Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods
By Ronald E. Long
Harrington Park Press, 178 pages, pb, $16.95

Ron Long is a teacher of religion at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He’s an active member of the Steering Committee of the Gay Men’s Issues in Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion.

In Men, Homosexuality, and the Gods: An Exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective, he’s written an interesting and readable book that surveys variations in the way religion has treated homosexuality through the years. He deals with a rich (though, he acknowledges, intentionally not exhaustive) variety of traditions: primitive Papua New Guinean, ancient Taoist Chinese, Classical Greek, Islamic Sufi, Biblical era Hebrew, Early Christian, Native American, Buddhist, down to modern gay political and cultural movements, including antidiscrimination laws, gays in the military, and gay marriage.

The book is full of delightful tidbits about homosexual behaviors throughout human history. Some of these discussions are familiar, like Plato’s report of Aristophanes’ story of the original androgynes or the exegesis of the Bible passages about male to male intercourse. But some are relatively new to the discussion, like the Sufi spiritual practice of gazing at the beauty of young men to see God and the Buddhist quest for loss of self-consciousness in sexual ecstasy as an experience of emptiness and mutual co-arising.

The interesting and curious aspect of the analysis is its concern with the mechanics of male-male sex. Long says, “Simply put, the thesis of this book is that religious evaluations of homosexual love and sex depend upon the way male ‘bottoming’ is construed—as does the resistance to male homosexuality in the contemporary period.” He argues that “the revolutionary importance of the contemporary gay rights movement lies in its—by no means clearly articulated as yet—revolutionary idea of gender, that male sexual receptivity is part of the repertoire of a normal, adult, fully masculine male.”

The rather lyrical and touching conclusion of the book is that what homosexuality challenges is the notion that sex is about penetrating other bodies, doing something to someone else who has been rendered passive, that is, that it’s a kind of war. The male homosexual movement, by insisting on the masculinity of the penetrated party, the bottom, Long says, is a movement for the spiritual liberation of all men. Getting over the fear of homosexuality and passivity would allow all men to discover they can be lovers as well as soldiers. Indeed, that they can stop seeing sex as war and war as sexy.

Long has interesting takes on some of the familiar history. He offers insights and explanations that are sometimes surprisingly new and particularly incisive. You’ll be glad you read this book. It will expand your understanding of things you’ve heard before.

The book is clearly written for an audience unfamiliar with these gay religious issues, i.e., the author’s students at Hunter College. What that means is that it seems to appear totally out of context and relatively unaware of the gay spirituality movement or the conventions of gay cultural conversation: Long uses the word “homophile,” for instance, as though it were a serviceable synonym for homosexual, rather than a slightly antiquated term that now defines an era in early gay organizing. “Homophile,” the term embraced by the pre-gay liberation activists of the Mattachine Society days, is not quite as out-of-date as that embraced by the mid-19th century Europeans, “Uranians,” but it comes across glaring every time.

This seeming unawareness of the contemporary movement shows up in the absence of any recognition of Gay religion outside the academy (by which I mean the “university environment,” but maybe also the American Academy of Religion made up of university professors). There’s no acknowledgement of Mark Thompson or Christian de la Huerta (or Toby Johnson, for that matter), no reference to Harry Hay or Joseph Kramer or the Radical Faeries, not even Troy Perry and the MCC. I have to admit I was disappointed to see that a “synthesis” of Gay spirituality and religion wouldn’t even recognize what I think of—and write about—as the “Gay men’s spirituality movement.” College professors talking to college professors without ever observing the real world! I think that examining the ideas about the nature and transformation of religion implied by Gay spirituality is much more interesting and fruitful than rehashing all that stuff about the Bible. (Aren’t we done with that yet? It’s time to stop caring what desert nomads were spooked by five thousand years ago.)

By coincidence, just as I was finishing the book, there was a convention of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio. I was invited by Mark Jordan to attend a reception for the Gay caucus. I learned that the night before Ron Long and another member of the caucus had been invited to participate in a roundtable discussion of Gay marriage and had been ambushed by the Fundamentalists on the other side. Long had presented a well-reasoned and Biblically-based discussion regarding Gay marriage. But it wasn’t a roundtable of honored equals; the Gay speakers had been invited to be excoriated, condemned, told they were going to hell, and made fools of by the other side.

So while I want to complain that Ron Long’s book doesn’t recognize my and my peers’ contributions to his discussion of the meaning of Gay spirituality, I want also to honor him and his peers in the Academy of Religion. These men are doing difficult work; they are contending with powerful forces and people who really do think those desert nomads’ opinions matter and should be enforced by law on the rest of us; these Gay religion professors are putting themselves, literally, in harms’ way for the sake of protecting all us homosexuals from misguided religion. Ron Long and his fellow professors are truly saints.

There’s much to learn in this book. The discussion about tops and bottoms alone is worth the reading. I wonder if the book might bring the word “homophile” back into use.