Posted in category "Lesbians & Gays"
This Thursday the Suffolk Times completed a four-issue series about gays and lesbians on the North Fork. When Lori and I got to the house last night, I saw that Anne MacKay of Orient was interviewed about the growth of the North Fork Community.
“It was a wonderful place, not as expensive as the South Fork, and lesbians began coming out and buying property in the 1960s,” MacKay said. As a fourth-generation summer person, “I’m not really a local,” she added wryly.
A retired theater professor, MacKay moved into her home in Brown’s Hills in 1959, and summered there until she retired “in about 1990″ when she moved to Orient full-time.
In the article MacKay described the beginning of the North Fork women’s community. Early on, the women would have gatherings in one another’s homes. “At first, we’d all just fit into a living room,” but over the years the group expanded. The North Fork Women for Women Fund now has a mailing list of about 500 names.
Lori and I met Anne MacKay at a NFWFWF event earlier this year. Engaging and energetic, she carried the perspective–but not the weight–of her 80 years. Her eyes are lively and intelligent. She is still a charmer.
Shortly after the event I made a point to go get copies of her books of poetry, Salt Water Days and Sailing the Edge. The Orient General Store carries them, in an old fashion wood and glass case. Women, nature, water, myth, and memory run and blend together in the poems, which is just perfect for me. 
Prominent special interest lobbyist and evangelical preacher, James C. Dobson, is back in the news. He sharply attacked presidential candidate Barak Obama, accusing him of having “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution” and twisting the meaning of both the Old and New Testaments. 
“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Mr. Dobson said in one of the recent radio broadcasts for the group he leads, Focus on the Family.
He’s some kind of Biblical authority?” Mr. Dobson also asked.
Mr. Dobson’s remarks focused on a June 28, 2006 speech in which Mr. Obama mentioned passages from the Bible that he suggested were in conflict with present-day practices. Mr. Dobson made his criticisms shortly after Joshua Dubois, the Obama campaign’s religious affairs director, offered to meet with Focus on the Family leaders.
“Young conservative evangelicals seem more open to Obama’s ‘Christian’ message of caring for the poor, fighting genocide, health care for all and climate change,” David Brody, senior national correspondent of the Christian Broadcasting Network noted.
But so far, the attack seems to have backfired. Obama issued a strong response, and one supporter quickly created a website - jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com - that quotes Old Testament prophets, giving Dobson a Biblical wallop of his own.
It seems as if the Democrats have finally figured out what to do, when the Dobsons of the world try to paint them as faithless or anti-religious.
In the words of Jim Wallis, a politically liberal Christian activist, you have to go toe-to-toe with fundamentalists, carrying a Bible in one hand, and the Constitution in the other.
Fr. Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) was the author of The Wounded Healer and dozens of other books. He is famous for his religious meditations and his guides to spiritual development. 
BBC producer Michael Ford met Nouwen while interviewing him for a TV program. He later took at leave of absence to write the book, The Wounded Prophet - A Portrait of Henri J.M. Nouwen.
Ford said it is impossible to “understand the complexity and anguish of the man” without considering his homosexual orientation, something he was aware of from the time he was a boy, but started to come to grips with only in the final years of his life.
He wrestled with his homosexual leanings, which he regarded as a disability, a cross to bear. While he taught at Harvard in the 1980s, he was hard on gay students, telling them homosexuality was an evil state of being.
In time, Nouwen became friends with some gay people, and was under pressure to go public. Other friends, however, counseled him to keep his secret, saying he would lose all credibility as a famous and widely admired Catholic if people knew he was gay.
Nouwen never publicly came out during his lifetime. He did acknowledge he was gay in private conversations and in his diaries.
Nouwen was deeply troubled by the possibility that people would reject him if they knew about his sexual orientation. “This took an enormous emotional, spiritual and physical toll on his life and may have contributed to his early death,” Ford said.
His homosexual feelings may also have contributed to a midlife nervous breakdown. When his close friend Nathan Ball pulled back from their platonic relationship, Nouwen went into a tailspin and had to seek treatment for an emotional breakdown.
Ford believes this brokenness within Nouwen was the key to his ability to reach out to those in need, those who are suffering and wounded. Ford writes, “He discovered that it was from the wounded places in himself that he could reach the wounded places in others.”
Henri saw the 1987 film, Maurice, based on E. M. Forster’s novel of classism and homophobia in England. After the movie, Henri collapsed. His companion’s description of what happened is recounted by Ford:
“…he had to stop on the highway because he was sobbing uncontrollably. He was so caught up with the story and the dilema the two main characters were living, because it was his. All I could do was hold him and let him cry. He was really in pieces.” 
“Today the small rejections of my life are too much for me,” Nouwen writes. “A sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial, a bitter silence, a failure to be noticed, a coldness from a colleague, an indifference from someone I love, a nagging tiredness, the lack of a soulmate, a loneliness I can’t explain. I feel empty, alone, afraid, restless, unsure of myself, and I look around for invitations, letters, phone calls, gifts, for someone to catch my eye in sympathy, for some warm gesture that can heal my emptiness..And right now I don’t particularly want God, faith, church or even a big and gracious heart. I want simply to be held, embraced, loved by someone special, made to feel unique, kissed by a soulmate. I’m empty, a half-person. I need someone to make me whole.”
The June 9th New York Post ran the opinion piece “Marriage Fight Wastes Gay Dollars” by a man named David Benkof, who was identified as a “columnist for several gay newspapers and a blogger at GaysDefendMarriage.com. 
Benkof, 38, wrote he was against spending gay community dollars on the upcoming California vote on marriage. He believes the gay community, and the Human Rights Commission in particular, should use the cash they have raised for California PR to “achieve rights for same-sex couples who live in states that are much more hostile to gays and lesbians than California.” He dismissed the marriage initiative battle by saying “HRC is pushing for gays in San Francisco to be able to use their favorite term for their relationship.”
He chided the gay community for not routinely raising funds like “Catholics and African-Americans” to help out the poorest members of their communities. “We in the gay and lesbian movement have done a lousy job of paying attention to people who share our identify but lack the resources to hobnob at fancy diners.” He insinuated that now that the faces of AIDS and HIV infections are not wealthy white men, but poor and black men, the movement has moved on to other “more relevant” issues.
Since Mr. Benkof did not say anything about himself or his experiences in the article, one would assume, as I did, that he is a regular gay guy, someone active in the movement as a columnist, but who chooses to sound ideologically out-of-step, peevish or both. Since his righteous attitude both annoyed and piqued my interest, I decided to dig. Here’s what I found:
-David Benkof (born David Bianco) is not a columnist for several gay newspapers. He’s a freelancer who submits articles and opinion pieces. He does not have a regular gig with anyone, including the Dallas Voice.
-In 2003 Benkof, who had been raised as a Conservative Jew, became Orthodox. He stopped saving sex with men, and professed that “the liberal…approach to homosexuality and Judaism was completely bankrupt.”
-He now identifies not as a gay man, but as bisexual. “I believe that within a couple of years I’m probably going to be married with a growing family.”
-Benkof views heterosexuality as an integral part of the teachings of Judaism. “I rejected all the unsuccessful attempts to reconcile traditional Judaism with gay sex and gay relationships. And I decided to take more seriously the demands that I believe G-d has made on the Jewish people in terms of how we live out our sexual feelings.”
“I happen to believe that G-d has been clear to the Jewish people that we should be pursuing opposite-sex relationships, and particularly not having intercourse between two males.”
Since his orthodox awakening Benkof has become a strong opponent of same-sex marriage: “It insults the millions of Americans whose traditional faiths call on us to defend marriage as a central institution in society defined as a union between a man and a woman.”
Why didn’t he raise any of this in the Post article?
If it’s not made-up, Benkof has at least one Christian that agrees with him. “Mark” writes:
“David-thank you for creating this website and putting into words exactly what my partner and I believe. I am so sick of “gay” people acting like gayness is our one defining attribute. I am also an American and a Christian, to name a few. Demanding that marriage, which is a religious institution, be afforded to gay people regardless of the wishes of a vast majority will only cement in the minds of many that gays care only about their own self interests regardless of the potential or perceived damage our behavior and pet issues might have on society. Such egocentricity, thus, could lead to a great backlash by the vast majority of people, who regardless of what we want and hope, still find homosexuality disgusting on a personal level–not to mention immoral on a religious level–I fear that someday, in the not too distant future, my partner and I will have to pay a great price for the indulgences and egotism of the annointed leaders of today’s gay movement.”
Note: I haven’t been able to google any articles by David, five years now as a self-identified bisexual, on how the love and physical intimacy with a woman has been a gift of God for him.
Read more on David Benkoff here and here and here.
Ellen DeGeneres, 50, and Portia de Rossi, 36, seem to think so.
As gay couples celebrate their newfound right to marry in California, opposition groups, including a few from our own dear Mother Church, will rally to fight the ruling. Many will struggle with this question: Is homosexuality natural?
Nature seems to think so. Same-sex sex, including one-night-stands, oral sex, mutual masturabation, parental relationships, bonded couples, serial monogamy, and multiple couplings have been observed in about 1,500 animal species, including bottlenose dolphins, bonobo chimpanzees, American bison, giraffes, gray whales, walrus, Kob antelopes, Japanese macaques, and–how could I leave them out–penguins and seagulls.
Here’s a description of a female-female Kob antelope encounter: “On average, females mount with other females a couple of times an hour during mating season. Homosexual mounting encompasses almost 9% of all sexual activities within these hoofed mammals in the wild. While courting, the pursuer slides up behind a pal and raises her foreleg, touching the other female between her legs. This leggy foreplay ultimately leads to mounting.”
Makes sense to me!
“Not every sexual act has a reproductive function,” said Janet Mann, a biologist at Georgetown University who studies dolphins (homosexual behavior is very common in these marine mammals.) “That’s true of humans and non-humans.”
Some scientists have proposed being gay may serve its own evolutionary purpose.
“It could be a way that you strengthen bonds–that’s one hypothesis,” Mann told Live Science. “Another is that it could be practice for heterosexual sex. Bottlenose dolphin calves mount each other a lot. That might benefit them later on.”
Marlene Zuk, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside, suggested that gay individuals contribute to the gene pool of their community by nurturing their relatives’ young without diverting resources by having their own offspring.
The one thing that does seem to be exclusive to humans is homophobia.
“It’s a very interesting question as to why anybody ever cares,” Mann said. “There are different theories about why people find it threatening. Some think it disrupts male bonds, like you’re not playing for the right team. The funny thing is people say homosexuality is unnatural, that nonhumans don’t engage in homosexual behavior, but that’s not true. Then they’ll say it’s base and animalistic.”
Humans resistance to the idea of homosexuality extends even to research in behavior in animals. Scientists who study the topic are often accused of trying to forward an agenda, and their work can come under greater scrutiny than that of their colleagues who study other topics, Mann said. “It’s kind of a shame because I think that probably is a reason why people don’t look at it more,” Mann said. “That’s probably why we haven’t gotten further. You would think that we’d know more than we do by now.”
Instead of “fish on Friday” we’ll enjoy “film on Friday” courtesy of You Tube. Clips might be funny, outrageous, silly, strange or provovative.
That We Would Be Heard includes the love story of two Catholic lesbians who went to a retreat looking for peace, and came away with one another. One of the women, Molly, speaks out about the church:
“I don’t understand how the church can continue to close their ears to the stories and the lives and the experience of people who are gay and lesbian and bisexual.”
See the video here.
Manila Archbishop Caudencio Cardinal Rosales scolded members of one parish for allowing gay men dressed as female saints and queens to participate in the Santacruzan processional.
He added the incident prompted him to issue a letter saying that any parish or chapel that will use gays in a procession honoring the Virgin Mary will not be allowed to have Mass.
The Philippines observes the Flores de Mayo festival every May. The highlight of the celebration is the Santacruzan, a procession that features beautifully dressed young women portraying queens and women religious figures from the past.
Santacruzan recalls the search for the Holy Cross by Queen Helena and her newly converted son Emperor Constantine the Great. They found it in Jerusalem and brought it to Rome to joyous thanksgiving.
“We should keep sacred what is sacred,” Cardinal Rosales said as he admonished parishes now to allow gay men to play Saint Helena and other female roles traditionally given to local beauty queens.
“The procession is religious. (But) what the parishes do is organize a parade. That’s an insult to the Blessed Mother. Instead of pious young women, gay men are paraded, which makes (the procession) ridiculous,” he added.
Danton Remoto, a professor at Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, and head of the LGBT rights group, Ang Ladlad, said many gay participants were low-income people who had spent for expensive gowns they would wear in the procession “out of the goodness and love in their hearts for the Virgin Mary.”
Remoto went on to say “In the eyes of God, everyone is equal. Some of these gay men have saved a lot of money for their gowns and they were doing it because they believed in the Virgin Mary. They need understanding, not condemnation.” “There is really no intention to malign the Catholic Church,” he added.
Cardinal Rosales dismissed the charges of discrimination against individuals with “homosexual inclinations.” “I’m not angry at gay men. But, I am against what they’re actually doing.”
What’s that, I wonder? Having sex with each other, or dressing up as the Virgin Mary and St. Helena and parading down the main street? The Cardinal wasn’t specific about what he was against.
I have mixed feelings about cross-dressing gay men participating in the procession:
Can’t we have religious events in which the leading female roles are limited to women? It seems to me to be arrogant and disrespectful for these men to assume women should step aside for them to participate–especially if it is to turn a religious procession into a drag show.
However, I also feel that if these men are compelled by faith to witness to the roles these female figures played in their religion, then I feel they should be welcomed to participate as such.
Sister Jeannine Gramick of New Ways Ministry once told me the story about a chance meeting with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger during a flight to Germany. He had an empty seat next to his, and Sr. Jeannine, ever bold and resourceful, seized the opportunity and sat down next to him. She introduced herself, and he said with a smile and twinkle in his eye, “Oh, sister, I have known you for 20 years.” “I’m sure he was referring,” Jeannine said, “to the length of time my file in the Vatican had been accumulating.”
Jeannine was surprised by the man. He was gracious and gentle-spoken, and listened to whay she had to say. He asked questions. But Jeannine felt as she was speaking to him that Cardinal Ratzinger had already made up his mind about lesbian and gay Catholics and ministry to us. He wasn’t open to change about what he believed to be true and necessary.
In an April 17, 2008 article in Newsday, Sr. Jeannine told senior editor Carol Eisenberg that her impression of Pope Benedict is that “he comes from a worldview that sees truth as fixed and unchanging, and nothing you can say or do will change that truth.”
“The world that he and other members of the Vatican most fear is change. They cannot accept a dynamic worldview that sees truth as something we search for and something the Spirit is constantly revealing to us if we would just open our hearts and minds.”
Cardinal Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith–the Vatican’s chief theological enforcer–had some pretty fixed ideas on how to handle dissent and alternative ways of thinking. He cracked down.
Much of the debate on homosexuality and women’s ordination became “secular” because discussion and theological exploration and exchange wasn’t permitted in church venues. It’s ironic the Vatican decries a secularization it helped to create!
The discussion of gay and lesbian issues in the Church has always been faith-based. Some Catholics hear “Church teaching” as the starting and ending point of this topic. Other groups of Catholics focus more on Jesus’ example of challenge to religious authorities.
I guess if I had five minutes with Pope Benedict, I would ask him–as a scholar–does he believe in the limit of knowledge? What is the relationship between faith and knowledge? And then, with my minute or two left, I would ask him–as a Catholic–does he believe the Holy Spirit works in the mystery of the human heart?
The upcoming papal visit will generate a lot of press coverage by TV, radio, newspapers and the internet. New Ways Ministry hopes to make a good use of this opportunity to help the pope and others in our church hear the voices of those who support lesbian/gay inclusion and equality.
On April 10, 2008, New Ways will host a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC featuring four prominent lesbian and gay Catholics speaking about their lives, loves and hopes for the Church.
Entitled “A Few Minutes with the Pope: Lesbian/Gay Catholics Speak About Their Church,” the press conference will feature four leaders in the worlds of social service, literature, politics and journalism.
Teresa DeCrescenzo, Executive Director of Gay Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS), Los Angeles; Gregory Maguire, author of more than a dozen novels, most notably Wicked, which was the basis of the Tony-award winning Broadway musical; Heather Mizeur, Delegate representing the 20th District in Maryland and a leader in the debate about legalizing same-sex marriage; and Richard Rodriguez, social and cultural commentator, author, and Peabody-award winning contributor to PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Michael Hampson, an Anglican priest for 13 years and now a full time writer and retreat leader, wrote and asked if CCLonline would like a review copy of his upcoming book, God Without God. I wrote back to him to say I would be delighted to review the book, and post the review in our May 2008 bookshelf. God Without God is published by O Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing of Hampshire, U.K.
I picked up my copy at the Greenport post office yesterday morning. I plan to take the book with me on my upcoming pilgrimage trip to Ireland. It was probably serendipity to receive the book now, as I head off in the footsteps of St. Patrick and St. Brigid.
Hampson descibes his book as “suprisingly conservative” in its affirmation of the entire Nicene Creed and serious approach to scripture and tradition; and yet the final chapter (”Home Life, Sex and Gender”) affirms the place of LGBTI people within the Christian community.
It appears Hampson also attempts to refute the God of atheists–the angry, invisible avenger–is not the God of people of true faith.
I welcome anyone else to read the book with me, and let’s exchange comments for the book review.
In the meantime, my thanks to Michael Hampson and Catherine Harris of O Books. I’ll do my best. 
