You Have to Be Gay to Know God. Siya Khumalo
of as the Bible’s first reference to homosexuality, tells us the patriarch Lot offered his two virgin daughters to be raped by the neighbourhood’s mobs instead of his male guests. And Lot is frequently referred to as ‘righteous’. This train of thought often causes me to ask people my next question:
‘Do you hold to everything the Old Testament prescribes?’
‘No,’ they often say. ‘We’re no longer under the Old Covenant, so we don’t have to subscribe to the literal letter of the Law.’
Then who gets to decide which parts of the Bible apply, and how is anyone who wants to opt out (but is trapped by economic or familial circumstances) to stay shielded from the consequences of unpredictable Bible-verse cherry-picking?
I scoured the Bible for answers. But was I allowed to? The Johannine verses’ masculine focal point confounded me. God’s Son was gendered, every son having been at some point a boy and every boy a son.
Indeed, the lithe Jesus on the Catholic crucifix was not depicted as a sexless cherub. He was a man; the first pin-up I ever knelt before. I kissed the Saviour’s chiselled knees and thighs under a suspicious priest’s glare at Veneration the year before I had my first Communion, where I gulped Jesus’s wafer-thin body down my gullet. Look, I might go to hell for writing this but the poor excuse for a loin-cloth draped about Jesus’s pale waist messed with my head. If his plan for saving me from the perversions of my flesh was himself being made into a perversion of the flesh, then I was a spiritual disaster because I kept seeing the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred.
Some light did transplant itself from the buttery oil-painting clouds of cheap Renaissance imitations into the skies of my imagination. The half-naked Jesus of those paintings appeared to be the only person, dead or alive, who could understand this conflict of spiritual and sexual awareness. But, he was both God and God’s Son; judge and judged, executioner and executed: a grim warning about what God would have done to boys who think shameful thoughts. He was a type of the boy on the bike — a son with a capital-letter S, like on Superman’s vest.
I threw myself into the pursuit of holiness, sublimating my growing sexual awareness into religious zeal. I was on my way to becoming a self and body-hating Saul, the anally-retentive Pharisee.
A girl who supposedly had a message from the Lord of Darkness stood at the front of the Pentecostal church I was at. ‘Satan said to say all the believers’ homes are going down,’ she announced matter-of-factly. A shudder went through the congregation. Another night, a young man confessed his sin in a regretful tone: he’d dreamt he was sleeping with a woman. The congregation gasped. I envied him — marriage could be prescribed for that, unless he was one of the fated Christians Pastor Gumede had seen burning in hell in one of his visions. ‘Abanye benu basesihogweni njegamanje,’ he warned us. Some of you are in hell already. This was said to ‘encourage’ all of us to turn away from hidden sin.
Even as I muttered pious shock like the adults and teenagers around me, my hypocrisy gnawed at me from below my diaphragm. My desire’s acute demand for release singed nerve endings I didn’t know existed in places on my body I wouldn’t have pointed out on a doctor’s chart. Each internal gyration echoed my pulse down my groin, to my toes — right there in church. I learned to tuck my feet under my seat while squirming as the attractive pastor preached about that sin, that most hidden, alluring sin dragging you off to hell from the inside because you like how it caresses you while it ensnares you. And you’re not confessing it, you filthy sinner. You’ve got the Pharaoh’s army of enjoyment behind you and the Red Sea of shame before you — Amen!
He’s not talking about me, I would tell myself in a panic, especially when he preached against the sins of Sodom. The dreadful, terrible deeds of that place; deeds some of you are secretly practising. Or considering. And we church-goers worshipped frenziedly, like each of us was putting his or her religiosity out there to deflect suspicions that we were that sinner in the sermon; passionately, as though we knew it was as close to getting off as we’d ever, er, come.
Years later, Pastor Gumede made news headlines for statutorily raping male students at the school he taught at, and half the ‘holy ones’ he preached and worshipped with. ‘Had you continued going to that church,’ said a cousin from Dad’s side, ‘you’d have grown up to become one of his fuck boys.’
And not to say the thought had crossed my mind (the guy was married with children) but I’d probably have overcome my shyness to ask that he call me a filthy sinner while we were doing it.
I spent hours as a teenager at a beachside pool that was too cold for anyone else in my family to swim in. I’d leave everyone and float on my back in the deep end for hours, gazing at skies purpled by the chemicals in the water and in my eyes. ‘You were once the happiest child any of us had ever seen,’ Mom complained. I wanted to reply, ‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but that child may have died.’
So, before I even came out to her, she turned every hostile tradition I had been exposed to on its head. Were gays a hoax or riddle from the ancestors? No: they were spiritual guides from beyond. Abominations? No: God is love; he creates different kinds of people to love. Were gay people from Satan? No! Satan’s hold on us is never that direct — his influence, like God’s, works more in the realm of relationships than innate traits like sexual orientation, though those can be leveraged by Satan for blackmailing and shaming people. In the end, religious legalism would do more to turn folks away from God’s light than towards it. The spiritual fight could not be rushed into superficially, the way most churches preached it. We’d only shipwreck our faith if we took everything religion said literally.
‘But how do you pick which parts of the Bible to follow?’ I asked.
‘You take what you can, and leave what you can’t take. Anyone who thinks they can take all of it is lying to himself,’ she replied. Oddly, this also echoed Jesus’s preaching about eunuchs — a teaching he said would be another one of those things not everyone could take on board.
Matthew’s Gospel tells of2 Pharisees who asked Jesus whether it was lawful to divorce one’s wife for any and every reason. Jesus replied that Moses allowed divorce, but it was only to be resorted to in the case of sexual immorality.
Jesus’s disciples remarked that if the Law of Moses was to be lived that strictly, it would be better not to marry (which makes them a lot more honest than most legalists). That’s when Jesus replied, ‘Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.’
What’s worried me is that our churches don’t have support groups, systems or ministries for these eunuchs. It would be very strange for the number of eunuchs born as such to also drop.
If Jesus’s ‘born eunuch’ is today’s intersexed person, that opens the door to the whole sexual spectrum because if nature can make one kind of exception to gender binary, which Jesus recognised as prolific enough to qualify religious expectations, it would be difficult to argue against a full-blooded spectrum much like we see in today’s LGBTI3 community.
CHAPTER 4
Coming Out
The dance around what I couldn’t know about myself intensified until I was twelve. I described this unknown demon grazing on illicit nerve endings in my body as my ‘forbidden self’ to the occupational therapist. When I dreamt that actor Austin Peck and I were about to set a bed in my grandmother’s house on fire at age eleven, bronzed dimples flashing as he smiled wildly at me, I knew this ‘forbidden self’ was growing stronger, more defiant — on the verge of being unleashed and consuming me.
It couldn’t be that I was gay, I told myself; surely, whatever cross this forbidden self-represented, it couldn’t be that. Hadn’t my praying and church-going inoculated me?
The evening two weeks before my thirteenth birthday, I watched a mini-series titled Family Album.