JHD: A Homeless Thinker | 1994

[(Editor's note: Originally published in the Windy City Times, January 6, 1994 as "A Homeless Thinker." Republished as schizo-file #45 in Damski's dead/qeeer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2001).]


 45"EARTH TO DAMSKI, EARTH TO DAMSKI." FUCK OFF! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M THINKING?...WHAT? OH...REALLY? OK...REMEMBER THAT VOICE IN YOUR HEAD? DO WHAT EVER IT SAYS: THAT'S THINKING.

There is nothing free about being a freethinker. Old Aristotle used to say “thinking is a process that begins in wonder.” My personal experience is that thinking is more likely to begin in horror and end in terror. Thinking is a process that leads nowhere. Your mother was right; you will never make a great living thinking. But that’s also its greatest pleasure. Thinking takes you out of here on a utopia quest.

It is a false notion to imagine that thinking leads people to a common ground. That’s for seminars and fairy tales. Thinking will not put you on the same ground with your fellow creatures. More likely it will put you in the clouds when they are on the ground and on the ground when they are in the clouds. Thinking will isolate you even from your closest friends. They will whisper behind your back: “I don’t get it,” “I don’t understand it.”

Thinking will leave you feeling homeless. It gives you notions and ideas that don’t fit anywhere, politically or socially. You become a displaced person. Like being Henry David Thoreau at the Water Tower mall in the middle of holiday shoppers. You look, observe and don’t buy. The manager thinks you are homeless vagrant, calls security and has you ejected from the store.

Yet you remain kind of child-like in your idiot state; everything seems like a first experience to you. To feel true paranoia, you have to have a mind to go out of in the first place. People with half your mind are always telling you to “think for yourself.” But when you do, they become nervous. You make them uncomfortable, so they try various ways to get rid of you. Calling you a “genius,” as they did Wittgenstein, is a very sophisticated way of getting rid of you. Sometimes, the Blue Meanies will apply simple brute force.

In school, teachers were always encouraging me to “think for yourself.” “Come up with your own ideas on this assignment.” But when I did, I stood the risk of being accused of plagiarism or worse. My teachers would act very puzzled. “This is not like what anyone else wrote or answered.” “How can I grade this?” Sometimes they would give me honors, other times special punishments. They would threaten to fail me for spelling and penmanship and skip over the content.

That’s why my official school records are so checkered. I would either win high honors, scholarships and fellowships; or be threatened with expulsion and sent to the administration with the other dunces, dyslexics and delinquents.

In high school, my senior honors paper in a special class on “The Philosophy of the East and West” got me into lots of trouble–as did a speech I gave in the William Randolph Hearst oratorical contest, which I titled “Lincoln, A Marxian Hero.” The head of the math department was in charge of senior honors. He thought my approach was too “literary” and not “logical enough.” He very much implied I was in danger of failing and caused me a lot of trauma.

Our final papers and test, however, were sent to outside graders who were in the philosophy department at the University of Washington. Surprise, surprise, the papers came back and I received the highest grade. My teacher, being an honest man, despite his personal reservations and warning about my future life, gave me the grade I earned.

My senior year in college I was runner-up for a Rhodes Scholarship and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. I chose to go to Brandeis University, a Jewish school, majoring in the History of Ideas.

My college adviser thought I had made a poor choice and I was just committing myself to a “weird waste of time.” He insisted that with this kind of fellowship I could go to a good school like Harvard. 


When my senior orals came in political science, my adviser and his department assistant drilled me mercilessly. They, told me point blank that my thinking was “erratic.” (That’s news?) Had they known “how crazy I was,” they would have flunked me out years ago. The chairman of the French department was also on the orals committee. He came to my defense and saw that I passed and was able to go on to Brandeis graduate school, over the objection of my personal adviser.

When I reentered graduate school in classics at the University of Washington, I clearly told them and especially my adviser, that I knew I had a funny way of thinking. I came from the anti-rational tradition of counterculture. It was the ’60s and the whole campus was in revolt. They found me cute and said they didn’t care what, or how, I thought, as long as I performed well at the languages. They assumed that after I got my degree, I would teach in a small college in Ellensburgh, Washington and would never be an embarrassment to their department anyway.

Then, out of the blue, I got hired to teach Latin and Roman history at Bryn Mawr College, one of the top classics departments in the country. Suddenly my adviser and other members of the department took me much more seriously. They couldn’t have such a flaky thinker out East at such a fine place, representing their department. They must straighten out my thinking. Consequently, they put me through not one, but three, grueling Ph.D. orals over a two year period. It was pure hell. 

We mind-wrestled point by point, like guys in a macho straight bar arm-wrestling over a prize. The outside examiners told me later they were puzzled that I kept failing, but because of protocol, were afraid to interfere. My own thesis adviser was the worst culprit, because people out East would say I was “his boy” and he would lose points because of my queer way of thinking.

This was a department that would not acknowledge that Virgil was “gay." No wonder they thought I took “liberties with the text,” because I was also in a process of taking liberation of my gay life.

Over the years I have learned to stand my ground, which is really no ground, with greater humor. Friends and advisors mean well. They want the best for me, which is a life like they imagine they have. They don’t want some queer thinker ruining their show, or challenging their mythical chain of command and being.

But in my child-like state, I still find it curious that such a harmless act as thinking, or mental masturbation, can cause you violent and hostile reactions–so much that you sometimes feel homeless even in the company of friends.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press.

JHD: Dignity and the Rat Master | 1986

 Orsetti detail which would be used for dead/queer/proud cover. Firetrap Press, 2002.

31YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK IN? 

HELLO? THEY SHOULD WANT YOU.

The Vatican’s letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” will not stop people from being gay or Catholic. But it will make life more tense when you try to he both gay and Catholic at the same time. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing for the Company of Men, asserts that gay groups (though he never calls us by name) such as Dignity, have no right to meet and hold services on church property. 

In an ironically gay use of words, the Rat wants us to obey his dignitas, which in Latin meant “office, rank and authority,” and was often used by the Emperor to refer to himself. The Society of Homos still have visions of extending the Holy Roman Empire to America. And they become very upset when ordinary Americans question their authority.

As the Rat states: “The use of church buildings by these (gay groups)... and permission to use church property may seem only just and charitable, but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded: it is misleading and often scandalous.”

Should any “homosexual persons” come together on church property they must first abjure and renounce themselves: “No authentic pastoral program will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral.”

Lesbian and gay people are not welcome on church property. Harsh lines are drawn: it would seem that the only gay priest would be an ex priest, the only lesbian nun would be an ex nun and the only gay Catholic would be an exCatholic.

What do you do? Do you fight or quit? Stay on or drop out of the church? Do you attend services wearing a red letter “G” on your forehead and cause a scandal? Or, as one rebel suggested, do you chain yourself to your pew and force them to throw you out? It seems like the Holy Father is saying: “This is my church, love it or leave it!”

Fortunately, life is not a series of pseudo dramatic often neurotic either/or choices. As theologian Rosalle Muschal Remnhardt says, “you can be both/and and more/than.” When you are gay or lesbian there is no reason you have to cut yourself off from your church, family, or country. It is your choice how you place yourself. Inside or outside, or both in and out and more. Stay where it is comfortable for you. Adopt a style that is comfortable for you. Be confrontational, or moderational, as you feel free to be. Go along, or make trouble, do what you feel most expresses your love for your church and country.

Once you overcome the negativity of this Vatican letter and get yourself back in place a lot of issues will start to clarify. I can suggest a few and I’m sure you can think of others: 

1. If you want to get their attention fast start a movement to tax their Company. This is still America, where the idea of individual freedom prevails. Each person is free to act on her own authority according to the promptings of her own conscience. The founders of this country ran away from Kings, Queens (of either gender) and Emperors, to make this land the home of freedom. We are not now going to allow some Company of Foreign Men extend their vision of the Holy Roman Empire to our shores. We don’t accept the teaching of foreign potentates here, be they Ayatollahs, Bhagwans, or Popes. If the Company of Men in Rome want to assert their corporate rights of private property, let them begin to pay corporate taxes in America–and property taxes. Let the pseudo masters in Rome know: there will be no magisterium without taxation.

2.  The Society of Homos can't look you in the eye and won't have you in their "house". Ask yourself why.  Nowhere in the Rat's letter is the word gay or lesbian mentioned. They treat us as though we do not exist. They do not know our mores, our morals, our ways and means of existence. Their lack of respect and willed ignorance of us reveals much about themselves. They don’t understand that people who fight homosexuality are always fighting their own homosexuality. Since most of us have done the work it takes to come out, this is something we know that the Pope's gang doesn't. It's a Company loss, but they make us pay.

3. The Company of Men has "a long tradition" says the Rat. He's right. It's called lying and the Society of Homos have a special name for it: jesuitical "Crafty, intriguing, or equivocating person.” Though they say we "deceive" they are the real masters of deceitful Sophistry (here their magisterium fits). They've been "sodomites" for centuries: They ripped the "sin" of Sodom (inhospitality) out of its biblical roots, made up something new and have been killing people for this truly original sin ever since. The Rat takes the art to a new extreme: he blames us for the AIDS plague. Their letter on "pastoral care" (one more touch of sophistry) is a plague of words. It falls back on the Church of Rome. 

What are these liars hiding? They are on the run, terrified of the "gay" plague. They tell the world, that plague is AIDS. The thing that scares them, the dis-ease which freaks out these old homos, is a very young idea: two gays or two lesbians, together, publicly. Honest gays and lesbians threaten the entire Homo Order! Now we understand what the Rat means about "the lives and well-being of a large number of people."  He's out to save his Company of Men. 

If any of them are smart rats, they'd better start practicing 'pastoral care' at Homo Heights, first,  and leave morality to those who can handle it. I've been a witness to such strength: every breath taken by a person with AIDS is a moral act. Without serious homo (mental) health-care at the Vatican–and lessons about how to treat guests–the Company of Men has no healthy future. It will die of its own terminal theology. (Rome has fallen before.)

For the recovering Catholics out there, Ratzinger's letter is just one more piece of junk mail. Send it back: addressee unknown. Or trash it.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally appeared in Damski's JHD column, November 27, 1986 and republished in Damski's dead/queer/proud as Schizo-file#31 (Firetrap Press 2002).

JHD:The Pope's Gay Bangers | 1986

Early iteration of  what would become Damki's 2002 Firetrap Press book, dead/queer/proud.

30THE POPE'S HOMO GANGBANGERS (OR, RELIGION AS RETROVIRUS–NOTHING FUNNY HERE).

We’ve all known for years that the Pope and his gang at the Vatican live like homos without the sexuality. They are men who prefer the company of men. They are the Society of Homos and they prefer to run the church from Rome as a company of men. And they lay down laws and discipline the church as though it were an army of men.

In their everyday life they imitate the homo lifestyle without the sexuality. To get rid of their guilt, they come out in public and condemn the homo lifestyle, without acknowledging that it is pretty much their lifestyle too.

I have never been in a living situation with a high prelate for longer than a week; I see them most at meetings and interviews. I think they avoid and contain their sexuality as much as is humanly possible. I would not say that homosexuality is rampant inside the church–they are not a bunch of horny gay Thornbirds.

They behave more like retroviruses. They replicate the homo lifestyle and get everything backwards. Instead of having homosexual urges, they have power urges: and, often, the will to gay bash and destroy comes over them. Everything gay must seem alien to them. They feel they must attack and invade the living gay cell in order to control and ultimately destroy it.

In speeches and proclamations they babble on endlessly about “inclinations and tendencies” of the homosexual kind. I am a gay person. I have no tendency or inclination to be a homosexual! I am light years beyond that point. The Pope and his gang dwell and live at that point. Often they seem like timid men stuck in a teenage hang up.

Gay is the way my life force flows. I am not back at the crossroads deciding whether I should be or do gay. They are still at the crossroads. Talking like top men, they want us to hang up our sexuality on a cross. In their company of men you can he homo, but not sexual. Everything sexual is a disorder to them because it threatens their nice order, their theological company. They are pure homos: they don’t want their order disturbed.

When you join the Society of Homos you put your body on the cross between homo and sexuality. You give up your own sexuality for the love of Jesus. As Cardinal Ratzinger put it in the Vatican’s recent letter On Homosexuality: ‘Just as the cross was central to the expression of God’s redemptive love for us in Jesus, so the conformity of the self-denial of homosexual men and women with the sacrifice of the Lord will constitute for them a source of self-giving.” After a little act of psycho-castration, you too can join the Company of Men and live on ethereal Homo Heights.

The Catholic church has always been an eternally fascinating and attractive organization for young men. And in reverse, the Church has been eternally fascinated by and attracted to young men. They share a homo symbiosis.

Many young men come to join an order and be a priest because they are having trouble handling their sexuality-or are handling it too much. They feel compelled to join the Company of Men where they can be pure homos and at the same time escape their sexuality–give the troubled thing up. When they arrive, the church gives them a cross and a stiff doctrine to hold on to.

In many cases the solution works. Most clergy toe the line of celibacy. And those who can’t usually quit along the way. The church allows you to forget your body and yet keep some of the manners, forms and gestures of the homo lifestyle. You can wear elaborate ecclesiastical drag. The Bishops at their conference in Washington, D.C. could buy many “gay” sartorial trinkets: gold-filled pectoral crosses, brilliant colored sashes, bishop rings and magenta zucchettos (skullcaps) lined with chamois.

The society at large tolerates a lot of gay theater inside the church in ceremony and dress. They allow men to kiss each others’ hand, ring and finger. At Easter they can pick up some poor beggar and wash and kiss his feet. They can walk down the aisles dressed like a bride with two young guys in black holding up their gown. They can bless each other with church room odorizer. They are free to put on a show of queens, because as prelates they live a pure homo life.

The Pope and his gang at the Vatican  live like homopuritans, not homosexuals. They are not repressed homosexuals. They are all form and no body and their acts are only imitation ceremonial acts.

Clothes make the holy man. But behind those clothes is flesh, which sometimes feels the pull and tug of their mortality. The Pope does not always act rationally or in his best political interest. Why would he send out the message of a stern Polish Holy Father, condemning homosexuality in America and then plan his trip here so it ends up in San Francisco? Does he want to engage the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in a street fight? Does he want a pie in his face? Does he find us in the flesh so irresistible?

The Pope and his gang will not be shaken from their Homo Heights. The wimpish American bishops have again submitted to his authority. His place is secure.

But they are not secure in their place. Gay frightens them: it’s new and it’s free and it’s lustfully loving. They never had the gay option when they were young in Poland and now they want to bash it when they see it in the flesh.

And yet the Pope plans to plop down in the middle of it in San Francisco. Are we his last temptation?

Gay liberation represents almost the ultimate in Protestantism. We say you can love yourself and your friend and Jesus directly. You do not have to ask permission from the top men in the Society of Homos in order to love.

Like all mortals, the Pope and his gang are panicked by this new gay option. A world where you can be gay and don’t have to be homosexual; be sane and don’t have to be a sinner; be a body–a loving body–and don’t have to be a theologian–all this zaps their mind.

But if they don’t catch on soon to the winds of freedom, they might just get left behind when all the people take back their church for the love of Jesus and leave them behind, a company of forgotten old men.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally published in Windy City Times in Jon-Henri Damski's JHD column, November 20, 1986. v1r3. Published as Schizo-file#30 in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002).

Jon-Henri Damski's Nothing Personal: Sleaze Buckets (1979)

Still from Nighthawks (1978), grabbed here.

"SLEAZE BUCKETS" | 1979

We, that is, homosexuals, or as they like to pronounce it on television, HOmo-SEX-U-als, are more and more in the news.

We are in the news because they want to know about us. 

Often, journalists report on our activities as though we were a sub-species, a sub-culture, or some subterranean night crawlers from another planet. 

The rule is: when talking about homosexuals, keep your distance. Never expose your own sexuality. Hide behind your objectivity. But this rule and style of reporting often breaks down, because in matters of sexuality, there is no clear and fixed distinction between them and us. 

When you are talking about homosexuality, it is hard to tell who is them, who is us, and who is hiding. The traditional canons of objectivity fail. 

People are always saying you can't be a little pregnant without eventually showing it. True. But you can be a little gay without ever wanting to show it. In fact, that's the state most people live in. 

And so, since there is always a little bit of us in them, journalists have difficult time with us. 

Most journalists, when talking about homosexuals, get their facts right, but err in interpretation. For straight facts often lead to queer interpretations. 

Roger Ebert in his review of Nighthawks

 (Sun-Times, Oct. 16, 1979), for example, has all his facts right, but his quasi-objective and distant point-of-view distorts his interpretations. 

For Ebert, Nighthawks is a movie about them (gays)--for them. And his conclusion is: let's hope nobody is like them. 

He keeps his critical distance from us and our world, and he dutifully reports in his liberal family newspaper that gay is sad, and gay is bad. 

Factually, he is right: Nighthawks is a dull, uninspired, two-star movie. It has left town after a week at the 3 Penny.

 Even with foreign kudos, it couldn't hold an audience: gay or curious. 

Jim, the school teacher/nighthawk, is an anti-anti-hero: so ordinary that he stirs little more than a yawn. Sure, he does the best his lukewarm British flesh will allow, but he has a difficult time keeping a stiff upper anything. 

The movie is so ordinary, in fact, that it begs all kinds of interpretations. And a critic can't just say, "well, folks, that was one I slept through." So Ebert fills in with gratuitous interpretations and musings on gay life. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim, his haunts are gloomy, and his life, dead end. And the last and only good thing you can say about the movie is that it was playing at the 3 Penny, and not at one of those male "sleaze buckets" on Clark Street. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim because he cannot find an "Enduring Relationship," which according to Ebert is the "social epidemic" of the 20th century. 

But: male homosexuals have been having and surviving transitory relationships for centuries. It's nothing new for us. That's why we are probably better able to cope with this urban situation than most self-proclaimed, married-again monogamists. 

True, among homosexuals you will not find too many American Gothic, til-death-do-us-part couples. In a gay "marriage" it's more likely that both partners will be holding a pitch fork. 

There are millions of couples in New York, Chicago, and London who have discovered that an exclusive, one-on-one relationship is not essential. Many of us don't even have an enduring weekend together. 

But that does not mean life is a horror show. It means we have changed our expectations, or totally abandoned them. And for us it's not a dead end; it's a life cycle on speed. 

Further, to call homosexual haunts gloomy is a prudish cliche. Gloomy for whom? That's where we find other guys, our sex partners, our sun shine. 

It might seem sad to you, an outsider, because you are not there for what we are there for. But the wait is worth it, honey; the wait is worth it! For when the arrow hits the target, you scream inside like a Zen master. 

And as for "sleaze buckets": I remember the Newberry Theater [note: a gay porn theater],  now a parking lot on Clark. Cold seats, fat men, leaking roof, stink bombs, and the projectionist sleeping at the switch. 

Who used to go there? Dirty nighthawks. Sure. 

And kids from the suburbs. Who found out about the all male sleaze bucket from reading Roger Ebert's Sun-Times movie section. And since they never read about an all-male anything else, they would flock to the Newberry, often for their first coming out experience. 

Yes, I remember one kid, in his early twenties, arriving at the Newberry on a cold, rainy Friday: going to the bathroom, showing a half of dozen men what he had to offer: and then, leading them, like a good shepherd, down in front to the cement floor, and while another dozen men watched, he made sure there were a lot of satisfied customers at the Newberry that night. 

And all the while he performed, there was a movie going on above them. Duffy's Tavern, with a couple of long haired blond kids making it on a pool table, while the Stones rolled on in the background. Talk about Apocalypse Now. Talk about a real movie experience. 

So, Mr. Ebert, do keep your critical distance: for if you were to slip into one of the sleaze buckets on Clark Street, and review one of our movies, it just might turn out to be a living experience. 

And if you looked down beneath the screen, I just don't know who you would recognize. 

Originally published in "Gay Chicago," October 25, 1979.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press Cooperative.

ABOUT deadqueerproud

The title of this blog comes from the book of essays by Jon-Henri Damski with the same title: dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002).

Both titles arise from some obvious and not-so-obvious things. He is dead. He was queer and proud. As well, however, Damski took on a lot of fads, both in his former academic life and in his everyday, queer Chicago life. One of his favorite targets was the de-evaluation of the Classics, of which he was a scholar.

The point: this dead white guy was proud of the life he lived...

John Michael Vore, Publisher
Firetrap Press

Homokind

Frank J. Tipler, in his enlightening book, The Physics of Immortality, reports (pg 370):

At the Council of Florence 1442, the Catholic Church laid it out forcefully: ‘The Holy Roman Church, firmly believes, professes and proclaims that none of those outside the Church (Extra Ecclesium nulla salus), not Jews, not heretics, can participate in eternal life, but will go into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, unless they are brought back into the Catholic Church before the end of life."

This doctrine clearly makes the Roman Catholic Church the most extreme fundamentalist church of them all.

Today Jews and heretics have been replaced by gays and lesbians. We go to the fire, unless we go (back) into the Church before our life ends. No option for eternal life for us.

In the 15th century the Church sold the notion that heaven is only for the select few. Kept its priests at the door of the big Disco in the sky. Tempted all queens who wanted a VIP pass to the stairway to heaven. Admit One Selected Soul-a lucky person to get in.

Even at the time, this doctrine of selectivity was challenged. If the Church happened to be wrong, then it meant the Church falsified itself and stood between a loving God and Jesus, who admitted everyone and humankind. It meant the Church shut off the electrifying flow of love between God and her people. God left heaven’s gate open to all.

For our tribe, I like the word HOMOKIND. HOMO from Latin refers to the universal generic man, who like gays and lesbians, “are everywhere.” Tiny in numerical size, but universal in application. That’s why a church which calls itself “universal and whole” should be the first to include us all as equal members, equal to the body of Christ.

Pope comes from the word pontifex, which means “bridge builder.” Hardly. Instead Popes use their bully pulpit to brand us “molokai,” softies, sissies, the no accounts. Tragically, because of our soft, kind and gentle nature (the KIND in HOMOKIND) we seem to stir up and provoke their brutal atoms. So they harass and keep us outside the Church and try to keep us away from eternal life. This harsh punishment hits gay sons and lesbian daughters hard, puts fear instead of the love of God in our older members.

For 27 centuries the Church has been wacky and out of balance. In the beginning all it talks about is HOMOGENITALITY. As Rick Garcia has remarked: they keep sticking their noses into our genitals. They are one rigid kind of unkind church that concentrates all its fire in condemning one kind of homo/sex. They particularly refuse to acknowledge over the years how we have evolved a loving kind of domestic partners.

The Church has a deliberate stand against domestic partners at City Hall and in Oak Park, as recently signaled by Archbishop George. Chicago aldermen have and make better sense than the pack of bishops.

It took them half a millennium to seek forgiveness for standing between God and Galileo, between God and the Jews. Will it take them another 500 for the church to reach the apology and realization stage with us? YES. Meanwhile they themselves, because they deal in an ethic that is dark, closed and closeted, suffer a horrendous perception problem. Many if not most who stand outside the Church believe these men in fine silks and dress are gay.

Believe that homo priests and pedophile clergy run the shop.

If in the next millennium they want to live up to their name “universal,” they will have to incorporate outsider gays and lesbians with the folks inside the Church, decent folk who do not like their mind trapped in such deception. Ironically the Church’s salvation hinges on their outreach, love and acceptance of gays and lesbians, not our obedience to a cabal of secretive repressed homos, men who exhibit too much genital expression in their talk about us, and not enough kindness in actually dealing with us.

[Publisher’s Note(s): Along with “The Field of God,” this makes up the last essays Damski wrote and edited in 1997. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 32, under the title “By the time you read this I’ll be a dead queer, but I was always homokind to you.” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--John Vore]

The Field Of God

I am hesitant to enter the field of God. Reluctant to talk about God. She does not need my talk. Etymologically speaking the primary Indo-European and Teutonic roots of the word “God” are “invoked,” “the invoked one,” “the called on Being.” She does not need me to call on Her, if She is all-knowing and all-powerful.

The Greek root for the word “God” from the same family is kauchaomai, which means “I boast.” To presume to call on God is to boast.

That’s what I find so unappealing about all God talk from street corner to coffee shop. It causes us to boast and imagine that because we are having a conversation with the All-Knowing that somehow we are all knowing too.

In all God talk from the bible on, there is a viral overload of distasteful sexism. God is assumed to be a He/Him. Only in the last century have we broken the old iron code and realized that God is both a He and She, Him and Her. Those who cannot handle the pronoun shift, I cannot handle.

For me:
God is
God is love
God’s love will take care of us queers,,for God is the original loving He/She. And He/She is more concerned with love and forgiveness than sin and condemnation, more concerned with saving you and your neighborhood of domestic partners than in keeping anyone away from the Field of God and the stairway to heaven.

The Church and its bully pulpits, with their overly gooey and false interpretations of the Bible are even more virulently anti-gay today, hurling more vile doctrines at us. This is because we are the last to become the first, and because we offer the most serious threat to the monarchical rule of the Church.

When Paul picked out the sin of homosexuality to condemn, he chose it because it was the “safe sin” in his day. If he had picked circumcision or dietary law he would have spoken against sins his audience of Jew, Gentile Christians and Romans. Then as now, because of our long-standing denial mechanism, few if any believed or would say they were homosexual. Paul picked the safe sin to condemn, the one many felt was not serious and and the one they didn’t take personally.

In the daytime, Jesus threw out the Book of the Laws of the Jews. Love God as God loves you. Love your neighbor as you want your neighbor to love you. At night Jesus kept company and ate with some very queer types: whores, tax collectors, street people and us queers too. He loved us queers, and forgave our sins.

The Bible is so overpoweringly sexist: it continually disrespects women and gay men. We are no-accounts both on earth and in heaven. No voice - no rights nor say. The Men of Sodom ask Lot to send out the ambassadors of God “so we can know them” (causing most biblical scholars to twist the verb “know,” like an eight, to mean “have intercourse with” (ha,ha)). Instead, Job offers as compensation his two daughters “who have not yet known a man” (another sick joke). He can do this because the women are property, his property!

Strange, only God does not think you have sinned when you commit a queer act. Your mother does. Your lover does because you have betrayed him/her. Your brother and neighbor, but only She, who like us is everywhere, does not think you have sinned.

The only way to lord it over someone is to love the sin as well as forgive the sinner. Preachers and pastoral letters proclaim that you love your son for being gay, but not for doing gay (sex), sawing your son in half. The essence of being gay is gay sexuality.

Gays and lesbians have progressed like evolution, while the Church inches its way historically. They still refuses to see us for who we are.
HOMOSEXUAL IS NOT GAY.
DOMESTIC PARTNERS DO NOT LIVE IN SIN.
UNLESS THE CHURCH IS WILLING TO
REACH OUT AND OFFER US TOTAL SALVATION,
THE CHURCH IS DOOMED.

A wise theologian once said “To think you can teach and preach this stuff, makes you an ass. But to stay out of the Field of God and the eternally joyous and gay rewards of eternal life, makes you an ox.” We are still a threat to the Church after all these centuries because we challenge–to its face–monarchical and patriarchal ownership. God does not look kindly on people who want to keep us out of Her Church and Field. For by Her love and leave we are either all saved, included, or the Church is doomed.

HER LOVE GUARANTEES
WE ALL HAVE EQUAL ACCESS TO
THE FIELD OF GOD.


[Publisher’s Note: Along with “Homokind,” this makes up the last essays Damski wrote and edited in late October 1997. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 57, under the title “Final Scene: Academic odd ball lands in Chicago for mid-life Crisis, ends up writing columns for 20 years - and his last one has to be about the fucking Catholic Church and I’m not even Catholic. (I am out of here.).” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--jmv.]