccurate — ideas about what the Bible says. Why is that?

Mark Jordan: The Bible has been preached that way, for one thing. A lot of effort has gone into producing bad Biblical interpretations that reinforce prevailing social prejudices about homosexuality. A hundred and fifty years ago, similar efforts were made to use the Bible to reinforce the interests of slaveholders. But the larger issue here has to do with our assumptions about what the Bible means and what kind of answers it gives to moral questions. One man asked me at a book signing whether I had ever read Leviticus 18 –where it says, roughly speaking, that it is an abomination for a man to “lie with a man as with a woman.” He assumed that if I had ever read it, I would instantly know better than to live as a homosexual. I answered that I had not only read it, but had used my faltering Hebrew to try to read it in the original. I then added that it’s very hard to know how any verse in Leviticus 18 applies to a modern Christian. The chapter is part of the holiness code that imposed standards of purity or “cleanness” on adult male Israelites. But by that point I had begun to push against my questioner’s fundamental assumptions — or fears.

Gip Plaster: Americans sometimes seem to act as if the Bible were originally written in English.

Mark Jordan: If God had wanted the original Bible in English, God would have caused it to be written in English. But God caused the Bible to be written in Hebrew and a common street version of Greek. We ought to remember and respect that divine choice.

Gip Plaster: Let’s talk a little about your new book, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Tell me about it.

Mark Jordan: In the process of writing the book, I made a historical discovery, which is that the category “sodomy” appears very late in moral theology. I think that I can pinpoint when and where it was coined as a theological term — around the year 1050 by the religious reformer Peter Damian.

Gip Plaster: And what application does your finding have for our lives?

Mark Jordan: One conclusion is that “sodomy” is worthless as a category for serious theology. It was glued together out of paradoxes, misreadings and equivocations. That makes it even more peculiar that this particular theological category got written into English and American law as the main category under which we homosexuals were persecuted. I want to show how illegitimate the category always has been.

Gip Plaster: Who will want to read your book, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology?

Mark Jordan: Despite the fact that it has footnotes, I didn’t intend the book mainly for an academic audience–though of course I wanted my scholarship to be sound. I intended the book primarily for those who are still being wounded by condemnations of homosexuality as sodomy. I wanted to say to them, “Look, there’s no reason to bleed. The supposed arguments that are being wielded against you are, in fact, theologically incoherent.”

Gip Plaster: Did writing the book change you spiritually?

Mark Jordan: It did and it does, in ways I don’t yet understand. In the course of writing the book I’ve become more and more radical in my consideration of future alternatives. At the start, I positioned myself very deliberately as a dissenting Catholic. Now I think that my position may be something else, somewhere else. God may want more prophetic and radical responses to the churchly persecution of homosexuals. And my future as a teacher or writer may be in specifically gay and lesbian churches. The mainline churches have been killing us, mangling us and silencing us for a long time. We may need fifty or a hundred years away from them, in our own communities, to begin healing. Of course, I’m not sure how smoothly they’ll keep all those congregations running without us.

Gip Plaster: Do you think the book will have an effect on your readers’ spiritually, too?

Mark Jordan: My hope has always been that the primary effect would be to release some anger and bring about some consolation: anger that the church has distorted the tradition, consolation that this distortion isn’t from God.

 Gip Plaster: We’ve talked a little about overcoming what some people think the Bible says about homosexuality. Do you believe the Bible say things that are supportive of gay and lesbian people?

Mark Jordan: There are no homosexuals in the Christian Bible. But then there aren’t any heterosexuals either. “Homosexual” and “heterosexual” are categories invented barely a hundred years ago. They don’t figure in the Bible any more than the categories “American” or “Republican.” There are passages in the Bible that speak about erotic relations between some members of the same sex, but these passages cannot be made into generalizations about homosexuality. The hard issue is how you get from these very old texts, written in and for dead cultures, to your own life circumstances.

Gip Plaster: Then what?

Mark Jordan: Once you settle that question, you will discover many passages that speak to homosexuals. Some of these are passages about same-sex love — like David and Jonathan or Ruth and Naomi. Others will be passages about less likely figures — say, about eunuchs, a marginalized and badly understood sexual minority. We should also remember that earlier versions of the Gospels may have contained more explicitly homoerotic material — for example, the story in the “secret Gospel of Mark” about the young man who became Jesus’ special companion, of whom there remains only the tantalizing mention in Mark 14.51-52.

Gip Plaster: Which parts of the Bible seem most supportive to you?

Mark Jordan: The most supportive passages for me are those about the sufferings required of God’s chosen ones — of the Israelites in Egypt, of the prophets in Israel, of Jesus and his followers. And doesn’t Jesus talk directly to lesbian and gay Christians when he says things like, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account”? (Matthew 5:11). That is the Bible saying something very supportive to homosexuals — very supportive, but not very easy. You have to weight these words from the Lord against the disgust at same-sex desire that Paul expresses in Romans 1 and elsewhere.

Gip Plaster: So how do we justify being gay and Christian? Do we simply ignore the Bible parts of the Bible that trouble us?

Mark Jordan: I don’t think we can ignore anything that’s in the Bible, but I think the Bible is not one book. It’s a whole library of books, spoken in a lot of different voices with varying relevance to us in the present. It’s crucial to remember — and now I’m really talking like a Catholic — that the Bible is for the sake of the Christian community, not the other way around. The Bible is a privileged instrument for God’s teaching humankind, but it is only an instrument. The heart of Christianity is not a text. It’s being in love for a living God. The Bible has authority only so far as it ministers to that love.

Starting A Company Gay And Lesbian Employee Group

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If you’re an employee at a company where no gay and lesbian group exists, what can you do to make a little progress in the direction of equality?

The answer is simple: start a group. But the process of actually starting one is a little more complicated. We asked some experts how you can get started.

Kim Mills, director of workplace education at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay and lesbian political organization, says the first thing you have to do is make sure there isn’t already an underground group at the company that you don’t know about.

Once you’re fairly sure you aren’t duplicating someone else’s efforts, Mills says there aren’t many qualifications for the person who decides to take the first step.

“I think you just have to be motivated,” Mills says. “Usually, though, the person who steps forward has some leadership ability.”

Your next step is to determine what rules your company has about the formation of employee groups, according to Sheryl Robertson, the chair of COLLEAGUES, an umbrella organization which gay and lesbian employee groups or individuals can join. Obviously, your job will be in jeopardy if you violate any company rules while trying to start a group.

Once you’re sure the rules are on your side — or at least know what rules you will have to abide by — it is a good idea to start forming a relationship with key people in the human resources department who can be useful when the group wants to become recognized by the company or tried to obtain domestic partner benefits.

At the same time, you can meet one-on-one with some carefully chosen people to let them know what you plan to do, she says. You should also try to meet with employees that you think are gay or gay-friendly and with essential members of management, even if you aren’t sure they what their response will be.

“Make an appointment and tell them what you want to talk about,” Robertson says. She says you’ll be surprised how far one person can get if they are willing to talk a risk.

Robertson says there is no way to avoid the risk of stepping out. She says “somebody’s got to be out,” but adds that “of everybody I’ve known that’s done this, I haven’t heard of anyone that’s been adversely affected.”

“I put it on my resume because it’s leadership experience,” she adds, noting that she has been promoted since she started working with gay employee groups.

Once you have established contact with even a few people who are willing to help in the formation of the group, call a meeting. It can be a small, simple meeting after work at a coffee shop.

“If there are three of you — boom — you have a group,” Mills says.

If employees seem resistant to forming a group, take a closer look at the company to see if groups exist for African Americans, Hispanics or other minorities. If not, “the problem might be that the company hasn’t made it clear to employees that it’s OK” to form groups, Mills says. If other groups do exist, try to get advice and support from their leaders.

Robertson says once you have an established core group, even one as small as two or three people, it is important to try to become an officially recognized employee group, if that is possible at your company.

“If you want to influence, help educate and create a safer work environment at the company, go within the structure,” Robertson says.

It is also important to have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish as a group, Robertson says. Gaining domestic partner benefits is a good goal, but it should not be the only one because the group will be in danger of dying once the benefits are achieved.

Here are some additional suggestion if you want to start a group, compiled from various sources:

  • Create a mission statement, and articulate your goals to all members of the group. Set timelines and make structured plans on how to achieve you goals.
  • Set up a telephone number and website for your group as soon as possible. Use a company email address and web server only if allowed by your employer’s rules. If not, get voicemail and a website from a service provider.
  • Even if employee groups are allowed at your company, if a nondiscrimination policy that includes specific protection based on sexual orientation is not in place, it might be best to stay outside the company’s structure and to use caution in approaching management.
  • Start an email list to help members stay in touch and feel connected to the group. Again, use private email addresses for both you and the recipient if the company’s policies are not in your favor.
  • Form strong heterosexual allies. Your cause will not succeed without their help.
  • If your company requires you to have a member of management sponsor your group, you might not should choose the obvious choice. An open-minded skeptic can help lend credibility.
  • Not all gay or lesbians in the company will be willing to be a part of the group, perhaps because they are not out or maybe because they are not political. You will have to accept that.

Daniel Harris: The Rise And Fall Of Gay Culture

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Bit by bit, the bonds of homophobia and oppression are being broken. Gay men lurking in parks hoping for a secret encounter are giving way to glossy magazines like Out that make “gay” look glamorous.

The gay community is going mainstream, and it’s about time. But listen closely. A faint, witty-but-serious voice can be heard in the background — asking us to consider what this newfound freedom is taking from us.

“What is happening to gay culture parallels what has been happening to popular culture on a much larger scale ever since the invention of a metaphor central to our understanding of the historical mission of America: the melting pot,” Daniel Harris writes in his book The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. “By focusing as a test case on the changes that have occurred in the gay community, I describe the gradual dissolution of the ethnic diversity of a country that demands from its minorities nothing less than a voluntary act of subcultural suicide.”

The thesis of the book is that the gay culture’s movement into the mainstream is undermining gay men’s sense of the themselves as distinct minority. With that, Harris says, we lose some of the things that make us unique.

“I argue that gay culture, the things that really distinguish us from other minority cultures, things like our aestheticism, our cultivation of the arts, our sense of humor, camp, that those were things that were formulated in an atmosphere of oppression,” Harris said in an interview. “If our society was going to ostracize us as immoral citizens and condemn us as outlaws and heretics, we were going to create a different kind of respectability for ourselves.”

Gay culture, Harris contends, seems to appear on every talk show and sitcom, yet that exposure is causing the things that make us worth talking about to disappear.

“So the fact that we have achieved a high degree of visibility does not mean that gay culture is flourishing. In fact, what we are seeing is that we are on the verge of assimilation and that assimilation will ultimately result in the obliteration of gay culture,” he says.

Harris points out that assimilation is not necessarily a bad thing, given that the alternative to the loss of a culture built on oppression is continued persecution. The book, though, provides interesting analysis in a refreshingly objective way considering the author is analyzing his own culture.

He covers a wide range of topics and in most cases analyzes them thoroughly. In fact, some of his analysis is too through. He spends two pages describing foreskin’s impact on our culture. He comments on the death of the era of Hollywood diva worship, the evolution of gay porn in film and literature, “glad-to-be gay propaganda” and the unusual way our culture handles AIDS. His writing is sharp and clever.

He also has some interesting observations about how we differ from ethnic minorities.

“What sets us apart from all other minorities is that we have neither a geographic place of origin… nor physical characteristics” in common, he says. We are “utterly nondescript” and “dispersed through every social class and region of the country.”

Harris, whose essays have appeared in Harper’s, Antioch Review and Newsday, among others, is quite entertaining. Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, the analysis is always entertaining and usually well thought out.

His comments about the evolution of personal ads will make you think. Early ads were by gay men searching for anyone who would answer them, but as more opportunities became available and being gay moved into the mainstream, the ads changed, he notes.

“In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a new character emerges in gay personal ads: Mr. Right, a sentimental figure who, over the next decade, slowly edges out the Man Without Qualities,” Harris writes. “When gay liberation increased contact among homosexuals, it inadvertently contributed to the state of romantic dissatisfaction in which many of us now flounder.”

His observations about the difference between gay and straight men will also probably have you laughing and nodding in agreement.

“In attempting to assuage our fears of disintegrating into the battered carcasses of worn-out old queens, Harris says, we have become “ageless, artificial creatures taut from too many face-lifts” and with “pouting, bee stung lips swollen with collagen injections.”

“Straight men, by contrast, maintain their naturalness by allowing themselves to disintegrate and refusing to even lift a hand to arrest the process of aging,” he says.

Harris has written a bold and challenging work. If you agree with every word of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, perhaps you aren’t reading closely enough since there is plenty with which to take issue. But if you dismiss the book as a bitter account by someone who doesn’t support his community, then perhaps you are missing his subtle call to action.

“We don’t need another uplifting gay book, for God’s sake. So I consciously set out to write a book that was 100 percent free of propaganda,” Harris says. “This book does not serve in any way to enhance the social status of gay people, to help us psychologically, it’s not propaganda, it’s pure analysis — something of an exception, I’d say, in a sea of books whose sole function is to make us feel proud and happy and secure and socially comfortable and complacent as hell.”

Michael Piazza: Rainbow Family Values

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Lesbian and gay people are just beginning to find role models, and very few good examples of healthy relationships with partners and families of choice exist. Now, the senior pastor of the world’s largest predominately lesbian and gay church has written a book that fills this void with stories and practical advice.

Rev. Michael Piazza, whose church serves a congregation of three thousand mostly gay and lesbian people and has already outgrown a 900 seat sanctuary completed in 1992, shares his personal experiences and research in his fourth book, Rainbow Family Values.

The book is divided into two parts. First, Piazza looks at family formation, then he offers advice on beginning a healthy family by starting with a committed relationship with a partner. Piazza says right-wing religious zealots are destroying the family fabric of America by attacking gay and lesbian people.

“Today, overt racism is socially frowned upon, and Communism has been defeated. The Radical Right requires another ‘enemy’,” Piazza writes. But their rhetoric, he says, causes children to be rejected and abused. “The hateful Right should be worried, because they are undermining the very institution they purport to esteem.”

Piazza examines the conservative Christianity’s attacks on gay and lesbian people and suggests the “Family of God’s Dreams,” made up of more than just one or two people, but of an extended family of choice — people who may or may not be related by biology but are related by emotion. The pastor says relationships don’t have to be based on a committed couple. His relationship with Bill, his partner, though, forms the basis of his other relationships, which include two children (one adopted, the other born by artificial insemination) the mothers of his children and a circle of close friends.

Piazza is the senior pastor of Cathedral of Hope Metropolitan Community Church. He pastored Methodist churches for almost a decade before joining Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination of churches formed by lesbian and gay Christians. He hopes to build the Dallas church into a “Psychological Cathedral” for the lesbian and gay community, a goal that is rapidly becoming a reality as the congregation embarks on a plan to build a new church home designed by the world-famous architect Philip Johnson.

Most of the Rainbow Family Values is devoted to Piazza’s advice for couples. He uses his own relationship as an example as well as examples from the couples he has encountered in more than twenty years of pastoring Methodist and Metropolitan Community Church congregations. Piazza points out that many lesbian and gay people don’t get to date as teens and often must either rush ahead with no experience to adult relationships or try to date like teens in later life; neither is a really good option, he says. He encourages readers to enter relationships slowly.

Time is important in relationships, he says, just as it is in cooking with yeast. “Without time, the proper chemical reaction does not occur and you end up with something that is half-baked,” Piazza says.

He notes four keys to forming healthy relationships. Commitment, covenant, communication and compatibility. Each have their own chapter, and he also provides several lists of “do’s and don’t” about forming and sustaining long term relationships.

Ultimately, Piazza’s book recommends relationship based on trust, mutuality, communication, prayer, love and fun. He encourages gay and lesbian couples to not worry about trying to fit their relationships into the mold of a heterosexual couple with children. After all, that model is resulting in high percentages of divorce, dysfunction and unhappiness.

Piazza suggest readers live a life like Jesus — the Jesus who turned water into wine (not grape juice, he notes) at a wedding feast and called a group of outcasts who weren’t biologically related to him his family. The Religious Right may see healthy gay and lesbian relationships as a threat, but Jesus, he says, sees those relationships as modeled after God’s plan.

Conservative Christianity often seem to be trying to destroy the lesbian and gay community, but by forming stronger relationship within the community and outside of it, the community can become stronger than ever. Rev. Piazza’s book can help that happen.

[At last check, Piazza had moved on from Cathedral of Hope. He now pastors a church in Georgia.]