The Queer Thing Is…

Queer.  Not so long ago, in relationship to sexuality, the word was used almost exclusively as an insult.  The harsh, sneering and threatening sound of being labeled "queer” still resonates with memories of fear, rejection and condemnation for many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) people.  It still is frequently used as an insult, an attempt to intimidate, a gesture of verbally spitting in someone’s face.  Even reading the word “queer” in a publication that is intended to be supportive of lgbt people may be difficult for some.  But in the last couple of decades a variety of activists, artists, writers and intellectuals have begun using the word “queer” in different ways and for different reasons.

The most superficial reason for referring to people in sexual minorities as “queer” is, quite simply, the brevity of the word.  It’s shorter and simpler to say than “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, and intersexed peoples,” for example.  Since the contemporary movement for gay and lesbian liberation began to gain some mass momentum in the 1970’s, recognition of the complexity and variety of sexual and gender identities has increased.  The word “queer” is sometimes used as a term intended to incorporate the complexity and diversity of minority sexual and gender identities without going all the way through a long list of words.  In its broadest use, the word “queer” is sometimes used to include any expressions of sexuality and gender that are outside of the norm.  Activists and commentators disagree about the validity and usefulness of this practice, despite its increasing use.

In addition to encompassing a range of non-normative sexual and gender expressions, the word “queer” is also sometimes used to acknowledge that sexuality and gender manifest a certain amount of fluidity.  Individuals who identify themselves as “queer” may reject labels such as “gay,” or “lesbian,” or “bi,” or “straight” because they do not consider their identities to be permanently related to the biological sex of the person (or persons) they have sex with.  A friend of mine, for example, sometimes describes herself as a “lesbian-identified bisexual;” a former professor has written about a friend of hers who was getting married to a man even though she identified herself primarily as a lesbian.  Taking a traditional view toward sexuality as a stable and unchanging component of human life might lead a person to see such examples as somehow fundamentally unhealthy and disordered, or simply as people unwilling to assert a clear identity.  A “queer” view toward sexuality might lead a person to see such examples as engaging and affirming the wonder and complexity of human sexuality more fully, and as honoring the struggle to grapple with that complexity.

“Queerness,” then, challenges the usual, most accepted expression of sexuality and gender in our society—exclusively heterosexual monogamy between two people who clearly understand themselves as male and female, masculine and feminine.  It also challenges our society’s attempts to put different kinds of sexuality into neat little categories, even if those categories happen to be labeled “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual.”  Any way a person looks at it, “queerness” has the potential to fundamentally challenge the structures and practices of power based on sexuality and gender that so much of our culture (and its injustices) depends upon.  As Anita Fast points out in her article, being queer is not about being lesbian or gay, and gaining acceptance as a “normal” member of society.  Being queer disrupts and challenges what is accepted as normal.  And it challenges the labels, categories, assumptions, and social structures that may compel us to be “normal” and reinforce “normal” behavior. 

Because “queerness” can be about challenging existing power structures, especially those based on sexuality and gender, it is an important idea for people of faith to begin to understand.  Those of us who identify as lgbt people might consider, for example, whether or not we are called to more “queerness” in the ways we live our lives, and risk staying at the margins of society in order to challenge it.  And all of us may be able to explore biblical texts differently if we learned to read them with a “queered” eye: an eye toward seeing and interpreting biblical texts so that we take into account power relationships (or the subversion of power relationships) based on sexuality and gender.  This is not only a matter of putting together gay-friendly interpretations of the Bible.  It is the attempt to read biblical texts while examining the ways they challenge the assumptions and power of heterosexual patriarchy, and critiquing the ways biblical texts have created the unjust power structures of gender and sexuality.  The sermon by Ken Stone included here provides an example of “queering” a biblical text and exploring the ways sexual “otherness” is used as a source of transformative power. 

Because the ideas introduced here are very complex, and the subject of a great deal of discussion and debate, this issue also provides a brief list of resources for people that may want to explore the topics more.  I hope you find the subject interesting and challenging, and I hope we may all have the courage to challenge the powers that be.  Claiming a kind of “queerness” is one way we might consider doing that.

Ruth Moerdyk
Chicago, Illinois

My relationship with the Bible has been much like most of my relationships–a mixed bag of joy and frustration, rejection and embrace.  Also like any relationship, it has been influenced by other factors in my life–education, community, personal growth and development, important life experiences–the list could go on.  I prefer the term “relationship” to describe my interaction with the Bible because it describes how I believe a community’s sacred texts are ideally approached.  Sacred texts should not be treated as objects to use for one’s own ends, but as subjects allowed to speak in the voice of an “other” and hence have the possibility to challenge and transform.

Although I don’t remember being taught this directly, I think I must have initially understood my relationship with the Bible as one of subservience and submission.  The Bible was a rule book, an authoritative voice telling me what to do and how to live.  God dictated, the apostles wrote, and I listened (and if I was good, conformed).  And so, in my late teens and early twenties, when I discovered that so much oppression and injustice had been, and still was, justified by quoting Biblical texts, I concluded that the Bible was not a book I wanted to relate to anymore. 

Around this same time, I began to acknowledge and act upon my attraction to women.  As it seemed abundantly clear to me at that time that the Bible was a load of patriarchal hogwash (to be polite), the only wise thing to do with it was to get rid of it entirely.  I dealt with the difficult sayings, perspectives, and world view of the Bible by rejecting it altogether.  Although it wasn’t only the discovery of my attraction to women that led to my disregard of the Bible, my identity as a lesbian drove the final pegs into the coffin’s lid.  

God, however, has proven to be quite adept at resurrection, and that lid did not hold for long.  When my many attempts at exploring and adopting the sacred texts of other traditions did not bring me spiritual satisfaction and fulfillment, I decided to risk engagement once again, and entered seminary at the Vancouver School of Theology.  Although tentative and slow, in-depth study opened up new ways of reading the Biblical texts and new life was breathed into those dry bones.  I learned to understand the context in which the early Christians wrote the texts we now consider sacred, and realized that the sense of the text isn’t always apparent from a plain reading of it.  I learned to be critically aware of my own position in our society and challenge the assumptions that I brought to my reading and interpretation of the text.  
I learned to read the Bible as an invitation into a world brought into focus through God, Jesus Christ, and the community of believers.  It wasn’t primarily a book of proscriptive rules telling me to do some things and not others, but a book of descriptive stories asking me to explore, to “come and see” for myself.   In other words, I learned to have a mutual relationship with the Bible and not a dictatorial one; because I was allowed to disagree with its voice, I didn’t need to stop listening to certain parts of it.  My focus during my slow and tentative steps back into the world of Christianity had been on the way I read the Biblical texts.  As my commitment to the relationship grew stronger, this focus began to shift towards an exploration of the way the texts read me.

When I think about the beginning of my awareness of this shift, as well as how my changing relationship with the Bible was affecting my self-understanding as lesbian, one particular day several years ago comes to mind.  I had ventured into downtown Vancouver to watch the Queer Pride Parade.  As I walked along the business-lined streets of the corporate corridor, I was amazed to see rainbow flags hanging from the rafters of The Bay–Canada’s major department store.  My friend and I found a place in the crowd and watched the brightly-colored floats pass by: 7-Eleven…Kentucky Fried Chicken…The Future Shop….  I turned to my friend and asked, sarcastically, “Are you proud to be….normal?”

This sparked a lengthy conversation during which my friend argued convincingly that there was no inherent reason why gays and lesbians shouldn’t enjoy the privileges of mainstream society and the support of big business.  It was a sign of progress to have corporate floats in the Pride Parade.  I found that my arguments to the contrary were only convincing if one wanted to be “queer”–outside the mainstream, peculiar in some way.  And suddenly it struck me that the reasons why I was uncomfortable with this show of support from the halls of power did not originate from my lesbianism, but from my discipleship of Jesus Christ.  It was my Christianity, not my sexuality, that made me queer.  In its original sense, the term “queer” describes a “positionality” vis a vis mainstream expectations, in much the same way that many Anabaptists have considered themselves a “peculiar” people.  Using the term in this way, it suddenly struck me that the Bible was ‘queering’ me–not in determining my sexual attraction to women (which, granted, has not yet lost all of its queerness in our society!), but in insisting that I find ways of understanding that sexual attraction other than merely seeking a normalized place for it within mainstream society.

When I returned to my reading of the Bible, I shifted from trying to find texts that supported same-sex love and sexuality, thereby seeking to normalize my queerness.  Instead, I began to see how God consistently seemed to work through sexual situations that were “queer” and unacceptable in their time and place (Ruth; Tamar; Mary), or perhaps would be considered ‘queer’ and unacceptable in ours (Abraham and Hagar; Levirate marriage; Jacob and his two wives and two concubines).  I realized that even as my sexual expression becomes less queer in my society, as a Christian I must always remain awake to the ways God continuously surprises, eternally unsettles, and relentlessly astounds us with the unanticipated and unanticipatable.

I do not want to deny all the obvious social benefits of the “homosexual liberation movement.”  I want only to warn that while rejection and marginalization have their challenges and dangers, acceptance and inclusion have dangers as well.  Privilege has its price.  One of the costs is that where sexual minorities once destabilized an oppressive status quo, we now run the risk of stabilizing it.  I relate to the Bible as calling me to remain queer in relationship to our society’s power structures, including the structures of sexual expression and gender.  This raises the question of whether society’s growing acceptance of a variety of sexual expressions is not necessarily because the world has become a safer place to be different, but rather because sexual difference is no longer considered a threat to the powers that decide who’s in and who’s out.  A Bible that queers keeps us asking the question of who is being marginalized and rejected, and to seek the voice and presence of God there.

And so, it is with great anticipation, as well as a solid dose of fear and trembling, that I continue to risk engagement and conversation with the Bible and the God revealed therein.  Relating to the Bible as texts that call me to be queer continuously challenges the tendency to use its texts to normalize my perspective and my life. This relationship requires me, and, I believe, the entire community of believers, to resist speaking the final word, drawing the line, declaring the way it is once and for all, because God isn’t done talking, and for God’s sake neither are we.

--Anita Fast
Anita lives with her partner, Kelly, in Vancouver, British Columbia.  She is on the board of BMC and BMC Canada, works at the Vancouver School of Theology, and volunteered for three years with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

The following article is adapted from a sermon delivered by Ken Stone at a chapel service at Chicago Theological Seminary, Coming Out Day, October 2002.  The text for the sermon is Genesis 38.

The first time I came out as a gay man in a public setting was in a seminary sermon.  But since then my own attempts to create a gay life in church and society have taken me new directions.  The rituals of “coming out” have sometimes started to seem a little stale.

But over the last few years, I have become intrigued by the process of taking some matter that seems a little stale to me and thinking about it in a fresh way, by bringing it into dialogue with and biblical text.  Or taking a biblical text that seems a little bit stale and bringing it into dialogue with some matter of contemporary concern.  So I decided to think once again about reasons for “coming out,” but in relation to a biblical text that is seldom read in such contexts.

Genesis 38 is not the sort of text that one often hears.  The Revised Common Lectionary does not include this chapter of Genesis anywhere; I suspect this omission is neither accidental nor atypical.  For that reason it may be useful to think about the story in a service that marks a day on which we speak of things many folks would prefer to remain silent about. 

The particular detail that first got me thinking along these lines is the moment in this story when Tamar reveals to others something about her sexual life that they have not previously known.  That revelation—Tamar’s “coming out,” if you will—is quite different from the revelation that we call “coming out.”  So what about this story is pertinent to our reflections today?

I certainly don’t intend to suggest that the story describes circumstances that we wish to recreate.  The story comes from a patriarchal world in which the survival of most women depended upon some man—father, husband, or son—under whose protection and authority she would live.  Women who managed to live outside of such household structures, such as the prostitutes and holy women referred to in the story, are stigmatized in other biblical texts.  Many of us would conclude that such assumptions about gender, sexuality, and family have to be combated.

We do not need to ask whether we must endorse all the assumptions presupposed by this ancient text.  Rather, we need to ask how Tamar, within the framework of a very serious set of social constraints, acts to expand the possibilities of her life.  We need to ask how her actions impact not only herself but also those with whom she interacts.  By keeping these questions in mind we may find that her story can be a useful dialogue partner in our attempts to think about the purposes, the character, and the possible effects of what we call, today, “coming out.”

The narrator first tells us how Tamar’s sexual involvements came to produce in others a fear of death.  The reader knows that sexual contact with Tamar did not actually kill Judah’s first two sons.  However, Judah, ignorant of this fact, blocks sexual relations between Tamar and his first-born son in an ill-informed attempt to keep his son safe from risky sex.  In the age of AIDS it’s not hard to recognize this sort of fear.  But the actions taken by Tamar are made necessary, not only on the basis of her own goals, but also by the ignorance of others about her sexual life and by the actions taken by others on the basis of their ignorance.  In an ideal world it might never have been necessary to learn about Tamar’s sexual practices.  But Tamar did not live in an ideal world; and, of course, neither do we.

So Tamar, acting in her world, makes an important strategic decision.  Recognizing that possibilities for her future are being limited because of sexual restrictions, Tamar decides her battle for a more livable future must be fought on contested sexual terrain.  Tamar understands the realities of her situation better than some of us understand ours.  Gay men and lesbians sometimes seem determined to relate “coming out” to anything other than sex.  I have, for example, heard committed lesbian and gay activists argue that the word “bisexual” should be kept out of organization names because it has within it the word “sex,” and may hint at possibilities beyond monogamy.  It’s better, they insist, to direct attention away from such messy matters and toward more respectable topics such as equal access and civil rights.

And those are important topics.

But the sexual frankness of much of the Hebrew Bible, and of the story of Tamar in particular, stands in contrast and judgment against our tendency to make “coming out” about anything other than sex.  Tamar is no fool.  The fears of others, which have restricted the possibilities for her future, are sexual fears.  What is called for is not a change of subject, or better public relations, but an intervention in the sexual domain.

This recognition puts Tamar on a very dangerous path.  Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute.  Though prostitution was not illegal in Israel, it was explicitly off-limits, under penalty of death, to a young woman living in her father’s household (as Tamar was).  Tamar risks not only her respectability, but her life.

This requires of Tamar a good knowledge of her social world and a careful assessment of how individuals are likely to act.  She has to discern that sexual relations with her father-in-law will have the same legal effect as sexual relations with her brother-in-law.  She has to know that prostitutes would likely be sought by men off on sheep-shearing trips, and that food was the expected payment for sexual services.  She has to calculate that Judah might not have that payment with him, but might be persuaded to leave a pledge.  Tamar realizes that it takes a lot of knowledge to act strategically.  But it pays off—by the time Judah’s friend brings food to Tamar, Tamar is nowhere to be found and neither is Judah’s pledge.

Judah, good family man that he is, doesn’t want the town to learn that a prostitute has gotten the better of him.  He fears being laughed at.  Yet when he learns that Tamar has been sexually active, too, laughter is far from his mind.  “Bring her out,” he says of his daughter-in-law, “and let her be burned.”

At this point, Tamar does something that could be called “coming out.”  Her timing is carefully and strategically chosen.  Those around her believe that they already understand the facts about Tamar’s sexual life, but Tamar now reveals that there is more to her sexual situation then others have previously known.  That may seem like a loose use of the phrase “coming out,” but that is just as well; there are many ways of revealing things about one’s sexual life in addition to saying “I’m gay,” or “I’m lesbian.”

What I want to stress, however, is the fact that the result of this revelation is not simply new light on Tamar’s sexual activity.  Confronted with new information from, and about, Tamar, Judah suddenly understands some things about himself as well.  This, I imagine, is often one actual effect of “coming out.”  Whatever our sexual preferences might be, when we share things about our sexual lives that are unexpected or unconventional, we often compel others to reassess their own sexual assumptions and their own sexual practices.  This is one of the things that makes people uncomfortable with the practice of “coming out.”  It contributes to a certain risk in the process because we don’t know how others will respond to their own discomfort.

But notice how this plays out in the story.  Tamar’s disclosure brings about a different future for herself, and a transformation in Judah’s attitude.  He sees his own sexual activity, and his earlier constraints on Tamar’s options, in a new light.  As he puts it: “She is more in the right than I, since I did not give to her my son.”  It is easy to see that this response presupposes the power of the patriarch.  Nonetheless, Tamar, living within a patriarchal system, has managed to claim at least some sexual agency.  Doing so, she has expanded the possibilities for her future and effected a transformation in the person who previously attempted to restrict her sexual activity and her options for life.  In the end, it’s not only Tamar and Judah who benefit.  Tamar goes on to give birth to an ancestor of David, and Matthew associates the genealogy of Jesus with Tamar as well.  Tamar’s bold but dangerous actions make possible both the Davidic monarchy and the Davidic messiah.

So I want to suggest that we may gain some insight from this story into the actual importance of “coming out.”  We’re sometimes tempted to say that “coming out” is simply about confessing the truth, telling the world who we really are.  I’m not convinced that this is an adequate account.  It’s not the confessional value, but rather the strategic and tactical value of “coming out” that is underscored in this story.  “Coming out” is important because of its potential effects, because of the possibilities that are opened, because of the constraints that are challenged, and because of the changes that subsequently take place.  Those changes may not all be good; they are certainly unpredictable.  They don’t eliminate all our problems any more than Tamar’s actions eliminated patriarchy; like Tamar we may actually contribute to such changes only by risking our very lives.  Nevertheless, without such risk, possibilities for transformation do not exist.

And, as Tamar’s story shows, when we do “come out” sexually—whatever that means for us—we do so not only for our own benefit.  We come out for future generations whose ways of living none of us may yet anticipate.  We come out for a church that has forsaken the biblical tradition of speaking frankly about sex, while placing far too much emotional and symbolic weight upon sex.  And we come out even for those authorities who wish to restrict our sexual possibilities now, but might one day affirm, like Judah, that people, whose lives they were eager to condemn, were, in fact, “more in the right than I.”

--Ken Stone
Ken Stone is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary, and editor of Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, which won a Lambda Literary Award in 2002.