Post-humorous outing
3 September 2008 - 4 אלול 5768 by Huw
AS CARDINAL NEWMAN gay? Was Cardinal Newman straight? Good heavens, I don’t know. And neither do you. Or anyone else living today. If he was sexually attracted to anyone he was probably horrified about it in that repressed, old-school British way (mangled with the conservative Christian anti-Body neo-gnostic kinda way).
Yet some folks imagine that because he wanted his bones mingled with another guy, they could therefore imagine him (Newman) as gay. In like manner Aelred, Shakespear, Sergius and Bacchus, Jesus (with his “Beloved Disciple”) and Jonathan and David as well. I don’t think we have any proof one way or the other.
Still, a Biographer of Cardinal Newman answers calumnies of homosexual lobby. ANd it’s funny because we see the same kind of assumptions in the biographer. Once you assume he’s straight - with no evidence at all, because he was celibate - all the other assumptions fall directly into place. No evidence is needed. At all. If we assume you’re gay, the evidence falls into place. If we assume you are straight, the evidence falls into place. If you assume that a given option is “objectively disordered” then - horrors - None of the “good people” could be that and all the evidence falls into place.
In other words, there is no evidence. At all: there is only assumptions.
Was Newman attracted to men? I assume that he was: because I assume that most celibate men (ER, WR, Anglican, RC or EO) in orders are sexually attracted to men. Most of them are campier than drag queens and quite a few of them are exactly the men that the boys who got beat up in school were expected to grow into (one priest known to me referred to the lot of them as “booger eaters”). The few men who do not fit either model are bookish geeks whom I imagine to be without any sexuality whatsover.
In this regard, I’m rather fond of my late friend Linda who - at least once in my presence - when asked if she were gay or straight said, “I’m celibate. Celibacy is my sexuality.”
If we assume you are celibate - and allow in Charity for you to live that way - everything else will fall into place. No?
Linda has the best answer. If one is celibate and controlling one’s sexual desires, who would know except God alone? And, if one is in control of themselves in that area and is celibate, does the distinction make any practical difference? In fact, let me tweak you a little bit. Are you not, yourself, simply guessing that he was “horrified about it in that repressed . . .”?
No, when one encounters true holiness, there are many questions that seem to fall by the wayside. Was Mother Theresa [fill in the blank]? No, one simply looks into the faces of the lepers, the poor, the abandoned that she helped and says, “May God have mercy on me, a sinner.”
No no no nono! *I* am right in my assumptions. Always. :-)
I think the pendulum has completely swung in the opposite direction these days on sexuality from the victorian repression of Cardinal Newman’s days. In our culture, “celibacy” no longer exists in the imaginations of most. For this reason, I think some of my friends and family interpreted my “celibacy” while I was growing up as homosexuality. I think their logic went that if he’s not with a girl, he must be with a guy. They - and the cultural assumptions that have formed their opinions - couldn’t be farther from the truth.