Michel Serres on gay marriage: "The whole Catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke"

 Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris's blog Nomadics is always a wonderful place to discover and revisit to reassure the reader there is entertaining writing on the internet if you know where to look in its endless hall of mirrors. Joris -- an educator, author, translator, raconteur and dapper dresser (not necessarily in that order) posts items of great interest to the academic and the amateur alike -- a trick very few can manage with Joris's wit and style.

He enjoys posting the work of others he finds illuminating, especially in translation, and which otherwise would go unnoted. Here, for example, is a recent contribution that bears on Biblical interpretation, marriage relationships, the structure of the family, and the  debate in France about gay marriage. The quote is by French philosopher Michel Serres, who takes an interesting path getting to his eminently logical conclusion.

The logic must have worked: France became the thirteenth nation to legalize same-sex marriage on May 18, 2013.

Nomadics is worth a regular browse for anyone interested in literature, language, poetics, and travel.

Michel Serres

Our friend Cathie Fournier Facebook-forwarded a lovely quote by French philosopher Michel Serres, which I thought would be worthwhile to English. I don’t know the context in which he said or wrote it, except that the French parliament is discussing gay marriage right now! Here it is:

“This question of gay marriage interests me, given the answer the ecclesiastical hierarchy brings to it. Since the first century after Jesus-Christ, the model of the family has been that of the church, that of the Holy Family.

But let us examine the Holy Family. In the Holy Family, the father is not the father: Joseph is not Jesus’ father. The son is not the son: Jesus is the son of God, not the son of Joseph. Joseph, he has never made love to his wife. Concerning the mother, she is the mother indeed, but she is a virgin. The Holy Family, that’s what Levi-Strauss called the elementary structure of kinship. A structure that breaks completely with ancient genealogy, based until then on filiation: one is Jewish through the mother. There are three types of filiation: natural filiation, recognition of paternity and adoption. In the Holy Family, what is blocked is both natural filiation and recognition; only adoption remains.

Thus, since the Gospel according to Luke, the Church proposes as model for the family an elementary structure based on adoption: it is no longer a question of making children, but of choosing oneself, to the point where we are parents, you will be parents, father and mother, only if you say to your child “I have chosen you,” “I adopt you because I love you,” “ it is you I wanted.” And reciprocally, the child also chooses his parents because he loves them.

Thus to me the position of the Church concerning homosexual marriage is perfectly mysterious: this problem was solved some 2000 years ago. I suggest that the whole Catholic hierarchy should reread the Gospel according to Luke. Or to convert.”

"Dreadful": an excerpt from the biography of John Horne Burns by David Margolick

 

In the current national mood of public and legal acceptance for gay marriage,  it may be difficult to imagine the hiding and secrecy that once was the norm for homosexuals in 20th-century America. This was especially true in the military, where long-held ideas required that gay and lesbian service members hide or suppress their sexuality.

David Margolick has written a new biography of John Horne Burns focusing attention on Burns's  episodic 1947 novel of war-time portraits, The Gallery. When the novel was published it gathered strong praise among critics and writers from Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos  to Hemingway, who wrote a friend that the book was "wonderfully written." One aspect of the novel -- bold for the times -- was Horne's depiction of gay life, which few contemporary reviews mentioned, although the Time magazine reviewer noted the scenes of "an evening spent in a homosexuals’ hangout.” 

A lengthy recent New York Times extract from Margolick's new biography refers to Burns in its headline as "the great gay novelist you've never heard of," but it's clear that Burns -- who never expressly hid his homosexuality -- was neither a good fit in the literary world of post-war America nor comfortable in it. He died, without conclusive explanation, in 1953 at the age of 36 while traveling in Europe with his partner, which prompted rounds of curious speculation. His death was a suspected cerebral hemorrhage brought on by alcoholism, but others suggested suicide due to depression, a failed affair, or even murder. 

Some of the response was in keeping with Burns's own literary-misfit personality: one female acquaintance laughed at the cause of a cerebral hemorrhage and suggested "yes, a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a bullet in his brain." From the book Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press):

...“The Gallery” was actually his ninth novel; he wrote one pretty much every summer, first at Andover, then at Harvard, then at Loomis, books that even his friends conceded were unpublishable — nasty, nihilistic and narcissistic things populated with characters his own agent once called “stinkers.” But the war had touched and humanized Burns, changing his outlook, tone and style. He told a friend that he had shed his ungenügender Selbstsucht — a term he would have learned from Goethe and Brahms, meaning unsatisfying egotism or insatiable self-love — and come, at long last, to care about someone besides himself. 

His new war novel wasn’t really a novel at all. It consisted, instead, of nine portraits, alternately caustic and sympathetic but all keenly observed — primarily of American soldiers, but also of two Italian women — and eight “promenades”: personal reflections of an anonymous, Burns-like G.I. wandering from one image and place in North Africa and Italy to another, just as Burns himself had done. ... 

Like a vast majority of G.I.’s, Burns never saw combat: thanks to his fluent Italian (and German and French), he was channeled into military intelligence, which for him meant reading and censoring the letters of Italy’s captured, homesick soldiers. The only weapon Burns ever wielded was an X-acto knife. But whether in Casablanca, Algiers or Naples, he witnessed, then chronicled, first in his letters home and then in his novel, something else: as he put it to a friend, “the effects of war after the wedge has gone through and left nothing but splinters and pain.” ... 

Undoubtedly the book’s most remarkable portrait is of Momma, the proprietress of the Galleria’s gay bar, where, every day but Sunday from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., gay soldiers from every branch of the Grand Alliance gather to imbibe and cruise and sometimes score. Whether Momma’s Bar ever really existed or was simply Burns’s earnest dream is unclear and, in a way, irrelevant: for someone as evasive about his own sexuality as a gay man of his generation had to be — ostentatiously “dating” and pretending periodically to have a fiancée — it was more than a startlingly ringing endorsement of gay culture; it was an act of enormous and atypical, almost inexplicable, courage. 

The men in the gallery of gays (and, with only a couple of exceptions, they are all men) in “The Gallery” are alternately lonely, proud, unpleasant, sensitive, officious, effeminate, macho, offensive and lovable; in other words, reasonably normal, rather than the suicidal freaks and criminals that had populated American literature, gay and straight, up to then. And they are all in uniform at a time in the history of the United States military when, officially at least, they were not allowed and did not exist. ...

Stonewall, June 1969: "The liberation is underway"

"We are the Stonewall girls

We wear our hair in curls

We show our pubic hair ...

we wear our dungarees

above our nelly knees!"

(Chant at Stonewall, June 1969)

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn. For those of a particular and increasing age, the Stonewall Inn riots, in New York's West Village, June 27-28, 1969 seem an improbable long time ago. 

The police who harassed the bar crowd that gathered to observe the memory of Judy Garland (she had died on the 22nd and a memorial service held on the 26th) were met by Stonewall patrons who refused to show I.D. one more time, including Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist. What happened afterward has been called by many names -- a riot, an uprising, a beginning -- but it began, as many historical events do, at a point when the ideas of the past collide with the idea of a future.

Allen Ginsberg, never one to miss the action of whatever kind, was eventually drawn to The Stonewall Inn to make the scene. As it was reported in Lucien K Truscott IV’s controversial Village Voice account:

“... Allen Ginsberg and Taylor Mead walked by to see what was happening and were filled in on the previous evening’s activities by some of the gay activists. 'Gay power. Isn’t that great!' Allen said. 'We’re one of the largest minorities in the country –- 10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.'

Ginsberg expressed a desire to visit the Stonewall ('You know, I've never been in there') and ambled on down the street, flashing peace signs and helloing the TPF. It was a relief and a kind of a joy to see him on the street. He lent an extra umbrella of serenity to the scene with his laughter and quiet commentary on consciousness, 'gay power' as a new movement, and the various implications of what had happened.

I followed him into the Stonewall where rock music blared from speakers all around a room that might have come from a Hollywood set of a gay bar. He was immediately bouncing and dancing wherever he moved.

He left, and I walked east with him. Along the way he described how things used to be. 'You know, the guys there were so beautiful –- they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.' It was the first time I had heard that crowd described as beautiful.

Outside the Stonewall Inn, June 27-28, 1969

We reached Cooper Square, and as Ginsberg turned to head toward home, he waved and yelled 'Defend the fairies!' and bounced on across the square. He enjoyed the prospect of 'gay power' and is probably working on a manifesto for the movement right now. Watch out. The liberation is underway.

As David Carter has pointed out: 'Ginsberg's characterization of the change that the Stonewall Uprising had brought about was so trenchant that when the early gay activist Allen Young interviewed (him) for the literary magazine, Gay Sunshine, the only question that (he) asked him about Stonewall was the circumstances behind Allen's statement.' Allen's reply:

'I wasn't there at the riot. I heard about it, and I went down the next night to the Stonewall to show the colors. A crowd was there, and the place was open. So I said, the best thing I can do is go in; the worst that can happen is I'll calm the scene. They're not going to attack them while I'm there. I"ll just start a big "Om". I didn't relate to the violent part. The trashing part I thought was bitchy, unnecessary, hysterical. But, on the other hand, there was this image that everybody wanted to make that they could beat up the police, which apparently they managed to do. It was so funny as an image that it was hard to disapprove of, even though it involved a little violence'." ...

Whatever happens next in the national discussion of same-sex marriage is anyone's guess (in 2011 one opponent called the law's passage in New York state a victory of "the last of the low-hanging fruit"), but more arcane lawsuits and loud accusations of Supreme Court politics are sure to follow.

The passage of legislation permitting same-sex marriage is in a slow-motion, stately procession -- state by state the national (and legal) mood is changing, even as the road ahead still seems a long one. It will be a different world to imagine that what was once too scandalous to speak openly of in a court of law will one day be the subject of that court’s august deliberations.

(1969 Stonewall photo from the Columbia University archives)

Ginsberg at Stonewall, June 1969: "defend the fairies!"

"We are the Stonewall girls

We wear our hair in curls

We show our pubic hair ...

we wear our dungarees

above our nelly knees!"

(Chant at Stonewall, June 1969)

The passage of legislation permitting same-sex marriage is in a slow-motion, stately procession -- state by state the national (and legal) mood is changing, even as the road ahead still seems a long one. For those of a particular and increasing age, the Stonewall Inn riots, in New York's West Village, June 27-28, 1969 seems an improbably long time ago. 

The police who harassed the bar crowd that gathered to observe the memory of Judy Garland (she had died on the 22nd and a memorial service held on the 26th) were met by Stonewall patrons who refused to show I.D. one more time, including Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist. What happened afterward has been called by many names -- a riot, an uprising, a beginning -- but it began, as many historical events do, at a point when the ideas of the past collide with the idea of a future.

Allen Ginsberg, never one to miss the action of whatever kind, was eventually drawn to The Stonewall Inn to make the scene. As it was reported in Lucien K Truscott IV’s controversial Village Voice account:

“... Allen Ginsberg and Taylor Mead walked by to see what was happening and were filled in on the previous evening’s activities by some of the gay activists. 'Gay power. Isn’t that great!' Allen said. 'We’re one of the largest minorities in the country –- 10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.'

Ginsberg expressed a desire to visit the Stonewall ('You know, I've never been in there') and ambled on down the street, flashing peace signs and helloing the TPF. It was a relief and a kind of a joy to see him on the street. He lent an extra umbrella of serenity to the scene with his laughter and quiet commentary on consciousness, 'gay power' as a new movement, and the various implications of what had happened.

I followed him into the Stonewall where rock music blared from speakers all around a room that might have come from a Hollywood set of a gay bar. He was immediately bouncing and dancing wherever he moved.

He left, and I walked east with him. Along the way he described how things used to be. 'You know, the guys there were so beautiful –- they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.' It was the first time I had heard that crowd described as beautiful.

Outside the Stonewall Inn, June 27-28, 1969

We reached Cooper Square, and as Ginsberg turned to head toward home, he waved and yelled 'Defend the fairies!' and bounced on across the square. He enjoyed the prospect of 'gay power' and is probably working on a manifesto for the movement right now. Watch out. The liberation is underway.

As David Carter has pointed out: 'Ginsberg's characterization of the change that the Stonewall Uprising had brought about was so trenchant that when the early gay activist Allen Younginterviewed (him) for the literary magazine, Gay Sunshine, the only question that (he) asked him about Stonewall was the circumstances behind Allen's statement.' Allen's reply:

'I wasn't there at the riot. I heard about it, and I went down the next night to the Stonewall to show the colors. A crowd was there, and the place was open. So I said, the best thing I can do is go in; the worst that can happen is I'll calm the scene. They're not going to attack them while I'm there. I"ll just start a big "Om". I didn't relate to the violent part. The trashing part I thought was bitchy, unnecessary, hysterical. But, on the other hand, there was this image that everybody wanted to make that they could beat up the police, which apparently they managed to do. It was so funny as an image that it was hard to disapprove of, even though it involved a little violence'." ...

Whatever happens in the national discussion of same-sex marriage it appears the conservative tactic of state-by-state challenge is failing (in 2011 one opponent called the law's passage in New York state a victory of "the last of the low-hanging fruit." Currently same-sex marriage has been ratified in 17 states and the District of Columbia), but more arcane lawsuits and loud accusations of Supreme Court politics are sure to follow.

It would be interesting to see what Ginsberg and Harry Hay of the Mattachine Society would say regarding the sweeping momentum of same-sex marriage legislation, its challenges and legal effects. It will be a different world to imagine that what was once too scandalous to speak openly of in a court of law will be the basis of the court's august deliberations about the very meaning of marriage as the lawsuits unfold.

(1969 Stonewall photo from the Columbia University archives)