Priscilla revisited

For those of you too young to remember, “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” is a 1994 Australian movie, starring Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terrence Stamp. It involves two drag-queens (Anthony/Mitzi and Adam/Felicia) and a transexual (Bernadette) who are contracted to perform a drag show at a resort in Alice Springs, a town in the remote Australian desert. They head west from Sydney aboard their huge bus, called “Priscilla”. En route, it is discovered that the woman they have contracted to do the work with is Anthony's wife. The bus breaks down in the middle of the desert and gets repaired by a salt-of-the-earth type called Bob, who travels on with them. We decided to watch it last night, with our children, aged 7 and 8– one of whom has, since a very young age, shown a serious interest in cross-dressing.

Now, immediately, there were some issues. Firstly, the movie far from clean in its language. Secondly, it deals with cross-dressing as a major theme. And thirdly, some of the situations these drag queens get themselves into could have proved themselves a little difficult to explain to a child. So then why did we do it, and how did we justify doing it?

Firstly, we dealt with the swearing. Both the children know words like “Fuck” and “Shit”. (It is not unknown for me to use them myself – but I certainly do so only by mistake in front of the children. And we frown upon others who might not have children and not be practised in the art of avoidance of words like these in normal conversation). Both children have demonstrated to us that they are aware of words such as these and we do not allow them in the house at all.

On the issue of cross-dressing – well, this is an issue we had had to face in the life of one of the children from his earliest years. Neither my partner, nor I cross-dress. Nor do we have any men friends who do so - (with women, it is sometimes a bit hard to tell whether the cross dressing “line” has been crossed or not).

But our child has just always done it! He would twist a T-shirt into a boob-tube. He would turn anything available into a skirt. One Christmas a friend gave him a wig, which we could almost never get him out of. It got so serious that, at one point I called a sexologist for advice. She listened to the story and said, firstly, that counselling could not start until the age of 9, and that gender reassignment (if that was the outcome of it all) was not possible until after the age of 20. (At this point, I was hyperventilating!). And that (and here was the real nub of the matter) perhaps I “should just get used to the idea that I might be living with a transgendered person”.

Our response to his cross-dressing has always been neither to encourage it, nor to show disapproval. We have simply allowed him to do it, if he wants to, in the home. I note that it seems as though social pressure outside the home (such as the school, for instance) may well have made him stop the behaviour. Because, at the moment, I can see that what used to be an almost daily occurrence, has now virtually disappeared.

Then why would we want him to see things like Priscilla? Do we not stand the risk of reinforcing a behaviour that is now apparently, a thing of the past? We don’t think so. But we did manage the process and intervene on several occasions to explain what was going on in the movie.

Both children watched it through to the end, and both said that they enjoyed it. When the younger one asked why “those men are wearing girls clothes” (despite that fact that he has grown up with his brother doing it all the time), we explained that that is what some men wanted to do. It made them feel good and it made them like themselves. And that it really doesn’t matter what people choose to wear.

That settled, the movie continued and we laughed at the funny bits and felt sad at the sad bits. When the trans-sexual (Bernadette) confronted a bigot who was threatening her, our eldest said “she’s gonna beat him up!” And she sure did, much to everyone’s great enjoyment.

As for “Priscilla” itself – it was a bit strange to be taken back into a world where neither cell phones, nor computers were anywhere evident. And the issues which came up in the movie, many of them, demonstrated how much further we are all conceptually. For instance, they have obscenities painted on their bus, which link them to AIDS. No-one in their right mind would necessarily put the two together anymore. Similarly, the issue of being in gender transition seems to be much less of an issue today than it was then.

Or maybe not. Maybe it is just me that has grown a bit older and a bit wiser. Whatever the case, we want to create a home environment where our children can know that nothing they choose to wear, and nothing that they authentically are, will ever put them outside of our love.

Morality or Illness?

You know how sometimes, in a word or a phrase, or in a picture, or in a moment – suddenly something becomes clear? Archimedes “Eureka”? Oprah’s less durable “Aha” moment? Well, it happened to me yesterday in conversation with a friend. It was what she said that gave me that moment of clarity.

We had been discussing an article that I and a colleague had written nine years ago, in a little known Festschrift for Albert Nolan. It was called “Oil and Water: the impossibility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church”.

This long-forgotten article has suddenly re-surfaced the other day. It was found a by an apparently not unsympathetic cleric, who is attached to the University of Cape Town, and who is valiantly trying to “listen” to LGBTI people in the “conversation” which the church is presently supposed to be having on the Gay issue.

The article had given him quite a shock,apparently. Because it is completely uncompromising and unforgiving. Both I and my Lesbian colleague described, in some fairly graphic detail, the journey we had taken to get us to this place. We decided not to pull any punches and consequently, the piece is fairly candid.

And that was that for a very long time. It seemed to have been studiously ignored, until now, when a shocked Dean of Studies from the University of Cape Town stumbled across it and raised the alarm. He is, I understand, one of the few Evangelical Anglicans around who is willing to even consider the issue.

So, I was talking to my friend about how it is that this, out of all the things I have written and said about the Church, should become the focus of concern? I have had “controversial” views on a range of things, and I have written extensively about them. But this is the area where the alarm persistently gets raised.

The article said, in brief, that sex should not be determinative of relationship. That there are other things much more significant than sex, which determine and define relationships. That of itself, sex is not particularly significant and should not be held as the grounds to decide anything at all.

And specifically with regard to homosexuality, we argued that a church which was entirely and disastrously hetero-normative cannot expect homosexuals to simply buckle under and accept (or even worse – promote!) hetero-normative standards and ideas. Because time has proved these to be changeable things in themselves and that the path chosen by the church is both unrepresentative of the human reality and disastrous in its own right.

So, if there is to be a “discussion” or a “debate” or “listening” to LGBTI people, then it has to consist of much more than the one side happily talking to itself, while the other side stands obediently silent. If the church wants to listen to the experience of Gay and Lesbian people, then it needs to accept the possibility that its present hetero-normative paradigm regarding sexuality might be so seriously flawed as to be worthy of being dumped. And if that is not at least a possibility, then the conversation is not worth having.

My friend then made the point which sharpened my perspective. She said this: She said that the view of the Church is essentially the view of an addict. When a food addict is at a party, they will know what every person in the room has eaten; they will note each time a person returns to be buffet table and they will observe what has been placed on the plate. An alcoholic will know where the liquor is in every house they visit. They will know where the liquor store is in every suburb. They will know the alcoholic content of every drink.

It is an obsession. It is a sickness. It is something which takes over rational thinking and distorts it and twists it and produces a view of reality which is profoundly dis-ordered. It shows itself in the kinds of decisions which have been made protecting priests who are paedophiles. It shows itself in the way in which parts of the church have handled intersex people. It shows itself in the discrimination which of Gay and Lesbian people in the church routinely endure. It is an obsession. It is an illness. It is not wholesome.

It cannot be expected that Gay and Lesbian people have any responsibility to protect this obsession, or to perpetuate it. It cannot be expected that we have any reason to tolerate or entertain a system of wrongdoing which is so clearly and obviously distorted, in its view of reality.
So when the Church tells us that they want to “listen” to us – then that is what they need to do. It needs to start by shutting up and allowing us to say what we need to say. It needs to start by dumping the sanitized and doctored versions of tame homosexuals who actually believe that the homosexual orientation is something less glorious than the heterosexual one. They are the “Bantustan leaders” on the sexual map. They are the “Uncle Toms”.

If the Church is not willing to accept that LGBTI people can teach it a new and better way of being the Church, then frankly, they should just stop talking. It is wasting everyone’s time. Because the sickness lies within the Church, not elsewhere.

The article I refer to above is in:

Spekman MT & Kaufmann LT (eds) Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology. Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan. Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2001.

Garner H and Worsnip M, "Oil and Water: The impossibilility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church".

The kids are alright

In Cape Town, one is going to find a somewhat unexpected audience attending a movie such as this. Don’t ask me why – that is just the way it is. So, I was not surprised to see half the bowling club walk in and sit down in the row in front of me.

The story is an interesting one. It is a snapshot of a particular moment in time in the life of a somewhat unconventional family. A lesbian couple, played superbly by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, whose children are now 15 (Laser) and 18 (Joni). Joni is about to leave home for college. Laser is curious about the identity of his sperm donor father.

The children are ordinary teenagers. Somewhat petulant, irritated by their parents, but otherwise well rounded, curious, differently gifted, and each imbued with a particular personality. The parents are similarly individual. Nic (Annette Bening) is the more serious one. The worrier, the one bringing home the bacon in the high pressured responsible job. Jules (Julianne Moore) raised the children, dithered about her career, tried several things which didn’t quite get off the ground and is now setting up a business in landscape gardening.

The son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), wants to meet his father and pressures his sister into making the contact. They both meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo) and, after the first awkward meeting, start to develop something of a relationship. Laser’s interest is far from intense, and once the initial meeting is over, he seems to lose interest, whereas his sister’s starts to increase.

Paul owns a restaurant, shags one of the staff every now and again and generally leads a fairly calm, but unremarkable life. His reaction, when he is phoned by the sperm donor agency to say that a nineteen year old girl bearing his DNA is looking for him, is mild curiosity. The problem is, it doesn’t end there.

He and the family start to get enmeshed. Jody, his biological daughter and Jules in particular start to get emotionally involved with him. Laser to a lesser extent, but it is only the one mother, Nic, that is excluded. Jules starts to fall for him and he for her and the result is a sexual liaison which is neither expected, nor altogether explained. But the fact is, it happens. And when Nic and the children eventually find out, the hurt which it causes is devastating.

What is so interesting and exciting about this movie, is the profound normalcy of the same-sex set up. The family is an ordinary one. The children are ordinary. The tensions and deceits and heartbreaks are ordinary. That is what makes it so powerful.

The fact is, this is a particular set of circumstances which brought a third party into the relationship. It could have been other circumstances. It could have been other impulses. This is just what it is.

And it is this which makes the movie so profound. On the one hand, there was someone in the audience who obviously had difficulties with Lesbians. You could hear this from the over-loud laughter and the obtuse reactions she gave. But even she could not have failed to recognise the universalizability of the experience. Because there was nothing particularly Lesbian about the betrayal. It was just a betrayal. The circumstances for it may have been somewhat different from the norm, but the actions and reactions could and would have taken place in any relationship – anywhere.

The film is a snapshot into the life of one family. One normally happy, sorted family, which, at one particular moment reached breaking point. It is emotional and touching in its rare and uncomplicated approach to life. It is very worth seeing.

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko; written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg; Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
WITH: Julianne Moore (Jules), Annette Bening (Nic), Mark Ruffalo (Paul), Mia Wasikowska (Joni), Josh Hutcherson (Laser), Eddie Hassell (Clay) and Yaya DaCosta (Tanya).

Worshipping Mary but overlooking women

Growing up, as I did, in a kind of Broad Church environment, Mary was considered a necessary part of Christmas, but to be ignored for the rest of the year - with occasional curt nods in her general direction, during the singing of the Magnificat.

Indeed, we eschewed anything which could be considered vaguely Roman. There were two - and only two - candles near the altar. Saints were in the stain-glass windows and nowhere else. Crossing one’s self would have been seen as an indication that one wouldn’t be taking communion, because the Holy See had forbidden it.

I first encountered Mary through a friendship I developed with a monk of the Community of the Resurrection. He was a man in his sixties and I was an irritating 20 year old. He was blessed with an impish sense of humour. He loathed posturing and falseness and would poke merciless fun at all pretence and posing. He would laugh uproariously at some of the things I took extremely seriously, at the time. Not because he was cruel, but because he was forgiving of my youthful enthusiasm.

It was he that introduced me to Mary. His devotion to her was neither extreme, nor passionate. It was just something ordinary, natural and true. And I suppose I sort of decided to emulate him and, from a very uncertain base, conjured up and fashioned an untutored but real devotion to the Mother of Jesus.

He once told me a joke, which I suppose, demonstrated his ease with the holiest of things. Pope Paul VI (it was round about that era) died and went to heaven. There at the pearly gates he was met by St Peter.

“How wonderful to meet you!” said St Peter. “God has told me to tell you that he is so pleased with your work on Earth, that I should grant you one wish – and that I should grant it – whatever it is”.

Pope Paul, rubbing his hands in abject humility, was overcome by God’s gift. After thinking about it for a while, he responded in Latin.

“St Peter”, he said, “it was a great honour and privilege to be the Pope and I really don’t feel I need any recognition at all. But if God insists”, he said, “and if it isn’t too much trouble, I would very much like to meet the Virgin Mary”.

“Done!” said St Peter. He snapped his fingers and a golden chariot, drawn by 10 white horses drew up. Pope Paul got into the chariot and the horses took him a couple of heavenly kilometres down the road. The horses stopped at a tiny little house on one of the streets of gold.

Pope Paul nervously stepped down from the chariot, went to the front door and knocked, with due reverence. After a while, the door opened a crack. Then wider, revealing a tiny little old lady.

She looked at him, but said nothing.

“Virgin Mary”, said St Paul, dropping to his knees, “it is such a privilege to meet you, considering you are the Mother of our Blessed Lord”.
There was a long silence, and Pope Paul nervously looked up from his kneeling position.

“Vell, you see”, said the little old lady, “he vas a great dishapointment to us, you know. Ve vanted him to be a lawyer!”

I recount this story, not only because it is a good story, but because it so scandalously (and thoroughly) demystifies Mary. Mary, seen as a little old “Bobba”, instead of the Queen of Heaven.

And my point is this. It is all too easy to worship a deified serene image of the Virgin with gold rays beaming from her crowned head. That is the religious imagery of wonder and awe and mystery and divine fabulousness. That is flawless stuff. It is the stuff of which worship and devotion is made.

It is much more difficult. Much, MUCH more difficult to see and to worship Mary in the "Bobba" next door. And there is the heart of the contradiction. Why is it so easy for Catholics to adore the showgirl, but to ignore (at the very best) any other girl?

While this is not something which men do alone in the church, it is something which has its essence in a patriarchal world view. A view where, functionally, to be divine is to be male. And, most of the time, to be human is to be male as well. Women need to define themselves in the light of the male paradigm, which is fearlessly and vigourously defended at every turn.

And so the image of Mary is stately, regal, virginal and ageless. That is the pristine image which is venerated. She didn't grow old and ordinary. Her breasts remained pert and firm. Her lips rounded. Her eyes clear. Her waist slim. That is the image of the theotokos - the God bearer.

But there is a slight of hand in the image. Because it is unreal, because it is much more similar to a Hollywood movie than any common reality, it is controlable, manageable, essentially dismissable. If the image were not like that and more like reality, it would point us inexorably to the woman sitting next to us in the pew, or in the traffic, or in our street. Then it would lose its glamour and become disturbingly familiar. It would then lose its holiness. That is the sad truth of the matter.

It strikes me, altogether more so in a consciously Catholic parish, that the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary is no guarantee of an exalted place for women in general. In fact, it is disturbingly true that, more often than not, that where Mary is most fervently honoured, women are most emphatically overlooked. And if not that, then held in lower esteem in one way or another. Or made to occupy a place specially reserved for them, away from the real action.

It is a strange and curious contradiction and I think it has something to do with the problem we have with seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary as someone's rather ordinary grandmother.