More on Julie Lyons

Julie Lyons' piece is amazing not only because it appeared on the website of an alt-weekly, but because it breaks a taboo that needs breaking. The public discussion about homosexuality has become so stilted and false.

On one side, you have people -- usually Christians -- who speak with complete certainty about the lives of homosexuals, their "choice" to be gay, and how healing awaits them if they'd only come to Jesus. On the other, you gays and their allies who will not tolerate any divergence from the party line that everything is always and everywhere perfect in gay lives, and that any questioning is a sign of the foulest bigotry, to be denounced and vilified without quarter. Left in the vast middle, I believe, are people like Julie Lyons -- whether or not they personally struggle with same-sex attraction. Speaking for myself, I have and have had gay friends who are saner and better adjusted than most straights I know; it is only an ideologue who could look at these men and women and see utter brokenness and despair. It's just not there. But I have also had gay friends who are sex-addicted messes in a way that the straights I know just ... aren't. And broadly speaking, there is something about gay male culture, with its deification of desire, that I find deeply disordered. You can't read books like Randy Shilts' "And The Band Played On," which in part chronicled the refusal of San Francisco's gay male community to close the bathhouses despite the raging AIDS epidemic, without having profound questions of the spirit behind much of this stuff. And yet, even though I do believe in the traditional Christian/Biblical teaching on homosexuality, when I hear some Christians pronouncing so authoritatively about the matter, and what is to be done, I cringe, and wonder, "Do you even know any gay people?"

Given the fiercely clashing ideologies, to read someone like Julie Lyons come forward and talk about the complicated realities of struggling with not only same-sex attraction, but sexuality in general -- well, it's liberating. (So has been the work of my friend David Morrison, a chaste orthodox Catholic and former gay activist who does not respect the political correctness of the right or the left in his writing about same-sex attraction.) And to be perfectly frank, though I believe she got to a good point (by the grace of God and her own openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit), if she had become a lesbian, I still would have been grateful for her testimony in this piece. What she does here is talk about a real life, about the refusal to accept easy answers and false solutions for her brokenness. I suspect there are very few heterosexuals who haven't struggled to master their own sexual brokenness, especially in a culture that instructs you to accept it and indulge it as "who you are" -- as if our true and complete identity was determined by our sexual desires. I believe that there is a "right ordering" of our sexual desires, and that all of us are required to struggle to achieve it, all the days of our life. It is never easy, certainly not in a culture like ours, for reasons already stated. But the difficulty of the struggle doesn't relieve us from the obligation to embrace it, and to show mercy to our fellow strugglers, but not at the sacrifice of living in truth.

Of course we argue over what it means to "live in truth" about sex and sexuality, but look, can't we stand down a bit and try to see what the other side is saying, and just ... listen, with an open mind, putting aside the compulsion to demonize, instead seeking to understand, even if we are unlikely to agree? I see the whole public conversation about homosexuality as being like the one we have on the Iraq war: on vast segments of the Right, to express any doubts about this administration, its case for war, its conduct of the war, etc., is to show yourself to be the worst kind of traitor to the Glorious Cause. And on the Left, to express any doubts about the dogma that Bush is Chimpy McHitler, and undertook this war from the basest of motives, etc., is to be the worst kind of traitor to the Glorious Cause.

I'm awfully tired of Glorious Causes, especially when they render the difficult and complicated truths of lived human experience into politically and emotionally useful abstractions.

Anyway, I first learned about the Lyons essay on FrontBurner, the snarky, must-read blog of D, the Dallas city magazine. There was some expected commentary about how Lyons must be a self-hating closet case, and so forth, but I really liked what the magazine's publisher, Wick Allison, a conservative who is very comfortable with and friendly to gays (you'd have to be to go to his parish) had to say in response:

All I've read so far on FB, pardon me for saying so, is a bunch of secular media people unable to fathom the depth and complexity of a woman's Christian faith. Perhaps it is impossible to grasp unless one has faced the demons she speaks of, not just about one's sexuality, but about alcoholism or drug addiction or personal corruption or the scores of other ills that afflict the human soul. As she notes, opinions about the "causes" of homosexuality are a dime a dozen. She's talking about something more important than that. I admire her honesty in making such a heartfelt witness--which, like most witness, is made to an uncomprehending world.

Amen and amen.