Brothers and Bathhouses
where does the gay theologian sit?
Last month, I presented a paper at the Gay Men and Religion Unit of the American Academy of Religion. The paper was titled “Fraternity: In Pleasure and Death,” and I’ve modified it slightly to share with you.
The essay raises some theological questions I think about regularly, and it introduces the figure at the heart of my dissertation’s first two chapters—a Christian Brother, theologian, therapist, and activist named Kevin Gordon.
I’d like to pick up some threads I dropped in the last paper I gave for this unit. In “Gay Ambivalence” (which appears, tweaked, in Coarse Work), I teased out tendencies in queer theology either to abstract promiscuity, and sex generally, into a broader spirituality of hospitality or to leave sex behind in the pursuit of anti-identitarian queer theoretical approaches to various points of doctrine. In contrast to queerness-as-fluidity-without-sex, the gay man is marked as a fixed identity and limited by its association with sex. Gay male sexuality is something to pass over in the pursuit of a more fluid future and queerer God. I didn’t want to do that then, and, although I am increasingly convinced gay men need more paradigms for understanding our bodies and desires, I still believe that, for some of us, the path towards new language is found in the practices and desires that grow out of (and into) our relational and sexual lives.
In this essay, I bring the question of sex and promiscuity to the archive of gay theology. I focus on two loci where it emerges in that archive: the bathhouse and fraternity.
In Doing the Work of Love: Men and Commitment in Same-Sex Couples, published 1999, J. Michael Clark, the founder of this unit, recalls being invited to the baths in Atlanta by a fellow seminarian. Clark took his friend up on the offer and didn’t enjoy the experience. He writes, “I sat anxiously by the pool in nothing but a towel.” The image of a young gay theologian sitting by the pool in the bathhouse, perhaps twiddling his thumbs, has stuck with me.
It reminds me of moments in Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Late Victorians,” about AIDS in the Castro. In the essay, Rodriguez recounts the death of his friend César, who found “paradise” in the baths, “floating from body to body, open arms yielding in an angelic round.” Rodriguez writes, “He [César] said I would be the only one spared. . . . It was then I saw that the great sin against heaven was my unwillingness to embrace life.” Rodriguez sees his refusal of the baths—and the risks they bring—as a failure to embrace life, its own kind of death.
“The Late Victorians” ends at Most Holy Redeemer Church, the Catholic parish in the Castro, where a speaker calls the names of volunteers for the AIDS Support Group. One by one, the volunteers—people of all walks of life—are called up to receive recognition for their work. The essayist writes, “These learned to love what is corruptible, while I, barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew.”
The image of Clark as a young man sitting anxiously at the bathhouse pool by no means sums up his work or his life (in “Gay Ambivalence,” I cite a passage in which he calls for a theology attuned to the presence of the numinous in cruising and poppers)—but it raises a helpful question about the theologian’s relationship to gay community and sex:
Where does the gay theologian sit?
Clark reports developing an “addiction” to what his frequent interlocutor Ronald Long favorably termed “the [gay] ghetto’s ‘sexual delivery system of the bars.’’ Clark became “addicted” to the bars, but he never liked the baths; to the contrary, he writes in a couple places, he only became more resentful of them as two of his relationships ended due to his partners’ love for the baths and the infinite sex they offer. This is some real gay shit, and I love Clark for writing about it as a theologian. He says, “My first live-in relationship of six months and, later, my first longer term relationship of three years both disintegrated, at least in part, because my partner in each of these relationships was obsessively enamored of bath-house sex.” Against this backdrop of addiction and obsession, Clark laments gay men’s aversion to commitment as represented by the baths and the bars and the gyms, as well.
In the gay theology of the 1980s and 1990s, the bathhouse served as a metonym for the darker side of gay life, community, and sex.
Clark sees the baths not only as a problem in his own romantic endeavors, but also as a threat to the health and lives of gay men generally. He writes, “HIV/AIDS has become a powerful sign… of the extent to which we gay men have been willing to wound one another, from protesting bath-house closings a decade ago, to advocating multiple sexual encounters as requisite for gay male identity, to failing to support long-term committed couples.” He says that gay men helped to bring the devastation of HIV/AIDS upon themselves, while insisting that he is not blaming the victim. This is Clark at his most angry and hurt, and I think, cruel. However, the idea that gay men were complicit in their own deaths, indeed killing one another through sex, was not his idea alone.
Clark was, by no means, the only gay theologian of his time to poo-poo bathhouses. In the gay theology of the 1980s and 1990s, the bathhouse served as a metonym for the darker side of gay life, community, and sex. In John Fortunato’s book AIDS: The Spiritual Dilemma from 1987, Fortunato offers bars and baths as examples of gay institutions that support a dichotomy gays inherit from society between “our sexual selves in one social sphere and the rest of us in another.” Cordoning off one’s sexual self in this indulgent way, Fortunato argues, is a result of the gay liberation movement’s failed assumption that “all we had to do was lift up the gay and we would be free.”
In The Church and the Homosexual, first published in 1976, John J. McNeill argues gay promiscuity is a result of psychological wounding by a homophobic society. He defends monogamous gay relationships by arguing against promiscuity of any orientation. He writes, “Whenever and by whomoever sexual promiscuity is indulged in, one has to do with a neurotic, unhappy, and compulsive form of sexuality.” Given “the guilt and self-hatred which so many homosexuals tend to introject as a result of the judgment passed on them by society,” the “real moral miracle” is that “many homosexuals have succeeded in maintaining a high degree of stability and have provided a truly human companionship and fulfillment.”
In a later edition, McNeill adds an appendix to The Church and the Homosexual that retracts another argument he made, that heterosexuality is preferable for those who can manage it. He doubles down, however, on his stances on monogamy and nonmonogamy. Although monogamy is “a fundamental human need,” he recognizes that “many people [] are incapable, for whatever reason—psychological, social, or economic—of entering into such a relationship. The best these people are capable of is a ‘one-night stand’ or an occasional sexual liaison with a friend.”
Not coincidentally, both Fortunato and McNeill were psychotherapists as well as theologians. In his second book, Taking a Chance on God (1988), McNeill draws on his clients’ experience as evidence that promiscuity “intensifies loneliness.” He writes, “Clients have told me many times that their sense of isolation only increased after an all-night orgy in a gay bath house.”
Where does the gay theologian sit?
Sitting in the analyst’s chair, Fortunato and McNeill extrapolate from the experiences of their clients to determine that sexual relationships beyond monogamy are failures at self-integration. They extrapolate from the lives of their clients, a self-selecting group of people who perceive their sexuality as a problem. This is bad methodology that pathologizes gay desire instead of attempting to understand it or the forms of life and community it may create. In this framework, gay desire has no place beyond conventional Christian marriage; outside of that, it builds nothing, only breaks apart. The approach is, ultimately, inadequate for my use today.
I see an alternative in the later work Kevin Gordon, who offered fraternity as a category for theological and ethical reflection in the midst of AIDS. In an essay called “Religion, Moralizing, and AIDS,” first published in 1983 and then again in revised form in 1986, Kevin writes, “Precisely because we are reflecting about sex, and the true, the good, and the beautiful, against the traumatic reality of AIDS, I want to say a very clear word in support of sex as such.” What does that mean? It means recognizing, for one, that sex is not the cause of HIV but one mechanism of its transmission. It also mean that Kevin understands sex as a generative and complicated thing—something whose ambiguities are worth learning from.
In response to the “sexual fundamentalists” and “moralizers” who took AIDS as an opportunity to “hold forth on sexual promiscuity,” Kevin argues that questions of “unsafe” sex practices and multiple sexual partners are important but not simple. Thinking well about these questions is made even more difficult by the vocabularies we have inherited. He says, “we do not even have words for what goes on inter-sexually among the 50 million single people over 18 in this country, heterosexual as well as homosexual, as they try to make responsible decisions about commitments to one another, except the language of promiscuity or one-night stands. We do not have language, because we do not, as a society, want the language to recognize the reality.” So, Kevin turns to gay community to find new language, new “sexual data.”
The sketch of a solution Kevin provides to the question of sex between men particularly in the midst of AIDS is informed by Kevin’s own particular fraternal formation. Born to an Italian-American family in Brooklyn in 1937, he entered the novitiate of Long Island-New England (LI-NE) District of the Lasallian Christian Brothers at 17 and became Brother Aquinas Kevin, taking final vows in 1962. The Lasallian Christian Brothers are an order of lay teachers founded in France in the 1680s. Their charism is “to work together in conducting gratuitous schools.”
Formalization, with its promise of longevity, requires sacrifice.
The founder of the order, Jean-Baptiste De La Salle, prohibited the Brothers from using or teaching Latin. Classes and lives were conducted in the vernacular. Their distinct vow or profession, known as the “heroic vow,” set the Brothers apart from Franciscans and Dominicans, who took vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity—often referred to together as the evangelical counsels. De La Salle refused when Brothers asked for permission to take a vow of chastity. With recognition from Rome, however, came the requirement of adopting the evangelical counsels; that is, of conceding some definition of their own way of life to the Vatican. Since the start of the Institute, the Brothers sought to articulate their own vocation in their own terms. Formalization, with its promise of longevity, requires sacrifice.
Brother Kevin was a promising young teacher and theologian from the start, writing articles on mission and pedagogy for the Christian Brothers’ academic journal as early as 1959. He fully immersed himself in the LI-NE District and its hub at Manhattan College in the Bronx at an exciting time for religious institutes, as they kept tabs on the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council (VII) and its potential implications for religious life.
As school teachers, the Brothers teach theology, but they are not priests, and during their 1967–68 General Chapter they explicitly refused the Vatican’s invitation to allow Brothers to be ordained, because it is crucial to the spirit of their institute that they embody a different kind of authority than that of the priest or bishop.
In 1965, VII’s document Perfectae Caritatis provided a mandate for Religious institutes to renew their vocations through “a constant return to the sources of the whole of the Christian life and to the primitive inspiration of the institutes, and their adaptation to the changed conditions of our time.” The following year, the Vatican called for “a sufficient measure of prudent experimentation” in “revising and adapting” the formation process, according to “the specific character of each institute.” The LI-NE District got to work imagining what it might look like to be a Brother in this new world.
Kevin began a ThD at Union Theological Seminary in 1966, researching Protestant developments in ministerial formation. In the early months of 1969, Kevin traveled to Rome, where he wrote a lengthy report called “New Patterns of Professional Education for Christian Brothers.” “New Patterns” summarizes a wide swath of research in Protestant theological education. Its suggestions would have done away with the traditional novitiate in which a young Brother fresh out of high school was truly separated from the world, implementing instead a series of placements and periods of study that immersed college graduates in ecumenical Christian community as well as the life of their District, and encouraged them to obtain advanced degrees in a field of their choice.
In general, Kevin’s plan would have slowed down the process of becoming a Brother, adding years of socialization and education prior to taking any vows. It would become less clear who is and who is not a Christian Brother. “This,” he writes,
will test the Brothers’ ability to tolerate ambiguity. Who’s in and who’s out? There are no garb changes, encouraged limitation of letter writing and family visitations, no vow formulas, special retreats, impressive ceremonies, in other words, no more effective techniques of socialization to mark one’s deepening allegiance to the group. . . . When does one become a Brother and how is this allegiance expressed? I can only answer that I don’t know. I think that the answers to those questions will only emerge out of the situations themselves, and be a communal decision of the individual, his supervisor, and his community. I do know that I personally have no taste for establishing a priori conditions of promises and the like before we really know, through concrete experience, if they are really necessary for other than the satisfaction of our own group insecurities.
When the formal elements of fraternal belonging are pared down, what is it that makes one a Brother? Even as Kevin replaces the identity of the individual brother with a question mark, a placeholder for some future personal form, something brings and holds together these persons in formation. A desire for homosociality sits at the core of Kevin’s vision for a new Brother. Desire, if allowed, produces new forms.
Kevin failed to win the election to become the new head of his district to a close friend of his, theologian Gabe Moran, around 1970. He moved to New Haven in ’71 and then to San Francisco in ’72 to teach at Lone Mountain College. He moved to the Castro shortly after. He remained a Christian Brother officially until ’75, when he had a persistent infection and it became difficult to continue his health care through his district’s insurance. He remained, in his own mind, committed to the spirit of the order and to the work Christian Brothers are called to do: teaching. As he built institutions for rethinking theology and sexuality, he leaned on his fellow Brothers and Sisters religious, keeping abreast of their work and bringing them along with him. Well into the 1980s, Kevin insisted that his work remained within the Spirit of the Lasallian Christian Brothers and signed off letters to them: “Fraternally, Kevin.”
Like McNeill and Fortunato, Kevin became a therapist. He completed a clinical internship at the University of San Francisco’s Human Sexuality Program around 1976. The HSP collected practitioners from various disciplines into the same room for some fairly bold sexological pedagogy, for example, watching pornography communally in an attempt to understand arousal. Kevin opened a private therapy practice and became something of a locally known figure. He gave free lectures on theology, psychology, and sexuality at St. Mary’s Cathedral. He gave an invocation at the 1982 Gay Games in San Francisco. He was, himself, a leatherman, as his good friend and collaborator, the lesbian ethicist and theologian Mary Hunt remembers. Kevin later described himself as the “resident theologian of Castro Street.”
Kevin wrote a review of McNeill’s The Church and the Homosexual for the Advocate in 1976. He appreciated the book while critiquing McNeill’s failure to grapple with gay forms of relationality. Kevin writes, “it would be sad, indeed, for homosexuals, on the advice of theologians, to rush to monogamous relationships, a little late and slightly breathless.” McNeill mastered the theological and biblical terrain on which the church defines sexuality, but Kevin asks if that is the right place from which to theologize gay life. He writes, “In the short range, only a certain amount of discernment can be done by theologians at the drawing board. But the rest, the middle and long range data, can only come from the actual building site. Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters.”
Where does the gay theologian sit? Not at the drawing board. He’s not sitting, but standing. He’s participating in the building of a gay community.
Kevin remained committed to Catholic theology through burning away the dross of its sexual inadequacies and sifting for new wisdom with which to transform it. He chaired the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s Task Force on Gay/Lesbian Issues in 1981–83 and seemingly authored most of its impressive book-length report on how to reform the Church for gays and lesbians. When the Archbishop subsequently disbanded the Task Force, Kevin’s glamor shots popped up in magazines and papers across the country, including Time, as the face of the faithful gay male challenge to Catholic hierarchy. He started the Consultation on Homosexuality, Social Justice, and Roman Catholic Theology, which brought together lay scholars like Mary Hunt, John Boswell, Rosemary Ratherford Ruether, Bernadette Brooten, and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as well as former monks and nuns like his friend Gabe Moran.
Kevin moved back to New York in 1985 to resume his ThD thesis, now on the possibility of lesbian/gay Roman Catholic theology using what he termed “a hermeneutics of radical suspicion and fundamental trust.” He was arrested alongside Hunt and Catholic feminists protesting for abortion rights during a papal visit in 1987.
Kevin began to reconsider the theological category of fraternity in discussions with Mary Hunt about differences between lesbian sisterhood and gay brotherhood. This work never came to full fruition, as Kevin became increasingly involved in organizing around AIDS and also the building of lesbian/gay academic institutions, like the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). He himself fell ill in the mid-80s, and he died of AIDS in 1989, before he could complete his dissertation.
Returning, then, to “Religion, Moralizing, and AIDS.” In the essay, Kevin rehearses a distinction core to his theological methodology. He writes, “Out of our ongoing human and sexual lives we eventually get data, facts about sexual living. That is sexology, the study of sexuality, its logos, its data. That is not yet sexosophy, wisdom about sexuality, its sophia, its wisdom. That wisdom eventually comes out of a combination of a number of related sources, religious texts, church traditions, empirical evidence, sound reasonings, but a major and indispensable focus is the lived experience of the community itself.”
Kevin does not believe Christian ethics starts with the imposition of a predetermined code of conduct or that it may be encapsulated by a set of moral principles (although the formulation of morals is certainly part of it). Citing the Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, he says Christian ethics entails “a way of discovering about the depths of life, out of which decisions about our behavior emerge.” In order to make decisions about a problematic, a community must be immersed in that problematic over time. And “out of the immersion will emerge the dictates of wisdom.”
For gay men living during AIDS, Kevin sets an ethical agenda of “self consciously deepening and reflecting upon [the gay male community’s] own experience of friendship” to develop a sexosophy adequate to gay men’s lives. Kevin remained clear: there is no skipping over sexual data to sexual wisdom. There is no sexosophy without sexology. But, Kevin does offer three points of departure for discerning sexual wisdom: informed consent, related autonomy, and fraternal friendships.
The principle of informed consent comes from medical ethics. It is an affirmation of the patient’s right to self-determination and “a negative right—the right of non-interference.” In the context of AIDS, this would mean learning “about the risk factors involved in various sexual activities,” and making decisions from that place of information. A value must ground informed consent, and for that value Kevin suggests “related autonomy.” “Autonomy” affirms self-determination while “related” widens the scope of care to one’s “brothers and sisters, known and unknown, near and far.” This counters the potential for sexual decisions to be made solely for selfish ends and instead locates sex within a network of relations. Finally, related autonomy gets “literally fleshed out in fraternal friendship.” Kevin insists on only sketching out this new gay sexual ethic because it must emerge from community. But, he recommends “friendship, fraternity, become our central lens for watching for ethical wisdom to emerge from our on-going life together; that friendship, fraternity, be the grounding for our sense of autonomy in relatedness, for informed decisions in solidarity, decisions both sexual and otherwise.”
By focusing on fraternity, Kevin sneakily sets marriage to the side. Fraternal friendship, he continues, “might provide us a relational context to creatively see what we can come up with, that is not necessarily monogamy on the one hand, nor genital anonymity on the other.” Kevin’s fraternity is not equatable with promiscuity, although it might take up and transform promiscuity.
In his theology of sexuality, like in his reimagining of the Lasallian Christian Brother, Kevin defers vows.
Where does the gay theologian sit?
Kevin’s alternative to Clark’s bathhouse pool or Rodriguez’s cold hard pew is, most simply, not sitting alone. Kevin would rather sit next to, or on—maybe under—a brother. His fraternity involves embracing others and accepting the risks that come with embrace. His fraternity entails openness to forms of sexual relationship that gay men, and certainly the Catholic Church, have not yet found or formalized.
Kevin also provides an alternative to Fortunato’s and McNeill’s theologizing from the analyst chair, a perch from which the pursuit of any relational form beyond marriage-like monogamy appears to be a refusal of wholeness, a refusal even of humanity. In his theology of sexuality, like in his reimagining of the Lasallian Christian Brother, Kevin defers vows. While I am unsure if or how I will use the category of “fraternity” in my work going forward, I will take some of this with me.
Kevin’s friend and colleague, John Boswell, also used brotherhood as a model for gay relationships, but his appropriation of medieval brother-making rites moved in the direction of monogamous gay marriages. More recently, celibate gay Christians like Wesley Hill have reclaimed monastic forms of spiritual friendship as models for their own relationships. Each of these are different kinds of gay Christian fraternity, and each of them may actually be adequate to different gay men. Kevin’s model has the added benefit of being undergirded by a theological methodology that allows for different brothers to embody their being in different ways. Might a monogamous brother share a fraternity with the promiscuous brother, who might share a fraternity with the celibate brother?
What makes a brother a brother is not a particular set of characteristics or a preformed identity—no, recall that Kevin put a question mark at the heart of what it meant to be a Lasallian Christian Brother. What makes a brother a brother is his brothers, and the desire that draws them together.
Thank you to the Gay Men and Religion Unit for allowing me the space to present this paper. Thank you to Lynne Gerber, my friend and co-conspirator, for archive help and abundantly fruitful conversation. And thank you for reading.
If you know of someone who might enjoy this essay, please pass it along.
Next month (or later this month), I’ll share an interview with Josh Tvrdy, whose excellent first chapbook, Smut Psalm, won the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and was just published.
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