W@H: Hot Man-on-Man Action

Why do lovers choose others To mirror their pain Yeah, slow down stranger You know that you're in danger --Richard Ashcroft, "Why do Lovers?" We here at Accidental Historian like to mix things up every once in a while. As such, we're pleased to present a one act play in one part called "John Eldredge Makes Shit Up." CHARACTERS: John Eldredge Darrell, a man born with only half a brain Ralph, an innocent ficus plant SCENE: JOHN has a great idea. DARRELL, a ward of the state who works in JOHN'S office licking envelopes then stuffing them with live crickets, is the only one nearby for him to bounce it off. JOHN ELDREDGE: Darrell, come in here. DARRELL: (Looking around, confused) Who's Darrell? JE: You are. Come here. D: Okay, Mr. Patterson. JE: It's Eldredge. But whatever. I've got an idea and I want to know what you think of it. D: I only really know envelopes and cickets Mr. Patterson. JE: Yes. And you're doing a great job of...whatever it is you do. But so far you haven't cost me more than that tax write-off, so just keep doin' it. Anyway, here's my idea. You know how I spend a lot of time on the Father Wound, right? D: My father gave me a dollar and dropped me off at the bus stop. JE: Yes. I know. D: The next thing I knew I was here. And the man at the door said I couldn't leave. Ever. JE: Focus, Darrell. Anyway, here's my idea. I'll tell everyone that guys who are gay do it because they didn't get important affirmations from their fathers. And since they didn't get those affirmations from their fathers, they look to get them from other men. More specifically, other mens' penises. Y'know. Inside them. Like those videos my pastor keeps accidentally finding on the internet. D: (Thinks about the idea for about five seconds.) My friend Steve likes having sex with other men. He says it's because they're hot. He also says that he really likes the cock. But I don't know what that means. JE: (Leans forward, excited.) And I'll bet he has a terrible relationship with his father. D: (Shakes his head.) No. His dad's a great guy. He used to take us all for ice cream after our basketball games back in high school. And he calls Steve's boyfriend Adam, "The other son I never had." JE: Well obviously your friend Steve in in deep denial about his Father Wound. D: I don't think so, Mr. Patterson. JE: Get back to work, Darrell. DARRELL leaves. JOHN stares at his desk for a long time, a look of confusion on his face. Finally he looks up and sees RALPH, the ficus plant, in the corner. JE: You think it's a great idea, right? Ralph: (Talking, but JOHN can't hear him.) Oh, god. Why does he always drag me in to this? I knew I should have listened to Carson Daly when he was talking about that Karma thing... END SCENE Unfortunately for everyone involved, any discussion of Christianity and manhood eventually has to work its way around to that thorny issue of hot man-on-man action. I really don't feel like delving in to issues of why this is. Nor do I want to spend a lot of time discussing why so many Christians are freaked out by homosexuality. There are a lot of theories out there about the topic, ranging from an entire religious sect of closeted homosexuals to theories about how a guy who likes to take the traditional role granted women in sexual congress is a threat to their gender stratification scheme. The reason I don't want to spend a lot of time on the theories is simple. I'm almost 100% sure that most of the ones I've seen are wrong. See, they're generally presented by people who are completely outside the tradition and haven't spent a lot of time having honest discussions with people on the inside. So they make up motivations. This is, not surprisingly, very similar to the way people inside evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity have a bad habit of inventing motivations to explain why outsiders think the way they do. For the average believer the issue of homosexuality is a completely teleological argument. The Bible says (they say, since lots of things in fundagelical Christianity are covered by the blanket statement, "The Bible says") that god created man and woman to have sex with each other. You don't even need to go to the verse in Leviticus about men lying with other men or that place in the epistles where Paul puts butt sex on the same level as murdering and stealing to see the problem. Boys have tabs. Girls have slots. Tabs go in slots. It's all crystal clear. Men who like other men completely ruin that image. Women who like other women probably do, too, but let's face it, for as long as men have been able to conceive of the idea of two women in the same room together, they've pictured those two women ripping each others' clothes off and making with the intercourse. So as long as we've had a patriarchy, women who want to diddle other women have had a more or less free pass because it's hot and, quite frankly, men want to believe that a woman who has never once thought of another woman in a sexual light is actually constantly about ten seconds away from going down on every other woman in the room. It's a double standard, but dammit, it's a great double standard... Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Homosexuality is outside of "god's plan." Now, we all know that god's plan was screwed up by the whole eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil thing. Since then sin has been a conscious choice. Therefore, if a guy wants to sin by, um, engaging in sin with another guy, it has to have been his choice. This is what leads us to things like ex-gay ministries, wherein one can "pray the gay away" or whatever. That, by the way, is a part of a much larger misunderstanding of the sexuality of humans. Put a bunch of teenage boys in a room with a bunch of teenage girls and tell them to keep their thoughts pure, avoid masturbating, and not sneak off to feel each other up and try to get to third base. It ain't going to happen. We have libidos and biological clocks for a reason, and it's not so we can learn to have stronger prayer lives by asking god to help us keep our hands out of our pants. There's an associated phenomenon wherein it's apparently the boy's job to push the boundaries and the girl's job to say what is and isn't allowed. Because, you know, girls never actually want to have sex and have to be forced to do it by, um, apparently marrying them and making it part of the pre-nup. Now, I will fully admit that the different genders generally have completely different ideas about what sex is and/or should be. But that doesn't mean that both don't want sex. I, uh, I didn't learn that in church. And so but anyway:

What's fascinating to note is that homosexuals are actually more clear on this point. They know what is missing in their hearts is masculine love. The problem is that they've sexualized it. Joseph Nicolosi says that homosexuality is an attempt to repair the wound by filling it with masculinity, either the masculine love that was missing or the masculine strength many men feel they do not possess. It, too, is a vain search and that is why the overwhelming number of homosexual relationships do not last, why so many gay men move from one man to another and why so many of them suffer from depression and a host of other addictions. What they need can't be found there. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (94-95) [emphasis his, bold mine]

Now, leave aside the fact that a man with some sort of graduate level degree in psychology just called depression "an addiction." Actually. don't. Dwell on that for a moment. Let the unintended consequences of that construction of "depression and...other addictions" roll around in your mind for a moment. I'll wait. We're back? Good. Now, then, this is a perfect place for a little game I like to call "Damning Eldredge with his own words." For, you see, this sequence comes three pages after Eldredge uses Bly's imagery of the Golden-Haired Woman to explain why a man will fall in love with a woman across a room, reach her, realize she's normal, then fall in love with another woman in yet a different part of the room. I guess it's perfectly normal for a man to move from one relationship to another if it's always with women and not so much if he's doing the same thing with guys. Also, let's pretend for a moment that he actually has statistics to back up his "overwhelming number" of broken homosexual relationships. First of all, it's fascinating the way he apparently uses "gay men" and "all homosexual people" interchangeably. Either he doesn't realize that gay men and lesbians may well have different relationship dynamics (um, I developed this weird idea that it might actually be way easier to set up homosexual relationships. My theory is that men look for "man things" in relationships while women look for "woman things." So if you've got two women they're both looking for "woman things" whereas if you've got a man and a woman one is looking for "man things" and the other for "woman things." Bear in mind that it was early in the morning when I came up with this, I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and I never even bothered to suss out the difference between "man things" and "woman things." So, please, take it with a planet-sized grain of salt), or he's conveniently ignoring lesbian relationships in his wild theorizing. Either option works. Second, um, I have no statistics to back this up, save old re-runs of Seinfeld, but I'm pretty sure that an overwhelming number of ALL relationships end badly. That's why on the ninth day god invented gin and tonic and that dive bar down the street from the Garden. But, again, it's not worth mentioning that it happens to heterosexuals, too, if it can ruin your wild accusations and help maintain that general idea that homosexuality is a special variety of bad. Either way, the root of the problem evangelicals have with homosexuality isn't that they're some entirely closeted subculture. It's that they have to call homosexuality a sin. In calling it a sin they have to make it a choice. And in making it a sinful choice, they have to make sure everyone knows that it's fraught with pitfalls and will never bring satisfaction. This, in turn, requires a lot of time spent making shit up. I had a friend tell me once that he thought people went gay because they just really wanted sex and didn't care where it came from. I asked, "So why don't they have it with people of the opposite gender? Or animals?" That pretty much stopped him dead in his tracks. It created one of my many, many theories, too. Basically, if someone makes an argument against homosexuality that can be countered by asking why they don't just stay straight or asking why straight people do exactly the same thing, it's probably not a good argument. But I think I'll leave the final word here to Daniel Radosh, who ran in to a competing theory while at Cornerstone in the process of writing Rapture Ready! The theory in his case was that men turn to other men after they've been disrespected by a lot of women.

"A man's greatest need is to feel respected, and if a man doesn't feel respected he'll go anywhere." [said John Smid, the ex-gay speaker] My jaw dropped. This is what turns people gay? Because before I met my wife, I often felt disrespected by women, and it never occurred to me to remedy that by sucking cock. --Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready! (181) [emphasis his]

Ah, hell, I can't resist getting in the last word... If it's an issue of disrespect from women, someone needs to call those guys who are looking for dominatrixes* and tell them they're doing it wrong. And someone needs to call all the guys who are being disrespected by their boyfriends and tell them they'd better just give up. I mean, where do you go when neither gender respects you and that's the only reason that you could possibly have for being in a relationship? --------------------------- *And, yes, I know that should probably be "dominatrices." It looks weird, though.