Category Archives: WC77 – Race & Identity

Bo Young, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Sin, Sex and Democracy

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Sin, Sex and Democracy:
Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right
By Cynthia Burack, SUNY Press
ISBN: 978-0-7914-7406-8
Reviewed by Bo Young

My own personal prophet, Noel Coward opined that “We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?” Well, no. Not that I’m suggesting I found it exasperating that with a title like Sin, Sex and Democracy, I half expected to see Stephen Colbert leering from the cover, clad in some a red, white and blue leather dominatrix outfit wielding a star-spangled cat-o-nine tails. No…this is a scholarly examination of the tactics and language of the Christian Right by Cynthia Burack; she’s not kidding, and neither is the Christian Right. I have to keep reminding myself: you have to take seriously the people who take this Bible thing seriously. They (and their source material) are dangerous.

Burack, an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Ohio State University, makes it plain that, whatever the stripe, the rising Religious Right has one goal and one goal only: theocracy in the United States. Their theocracy. She explains how, using rhetoric, they dissemble and “strive to have their political and theological beliefs misidentified by the broad public.” The frightening thing is how far along they’ve dragged us all on this road to the perdition of their own making, how effective this tactic is.

Burack maps the triumphalist path(ology) and has put together the essential reader for anyone interested in the political implications and the maniacal agenda of the religionists. Language is important, and she has the ears to decipher and is offering us all the Religious Wingnut Decoder Ring. As she warns in her introduction, “Political discourse is a form of pedagogy, and those of us who do not appreciate the complexities of conservative Christian pedagogy will have a more impoverished understanding of American politics than those who do.” This is not theological debate. This is the unholy alliance of politics and religion met on the field of rhetoric. He who gets to the words, first, defines the word, and thereby defines the battle. Obsequious public piety crossed the lines of unseemly long ago and entered the realm of appalling. And GLBT people continue to present too tempting a target for the theocrats to pass up. There will be no Murrovian “Have you no shame?” moment in this battle. The answer is no.

Burack’s assay of the religious right is most interesting when she examines how the supposed religious movement presents itself as one thing when it is truly another. The obvious one is how they present and package themselves some “moral majority” but in fact have no claim to any measurable morality (and so long as proper public self-abasement is exhibited) like any snake oil seller, they maintain the key to their own absolution and “forgiveness”). Whatever the hypocrisy, fall in line and all is forgiven.

They present as underdogs, when they hold as much sway, now, as corporations (and with whom they are in league, of course). They cloak themselves in the sheep’s clothing of Democracy, but are hell bent on asserting a theocracy. Indeed, Burack shows that Christian conservatives “profoundly mistrust democracy, identifying liberty with license and with the satisfaction of individual interests through enslavement to selfish desires.” Which is precisely what they’d have everyone believe about Gay folk.

Professor Burack has an anthropological eye, as well as a politicians (and an ear for humor, which would seem to be indispensible when mucking around in this stuff) and discusses the La Haye’s Left Behind series and the weird world of Jack T. Chick’s comic book tracts which most of us have encountered at one point or another in some interstate highway bathroom or stuck under the windshield wiper on our car.

In the current campaign cacophony about the black Reverend Jeremiah Wright (and why has no one pointed out that he’s only living up to his biblical namesake when his speech reaches for the jeremiad heights?) when not even a sliver of the same attention is being paid to John McCain’s white Reverend Hagee and to white Pat Robertson’s blaming of all Gay people for Katrina and 9/11, it is refreshing to see Burack taking on these snake oil salesmen and holding them up to the same purifying light of day.

Burack has written a readable and fascinating appraisal and charting of our enemy within and the language they use to persuade. She asks “Do we hear what they hear? And once we listen for their vision of the good, what kind of sense can we make of it?” She makes sense of it and if you truck with these folks, you would certainly be well advised to read her assessment.

We’ll close with a reading from the prophet Noel Coward, once again: “It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Burack’s book is an honest appraisal of political deceit.

Bo Young is the publisher and editor of White Crane. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his fere and two hair children.

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of The Starry Dynamo

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

The Starry Dynamo:
The Machinery of Night Remixed
By Sven Davisson, Rebel Satori Press
ISBN 978-0-9790838-0-8, 249 pages, pb.
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Sven Davisson produces Ashé Journal of Experimental Spirituality, a parallel of White Crane with a Foucaultian queer post-Gay edge. He’s a creative writer, a reporter with a wry sense of storytelling, a scholar (with a degree in Queer Theory from Hampshire College) and a poet.

The Starry Dynamo is a collection of diverse writing. It opens almost like a novel with a short story, the sub-eponymous “The Machinery of Night,” that tells of two Gay teenagers meeting for what turns out to be a sexual adventure. Davisson’s intro begins: “This work is driven by a critical analysis of love, control and control structures.” Consistently then, that budding romance transforms into a story about accidental death.

The most interesting and experimental piece, titled “Mutilations,” involves incest and child sexuality and abuse. It’s written in a way that violates all traditional “unities,”: place, time, person. And, in doing so, poignantly and beautifully captures the feeling of being “mutilated” the author means to communicate in the story, whether fiction or non-fiction.

Following is a series of essays about a variety of topics: the Indian guru Rajneesh and the rise and fall of his compound in Oregon, the French Symbolist poets, Oscar Wilde, the Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs and several about the ideas of the French philosopher of sexuality Michael Foucault. I want to especially recommend this book for these specific chapters. I found I understood Foucault better while reading Sven Davisson than I have ever before (i.e. that at any given time and place in human history ideas about sex—and sexual orientation—are influenced by a vast array of factors of history, politics, culture, economics, etc. and so always have to be understood in context).

This is an interesting and—to use Davisson’s own term, experimental—book that deserves to be read, written by an important character in the long term history of Gay consciousness.

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, and Charmed Lives. He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and currently Reviews editor. He lives in San Antonio Texas. Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Jesus in Love: At the Cross

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Jesus in Love: At the Cross
By Kittridge Cherry, Androgyne Press
ISBN978-1-933993-42-3, pb, 304 pages.
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

We’ve previously reviewed Kitt Cherry’s Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More and Jesus in Love, Part I. Now the second half of this mind-blowing, provocative and fascinating life of Christ has appeared, At the Cross. Like the first part of the story, it’s a first-person narrative from the point of view of a Jesus who is a modern, psychologically and sexually (and homosexually) sophisticated ego-person who is able to relate his experience in terms understandable to 21st Century readers. This approach makes Jesus much more real than the mythological character of traditional religion. But, adding to the amazing quality of this book, Cherry’s Jesus is also the very character of that mythology, the “Son of God” incarnate, who is occasionally distracted by having to hold the cosmos in existence and keep the planets spinning round the Sun. The interplay of these two portrayals makes this book ever more fascinating and insightful about the real message of Christianity.
As the subtitle indicates, the second half of the story involves Jesus’s death and resurrection and role as “world savior.” I was especially struck by Cherry’s presentation of Jesus taking on the sins of the world. She manages to make it both realistic and mystical—the way a good myth should be able to do! As he is dying, this Jesus actually reviews all the sins of humankind, both past and future, and one by one forgives them, finally even forgiving himself for the arrogance of thinking himself God.

The two books of Jesus in Love truly transcend the Christian myth. This is a way of looking at Jesus that demonstrate the ability of Gay/lesbian consciousness to see deeper and wider into the nature of religion and spirituality. This is Jesus the way you’ve always wanted him to be. The books are very readable and entertaining. And you won’t be able to resist telling your friends about them. (I can testify to that personally.) They are so “outrageous” in the best possible sense, they need to be enjoyed and shared.

Dan Vera, Poetry, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Edward Field’s After The Fall

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

After The Fall: Poems Old and New
By Edward Field
University of Pittsburgh Press, 160 pages.
ISBN-10: 0822959801
Reviewed by Dan Vera

The appearance of new poems by Edward Field is always a cause for celebration. The master poet begins his most recent collection, After the Fall: Poems Old & New with a series of poems that serve as gutsy ars poetica on the engagement of the poet with the world. Under the title “What Poetry Is For” Field surveys the landscape of the wartime Bush years. Some of the poetry is time-sensitive and will soon (hopefully) read to the future as a time capsule of our era. In “Letter on the Brink of War” Field bears witness to what the unjaundiced eye sees at the beginning of a disaster he has lived through before:

“Homeland Security” extends the theme by offering an analysis of the police state tactics faced by those who raise suspicion. Field has a way of writing that delivers a punch with the deftest of comic timing. It leaves you smiling and wincing at the same time.

What I have always loved about Field’s writing is its utter lack of pretense and its firm conviction in telling the truth. Beauty is not the word here. Breathtaking is. You read a marital poem like “Oedipus Schmoedipus” or the searing indictment of Jews complicit in the current administration’s wrong-doing "But what are Jews doing in this government? / Wasn’t civil liberties always a Jewish passion?" and you understand why Plato wanted poets banned from his Republic for their insistence on telling the truth. There is also humor. Lots of it —whether writing on aging in “Prospero, in Retirement,” or his apologia to his lover who must live with “the poet” in “Mrs. Wallace Stevens,” Field always delivers. Take “In Praise of My Prostate” in with Field celebrates his body’s resiliencies:

When you’re dealing with a great poet, the beauty of a volume of selected works like this—especially for the uninitiated—is its ability to offer up new work that captures your affections, and also present the earlier work that serves as confirmation that this genius has roots and, even better, offer a past catalogue of volumes to seek out. Here in one gem of a book are the poems I have loved for many years. Field’s “The Life of Joan Crawford” from his 1967 volume Variety Photoplays, “From Poland,” and “Mae West” are here too.

As he did in his memoirs published three years ago, Field continues his clear-eye seeing and saying of the world. I believe he writes with the clear understanding that there is a beauty to be found in honesty. With After the Fall Field somehow gives courageous permission to be more honest in our lives. As if saying life is more fun and more compelling by facing the truth of oneself. In all its beauty. I truly believe it.

Dan Vera is managing editor of White Crane. He lives in Washington, DC where he writes poetry, organizes readings and publishers books of poetry. Visit him at www.danvera.com

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of So Fey

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction
Edited by by Steve Berman
Haworth Positronic Press, 370 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1560235903
Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

In his masterpiece, Peter Pan, Sir J. M. Barrie tells us that “Every time a child says, “I don’t believe in fairies, somewhere a fairy falls down dead.” Fortunately, I do believe in fairies and so do the 22 authors who contributed to So Fey.

This is an outstanding collection, because without a direct chronology, the reader time trips from modern times with the hero of Tom Cardamone’s “A Faun’s Tale,” who discovers the pleasures held within Central Park’s Rambles, to Delia Sherman‘s medieval “The Faerie Cony-Catcher,” as the queen of Elfland (borrowed from Purcell’s Faerie Queen) and her handmaiden lead their prey, a smith, into gay sexual fulfillment. The queen of Elfland makes another appearance in Sarah Monette’s “Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland,” as a young wife is drawn to the queen, in spite of her husband’s pleading to stay with him.

Three tales focus on tragic love with objects from nature: Danny finds a tragic love with his perfect man in Kenneth D. Woods’ “The King of Oak and Holly;” a monk is fascinated by Craig Laurance Gidney’s “A Bird of Ice,” and an Asian princess discovers love in the Tolkien-like, “Year of the Fox” by Eugie Foster.

Some of the pieces collected here are drawn from or are renovated versions of classic literature. The myth of Orpheus and Euridice is used by Holly Black for “Coat of Stars as Rafael,” a young gay dancer, Rafael, returning to his hometown and visiting a strange underworld where he makes a bargain to reconnect with his deceased love. Laurie J. Marks’ “How the Ocean Loved Margie” borrows from the same Celtic tale which John Sayles used in his film, “The Secret of Roan Inish.”

Two stories toward the end of the volume held special interest for me. Because I recently completed the first volume of His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass, I loved Lynne Jamneck’s “How Laura Left a Rotten Apple and Came Not to Regret the Cold of the Yukon.” Told in first person, Laura leaves Manhattan for a place called Poniwok. There, she finds herself attracted to Gwen, the town’s police sergeant. At first rejecting her friendship, Laura finds herself fascinated by the woman who shows her the Northern lights.

Borrowing the names of Jane, George and Michael from P.L. Travers, Joshua Lewis was inspired by the aforementioned J. M. Barrie in his lovely piece, “Ever So Much More Than Twenty” (the words Wendy uses tell Peter Pan that she’s no longer a child). In this enchanting story, Michael’s daughter, Jane, recommends that they return to the cabin of her father’s childhood. It was in the magical woods that both Jane and Michael encounter the joys of his youth, as they both encounter a fairy who is every bit a modern incarnation of Barrie’s most famous hero.

A sublime experience for any gay reader, So Fey has 22 remarkable stories you’ll return to on a frequent basis, and if you don’t already, will have you believing, once and for all, in fairies!

Aside from his role as a regular contributor and reviewer for White Crane, Steven LaVigne is also a teacher, playwright, reviewer and director who lives in the Twin Cities. His work appears regularly online and he frequently adapts literature for children’s theatre. His most recent play, based on the Arabian Nights, was presented this past summer. He’s presently doing research for a new project.

Bo Young, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Forgiving the Franklins

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Forgiving the Franklins (DVD)
Written, Directed & Produced by Jay Floyd
Grinning Idiot Entertainment – 2006
Starring Teresa Willis, Robertson Dean, Aviva,
Vince Pavia, Mari Blackwell, and Pop DaSilva as Christ
Reviewed by Bo Young

OK. This one is never going to make it to the malls, which is a shame, because that’s precisely the audience that needs to see this satirical parable of modern fundamentalist self-righteousness. Well…maybe not the audience that needs to see it, but it sure as heck it the audience you’d want to see it, if for only the moment when they ran screaming from the theater, their heads exploding from the sheer sacrilege of it all.

I don’t really know from sacrilege anymore, but I sure as hell know from sacred cows and this movie grinds up every Christian sacred cow and turns them into quarter-pounders with cheese. Think Will and Grace crossed with Six Feet Under. Your basic Sears catalogue suburban family, stiff with their religious piety…suddenly dead. Literally, hit by a truck, only the daughter is (you’ll pardon the expression) left behind. The other three…her deeply frustrated mother, her stiff (and yet somehow humpy) board of a father (who have intercourse without ever opening their eyes) and her big pretty football playing brother (who listens to Gilbert & Sullivan in his car CD player, to give you some idea of the subtlety of the script) wake up in a vast arid plain of the afterworld, a little disoriented, a little confused to see a decidedly third-world looking guy taking an axe to a large wooden crucifix. Like I said…subtlety isn’t one of the strong points of this script, as entertaining as it is.

Anyway, the dark-skinned Jesus, in one of the more delicious visual metaphors, proceeds to remove “bloody apples” from the backsides of the brains of the three undead family members, who quickly find themselves back in the hospital with nary a scratch. Their just-this-side-of-bulimic daughter, who wasn’t hurt as badly in the accident is still limping around on a crutch. Ah metaphor.

The script is a ham-fisted from time to time as if the director and writer were “trying to make a point” and sometimes the jokes seem a little bit like shooting fish in a barrel. That said, there is a hilarious discussion of the pros and cons of teachers having sex with their students around the family dinner table at one point which is no small feat to pull off humorously. Male teachers and football playing students, that is. And again, this story gets a little ham-fisted.

But frankly, if LOGO had real balls, they’d turn this into a regular, ongoing television series. It has a TV sitcom feel. And while it’s a very funny movie that takes predictable turns, they’re fun to watch.

My favorite line is when the mother is talking to her self-righteous fundamentalist (is that redundant?) “best friend” and says, “When you talk about God, you sound like one of those women on the talk shows who’s still in love with the husband that beats them.”

The ending has a twist that I wasn’t so sure I liked that seems like the writers just didn’t know what to do with the characters after a while. But at least the daughter loses her crutches.

Bo Young is the publisher and editor of White Crane. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his fere and two hair children.

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Murder in the Vatican

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Murder in the Vatican: The Revolutionary Life
of John Paul and the Vatican Murders of 1978
By Lucien Gregoire, Authorhouse Press
ISBN1-4259-5309-3, pb 385 pages, $19.99
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

George Lucien Gregoire, a Gay man, happened to be boyhood best friends with John Champney who grew up to become a Catholic priest and was for a while the personal secretary to Albino Luciani, the man who, in 1978, became Pope John Paul I but who then died—mysteriously—just thirty-three days after his election to the Papacy. Champney “happened” to die the very next day, killed by a hit and run driver outside the walls of the Vatican (along with another some twelve people related to John Paul I who also died mysteriously in ensuing months).

Gregoire has made it one his life’s missions to bring attention to what he sees as the murder of this Pope who had promised to be a truly revolutionary figure in the history of religion. Had he remained Pope, Luciani would probably have changed the Church’s position of birth control, priestly celibacy and, notably, homosexuality.

White Crane previously reviewed Gregoire’s book Murder in the Vatican. Now that book has been rewritten and reorganized. The story is now presented as “Two Books in One Volume:” The Revolutionary Life of John Paul and The Vatican Murders of 1978.

Conspiracy theorists will love this book. It certainly makes one wonder. But more important than the questions about all the deaths that seemed to follow from Albino Luciani’s elevation to the Papacy is the presentation of this man’s modern and sensible ideas about what religion should be. The world really did suffer a tragedy and the evolution of consciousness was set back by whatever machinations cut short the term of John Paul I.

The new edition of the book is better organized than the first. And the story of John Paul I and his “revolutionary” but imminently sensible ideas, has been told in yet another volume by Lucien Gregoire titled White Light Dark Night. Gay Catholics, especially, should be interested in these various accounts by this Gay writer who just “happened” to be close enough to see what the world wasn’t allowed to see.

Dan Vera, Reviews, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Freethinkers

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
By Susan Jacoby
Holt Paperbacks, 448 pages
ISBN-10: 0805077766
Reviewed by Dan Vera

I was a history major in college and have retained a deep interest in historical subjects. I consider myself pretty well-read in history. My time in seminary and a lifetime in the church also left me with what I thought was a pretty good sense of the religious history of the United States. Then I picked up a copy of Susan Jacoby’s best-selling book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and discovered how little I really knew. It would seem strange that a book about the secularist history of the United States would teach me so much about American religious history but as is often the case, you need to know both sides to understand the full story. Having read and enjoyed this incredibly well-researched and thought-provoking book, I now realize that what I most love about the religious contributions to American culture were forged and informed by its progressive and open exchange with secularists and freethinkers.

Freethinkers came out in 2004 and spent some time on the New York Times best seller lists so it is widely available in paperback now. I can say without reservation that it is the best book I’ve read this year and perhaps the most mind-altering book of history I’ve read in the last ten years. I cannot think of another book that left me with a clarifying “aha!” moment on almost every single page. I tend to read a few books at a time and I’ve enjoyed savoring Jacoby’s writing. It is laid out in chronological order but its abundance of new information of a largely overlooked section of American history makes it an almanac of sorts on those figures who stood for free expression, for reason, and for a clear separation of church and state. There were many misconceptions about religion in American history that were deflated by this book. One discovers that in the colonial period it was the South, in states like Virginia and Georgia that the power of religion and of church structures was most fought, most notably by founding fathers Jefferson and Madison. The northern states were zealous in their desire to have an established church and to have religious tests for office-holders. It was Baptists in the South who, fearing the dominance of the Anglican/Episcopal church, wanted no church sponsorship of religion. Of course this geographic split would be reversed in a generation in ways that would echo the culture wars we are currently living in. This is the gift of Jacoby’s book. So many “how did we get here?” questions, whether we have even known to ask them, are answered in her entertaining and informative writing.

Along the way Jacoby recovers some astounding exemplars of freethought—people like Robert Ingersoll. Known in his day as “the Great Agnostic,” he drew enormous audiences to his live talks around the country and had the admiration of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, who said that Ingersoll was “from head to foot [sic] is flushed with the square — every line of him—of his books—bathed in justice, love of right, human generosity, to a degree I fail to find in any other.” Ingersoll’s words still resonate more than a hundred years later:

We are in many ways indebted to Ingersoll for the fact that we even know and read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. As an attorney Ingersoll was instrumental in battling the Comstock censorship laws that barred the distribution of materials deemed “obscene.” For years it kept Whitman’s work from not only finding a publisher but from receiving a wide audience by mail. Ingersoll’s importance to Whitman was clarified by the fact that the great “agnostic” speaker was chosen to give the eulogy at Whitman’s funeral. Jacoby, in her sole appendix item, includes Ingersoll’s moving tribute to Whitman’s vision and importance.

Jacoby’s book is thoughtfully written and such a pleasure. She does not have an axe to grind, but just tells the stories we have never been told. The book traverses through the history of the country and ends with a very pointed critique of how much we have lost by being cheated of this important history of freethought. Liberalism and skepticism and reason—those movements or understandings that have been so instrumental to a social and cultural relaxing around sexuality—are the result of individuals and movements for a rejection of illogical dogma and towards a clear-thinking approach to living life. We owe our liberty of mind and body to those who challenged the assumptions and laws of tradition and institution. Jacoby’s book should be on every reading list this year.

Jacoby’s latest book, The Age of American Unreason offers up a critique of the current war on intellect that we are living through in the United States. I look forward to reviewing it for these pages. But don’t wait for me. Read Freethinkers and I suspect you will seek out Jacoby’s newer book soon after. It’s that well-written.

Dan Vera is managing editor of White Crane. He lives in Washington, DC where he writes poetry and organizes readings and other arts and culture events. Visit him at www.wondermachine.org

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of The Voyeur

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

The Voyeur
By Michael T. Luongo
Alyson Books, 308 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1593500177

Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

Any book that begins with its leading character fighting off an attacker with a wooden dildo deserves attention. That book is Michael T. Luongo’s deliciously entertaining novel, The Voyeur. Write what you know, and always have an opening that will grab the reader are valuable pieces of advice for all writers, and Luongo’s novel definitely fits the bill. Inspired by Rudy Guiliani’s moralist campaign to clean up Manhattan, it’s the story of Jason Green whose job as a sex researcher will earn him a Ph.D. When a reporter misconstrues the facts, it sets the comic tone for the upheaval of Jason’s life.

Following the press coverage, Shelley, his boss, who’s always looking for methods of raising funds for her projects, She puts Jason in charge of an NIH study on HIV+ Gay men, that will take him into sex clubs, the baths and other dark Gay locales. Due to his upbringing, Jason’s a little like a fish out of water here, but he’s got the support of his office staff, including David, whose stiff and formal demeanor hide an interesting secret; Alicia, Jason’s close friend, who sometimes camps out in the office overnight rather than going home to her husband and family, and Ricky, hip, handsome and horny, whose attitude often forces Jason to question the realities of his life.

Because he’s so involved in his work, Jason has been ignoring his boyfriend, Mark to the point that their sex life is nonexistent. Convinced by Ricky that he needs to peruse the internet, Jason discovers that not only is Mark cheating on him, but the cheating has changed his health status, and that he’s now a likely candidate for Jason’s research. The Voyeur, then, becomes Jason’s personal journey toward self-discovery. Luongo adds a cliché character by drawing his mother as a bossy, but loving 1960s housewife, whom Jason loves teasing. The conclusion even pays homage to the cinematic version of Valley of the Dolls, and the reader understands how Jason will be able to face his future, with or without Mark.

Anyone who’s ended a relationship can appreciate how much Luongo’s writing captures the situations and can take comfort in the manner that Jason endures and articulates his feelings. The Voyeur is an enlightening and enjoyable read.

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC77 - Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of In The Eye of the Storm

June 24, 2008 Editors Leave a comment

In The Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God
By Gene Robinson
Seabury Books
ISBN 978-1-59627-088-6, HB, 162 pp. $25
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

In 2003 the New Hampshire diocese of the Episcopal Church elected the openly Gay Gene Robinson as its bishop. He’d been an exemplary priest and religious leader, popular in the diocese, loved by his congregation and more than competent to serve as a church official. He also led what many of us would think of as a satisfying and successful life as a modern Gay man: settled with a long-term partner of twenty years, with two daughters from a previous heterosexual marriage, contributing significantly to the lives of his friends and neighbors.

Of course, as we all heard in the news that year, trumpeted over and over on the TV as though it really mattered, his election by his local community, then ratified by the national Episcopal Church, brought on a veritable firestorm of protest and internecine rancor from conservatives who declared him unworthy of the post of bishop because he was openly Gay—and apparently a proponent of “Gay marriage” since he was in one. His election was pushing the Episcopal Church in a direction that conservatives, especially in Africa, disapproved of and could wave their Bibles at with chapter and verse. (One can’t imagine Episcopalians in New Hampshire sharing much of a worldview, culture or lifestyle with Episcopalians in Africa.)

In the Eye of the Storm is the very readable and interesting autobiographical account of the events surrounding Robinson’s election interwoven into a theological discussion of homosexuality and Christian doctrine.

Readers of White Crane probably won’t find anything new in the theology or the discussions of “what the Bible really says” or how the teachings of Jesus would almost necessarily have been pro-Gay (if Jesus would have known about this as a social issue). Robinson does have an appealing homiletic manner of presentation. One might even imagine he writes like Jesus would have if he were writing for a 21st century audience: Robinson uses personal examples and anecdotes—that seem very much like New Testament parables—and keeps applying the Christian teaching to real life examples instead of focusing on abstract theological principles of morality or obedience to the letter of the Law. Just like Jesus!

The book isn’t really directed to Gay people—that would be “preaching to the choir.” It’s written for the laity of the American Episcopal Church. It certainly provides those readers with new information about a topic not discussed very openly in religious circles. One would hope Robinson’s detractors would study this book.

I enjoyed reading the book; Gene Robinson comes across as a very nice fellow. Gay Episcopalians will also find the reports of Church business revealing and the projections about the future of the Anglican Communion salient: will the Church schism over sexual issues? To wit, the ordination of women, the appointment of a woman as bishop (Barbara Harris) and then another woman as head of the American Church (Katharine Jefferts Schori), and the acknowledgement of sexual goodness in an openly Gay person (Bishop Robinson).

Another openly Gay Episcopalian priest, Malcolm Boyd, is, of course, an important member of the White Crane family. He and his life partner Mark Thompson have helped shape the Gay spirituality movement. Mark’s 1987 book Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning was the book that really articulated the movement for the first time. Mark’s book is one of the anchor titles in White Crane Books‘ Gay Spirituality Series. And this past year, White Crane has brought out a new edition of Malcolm’s autobiographical Take Off the Masks AND most recently White Crane editors, Bo Young and Dan Vera, have produced a “Malcolm Boyd Reader” titled A Prophet In His Own Land which includes interviews and commentaries about Boyd’s work as a proponent of social justice and civil rights in America down through the decades (and for which Bishop Robinson has written a Foreword).

It’s been curious for me to notice how Episcopalian White Crane has suddenly gotten (I say, tongue-in-cheek). Coincidentally (??), at the same time, I’ve been watching the Showtime cable TV series The Tudors which recounts the creation of the Church of England in a schism over the sexual life of King Henry VIII. Showtime has certainly made vivid the sex and the gore that accompanied this development in Christian history!

The iconoclast in me—an integral part, I believe, of my Gay spirituality—jokes that the carrying on of Henry VIII, matched by that of his antagonist Pope Paul III, certainly demonstrates empirically that matters of Church organization are not being guided by the hand of a provident, personal God. And that is demonstrated again in our own day by the rancor over Bishop Robinson.

The spiritual visionary in me—also an integral part, I believe, of my Gay perspective—observes that the forced evolution in thought among the Episcopalians is a wonderful demonstration of the role Gay consciousness plays in human evolution. Gay spiritual writer Christian de la Huerta identifies ten roles Gay people have played throughout history. The first of them is as “catalytic transformers.” That is, Gay people have been involved in the major transformations of human thought—in the religions, the arts, the sciences, all forms of human culture. De la Huerta’s observation includes the idea of our being “catalysts,” i.e., not actually entering the change itself, but creating the ground in which the change can occur. That is, we have bigger effects than just our own minor issues (say, of sexual freedom and personal respectability).

Robinson’s subtitle for this autobiography of turmoil is “Swept to the Center by God.” That is, he’s been pushed into being the catalyst for a much bigger transformation. What will follow from his appointment as Bishop of New Hampshire is likely to have far greater effect: Christianity itself is challenged and forced to mature and face modernity.

We can all be proud we live in the same world as Gene Robinson. It’s getting to be a better world because of him.

White Crane Institute

Category Archives: WC77 – Race & Identity

WC77 – Review of Sin, Sex and Democracy

WC77 – Review of The Starry Dynamo

WC77 – Review of Jesus in Love: At the Cross

WC77 – Review of Edward Field’s After The Fall

WC77 – Review of So Fey

WC77 – Review of Forgiving the Franklins

WC77 – Review of Murder in the Vatican

WC77 – Review of Freethinkers

WC77 – Review of The Voyeur

WC77 – Review of In The Eye of the Storm

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