The State of Side B (Part II)

A film by Mel Brooks

Creatures, when last we met, I ranted to you about the gay, Christian subculture known as “side B.” I promised I would rant further! This is a promise I can keep. Part One is here, with definitions and setup; Part Two and Last below.

The Structural Problem With Side B

I’m gonna jump right in here: The “sides” framework can make morality seem like a matter for personal interpretation (are you Side A or Side B?). From my perspective as a Catholic, by contrast, the principal question at stake is my relationship to the Church as my Mother and Teacher.

Side B tends to overemphasize sexual morality and vastly underemphasize ecclesiology and church membership. It draws a bright line between “traditional” and “nontraditional” sexual ethics (and draws it in a bizarre place, focusing solely on same-sex acts and not on divorce, premarital sex, masturbation, birth control, etc.). It encourages us to feel a greater kinship with “side B” members of other communions, rather than with the dissenting people we actually worship with every Sunday, when in fact we are responsible to both groups. It encourages us to use the same litmus tests that are so often used against us: Are you in or out?

There is a specific beauty in ecumenical movements. The complicated virtues of respect, humility, and solidarity flourish in “Side B,” as in other ecumenical communities. And yet the community’s shared morality also distorts the place of morality in the greater life of faith.

Building Catholic Futures tends to use language of “ambivalent Catholics,” rather than thinking in terms of “orthodox vs. dissenting,” or, for sure, “side B vs. side A.” That’s not because heresy is just another lifestyle choice, but because almost everyone’s relationship to Mother Church includes a mix of openness and rejection, trust and ambivalence. Our goal is to help those in pastoral care guide all of those people, including the orthodox!!!, to a “next good step” in their journey to deeper faith.

So maybe there shouldn’t be a Side B. And yet—many of the experiences and questions that defined “Side B” in the first place remain relevant today. There are two sets of these common experiences, and both of them shape the insights and limits of Side B culture.

Things Held in Common

First, there are the painful experiences: being a political football within your church; discovering that no matter how clear your faith is to you, you don’t make sense to most of the people around you; discovering that desires and aspirations that deeply matter to you must be, in at least some ways, transformed or sacrificed.

These experiences leads to a kind of culture of the Cross. At the opening session for this year’s Revoice, I was struck by how insistently people struck this note of suffering: being rejected by one’s community, experiencing unslaked longing. Wes Hill’s lovely book, Washed and Waiting, and my book Tenderness, both explore these experiences of lack, unfulfillment, the not-yet; Tenderness also gets into the oppression, the injustice people experience and how they might respond to that injustice without damaging themselves further.

That culture of the Cross can become lugubrious, infected with its own shame and sorrow like an ingrown toenail. There are “side B” spaces that just feel sad! Like it’s part of being gay to be sad. I loved David Halperin’s exploration of secular gay culture as an expression of unslakable longing. Far be it from me to deny us the right to be The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, Sorrow’s Native Son, etc etc. But like, even the Smiths had fun. There are glitter crowns as well as glitter crosses!

And so I’m grateful that the second shared experience of Side B leads to some ideas of where crowns may be found. This second shared experience is the quest to articulate the common experiences of gay people in the language of Christian faith. Side B is a community created by asking: Do my desires separate me from God? Is there anything good in my longings to love? (To use the terms of the Catechism: If “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” what might ordered love look like for me?) What should I learn from the manifest care and self-gift I see in gay relationships around me?

As long as people seek guidance in answering these questions, there will be common ground on which something like “Side B” will form.

And these questions ground the other persistent aspect of Side B culture: Side B communities still center friendship as the normative form of love. One of the most common Side B critiques of American church cultures is that they make an idol of marriage, treating marriage as the highest form of love and the marker of Christian maturity. Side B communities, sometimes clumsily and sometimes with great wisdom, illuminate an anthropology centered on friendship.

The ideal anthropology for understanding gay lives would be grounded in something we share in common with all people, and indeed with Jesus Christ. It would include much that resonates with secular gay people, so that it could become a doorway into faith. It would reach back to the very first moments when we began to sense that we were different from our peers, and forward into our hopes for self-giving love and community.

In John 15:13 – 15, Jesus names His relationship to His disciples “friendship.” Friendship, and friends as “chosen family,” play an honored role in many gay communities and in gay people’s self-understanding. Whether in pairs (Frog and Toad, Jesus and John, medieval vowed friendships) or communities (“The Golden Girls,” Jesus and the disciples, monastic life), friendship links childhood ideals, gay culture, the life of Christ, and paths of self-giving love. We know what unfallen love between man and woman looks like: Adam and Eve in Eden. We don’t know what Edenic love between two men might be—but when we look to the life of the New Adam, Jesus, we discover that the holy love He shared with John is named friendship.

Side B people live as many different ways as any other Christians. There are Side B people in sacramental marriages, religious vows, parish ministry; leading lives of artistic creation, teaching, and service to the neediest. When BCF talks about life paths, we say, “Showcase Unnoticed Vocations,” not, “Honor Friendship” (or “Honor Celibacy,” for that matter). But as long as there’s a “Side B,” friendship will have a special place in this community, because it offers an interpretive key to our deepest longings.

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Beyond Side B (or, In the Room the Women Come and Go/Speaking of Michelangelo)

I hope it’s obvious, then, that this cobbled-together, #problematic community has some insights to share with the broader Church. A culture of the Cross is an insight into our life of longing, waiting, our betrothed life awaiting an afterlife of consummation. (This life is just the wedding, as Isaac Bashevis Singer might say.) A culture of friendship is an insight into the nature of self-giving love, and the possibilities for all people to form covenants and find kin.

But I came home from Revoice extra-grateful for Keith’s perspective as my BCF co-founder. He has (almost) always simply assumed that “gay and Catholic” go together like chocolate and peanut butter. He has spent his adult life not healing but evangelizing. And he’s the one who pulled together a mountain of personal testimonies and written records, to create BCF’s model of the Four Lenses: four starting points, four vocabularies that shape how we interpret the experience of same-sex desire.

“Side B” voices three of these perspectives frequently, though not without internal controversy. The Equality perspective grounds the community’s call for gay voices in pastoral leadership and its praise of same-sex friendship: an equally holy, equally life-shaping love. The Imperfection perspective grounds the emphasis on longing or lack, chastity, acceptance of “hard teachings,” and what one book about Side B Christians called “costly obedience.” The Autonomy perspective grounds the critique of marriage-idolatry in the churches, and the discussion of diverse life paths: from mixed-orientation marriage to covenant brotherhood/sisterhood, from nursing to artistry to ministry to care for elderly parents. The Excellence perspective (Keith’s own!) is heard least often, perhaps because its emphasis on the gifts and virtues gay people are called to express sits uneasily with a community brought together by love and struggle rather than by a shared charism.

I like these Lenses. I think each of them illuminates something about what it means to be gay, and what it means to be human. And I like, most of all, that there are four of them. No Lens is complete. No Lens is correct (or, all of them are). All can be expressed within Catholic orthodoxy, though all of them are frequently distorted by secular culture.

These Lenses create multiple, overlapping cultures and communities, within the wide world of people who love Christ and experience same-sex desire. Each of them needs the others to move closer to the heart of the Church.