BABY, LET’S TWIST AGAIN, LIKE WE DID LAST SUMMER: My post (“Playground Twist“) on how societal response to homosexuality shapes our identities got a lot of really illuminating, personal, intense responses. I’d really like to thank everyone who wrote to me, and apologize for not replying sooner. I didn’t write back to people in anything remotely resembling a timely fashion. But I really, really appreciated every email I got.

Here’s a selection from the emails I received.

Anonyreader #1: Interesting post. Point number 2 is pretty spot on. Point number 1 differed from my experience a bit (though I believe I came out at a considerably older age than you–I was 33). Hardening of identity–probably–but it might be likened more to “siege mentality”–a very real sense that I and people like me were under attack (whether sexually active or not) and that the gay community was a vehicle to do something about it.

In the past week I have discovered yet another grand unifying theory of the sort I discover about once a month. The stereotypical gay activist appears to lump gay identity, homosexual orientation and homosex into one sort of all-or-nothing package. To have an objection to any of it is to be hateful to the entire person. Then there are the (I’ll call them) anti-gay Catholic conservative people who try to explain the distinction the Church draws between homosex (deemed immoral) and homosexual persons (fundamentally good–but possessing an objective disorder). This just explains the relationship to the homosexual person.

Both of these positions ignore one thing–the culture. I think it is fair to say that in addition to wanting homosexual individuals to live chaste lives, the Church also wants the culture to teach chastity and the ways in which the culture teaches chastity are far from precise and often quite cruel. The playground incidents you describe are just a small subset of how I’m convinced the culture used to convey disapproval of homosex–by heaping stigma on the gay person. In other words, you avoided looking for gay sex because, well, someone might get the impression that you ARE a homosexual.

While I have read, and believe I know pretty well, what the Church teaches about the dignity of the homosexual person, I do see them supporting cultural conventions that try (granted without too much success lately) to keep homosexual persons from being able to identify each other (potential partners) by encouraging them to remain silent about their orientation (which is accomplished by stigmatizing the orientation). This is what makes “love the sinner hate the sin” and “all God wants you to do in this area is avoid sodomy,” which does describe the Church attitude toward the homosexual individual, ring pretty false.

A possibly-anonyreader writes: There is some truth to your first observation. You second observation is, at best, a half truth. The most telling omission is that you neglected a sense of group identity formed by common oppression. A grown up gay man who hears some kid being called “faggot” is justifiably outraged because he knows precisely how that feels.

The problem with “Courage” is that it sweeps the last point under the rug, and that’s not acceptable or forgivable. It’s the reason so many gay-identified people hate Courage.

Elizabeth says some stuff that rings really true to me, and that does not exactly speak well for the Church’s response to contemporary culture: I’ve formed this from what I’ve heard some Christians say about homosexuality and people with SSA. They often talk as though homosexuality is the “unforgivable sin.” Non-Catholic types seem to do this more as they don’t seem to distinguish between the disorder and the person; just to be homosexual is sinful even if one is chaste.

So my theory goes like this: Homosexuality affects a minority of the population so most Christians do not live with this temptation to sin. And while they may be tempted to pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, porn etc. they are not tempted by a person of the same sex. Plus, they can reason it’s normal to be attracted to a person of the opposite sex, so it’s normal to have sex with them. And, homosexuality is never normal, even if one is not sexually active. Main point: It’s one sin they are almost guaranteed not to commit.

Now if some do happen to be living with some degree of SSA but believe that if anyone found out that they will be ostracized and condemned they may not act on it. They may be even more strident than others to deflect suspision. Once again, it’s a sin they are almost guaranteed not to commit. The cost would be to great.

I know I made some generalizations here; I hope they are not too sweeping.

Anonyreader the third: So I read the above-named post. It’s on-target. The particular stigma attached to homosexual attractions doesn’t just harden one’s identity. It creates an unhealthy disconnect between one’s inner and outer self. By this I mean not just being in the closet, but having as a result such a stark divide between inner actions and outer actions that one might view the former as existing in a sealed container. If one can help it, they do not affect one’s outer actions, so one is tempted to believe that they don’t matter.

And if the shame doesn’t harden one’s self-identity enough, the mantra to the effect that a gay leopard can’t change his spots will–even less motivation to guide one’s internal currents. I’d call it textbook vice, but this particular example doesn’t appear in the textbooks. (For the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many, etc.)

And your comment about loving care being woven into the fabric of a sinful relationship (or vice versa)? So very Brideshead–Charles and Sebastian, Charles and Julia, Julia and Rex, Lord Marchmain and Cara. There’s a reason (among many) why it’s my favorite novel.

Joe Perez responds here. I think this is condescending (I mean, Joe couldn’t know this, but I did co-found my high school’s gay-straight alliance, this is stuff I’ve had to wrestle with practically since I could read, I really am neither new to this stuff nor unwilling to put myself on the line) but it is nonetheless worth reading. I find it thoroughly bizarre that he writes, “I can honestly say that, by and large, the possibility has never seriously occurred to me that my sexual instincts, attractions, and desires could possibly be as disordered, evil, sinful, or disgusting as so much of the world around me preached.” I mean, I can’t think of anything I believe that I have never doubted, except for stuff that nobody in this society tries to make you doubt, like “genocide is wrong.” I can think of things I’ve never actually changed my mind about (the political examples are capital punishment and the drug war), but really, the fact that I desire something tends to make it more suspect for me, not less. Yet I do realize that neither attitude (“I will do what comes naturally” or “I will do what I hate in order to assert my willpower over my inclinations”) is an especially good guide to truth.

Anonyreader #4: Some unconnected points on the question you posed about why homosexual temptation get treated as unique (it’s long, and the most important part is at the end if you want to skip):

(1) I think sex (as opposed to gender) has often, maybe always, been a centrally important way for , especially for women, but for men too. With saints, you have martyrs and virgin martyrs, who get their own category. When two close friends of mine in college met as freshmen roommates at Harvard, on the first night after the lights went out, one asked the other what she most felt she needed to know about this stranger she’d be sharing space with: “Are you a virgin?” Virginity is its own complicated issue, but I think it points to people’s tendency to self-define and define others through sex. And on the other side of the Madonna-whore dichotomy, ‘slut’ is probably the schoolyard label most stigmatized after ‘gay,’ and sometimes has equally little to do with whether someone’s actually had any sex–the class ‘slut’ can be someone who’s pretty or develops early or talks to boys. I do realize this label is different from ‘gay’ in that it doesn’t deal with someone’s besetting temptation, though.

(2) I think that in parts of Evangelical America, same-sex attraction has become the scapegoat that people look at when they don’t want to think about there own sex lives. This goes both for things people might not think of as sexual sins at all and those they do think are sinful but don’t see as self-defining. Yes, it’s simplistic to accuse people of saying, “Sure, I have sex outside marriage/have been divorced and remarried three times/use abortifacient contraception/watch a lot of porn, but I’m not like those homosexuals,” but I think there’s a grain of truth to it.

(4) Which came first, viewing same-sex attraction as a unique and defining temptation or insistence by gays that being gay was a central aspect of identity, like being black or female? Maybe there’s a historical answer to this, or maybe it’s a chicken/egg problem–I don’t know.

(4) Getting more personal: when I was thirteen I considered the fact that I was odd, thought girls were pretty, and found boys my age annoying, and became afraid that I was gay. For about six months I was secretly full of angst and fear like I’ve never known about anything else, and I think the why of it is interesting. My parents are not Christian, are in fact very much opposed to organized religion in general, and I’d never thought of the belief that homosexuality was a sin as anything other than superstition. I knew gays were stigmatized, but considered that stigma a bad and stupid thing, like racism. Still, I wasn’t thrilled about acquiring a stigma I’d never grow out of (unlike ‘nerd’), but that wasn’t the thing that scared me most. What scared me most was the thought that I could never get married and have kids. Which was weird, because (a) I had never before been aware of wanting to such a thing, and (b) this was 1995, and I read a lot of TIME magazine, so I must have known that there were gay people who had partners or even kids, but that never struck me as a future life that was even within the realm of possibility for me. In a culture with almost no positive ways of thinking about celibacy that (especially in ’95) hadn’t really absorbed the idea of gay marriage, what gay really meant to thirteen-year-old me was isolated, lonely, without family. Which may have been why I started thinking I was gay in the first place, because I was already isolated in the way only over-intellectualized middle-schoolers can be. And I think that idea–that gay means isolated, cut off the deep ties of marriage and family–may help explain both why same-sex attraction gets treated so differently from other temptations and why supporters of SSM see it as a basic human right.