Life Is A Mitigating Circumstance

Two things that have to be understood as being very connected even though they don't immediatley appear to be so are these:
1.) Men have sex with men in prison and they don't necessarily consider it gay.
2.) The church as a body in the US and various of its members are desperately afraid of single people.

A friend of mine was dating someone formerly of the video pornography industry. He was not an actor. Rather, he was involved in the post-production aspect of the industry. I think his job was to edit scenes of explicit sexual activities together with banal scenes of bad acting and deficient plot development. I do know he became a Christian and was convinced it was not a job appropriate to his life in Christ. So he quit. He and my friend were ultimately not able to make a dating relationship work. I asked, jokingly, if it was because he is gay. I was told he is just the opposite. It turns out this means he could not be in a dating relationship with my friend only. He thought it necessary and acceptable to date a number of women at once. While he did not actively keep this a secret from my friend, neither did he fully disclose he was doing this. My friend did not share his view of dating. She thought it better that they get to know each other romantically at the exclusion of others unless or until they decided they were going to get married. Like many people, their dating did not result in marriage, so they stopped seeing each other all together. It was suggested his view of relationships had something to do with his history in the porn industry. My friend believes her view has something to do with her being a Christian.

The implication seems to be that because he wanted to date many girls at once, this man formerly of the porn industry was the opposite of gay. It is as if his sexual appetite was on a spectrum where as he moved further away from “gay,” he moved more towards "man whore." That's dumb. I have known homosexual men who were not very promiscuous and heterosexual men who were very proud of the fact that they slept with 3 different women over a two day period. Similarly I have known homosexual men who were very promiscuous and heterosexual men for whom promiscuity was not at all attractive. I do not want to date many women at once. But at the same time, neither do I want to date many men at once. I am content to date only my wife. What does that make me? I have never consciously thought of homosexuality and heterosexuality in terms of opposites, but it seems that is how I was acting until that little statement actually caused me to think about that assumption. Homosexual and heterosexual are not opposite sides of a sexual coin (the most sexual of coins being the 50 cent piece, both because of the Kennedy icon and its association with hip hop- Hmm, I guess the same criteria would qualify the nickel too).

I guess I know what it's not, but I don't know that I know what it is- "gayness" that is. I don't like the word "gay" as it is used among young people, boys especially. You know how they use it to describe something they don't like or find particularly confusing, as in, "You like The Backstreet Boys?! Dude, that's so gay." I would hear that frequently in class and tell students that there was only one thing that made someone gay. It is not found in liking musicals. It isn’t being thin, talking with a lisp, or preferring drama to sports if you’re a boy. It isn’t having a predilection for short hair, pants over skirts, and softball or preferring to not spend your time doting on make-up and what boys are thinking if you’re a girl. I would tell them having sexual contact with someone of your sex identifies one as gay. Now, I am not so sure. That's brings us to the men in prison thing. Men have sex with men in prison and they do not consider it gay. It is considered a result of the mitigating circumstances of prison. But life is a mitigating circumstance. We understate the consequences of sin if we think we approach life with a reasonable and healthy understanding of anything about ourselves- especially sex. Nowhere here am I saying a "man lying with a man as he would a woman" is not sin, I am saying that much of our approach as the Church to relationships in general is pathetic.

It seems the Church struggles so much with the idea of homosexuality because we are so wrapped up in cultural ideas of sex. The dominant culture values sex so much, especially as a commodity or evidence of worth, we can't imagine that anyone's sexuality is a part of who they are without it being used exploitively. We are so identified by how and what we consume and we so readily treat others as objects intended for our gratification, we can't imagine someone being attracted to another and not sinning with that. We no longer treat people like people but problems or projects to be punished or paired off (this last sentence was brought to you by the letter "p").

Anyway, I think my friend's troubles with this boy, and other boys before and since then have to do with sin. That's not news- or maybe it would be to her. I don't know. And I don't mean that she struggles with sexual temptation in the way everyone seems to think that is meant. I mean big picture sin. I mean the sin that turns people into objects of lust and finds us substituting every manner of misery for intimacy. I think I mean the extenuating circumstances causing sin.

And why does my hair go gray from the ends to the scalp and not vice versa?