Gay and Christian in a Changing America

Jeff Chu, Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America

Society’s mass realignment regarding sexual identity and gay rights leaves religious believers in turmoil. If God’s Law is the same yesterday, today, and forever, how do we cope with a world whose morality looks more malleable? What does it even mean to believe in a transcendent, redeeming Lord as a gay American? As someone with one foot in each camp, journalist Jeff Chu set out to unpack the diverse answers.

Protestant theology believes all sins are equal in God’s sight. White lies make us as culpable as murder, because any sin puts us outside God’s grace. Yet in the early 21st Century, we’ve made homosexuality a litmus test of Christianity. While mainline denominations race to be the most inclusive, evangelicals double down on Levitical prohibitions, making homosexuality the great unforgivable sin. This theological absolutism boggles observers’ imaginations.

Early on, and incrementally throughout his narrative, Chu stresses that nobody reads Scripture “just as it is,” much less in an unbroken arc throughout history. Everybody brings their unique experiences and suppositions to the Bible, and the lessons we draw meld ourselves with the text. He demonstrates that passages in Leviticus, Romans, and elsewhere that demagogues claim have invariable meanings, in fact possess surprising shades of implication.

These differences become problematic when churches, or church leaders, claim one inviolable position, and brook no dispute among loving believers. Chu speaks with several fellow travellers who, unlike him, could no longer stomach belief when plagued by Christianity’s polar divisions. Some just became agnostic and abandoned the fight, while others—he cites the first gay ’zine at Arkansas’ largest Christian university—become outright adversarial.

Too often, we judge one another without first knowing one another. For instance, many Americans, even good Bible-believing Christians, see Westboro Baptist Church as a seething cauldron of blasphemy and pietistic evil. But when Chu sits down with Fred Phelps, he discovers a remarkably warm, affable grandfather with a quick laugh. Westboro’s actual religious motivations prove more complex, subtle, and markedly familiar than Chu could have ever predicted.

From across the sexuality divide, events prove even more remarkable. Jennifer Knapp, whose gospel folk-rock helped define Clinton-era pop Christianity, found herself an outcast when she couldn’t deny her inclinations any longer. This rejection has dug a trench between her and the Church, but she has found herself closer to God on the outside. And she’s provided many dedicated believers the chance to venture beyond their insular fortresses.

The lengths some Christians travel to reconcile Biblical faith with homosexuality become, at times, epic. Chu spends an extended sojourn with Exodus International, America’s largest ex-gay therapy organization. He witnesses a morass of moral and scientific contradictions, which demands the question: is this any better than nothing at all? (Months after Chu wrote these chapters, Exodus shuttered its doors and officially apologized for its own existence.)

But rather than fleeing the problem, some people, remarkably, make it work. Chu meets one husband and wife who’ve enjoyed several years of happy marriage and joint ministry, despite his professed homosexuality. (He claims no attraction to women overall, but intense attraction to his wife. He says.) Another man, after much prayer and contemplation, decided to simply remain celibate, no small decision in modern sex-obsessed culture.

Others believe nobody should have to make compromises on their identity, even when it makes traditionalists uncomfortable. Metropolitan Community Church, the largest denomination organized by and for gays, has grown to become a competitive force in American Christian discourse. But when Chu worships at MCC, he discovers: an explicitly gay church can inadvertently privilege “gay” over “church,” losing sight of their founding mission.

Why does anybody think they can define whom God excludes? As Chu notes, Jesus never dealt with homosexuality. But consider whom he considered worthy of his ministrations: tax collectors, Samaritans, widows, prostitutes, adulterers. Given the choice, Jesus shared his inmost secrets with those outside power, not those goody-two-shoes who claimed they had God’s direct line. If he came back tomorrow, Jesus might have many gay friends.

Chu’s wide-ranging exploration of gays and Christianity matters not for moddish concerns or Supreme Court decisions, but because how we treat “the least of these” counts. Future Christians will look back on our time and wonder, not whether we kept the letter of the Law, but if we upheld the spirit of the Gospel. And we need to decide what that means, soon. Because in these last days, God’s people too often think we know our Father’s mind, and have stopped listening for His voice.

L.A. Confutational

Dennis M. Walsh, Nobody Walks: Bringing My Brother's Killers to Justice

In July 2003, two Los Angeles hoodlums shot tweaker Christopher Walsh in the head, stuffed his body in a plastic garbage barrel, and stowed his remains in a Van Nuys storage unit. His brother, defense attorney Dennis Walsh, swore vengeance on LA’s criminal underground, telling anybody who would listen, “Nobody walks on this case.” Little did he know he’d become the biggest scourge on the underworld since Charles Bronson.

Dennis Walsh tells his own story with the kinetic aggression that drives filmmakers like Scorsese and Tarantino. His brash, violent, gleefully profane narrative never lags, leaving readers feeling like they’ve been pummeled by a true master pummeler. And while his cast of thousands may demand intense attention to keep names straight (keep notes on the endpaper), his story of realistic sublegal crime fighting makes CSI look wimpy by comparison.

Walsh’s father was a Cleveland PD detective who got rich working the other side. A one-time rising star of California’s Irish mob, he led his many sons into “the life.” The only Walsh without a record, Dennis did a hitch in the Navy, completed his law degree, and went into private practice, keeping bottom-feeders out of the hoosegow. This strange dual life made him perfect to nvestigate crimes where police cannot venture.

Christopher Walsh, Dennis’ youngest brother, drifted through life, got hooked on meth, and spent his final days among tweakers who’d surrendered normal humanity. Nobody heard from him for weeks before his remains surfaced. Seems tweakers don’t interact outside their circle, even when somebody has to clean up the blood. Even less when it means talking to the police: everybody knew who killed Christopher, but nobody would sing for the LAPD.

An an attorney with longstanding underground connections, Dennis stood in a unique position to haunt his brother’s killers. In his trademark Cleveland Indians ballcap and jeans, he infiltrated California’s insular meth-head community; with his brother Tim at his side, tweakers began saying “the Walsh Brothers” like you might say “Sinn Fein.” But his sharp suits and avuncular silver curls gave him unique access to California’s byzantine legal system, too.

Walsh tells a gripping story, shifting between Wild West vigilante heroics among an essentially lawless community, and the tense compromises necessary from an officer of the courts. One moment, Walsh and his brothers may serve a beat-down on some Valley scum-sucker to nab new leads. The next, he walks careful lines in the LA criminal court, perennially trying to stay on deputy DA Stephanie Sparagna's good side.

While Walsh remains the hero of his story—dude, meth-heads shot his brother in the face—he doesn’t flinch from his ad hoc morality. As an unwanted guest in a community with no law and little order, he often has no choice but to solve problems with his fists and lie to his allies. When the LAPD proves ill-equipped for Christopher’s case, Dennis helpfully offers to distribute old-fashioned street justice.

Eventually, evidence in Christopher’s murder crisscrosses LA County, transcends economic class, and overlaps California’s many criminal subcultures. Arresting Christopher’s killers requires Faustian bargains, impromptu partnerships, and elaborate knife-edge dances between law enforcement agencies. When his drug-addled chief witness makes a deal with the US Marshals but has an LAPD warrant on his ass, Dennis uncorks diplomacy worthy of Churchill at Yalta.

Even when the cops have Christopher’s killers behind bars, Dennis’s journey isn’t over. On Law & Order, everything looks so neat: 24 minutes for arrest, 24 minutes for trial, and by the credits, they (almost) always have the guilty party in chains. Not so, says Walsh: enterprising defendants can impede the legal process for years, while witnesses age, memories fade, and evidence languishes. Christopher’s killers prove astute heel-draggers.

Nothing proves easy in this story. While working both the courts and the criminal underworld, Dennis must also control his criminal brothers, keep his sources from discovering one another, and remain a viable vigilante after everyone treats him like Batman. He never recovers the murder weapon. It may be in the concrete foundations of actor Ving Rhames’s house, demonstrating how this case binds SoCal glamour with postmodern urban decay.

Not everyone will like this story. Walsh’s intense, meteoric narrative requires acute attention, especially since he compresses events that actually occured some time and distance apart. His raunchy prose may bother some readers, particularly his frequent f-bombs and casual violence. But Walsh’s deeply cinematic story, bolstered by heartfelt investment in events over a decade later, gives him distinct power. This stark, unforgiving story won’t leave you easily.

The Real Price of a Fake Economy

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernenke

Last week’s rapid stock sell-off, which ended as quickly as it began, exposes underlying fractures that remain in our financial markets even this long after the 2007 meltdown. Moreover, and more important for our daily business, it exposes the fundamental flaw behind ongoing “recovery” efforts in the American economy. And if it doesn’t give us warning that our current economic track is ultimately unsustainable, that only proves we weren’t listening.

Multiple news sources used the word “plunge” to describe the Dow’s 354-point nose dive, though in historic terms, Thursday, June 20th, 2013 doesn’t even rank. Whether in absolute point terms or percentages, Thursday’s slide barely registers. But because we’ve grown accustomed to supposed constant growth like Jack’s beanstalk, any triple-digit slide seems catastrophic, at least to the financial journalists who cover Wall Street for the national publications.

But most Americans don’t own stocks. Most Americans shouldn’t own stocks, because we lack the specialized skills for reading market movements and anticipate future trends. While many Americans indirectly hold stock through mutual funds or retirement portfolios, in practical terms, Dow fluctuations are as distant from our lives as castor bean futures or the floating value of the Mozambican metical on global currency markets. It’s hard for Americans to care.

We should care about this seemingly remote economic benchmark, not because it impacts us (it barely does), but because it provides a valuable barometer of our economy’s basic weakness. Thursday’s stock drop took place not in response to market forces, but as a lemming-like response to the Federal Reserve’s decision to scale back economic recovery measures. The suggested end to fictitious influences caused very real financial blowback.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew

Since the global financial meltdown of 2007-2008, multiple governments, including America’s, have trumpeted the goal of “recovery.” Most citizens hear that and think it means getting people back on their feet, encouraging new hiring, and ensuring smooth working for the whole economy. Yet the Demopublican duopoly that dominates government has grown infatuated with the financial sector. They’re primarily trying to regain the boomtown mentality that dominated a decade ago.

Financial journalists got news-drunk when the Dow closed above 15,000 in May. But the nearly continuous bull market since 2009 has been driven by “quantitative easing,” a bureaucratic euphemism meaning the Treasury encourages buying by cheapening the value of a buck. This has flooded markets with abundant bargain-basement cash, while producing a profoundly topheavy economy, as dough rushes to the top by draining value from ordinary wages.

Joseph Stiglitz notes that 93 percent of the “recovery” since 2009 has accrued to the dreaded One Percent. This happens partly because President Obama packed his economic advisors with Robert Rubin acolytes, who assume the financial services industry’s innate goodness. They’ve performed remarkable fiscal gymnastics to infuse markets with cheap money. This produces a strong economy in the aggregate, but doesn’t help most ordinary Americans.

Financial operators are herd beasts. When the Fed throws cheap money, financiers crowd around, grab what they can, and follow the leader. If one broker makes bank on stocks, everyone joins in. If somebody gets rich gambling on tech stocks or housing prices (let’s just imagine), hundreds want on the bandwagon. This creates illusory market pressures that seem to increase the value of a desired commodity beyond comprehension.

This explains how, for instance, gas prices skyrocketed during a period of low demand. History shows us, though, that such herd pressures are appallingly volatile. It takes only one herd member fleeing the bubble to create panic. Commodities, and the complex derivatives based on commodity values, go into freefall. And anybody who trusted financial trend-spotters to know what they were talking about takes it in the wallet.

President Barack Obama

The two biggest Dow point rises and two biggest drops ever occurred less than one month apart, in September and October of 2008. This market volatility, which continues less dramatically today, reflects the artificial pressures steering the market, particularly cheap money completely separated from any process of creating value. And it reflects political and economics elites’ attempts to keep the party going long after it should have burned out naturally.

May’s record Dow high, and June’s panicked Dow sell-off, prove that America’s economy has become estranged from the process of creating value. Attempts to preserve old ways of doing business have become a liability, because they demonstrate themselves unresponsive to real needs. But our entwined financial and political sectors won’t let their sick puppy die. Yesterday’s solutions can’t fix today’s problems. It falls to us citizens to demand something better.


On a related topic, see also:
High Noon for the Economic Assassins 
How the Economy Hit Bottom—and What Comes Next 

White-Knuckle Widow and the Open Road Serenade

Linda Crill, Blind Curves: One Woman's Unusual Journey to Reinvent Herself and Answer: What Now?

For the first two years of widowhood, Linda Crill followed all the standard advice: eat well, sleep plenty, keep up with friends and work. Blah blah blah. When nothing worked, and the grief still kept her sidelined, everybody gave her the same suggestions. Then, in a moment of anger, she declared her intent to learn to ride a motorcycle. That impulsive decision proved the turning point in reclaiming her identity.

Everybody who lives long enough experiences the moment of looking in the morning mirror and realizing: I don’t like the person I’ve become. Workaday compromises, social pressure, and the tendency to repeat past successes, conspire to turn us into ghosts of our former vibrant potential. We used to call this “growing up.” But Linda Crill, like an increasing number of Baby Boomers, no longer accepts decrepitude as inevitable with maturity.

As a suburban DC-area management consultant, Crill spent years coaching corporations out of indecision, stagnation, and walking death. But when it closed upon her, she admits, she enacted the same behaviors that doom corporations. She rationalized, she temporized, she clung to the familiar. And she maintained these behaviors right up to the moment she couldn’t anymore. Then, she did something dramatic to upset the fatiguing status quo.

John Lennon sang: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Crill admits that describes her perfectly. She thought she’d never work for big corporations, until she did. She thought she’d never marry a square-suited establishmentarian and become a mommy, until she did. And when widowhood caught her unprepared, this former greenie bicyclist learned to ride a chopper and joined a team descending the entire West Coast.

Crill’s spirited, surprisingly funny memoir unpacks the process by which most of us inescapably settle into vestigial lives. She never sought a beige corporate life, yet she found herself trapped by the façade she created. Suddenly single at an age when many women gear down for retirement, she could no longer sustain the person she’d become; but change is always painful, even when it’s necessary.

Then, in moments when she’s persuaded to quit the entire enterprise, Crill surprises herself with how much she has going on inside. She believes she’ll fail the road test, right until the moment she receives a perfect score. She assumes a fifty-something businesswoman will get hooted out of the bikers’ store, until she emerges from the fitting room in her new leathers and catches dozens of staring at her.

Perhaps her most daunting challenge was the “imposter syndrome.” I remember this from my teaching days: the feeling that you don’t really belong here, that everybody else has credentials you don’t share, that something will happen in the next moment to expose you as a fraud. This syndrome can be paralyzing. It’s impossible to realize, until you face it, that everybody has this same fear, sometimes, too.

At every turn, Crill’s head warns: “I can’t.” But her heart exults: “I just did.” She’s accepted the smallness of her life for so long that, when she repeatedly discovers the stronger, craftier, more adventurous woman waiting inside, her brain deflects the evidence. Time after time, she prepares herself to accept “good enough.” Then every time, the real Linda rears up and demands the world take notice.

As a business consultant, Crill has observed and described several common behaviors that stymie corporate movement. She talks, for instance, about “The Decision Pendulum,” by which leaders accept a good idea, but talk themselves out of it, then back in, then back out. Or the principle that “Failures Facilitate Change,” the reality that leaders won’t accept needed process revisions during good times. Only disaster overwhelms executive inertia.

She knew all this, yes, the way you know something you read in a book. But stepping outside her box, learning something new and dangerous, then flying cross-country to attempt a journey unprecedented in her life... That’s when she became the Linda she always dreamed about. She learned to apply her principles. And she learned that a widow pushing sixty isn’t preparing for death. Life happens because you take it.

Everybody, every day, accepts compromises that leave us living small lives. Too often, only personal catastrophe interrupts the “good enough” life we’ve come to accept. Linda Crill reminds us that we don’t have to just accept life. Like her, we have the power to choose. We never know how the journey will end, but we have the power to commence, if only, like Crill, we take it.

Deborah Landau and the Trouble With Silence

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part Seventeen
Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

I love a poem like midnight Brooklyn blues, following strange frenetic languages down unmarked streets, ordering off menus we cannot read. Meaning peeks between lines, bold but never loud, announcing transcendence in lacunae between heartbeats. Deborah Landau plays English like Gypsy violins, drawing profundities from moments that first seem like collisions. Only when we hear the completed tune do we recognize her full and resonant music.

In dark midwinter, Landau’s narrators battle crushing urban ennui, struggling to reconcile fragile self-figurations with New York’s harsh realities. Her voices, multiple, bounce off one another, forming a veritable Greek chorus of Gothamite despondency, the white noise of eight million voices wondering. Why am I alone, they ask. Who am I without you. What gives me hope that tomorrow will outshine my long straight line of yesterdays.

Landau’s long, cyclic, interlinking poems form cycles that propel themes across different voices, different forms, different cityscapes. Thus she only offers four very long poems in this book—or maybe fifty-three short, untitled poems—maybe many poems, only four titles. It gets very meta. Themes build across several pages, drawing in allusions, thickets of knowledge, winks at moments of shared recognition:

In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.
The day was going toward the narrow place the blank.
No matter how many glasses of gin
it will get dark on this platform of earth.
When with your milk and fruit
when with your wine
when with your little mirror and your book
you sit tableside in the candlelit clearing
when with your warm breath
are you sick
are you all done flirting
have you lost your appetites
no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.

With verse like this we cannot seek the story. We cannot long for through-lines and marching dogmatic chronicles. Landau instead urges us to immerse ourselves, align our rhythms with the questing voices in her poems. Like Philip Glass, she doesn’t thrust obvious themes at her audience; instead, we listen for the patterns. She trusts us enough to let us find the message, rather than demanding, schoolteacher-ish, the correct answer.

This means sometimes her poetic voice declares absolutely something untrue or beyond proof. She tells us the answer and waits for the question. (And it usually feels like “she”—though we shouldn’t mistake the plural threads entwining these verses for Landau herself, her language has a preponderantly feminine lilt.) Even when she says something seemingly true, Landau’s persona invites us to share with her the experience of doubt:

the trouble with silence
is the high square room
hymnless and the window
opening on a blank
the trouble with silence is creation
farewell the glistening mouth
the trouble with silence
oh mother
the trouble
the harmless pleasures
and the ones that come to harm
in the fields
in the central city
the trouble with silence
is none ever was

Though Landau writes a deeply introspective tenor, caroming among dozens, the specific urban landscape shines through. She populates her verse with snow-blanked parks, mumbling thirsty streets, bedtime incandescence keeping the struggling soul from blissful sleep. Reading Landau, one tastes the soot and hears boot leather on pavement. No otherworldly vagueness here: Landau writes about specific people in specific places.

Landau primarily writes free verse, the common coin of modern poetry. Not that she’s averse to formalism, though she seldom adopts schoolbook forms just because somebody thinks she should. More like, she invents forms (which include little rhyme, and that only indirectly) as she needs them, to reflect the voices striving to emerge from her work. She seems especially fond of couplets, perhaps reflecting the dual nature of herself as observing poet and observed voice:

I am writing this to do as right as possible by Richard
think back to the bed consider the bar

the fragrant medicinal flasks
I don’t care to drink anymore because when I drink

it makes me hopeless
Richard, are you going to come back

to the bar where you belong
or just leave me here

here is a flask
I’m tired of being metaphysical

Schoolteachers love to ask: who knows what the author is saying here? But Landau doesn’t “say” anything, not in the way English teachers mean. Her poetry is more of an invitation. She invites us to join her on a complex journey, one without any single destination. She invites us to join her getting lost in streets that reveal their secrets only to the attentive. She invites us to simply listen.