I’ve got an essay in the new issue of The Other Journal, which is now available online. It’s called “The Problem of Gay Friendship,” and it will give you some idea of how the book I’m writing is taking shape. Here’s an excerpt:
Going back to Aelred, it’s significant that most of the saint’s gay admirers admit that, although the eleventh century abbot likely experienced what we now call a “homosexual orientation,” he himself was celibate. The man who could describe a friend as one “to whom you so join and unite yourself that you mix soul with soul” and one whom you could embrace “in the kiss of unity, with the sweetness of the Holy Spirit flowing over you” apparently never had gay sex. What Aelred called “spiritual friendship” was a form of same-sex intimacy that sublimated or transmuted erotic passion, rather than sanctioning its genital expression. In light of this, I wonder what it might look like to part ways with Aelred’s largest circle of admirers today and attempt to recover the abbot’s original vision of an intimacy between friends that didn’t involve a physical, sexual union.
I’d love to hear from you in the com-box if you have a chance to read this. (That would help as I work on revising my manuscript.)
My main gripe about my own essay is that I think I should have engaged more deeply and carefully with the objection Gerald Bray raises—that speaking of “gay friendship” runs the risk of making sexual desire part of the definition of a friendship and therefore subverts friendship’s true character. Bray is not the only one to voice this worry, and it’s a question that deserves more of a response than I was able to give in this article.
Here’s how the piece concludes:
To the John Boswells and Elizabeth Stuarts of the world, I want to insist that Aelred’s vision of spiritual friendship need not, and ought not, be coopted for the project of overturning traditional Christian sexual ethics. But to my fellow traditionalist believers, I want to place Aelred’s vision as a disturbing question mark over our pastoral approach to the question of homosexuality. If we can’t envision a way for celibate gay Christians to embody his ideal of same-sex companionship today, what is our alternative way of ensuring that those Christians aren’t asked to shoulder a burden beyond what they can bear? Outside the cloister of an eleventh-century abbey in North Yorkshire, what is our solution to the problem of gay loneliness?
