Thursday reflection: Theo-ethical queer activism
The assigned reading for today's class was from Eric Rofes' Reviving The Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic. What I really took away from this book was an understanding of some of the ways in which queer activism was coopted by the dominant discourse as a result of AIDS. After the gay liberation of the seventies, there has been a repathologization of queer sex under the guise of medical expertise and safe-sex education.
One example is the way safe-sex education and HIV prevention campaigns often prresent gay male sexuality as a force that needs to be brought under control (for our own good and for that of society). We are "transgressive bad boys." Heterosexual resistance to and ignorance of safer sex practices are winked at (after all, unprotected vaginal sex is only natural, and necessary to the reproduction of the species), while unprotected anal sex (between men) is treated with moral opprobrium.
Tied up in all of this is the fact that even queer men, especially younger men who never experienced the political activism of the sixties and seventies, have a tendency to substitute "love" for sex in their political discourse. Queer rights and queer marriage are not about the right to love one another — we have been loving one another for centuries and no system of powers can stop that. They are about our right to fuck, about the unchaining of our erotic power. Endless prattle about equal love (of which I am myself guilty) obscures what it is we are really fighting for, and what it is that heteronormative discourse so virulently seeks to suppress.
We began the class itself, however, on an entirely different note. Jim Mitulski and Penny Nixon shared stories concerning their recent visit to the Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage in rural Zimbabwe. An interesting and powerful juxtaposition of issues and images... The cultural apartheid brought about by AIDS in post-Reagan America, contrasted with the physical apartheid of gender and poverty in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe.
Penny bridged these two worlds through her observations on how her work in the Castro and Soweto prepared her for her experiences in Zimbabwe.
In our group workshop session we were asked to consider some important ethical questions for queer ministry, and to identify some broad ethical principles. The question that I raised in our group was the possibility of lying as an ethical imperative, something I termed "sacred dishonesty." An example might be witholding information from an insurer in order to maintain health coverage. The imperative to protect life can be viewed as a higher ethical obligation than that of not bearing false witness. There are clear biblical precedents for this type of situational ethic — one example is the story of Abram lying to Pharaoh to protect his wife Sarai.
The two broad ethical principles our group agreed upon were:
- Do to others as you would have them do to you
- How would grace/compassion operate in this situation?
Comments
Posted by: Dan Vera | June 28, 2006 12:17 AM
Posted by: Mark Poole
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June 28, 2006 2:15 PM