My Teenage Dream of a Gay Apartment House in LA

When I was about 15, a neighbor went to Los Angeles on vacation, and she brought us back a copy of the LA Times as a souvenir. I thought that was a pretty cool gift since I had never been to a large city.

This was in the early ’80s. LGBTs were still deep in the closet. I had known I was gay for several years by this point, but I had never told anyone, and I had never met an out gay person. However, I was aware of gay ghettos in large metro areas like LA. I had recently seen American Gigolo, which had given me my first glimpse into a gay bar. I knew the film was set in and around Los Angeles, so I scoured that paper looking for any telltale signs of gay life in the city.

I found what I was looking for in the classifieds. It was an ad for an apartment. The special thing about this apartment was that it was for a gay man or a gay couple. All the apartments in the building were for gay guys. Wow!

This set my imagination on fire, and I could feel the hope swelling inside me. Imagine an entire apartment building filled with gay men! I was sure they’d all look like Richard Gere or the cute blond boy. (If you remember the film, you know who I’m talking about.) I immediately started dreaming of moving to LA and living in such an apartment building. I was sure we’d all be the best of buddies and hot, friendly sex would always be available. It would be like heaven.

Sincerely Bigoted

I grew up among Christian fundamentalists, and they seemed to think all kinds of things were sinful—gambling, drinking, extra and premarital sex, short skirts, tight pants, cussing… But they weren’t really sticklers about much of it. They thought working on a Sunday was sinful, but they didn’t refrain from buying stuff on Sundays, and if you had a job that required you to work on Sunday, they’d say that God will understand. They didn’t try to force stores to stop selling beer. They didn’t shun family and friends who drank. They thought smoking was sinful. My parents thought smoking was sinful, and yet they both smoked. My parents and my aunt and uncle smoked right in front of my grandmother who was the most pious member of the family. They even smoked in her house.

Harsh condemnation was usually reserved for people they didn’t like—uppity blacks, trashy whites, slutty women, rebellious teenagers and queers. Nearly everyone else was given some slack. The fundamentalists of southern West Virginia regularly used their religion to justify their prejudices.

That’s why I have little patience with the idea that those who judge and want the legal right to discriminate against LGBTs today are just doing what they think is right. I’ve seen this kind of thing before many times, and in my opinion, it has little to do with “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Republican Jesus: A New Religion?

I’ve been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. It’s a fascinating book. I love it. Harari argues that the thing that gave sapiens an advantage over other animals and other human species was something he calls a “cognitive revolution.” (Not to be confused with a development in the study of psychology.)

According to Harari, sapiens are able to organize themselves in huge groups consisting of thousands and even millions of individuals because of their ability to accept mutually agreed upon constructs, or fictions as he calls them, that are not part of the physical world. Constructs such as nations, borders and money.

The interesting thing about these constructs is that they can vary from group to group, and humans are capable of adapting to rapid changes in these group constructs. Thus indicating the ability to understand and accept these constructs might be in our nature, but the individual constructs are contrived by individual groups. (There goes the concept of natural law.) That’s why the French could go from believing in the divine right of kings to the idea that sovereignty rests in the people almost overnight. Religion has played a significant role in helping form cultures and group identity and shared beliefs, and Harari claims that the belief in capitalism and corporations works in much the same way.
 
That made me think of the Republican Jesus. What if Republican Jesus is actually a completely new religion with the façade of classic Christianity but with capitalism at its core? Something like that has happened before with the Santeria religion, the Caribbean religion that is outwardly Catholic with a West African mythology.

Natural Law

I took a couple of ethics classes in college, but natural law was only given a cursory review, so I only had a limited understanding of the concept. I’ve always wanted to know more about it, so while doing my walking this week, I decided to listen to a lecture series on natural law taught by Father Joseph Koterski, S.J., a Jesuit priest and associate professor of philosophy at Fordham University.

Natural law starts with the presumption that there is a higher law than the written, legislative laws of a particular state and the customs and mores of a society. Father Koterski gives us three examples to help us understand. The play Antigone by Sophocles (441 BCE) tells the story of a woman who gives her brother a proper burial after the ruler of Thebes decrees that he is not to be honored with a burial. Antigone claims this simply isn’t right, and Creon, the ruler, is being unjust despite the fact that he is the authentic leader and lawgiver of the city. The Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity at Nuremburg because none of the laws of the Allied nations applied since the Nazis operated outside of their jurisdiction, and the Nazis were careful to create a legal framework for their aims inside of Germany. Martin Luther King said segregation violated a higher law.

Natural law theory starts with Aristotle. Aristotle believed that things have a basic nature that exists in nascent form from the very beginning, and this nature is driving toward a particular goal or telos. The essence of an oak tree exists in the acorn, and it is the telos of an acorn to become an oak tree. Beings have an instinctive, intrinsic understanding of this telos, but it takes discipline to achieve this goal smartly and efficiently.

Natural law also draws on the Stoics who believed in living in harmony with nature and stressed balance.

Natural law didn’t take off within Christianity until Thomas Aquinas advocated the idea in the 13^th century. Before then, church leaders were skeptical of the ability of humans to figure out right and wrong on their own because of the concept of original sin, especially as espoused by Augustine in the 4^th century. Augustine believed that human nature was fundamentally flawed and fallen due to Adam’s original sin. To be moral in the early church was to be obedient to revealed law. Aquinas focused on another part of the Adam and Eve story, the part about how human beings were made in the image of God. He concluded that our powers of reason were unique and God-like, and our reason was restored to a large degree through grace after accepting Jesus through faith. Aquinas didn’t dismiss Augustine’s views, but he wasn’t so pessimistic about the abilities of the faithful.

From there you get Christians insisting that they know the nature of things and their telos by way of their God-like reasoning, and anyone who doesn’t agree is unfaithful, sinful and confused about reality.

It’s assumed that the nature of human beings is to propagate the species by marrying and rising children in stable homes. Any attempt to thwart reproduction is supposedly a violation of this telos. Every embryo is a human in acorn form, and to thwart it or view it in any other way is a violation of its telos. Every human being must be allowed to live out their natural life, and no one can participate in euthanasia with or without the patient’s consent because that’s a violation of our telos, our goal, of our natural law. Men and women are given specific roles to play in the process of continuing our species. It’s all black and white. No grey. To act outside of these roles is to violate natural law. If you disagree, then your God-like reasoning process is messed up do to your obvious faithlessness and sinfulness.

All of this reminded me of the time Rick Santorum insisted that marriage equality is wrong because people of the same sex getting married simply isn’t marriage. He pointed to a glass of water and said it was a glass of water no matter if you insisted it was something else. In his mind, he knew the truth because he had been taught he was looking at the world with God-like reason and those who disagreed with him were messed up in some way.

LGBT people know what it’s like to live outside of the laws and customs of their society. They know what it’s like to rely on and believe in truth that supersedes common beliefs, but that’s because we know what it’s like to be LGBT, and we know from first hand experience that the laws and customs against us are based on false assumptions and assertions.

Many believe in God, but it’s not a forgone conclusion that God is real. And even if you do have faith, I think it’s extremely arrogant to assume your powers of reason are God-like. Humans make stupid mistakes with great regularity, and they often have a hard time figuring out the most basic concepts. Is that really God-like reasoning in play? If so, God help us. And even if something has an intrinsic nature, how arrogant to assume you know that nature so clearly.

I think if you want to understand human nature better, you might pay more attention to biology and psychology. (Well, to be fair, Father Koterski did refer to an expert on psychology to justify his natural law assumptions about sexuality and gender. He spoke of Freud. Never mind that Freud formulated his ideas without the benefit of scholarly research and that his views are now widely thought of as outdated and false.) I think human experience and science indicates sex and gender are not black and white, and sexuality isn’t merely a matter of reproduction. And I don’t think it takes a genus to figure out that if we really are interested in the survival of our species, it’s probably not a good idea to overpopulate the earth.

I don’t pretend to know with absolute assurance what is right and wrong, and I don’t work from a systematic understanding of ethics. I’m flying by the seat of my pants. I am glad to have a better understanding of natural law, but I don’t think much of it or those who use it in an attempt to give legitimacy to their claims about morality.

Realistic Goals

This past week while doing my daily walks, I listened to lecture series on cognitive behavior therapy taught by Jason M. Satterfield, Ph.D., Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Cognitive behavior therapy is not the type of therapy I had in my youth, so I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but now I have a clearer picture of it. So that’s good.

CBT is symptom based and generally short term. There’s this thing called the CBT triangle that’s examined in therapy, and the three points are behavior, cognition and emotions and how those things influence and connect to one another. People have little control of their emotions, so the therapist tries to help you focus on thoughts and behaviors that are driving those emotions. Thoughts are either helpful or hurtful, so the therapist attempts to assist you supplant hurtful thoughts with positive ones. There are other methods used to assist you like meditation and visualization. It’s a very practical approach, and the therapist encourages you to set realistic goals. In other words, Satterfield doesn’t promise you a rose garden.

Unlike a quack you might see on the Oprah Show who insists that if you buy his book, your life will be nothing but sunshine and daisies from here on out, Satterfield gives some stone cold facts about human behavior. He’s a scientist, and what he’s offering is science based, so he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It was a bit of a downer hearing all of that. Addicts are apt to fall off the wagon. Those who have experienced a depressive episode are more likely to experience another, and after two, your changes of having a third increase even more. It keeps going like that until a future episode is almost a sure thing. Those who experience social anxiety are likely to never be the life of the party. And those who want to lose weight might lose a few pounds but then gain it back within a year.

According to Satterfield, nearly 70% of adults in the U.S. are overweight, and about half of those are obese. That statistic is way up sense the ’60s and early ’70s. Something is happening in society at large, so it’s not merely a matter of a lack of will power. And this phenomenon is not confined to the U.S. Satterfield claims it is expected that nearly 60% of the world’s population will be overweight by 2030. Maybe humans simply aren’t designed to deal with an abundance of food. On the bright side, it’s better to have overweight people than starving people.

A few years ago, I discovered William Gedney’s Appalachian poverty photos from the ’60s. They resonated with me because they reminded me of my early childhood. The people in the photos were often very thin. But that’s not because they had better eating habits back then. They couldn’t afford to buy enough food.

Satterfield recommends that you look at things in a more sensible way. Practicality is a big part of CBT. People often make themselves miserable by expecting too much of themselves and others. If you’re overweight, you might not ever look like a fashion model or the personal trainer at the gym. But you can lose a few pounds, increase your fitness level, and prevent yourself from gaining any more weight. If you have serious social anxiety, that might always be with you, but you might be able to make a few friends and establish a strong social network. If you’re prone to depression, you can learn to weather the storms a little better. Perfection isn’t the goal. Doing reasonably better is the thing to aim for.

May you have freedom. May you have peace. May you have grace and courage.

The Angry Heavenly Overseer

If there is a god, I don’t think this god expects, wants or demands worship, sacrifices or adherence to any rules. I think religion is for human beings, not a god.

I think when early humans developed a larger brain, they began to contemplate the mystery of life, and they sensed their environment was infused with spirit. Maybe they were right and there was some unseen force in the world, or maybe that sensation and belief was something their imagination imposed on reality as a kind of quirk of the human mind.

When the Neolithic Revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago, human beings began to raise crops and livestock. This meant that human beings were now fixed to one spot. They couldn’t easily pick up and move on if conditions were unfavorable where they were at. They became dependent on the right weather conditions. This caused them to look at the skies and notice seasons and patterns in weather. And I think this is when human beings began to think that God (or gods or a spiritual force) was not part of nature but over and above it, and when things weren’t going right, that meant that God was angry. I think that led to the idea that worship, sacrifice and following certain rules and rituals would satisfy the heavenly overseer and they would be blessed with the right amount of rain and sunshine and safety from invading neighbors.

Reading Between the Lines

Recently, I listened to a lecture series about the origins of religion from an archeological perspective taught by Professor John Hale. It was 36 lectures long, but even Professor Hale admits that was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Interestingly, there is evidence that even the Neanderthals ritualized the burial of their dead. They laid their dead to rest in caves. Then we get those early prehistoric cave paintings. Throughout the ages and across many cultures, caves, both natural and artificial, have been used as sacred spaces. Even churches and cathedrals can be dark and cave-like. The cave is all about the womb and Earth Mother and the mysterious forces of birth and creativity. Animism was also quite common in these early hunting and gathering cultures. Everything had spirit. Everything was sacred.

Then something happened about 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution. When human beings gradually transitioned from hunting and gathering societies to agriculture based societies, they began to focus on the sky, toward the sun, seasons and weather. Of course, that makes sense because they were much more dependent on the seasons and weather now that they were fixed to one location. They couldn’t just pick up and move. They needed conditions to be right where they were. Their lives depended on it.

I think this is were you get the idea of a moody god that needs to be appeased with worship and sacrifices. Sacrificial religious activities spread everywhere. They were very common. They were common in the ancient Mediterranean world and the Middle East. It’s no wonder that this idea was so strong with the ancient Jews. That’s what the Temple in Jerusalem was all about. Many Jews went to Jerusalem during Passover so they could have a priest sacrifice their lamb in the Temple.

With the advent of agriculture, you gradually get civilization, greater specialization, and private property, wealth and status. Some have more money, land and status, and this leads to political and military power.

I think apocalypticism and Jesus’ message is a reaction to the inherent injustice of a stratified society, and specifically to Roman occupation and elite Jewish authorities in control of the Temple who capitulated to Rome. I think Jesus imagined a more just, equitable and compassionate society, and I think he was killed because he challenged the status quo. I think it was only after he was killed that some of his followers superimposed this sacrificial scheme onto his message as a way of making sense of his death and continuing the message. Sacrifice was already a deeply entrenched idea in the culture.

Can I prove this? No, I can’t. Admittedly, I’m reading between the lines (with the help of several Biblical scholars). But there isn’t any actual proof that Jesus died for our sins either.