A Special Illumination

Authority, Inspiration and Heresy in Gay Spirituality

Rollan McCleary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315475677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Gay spirituality represents a hidden strand in Western thought that was only publically declared from the Gay Liberation of the 1970s. Since "coming out", expressions of gay spirituality have proliferated in both number and diversity. Beginning with gay theology within Christianity, the phenomenon has now reached as far as Buddhism and neo-paganism. But, so far, critical analysis of the movement has been very limited largely because gay spirituality has been treated as a political and social movement arguing for rights and acceptance within religious circles. 'A Special Illumination' offers an indepth analysis and argues that gay spirituality should be placed at the heart of religion.

Part I
Authority

Chapter 1
General Introduction

A Uniquely Modern Movement

There have always been people who have identified themselves, or whom society would describe, as gay, queer, homosexual or something indicative of a sexual nonconformity involving same-sex preferences. Among these we also know, if only from legal records, there have always been those who linked their preference in some original fashion to religion. There were, for example, the couple in Renaissance Florence who in their determination to be married caused scandal by swearing allegiance on a famous altar bible,¹ and the accused sodomite of eighteenth-century Amsterdam who had chosen his lover because he exhibited superior knowledge of the gospels.² Earlier, the medieval era had been full of rumours of sodomitical clerics and the sight of ‘faggots’ burned with witches at the stake for heresies part sexual and religious. It is nonetheless only in modern times, and following Gay Liberation in 1969, that there has been an open, collective movement among such people to define themselves in terms of their personal experiences and metaphysical beliefs.

Alongside the biblically inclined Amsterdam sodomite, one must place another accused with him, who admitted he would have had sex with any man. The difference between these two programmes, one so discriminating, the other so non-discriminating, might even provide us a preliminary, very provisional definition of Gay Spirituality (GS). It is that aspect of homosexual life and culture most liable to render Its unconscious contents conscious; because whereas large elements of modern gay lifestyle (leathersex, rave parties, etc.) contain suggestive parallels with forms of initiatory or tribal religious experience, as a gay neo-Jungian notes, even while treading such deeply symbolic territory gays may remain very unconscious about it.³

GS is a unique development facilitated by a specifically modern, or post-modern⁴ and liberationist consciousness, often American, that has perceived in same-sex love not just a means to a higher end (as in Platonism and later, tamer formulations), but good in itself. In a sense it represents a triumph for positive thought. Earlier in the twentieth century many gays, including even the philosopher Wittgenstein and the film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, both clearly victims of what today Gay Liberation and GS would call ‘internalized homophobia’, might still experience their disposition as so unspiritual as to be an urge external to themselves, even demonic.⁵ And despite some specialized heretical musings and visions from such as Jean Cocteau⁶ and André Gide,⁷ even within the influential French tradition of writing on gay themes since the eighteenth century, the emphasis is less on the spiritual than the outsider or criminal associations of homosexuality, the value of perception achieved through transgression rather than some elevated or deconstructionist sense of difference.⁸

The first glimmerings of anything remotely akin to modern GS in consciousness or organization came early in the twentieth century with publication of Hymnen der Heiligen Burg (Hymns of the Holy Citadel)⁹ and foundation of the Klaristische movement. An elitist call to an aesthetic and spiritual Renaissance with room for an individualism including same-sex relations rather than a rights-claiming, popular movement in the modern style, the Klarwelt (Clear World) vision with its confessionless Christianity was founded in Munich in 1911 by the artist Elisar von Kupffer (1872-1942) with his philosopher lover, Eduard von Meyer.¹⁰ The situation in central Europe was not conducive to enlarged influence even if desired. The Sanctuarium they established near Locarno in 1925 after settling in Switzerland caught few imaginations beyond those who continue to appreciate its gay-themed frescoes. But this European anticipation of GS was perhaps inevitable following the career of the first Gay Rights’ theorist, a Lutheran pastor's son, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95). The Urning or Uranian person (Ulrichs’ name for the congenital homosexual) was anima muliebris in corpore inclusa, a female soul within a male body.¹¹ Though always a disputed formula, its novel insistence upon an innate homosexuality supplied gays with a basis in consciousness and ethics to discover themselves and thus rediscover or remake religion.

Unlike modern queer theory's fluid notions of identity (see Chapter 3) and the constructionist analysis of gayness after the manner of Foucault, which regards gay identity as probably modern only,¹² GS mostly assumes the existence of a trans-historical, trans-cultural element of spontaneous gay consciousness. This colours all experience and is capable of being introspected and compared with past and present developments. Indeed, the word ‘gay’ as opposed to ‘queer’ tends to imply a fixed or genetically ‘born that way’ identity for which reason the epithet, Gay Spirituality (which arguably signifies perennial gay inspiration or vision), is a proper alliance of terms. The epithet appears to have been first employed by the American Dominican priest, Fr Richard Woods. His Another Kind of Love, first published in 1977, contains a chapter devoted to ‘Gay Spirituality'.¹³ Earlier in the work the author had affirmed that ‘gay’ as opposed to ‘homosexual’ signified something wider than a sexual attraction to one's own sex and referred

primarily to consciousness —the awareness and acceptance of homosexual orientation and to some extent, the sharing of that awareness with others, that is, being ‘out of the closet'... Gay consciousness means much more than openly shared homosexual orientation, however. It includes a wide range of personal and social sensibilities differing in significant respects from those of heterosexual ('straight') persons. In this sense ‘gay’ need not connote sexual activity, though it often does.¹⁴

So, gay is a matter of situation, of sensibility and also the sharing (read tribalism), often deemed an important aspect of gay lifestyle especially in America. As to Spirituality, a word further considered presently, in Woods’ definition something of tribalism enters into that too:

Basically spirituality refers to the fundamental openness of human nature itself to transcendent experience, that is, the encounter with other selves which takes us ‘out’ of ourselves... [It involves] some dimension of trans-subjective reality which is raised to conscious awareness, organized and cultivated as a way of life...[but] even individual spiritualities are to a large extent derived from community experience.¹⁵

As an activity and experience, the goal of GS is "the whole person’, an activity which is an art of integration, or more precisely, ‘re-integration’ of the self.¹⁶

American Ferment, European Sources

Though Europe might be the ultimate source of GS, American religiosity and a more populist approach to homosexual issues were needed to trigger any notable movement. To a considerable extent GS is an American phenomenon, New York's Stonewall Riots of 1969 led to the foundation of an international Gay Liberation movement which soon came to share with the Woman's Liberation Movement, which influenced it, the notion that "the personal is political'. While this recognition heightened a sense of separate identity and led to examination of one's consciousness as an individual in a way that made a modem gay ‘culture’ possible, overall Liberation remained highly politicized and basically materialistic in orientation. Even within those churches willing to adjust to the Women's and Gay movements, the original stress was mainly political and social. I will nevertheless argue that seeds of GS were present almost from the first in a manifesto written in 1969 and favoured within the secular movement.

Already in the 70s, a reaction set in among gays of a more metaphysical disposition. Like GS theorist, Don Kilhefner, they felt that socially ‘coming out’ might need to be paralleled by a more psychological and spiritual ‘coming out within’ if Liberation was to signify any ongoing, meaningful personal development serving more than mere in-your-face rebellion,¹⁷ A determination to explore the religious/mystical self led to the First Spiritual Conference of Radical Faeries in Benson, Arizona, in 1979, the brainchild of Don Kilhefner, Mitch Walker and especially pioneer gay rights campaigner, Harry Hay. The results of the conference soon gave rise to a recognizable ‘Gay Spirit’ movement—albeit the concept of a movement owes something to the popularizations of Mark Thompson's 1987 collection of essays, Gay Spirit, summarizing Faerie and other trends to that date.¹⁸ The book marks a turning point in the acceptance of and interest in GS at the time that the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s made issues of religion and spirituality more urgent for many.

However, when not prompted by directly personal concerns such as the response to AIDS, management of psychic ability or affirmation of the compatibility of sex with religion in the face of a new Puritanism, GS supplies transcendent meaning to the increasingly defined gay sensibility and value system. The latter were something that social conditions and challenged religious assumptions had been letting emerge in the West since the eighteenth century. Though his emphasis is primarily upon the role of (sexual) pleasure, Andrew Bronski's understanding of the formation of the modern gay sensibility appears well supported by the facts.¹⁹ Bronski shows that as social rank in Europe gave way to economic ‘class’, the craftsman became ‘the artist’ and Romanticism promoted ‘the individual’, often aesthetes and same-sex lovers. These implicit members of a ‘pleasure class’, uncommitted to family and sexual reproduction with its affinity for capitalism's ‘productivity’, began to justify their alienation from the mainstream. The value they set by friendship, art, beauty, individualism, pleasure and freedom of the imagination (which Bronski observes is a very sex-linked function), challenged the prevailing utilitarian materialism. Socialism and Aestheticism began to crystallize into an ideology and sensibility through European figures such as Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter who represent the love that now dares to speak its name and which can provide an identity to individuals within a society previously much less individualized.

Religion meanwhile is challenged in its explanatory range by the disciplines of science, sociology and psychology. The psychologist, Havelock Ellis, discovers a ‘homosexual’ type across history and cultures.²⁰ The formerly faceless Sodomites, who scripturally suffer the generalizations of most earlier literary description, are assimilated to more closely defined medical types, while science defines for religion the limits of the possible, what and who are changeable or not. Thus, homosexuality, though for long still prone to be regarded by science as a sickness, becomes an object of study, an object that might represent a natural, not an unnatural function.

Gay Function and an Indigenous Vision

'Function’ is the operative word here. Early modern apologetics by or on behalf of ‘homosexuals’ tended, like those of Carpenter and Ellis, to explain the gay person as naturally artistic or visionary, hence contributing to society in necessary ways even while gays themselves might appear to be supporting agenda of a decorative and purposeless art for art's sake kind. Issues of adaptation and usefulness, the whole question of what gays and gayness are for, continue to this day. They are fundamental to a division between assimilationists and liberationists within gay policy and by extension within GS too. The assimiliationist mainstream is ‘reformist’, seeking rights and acceptance on the basis of a private sexual difference deemed almost irrelevant, whereas liberationists aim for acceptance of Bronski's revolution of consciousness which entails a cultural change for gays, and potentially everyone, as regards pleasure and ethics,

Reflecting this, GS embraces two tendencies of thought. One is more concerned with simple toleration within and us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part I Authority
• Part II Inspiration
• Part III Heresy
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects