An interview with gay theologian
Dr. L. William Countryman on the role
of heteros in the struggle for gay rights

Dr. Countryman’s latest book, Gifted by Otherness, (coauthored with M. R. Ritley) is a stirring plea for gays and lesbians to take over the leadership of their own struggle, and not wait for the wider heterosexual community to offer them a place at the table. This raises questions as to the role of heterosexual allies in this paradigm. An interview with gay theologian Dr. L. William Countryman on the role of heteros in the struggle for gay rights Newsletter of Clergy United for the Equality of Homosexuals Winter 2002 A newsletter devoted to assisting faith communities in the struggle for gay equality. Open Affirming Pages Hearts Vol. 1 No. 1 www.clergyunited.com 1 INSIDE: News from 30,000 Feet, page 2. Out-Standing!, page 2. Profiles in Courage, page 3. CUEH Activites, page 3. Allies in the Struggle, page 4 Ex-Gay Ministries Watch, page 5. World Watch, page 5. September 11 Update, page 6.

SK: Bill, your writing ministry up to now has mostly concerned itself with helping church people live into the heart of Christianity. I’m thinking that your emphases on forgiveness and grace and the priesthood of all believers, and how to live these concepts out in our daily life has pretty much preoccupied you in the past. How does your most recent book, Gifted by Otherness, fit into this mold?

BC: Well, it’s actually very much in the same tradition. It’s looking at a specific group within the church rather than trying to address itself to the most general topics, but my great concern has always been that the really serious questions of theology and ethics are things that everybody lives with everyday, and they need to be discussed in everyday language.

SK: So Gifted by Otherness, then, is specifically looking at the gay and lesbian community within the church and how it can live its life out within that context?

BC: Yes. And I think some of that has implications for other people in the church, too, but they weren’t my primary concern as I was writing.

SK: What have you learned about the otherness of other minorities; for instance, people of color and women, that help inform your sense of the gift of gay and lesbian otherness?

BC: I think that I’ve tried to be attentive over the years to the experiences of people of color and of women in a church dominated by men, and I think there are some significant differences in gay and lesbian experience. One is that gay and lesbian people almost invariably are actually born and raised in heterosexual households, so we don’t form a kind of instantly obvious minority group. That sense of identity has to be discovered individually, person by person. But there certainly is a way in which a culture is tailored to conceive of a standard issue person. In our culture, a white, heterosexual male, I think, would probably fit that description most readily. We’re very much aware of that just as people of color are very much aware of it, and women are very much aware of it.

SK: I’m writing a book with Rodney Powell, who is one of the people that David Halberstam featured in his book, The Children, regarding the civil rights struggle of the Sixties and the place that college students played in it, and what we’re focusing on happens to be the parallels between the civil rights struggle then and the gay rights struggle of today. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about how they might be compared to each other as opposed to what you just said now of the differences.

BC: What is similar is that basic difficulty that any society has in thinking that things could possibly be different. Imagine a new way of being in which the people who’ve been in charge of everything are not the only people in charge anymore. I think our initial human assumption is, “Oh, everything will fall apart” if the same people are not in charge.

SK: Blacks in the military, gays in the military.

BC: Exactly! And it takes a certain length of experience, I think, before that comes to be disproved. Plus there are some people who are just bigots. For those people, about all one can hope is that they become fewer over time. If they are going to be converted, it won’t be by public discourse; it will be by private experience. I think an awful lot of people come to a point of discovery about gay and lesbian people when they realize that some favorite nephew or whoever is gay, and then they have to start working with their own presumptions about that.

SK: Well, among other things, your book is a stirring call to gays and  lesbians to take charge of their own destiny and not leave it in the hands of the “ignorant, ill-informed at best, or hostile at worst,” heterosexual community. What particular obstacles are in your way that the heterosexual community has placed there?

BC: Well, I think there is a huge cultural obstacle that you can’t lay the blame on anybody for. It’s just built into western culture, this insistence that being homosexual is, at best, a kind of medical deficiency and, at worst, a really quite dreadful sort of subversion of society, a sin, et cetera. That’s built in and not something that one readily shrugs off. So, in order to discover one’s self as a gay or lesbian person, you really have to do a radical reevaluation of what the church and the culture at large have been telling you about what that means, and you have to reject most of that because you have to find out in your own experience and in conversations, particularly with other gay and lesbian people that, yes, it’s possible to be genuinely human and generous and faithful and hopeful and loving as a gay or lesbian person. So that’s the first thing and then, of course, there are a lot of legal impediments about membership in various groups, about protection from discrimination, about protection for our family statuses.

SK: One researcher found there’s over one thousand rights that heterosexuals have that homosexuals do not have.

BC: That doesn’t surprise me at all.

SK: Your focus in Otherness is specifically on the gay community and its struggle to define and empower itself. What role, if any, do you see for heterosexual allies in this struggle?

BC: Oh, I think it’s a partnership and I don’t think big social change ever takes place because of a single line of action or because a single group of people is pushing for action. Tensions can sometimes arise as arose for example in the civil rights movement when some African Americans begin to say to white liberals, “Back off, this is our movement and we are in charge,” but I don’t think it’s helpful for either the white liberals or the African Americans to invite the other group out, and I don’t think it’s helpful for either heterosexuals or homosexuals to invite each other out on this one. But this is our life and, therefore, we have a certain priority in it. There has been a tendency among Christian gay and lesbian folk to feel like we spend much of our public life battling the heterosexual authorities. We also have acquired a lot of superb allies in the process and I don’t think most of us have any question or problem or distress about that at all. In fact, quite the contrary. I think we’re very delighted to be sharing the work with those folk. The only point at which it becomes a problem is if someone, I don’t wish to name names here, (there have been a few examples) but if a heterosexual ally begins to sort of define for us who we are, what we mean, what our limits are, what kind of conception of family, of sexual behavior we ought to be embracing. Not that that can’t be discussed; it can be. But it needs to be clear that the heterosexual partners in this are not the grown-ups who are telling us what to do. We’re all grownups and, yes, we can discuss all these things with each other, but heterosexual folk are not in charge any more than we are.

SK: My experience, having been included in many gay and lesbian actions and discussions, is they’re not quite sure what to do with their heterosexual allies. I’m hoping that, through conversations such as our own, we might be able to find some areas that are comfortable for both gays and straights to work together in and achieve common objectives. So, what is the best use of straight allies in the gay rights struggle?

BC: Well, I think another aspect of it that’s tremendously important is that heterosexuals often have the ear of other heterosexuals in a way that gay and lesbian people don’t. Another important related aspect to that is there are a lot of issues about what heterosexual people take for granted, that have to be worked on because gay and lesbian liberation isn’t simply a matter of saying, “Well, everything’s going to stay exactly the same except that gay and lesbian people will be treated a little nicer,” because as soon as you make alterations like that, you discover that everything changes. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re still having such a struggle with racism, because people are still unwilling to admit that being white won’t mean the same thing anymore, that it’s just as good to be black. And so I think one of the things that has to happen (and everything can’t happen at once; I’m not complaining) in the long run is for heterosexuals to be thinking pretty carefully about what their sexuality means to them and how that might be different or at least be expressed differently in a world where it’s just as good to be homosexual. An example of this kind of thinking is Patricia Beattie Jung and her book on heterosexism. Which, for me, was a real eye-opening book because of the way it defined the presuppositions that are clearly there, that we all work with in various ways, but which I took for granted so much, and I think most heterosexuals even take for granted so much, that I couldn’t have even put my finger on them.

SK: Well, it would take a feminist to point them out.

BC: Yes!

SK: I’m wondering what your view of gay-centered churches is? Are they a transition to a more inclusive way of doing church, or do they have a permanent and vital role to play?

BC: That’s a really interesting question and I don’t have an answer to it. My own experience is that it’s really pretty easy for a church with a substantial gay population to become much broader. I think it’s happened a lot in MCC congregations. Most of us – well, I don’t know; maybe that’s an exaggeration– many of us, straight or gay, have about us a sense that we’re really not acceptable, and to be in a church where gays are at home, means you’re in a church where you can be at home, too, even if you’re not gay.

SK: Well, what prompted the question is that I know several pastors who are now retired who were very much a part of the African American civil rights struggle in the Sixties and to their chagrin they find that the churches are still as segregated as they’ve ever been, and they thought that in many respects what they were fighting for, integrated churches across the board, just never happened, and they’re very saddened by that. I think their point is well taken that the Realm of God is an inclusive community, and I think that these expressions are necessary in their exclusive forms, but only in transition to something more inclusive, and I think that’s a long way down the line. So the interim steps that we take are helpful, but I don’t know if you would agree with me that these really represent the fullness of God’s Realm.

BC: You know, I think, in a strange way, I’m just not worried about it. I think whatever happens will happen and if 100 years from now there are still gay and lesbian congregations, that thought doesn’t bother me unless it means that the rest of the church is just whisking people off into those congregations.

SK: I’ve got just two more questions. One is that I would assume from what I’ve read so far, that in the essentialist/constructionist controversy, you would be an essentialist and, if that’s true, I’m wondering how you would handle Romans 1.

BC: I’m actually not an essentialist. I am totally bewildered at both positions. I don’t see any possible way of talking about sexual orientation that doesn’t pull from both of those. I don’t think the constructionists have ever been able to offer the least notion of why anybody would be homosexual purely on the basis of social construction.

SK: Exactly.

BC: And, on the other hand, no matter how essentialist you get, you just can’t talk about human sexuality without having to talk about social construction.

SK: That’s right, yes.

BC: Heterosexuality is not the same thing in different cultures. So, why wouldn’t it be true of homosexuality? And so I just think the whole conflict is bizarre. It just perplexes me more and more all the time. I just think there’s no evidence, as far as I can see, for there being any significant human culture where you don’t find people who are attracted to members of the same sex.

SK: Well, I think you’ve explained yourself very well on that. Thank you. Now, my —

BC: But, to come back to the Roman’s thing, I’m still convinced that the argument I laid out in Dirt, Greed and Sex is correct in so far as the apostle Paul is not saying that samesex sexual acts are sinful. I think he’s saying they’re disgusting. He’s speaking as a Jew of the time, but it’s really very awkward for him theologically. I think he would like to say they’re sinful, but I don’t think he can quite bring himself to do that because it would betray his theological position.

SK: Well that, in fact, is a perfect segue into my last question. You’ve touched on it already. What do you think about what Richard Hayes and Robert Gagnon have done in their criticisms of Dirt, Greed and Sex?

BC: Yes, I have looked at that, as a matter of fact, and they’re precisely the people I have in mind. Most people would just bypass the whole thing. They have at least made some effort to acknowledge my arguments, but I don’t think either one of them understood them, especially in terms of my arguments regarding the rhetoric of the letter, which is actually one of the two pillars of my argument, and that one, as I recall, basically gets ignored by both Gagnon and Hayes. The other pillar of it is Paul’s use of a perfect passive participle which I don’t think either of them understands.

SK: Which is that?

BC: Where he says, “...people having been filled up with,” and then you get the long list at the very end of the passage of all the vile things that people have committed and virtually everybody who reads the passage reads it as a continuation as if it’s referring back to the...

SK: ...anti-homoerotic tirade.

BC: Yes, uh huh. I think that simply ignores the grammar and syntax of it.

SK: To say nothing of the use of the word “natural.”

BC: Yes.

SK: When Paul can say it’s unnatural for a man to have long hair, I think right there you just have to say he is a product of his culture, and this is another case of it. Homophobia actually informs our theology rather than comes out of it.

BC: Yes, I think that’s right.

SK: And I think that was true of Paul.

BC: Oh, yes.

SK: So to really answer Romans 1, from Hayes’ perspective in particular, requires acknowledging that all of that section is by way of illustration. Paul’s concern here is with idolatry and the effect it has on idolators. There were any number of examples of how idolatry had worked itself out in the lives of people. Homoeroticism happened to be the example Paul chose. Why? Because of Paul’s own homophobia that makes him think this is the worse-case scenario. Well, anyway. It’s been a pleasure talking with you, Bill, and —

BC: Well, likewise. Thank you for making the effort. And I commend you on your efforts with Clergy United.