As some of you may have noticed, it looks like that provocative Gospeleer post on sexuality and scripture we were discussing last week has been taken down.

When I first saw the post was missing, my reactions were, in order of their intensity:

• Disbelief: no way has Mickey Gamble, with whom I’ve had enough interaction to find a pretty self-possessed guy, had second thoughts on what he said in the post;
• Suspicion: someone or something has gotten to him;
• Cynicism: this figures … southern gospel types can’t figure out how to have the microphones on when a group takes the stage, but the hegemony of fear and insecurity running throughout the industry works with swift efficiency to punish public contradictions of the party line … and finally;
• Sadness and disappointment: Sigh.

This turn of events is not that surprising, but it’s too bad all the same. I think I’ve got a long and good enough record of encouraging the widest possible range of view points on issues and ideas to say with some authority that even if I hadn’t largely agreed with the content of the post, it would still be valuable to the degree that it brought to the surface tensions, blindspots, and contradictions in key parts of conservative Christian culture that dominates in sg.

But of course You Just Don’t Do That in southern gospel.

One reason the gospel music industry enforces such a narrow orthodoxy in matters of belief and business is that the more people who are allowed inside the gate, the more pressure gets put on the ideas and convictions people say they hold dear. Southern gospel performers and other insider types like to talk a lot about how hard it is to be a very visible Christian in an unsaved world. And that _might_ have been partly true 40 or 50 years ago when gospel music really was a dominant strain of mainstream American entertainment that interacted with all sorts of people from different backgrounds, beliefs, and ideas. But it’s been clear for sometime now that most gospel groups are overwhelmingly singing to the choir.

I’m don’t necessarily think that makes hypocrites out of the performers who insist that a career in gospel music is a modern day lion’s den, but it seems pretty clear that the strategic insularity of gospel music’s carefully policed borders guarantees a mostly safe, ideologically pure environment in which gospel-music professionals rarely have much meaningful, external pressure applied to their religious commitments or the doctrines they espouse. Singing about how hard it is to be a Christian in this ole world of sin in large part creates the reality it imagines. To sing the song – and listen to it as a fan – is itself a symbolic attainment of that persecuted, beset-by-sin status described by the music.

Posts like the one at Gospeleer essentially call bullshit on this arrangement by exposing the way key parts of the fundamentalist evangelical worldview are a construct of strategically contradictory, illogical, counterfactual, or disingenuous rhetoric (i.e. my freedom of religion requires the state to take away other people’s rights and liberties etc).

As I have suggested before, there is a significant, if unseen and largely unheard, segment of existing and future potential consumers of gospel music out there (vaster than any of us realize, I think), and they would eagerly support products and people associated with businesses that make an effort to get beyond this narrow way of thinking and living – to reach out to (in the words of one of Mickey Gamble’s artists at Crossroads) the broken ones … among them, the individuals and groups who have, for so long, been told their participation, their lives, their spiritual experiences matter less than others’ (yes, yes, I know, you’re just hating the sin and loving the sinner, but this is rather like whipping a child while claiming this hurts you worse than it does the kid … both claims are only true if you place disproportionate value on the experience of the people with most power and freedom in the situation).

I’m not just talking about gay people (or their straight allies, who are, as the fate of that Gospeleer post suggests, often singled out for attack in southern gospel culture), but this issue does bring into focus the fault lines that run throughout evangelicalism today, including the world of southern gospel.

Gospel music hasn’t had much trouble taking our money for as long we can all can remember. But the transaction has always been a begrudging, distasteful exchange for everyone involved, and the whole experience is more often than not engineered from the seller’s perspective to make the “sinful” consumer understand that a great favor has been done to him in the taking of his money.

Yet no one has fully, intentionally tested the hypothesis that southern gospel can survive and thrive if the people who make and sell it don’t try to put limits on what the music can mean, or to whom it can matter. Put a tshirt at NQC, this concept might read: let go and let God  … and see what happens. Which is to say, doing the right thing in this case may be the beginning of a change that also makes record labels and artists more money. That shouldn’t be the only thing that matters, but it doesn’t hurt, either.

While there are various thoughtful but opinion-based arguments to the contrary,  I know of no scientific studies that I can consider as “serious”,  acknowledging that sexual orientation is anything other than a fact of birth. Not a “condition.” Not a “lifestyle.” Not a choice.  Hair color, gender, skin color, body height, race, and sexual orientation, are all traits in the same “facts of birth” set. The mix of these traits in any person are facts that precede any life decisions or choices that we add on to determine the whole of “who I am.”

[snip]

Fear and mistrust of those with traits “not like me” have created dramatic and oppressive prejudices throughout history. Those who have been the targets of all such prejudices have created much of the great and transformative music and literature, as well as  political and religious discourse, borne out of the struggle to just belong to the whole, to accept their own “unwanted” bodies, and to be accepted as contributors in their own societies.

In America, our own long, deep, and violent struggles for racial and gender equality come easily to mind. The perspective we get from that history is instructive to this discussion in a couple of ways. First, embedded deeply in those struggles was the effort to use scripture as the bottom line unchallengeable “reason” for maintaining the status quo. Just as now with the so-called “gay issue.” If those scriptures quoted against the struggle for racial and gender equality were so important then, why not now? You just don’t hear many folks quoting the Bible to justify slavery these days.

You should read the whole thing. I’d love to be wrong here, but I don’t know of any public statement by someone of Gamble’s status and place in the industry that comes anywhere close to this.

As I noted in my article, Gaither got clobbered into a full-scale retraction and denunciation of homosexuality when he dared to speak non-negatively about a gay person and her music in public. Dottie Rambo sent a lot of signals in her career that she was at least gay-friendly (appearing with Lily Tomlin, for instance), but she left unaddressed her own feelings or thinking on this issue, so far as I know.

What’s striking about Gamble’s post is not just that he bucks the party line on homosexuality, but that he does so in terms explicitly based, not on a critique of Christianity (what is typically disparaged as the godless atheistic homosexual agenda etc), but rather critiques evangelical (ab)uses of scripture from a distinctly Christian perspective, something that just doesn’t happen in sg:

There is something about being told, through no fault of your own, that  “you’re different” and “you’re bad” and “you don’t belong” that forces you to deal with how alien you feel to yourself and how alienated you feel from those around you. And is not this exactly the Christian experience of “having to be in this world” where we do not feel we belong?

The conventional wisdom will doubtless be to dismiss Gamble and his pov as a one-off exception to the consensus view, but all the email I get from gay and straight alike every time this topic comes up suggests otherwise. For instance, here’s an email I received last week from a performer whose name all of you would recognize:

I had several gay friends while I was in the music dept. at college, and I think without exception all shared this evangelical background experience Shores identifies. I was able to identify with them because I spent my high school years being called a sissie: I played the piano, sang, was in the band instead of playing football, wore Calvin Kleins and hairspray - hey, it was the 80’s. You know how hard it is to get dates with girls when they all think you’re gay !!??!?!?!

The absolutist mentality in southern gospel music/southern evangelicalism could perhaps be the root of all evil. The either/or of ministry-entertainment, gay-straight, crew cut-spiked hair, tie-open collar . . . it goes on and on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been chided for “leaving my bible on the shelf!” when I go to the polls and vote for those damned liberals. Not only do they hate the sin, most of them openly hate the sinner. Surely that must be a miserable existence?

While no one would mistake southern gospel for a progressive or inclusive culture, history tells us that the emergent viewpoints appear like icebergs … the visible portion is always just the beginning.

So here’s a question for you (and I’m really asking): what if there a lot more – not a majority mind you, but a not insubstantial number all the same – of Mickey Gambles out there in sg:  straight but not necessarily narrow?

As admirable as it is for Daniel Mount to attempt an intervention into the obnoxious Sister Tenor schtick that afflicts so many hackneyed sg emcees’ repertoire or “jokes” (and I agree, these droolingly dumb jokes can’t stop too soon), it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that these jokes and his argument against them might be drawing from the same well of flatfooted assumptions among (conservative) Christians about sexuality. Thus Mount:

In today’s society, homosexual behavior has become more prevalent and openly admitted. Some but not all homosexual men think of themselves as women and adopt effeminate mannerisms, including but not limited to speaking / singing in a high voice. […] But this problem is too real–too much a major cultural problem right now–for me to enjoy a joke about it [i.e. how the tenor looks like a man but sings like a woman].

Homosexual panic? Party of one? Your decompression chamber is now available.

Honestly. Mount’s got it all backwards here. He’s right to sense some anxiety about gender-bending in these tenor jokes, but the point of the joke isn’t to legitimize or trivialize homosexuality in a religious culture that is Seriously. Freaked Out. By. Gay Men. Rather, these jokes are part of the mechanism by which evangelical popular culture keeps the “the homosexual crisis” at bay.

First and on the surface, a sister tenor joke is a way of managing a collective fear among your average southern gospel crowd that they might catch cooties from the high-voiced tenor if he’s … you know … [in a stage whisper] one of them … because, as Mount’s comment suggests, it’s a pretty common view in certain conservative quarters that the best way to spot a homosexual man is to look for limp wrists, mincing catty banter, lisping queens or high talkers (which is true, of course, except when it isn’t — “some but not all” — but then you don’t know what you don’t know, and which is which, anyway, and how do you keep it all, uhm, straight?). The joke neutralizes the issue by acknowledging what has been called a “visceral surface revulsion” about effeminate/gay males (and the assumptions it’s predicated on) through humor. If we can all laugh at it – including Sister Tenor – then there’s nothing to worry about, nes café?

More deeply, though, the joke is a way for a macho culture of manly Christian men to humorously act out a not-so-latent distaste for homosexuality. Everyone is only half-joking, after all (the other half of the joke carries with it clear implications: we wouldn’t be jokin’ if you were one of them … and you better not be … it’s Adam and Even, not Adam and Steve). But that half-measure is important. It’s when the jokes stop altogether that you ought to be worried, because nothing is scarier than unsublimated phobias. Then it’s open season on every guy whose voice ranges above middle C and crosses his legs at the knee.

That and, well, the jokes just aren’t that funny.

Why? The story takes a not-half-bad stab at it, and you can read that for yourself (or not - if this isn’t your bag, don’t say you weren’t warned). But besides oddly implying that gay people don’t go to church (which, no matter your feelings on the issue, is just plain counterfactual) - or on second thought, maybe the article is suggesting that music of the sort Patty makes is church enough for some people - one thing noticeably absent from the story’s analysis was any mention of the element of campiness in Patty’s persona and performance and its role in her appeal to gay men. Like showtunes and some of the outsized personalities of many charismatic televangelicals and the hyper-stylized, over-the-top persona of a Cher or a Madonna or a Judy Garland or, even - yes - a Vestal Goodman (all with long-established followings among gay guys), there’s something campy - that is exagerrated and theatrical and a touch ironic or more knowing than we think - about Sandi Patty’s stage presence (all those operatic flourishes she uses and the bedazzling costumes and the arrangements and choreography of many of her songs and performances taken, ehrm, straight out of Broadway).

It would take (and has taken) many a PhD dissertation and several books to get into the connection between homosexuality, camp, and music (though the essayist Richard Rodriguez may be on to something when he suggests, in his memoir Brown: The Last Discovery of America, that the exaggeration and role-playing that Broadway musicals rely on and other music that borrows from Broadway employs often feel like the most authentic way for socially marginalized people - not just gay people but many women, and artistic or eccentric types - to express themselves). But this Blade piece not only reminds us that many of our favorite Christian (including southern gospel) artists rely on stage personae that are to some extent carefully crafted constructs (which is, as I’ve said before, no reason at all to think the music is any less “real” or “authentic”). The story also does a decent job of capturing the sometimes vertiginous intersection of religion and sexuality that can happen when we’re not looking - or pretending we’re not to, anyway.

I think 25 years ago my brother Danny who used to sing with us, and by the way, he passed away last year, and also, um, two days ago we buried my Mom, 88 years old, and um sweet lady, and uhm we said good bye to her - my dad’s still with us, here with us tonight, so I’m thankful for that - but we sang a song by a young lady who’s here tonight, Marsha Stevens and…[to Kim Hopper] Sing a verse of this ok?” [Kim sings verse one and all sing two choruses] “… and Marsha, we have sung that song all over the country and I love it because you may have seen and grown up with a Jesus that maybe was pushing you away, that wouldn’t let you in, and you were never too good enough [sic]. The only Christ I know is the Christ in that song, with his arms out very wide, saying, ‘come to the water’, that’s the only Christ I know. Come as you are, [big applause; Gaither is weepy at this point] and we’ve had a lot of fun tonight and Ken, I’ve never heard you funnier. You are a funny rascal, and Taylor and Mark, and one of the things I want to do - I know these can be tough times, but I want you to have a good time laughing and I hope you did laugh. But also somewhere along the way, you understood where our source of joy comes from. And it comes from this Christ who makes sense in a world that does not make sense at all. Let me see your lights on that one and sing the chorus.” [The audience lights their lights and everyone sings] “And Jesus said, ‘Come to the water, stand by my side…’” [Bill says “And why not? Why not?” and clip ends]

Aside from being a great primary text in the rhetorical style of Gaither’s stage presence, the transcript (and video) makes a few things pretty clear:

1) Gaither was speaking directly to Marsha Stevens when he says “you may have seen and grown up with a Jesus that maybe was pushing you away, that wouldn’t let you in, and you were never too good enough [sic]”;

2) Gaither was somewhat obliquely but nevertheless identifiably referring to Stevens’ sexuality and the alienation from faith and faith communities she has experienced; and

3) Gaither is describing his own view of Christian charity and Christ’s love as fundamentally inclusive: “The only Christ I know is the Christ in that song, with his arms out very wide … Come as you are …”

Gaither, of course, is a master of southern gospel ecumenicalism, of pivoting the spiritual and religious force of his shows away from theological specificity or denominational particularism and toward the much more spacious language of love and hope and faith. Rather than prescribing or espousing a particular theological meaning for these ideas, Gaither lets the people in his audiences fill the space he creates rhetorically with their own individual meaning. He also is a careful student of literature and art, which means this aw-shucks avuncular pose and his “it’s just us folks talking” routine from the stage are carefully crafted parts of a showman’s persona. I don’t think that makes him a fraud. In fact, I think that makes him a genius, but never mind. The point is that we can assume he chooses his words with great care and for a reason. So I guess one could argue that what he really meant was “Christ has his arms out very wide saying ‘come to the water’ … in order to be condemned for your sin of homosexuality and to repent of your abominable existence before God.” But when you hear hoof beats, why think zebras?

This “news” is delivered with the stentorian gravity of a BFD (the title: “Bill & Gloria are brought up in gay discussion on radio talk show,” as if the mere asociation of Gaither and Gay is newsworthy), but is this really that shocking (and now we’re to the place where I make my point)? I mean, opposing homosexuality, as many of Gaither and gospel-music fans do, does not undo the reality that gay people exist (including gay people who don’t consider themselves mired in sin or unbelief), even and perhaps especially in gospel music, which - as I suggested below - has a long history of appealing to a wide range of people with disparate backgrounds and identities and needs. Believe it or not, gay people (and gay-friendly people) drive your buses and produce your albums and market your singles and write your songs and buy your records and play your tunes and sing next to you on the stage and play your pianos and bass guitars and drums and radios and (yes, even) interview you on the air and promote your concerts and make some of that food at churches and in hospitality rooms and sit next to you at concerts. The scandal isn’t so much that the Gaithers (or anyone else in Christian music and in the world at large) are surrounded by gay people everyday, whether it’s obvious or not. What’s scandalous is that so many people involved in Christian monestry persist in the self-delusion that everyone in gospel music thinks and lives exactly alike in matters of theology, morality, sexuality, and identity. Update: Gaither’ statement is now up on the Singing News website. It’s difficult to reread what Gaither himself says he said in 2002 from the stage and not get the feeling that he was consciously and seriously trying to send a pretty inclusive signal to gays and lesbians. Which makes it all the more disappointing to see Gaither buckling to the homosexual panic that the sg web has managed to whip up about all this four years later. My own hunch is that Gaither’s original words from the stage were his true (and right) feelings on the matter (just as John McCain’s statements back in 2000 that Jerry Falwell was a bad influence on America and American politics were McCain’s true (and right) feelings on the matter).

“It’s not wrong,” he says, his voice rising, warming to the testimony. “It just is.” Amen, brother.
“I don’t think temptation of any sort is wrong.” Preach it.
“Yielding is a different story.” Glory to God.
“The only perfect person is Christ.” Amen.
“We all have struggles.” Praise the Lord.
“Mine just got into the papers.”

I could do without the wink-and-nod knowingness of the author’s half-mocking call-and-response embellishment, not least of all because the rhetorical setting the writer is conjuring up here comes out of a black gospel tradition that is absent from white evangelical Protestantism in all but a few particularly expressive strains of Pentecostal worship. But this is perhaps the inevitable misapprehension of someone who assumes too much about the world she’s describing or plays a bit too ham-fistedly to the audience she’s writing for - this is GQ after all. [Sidebar: Speaking of misapprehension, the title of the piece, “Out of the Lord’s Closet,” seems just plain wrong to me. In the evangelical Protestant context in which Talley lives and works, “the Lord” doesn’t have a closet that gay guys can come out of (for a taste of what I mean, see the AMGS thread that’s trundling along more or less in full toxicity mode … and, by the way: bravehost blogger, here are those sharks I was talking about). And, too, Talley really hasn’t come out in the first place. It might be more accurate to say he was outed and then sort of reclaimed some of the prerogatives of the closet in an attempt to rehabilitate his career and faith. But then that’s the kind of nuance that headline pithiness resists. The title seems to want to evoke the paradoxical and contradictory quality of Talley’s life and career, but it’s precisely the kind of thing someone who doesn’t fully “get it” would write or say.] What’s so striking about Talley’s comments are not anything that he says exactly (this notion of being born into a life of temptation and sin is almost as old as Christianity itself), but what he doesn’t say: Why doesn’t he have any sexual desires that he can act on?

It’s one thing to be beset by temptation (straight, gay, or whatever). But Talley here seems to make the “temptation” (to have sex with men or form deeper relationships with them) synonymous with “sexuality.” It would be like saying that “heterosexual” was all about avoiding adultery. In this view, the fall into sin seems to mean some people can expect little more than the latter-day life of a eunuch, of denial and unsexual relationships. “Burying yourself alive,” as the GQ article aptly puts it. As it applies to homosexuality, it’s unclear how this squares with the evangelical rhetoric of choice, of choosing to be gay. Is one a homosexual only if one CHOOSES to act on the desire or temptation? And if the answer is yes - if a gay person is only a heterosexual with no will power and not enough prayer - then it would seem that Talley’s “restoration” ought to culminate in a functional straight relationship. Of course there are plenty of case histories in the textbook of gay reparative therapy that its proponents like to cite as dispositive evidence of the success of ex-gay treatment (for an alternative take, see here). But in Talley, we have someone who, upon the best evangelical pastoral authority, has submitted himself to the redemptive power of God, and yet this seems to mean a life of asexuality, bereft of the till-death-do-us-part companionship that those same evangelical authorities assure us God has ordained from the foundations of the earth for all people to enjoy who submit to his will. Talley has submitted, so why the celibacy (he says he hasn’t had a relationship with anyone that included sex since his marriage ended in 1986)? Is God not always able or willing to accomplish a restoration to heterosexuality? Is there scripture that would explain or comprehend Talley’s plight - the plight of a repentant gay “sinner” who is stuck between his “sin” and the normative world of procreative heterosexuality?

If Talley himself has come to any conclusions about these problems, he doesn’t say or hasn’t said, preferring instead to highlight those aspects of his life and history that reinforce a narrative of human failure forgiven and forgotten (at least by God). The GQ profile seems to suggest that no matter how immobilized he may be or feel as a quasi-gay man in a professional and religious world that has no place for “quasi” anything, Talley has decided to remain connected, however tenuously, to gospel music and evangelical Christianity: “Talley understands how his life appears to those outside his faith,” as the article says, “how he may be seen by gays as a coward or a fraud. But he is not terribly concerned with those opinions because he is not on the outside. Talley is a southern gospel singer. And he is a man of God. And in neither place is there room for love between two men.” Even the meanness and rejection he faces from evangelical and southern culture are at least familiar and more predictable than the life that would await him beyond.

Perhaps this is the best someone like Talley could hope for - a kind of stoic surrender of the self to a God and other Christians who may love you but will still damn you for feelings and a sense of yourself you’ve done nothing to cause or create. “It just is,” as Talley says. Calling this “temptation,” as Talley does, allows him (I think I’ve said this before) to craft a story about growing up gay and Christian that reinforces what his audiences already wanted to believe about homosexuality and Christianity without forcing him to get more explicit his political or theological views. But Talley’s talk of temptation seems to address a certain set of private ambivalences as well. To collapse the meaning of “gay” into the idea of “temptation” and “sin” seems to allow Talley to make sense of his experience within the only theological framework and religious world he’s ever known. This system and world may have no other response to situations like Talley’s than feeble comparisons to alcoholism or drug addiction or criminal pathology, but it’s all he’s got. At 47 years old, it’s probably more feasible to come to some tentative terms with life as it has existed for the past four decades than to pull everything down around you, set it aflame, walk away from the burning mess and start all over again. By positioning himself as the spiritual victor over his own baser, gayer self, Talley appears to have found a way to redirect attention away from the abominable conversation-stopping, career-ending nature of his “perversion” and focus instead on the reinvention of himself through Christ - from public pariah to a prophet without a home.

Singer Kirk Talley was on top of the Christian-music world until a gay-blackmail scheme made him a pariah. Now he’s trying to rebuild-by fighting temptation with every bone in his body — By Allison Glock

I’ll be in the airport tomorrow, so I’ll pick up a copy. Speaking of traveling, I’ll be out of town again for a few days, traveling to a coast for some long overdue sand and sun, so if posting is light, that’ll be why. See you on the beach. Or if not, back here next week.