The gay-rights movement is usually presented as a movement for personal freedom, and specifically for sexual liberation: the throwing off of old shames, silences, and constraints. The history supports this claim, and there are ways of telling gay history that would center it: the emergence of something recognizably similar to a modern “gay identity” in the cruising grounds or “molly houses” of eighteenth-century England; the leadership of sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey in promoting acceptance of homosexuality; the prominence of libertarian arguments in American gay advocacy in the twentieth century.
But like every community, the LGBT community is defined not solely, or even mostly, by what it shares, but by the common ground on which it fights out its characteristic conflicts. These conflicts frequently center on some good that is intrinsic to gay liberation but seems incompatible with individual freedom or sexual liberation. When gay communities were tearing themselves apart over proposals to close bathhouses in order to combat AIDS, activist Bill Kraus voiced a cri de coeur that framed the bathhouse controversy as a battle over the foundation of gay liberation: “If the gay movement means anything, it means learning self-respect and respect for one another.” Intra-community disputes over whether gay marriage or a broader “family diversity” should be the goal marked the 1990s and 2000s. Conflicts over the role of asexual people in queer communities, or sexual displays at Pride celebrations, also play out as questions about what might matter to LGBT movements alongside—or even more than—sex and personal choice.
Part of what has made the Catholic Church’s response to gay liberation so challenging is that the movement is a volatile mix of elements. Individual freedom has a complex relationship with the Catholic idea of the common good; sexual liberation includes much that the Church considers sinful. But some of the elements of gay-liberation movements are goods recognized by the Church in other contexts, or imperfect expressions of those goods. There is a way of telling the story of gay liberation in which gay communities have been havens for expressions of love, selflessness, covenant, and care that were in danger of being lost in the modern world. This story opens out onto forms of beauty and even prayer that an anti-gay world would stigmatize. Let me sketch this side of history—polemical and partial but also true, hopeful, and intensely relevant to current pastoral needs. It is not the story we’re used to hearing in our churches.
They used to call it a “pash.” A high-school or college girl would become infatuated with another girl. She would blush and coo when she spoke her crush’s name; she wanted to spend every moment either with her pash or dissecting every glance, cutting comment, perfumed note, or inexplicable silence she received from the girl. A girl with a pash was silly, dizzy, but also adorable—and normal.
The women’s college “pash” was a latecomer to the parade of publicly acknowledged, structured forms of same-sex love and intimacy. That history starts in the ancient world. Warriors in the Iliad whose grandfathers have sworn friendship realize they cannot fight one another. The biblical covenant between David and Jonathan and the promises of Ruth to Naomi bring these honored forms of love, in which two men or two women become kin, into sacred Scripture. Sworn brotherhood and vowed friendship persisted in the West into the early modern world. The role of sex in these relationships varied across cultures. After the rise of Christianity, these relationships were not expected to be sexual, but they were often deeply emotional. Scripture’s examples are not marriages, and not sexual, but they are ardent. And these Biblical pairs have inspired contemporary gay people. We have recognized in them something of our longings and our hopes.
Christian societies preserved ancient forms of sworn brotherhood, covenant friendship, or adoptive siblinghood. In the West, our records largely show unions between men, who became kin and lived out their bond in ways that poignantly mirror the promises from the Book of Ruth: shared household and shared finances, care for one another’s children, mutual religious obligations, and burial together. In the East, monastic life gave rise to kinship bonds that included two men adopting one another as brothers or two women becoming sisters. In both East and West, there were other, more socially marginal forms of same-sex pairing, which were even more closely tied to one’s call to follow Christ: pilgrims often traveled in pairs, and hermits often lived in pairs. (A fact that may challenge our stereotype of hermits as necessarily solitary.) If a pilgrim or hermit gained a reputation for holiness, the friend would feature prominently in their hagiography.
With the uneven but unstoppable advance of modernity, these forms of Christian same-sex love became rare and were finally all but forgotten. It’s tempting to blame the Protestant Reformation. Certainly in the West, where Reformers like Martin Luther made marriage seem like the vocation of every Christian, alternative forms of love and kinship may have looked like inferior loves. It’s possible that this anti-celibacy, universal-marriage narrative is the genesis of a contemporary culture in which friendship is for childhood, while romance, sex, and marriage are treated as the adult forms of love—so that the friendships that are everything when you’re eleven are viewed as codependent or immature when you’re twenty-one. But the truth is that many premodern people in covenant or sworn friendships were also married. And these forms of publicly honored same-sex love also faded (though perhaps more slowly) in areas relatively untouched by the Reformation. So the loss of these forms of love remains, for me, basically unexplained.
When same-sex love no longer had intelligible public forms, that didn’t mean people stopped feeling it. Many people across the spectrum of what we would now call “sexual orientation” still desired to share their lives with another man or another woman. Finding no guidance, ritual adornment, religious purpose, or social respect for this longing, however, most of them shrugged and got married and had normal, beautiful, unacknowledged friendships. The only ones who continued to try to share their lives with someone of the same sex were the ones who had especially urgent motivations for doing so. One such urgent motivation has always been sexual desire. And so life-shaping same-sex love, which had once been a recognized possibility for all Christians, was now sought after mostly by homosexuals.
Which heterosexuals eventually noticed, to everybody’s misfortune. Love that had retreated to the shadows began to look suspicious there. Vassar girls had a couple fleeting decades to chat gaily about their “pashes” before parents began to worry that women’s colleges were hotbeds of lesbianism. A Frenchman quoted in Graham Robb’s Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century quipped, “Any friendship that lasts more than thirty years eventually becomes respectable.” The idea that you could have too much friendship—or that your friendship could be disreputable not because it was too self-interested or dissolute but precisely because it was too devoted—suggests a massive cultural transformation. And this kind of story comes up again and again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: both male and female friendships tilt suddenly underneath the friends’ feet, and relationships that once were not only normal but idealized became subject to harsh social scrutiny and even legal prosecution.
And here we still live. The 2022 Belgian drama Close tells the story of our current predicament. Two thirteen-year-old boys are inseparable friends: head on shoulder, dozing together outdoors, all the easy physical intimacy of friends who have loved each other as long as they can remember. But now they are reaching puberty—and suddenly they’re too close. Their schoolmates’ reaction to the boys’ friendship tears them apart. To love another boy when you’re ten is glorious. To love another boy when you’re thirteen…that’s gay.
A Belgian arthouse film can be honest about the cost of this pressure against same-sex love. Hollywood blockbusters, by contrast, may still be feeding fear of the “pash.” Former Pixar employees claim that Disney intervened in the production of Inside Out 2 to make thirteen-year-old Riley’s desire to impress an older girl seem “less gay.”
The English translation of the 1997 Catechism of the Catholic Church shows the same wincing discomfort. In its section on “Chastity and homosexuality,” the Catechism recommends “disinterested friendship.” This is friendship without an agenda—nice as far as it goes, but also a bit cold and standoffish. The phrase being translated here was, in the French original, amitié désintéressée. This phrase is somewhat more common in French than the seemingly equivalent phrase is in English, and the connotations in French are less fastidious. A better translation might be “selfless.”
The French original knows what the translation, like much of the modern world, has forgotten: that selfless friendship is real, that it speaks to some of the deepest longings of the heart, that it is a form of the imitation of Christ; that friendship reflects the relationship of Christ and his Church as well as marriage does (“I have not called you servants, but friends”). The Catechism seems to understand that a call to self-giving friendship may resonate with gay people in an especially urgent way. Christian ideas about homosexuality have often assumed that gay love must be narcissistic, but selfless love has been a part of what gay movements fought for since Oscar Wilde penned “The Nightingale and the Rose.”
There are Christians who would accept the alternative history I’ve just sketched, and acknowledge the colossal loss of devoted friendship that it ends with, but who would present gay communities not as the last havens of same-sex love but as the destroyers of that love. They would note that women and even men still share casual physical intimacy in cultures where homosexuality is harshly stigmatized, and argue that we will only see deep intimacy between men or women friends if we make homosexuality once more an unthinkable accusation. In 2013, two Russian women’s relay champions kissed on the podium. Progressive Westerners applauded what they assumed was a protest against Russia’s anti-gay policies; the women responded with indignant shock at this “insulting” interpretation. They were able to kiss on the lips because they thought nobody could accuse them of being lesbians.
The obvious rejoinder to this view is that it’s impossible to return to a culture where being gay is unthinkable—as the Russian relay champions learned. But there are deeper problems with the desire to promote good straight people and their homosociality at the expense of bad gay people and their homosexuality. Homosocial love looks like homosexual love because both of them are love of someone of the same sex. Those who defend the first and condemn the second are effectively saying, “The problem is not that you express your love in a way the Church condemns, but that it isn’t real love at all—not like ours.” This is simply unbelievable for anyone who has experienced or even witnessed selfless love in a gay couple. The claim, “You need to be silent about your love, so that I can love without anyone thinking I am like you,” turns a moral teaching into a social hierarchy—the very act Jesus condemns when he rescues the woman taken in adultery.
In her fascinating interview-based book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, Rhaina Cohen notes the willingness of queer people to center friendship and not just sexual relationships. Perhaps even more radically, she explores what needs to happen in order for straight people, especially straight men, to experience life-shaping, devoted friendship. In her chapter on the friendship of two Christian pastors, one gay and one straight, she finds that both friends had to confront their fears—including the fear of being perceived as gay. These are both men who accept the Christian prohibition on same-sex sexual activity. They did not need to reject this moral stricture in order to love one another. But they did have to reject the social hierarchy our libido dominandi has built on top of Christian prohibitions.
I’ve encountered many communities where two women or two men could love one another devotedly and intimately, with real commitment and care. Some of these communities included people who accept Catholic teaching on sexual morality. What distinguished these communities, and made them havens for friendship, was the lack of the social hierarchy: nobody was afraid to “look gay.”
If we overturn this social hierarchy, what other experiences might find voice? Would we be freer to express our awe at the beauty of another man or another woman? Would we be freer to discover, in that beauty, a doorway to something greater—as Plato’s Socrates, in the Symposium, travels through same-sex sexual desire to make contact with the divine Beauty?
Such awe was part of my own conversion to Catholicism. One of my most startling experiences of it came when I saw the woman I had a crush on emerge from the shadows of a candlelit room, her face catching the dim light and glowing suddenly like the moon. The gay poet Dunstan Thompson wrote his charming “Statues” about the shock of being seen as beautiful by another man, and confronting the possibility that one is called to beauty of soul, not only beauty of body. This intense response to the beauty of someone of the same sex is part of what contemporary people mean when they call themselves “gay.” What makes someone part of the lineage of queer history is not whether they believe sex to be the best or deepest response to the shock of beauty (Thompson, a practicing Catholic, lived chastely with his partner). It’s whether they believe this beauty deserves to be hymned, rather than silenced.
Perhaps when we are not afraid to be a queer kind of person, we may even be freed to pray. St. Bernard of Clairvaux envisioned Christ as his Bridegroom; Thomas à Kempis turned the Song of Songs into a shatteringly self-surrendering paean to Christ crucified. The old rye-bread ad said, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” And you don’t have to be queer to picture Christ as your Lover or, like the Victorian poet Eliza Keary, to picture the Church as your Bride. There is no Catholic spirituality that is exclusive to queer people.
But when I interviewed teachers and principals for an article on how Catholic schools were serving, or struggling to serve, LGBT students, one former teacher’s comment stood out. Recalling the retreats given separately for boys and girls at the Catholic high school where he taught, he said that the girls’ retreat always included a deeply emotional presentation on Jesus as their souls’ true Lover. The boys’ emotional talk was on porn. That talk may well have been necessary, but, as this teacher mused, “It would be fascinating if we gave [the girls’] talk to the boys!” Why don’t we? What would have to change in our communities to make that possible?
I have imagined three audiences as I make this argument. One is gay liberationists—an old-fashioned term, and yet, to me, more inspiring than “activists” or “advocates.” To them I will say that if you tell the history of gay movements as the history of a neglected form of love, you emphasize not what we are being liberated from, but what we are being liberated for. Moreover, this is a story in which assimilation happens not through gay people becoming more like straights but through the whole community rediscovering gifts a queer minority has treasured all these years. It is an assimilation that cannot happen except through solidarity: the willingness of the majority to be thought of as somehow like the minority, the willingness of the majority to learn from the minority. The utopia toward which this liberation aims is a community where no one is afraid to love someone of the same sex, or to see beauty in someone of the same sex.
The second audience I imagine is orthodox Catholics in pastoral ministry. It is always easier to shepherd someone when you can see the good they’re aiming for. Just as Catholic feminists have found necessary critiques and liberations within feminist movements, so there are necessary critiques and liberations within gay movements as well. There are, obviously, forms or expressions of feminism that are incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy, but scholars like Erika Bachiochi highlight strains of feminism that are not merely compatible with Catholicism but intrinsic to the faith. Catholic feminists guide priests to better serve women in abusive relationships, crisis pregnancies, theological study, and many other situations where sexism might distort the practice of our faith. A priest who recognizes and supports the goods that gay communities have harbored will better serve the gay Catholics and Catholic-curious whom he encounters.
And the third audience is queer people who want to know what gay liberation might look like for them personally. Covenant love, gratitude for others’ beauty, mystical prayer—liberation can look like this, too. It can look like this for you.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
