The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

Chapter 9. “Baptizing” Queer Characters

151 ChApter 9 “Baptizing” Queer Characters Mark D. Jordan ( ( sinCe the seCond world wAr, churchly discourse about samesex desire has changed remarkably—in its detail and volume, in its varieties of evidence and manners of argument, but above all in its choices to “baptize” certain identities or characters, as I prefer to say.1 Understanding changes in the chosen names for the characters projected around same-sex desire may help us assess the controversies now rending Christian institutions. It will certainly renew old questions about how Christian ethics can be said to make progress—especially when it appropriates from other expert discourses changing names and descriptions for ethical actors. In the last fifty years, church writers baptized at least three new characters: the invert, the homophile, and the homosexual. Each term has seemed to promise theologians progress in controversial matters. Did any of them in fact help to recognize or to foster Christian characters that could desire queerly? 152 The Embrace of Eros tHE InvErt I must begin by stepping back before my announced beginning after World War II. In the 1890s, the self-taught reformer Havelock Ellis popularized for English speakers the awkward noun invert to describe a character whose “sexual instinct” had been “turned by inborn constitutional abnormality” toward those of the same sex.2 Ellis fashioned neither the metaphor nor its implied theory. He copied the noun from Italian and French writers of forensic psychiatry, who had coined it to capture the diagnosis—proposed by Carl Westphal, applied by Richard von Krafft-Ebing—of “contrary sexual feeling,” that is, of the feeling’s “inborn reversal (Verkehrung).”3 The original term translated in English as “homosexuality” was also coined in German during these years. First a neutral term intended for use in legal reform, Krafft-Ebing fused “homosexuality” with Westphal’s notion of contrary sexual feeling. Note three things about Westphal’s original notion as Englished by Ellis: sexual inversion is inborn, it is a reversal of feeling across a fixed gender binary, and it is pathological. The reversal need not determine sexual behavior. It is entirely possible to be an invert and to have only heterosexual relations or none at all. The reversal of sexual feeling does invariably indicate a “general pathological condition.”4 It manifests an underlying disorder, such as “moral insanity,” which is linked in turn to tainted heredity or failed development.5 In short, Ellis’s term invert, like so many terms of early sexology, took its meanings from theories of racial superiority and degeneration. I now jump to the years immediately following World War II and to my first sample from the archives of church speech. In 1954, a group associated with the Moral Welfare Council of the Church of England published a pamphlet entitled The Problem of Homosexuality: An Interim Report. The specific occasion for the pamphlet was news reporting and public discussion leading up to a British Home Office review of criminal laws on prostitution and homosexual acts. The pamphlet was not meant to be public; it was printed “For private circulation,” as the title page cautions.6 It is an invitation to expert consultation among those who must deal with homosexuality as a social problem. The pamphlet cites the first Kinsey report, but it does not take up Alfred Kinsey’s suggestion about naming characters. Kinsey urges his readers not to speak of homosexuals but only of the frequency over a particular period of homosexual desires or acts (“outlets,” he famously calls them).7 The Anglican pamphlet, on the contrary, understands homosexuality not as frequent or infrequent conduct but as a permanent condition. Echoing Ellis, it calls a person who suffers the condition an invert. It distinguishes the true invert “Baptizing” Queer Characters 153 from the “pervert,” that is, from “a heterosexual who engages in homosexual practices.”8 The character of the invert appears during adolescence most probably from psychological causes rather than from inheritance. Eugenic theories are tacitly rejected by the pamphlet; institutionalized psychoanalytic ones are endorsed. The pamphlet admits that many normal adolescents feel homosexual tendencies for brief periods. The desires can become abnormally and tragically fixed if there is an “unsatisfactory parental relationship”: an absent father, a smothering mother, or the retreat of both parents after divorce. This latent parental damage may then be precipitated by failed attempts to date women, by sexual experiments at boys’ school, or by the solicitations of an older man...