November 27, 2022

Will Love Prevail?

An introduction to gay feelings, religious feelings, and gay religious feelings

In episode 2.07 of the HBO gay comedy-drama series Looking, ‘Looking for a Plot’, Patrick Murray (Jonathan Groff) inexplicably breaks down crying at the funeral of a man he’s never met. He’s accompanied his friend Doris (Lauren Weedman) to Modesto, California for her father’s funeral – nominally to provide moral support, but with the ulterior motive of escaping his problems back in San Francisco. In the middle of the eulogy delivered by Doris’s aunt, however, as she begins to read a poem by Walt Whitman, the weight of everything he’s running from seems to catch up with him. The camera slowly closes in on Patrick as tears suddenly start streaming down his face; his body becomes racked with sobs, and the scene goes on just a beat too long for comfort as he lets out a loud, inelegant whimper that draws concern from the other attendees, all of whom have far more direct personal connections to the deceased.

It's a moment that’s simultaneously funny and devastating, with Groff’s performance capturing the cringe-inducing shamelessness and abject pitifulness of the act as well as the deep well of unnameable sadness it suggests. Crucially, we’re never given a clear explanation for this outburst, and Patrick doesn’t seem to have one either. When confronted about the incident afterwards at the wake, he evasively remarks that it’s his first funeral, but – as per usual with this show – we’re invited to look beneath the surface of this interpretation. In this way, the show’s title carries a double meaning: Looking refers to the open-ended question of what the series’ gay protagonists are seeking in their lives and relationships, but it can also be interpreted as referring to the meaningful glances and wordless exchanges that form the bulk of the show’s drama. As viewers, we are also left to look closer, pay attention, and try to parse these moments in order to make sense of the narrative. At this moment in the show, Patrick is racked with guilt over his illicit affair with his boss Kevin (Russell Tovey), and struggling to maintain a friendship with his ex Richie (Raúl Castillo) despite lingering romantic feelings and clashes with Richie’s new boyfriend. Both of these relationships are exacerbated by Patrick’s inability to get over his mother’s less-than-unconditional acceptance of his lifestyle, alternating between desperately seeking her approval and acting out to flout her standards. In the previous episode, his attempt to be a ‘fun gay’ and host a party only amplifies his loneliness, culminating in a drunken meltdown in which he publicly insults nearly everyone close to him. That same loneliness also haunts him throughout the trip to Modesto; as Doris and Dom (Murray Bartlett) try to reconcile with traumatic childhoods in their hometown, Patrick projects his unresolved feelings about his own solitary past onto everything and everyone around him. None of these serve as straightforward reasons for his display of weeping, but taken together they are important context for interpreting it, even if they don’t really line up with the setting in which it happens.

With the hindsight of 2022, Looking, which aired from 2014 to 2016, is an odd beast; entire studies could be written on the series as an encapsulation of a strange juncture in U.S. gay life and politics in the early-to-mid-2010s. The series handles the shifting landscape of the gay culture that shapes its characters’ lives – the changing face of HIV diagnosis, prevention, and stigma; assimilationism and respectability politics; race and class in gay communities; and, eventually, the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States – with admirable complexity without becoming self-consciously ‘about’ any of these topics, but where it ends up thematically with them sometimes reads as politically naïve or myopic. And yet, watching the series recently with my husband, I found myself emotionally blindsided by it, in a manner comparable to Patrick’s reaction to Doris’s father’s funeral. Somehow, this sitcom I’d put on out of mild curiosity was bringing feelings I didn’t realise I still had to the surface of my consciousness, and how to articulate those feelings, and why this show in particular brought them up, still somewhat eludes me. The series’ gentle and nuanced insights into the complex tangle of gay men’s emotional lives are remarkably frank and cathartic about desires, fears, flaws, and anxieties for which gay men don’t often get catharsis in media. If this sounds like a dramatic reaction to a show in which not much actually happens from episode to episode, know that like Patrick, I’m also projecting a fair bit. The characters in Looking lead lives that are in some ways similar and in others different from my own, and the memories and emotions that the series dredged up for me, while mirroring the characters’ own experiences in some ways, are in other crucial ways markedly unrelated.

I’ve spent several hundred words talking about Looking; this is not a newsletter about that show, or even about gay television in general. But the spectacle of Patrick weeping dejectedly at the funeral – an event that should not concern him at all outside of support for his friend but that elicits an outpouring of sadness that surprises even him – strikes me as a potent image for thinking about the way unspeakable longings, worries, regrets, and grief can bubble up unannounced in the course of everyday gay life. In her book The Queer God (2003), the Argentinian-Scottish theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid describes this repository of feelings as a cry at the heart of queer life that asks the question, ‘¿Va a haber amor? Will love prevail?’1 As she notes, this cry is not just a personal but also a theological one shared by ‘those who go to gay bars with rosaries in their pockets, or who make camp chapels of their living rooms.’2 It’s within these discordant clashes between disparate spheres of life, where the meanings don’t fully line up, that the spirituality of queer people can be discerned – a queer spirituality that embraces unresolved contrarieties and refuses to be separated from the material, economic, racial, and sexual concerns of everyday life. The cry, ‘Will love prevail?’ is a prophetic one that springs from intersections of religious, social, political, and economic marginalisation, as well as from personal sexual desires, loneliness, and uncertainty about the future.

(As I edit this post I am still reeling from the news about the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, CO, on November 19th, 2022, which left five dead and eighteen injured. It is both difficult and necessary to connect stories of personal longing to the communal need to protect spaces where that cry can be heard and answered in real time by new possibilities for relating, from social systems and ideologies that seek to isolate and annihilate us. To take part in queer culture is, by necessity, to inhabit this difficult space that merges mourning, pleasure, desire, and joy.)

This newsletter is an evolving exploration of gay feelings, religious feelings, and especially the intersection between the two, filtered through the lens of my own experiences. I’ve been searching for a while now for a way of narrating the strange collisions between gay desire and relationships and Christian observance as they’ve manifested in my own life, from an upbringing as the son of a Southern Baptist minister, to a young adulthood at a Christian liberal arts college, to my involvement in various liberal and left-ish Christian communities since then. (Even this description feels too reductively linear, the stages in my life it describes too tidily delineated from one another.) Friends and partners have encouraged me to write about my experiences in the past, but for a long time I’ve hesitated because I wasn’t sure if I had anything original or uniquely insightful to contribute to conversations on queerness and Christianity at the level of personal storytelling, preferring to focus my energies on my academic writing on queer theology and fantasy literature. On occasions where I’ve written or spoken about my history with queerness and faith, usually in Christian forums or for Christian platforms, the story has followed a testimonial ‘before and after’ structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end that I, personally, have found unsatisfying. Lord knows the world does not need yet another white gay man sharing his ‘journey’ of reconciling his faith and sexuality, discovering that God loves gay, that love is love, etc., or urging readers that with enough effort and prayer, you, too, can become the model of the Good Gay Christian™.

In a now-deleted essay for his homodoxy blog, Samuel Ernest robustly criticised the gay Christian memoir industrial complex, pointing out that liberal Christianity is too quick to position newly out, often young, LGBTQ+ Christians as spokespeople and role models for faithful queerness rather than offering them the care and space for self-reflection and healing that they need. As Ernest went on to note, these books and blogs and newsletters also tend to be oriented toward forms of LGBTQ+ inclusion and participation in Christianity that faithfully reproduce middle-class and heteronormative forms of community, familial, economic, sexual, and relational structures. The assimilationist model of the ‘gay Christian’ privileged by liberal Christianity is often at odds with the material conditions, subcultural practices, relationships, and horizons of possibility that make up most queer people’s day-to-day lives. It often fails to account not only for the ways in which queer life may fail to cohere with, and pose significant challenges to, dominant forms of contemporary Christianity, but also how the forms of life sanctioned by ‘official’ Christianity conspire to render queer lives less livable. This model of gay Christian testimony, with its emphasis on the positive outcome of the successful integration of faith and sexuality, tends to prematurely foreclose the sites of dissonance – even within the lives of its own adherents – where the cry, ‘Will love prevail?’ makes itself most urgently known. In focusing on inclusion, it too rarely asks that we venture outside of the institutional church to encounter God at the gay bar.

Plenty of these types of memoirs were recommended to me when I first came out publicly in 2016, and I find their insistence that, if being gay isn’t sinful, then you, yes you, can in fact faithfully practice Christianity-as-usual while being gay, somewhat less than comforting. The fact is that I spent several years before coming out believing that being gay wasn’t a sin and I still felt unable to be out, to assign the name ‘gay’ to my desires and myself. What surprised the most when I came out, then, was the overwhelming sense that living not just as a person who ‘is’ gay but who is living a gay life changed everything about how I understood my relationship to Christianity (and in many respects, rightly so). I’m interested in the ways that coming out renders impossible, or at least problematic, the neatly linear narratives of journeying towards acceptance that liberal Christianity likes to hear and tell about itself: how it unsettles the meaning we make out of our experiences, how it calls into question our own self-understanding in relation to other people, how it causes memory to double back on itself, how we recast the narrative of our lives such that our understanding of ourselves as queer becomes dislocated from the event of coming out itself. It’s possibly fitting that I’ve only come around to writing about my experiences at a time in my life when my own relationship to Christianity and the church as institutional structures and practices is once again in flux and uncertain.

Once, at a public engagement talk I gave on gender and sexuality in Christianity, the personal context I gave for the subject of my talk got a little bit too personal, and I found myself responding to expressions of concern during the Q & A session afterwards with assurances that things are fine now, really! Except, well, a lot of things still aren’t fine – I don’t mean this in a debilitating way, but in the sense that a gay life shaped in some way by Christianity will always contain loose threads and places where the meanings of experiences and memories are unclear or unresolvable. And they can catch you unawares: someone from a past life gets back in touch and you have to re-evaluate what you meant to each other then and what that might mean now, or you go on a date with someone who shares a first and last name with a person you wronged out of defensiveness, or a realization about a memory knocks the wind out of you in the produce section of the supermarket … or you find yourself tearing up during the end credits of a sitcom. While the queer, theological cry ‘Will love prevail?’ reverberates through all of these instances, it’s important to recognise that I’m not the victim in many of these stories; often, I am inflicting pain onto others or otherwise failing to enact love. The cry is one not just for love for ourselves, but for a healing and transformation of the ways we love others in turn.

The title of this newsletter, ‘In a certain slant of light’, comes from two sources. The first is a poem by Emily Dickinson, which in its hymnlike cadence describes

a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are

Dickinson’s imagery is borrowed by Owen Pallett in their song ‘A Bloody Morning’, from their 2020 concept album Island. On the album, Pallett sings as Lewis, a character from the fantasy realm of Spectrum who alternately stands in for Roland Barthes’ concept of the beloved ‘other’ and repressed parts of Pallett’s own consciousness, as he navigates his embattled religious and erotic obsession with a deity also named Owen Pallett. At his lowest point of regret and reckless longing, Lewis asserts that

In a certain slant of light the feeling will hit me

Like a man against the waves and a violent wind

Waking up in a bloody morning

With the warmth of his forgiveness around me

If for Dickinson ‘a certain slant of light’ describes a subtle shift in atmosphere that scatters our sense of meaning with a weight of feeling akin to religious observance, for Pallett this shift is dramatic, occurring in the violent clashes between different parts of ourselves with a yearning for resolution that combines the theological with the erotic. If the lived experience of queerness troubles the possibility of a self-continuous self that can accurately perceive, disclose, and narrate itself, this has to be taken up honestly in the way queer people narrate our religious experiences.

Another subplot in ‘Looking for a Plot’ involves Dom’s desire to visit the grave of his own father, who died when Dom was young, in order to symbolically come out to him in the way he never got to do. But in searching for the grave, Dom, now in his forties, realises that he hasn’t returned to Modesto in so long that he can’t even remember where his father is buried. The best he can do for closure is a makeshift resolution, driving his van through the middle of the cemetery plots loudly proclaiming, ‘I’m gay!’ In one sense, this newsletter is an act of shouting into the void from imprecise and sometimes haphazardly recollected memories, in the hopes that some form of meaning or recognition – or maybe productive misrecognition – can emerge from it. Reconstructing our past selves and overlaying them with the knowledge we think we have about the present is an imperfect and unreliable endeavour … and yet I can’t help but look for answers there.