LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Gay 'n Gray |
by John D. Siegfried |
A Guy Goes Into a Gay Bar with a Parrot on His Shoulder
...and after a couple of drinks with the guys at the bar, he announces, "If any of you can guess the weight of this parrot, I'll take you home to bed with me." A smartass sitting at the end of the bar brashly calls out, "Two hundred pounds." "Hell, close enough," was the parrot owner's immediate response. I heard that story recently at a lecture and book signing given by John J. McNeil. His new book is Sex as God Intended It. The author himself at the start of his talk acknowledged, "It's a bit presumptuous of me to claim I know what God intended for sex. But sex sells, so I had to put it in the title." I loved the title. I enjoyed the talk. I bought the bookand I was disappointed. It may be the best part of the book is the title. That's not really true, but more on that in a moment. John McNeil isn't exactly a household name for gays and lesbians. In fact, he's practically unknown to younger gays and lesbians. For more than forty years, however, as an ordained priest and psychotherapist his ministry has focused on gays and lesbians, their families and friends. His trilogy of books, The Church and the Homosexual, Taking a Chance on God and Freedom, Glorious Freedom has been a source of hope and inspiration to thousands of gay men and women. The fact that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality is a cornerstone of his ministry. McNeil grew up gay in an Irish working class family in Buffalo, New York, was a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany and struggled with his sexual feelings in a time when homosexuality was seen as evil. He served as a Jesuit priest until Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, drummed him out of the corps because he refused to discontinue ministering to gays and lesbians. Without question, McNeil is one of the heroes of the gay liberation movement and the multiple awards bestowed on him by a variety of human rights organizations attest to his contribution. Unlike celibate Catholic priests who offer advice to married couples, McNeil has been in a committed male relationship for more than forty years. He knows whereof he speaks. What turned me off in reading Sex As God Intended It, was his reliance on interpretations of interpretations of scriptural fragments or writings of saints and councilsall operating hundreds of years after the fact and without verification. I realized a long time ago that the New York Times tag line of "all the news that's fit to print" really means all the news that the Times editors choose to print and that fits the editor's preconceptions of news. More accurately the McNeil book might be titled, Sex As God Intended It In The View of John McNeil, With Selected Evidence and Arguments Supportive Of The Author's Hypothesis. I don't think a title like that will put the book on the best seller list any time soon and, if that were the title, I would have kept my fifteen bucks in my wallet. But McNeil makes two arguments that I found helpful. Citing the creation story in Genesis, he points out there are two creation accounts. One account "clearly indicates the divine purpose in creating sexual differentiation was procreative." In the second account the purpose of sexual differentiation was not procreation but rather companionship. It was not good for Adam to be alone. It took the Catholic Church until Vatican II in 1966 to recognize companionship as coequal to procreation. No one ever accused the members of the Holy See of being fast learners. Secondly, McNeil sees sex as play and states, "Play should be understood as a basic form of human activity, irreducible to anything else." That answers a life long question for me and many others who are "recovering Catholics," or "recovering Methodists," or simply recovering from the Puritan tradition. As I've experienced sex, from my first orgasm to the present day, I've continually wondered, how can anything that feels so good be bad? Or more pointedly, how can an all-knowing Supreme Being create man as a sexual being, create sex as a totally pleasurable source of well being, and expect it to occur monthly in the missionary position? That never made sense to me and still doesn't. But to include sex as play and as a means toward companionshipthat does make sense. "...the conditions necessary for play to take place are identical with the conditions necessary for love to exist between two persons. The most important of these is that the partners must see each other as equals....Gay marriage is usually totally based on the equality of the partners and thus serves as an ideal model for the renewal of heterosexual relations on a healthier basis." There are lots of practical gems like this sprinkled throughout the book and, despite my inability to buy into the traditional religious gobbledy-gook, I got my money's worth.John Siegfried, a former Rehoboth resident who now lives in Ft. Lauderdale, maintains strong ties to our community and can be reached at hsajds@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 19, No. 07 June 19, 2009 |