In the 20 years of my career I have dealt with many homosexuals. Whether they were male or female their sexual preference manifested itself from lack of male role models during childhood, lack of female role models during childhood, childhood sexual abuse, witnessing long term abusive behavior as a child, or other abnormal circumstances. Kirk’s letter only shows a normal childhood. Therefore, I believe there was something left out. I’m not asking for the full story from Kirk.

Nevermind it’s probably worth knowing what kind of career we’re talking about here (twenty years as, say, a longshoreman would probably make for substantionally different interactions with gay people than, say, being a social worker). Instead, let’s play el abogado del Diablo with the bravehost blogger for a moment and ask: isn’t it at least possible that bravehost’s assumptions - and not some mysterious missing ingredient in Talley’s testimony - may be the reason why reality isn’t lining up with the bravehost’s ideas about the origins of homosexuality?

This is an interesting move for someone like Talley who aligns himself with (though never explicitly mentions) ex-gay thinking and behavior. In fact, Talley’s leveling a pretty pointed critique of the conservative Christian culture he continues to remain ambivalently a part of. Had his religious and social community been more willing to confront questions of sexual identity and encourage more open discussions of sexual orientation, Talley suggests, he might have been able to head off his same-sex inclinations earlier, have gotten them under control and led a much less complicated life. You don’t have to buy that argument to appreciate its force. By positioning himself between “sinful” homosexual feelings and identifications on one side and the rigid puritanical moral code of southern evangelical culture on the other, Talley manages to evince the requisite compunction for sin central to his return to the fold while also refusing to fully humiliate himself in front of his worst critics and assailants. The splinter in your own eye, and all that …

Honestly, it’s hard for me to know how to take this kinda thing. On the one hand, I’m deeply sympathetic to what is obviously Talley’s genuine struggle to reconcile the values of many in his community of family, friends, colleagues, and fans with the demands of his innermost self. On the other hand, for someone like Talley who by most accounts has been free to make many of the choices common to self-determined adulthood, “I was just following moral orders” is not a get-out-of-responsibility-free card, even if you’re gay in the American evangelical south.

It was, for instance, no doubt difficult for Talley to go to the authorities when he was being extorted, and it doubtless took every bit of the courage Talley imputes to himself to have “[taken] my chances and contacted the FBI” even knowing “the consequences” to his career and life. But where, it seems fair to ask, was that courage before he was backed into a corner by an extortionist? Countless gay people have confronted the irreconcilability of themselves in religious communities hostile to homosexuality. They have tallied up the costs long before they were facing imminent exposure by criminal enterprise, and they have insisted on the importance of honesty for themselves, of refusing to “pass” or fake it or put themselves through hell to protect heterosexual comfort zones in their churches, schools, workplaces, and homes. Whether or not you condone the “the lifestyle,” it’s hard not to appreciate that this takes courage. And even though I don’t buy the “logic” of ex-gay or reparative therapies and am deeply suspicious of the motives of many reparative therapists and ex-gay advocates, it still has to take no small amount of courage for someone who doesn’t want to be gay and is willing to submit to ex-gay therapies to stand up and say “I’m gay,” even if it is for the purposes of being de-gayed. Certainly more courage than is required to out yourself to the authorities when you faced imminent exposure from an extortionist anyway (which is not to say Talley shouldn’t have gone to the authorities; only that the courage of that act is distinct from the widsom of it).

And so we’re back to the inescapable contradictions of personal narratives. I have given this so much attention because it strikes me as one of the rarer moments when the private and public intersect dramatically and significantly, moments that speak directly to the way moral and religious meaning gets made from all too human experience - both the meaning Talley makes of his own experience and the meaning we take away from it. Thus, Talley’s testimony warrants attention on a number of levels. First there’s the story Talley tries to tell, about the bitter harvest of a sexually backward culture, about his path being pre-determined by the conspiratorial forces of sin or religious ideology. Then there are a few of the more salient facts of the matter in Talley’s case (which Talley glosses, to say the least). These would seem to demonstrate what Talley’s testimony evades: Talley appears to have actively pursued a double life of sorts for a variety reasons. In the context of his own writing about himself, it’s clear that many of these reasons were and are agonizingly human, probably pretty common, certainly ample cause for fellow feeling from straights and gays alike. The difference between “what happened” strictly speaking and the meaning Talley makes of those events measures the degree to which it is impossible to say for sure if Talley’s method of dealing with his sexuality was morally justifiable. Talley certainly seems to imply that to a certain extent it was (and for the really hardcore folks out there who need more proof of repentance, there’s the creepy exorcisim thingee that Talley redescribes); in fact, one principle object of the testimony seems to be to make precisely the point that there was a good reason for the way he acted, that he was justified - to others yes, but perhaps also to himself. Which just goes to show, I think, how Talley’s testimony, like all personal spiritual narratives, registers (in William James’s wonderful phrase) the truth it helps to create.

LORD! I can’t believe you people have nothing better to talk about over the past year. There is so much hatred on this web log that I just can’t stand it… and to think you call yourselves Christians.

In point of fact, not everyone there claims to be a Christian. But no matter … Most discussants, Christian and not, post comments with the idea of hectoring the opposition into some kind of cowed submission. But of course that never happens, and back roars the other side with more vitriol. There have a been a few moments of lucidity - times when someone pleaded movingly for leveler heads and wider perspectives or posts in which someone told a pretty moving personal story, put a real life to all the abstractions. The thread, though, has degenerated so far that even these bright spots get swallowed up by the darkness all around them, either because a preponderance of the regulars are embittered and suspect everyone and anything that doesn’t agree with them, or because the intervals of sanity are just too short to have any real effect. All of which is really too bad. Of course I support the notion of spaces (on or off line) in which people of differing worldviews can have a discussion that carries with it the potential to make real and lasting effects on people’s way of thinking and living. But the inthefaith thread seems too far gone to be of much good. Perhaps the one function it continues to serve is that it keeps at least some of the haters and bloviators and gasbags occupied so they can’t scorch the earth of another, more meaningful discussion somewhere else.