P-Town, Pride, the Dobbs Decision & Queer Anger

I’m not doing much preaching these days, but I have been writing a little bit.

“We useta have some big arguments, though - about the youngsters. I thought they was getting’ slack, lettin’ down their guard. Life was too soft, too easy for ‘em. They had all their clothes an’ their muscles and their boyfriends they could hold hands with on the streets. I was worried about ‘em getting’ off guard.”

-John Preston, Franny the Queen of Provincetown (1983)

Isadora, who is speaking in the quotation above, is a drag queen - one of the originals: “She’d get up on a stage and sing - none of that lip sync stuff, Isadora sang with her own voice,” her acolyte and devoted follower Franny remembers, “and you’d swear she was a real woman.” Franny, Isadora and their creator John Preston were completely unknown to me until a slim volume fell my way this summer in Provincetown: “Franny,” according to Preston, “is a history of the development of the gay community in the decades before HIV,” - and one of the first gay novels to present itself as such. It was published in 1983, the year after I was born, and reissued with a new appendix in 1994, the year Preston died: one of the thousands of queer artists cut off in their prime by the AIDS epidemic. In Preston’s novel, Franny moves from the mean streets of Boston to Provincetown, takes up residence on Commercial Street and becomes the devoted protector, parent, mentor, pastor and best friend to a generation of gay men, just as Provincetown is transitioning from a quiet Cape Cod fishing village to a queer Mecca. In so many ways, Franny IS Provincetown, and Provincetown IS the gay community, at least as we have sometimes (for better and for worse!) imagined ourselves to be. White, privileged, monied, beautiful - and with an edge. Spontaneous parades still happen in Provincetown: queers in all their glory, abandoning their decency and their shame and parading through these streets as if to say, to every supposedly straight passer-by, “in the rest of America you own the streets, but here these streets belong to us.” P-town is like a mini-Pride March every day of the week. It’s a little overwhelming.

It took me twenty-five years to learn how to do Pride. I never liked the word: pride is one of the seven deadly sins, after all. Lust, envy, greed, anger, gluttony and sloth are all pretty bad, but pride (the ancient fathers and mothers of the church say) is the deadliest of all: the root of all evil, the beginning of sin. When I came out, a timid and devout college student who wanted desperately to be a priest, Pride represented precisely the kind of gay person I didn’t want to be - or, more to the point, the kind of gay person I was pretty sure the church would never let me be: loud, boisterous, effeminate, pushy, hyper-sexualized and embarrassing. Queer. I spent those years quietly making sure I wasn’t “that kind” of gay person, that kind of priest. And it worked. I landed my dream job, and when my ex-husband and I got married (in church!) so many dear straight people came up to us, tears in their eyes, saying, “it just shows that love is love; we always knew you were just like us.” You’re just like us. This is what we fought for. It sends a chill up my spine.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization that will overturn the constitutional right women have held for fifty years in this country to make their own decisions about their bodies. Writing in a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated that this ruling unlocks the door that Christian conservatives have been hammering at for as long as I’ve been alive: “In future cases,” he writes, “we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold [establishing the right of married couples to practice contraception] Lawrence [prohibiting criminal punishment for those who commit acts of sodomy] and Obergefell [establishing the right to marry for all couples regardless of gender]. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ […] we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

It’s convenient when the people who are opposed to you - opposed to your body, to your desires, to your very existence - are this clear. There’s a kind of grace, in a way, because it’s so honest; so nakedly blunt. I’ve never met Justice Thomas, I don’t presume to know the state of his soul (although I note that he is one of seven professed Christians serving this Court: Justices Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavenaugh, and Roberts voted with the majority in Dobbs, and Justice Sotomayor did not). I’m not Justice Thomas’ pastor but if the traditions that bind us as brothers have any meaning at all he is part of my community, Christ’s Body. I made a promise at my baptism to protect and uphold his dignity. I wonder if he thinks of mine.

When six out of seven Christian justices indicate that they’re coming after you, you start paying attention. You know they’re using every ounce of ammunition that traditional Christianity affords them - and that’s quite a lot. For decades, many in the Episcopal Church and in ”progressive” parts of Christianity have sought to recover an earlier version of our tradition. We want the revolutionary spirit of Jesus’ first followers: the ones who gathered to remember a queer rabbi who called eleven other men his intimate friends; who reached out to women, wealthy and marginalized and gave them roles of authority; who offered what should be a sobering litmus test for those in the legal profession: “For with whatever judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with whatever measure you measure, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2).

A few years ago when my (gay) marriage ended, when at last there was preventative medication that meant men could have sex with each other without the fear of HIV, when a global pandemic locked all of us in our homes long enough to shock our systems and wake us up - suddenly, Pride started to mean something to me.

It started when I started to dismantle all the ways I’d learned to be suspicious, scornful and hateful of my body and desires. I’ve lugged this thing around with me for forty years; it’s mostly served, in somebody’s memorable words, as the vehicle to drive my head around. The times when other parts of it (the ones below the waist) have come alive were furtive, glorious, and filled with shame. I’ve been a gay man online since almost the very moment I came out (the rise of the internet has mapped the advent of my sexual maturity) but for twenty years I was careful, vigilant, about what I put out there. Even in a liberal, accepting, “open and welcoming” church, I knew that if a bishop could connect a picture of my queer body with the collared head of a priest, I was done. That may still be true, I don’t know.

But when they started coming for bodies, legislating bodies - bodies that didn’t, at first, look like mine - I got angry. It was the bodies of women, whose flesh has borne since time immemorial the projected fears and desires of men. It started with abortion rights, but let’s not kid ourselves. Justice Thomas and his cronies are delineating the future they imagine, and it’s not a kind future for those who walk through the world in a body that society genders as female, or a body that society can’t gender at all in the traditional ways.

They’re coming for black bodies, and for brown ones. Gunning them down in the streets, executing them over minor traffic infractions, incarcerating them, policing them, attempting to re-enslave them. They’ll come for the queers next - that’s already started. It started in classrooms, in all the places you can’t teach Critical Race Theory anymore. You’ve got “Can’t Say Gay” laws in Florida while a dozen other states work to enact similar legislation. If white cis heterosexuality is “natural,” as I presume my six Christian Supreme Court Justice Siblings believe it to be, it sure does seem to require a lot of work to police and protect.

It starts - as it ends - with bodies. Flesh, all the way down. When Christ is resurrected from the dead, when he stands back up (which all that crazy word, resurrection, really means) he stands back up in his old body: scars and all. Admittedly, that old/new body can do things like pass through locked doors. It also does all the normal things, like eat and defecate (the writer of John’s Gospel goes into great detail as to the resurrected body’s eating and elimination habits). Jesus is a body from beginning to end: a body like mine, a body like yours, a body gendered and policed and legislated, radicalized and tortured and brutalized; a body that experienced desire and pleasure and friendship and love. This is what Pride means for every body threatened with torture, brutalization, government regulation or cultural disgust. Our bodies are holy: there is nothing shameful about them. They belong to no government, they belong to the One who made them and called them good. They’re all we’ve got, and the weird and uncomfortable and deeply unscientific promise of the ancient Christian tradition is that - for better or worse! - we’ll get them back someday, warts and all. So the question (the original spiritual question?) is what the hell we’re supposed to do with our bodies during the brief time we get to walk around inside them.

I don’t feel a lot of hope today. I feel, instead, a queer kind of anger. I used to think that putting on a speedo and marching down Commercial Street was something flamboyant people did for attention. Now I see it for what it really is: a finger in the eye of every kind of evil, corruption and pious pretense. You can legislate rights, but you can’t legislate pleasure. Even if you outlaw it, even if you make it a criminal offense - even if we go back to cottaging, hooking up in urinals, back alleys and dark rooms, even if an underground railroad obtains for women the abortions they need - still, our bodies belong to God who tells us they’re good. Doesn’t matter what a legal institution or church tribunal says. This isn’t hope, it’s just determination. Civil Disobedience is what happens when you put your body - the site of pleasure - on the line for justice.

“You must not let this happen quietly,” Franny urges fellow queers as the AIDS epidemic ravages an entire generation; as governments and elected leaders refuse even to utter the acronym “HIV” in public. “You must not allow it to happen softly. You must do something, something, anything. To be silent is to be dead. I know that. It’s the knowledge of every queen in America. We know that.”

We’ve always known it. And Franny was right too, when Isadora raised her concerns about a new generation: the freedoms we took for granted and for which we never thought we’d have to fight, boys walking hand in hand down the street blissfully oblivious to the winter of death that was coming just around the bend: “Isadora, don’t you worry ‘bout my boys. They doin’ fine.”