Strange times make strange bedfellows. People who would have been ideological enemies ten years ago (or at least political opponents) may now suddenly find that they’re becoming friends. They might even get invited to some of the same cocktail parties—the kind reserved for people who aren’t getting invited to anyone else’s cocktail party.
I first met Joe Burgo at one of those parties. Burgo is a therapist specializing in gender dysphoria. He’s become a vocal advocate for young people vulnerable to transgender propaganda, at no small professional cost. He also happens to be a gay man, and like other concerned “LGBs without the T,” he regards “gender affirmation” as conversion therapy by another name. You can hear him speak in the important new documentary The Lost Boys, directed by Fairer Disputations featured author Jennifer Lahl. Much of the discourse around so-called “detransitioners” has focused on girls, but this film shifts the spotlight to the rarely told stories of young men suffering from the effects of cross-sex hormones and/or surgery. (Read my full review here.)
At Reality’s Last Stand, Burgo has written an article speculating about why these stories are rarely told. One reason, he suggests, is that many of the male victims of transgenderism identify as gay or bisexual. This places them in what Burgo calls “the impossible space.” Young women without breasts may still have the potential to find mates and even bear children, but young men with butchered genitalia have foreclosed all hope of a pleasurable sex life. And if they’re gay, it would have been the sort of sex life most people don’t care about, or care to think about. Burgo speculates that religious conservatives in particular “will naturally find it hard to empathize” with the young men quietly coming to his office, wondering what might have been.
Same Conclusion, Different Reasons
I am the sort of religious conservative Burgo has in mind. I regard the affirmation of gay romance as a heresy, no less clear-cut than the rejection of the Trinity or the Virgin Birth. Since conservative Christians like me don’t believe gay sex is a natural good, Burgo guesses right that we don’t regard losing gay sex as a privation on par with losing one’s ability to beget or breastfeed children.
However, if Burgo concludes from this that our sympathy for the young men in his practice will necessarily be diluted, or weaker than our sympathy for young detransitioning women, then he misunderstands why we protest their “treatment.” We protest it first and foremost because it is an assault on healthy bodies, violating the physician’s sacred trust and violating the patient’s human dignity. We protest it because it preys on the lonely, confused, and mentally ill, turning them into lifelong medical patients. The fact that the men it mutilates are often sexually conflicted, thus all the more vulnerable, should only increase our anger. Turning a man’s penis into a “neo-vagina” is intrinsically, heinously wrong, no matter what he would otherwise have done with it.
But for Burgo, his outrage is inextricably bound up with lament for his gay patients’ lost sex lives. When he asks how these young men “can take up the life of a gay man when they no longer have a penis,” his rhetorical question suggests a deeper counter-question: How does one define “the life of a gay man”? Even more fundamentally, how does one define the life of a man?
Our answers to these questions illuminate the foundational differences between Christian conservatives like me and “LGB without the T” voices like Burgo. We have found ourselves at some of the same cocktail parties, but not for all the same reasons. It’s worth examining why. In a world where old-school sexual revolutionaries are struggling to comprehend why the revolution has begun eating itself alive, Christians should take the opportunity to articulate why the traditional sexual ethic is still the most coherent, the most compelling, and the most loving.
Bad News
Burgo seems to regard a good sex life as an integral element in “the life of a gay man.” This won’t come as good news to gay men who fail to meet the ruthlessly high standards of the gay dating pool, where being even a little too old, overweight, or under-endowed can make you unfit to survive. Ask any honest man with experience in the scene, and he will tell you that no one is crueler to gay men than other gay men. To quote the gay writer Andrew Holleran, “In a promiscuous world, people come to believe they are worth no more than their genitals. In a promiscuous world, they’re right.”
The traditional sexual ethic teaches people that they are, in fact, worth more. It teaches, further, that nature is trying to tell us something about what sex is for, or not for. Burgo graphically describes the painfulness of anal intercourse for men who have been genitally mutilated, but pain and risk have always come with this territory, even for healthy gay men. A Christian theology of the body formalizes what is already illuminated by the natural light: that forcing intercourse to go against the grain of one’s physical design fails to love and honor the body properly. This is consistent with the primary reason Christians oppose “affirmation” surgery. We oppose whatever disturbs, damages, or disrespects the healthy body, whether a man’s doctor is failing to respect it, or whether he is failing to respect himself.
For Burgo and other “LGBs,” this raises the specter of that “fundamentalism” to which they think transgenderism is ironically regressing. They grant that telling a gay man to forego sex with men isn’t as violent as destroying his reproductive system, but it still communicates that there is something lacking or broken at the heart of his human experience. Therefore, in their eyes, it still perpetuates gay shame. Burgo will argue that the only way to overcome that shame is to embrace the sexual being you were always meant to be. The only way to become truly whole is to understand that you were never broken.
Proponents of the traditional ethic could retort (and Burgo himself would agree) that the gay rights movement didn’t exactly mend gay brokenness, pointing to articles like this Huffington Post story about “the epidemic of gay loneliness,” or documentaries like this terrifying descent into the underworld of “chemsex.” Granted, people still try to interpret these grim trends as the outworking of “minority stress” or leftover closet trauma. In this analysis of the chemsex epidemic, Dr. Silva Neves blames “overt and covert homophobia” and concludes that total self-acceptance (or, in psychological verbiage, “unconditional positive regard”) is the only therapeutic remedy. But the data speak louder than the spin: Even after getting everything they want, numerous actively gay men are still desperately unhappy and desperately self-medicating with whatever will numb the pain. Urging them to withdraw from sex with men is not cruel or unloving, any more than it’s cruel or unloving to tell a man lost at sea that ocean water won’t quench his thirst.
And still, the man lost at sea will die without water.
Good News
In some corners of very conservative Protestantism, the solution is straightforward: If a gay man doesn’t want to be lonely and childless, then he should “turn from” his homosexuality, marry a suitable woman, and start a family. Done and dusted!
As a conservative Protestant, I wish I didn’t need to explain why nobody should glibly propose this as a universal remedy, one which owes far more to the prosperity gospel than to the gospel proper. That’s not to say it’s impossible, provided it’s not simply undertaken as a means to an end, and provided the spouses share sufficient maturity, transparency, and mutual attraction. Such marriages do exist, and they can thrive. Yet for every man I’ve known who could take this path, I’ve known a man who couldn’t (or tried and failed). What, then, does “the good life” look like for him?
Naturally, the answer to this question depends on how one defines “the good.” The traditional Christian would define it as alignment with God’s will, even as we acknowledge such alignment will cost something—not just for gay men, but for all men (and women). In cultures where sex is regarded as a basic human entitlement, “one man, one woman, for life” sets a radically counter-cultural standard of sacrificial love. This is a dignifying vision, teaching us to govern and steward our desires as only human beings can. Rather than telling men that they “need” as much good sex as possible, it calls them to something higher, something nobler. For some men, this will mean living without sex altogether.
Yet, while Christianity teaches that we can live without sex, it recognizes that we cannot live without love. This is the deeper longing behind so many endless searches for perpetually unsatisfying sexual encounters. To the man who knows no other way to search for love, being told he might never have sex again comes as an announcement that he might never be loved. It comes as an announcement that he is alone in the ocean, and no one is bringing him fresh water.
For gay men, the fear of being unlovable often runs especially deep. But therapeutic prescriptions will be insufficient so long as they are limited to instructions for “healthier” sex. Therapists may be sincerely convinced that discouraging sex altogether will only affirm the self-taught lie that their clients are unlovable. But the traditional Christian ethic gently yet resolutely rejects this equivalence. It thereby offers good news, not bad news. It is finally grounded not in a negation but in an affirmation: that love can be ours even when sex cannot.
Creatures of God
The Westminster Catechism says that the chief end of man is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” This defines man’s highest good by a standard wholly independent of our ordinary standards for well-being. The man who lacks notoriety, wealth, health, or sexual gratification may yet have God, and so have everything. The man who longs for the touch of another man may yet be loved by Christ, and so loved more completely than he can imagine.
To the non-believer, this might sound like a sentimental abstraction. The promise of life everlasting is all very well, but in this life, what tangible good is the love of a man you can’t actually touch?
This is why the church is traditionally referred to as “the Body of Christ.” In form and function, it exists to make Christ’s love tangible. The late Pope Benedict XVI ended with this reminder in his 1986 letter to the bishops on “the pastoral care of homosexual persons” (written as Cardinal Ratzinger). At a time when people were tempted to agree with the gay lobby in reducing gay men (and women) to their sexual orientation, he admonished Catholics to see them as whole persons, with a need to be “nourished at many different levels simultaneously.” They were not to be left deluded, but they were not to be left isolated either. Prayer, sacrament, forgiveness, fellowship—all these were for them, too. This put flesh on the insistence “that every person has a fundamental identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life.”
To all who have ears to hear, the good news of this impossible gift still goes out. To all who are weary; to all who are thirsty; to all who are damaged beyond repair; to the bars and the bathhouses, to the cold clinic waiting rooms, to the bedrooms illuminated only by the pale light of a flickering screen.
I’m glad I met Joe at that cocktail party. I could tell that we worried about many of the same things, and many of the same people—especially lonely people, especially lonely men. I shared a couple of stories out of my relatively limited experience, and in return he shared some wisdom out of his much wider experience. We shook hands. Later we passed each other in the airport and waved. Until next time, I thought. Next party.
We’ll never completely agree, Joe and I, I don’t think. I will always think he’s gotten something importantly wrong, and the feeling will be mutual. But if we can’t wholly agree with each other, then let us make sure we at least understand each other. In strange times, this is not nothing. It is the beginning of friendship.
