Author: Timothy Kurek
Title: “The Cross in the Closet: One man’s abominable quest
to find Jesus in the margins”
Publication: Blue Head Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9835677-4-5,
331 pages, paper, 4 parts, 35 chapters
Amazon link is here.
Readers may know the 1961 book (and 1964 film) “Black Like Me” by John Howard
Griffin, in which the protagonist used certain medications and an ultraviolet
lamp to look black for a social experiment. Former Naval Academy midshipman had
mentioned this book in his own “Honor Bound” in 1992 (Oct. 10, 2007 on this
blog). I’ve just added the film to my
Netflix queue. Will Kurek’s book become a film, too?
Kurek, raised in a fundamentalist church in Tennessee,
decided to conduct his experiment after a lesbian friend was thrown out of her
family. For a whole calendar year, he
went undercover and lived as an “open” gay young man. Of course, he didn’t have to change his body
(although he did try a little light drag once).
He got to know the bar scene around a place in Nashville
called “The Tribe” (an ironic name). He traveled to New York to join a protest
against the Vatican for refusing to support a UN measure to stop anti-gay
legislation in the “third world” (that is, in countries like Uganda). He worked for a gay coffee house, which closed
late in his year and he really feared its change to “family” ownership. He even traveled to Topeka, Kansas, to try to
“interview” staff at the Westboro Baptist Church, which he depicts as having
bragged about its hatred. Kurek also notes how churches and conservative groups raise money and lobby to take away gay people's rights. He admits that one time as a teen working in a fast-food restaurant he pressured a gay manager who accidentally brushed against him at work. Those kinds of accusations are all too easy.
He also discovered a layer to love that he didn’t know
existed, as he built friendships with some of the men in the community. I found
particularly interesting his account of the gay softball league. In 1984, I played in one such league in
Dallas, where a team could forfeit a game if it had “too many straights”. I remember the Smith brothers, the quiet
younger gay one being an accomplished tennis player, and the older extroverted straight
one showing up at the Dallas TMC bar and saying one time “Hairy chests are for
sissies”. I wasn’t good enough to play
on the team regularly (I couldn’t compete with “Thunderbuns”), although I
remember an opposite field single (hard to do in slow pitch) in a 13-9 win for
JR’s, and a real opposite field home run (over the wall) in a practice
game. And I remember an 18-inning
women’s game that ended 4-3. Good slow
pitch can be very difficult to hit. I
also remember a bar softball league in NYC in 1978 where I played for Boots ‘n’
Saddle (on Pride Day) and got a
bases-loaded single to keep a rally alive in a 13-4 win in a field on Leroy
Street. The fence was so close that
clearing it was only a double. (For
those who remember, 1978 in NYC was the Year of Bucky Dent.)
Since the 1990s, the thrust in the “gay rights movement” has
focused on equality: in opportunity, benefits, responsibility, and sharing
risk. But back in the 1950s, when the
Mattachine formed, it was all about simply being left alone. Visitors to my blogs know my own story (from
my “Do Ask Do Tell” first book in 1997) about my “expulsion” from William and
Mary for telling the Dean of Men (under pressure) that I was gay.
Why did these things happen?
It has seemed like a brutal twist that it was more offensive or
traumatic to the community to say that you were gay (or be “found out”) and
presumably disinterested in having children at all, than to get a girl pregnant
by “mistake”. Moral standards seemed to
have contradictions, or what I call “wind shifts” like those that
accompany cold fronts. Sometimes the spun in circular reasoning like
tornadoes.
Of course, the book attributes most of this to
“fundamentalist religion”. It is
certainly true that people turn to “authorized” interpretations of “scripture”
when they can’ resolve seeming moral contradictions by science and intellect
alone. This leads to authoritarian social structures (often abused) and
intellectual childishness. But it’s
important to look even beyond “teachings of the Church” to see what could drive
them.
One good starting point for grasping this is to look at the
Biblical idea of not placing too much stock on your own material situation on
Earth. In short, bad things happen to
good people. Families and many communities need to maintain a lot of social cohesion
or “social capital”, just to survive and have a future. In such a culture, any challenge to the
importance of having children and proving the optimum environment for them
(mother and dad, married) is not tolerated. Given sustainability problems today, these
ideas could return. There was also the myth
that homosexuality undermines the ability of men to fight collectively to
protect women and children in a community, an idea that some people tried to leverage
in the 90s with the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for gays in the military,
although sometimes it sounded like “do ask, if necessary”. One of
Kurek’s anecdotes involves a Marine tossed out under DADT. In the 1980s, when AIDS surfaced, the
religious right tried to add hyrdrocarbons to homophobia by raise the idea of
an indirect threat to general public health (the “amplification and chain
letter” argument, which fizzled out with time. )
There is, also, the “windshift”. Once people say that scripture says that a
person has a particular life issue because of “sin”, other people are
confronted with the “love the sinner” paradox.
It’s a lot easier to hate the sinner to get out of this discomfort. There’s another paradox that older
homosexuals remember, at least those who were not physically competitive like
me (and that was more of an issue in the 1950s than it is today). I was told I was unfit, but suddenly people
changed windage and wanted to see me married and making babies to carry on the
family anyway (I’m an only child).
In the long run, this has been an issue where “reproduction
rules” until people get smart about the rules of engagement, which often invoke the idea, "If I have to play by these rules, so do you." It’s a sort of psychological communism.
Wikipedia attribution link for picture of downtown
Nashville.
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