Tag: Sex Positive

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An Interview With “Hidden Mercy” Author Michael O’Loughlin

By Andru Zodrow

On Nov. 12, The Spectator had the privilege of conducting a phone interview with Michael O’Loughlin, a national correspondent at America Magazine. As a gay Catholic journalist, he has spent the past several years exploring the intersection between these identities. His new book, “Hidden Mercy,” uncovers the response of the Catholic church to the AIDS crisis, including the inspiring acts of priests, nuns and laypeople who ministered to and assisted young gay men that were marginalized in the church and larger society during the turbulent 1980s and ’90s.

Just three days after that interview in which O’Loughlin shared his thoughts about LGBTQ+ issues in the church, he published a guest column in the New York Times sharing that the Holy Father himself had congratulated him on his new book. Pope Francis reflected upon the importance of accompanying the marginalized, and thanked O’Loughlin for his work.

“Thank you for shining a light on the lives and bearing witness to the many priests, religious sisters and lay people, who opted to accompany, support and help their brothers and sisters who were sick from HIV and AIDS at great risk to their profession and reputation,” Pope Francis wrote.

Given that the book merited the praise of the Vicar of Christ, “Hidden Mercy,” is a must-read for anyone interested in LGBTQ+ issues, the Catholic church or both. Here is a lightly edited transcript of The Spectator’s interview with O’Loughlin.

AZ: Could you explain your initial inspiration for writing this book? 

MO: I’ve been reporting on the Catholic Church for about a decade now, and a lot of my reporting was focused on LGBTQ+ issues. Partly because the debate about same-sex marriage was heating up when I started reporting, but a big part was because I’m a gay Catholic myself, and I was just really curious what church leaders were doing in this area, and how other gay Catholics felt about whether they were welcomed in the church or were finding a place in the Church.

It felt new, and like I was the only person who had done this because I didn’t have any understanding of the history of the fight for gay rights in the Church, and I wanted to fix that.

I was trying to just look at this time in the 1980s and ’90s, because there was this big clash between the LGBTQ+ community and the Catholic Church, at a time when HIV and AIDS was really taking a toll on the gay community. I hadn’t known that history. So I started reaching out to people who lived or worked through that time to just ask them, ‘what was it like back then, what was it like to be a gay Catholic faced with the brutality of HIV and AIDS, but also dedicated to your Church, which is fighting against gay rights,’ or ‘what was it like to be a priest ministering to people with AIDS?’ I was learning a lot of this history and realized that there was this whole generations-worth of wisdom that had been cut off for me, so my goal was to capture some of the stories and then present them in a way that might benefit other people as well.

AZ: You managed to compile all of this reporting several decades after the crisis itself. Can you explain what kind of challenges reporting on a decades-old event posed for you as a writer? 

MO: That’s a great question. One of the decisions I made early on in the project was, I wanted to include interviews and meet with people who are still alive. So, unfortunately with HIV and AIDS, that cut out almost an entire generation of gay men, because they just simply didn’t survive. We’ve lost all of that wisdom unless their story has been told in other ways. It’s a limited set of experiences, but important nonetheless. I did go into some history, I used a lot of newspaper archives, and there was some great documentary material, audio, news reports—things like that, but ultimately, I decided, the most fruitful endeavor would be to talk to people who are still living.

AZ: In the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” or the ‘Halloween Letter,’ which was indirectly aimed at groups like Dignity, Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) stated that homosexuality is “a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil.” Do you think that this is still the way the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith thanks about homosexuality today?

MO: I can’t speak for what any Vatican official or the Congregation thinks, but I think there is a sort of implicit homophobia that permeates a lot of discussion in the church around this issue. Some people would prefer that we just don’t talk about it because it is still taboo, both here in the U.S., and especially around the world where the Church is growing.

I think there’s a fear that if we talk about this too much, who knows where it will lead, and I think that’s what’s been so refreshing about Pope Francis—he’s actually encouraged us to talk about this issue, dating back to the earliest days of his pontificate, but also, especially during the Synod of Bishops on the family in 2014-2015. The Pope is simply saying, ‘don’t be afraid of this,’ he hasn’t changed church teaching, but he says ‘let’s listen to people’s lived experiences and see what their stories have to teach us about our faith.’

AZ: There’s a point in the book in which Fr. Bill McNichols says “the church will come around when it discovers that there are gay people who have lived full Christian lives and faced death with courage.” What work do we as Catholics need to be doing now to realize this reality in the future? 

MO: I think being intentional about collecting stories while people are still with us because we’re more than three decades out from the crisis now, and if you were in your ’30s or ’40s, you’re getting up in age now. I think part of my project has been preserving these stories. Let’s make sure that they are part of history, because I think there’s still a fairly un-nuanced understanding of this time, especially when it comes to the Catholic Church.

Collect these stories by forming intergenerational friendships: younger people being intentional about reaching out to older people and asking about their experiences. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard from either listeners of the Plague Podcast or people who have read early copies of the book, who have said that they haven’t been asked about their experiences in decades. These were harrowing, difficult times for people and to just see society move on so quickly, I imagine, could be difficult. I think Catholics should be intentional about not being afraid of what they might uncover when looking at this time in history, because there was a lot of shame and stigma, but [we should] be unafraid to deal with that, because there are inspiring stories like the ones I’ve collected in the book.

AZ: Why was Cardinal O’Connor on the Presidential AIDS Commission? 

MO: There was a sense that the Reagan Administration didn’t want to deal with this issue because their base found the topics of homosexuality, IV drug use and the sexual revolution to be morally taboo, and they didn’t want to talk about it.

Now, the public health angle was, ‘we have to talk about how slow the spread of HIV,’ whether that’s the use of condoms or drug treatment programs, and Reagan was trying to appease his base by appointing a religious figure to the AIDS Commission to say that ‘the moral dimension of this public health crisis will be taken seriously in the White House.’

O’Connor himself was skeptical of the idea, but he accepted the invitation after a couple meetings. But ultimately it didn’t satisfy critics who said that the White House failed to treat this as a public health crisis, and you can’t attach morality to those kinds of things, so it was a complicated thing. It does show the political power that someone like Cardinal O’Connor has. I think it’s difficult for younger Catholics today to understand the political influence of Catholic bishops in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and O’Connor’s inclusion on that commission shows that he had a direct line to the president, and that’s important to understand when we look at the church’s role in shaping the public health debate in the ’80s and ’90s.

AZ: Do you think that the Church has grown better at listening since the AIDS crisis?

MO: I asked Father Bill McNichols if he thought it was easier to be a gay Catholic or a gay Catholic priest today because of how much society has advanced, and he told me he didn’t. He thought it was actually easier in the ’80s because there was almost more of a willingness to look at people’s experiences, whereas today there seems to be more fear around the issue, so I think I agree with him on that.

I think figures like Pope Francis certainly show that there are church leaders who want to engage in dialogue and listening, and that’s been a major theme of his papacy, but I think there might be a tendency to be afraid as society changes its views on homosexuality. I think we see a lot of that in the Church in this country.

AZ: A major study of American Catholic priests was released just last week, and some information I found dismaying was that American priests ordained after 2010 are far more likely to believe that homosexual behavior is “always sinful,” compared to priests ordained prior to 1981. It seems the clergy is growing less tolerant while society becomes more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. Do you think this will impact the relationship of the church with LGBTQ+ Catholics in the coming years and, if so, how? 

MO: I think data like that shows how important it is that LGBTQ+ Catholics who want to stay part of the church make that decision and then stay, and make sure that their voices are heard, because something I’ve learned is that any welcoming Catholic space—any place which embraces and welcomes LGBTQ+ people—it was never inevitable. We look at places like Most Holy Redeemer in San Francisco, or St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, or affirming parishes anywhere in the U.S., it was never inevitable that would be the case. It took hard work from LGBTQ+ Catholics and their allies to form those places into spaces that were safe and welcoming. Regardless of the views of young priests, I think that will be necessary work over the coming decades. But I am encouraged that there are visible and articulate young LGBTQ+ Catholics who are saying that they aren’t leaving, that they are staying in the Church, and these are the kind of spaces they are demanding. I think it’ll be an ongoing conversation for decades, regardless of the views of younger clergy.

AZ: What does making your voice heard as a gay Catholic look like today? 

MO: That’s a great question, and one I haven’t thought about much. I guess for me, it’s been this notion of forging ahead with these projects, even if sometimes there’s some pushback that we shouldn’t explore too much of this history, because there is some shame and stigma still attached. I think it means going to mass and being part of the community, not being afraid of the resistance you might encounter. I understand that for some LGBTQ+ people, being part of a Catholic community might not be a healthy decision, especially if there’s one that’s particularly intolerant, but if you are called to take your faith seriously and you’re able to find a community that works for you, I think showing up is the first important step. Being visible, joining parish activities, engaging Catholic media—all the things that other Catholics are doing, who are making their view known, I think younger LGBTQ+ people have the same calling.

AZ: Did writing this book change the way you approach your own faith at all? 

MO: It did. When I started writing probably five years ago or so, I had an initial conversation with Sister Carol, and I was afraid to tell her that I was gay because I didn’t know how she would react, which in introspect, is completely absurd because she had been caring for gay men dying from AIDS for more than a decade, and she’d become an ally for the LGBTQ+ community. But there was still something internal within me that made me clam up and be unsure about how much of myself I should reveal to her. After meeting people like Sister Carol and other advocates now for the past five years, doing dozens and dozens of interviews, I really internalized this idea that I can be honest about myself and be totally committed to my faith at the same time and that’s been a journey. I don’t think it ever goes away. Father Bill told me that it doesn’t get easier to come out, it just means you have to keep doing it and doing it, and eventually you come out, but you still have that fear, so I do think it will be an ongoing process. But there is this sense that knowing the history that I write about in the book does give me—and I think it gives other people—the ability to see that they do have a place in the church and to make them understand their faith in a different way.

AZ: The theme of frustration or hurt with the institutional Church seems to have emerged over the course of the book. Did you notice any patterns of how priests and nuns and laypeople were dealing with that frustration, or is it an individual journey for everyone? 

MO: What I took away was that it was an individual journey for everyone. What I tried to do in the book was profile people who approach that journey in a different way or in various ways, so there’s someone like David Pais, who I chronicle throughout the book, who was very active in the church, very active in Dignity, ultimately steps away from the Church, is away for several years, then he gets a degree in theology and he returns to the Church. It sort of has this stepping in and out, which I think is a fairly common thing for not just LGBTQ+ people but young people in general, and then as they advance in the years, they have a different relationship with the church, so that’s one example. I interviewed Sean Strub, who grew up in a very Catholic household and was very devoted to his faith, but when HIV hit, he saw the hypocrisy, was turned off by that and ultimately left the Church. Today, while he still understands why Catholicism is important to people, he is not a practicing Catholic himself. So, between David and Sean, there’s all kinds of people. People deal with this hurt they feel because they are LGBTQ+ from Catholic leaders in different ways.

Some people say they just ignore the statements that are hurtful and they find a parish that works for them. I hope I offered different models of how to deal with that because I don’t think it’s an issue that’s going to go away anytime soon.

AZ: Thank you so much for your time. 

O’Loughlin is a sterling example of how LGBTQ+ journalists are documenting the interactions between the Church and queer Catholics. Pope Francis’ support of his work ought to serve as a source of hope and inspiration for gay Catholics, even as Church teachings regarding homosexuality remain static. As the global Church and LGBTQ+ Catholics learn how to interact more productively, journalists like O’Loughlin will continue to serve as an important source for information and analysis.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision 2021

Paintings by Douglas Blanchard

A contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern city with “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” by Douglas Blanchard. The 24 paintings present a liberating new vision of Jesus’ final days, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection.

“Christ is one of us in my pictures,” says Blanchard. “In His sufferings, I want to show Him as someone who experiences and understands fully what it is like to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to grapple with his own faith struggles as a New Yorker who witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.












High-quality reproductions of Doug Blanchard’s 24 gay Passion paintings are available at: http://douglas-blanchard.fineartamerica.com/ Giclee prints come in many sizes and formats. Greeting cards can be purchased too. Some originals are also available.

Visit Douglas Blanchard’s site ↪HERE↩!

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People reveal their shocking experiences of conversion therapy in the UK

By Jessica Lindsay

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange where the film’s protagonist Alex is ‘deprogrammed’ from violence through aversion therapy.

He’s shown distressing images of violent acts while his eyes are held open and electric shocks run through his body.

The scene is a disturbing one, as despite knowing how much Alex’s own savage behaviour has hurt others, you can’t help but feel sickened by the cruel therapy.

It may seem like something confined to dystopian films – or even to other countries – but conversion therapy is completely legal and happens here in the UK, as well as many parts of the world.

The 2018 National LGBT survey compiled by the government found that 2% of respondents had undergone conversion or reparative therapy in an attempt to ‘cure’ them of being LGBT, and a further 5% had been offered it.

Meanwhile, Stonewall, as part of a YouGov survey, found that 10% of health and social care workers – who they surveyed to analyse how beliefs may impact patient care – said a colleague had vocalised belief in a ‘gay cure’. Essentially, this is not just a fringe issue.

Although making conversion therapy illegal has been tabled – and promised – by government years ago, the legislation has not yet passed, despite a petition calling for this currently carrying more than 230,000 signatures.

What is conversion therapy?

The United Nations defines so-called conversion therapy as practices that seek ‘to change non-heteronormative sexual orientations and non-cisnormative gender identities.’

They continue that it is ‘an umbrella term to describe interventions of a wide-ranging nature, all of which are premised on the belief that a person’s sexual orientation and gender identity, including gender expression, can and should be changed or suppressed when they do not fall under what other actors in a given setting and time perceive as the desirable norm, in particular when the person is lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or gender diverse.

‘Such practices are therefore consistently aimed at effecting a change from non-heterosexual to heterosexual and from trans or gender diverse to cisgender.

‘Depending on the context, the term is used for a multitude of practices and methods, some of which are clandestine and therefore poorly documented.’

Some of the ‘techniques’ they have seen in their extensive research on the topic include ‘corrective’ rape, threats, exorcisms, forced repentance, and isolation from family and friends.

The Government response to the petition promises to ‘to deepen our understanding and consider all options for ending the practice of conversion therapy’, noting that ‘conversion therapy is a very complex issue’.

Carolyn Mercer – who was assigned male at birth – had aversion therapy at the age of 17, with the aim to ‘cure’ her from feelings of gender dysphoria.

Now 73, Carolyn says that this form of punitive treatment has affected her ability to feel positive emotions – despite the decades that have passed.

Her experience with aversion therapy began after she visited the doctor to talk about feeling like she was born in the wrong body. These feelings had started around age three, but the doctor brushed them off, telling the confused teenager to ‘stop worrying your mum’.

She said: ‘I needed someone to listen to me and recognise my identity not to try to change me by denial and punishment.’

From there, a meeting with the local vicar (who’d come to visit Carolyn’s parents while they were at work and only Carolyn was home) led to a chat where she spoke about her dysphoria, and then led to her being referred to a mental hospital.

‘I felt that I ought to be punished for feeling the way that I did,’ Carolyn told Metro.co.uk.

‘I didn’t know how to process it. Of course, in those days, there was no internet. There was no literature. There was no one I could talk to.’

When Carolyn did open up, she was sent to Whittingham Hospital near Preston, the town where she grew up.

She said: ‘I wanted to be cured. I didn’t want to be odd. I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want to be nasty, dirty – which is how I saw it.

‘And so he referred me to the psychiatrist, who then recommended NHS treatment.’

This ‘therapy’ (Carolyn doesn’t like the word, but stresses that she did enter into it voluntarily) saw her strapped to a wooden chair in a dark room, with electrodes fastened to her arms.

She said: ‘I can still smell it. They soaked the electrodes in salt water, in brine, and attached them to my arm.

‘And then from time to time while showing pictures [of women’s clothes or typically feminine things] on the wall, they’d pull the switch and send a pain through my body.

‘The idea was to make me associate the pain with what I wanted to do, and therefore that would stop me wanting to do it.

‘Effectively what it did was not make me hate that aspect of me. It made me hate me because it reinforced that I was wrong; I was evil, and so I deserved to be punished. And that was inflicted as part of NHS treatment.’

Carolyn went on to marry a woman and had children, moving up the ranks in teaching to become the youngest headteacher in Lancashire.

Her life was filled with enviable and admirable moments, but the spectre of the therapy and knowing she was trans was always there.

It was barbaric… and it clearly didn’t work

Carolyn likens what she went through to previous corrective and punitive measures used on left-handed people throughout history, which are not only proven not to work, but are designed to change a natural facet of someone, pathologising their sexuality or gender expression.

A UN study published in June 2020 found that 98% of the 940 persons who reported having undergone some form of conversion therapy testified to having suffered damage as a result.

However, due to the underreporting of conversion therapy and the myriad of effects from physical to psychological (potentially making it harder for a specific harm to be pinpointed by governments), these practices are still not banned.

Although such practices are frowned upon in the therapy industry (and have been disavowed by the NHS), a petition by the public to enshrine this into law recently highlighted the fact that the overarching practise is still allowed in the UK.

Josh Bradlow, Policy Manager, Stonewall told Metro.co.uk: ‘Conversion therapy can come in many different forms from a variety of sources and is often hidden.

‘It may be disguised as pastoral care or a form of support to help someone with difficult feelings. These so-called therapies are also sometimes based in psychotherapy or medical practices that try to “fix” a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.’

Many of the physically violent acts that fall under the conversion therapy banner are already illegal – rape, for example – so in theory, a ban would encompass the psychological methods being used.

We have to continue to shine a light on the horrifying after-effects of these methods, too, so that they don’t fall by the wayside in legislation.

Despite Carolyn doing the ‘blokey’ things she felt she were supposed to do, the dysphoria didn’t go away until she transitioned in 2002 ( or, as Carolyn puts it, ‘align my gender expression with my gender identity, which most people call transition’).

We can’t change the past, but we can look at the main effect for Carolyn – over 40 years of self-hatred and low self-esteem – as a stark warning of what we need to do next.

She said: ‘I can smile about it now, because I force myself to.’

‘But it was barbaric, you wouldn’t subject somebody to that in a concentration camp.

‘It clearly didn’t work, but worked at making me hate myself for a lifetime.’

Carolyn believes her experience has made her devote her life to teaching in an effort to help others, in part because of her low opinion of herself caused by the therapy.

Mark Loewen tells a similar story, although the form of conversion therapy he experienced was different to Carolyn’s.

Mark grew up in Paraguay in a religious family. As a child – and without the internet until about the age of 13 – he didn’t know what the word gay even meant, but tells us: ‘Growing up, I knew that something was different.’

Small things such as playing with girls’ toys and the sense of shame that came with that led to Mark questioning his sexuality, and it was when he went through puberty that he realised he was sexually attracted to men.

Mark’s fear and shame were largely rooted in religion

The way that homosexuality was treated by the pastors at his church was to read the passages of the Bible about sex between men, and to tell Mark ‘just don’t do it, and you’ll be fine’.

Mark worked in a pet shop where one of the customers was known to be gay. His colleagues warned Mark to be careful around the customer.

He said: ‘That’s the message; kind of like we’re dangerous, and that I could be dangerous.’

That man went on to kill himself, leaving Mark believing that this is what ‘destiny’ would have in store too if he came out.

When Mark reached his early twenties he found chatrooms where he was able to identify other gay men through coded language and have secret meet-ups for sex. But because of the negative messages he internalised, these were filled with shame for him and he began to use the internet in order to look for a ‘solution’.

‘I’m not looking for “how can I be happy as a gay man?”,’ said Mark.

‘My searches are “how do we get rid of this?” And so I get involved with a group I find called Exodus International.’

His church told Mark that homosexuality was caused by a distant father and an overbearing mother, and that he was being ‘respectful’ by not feeling a desire to sleep with the girls he was dating. When the time was right, they said, he would meet that right woman.

While working at a Christian book store at around the age of 22, Mark would regularly have business trips to the US, so he was able to go to his first ‘ex-gay’ conference in California without telling his family or friends.

The three-day conference including worship and music, which Mark says made the crowd feel like they were in a ‘trance’.

‘Their speakers would talk a lot about this seeking wholeness where we were missing something emotionally and to seek it. And so a lot of it was about finding approval for yourself in as a person as a man.’

The seminars were framed in a way where gay wasn’t who you were, instead portraying it as a series of attractions and behaviours that could be managed.

At first, these sessions were cathartic for Mark, seeming to him the one place he could truly talk about his innermost secrets and still be ‘loved’.

Mark said: ‘It goes well for some time, and then you notice that you’re still attracted to guys, and all of that happens again and again until you kind of fall again and have sex with someone or whatever it is that you do. And then you feel like you’ve failed.’

Throughout later group therapy sessions it was drummed into Mark that his desire for emotional connection with another man was not love, but instead a form of codependence and selfishness – a way to gain a stronger sense of masculinity that he believed he lacked.

Group members and those he knew would pray for him and he would be given what we’d know as a form of exorcism to change him.

It was only when he went to a college in the US and began studying psychotherapy himself that he realised these techniques were ineffective and morally wrong.

He left the sessions and has gone on to have a daughter and get married to a man he loves dearly. But he says that unpicking the idea that he was codependent and that who he is is shameful has taken a lot of work.

Now 40 years old, Mark writes inclusive children’s books, counsels adults and children alike, and runs a website for parents to raise empowered young girls.

Like Carolyn, he has channeled his energy into helping others.

If we look at the idea of the carrot or the stick, Carolyn’s aversion therapy was the stick and Mark’s conversion therapy was the carrot.

Where Carolyn experienced the more extreme-seeming Clockwork Orange type treatment, Mark’s therapy veered into the territory of the 1999 movie But I’m A Cheerleader, where ‘reparative therapy’ is used, with the idea being that same-sex attraction is a symptom of a psychological problem that can be fixed by talking through childhood issues.

The damage has been done

But both of these types of conversion therapy still go on throughout the world, and both have the end result of making people believe they are inherently wrong.

Stonewall’s Josh Bradlow said: ‘A person’s sexual orientation and gender identity is a natural, normal part of their identity and not something that can or should be changed.

‘By trying to shame a person into denying a core part of who they are, these ‘therapies’ can have a seriously damaging impact on their mental health and wellbeing. Major UK health organisations like the NHS, and the leading psychotherapy and counselling bodies have publicly condemned these practices.’

The ‘happy ending’ here is the fact that Carolyn transitioned and is a grandparent with a loving wife and children, and that Mark has found his calling and started a beautiful family.

But healing scars that run so deep are much harder than ensuring we don’t inflict them in the first place.

Carolyn likens the experience to stretching an elastic band to the point where it no longer has any give left.

‘I don’t feel positive emotions,’ she said.

‘And that’s what has been driven out of me by an understanding that I was wrong. I was evil.

‘[Without aversion therapy] I would have been freed from that. I would have been able to enjoy things more. It’s better now than it was, but the damage is done.’

As the stats above show, although these decades have passed in Carolyn and Mark’s stories, these therapies are still happening, and the damage is still being done to others.

Both the survivors of conversion therapy that Metro.co.uk spoke to say that the solution is more understanding and empathy alongside a ban on these practices.

It’s all very well to ban conversion therapy, but without the proper understanding about the shame and hiding that comes with gender dysphoria or questions about our sexuality, we’re no closer to equality.

Mr Bradlow said: ‘Banning sexual orientation and gender identity conversion therapy would send a powerful message to young LGBT people to let them know that they are not ill.

‘But we also need to work on raising awareness of these dangerous practices, and ensure practitioners are trained to recognise it too.

‘And fundamentally, we need to tackle messages young LGBT people may get from other places, whether that be school, the media or at home, that there’s something wrong with who they are.

‘Until that happens, our work continues to ensure every lesbian, gay, bi and trans person can grow up happy, healthy and supported to be themselves.’

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision 2020

Paintings by Douglas Blanchard

A contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern city with “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” by Douglas Blanchard. The 24 paintings present a liberating new vision of Jesus’ final days, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection.

“Christ is one of us in my pictures,” says Blanchard. “In His sufferings, I want to show Him as someone who experiences and understands fully what it is like to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to grapple with his own faith struggles as a New Yorker who witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.












High-quality reproductions of Doug Blanchard’s 24 gay Passion paintings are available at: http://douglas-blanchard.fineartamerica.com/ Giclee prints come in many sizes and formats. Greeting cards can be purchased too. Some originals are also available.

Visit Douglas Blanchard’s site ↪HERE↩!

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German bishops declare that homosexuality is completely and utterly ‘normal’

In a groundbreaking move, German bishops have revised teachings on sexual morality and said homosexuality is “normal”.

Pope Francis meets with German bishops during their ad limina visit Nov. 20, 2015.

By Josh Milton

As the Catholic Church prepares for its contended review, the Commission for Marriage and Family of the German Bishops’ Conference came to the consensus that being gay is a “normal form of sexual predisposition.”

Moreover, church organisers committed to “newly assessing” topics such as sacraments of ordination and marriage, with another revision being that adultery will not longer “always be qualified as grave sin”, the Catholic News Agency reported.

For centuries, Church leaders have been rattled by the thought of people being sexualities other than heterosexual. But as public attitudes and governments overwhelmingly sway in favour of letting the LGBT+ community exist, the church has steadily caught up to speed.

German bishops call for homophobia to be ‘rejected’ in the church.

The German Catholic Church’s statement comes ahead of a two-year ‘Synodal Process’ by the Germans which will see a national reform consultation. Although, Vatican leaders have warned against this.

In a press release detailing the conclusions of the conference, it detailed how a panel of bishops, sexologists, moral theologians and canon lawyers deliberated how to discuss “the sexuality of man […] scientifically-theologically, and how to assess it ecclesiastically.”

The experts, consisting of bishops from four diocese, agreed in the Berlin conference that “human sexuality encompasses a dimension of lust, of procreation, and of relationships”, the release stated.

“There was also agreement that the sexual preference of man expresses itself in puberty and assumes a hetero- or homosexual orientation. Both belong to the normal forms of sexual predisposition, which cannot or should be be changed with the help of a specific socialisation.”

The panel also said that “any form of discrimination of those persons with a homosexual orientation has to be rejected.”

However, the panel did not reach a consensus across all battle lines. There was no consensus on “whether the magisterial ban on practiced homosexuality is still up to date.”

Furthermore, the experts also disagreed on whether or not both married and unmarried people should be allowed to use artificial contraceptives.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision 2019

Paintings by Douglas Blanchard

A contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern city with “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” by Douglas Blanchard. The 24 paintings present a liberating new vision of Jesus’ final days, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection.

“Christ is one of us in my pictures,” says Blanchard. “In His sufferings, I want to show Him as someone who experiences and understands fully what it is like to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to grapple with his own faith struggles as a New Yorker who witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.












High-quality reproductions of Doug Blanchard’s 24 gay Passion paintings are available at: http://douglas-blanchard.fineartamerica.com/ Giclee prints come in many sizes and formats. Greeting cards can be purchased too. Some originals are also available.

Visit Douglas Blanchard’s site ↪HERE↩!

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For what’s believed to be the first time, the Vatican uses the term ‘LGBT’ in official document

by Michelle Boorstein

The Vatican this month is showing unprecedented, if symbolic, outreach on issues of human sexuality, using for what’s believed to be the first time the term “LGBT” in a planning document for a huge upcoming bishops meeting. Vatican officials also invited to speak at a second global meeting a prominent advocate for LGBT people, something some gay Catholic groups say has never been done.

The two moves, announced in the past 10 days, are being seen by church-watchers as largely an effort to speak in a more respectful way with a younger generation of Catholics who are confronting the church on topics from female priests and abortion to sexuality — but who are clearly not ready to totally walk away from the faith.

The efforts related to the Synod of Bishops on Young People (in October) and the World Meeting of Families (in August) are part of an explicit push by Pope Francis’s church to say “we have to pay attention to this whole LGBT reality, especially for those who have chosen to remain in the church,” said the Rev. Thomas Rosica, who has often served as an English assistant to the Vatican press office.

On Tuesday, the Vatican released the details of the bishops’ synod, or meeting, the third in major global gatherings about the family. The others were in 2014 and 2015. While the document was released only in Italian, the National Catholic Reporter noted it was the first time the acronym was used. The Catholic Church “has in the past formally referred to gay people as ‘persons with homosexual tendencies,’ ” the Reporter said.

Rosica agreed it was a first, but said “they’re just using the lingo young people use. There’s nothing earth-shattering.” Vatican spokeswoman Paloma Garcia Ovejero declined to comment on the reason for the adoption of the acronym beyond saying, “I guess there’s no specific answer … it’s just the result of so many proposals and will be used as a ‘tool’ for discussion.”

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke did not respond to a request for comment.

Hundreds of bishops will attend the meeting in Rome to discuss how they can serve young people better. Their meeting will touch on topics from lack of job opportunities for young people in some places and migration to digital addiction and the struggle for reliable news.

In a section of the synod outline called “the body, affectivity and sexuality,” reports the Catholic Reporter, “It states: ‘Sociological studies demonstrate that many young Catholics do not follow the indications of the Church’s sexual moral teachings. … No bishops’ conference offers solutions or recipes, but many are of the point of view that questions of sexuality must be discussed more openly and without prejudice.’ ”

“There are young Catholics that find in the teachings of the Church a source of joy and desire ‘not only that they continue to be taught despite their unpopularity, but that they be proclaimed with greater depth,’ ” the Catholic Reporter quotes the document as saying. “Those that instead do not share the teachings express the desire to remain part of the Church and ask for a greater clarity about them.”

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways ministry, which aims to connect gay Catholics and their church, said the use of the term LGBT is very significant — especially compared with past language, such as people with “homosexual inclinations.”

“That said, there is nothing in this new document that indicates a change in church teaching. It simply indicates a new openness to discuss these issues more respectfully. How they actually conduct the synod, and, more importantly, what the final synod document will say, is much more important than these developments,” he wrote in an email to The Washington Post.

The second development involves the World Meeting of Families, a massive, Vatican-run event the Catholic Church holds once every three years. The last time it was held, in 2015, Francis was in Philadelphia. The church faced criticism from LGBT advocates when the only sign of gay families amid a days-long display of family issues was a gay man and his mother talking about celibacy.

Eight days ago, the Vatican announced details of the next World Meeting, Aug. 21 to 26 in Dublin. Among many other speakers will be the Rev. Jim Martin, a New York City Jesuit popularly known as Stephen Colbert’s pastor — but within the church as a fierce advocate for positive images and engagement with gay Catholics. Martin will be the first speaker at a World Meeting “on positive pastoral outreach to LGBT people,” the Associated Press reported“Building a Bridge,” about Catholic outreach to the LGBT community, has had several talks canceled in the United States in recent months because of pressure from conservative groups who oppose his call for the church to better accompany gay Catholics, the AP reported.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision

Paintings by Douglas Blanchard

A contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern city with “The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision” by Douglas Blanchard.  The 24 paintings present a liberating new vision of Jesus’ final days, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection.

“Christ is one of us in my pictures,” says Blanchard.  “In His sufferings, I want to show Him as someone who experiences and understands fully what it is like to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to grapple with his own faith struggles as a New Yorker who witnessed the 9/11 terrorist attacks.












High-quality reproductions of Doug Blanchard’s 24 gay Passion paintings are available at: http://douglas-blanchard.fineartamerica.com/   Giclee prints come in many sizes and formats.  Greeting cards can be purchased too.  Some originals are also available.

Visit Douglas Blanchard’s site ↪HERE↩!

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A Modern Controversy Over Ancient Homosexuality

In 1980, a gay historian’s book about Catholic Church-approved homosexuality enraged both gays and Catholics.

This image, of the 7th century saints Sergius and Bacchus, was considered by the historian John Boswell to be a depiction of an example of an early Christian same-sex union.

by Natasha Frost

It might have been the first academic textbook that greeted the masses via the medium of Garry Trudeau’s comic Doonesbury. In a series of strips in June 1994, recently outed gay character Mark Slackmeyer attempts to pick up a fundamentalist Christian married man, and tells him that the church had, for a millennium, performed gay-marriage ceremonies. “Where did you hear such garbage?” the man replies, irate.

“It’s in a new book by this Yale professor,” answers Slackmeyer. “His research turned up liturgies for same-sex ceremonies that included communion, holy invocations and kissing to signify union. They were just like heterosexual ceremonies, except that straight weddings, being about property, were usually held outdoors. Gay rites, being about love, were held INSIDE the church!”

That week, at least two Illinois newspapers refused to print the strips, while a few dozen readers rang the distributor to ask “why Garry Trudeau exists to make their lives unhappy.” If the strip provoked controversy, the book, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, incited outrage both within and outside of the academic community. Its author, scholar John Eastburn Boswell, known as Jeb, died six months after the comic strips ran at the age of 47, of AIDS-related complications.

In barely 20 years at Yale, Boswell’s work as a historian managed to set the cat among the pigeons to stupendous effect, through years of meticulous scholarship that, if correct, undermined the very foundation of much modern homophobia. In the introduction to his 1980 American Book Award-winning Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, he observed that gay people were “still the objects of severe proscriptive legislation, widespread public hostility, and various civil restraints, all with ostensibly religious justification.” Boswell’s work suggested, however, that this “religious justification” might, in fact, be bogus—a latter-day alteration, introduced hundreds of years after Christianity was founded.

A young John Boswell, known to his friends as Jeb.

The book argued that the Roman Catholic Church had not always been as hostile to gay people, and indeed, until the 12th century, had thought homosexuality no more troubling than, say, hypocrisy—or even celebrated love between men. The response to the book was explosive, if polarized. “I would not hesitate to call his book revolutionary,” Paul Robinson, a Stanford University historian, wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1981. But other critics felt that, despite its attention to detail, its central thesis—that Christianity and homosexuality had not always been such uneasy bedfellows—was not only false, but a failed attempt by Boswell, gay and Catholic, to square two aspects of his identity they felt could not be reconciled.

Boswell was young and brilliant, blond and boyishly handsome, with an incredible facility for languages. His work might at any time draw on any of 17 dead and living examples—among them, Catalan, Latin, Old Iceland, Syriac and Persian. As a teenager growing up in Virginia, writes the researcher Bruce O’Brien, he had converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism. This conversion was precipitated by a show of tolerance and strength: “because, in large part, the archdiocese of Baltimore had voluntarily desegregated its schools, without a court order, solely because it was the right thing to do.” Here, he saw a Catholic church that was intrinsically moral and would be a beacon of light against intolerance—one that might lead the charge on other struggles for equality in a country whose sensibilities were shifting at great pace.

Many saw the book, therefore, as a chance for a reckoning—Boswell giving the church the opportunity to welcome the gay community. As his sister Patricia, who spoke at his funeral, puts it: “Jeb’s love of God was the dri­ving force in his life and the dri­ving pas­sion behind his work. He did not set out to shake up the straight world but rather to include the gay world in the love of Christ… to acquaint all with the fear­some power of that love, the wild­ness, the ‘not tame­ness’ of it.”

A detail from the Medieval manuscript La Somme le roy, from around 1300, shows David and Jonathan embracing.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is a 442-page journey through around 1,000 years of gay history. Assiduously researched, it jumps from country to country, instance to instance, drawing on examples of love between specific men, and generalized cases of societies in which sex between men was quite normalized.

Boswell spends some time delving into the relationship between the 4th-century Ausonius, a Roman poet living in Bordeaux, France, and his pupil Saint Paulinus, later the Bishop of Nola. Whether or not the relationship was a physical one is impossible to say—but the passionate affection the two had for one another seemed to transcend ordinary platonic friendship.

In whatever world I am found,
I shall hold you fast,
Grafted onto my being,
Not divided by distant shores or suns.
Everywhere you shall be with me,
I will see with my heart
And embrace you with my loving spirit.

“It would be inaccurate to suggest any exact parallel between such relationships and modern phenomena—as it is to compare medieval marriage with its modern counterpart,” Boswell wrote. But the idea that the concept of friendship has simply changed rang hollow to him—especially given that in many ancient societies, homosexuality was conventional and so might well have been part of a normal friendship. “Friends of the same sex borrowed from the standard vocabulary of homosexual love to express their feelings in erotic terms,” he wrote.

Saint Augustine, writing at the same time, described a friendship thus: “I felt that my soul and his were one soul in two bodies, and therefore life was a horror to me, since I did not want to live as a half; and yet I was also afraid to die lest he, whom I had loved so much, would completely die.” Elsewhere, however, he claims to have “contaminated the spring of friendship with the dirt of lust and darkened its brightness with the blackness of desire”—yet this is a denigration not specifically of homosexual lust and desire, but of sexuality more generally.

A 17th-century image of Saint Augustine, by the painter Antonio Rodríguez.

In the same period in Antioch, an ancient Greco-Roman city sometimes called “the cradle of Christianity,” Boswell described how Saint John Chrysostom visited the town, in what is today Turkey. Chrysostom was surprised to see the men of the city “consorting” not with prostitutes, but “fearlessly” with one another. Boswell quoted him: “The fathers of the young men take this in silence: they do not try to sequester their sons, nor do they seek any remedy for this evil. None is ashamed, no one blushes, but, rather, they take pride in their little game; the chaste seem to be the odd ones, and the disapproving the ones in error.” In this early Christian city, Chrysostom found homosexuality to be so very common and accepted that “there is some danger that womankind will become unnecessary with the future, with young men instead fulfilling all the needs women used to.”

Boswell shored up example after example of homosexual love and sex in the early Christian world over the course of almost 1,000 years. There were occasional laws against them, he pointed out, but they were not usually religious ones, but civil, where homosexual acts were fined as a way to increase tax coffers. Indeed, often the people being taxed in this way were not ordinary members of society, but bishops and clerics. “Purely ecclesiastical records usually stipulate either no penalty at all or a very mild one,” he wrote. Under Pope Saint Gregory II, for instance, lesbian activities carried a 160-day fasting penalty, likely under the same terms as Lent. A priest caught going hunting, on the other hand, would be in comparable trouble for three years.

In the 1980s, at a time when laws against sodomy remained in place in many American states, the book was a bombshell—especially for Catholics. The United States, at that time, was still a place of extreme homophobia and prejudice. In 1978, the openly gay politician Harvey Milk had been assassinated in San Francisco; a year earlier came Anita Bryant’s organized opposition to gay rights, with its rhetoric about saving children from gay “recruitment.” Queer studies remained a very niche part of academic study—Yale’s Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, which Boswell helped to found, emerged only in the late 1980s.

Criticism of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, therefore, came on a variety of fronts. In some parts of the academic community, it came from historians like the R. W. Southern of the University of Oxford, who believed that “gay history” was not an interesting or important part of historical research. (Southern, O’Brien notes, was largely influenced by having grown up in “a repressed age where homosexuals were criminals [a word he used when talking about homosexuality.]”) In others, it came from theological scholars who picked apart Boswell’s thesis and found it undermined by the scholar’s deep, deep desire to be right. In the Catholic magazine Commonweal, after the book’s release, Louis Crompton wrote: “It is a pity that [the book] is … vitiated by a determination to construe all its voluminous evidence in the light of an untenable leading idea.” Some of its harshest criticism came from members of the gay community, who accused Boswell of being an apologist for the church’s atrocities against gay people. In the Gay Books Bulletin, Wayne Dyne wrote, decisively: “Christianity is definitely guilty of the stigmatization and persecution of same-sex relations in our civilization. It has served as a redoubt for bigotry of all sorts, and until those who call themselves Christians are ready humbly to acknowledge this, they are coming to us with dirty hands.”

Boswell, for his part, seemed to take the response in his stride. To the many critics who argued that such categories as “gay” and “straight” were modern conceptions, Boswell responded: “If the categories ‘homosexual/heterosexual’ and ‘gay/straight’ are the inventions of particular societies rather than real aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay history.” The book had caused controversy, but it had also won multiple awards and cleared important ground in developing this largely uncharted territory of gay studies.

Today, Boswell is remembered for two things—by those who didn’t know him, for his contributions to his field; and by those who did, for his unwavering kindness and generosity. A 1986 video of Boswell giving a talk shows a man who was at once dazzlingly bright and brilliantly charismatic. He’s likeable, urbane, often very funny. On and off campus, he was adored—by undergraduates, who clamored to be in his classes, and undergraduates; gay and straight members of faculty alike; and by many members of the Catholic community. At Harvard, where he had completed his PhD, he counted among his devoted friends John Spencer, rector of the Jesuit community of Boston, and Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer professor of Christian morals, after he came out publicly in 1991. “At a time of great public trauma for me, he wrote me out of the blue a lovely letter of support,” Gomes told the Harvard Crimson, shortly after Boswell’s death. “He gave me courage.”

When he passed away in December 1994, Boswell had been in the Yale infirmary for some months. The music historian Geoffrey Block recalled visiting him in his hospital room, where, despite having only recently emerged from a coma, he was “brilliantly and miraculously holding court,” quoting lines from films and singing “Cause I’m a Blonde” from the musical Earth Girls Are Easy. Admirers and friends drifted in and out of the infirmary—friends he had helped through crises; a devoted graduate student; his father; the newly installed President of Yale, Richard Levin, who cried freely and readily. “A young bar­ber who came to the infir­mary room to give Jeb a hair­cut moved us to tears when he refused pay­ment.”

Boswell died on Christmas Eve, surrounded by family, friends, and his partner of many years, Jerry Hart. In the months leading up to his death, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which had been previewed in Doonesbury, incited similar levels of controversy to Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Comprised of the study of more than 60 manuscripts from the 8th to the 16th century, it was a full investigation into the history of same-sex unions. These he described as relationships that were “unmistakably a voluntary, emotional union of two persons,” and “closely related” to heterosexual marriage, “no matter how much some readers may be discomforted by this.” Again, critics argued that he was looking for something that he dearly wanted to be there. Block, in his 2013 memorial, wrote how delighted and thrilled Boswell would have been to have been able to legally marry Hart. “I came across a sign on a lawn that would have made Jeb, a devout Catholic—per­haps para­dox­i­cally con­sid­er­ing this insti­tu­tion’s take on his sex­ual iden­tity—extremely happy. It sim­ply said, ‘Approve R-74. My Church Sup­ports Mar­riage Equal­ity’.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘Ancient porn’ sheds new light on Bible verses

Gay sex is a sin. The New Testament makes that abundantly clear.

Or does it?

According to one of the UK’s most prominent evangelicals, if Christian scholarship engages with archaeological evidence from the rediscovered ancient city of Pompeii, much of St Paul’s teaching on sexuality must be radically reinterpreted.

In a new online video for the Open Church Network, Revd. Canon Steve Chalke argues that by studying the remains of Pompeii, and understanding the ancient Roman world’s highly sexualised culture, we can find new meaning in chapters such as Romans 1, which have traditionally been misinterpreted to condemn same-sex relations.


 
Revd. Canon Steve Chalke says, “For too long the remains of Pompeii have been little known to members of the general public, but when the chance to examine them is taken, it becomes abundantly clear that in ancient Rome, sex was everything. 80% of the artwork recovered from Pompeii and its sister town of Herculaneum is sexually explicit and also reveals a fascination with the image of the stiff, erect penis – a symbol of power and pleasure.  This is the context into which the New Testament was written.

“If you were a man in Roman culture, so long as someone was your social inferior – a slave, a gladiator, a woman etc. – it was considered socially acceptable and respectable to penetrate them.  A married man would have a mistress for pleasure and a non-Roman boy for ecstasy.  They called these people ‘infames’; those utterly lacking in social standing and deprived of most protections accorded to citizens under Roman law. There is also much evidence that Roman women also engaged exploitative sex – typically with female slaves, gladiators or male castrated slaves – whose testicles had been removed or rendered inoperative, so that they could not produce sperm and lost their desire for sex but still had the ability to perform it. Juvenal, the poet, tells us that bored Roman women took these eunuchs as lovers.

“So engrained was this way of thinking and behaving that it became incorporated into religion.  Drug and alcohol fuelled orgies featuring men sleeping with women, men sleeping with men and women sleeping with women and men were even classed as acts of worship.”

Chalke argues that against this backdrop, verses such as the often quoted Romans 1 v 27 (“In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error”) should be understood to condemn the power-driven sexual hierarchy and abuse so common to Roman life, with the rest of the chapter condemning their sex-driven approach to worship and idolatry.

“Every Christian believes God to be a God of love.  It is no wonder that these abusive practises are condemned by inspired scripture.  But, it is a disingenuous misreading of the text to conclude that what Paul describes in Romans 1 can be used to prevent people forming loving, faithful and nurturing relationships with people of the same-sex.”

The video, containing graphic images that were discovered in Pompeii, which also deals with the three other passages in the New Testament that have traditionally been used to condemn any kind of homosexual activity or even orientation has been released and is available at openchurch.network.

Chalke continues, “The content of the video is so graphic that we’ve had to place a parental warning label on it – however I have not released this out of any desire to provoke or shock for the sake of it.  Because of widespread ignorance of the ancient world and Greco-Roman culture in churches across the West, we throw Bible verses around without understanding their context.  We misunderstand Paul’s criticism of rituals that exploit power and abuse people and then, out of ignorance, use them to try to prevent people of same-sex orientation from finding loving, committed and fulfilling partnerships and of entering into, what I believe is, the holy institution of same-sex marriage.  For the Church, the Bible is the corner stone of faith and practise.  It is time we took it more seriously. The Church has a duty to use every tool of modern scholarship available in this task.”

The ancient city Pompeii was buried – although not, as we now know, destroyed – when the nearby, supposedly extinct, volcano Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, covering it and the nearby town of Herculaneum and their inhabitants in many tons of pumice and volcanic ash. Although the disaster remained in people’s minds for many years it was eventually forgotten, until the exploration of the ancient site started in 1748.

However, work to excavate the city still continues today and it is only in relatively recent years that there has been sufficient public access to allow the findings to influence theological and cultural scholarship.

Complete Article HERE!