God, Gays, and Gaga: Between Flesh and Faith

Perhaps this essay needs to be primarily historical, a recollection of personal development, rather than itself an effort at a new departure. That's certainly the tenor of this draft, which has the quality of retelling, of previous writings rewritten, and arguments long since hashed out. That may be what you needed to write here, or it might be accumulated habit.

But maybe new questions can now enter. All of us have some relationship to sex, some history of our affections, the people we loved and the things we did with them. Over the course of our lives, the priorities we gave to those impulses, needs, and feelings shifted, maybe wildly, perhaps sedately. Maybe they were always close to the most important of out concerns, maybe (even for decades at a time) they were displaced by other, intenser attitudes and needs.

It was, after all, a religious aversion it turned out you didn't feel that turned the issue of your sexual attractions into a matter of the first priority. If it hadn't been so unhealthily resisted in the place you grew up, if you had been left to find your way sexually, to fall in or out of love as occasions suited you, like any young human being finding her way, how relatively important would these matters have been as against the other grand topics of life, the other works, the other loves? You see, of course, that the selfishness and lack of self-control are projected from the center of other peoples' needs for their children to be what they expected, rather than what they are. But what if we imagine a draft about your life in which this, while important, is not so very important? What if we tried to organize thought on the basis of this baing the second or third most important aspect your life, rather than the cardinal fact that all else has been re-steered by? What would then be at the center of your thinking? You were owed normal, after all. Suppose you'd gotten it?