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Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
October 2003

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GAY LOVE

A generally positive review in The New York Observer got me curious about Fernanda Eberstadt's new novel, The Furies. So when I saw a review in The New York Times, by one Bruce Bawer, I paid attention. Bawer opened with some description and kindnesses, then took off the gloves. He wrote that Eberstadt differentiated between love, "which you pour yourself into unchecked, a flood of vulnerability and sacrifice, strong as death, terrible as an army with banners," and a relationship, "a contractual arrangement, subject to renegotiation, dependent on each party's continued satisfaction." She said that we are living "in an age of antilove." "But she's got it backward," retorted Bawer. "Until modern times, Western marriage was commonly a 'contractual arrangement' that had little to do with love.... In the West, romantic love is more exalted than ever."

My blood began to simmer. Who did Bawer think he was fooling? It is certainly possible to exalt "romantic love" in an age bereft of the thoroughly unromantic love Eberstadt described in that gorgeous sentence. The olden-days "contractual arrangement" pertained to the making of the match, while the "contractual arrangement" Eberstadt decried pertained to the endurance of that match as willed by the participants. And "romantic love" and "antilove" can happily co-exist, as long as romantic love dwells on the satisfaction of one's own desire for the beloved.

Bawer drove deeper. "Eberstadt's misstep here is curious. So is the startlingly brutal way in which this otherwise empathic author used homosexuals to put over her points about love and 'antilove.'" After listing several gay-unfriendly passages in the novel, he wrote, "Presumably, Eberstadt shares [her character] Gideon's view of same-sex marriage as a 'travesty' of wedlock's 'sacred import' -- in short, the apotheosis of our 'age of antilove.'" Then he fired back. "But why would anyone who's 'antilove' wish to marry? On the contrary, today's drive for gay nuptials is a sign of love's triumph."

Bawer's question was rhetorical, but it shouldn't have been. Though marriage is an act of love, a total self-gift to another, it is possible to imagine a "drive for gay nuptials" that does not take much note of love or love's triumph. Marriage has a public, political character. It is in some ways the first unit of a self-sustaining civilization. It carries with it public recognition and public validation of a relationship. Marriage is universal, and therefore, normal. For a group that has long been viewed as abnormal, marriage represents the casting off of social stigma, and who wouldn't want that, whether or not they shared Eberstadt's view of love?

The Times noted that Bawer is the author of Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity. I looked it up, and found that Bawer is himself a homosexual, and a Christian as well. My blood ceased its bubbling. It's easy to see why he might be upset by Eberstadt's novel, even if it doesn't excuse his sloppy argumentation. As a Christian, he probably understands something of Christ's sacrificial love. Supposing that he shares Paul's understanding of marriage (and I don't know if he does), he may be offended that some of his fellow Christians believe that it is impossible for him to proclaim and express that love through marriage to another man. And on at least one level, his feeling is understandable. The Church is claiming that marriage is not what you make it, that it has a nature, and that that nature will by definition prove exclusive to some. She is claiming that something exists between man and wife in which the homosexual -- and for that matter, the heterosexual cohabitator -- cannot partake. Something which makes their union superior, even if they are all but unaware of its existence. Something which may be completely obscured by external appearances.

The Church is full of hard teachings -- eat my body and drink my blood? -- but this one must be sharp as well as hard. In matrimony, the Church hopes the heterosexual will learn that the triumph of love is in fact the triumph of the cross, that Eberstadt is right, that love is sacrifice. But this lesson is mixed with the natural good of marital bliss, and it is conceivable that a spouse could weather a marriage without delving too deeply into the mystery of suffering. The homosexual is asked to drink of this mystery neat, to embrace the cross of an unfulfillable desire. I would like to tell him that there are finer and truer consolations than the one he seeks, and that his suffering may bring him nearer to them than I will ever get. I believe it's true, but still, I am married and he is not. Who could hear such words from such a source?

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