With all the studies of lesbians and gay men these days, plus our own self-reporting about our experience, I have wondered why more people are not convinced that homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality. But I can better understand by looking carefully at one of my own taboos that comes from my childrearing: a toilet is “dirty,” no matter how clean it looks or even is. By contrast, I view a kitchen counter as “clean,” no matter what foodstuffs have been prepared on it, and even when it is slightly messy. Despite the fact that studies have revealed that the cleanest surface in a house is usually the toilet, I hold onto my notion that it is “dirty.” In parallel fashion, we may view homosexuality as “dirty” no matter how loving, and heterosexuality as “clean” even when it is not as loving or as just in its expressions as we would expect. The vital difference in the analogous experiences of taboo, of course, is that mine doesn't interfere with how I view or relate to human beings.
Taboo and Shame
Contemporary writers in psychology and ethics make a distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt helps us take responsibility for our actions. Shame, in contrast, humiliates us to the point of believing ourselves incapable of taking responsibility for our actions, incapable of either confessing or correcting our sins. Whereas guilt suggests we are people who have done something bad, shame makes us feel like bad people. Though one might be ashamed of one's sin, taboos are all about shaming. A gay church member told me that the worst thing that a member of his conservative college campus group could say to another member was, “I will pray for you!” It meant something was seriously awry with the prayer victim's belief or behavior, and the words had the chilling effect of shaming the person for being different, an attempt to shame him or her into conformity. This shaming takes the form of formal and informal shunning in some expressions of Christianity, as in the apostle Paul's admonition to have nothing to do with such persons. When I began a gay Christian group on the Yale Divinity School campus in 1974, a Lutheran professor asked me, “What right do we have to tell these people they shouldn't be ashamed?” My response was, “Why do we feel we have the right to tell 'these people' they should be ashamed?—and we've been doing that for years!”
Shaming is what the men of Sodom were about in Genesis 19. The humiliation of rape was a common way to inflict shame on a defeated people in ancient times—raping not just the women, but the men as well. The intended gang rape of the angels by “all of the men” of the city of Sodom sealed its fate, to be destroyed by God for general wickedness. It is no more homosexual in orientation than similar rape in prisons. To treat a man as a woman in ancient times, or for a man to behave like a woman, was either to remove or relinquish superior male status. Apart from spilling seed outside a womb, another possible reason, this may be a basis for the Levitical taboo of (only) male homosexuality. Not long ago, this form of shaming was used by a few New York policemen accused of sodomizing a suspect with a broom handle, and by a few American soldiers in Iraq accused of sodomizing male captors with implements and photographing them naked in simulated homosexual group acts.
If one believes all the men of Sodom were homosexual, then logic would dictate the men in the above described incidents were also, a conclusion those men would undoubtedly protest. (I can't help but think that open gays in the military might help sensitize the armed services and make this type of behavior less likely. I also want to be clear that New York policemen and the American military as a whole should not be tarred with the same brush as the few perpetrators of these crimes, just as the few pedophile priests and ministers that have come to light should not prejudice us toward priests and ministers as a whole.)
An example of the importance of maintaining one's male status occurs when Jonathan chose, out of love for David, not to fight him and, instead, support him for his father's throne. King Saul viewed it as his son's degradation: “You have chosen the son of Jesse [David] to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness” (1 Samuel 20:30). In other words, Jonathan has not behaved like a man, having surrendered his own power to another man. (This story will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Six.) Breaking out of gender conformity is another deeply held taboo, thus the sometimes viscerally negative response today exhibited toward transgender people, “effeminate” men, and “masculine” women.
Shame on Rome!
Toward the end of the first chapter of his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul seems to be utilizing a rhetorical form of humiliation on Gentiles and their idolatry, in which he shames them by declaring they have debased themselves by controverting their “natural” gender and sexual roles:
For what can be known about God is plain … but they became futile in their thinking… . Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or four footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness …” (Romans 1:19a; 21c, 22–29a)
Then Paul finishes up by listing every kind of wickedness he can think of, though not a list unique to Paul and similar to the moralizers of his time who would say “that's not the way it should be.” It is also similar to the standard laundry list of sins in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, which includes a couple of words whose meaning has been debated over the centuries, and will be discussed in the next chapter.
I quote so much of this first chapter of Romans because the more one reads of it, the more one may recognize that Paul's tone in this section is at odds with the point of this and others of his letters. The apostle prefaces this viciously shaming diatribe with the theme of the letter, which is salvation by grace through faith: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul declares in Romans 1:16, and then quotes Habakkuk 2:4: “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Apparently Paul is writing because some in the Roman church have resented the fact that others are not following Jewish law, the legalists essentially saying, “that's not the way it should be.” Notice his emphasis on impurity, the violation of ritual law.
Quite apart from what additional biblical scholarship might bring to the passage, and apart from the psychological aspect of choosing against one's own nature, whether heterosexual or homosexual—if one were to observe simply the literary form of this “over-the-top” condemnation, one could conclude that Paul was up to something quite other than what initially meets the eye or ear. The reader familiar with other Pauline writings could conclude that the evangelist who said he would become all things to all people so that they might prove receptive to the gospel is not about to alienate the Gentiles, to whom he felt especially sent. To make plain his purpose, Paul turns the tables on his legalist opponent (“that's not the way it should be”) at the beginning of chapter 2: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on