Religion and Gay Sexual Politics in Late Twentieth-Century America

Religion and Gay Sexual Politics in Late Twentieth-Century America AFTER THE WRATH OF GOD: AIDS, SEXUALITY, AND AMERICAN RELIGION religion. Some, such as Rebecca Alpert’s (1998) analysis of lesbian reinterpretations of Judaism, Melissa Wilcox’s (2003) ethnography of LGBT Christians, and Bernadette Barton’s (2014) ethnography of gays and lesbians in the “Bible Belt,” have attempted to demonstrate why some LGBT Americans remain committed to their religious traditions in spite of pervasive condemnation. Others, such as Tanya Erzen (2006) and Lynne Gerber’s (2012) ethnographies of ex-gay ministries have investigated why some, primarily gay men, have gone to great lengths to change their sexualities to fit within the ideals of Evangelical Christianity. And, others, like Mark Jordan (2011), have examined the amassing rhetoric about homosexuality within Christianity to understand why it has been a seemingly ongoing source of concern within twentieth–century Christian communities. Religious studies scholars Heather White and Anthony Petro have added to this body of scholarship by analyzing historical intersections of religion, sexuality, and politics in the United States. Both White and Petro demonstrate why scholars of religion in America, and scholars of the history of sexuality, must look beyond the myopic portrayal of religion as uniformly antagonistic to gay activism. Taken together, their two monographs present a historical trajectory beginning after World War II and extending through the last years of the twentieth century that highlights diverse interactions of religion with gay sexual politics. Consequently, both books challenge prevailing notions about the “secular” politics surrounding homosexuality. White, for example, unpacks how the secular gay rights movement was informed and supported by Christianity. Petro examines how secular public health policies, and other responses to the AIDS epidemic, were framed by Christian moral teachings about sexuality. Read together or separately, these texts offer sophisticated historical scholarship and astute analyses of how public discourses about homosexuality in the United States, including both gay rights activism and antigay condemnation, have been influenced by Christianity. Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights begins with the first time the word “homosexual” appeared in an English Bible translation: 1946. As White illustrates, the editors of the Revised Standard Version elided earlier biblical translations that circumscribed By Anthony M. Petro New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 Pp. x 1 294. Hardcover, $29.95 REFORMING SODOM: PROTESTANTS AND THE RISE OF GAY RIGHTS By Heather R. White Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 Pp. xii 1 244. paper, $29.95 REVIEWER: Brett Krutzsch The College of Wooster 400 E. University Street Wooster, OH 44691 Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, Americans repeatedly witnessed public debates where politicians, clergy, and countless others presented religion as a barrier to greater rights for gay and lesbian citizens. With increased fervor that began in 1977 during Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign, politically active conservative Christians increasingly campaigned to restrict the rights of “homosexuals.”1 Gay and lesbian activists responded in turn and, as highlighted by the case of a gay man who publicly burned a Bible at the 1977 Boston Gay Pride demonstration, they commonly portrayed Christianity as the enemy, as the force most responsible for the oppression of gay men and lesbians (see Jordan 2005, 66). While Christian leaders unequivocally contributed to the regulation of sexuality in America, and to the condemnation of homosexuality in particular, scholars have also highlighted how the recurrent image of Christians against gays overlooks the ways in which the movements for gay rights have been shaped and influenced by Christianity (see Fetner 2008; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2004).2 To understand the history of sexuality in twentieth-century America, then, is to appreciate the multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways politicians, clergy, and religiously motivated citizens employed religious ideologies to promote sexual possibilities. For the past few decades, a growing number of religious studies scholars have investigated intersections of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities with Religious Studies Review, Vol. 42 No. 3, September 2016 C 2016 Rice University. V 175 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 42 effeminacy, masturbation, and non-procreative sex, and condensed them into the single figure of the homosexual. Occurring soon after World War II, and gaining prominence with its widespread publication in 1952, the Revised Standard Version’s new translation provided biblical justification for the condemnation of an increasingly visible presence in the United States. Following well documented incidents of same-sex sexual activity during World War II and Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 publication on male sexuality, the American public had a newly heightened awareness of homosexuality. White describes how liberal and conservative Protestant leaders increasingly ignored earlier Christian classifications of sex into unnatural and natural categories, where unnatural sex acts included those like masturbation and oral sex that did not lead to procreation. Instead, Christian leaders emphasized heterosexuality as the natural sexual ideal, not simply procreative sex. Correspondingly, Christian ministers depicted homosexuality, a new word in the Christian lexicon, as unnatural. Thus, as White illuminates, what the Bible says about homosexuality has only existed for a few decades. As White documents, the increased fixation in America with homosexuality as a perversion that needed to be eliminated from the country prompted many liberal Protestant ministers to advocate for compassion for homosexuals. More than that, as White elaborates, numerous Protestant leaders maintained that homosexuality was a mental condition that could be treated and cured. By the middle decades of the twentieth century, liberal Protestant clergy, and their theological schools, had embraced psychology and a therapeutic approach to helping their congregants. With a barrage of rhetoric about homosexuals as deviants, liberal Protestant ministers responded with the assertion that Christians had a duty to help this outcast group. Having embraced psychology, and having incorporated pastoral counseling into ministers’ theological training, liberal Protestants supported the position advanced by psychologists and psychiatrists that homosexuality could be treated. Homosexuals, through proper therapy and spiritual guidance, could become heterosexuals. But, as White asserts, such an approach, although framed as helpful rather than as condemnatory, presented homosexuality as a flaw to be corrected so the apparent naturalness of heterosexuality could be restored. According to White, the ongoing state-sponsored persecution of homosexuals in the United States provoked several liberal Protestant ministers to align themselves with homophile groups to advocate for greater homosexual rights.3 In particular, White focuses on the 1964 founding of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a group in San Francisco made up of at least forty ministers and • NUMBER 3 • SEPTEMBER 2016 numerous homophile activists. White makes explicit that the ministers involved in this activism did not accept homosexuality as ideal. Rather, they believed Christians had a moral imperative to protect the oppressed. And having witnessed police brutality against homosexual men, the ministers in the Council on Religion and the Homosexual believed homosexuals were unjustly persecuted. White illustrates how the clergy involved in this 1960s homophile activism added an image of respectability to homosexual men and women. Ministers speaking on behalf of homosexuals and against police violence helped secure greater audiences and media presence. In fact, White maintains that many homophile activists saw the active role of churches in the Black Civil Rights movement as a model to emulate. And although the Council on Religion and the Homosexual never grew into a national organization, several similar groups of ministers and homophile activists formed across the country. Therefore, and central to White’s argument, by the time of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, and the alleged birth of the gay rights movement, gay activism was actually already well established and empowered with the help of liberal Protestant ministers. In Reforming Sodom’s final chapter, “Born Again at Stonewall,” White analyzes the overlooked role of religion in shaping the mythic birth of the gay rights movement. As White notes, “It took a movement already in place to so effectively announce one had just been born” (139). And that movement, White shows, had been gathering in the basements and meeting rooms of churches throughout the country. Far from inhospitable to gay activism, many liberal Protestant ministers opened their doors to homophile groups. But memory of those alliances has been forgotten, in part, because the more secular-based groups in New York, where the Stonewall Riots took place, wanted to break from the rules of respectability that came with attachments to ministers and religious organizations. In turn, the New York-based groups rejected the term “homophile” and started such organizations as the Gay Liberation Front where they promoted a politics of radical social change instead of assimilation. What White demonstrates is that the focus on the gay rights movement as a secular undertaking ignores not only the work of groups like the Council on Religion and the Homosexual that came before Stonewall, but also the role of religion in gay politics after Stonewall. In particular, White highlights the work of the openly gay minister Troy Perry and his Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). Founded in Los Angeles before Stonewall in 1968, the MCC welcomed gay men and lesbians and grew into a substantial national denomination. Moreover, Perry and his large congregation made activism a central aspect of their religious community. In fact, Perry and the MCC 176 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 42 were instrumental in orchestrating the first parade to commemorate the events at Stonewall. And, as White claims, gay activists infused the celebration of Stonewall with Christian meaning and symbolism. She writes, “The story of a late-night bar raid–transposed through collective memory to Friday night instead of Saturday morning– recalled the familiar story of the Crucifixion, while the Sunday ritual of gay pride, in turn, evoked the twinned triumphs of the Exodus and Easter” (141). White argues that the appeal of Stonewall has been that it situated a story of an uprising within a veiled, but familiar, Christian narration that moved from degradation to glory, from humiliation to new life. Thus, as White contends throughout her book, religion, and Protestant Christianity in particular, informed multiple components of the secular gay rights movement in America. Where White ends her book in the 1970s, Petro focuses on the 1980s and 1990s. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion explores religious responses to the AIDS epidemic and the ways secular reactions to AIDS, such as those promoted by public health departments, were infused with religious ideas. While Petro’s book is not explicitly about homosexuality, the media initially presented AIDS as a gay disease and, consequently, After the Wrath of God reveals the pervasive religiously motivated attitudes toward homosexuality that were present throughout the AIDS crisis. Central to Petro’s argument is that the American media, politicians, and religious leaders commonly presented AIDS as a moral concern as much as a medical catastrophe. He writes, “One of my key arguments is that through the AIDS epidemic, Christian moral assumptions regarding sexuality were elaborated by, attached to, and translated into broader political and public health discourses” (5). In other words, unlike cancer and tuberculosis, AIDS was not understood primarily as a medical syndrome. Instead, AIDS reflected morality, or rather, immorality. For those in the Christian Right who had gained prominence in American politics in the late 1970s by publicly condemning homosexuality, AIDS provided proof that they had been correct about the sin of homosexuality all along. And as awareness grew that AIDS had spread into the heterosexual population, Christian Right leaders claimed that AIDS was spreading because Americans had supposedly allowed homosexuality to flourish. Therefore, as Petro highlights, the rhetoric surrounding AIDS was not simply about how to address its cause, a retrovirus, but how to eliminate the allegedly immoral sexual practices that brought a plague to the nation. Petro highlights how political leaders, public health officials, and some gay activists promoted monogamy as the best strategy to ameliorate the AIDS crisis. More than that, • NUMBER 3 • SEPTEMBER 2016 Petro argues that abstinence until marriage and monogamy within marriage were depicted as “not merely respectable, but fundamental to the health of the American public” (9). In other words, state responses to the epidemic largely suggested that AIDS resulted from promiscuity. To eradicate the epidemic, people needed to stop having sex with multiple partners. But as Petro notes, this tactic overlooked the fact that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus that spreads in specific ways. A person can have multiple sex partners but still not be at risk for HIV. Nevertheless, as Petro documents, public health departments in cities such as San Francisco and New York opted to close bathhouses that facilitated group sex spaces. Petro, therefore, cogently argues that the state, operating through public health departments, enforced a national sexual morality. This national sexuality, Petro shows, was informed by a Christian sexual standard that circumscribed multi-partner sexual relations and inscribed monogamy as necessary for the well-being of the country. As political leaders opted to close group sex spaces, some gay men, as Petro notes, attempted to promote a sexual ethos that addressed AIDS without endorsing the Christian sexual standards of abstinence and monogamy. In particular, Petro highlights groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an organization of men who dress in drag as nuns, who distributed their own safe sex brochures in San Francisco bathhouses before the city closed them permanently. In New York City, other gay men created the brochure “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” which encouraged gay men to avoid exchanging bodily fluids during sexual encounters. As Petro asserts, these examples reflected attempts by gay men to address AIDS while also rebuking the Christian moralism that informed mainstream rhetoric about AIDS. Petro dedicates a chapter in After the Wrath of God to C. Everett Koop, the evangelical Surgeon General in office during the AIDS crisis. Appointed by President Reagan, Koop was known for his opposition to abortion and euthanasia. But as Petro reveals, this conservative Christian physician also took great strides to educate the American public about how HIV spreads and how to engage in safer sexual practices. In 1986 Koop released a report where he insisted that Americans must refrain from condemning particular groups of people for spreading AIDS. In many ways, Koop was responding to the media’s “innocent victim” nomenclature for children and heterosexuals with AIDS. The “innocent victim” label implied that everyone else with AIDS, and gay men in particular, were responsible for the deadly disease that had been destroying their bodies. So, in 1988, the Surgeon General mailed a pamphlet that addressed AIDS to every household in America. The pamphlet described how HIV was and was not spread. And, of significance, the pamphlet encouraged condom use 177 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 42 as the best tactic to prevent the spread of HIV. Although Koop remained a committed evangelical, as Petro notes, he promoted condom use as a key strategy for Americans to combat the spread of HIV. Debates over the promotion of condoms came to a head in 1989, as Petro vividly narrates, when AIDS and abortion activists united to protest the Catholic Church’s involvement in New York City politics. New York’s Cardinal, John O’Connor, had actively lobbied against the distribution of condoms in the city’s public schools. In turn, the AIDS activist group ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) coordinated a massive protest against the Church’s interference into political affairs. As Petro recounts, ACT UP publicized the demonstration, which attracted thousands of protesters to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. During the protest ACT UP members threw themselves to the ground inside the church to stage a “die-in,” an act meant to represent the rapid rate at which people died from AIDS in America. When the Cardinal began speaking, an ACT UP member shouted “You’re killing us!” And, as another activist was carried out by the police, she screamed to the complacent congregants, “We’re fighting for your lives too” (150). As Petro describes, the protestors were attempting to convey the message that the Catholic Church was responsible for unnecessary deaths because of the Church’s political lobbying to prevent condom distribution. Although ACT UP was protesting what they perceived as a church-state separation issue, Petro reveals that the mainstream media, including all three New York City daily newspapers, presented the protesters as infringing on the religious freedoms of the city’s Catholics. By entering into a church, by screaming during the service, and by crumbling a communion wafer when things got particularly chaotic, the media depicted ACT UP as inappropriately violating Catholics’ ability to worship as they pleased. Consequently, the newspapers portrayed the demonstration as a protest against religion, as another example of an ongoing battle between gays and religion. But Petro astutely argues that such a description both misses the actual motivation behind the protest and the ways in which ACT UP also used religious ideas to promote their agenda. As Petro observes, ACT UP created posters of Jesus distributing condoms. Petro reads these posters alongside the crumbling of the communion wafer not as an assault on religion, but as a way to insist that the Catholic Church does not possess sole ownership of Jesus and his teachings. For ACT UP, Jesus would want people to be healthy and, therefore, he would distribute condoms. Rather than an outright rejection of Jesus and religion, Petro argues that ACT UP offered an alternative vision for how to think about Christianity and Jesus’s teachings. • NUMBER 3 • SEPTEMBER 2016 Both Reforming Sodom and After the Wrath of God provide rigorous historical scholarship that illuminate why the image of gays against religion has persisted, but also, and importantly, what that image overlooks about the role of religion within twentieth century gay politics. Far from simply an antigay monolith, Christianity has also been a source of support and inspiration in the secular political movements for American gay rights. Petro and White offer important contributions for scholars of American religious history and the history of sexuality. Both texts are also accessible and engaging for undergraduate students and could be incorporated into courses on religion and sexuality. Petro and White’s texts also point to possibilities for future directions in the study of religion and sexuality in America. As Petro notes, his study primarily investigated Christian responses to AIDS. Left unexamined, then, is how non-Christian communities, such as Jewish institutions, responded to AIDS. And, as related to White’s project, other scholars could investigate how diverse religious communities contributed to the movement for gay rights. Similarly, future scholarship could examine the often veiled ways religion has been strategically used within secular LGBT activism to promote assimilation. Additionally, Petro’s book provides some examples of religious responses to AIDS from the twenty-first century. Scholars interested in the more recent past could investigate if the religious responses to AIDS that Petro describes continue, or not, to influence policies, laws, and social norms about acceptable sexual practices in America. Finally, given Petro and White’s historical grounding in the intersections of religion and gay sexual politics, other scholars could examine the surge in “religious freedom” laws that have arisen throughout the United States in response to advances in legal protections for LGBT citizens. Thus, as Petro and White have aptly demonstrated, the field of religion and sexuality in America is ripe for further scholarly inquiry. NOTES 1. I use the term “homosexuals” here because that was the term Anita Bryant used to describe gay men and lesbians. I will also use the term later in the essay when groups like the Council on the Religion and the Homosexual, a group formed in the 1960s, used it for themselves. 2. Throughout this essay, I use terms such as “gay rights” and “gay activism” to refer to political movements that included both gay men and lesbians. I have made this choice to follow the rhetoric used by White in her book on “gay rights,” which was meant to include lesbians. However, much of what White and Petro discuss about gay rights and gay activism primarily concerned gay men. 3. “Homophile” is the term used throughout the 1950s and 1960s to describe groups that advocated for homosexuals. The Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, a group for 178 Religious Studies Review • VOLUME 42 women that broke off from the male-dominated Mattachine Society, are two examples of homophile groups. • NUMBER 3 • SEPTEMBER 2016 Gerber, Lynne 2012 Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. REFERENCES Jakobsen, Janet, and Pellegrini, Ann 2004 Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press. Alpert, Rebecca 1998 Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. Barton, Bernadette 2014 Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. New York: New York University Press. Jordan, Mark 2005 Blessing Same-Sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusion of Christian Marriage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Erzen, Tanya 2008 Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jordan, Mark 2011 Recruiting Young Love: How Christians Talk about Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fetner, Tina 2008 How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilcox, Melissa 2003 Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 179