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Chapter 1
Introduction
Raymond-Jean Frontain
Criticism has only recently begun to attend to what David Bergman calls “the genealogy of transformation that occurs as successive generations of gay writers work through each others’ material, transfiguring a homophobic trope into a somewhat celebratory one” (22). Such a process, notes Bergman, “is dialectical, the product of the interaction between the dominant society and the gay subculture. The end result is not a pure gay discourse (no such thing can exist) but a discourse made more sympathetic to the lives of gay men” and women (22).
The essays that follow show how Bergman’s observations apply in two distinct but obviously interconnected ways to the Bible, perhaps the dominant text in Western culture and the one most often cited as authorizing antihomosexual feeling. They illlustrate, first, how gay writers transfigure biblical tropes to undermine what is traditionally used for homophobic purposes, such as the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis or Paul’s New Testament imprecations. Second, they show how biblical texts that admit or even invite the possibility of a homoerotic reading have been co-opted by orthodox tradition, and how they can be reappropriated by gay writers and artists—most obviously the same-sex relationships of David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and John the Beloved Disciple. The details of these narratives suggest powerful emotional bonds, the implications of which centuries of religiously conservative readers have attempted to control, and which advocates of same-sex love have cited, explicitly or implicitly, as biblically sanctioned models for their own relationships.
Perhaps it is more productive to speak of two impulses: the transgressive, which challenges the authority of the Bible in order to resist oppression by those who read the Bible in an ideologically narrow way; and the appropriative, which finds in the Bible’s tropes and figures both the basis of a gay and lesbian spirituality, and the means of dignifying and possibly even sacralizing gay and lesbian existence.
SATIRIC CONTROVERSION: THE TRANSGRESSIVE IMPULSE
Insofar as debate concerning the authority of the Bible plays a critical role in the battle between the heterosexual majority and a gay/lesbian minority over the construction of social values, the Bible becomes—fairly or unfairly—an obstacle to gay and lesbian self-definition. As long as strident voices from among the straight majority justify discrimination by insisting that gay and lesbian experience is not dignified by the Bible, there is a danger that gay and lesbian readers may become angry with the Bible itself, rather than with fundamentalist ideologues who commandeer it for political purposes.1 When the Bible is used to support discriminatory ideology, the gay and lesbian struggle for dignity inevitably involves a struggle with the Bible.
One strategy of defense developed by gay and lesbian writers is to challenge outright the Bible’s preemptive authority. In Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), for example, the authority of the Bible is effectively undermined by the foolishness and gullibility of the characters who believe in it most fervently. Young Jeanette’s adoptive mother is convinced that her daughter has been chosen by the Lord to fulfill her own frustrated desire to become a missionary. Satirizing the elect’s interpretation—or misinterpretation—of signs (the “fizz” that Jeanette’s mother felt in youth for a seductive Frenchman, for example, proved to be, not love, but an ulcer), the novel reveals how the seemingly most faithful members of the congregation are exploiting the church for personal financial gain; exposes Jeanette’s mother as a spiritual “whore” (134); and shows Jeanette to be filled with a spirit not recognized by the “holy” and “called” to a very different ministry than the one for which her mother prepared her.
Winterson analyzes the seductive assurance of fundamentalism when, years after leaving the pulpit from which she preached as a teenaged evangelist, Jeanette draws upon the tension in ancient Israel between two divinely appointed groups:
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. (161)
The priestly mission offered her depends upon her acceptance of prescribed tradition; the priest is not allowed a voice of her own, but is expected to ventriloquize the words scripted for her, whether from the Bible or from another authoritative source. The priest’s mission is useful in that she can glibly comfort others, and offer assurance of an unambivalent scheme of divine judgment of human actions. And reassurance that, however miserable they are in this life, they will be glorified in the next—and that however powerless and socially marginalized they feel now, their voice will sound in heaven—is all that some people look for. But Winterson shrewdly observes that the words that comfort are also words that “discipline” and constrain, keeping people in line by dictating their values and controlling their actions, stunting both their emotional and spiritual development. The church reduces the priest to a prison warden and the Bible to a dictatorial source of behavioral do’s and don’t’s.
By asserting her sexual difference, Jeanette becomes a prophet instead. “The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons” (161). The prophet’s existence is not comfortable emotionally, socially, or even spiritually; the demon of difference will never let her rest, never let her feel comfortable with the status quo; it will drive her to question and challenge in a way that the pious will always judge to be blasphemous. But as a prophet, Jeanette creates her own book—an alternate scripture as it were. The chapters of Oranges are named for the first eight books of the Bible, and the action in each chapter provides an ironic commentary upon the biblical text insofar as it juxtaposes how a lesbian experiences and understands the world with how the evangelical orthodox try to force people to regard it. As a prophet, Jeanette discovers her name and power in the novel’s final chapter, one appropriately named for the Book of Ruth, the Bible’s most lesbian-sympathetic text.
It is important to note that, even while challenging one group’s self-justifying interpretation of the Bible, Winterson makes no attempt to erase the Bible’s authority. The compassion of dotty Elsie, Jeanette’s friend and comforter, is the standard by which Winterson herself seems to judge all of her characters; she is as willing to allow the “holy” their Bible as she is determined to assert the value of her own. To paraphrase the novel’s concluding line, she encourages the reader to follow whatever “light” is available, as long as it is a “kindly” one.
Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992), by contrast, deals with the oppressive weight of the Bible by going on the offensive, exposing to ridicule both inconsistencies within the Bible itself, and the enormous gap between biblical teaching and daily Christian practice. He does this in three ways. First, he exploits for satiric effect the uncertain process by which the New Testament texts were transmitted and canonized,2 revealing that the man whom witnesses saw crucified was Judas Iscariot, not Jesus of Nazareth—and a very fat, effeminate, lisping Judas at that. The narrator, Timothy, hears Paul’s actual description of his famous encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, and records what he acknowledges is the “unedited” version:
Wide as He was tall, Jesus waddled toward me…. That face. Those luminous eyes hidden somewhere in all that golden fat. The ineffable smile like the first slice from a honeydew melon. Oh, delight! He held up a hand, a tiny starfish cunningly fashioned of lard. He spoke, His voice so high, so shrill that only the odd canine ever got the whole message, hence the need for interpretation and self-consciousness—in short, mega-fiction [sic]…. “Why,” shrilled the Son of the One God, “dost thou persecuteth me-th?” (32)
“Naturally,” the narrator admits, “we do not teach the real cause for the Crucifixion but only the cover story. In actual life, Jesus was indeed the Jewish king, who had threatened the rule of Rome as well as that of the Temple rabbinate, whose bank controlled the monetary policy not only of the Middle East but that of Greece and Egypt as well” (119). Indeed, the history of biblical Christianity is revealed to have been a battle between Jesus’ “full-employment supply-side” economic policies and the Temple bank’s commitment to anti-inflationary, high interest rates (118). James, the brother of Jesus, conspires with other knowledgeable witnesses, remaining silent about the truth, in order to promote a fiscal ideology linked to messianic zionism.
Second, Vidal underscores Paul’s hijacking of Christianity by having Timothy repeatedly assert that Paul is the religion’s true founder, not Jesus. “The Jesus story was never much of anything until Saint cooked up the vision-on-the-road-to-Damascus number and then we pulled the whole story together,” Timothy boasts (173), praising Paul for creating a marketable image of Jesus and for distracting believers’ attention from the vexing problem of Jesus’ thus-far-unfulfilled promise of imminent return. The novel’s “real” Jesus, in fact, is furious when his message of social reform and fanatical zionism is supplanted by Paul’s fantasy about crucifixion, resurrection, and world dominion (164). Indeed, as Timothy comes to realize, “the actual Jesus” “is a formidable enemy of the church that we have based upon his teachings” (191-192). The novel emphasizes, however, that Paul was not the last to hijack Christ by teasing from Jesus’ words support for his own idiosyncratic beliefs: patristic theologians promoted a trinitarian god that even late first-century Christians would have found thoroughly alien (124). Later “visionaries” and media personalities such as Mary Baker Eddy, Marianne Williamson, Helen Schucman, Selma Suydam, and Jerry Falwell have prospered by altering the Bible to support their own ideology. The novel’s oftentimes confusing plot concerns, at bottom, a wrangling over who will control what the Bible says.
Vidal is particularly brutal in showing how the mass media participate in this process: Paul is portrayed as a vaudeville performer who distracts the attention of the masses by tap-dancing and juggling while preaching; the Crusades and the appearance of the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes resulted from brilliant public relations campaigns; and Oral Roberts and Pope John Paul II are media personalities, not spiritual leaders (9). Christianity is not so much a religion as a business, with Paul as the chief fund-raiser whose travels recorded in The Acts of the Apostles are referred to as “working the circuit” with Jerusalem as its “central office.” Christianity, Timothy observes, is “a wonderful religion, cash-flow-wise” (27). In satirizing Robert Viguerie’s making of the Christian Right into a significant force in recent American politics, Timothy refers to “the names on the Holy Rolodex” as “our Holiest of Holies, and never to be revealed to profane eyes, particularly those of tax gatherers” (57). Throughout the novel, Vidal satirizes modern media’s power to create opinion and to control the thinking of the masses, thus allowing a neon-lighted, besequined, spiritually shallow Christianity to dominate American political discourse. At the novel’s end, live coverage of the events at Golgotha is being heavily promoted as the ultimate Christian extravaganza in order to deliver to NBC a “Sweeps Week” ratings bonanza.
Third, Vidal destroys the authority of the Bible by offering a character analysis of Saint Paul that is surprisingly true both to biblical scholarship and to modern psychology. Vidal’s Paul is a self-hating Jew who chafes at his associates’ Semiticness and, worse, a self-hating homosexual who proscribes the very sex acts that he himself compulsively commits. Live from Golgotha is a case study of the religious fanatic who wants to control the very behaviors in others that he is himself most guilty of. As Timothy reveals, Paul
had this fantastic double standard, but then most saints do. Officially, he hated all sex inside and outside of wedlock on the ground that it made you unclean in the eyes of God, who is apt to return any minute now, and if you just happen to be pounding away in the sack at the time, woe is you. (45)
“But Saint himself never stopped fooling around,” Timothy continues, worshipping Timothy’s prodigious sexual equipment as “the true trinity” (47). As with Jim Bakker and a long line of Roman Catholic clergy, Paul is able sexually to exploit spiritually insecure young men “since there was no way you could say no to Saint if you were a Christian lad and wanted to be saved. Saint had us all, literally, as well as figuratively, by the balls” (108).
Vidal’s plot hinges upon the possibility of advances in twentieth-century computer technology that would allow a first-century bishop to see how Christianity is practiced almost two millennia later. This endows his satire with a double edge, enabling an early Christian to criticize what the religion has become in Vidal’s own time, and the modern reader to identify uncomfortably with abuses that compromised the religion from the start. Thus, the attempt of televangelists to exploit people whose lives are miserable and who are desperate for consolation of any kind is both repulsive to Timothy and oddly familiar: Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson are simply doing on a larger, more lucrative scale what Paul himself did. Vidal pulls the curtain back, as it were, and reveals the little man operating the levers to create the Wizard of Christianity’s booming voice and intimidating presence. The modern reader cannot take the Bible and its supposed teachings about homosexuality very seriously when he or she sees Paul constantly grabbing the ass of the long-suffering narrator.
The novel’s subtitle, The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, suggests a further extreme of the satiric impulse: to create an anti-Bible. Vidal’s alternative view of biblical Christianity is not only as valid as that of the canonical ones, but is more valid. One cannot complain that Vidal plays loosely with gospel kerygma when most televangelists—and, more importantly, Paul and members of the early Christian community—are shown selectively emphasizing details to assign a meaning clearly contrary to Jesus’ text or to what history can recover of its context. Vidal exposes the deconstructive impulse which is at the heart of institutional Christianity.
Thus, if Winterson and Vidal both challenge the authority of the Bible and its interpreters, they do so in different ways. Winterson’s satire is Horatian, a gentle chiding of the excesses of Christian fundamentalism while still sympathizing with the need for religious guidance in one’s life; she does not seem to doubt that the rational minority will prevail spiritually, if at great cost. Vidal’s satire, on the other hand, is Juvenalian, as vicious as the abuses that it strips and whips; Vidal wishes to expose the Bible as a fiction and its believers as dupes or frauds. At the furthest extreme of the satiric-transgressive spectrum, however, are texts which do not simply challenge the Bible’s authority, but labor to create a negative reversal of biblical values. Historically, the...
