Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die For (29 page)

thirteen

Queering the Church:

BRIAN

sexual and spiritual

SINGLETON

neo-orthodoxies in

Six Feet Under

David Fisher’s headlong descent into sexual self-hatred throughout season one is constructed as a counterpoint to an emerging
Bildungsroman
narrative of self-acceptance. In the final episode (‘Knock, Knock’, 1:13), after confronting his family with his sexual orientation, David comes out to his Christian congregation, renouncing his shame and self-loathing from the pulpit. David has discovered that the Church is not the haven before heaven that he thought it was, but a political animal that is bigoted and fearful in order to maintain control. At the end of his speech he imagines a round of applause, but this is a moment of wish-fulfilment. The congregation remains silent. His on-off boyfriend, Keith, smiles knowingly at this most public of self-outings, while the church deacons grimace knowingly that David’s outburst and deviance from the Scripture that he was supposed to read out is a political act. The choir strikes up as David goes back to his seat at the edge of the congregation. He looks up to a stained-glass window and glances momentarily at the image depicted of two priests in cassocks. A boy is kneeling in front of one of the priests while another bears witness.

The priest’s hands rest on the boy’s head in front of his groin, as David reads benediction as oral sex. David turns away from the window, but the window remains in the frame for us. David blinks and a slight smile spreads over his face in a moment of sexual 161

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‘knowingness’. David has not just rejected his self-loathing for being gay, and stood defiant in the pulpit rejecting the biblical reading in favour of his own personal faith and testimony; in that moment of

‘knowingness’ at the window, David has queered the Church.

David’s struggle with his Christian faith mirrors Jesus’s own battles with the institutional and state oppression of minorities. The Jesus with whom David is confronted, however, has been transformed through two millennia of reconstruction, first as the Catholic asexual and then reformed into the Protestant (and, in David Fisher’s case, Episcopalian) rampant heterosexual. The choice of denomination of faith for David is crucial, as to be a Catholic would permit a closeted-ness masquerading as abstinence. The Catholic representatives of God on earth in human form also deny their own sexuality as well as that of Jesus, and therefore David (were he Catholic) would be able to take some homo-social comfort in his outward performance of celibacy. That David is Protestant denies him this comfort of the closet or the excuse of celibacy that constructs the closet. Protestantism denies celibacy in its social and political formation. The Protestant priest performs not only his faith but also his sexuality. Beyond a certain age, the Protestant priest invariably marries and has children. The social order of the Church unit revolves around this family. It is set up as an ideal model, to be imitated throughout the congregation. The irony for the Fisher family, however, is that their church, St Bartholomew’s, has a seemingly celibate priest (Father Jack) at its helm. Further, throughout the series it is assumed, as David assumes, that Father Jack (Tim Maculan) is gay.

Whether he is or not is irrelevant, as Jack in the final episode denies he is gay. However, his celibacy remains an issue. His non-sexuality is tantamount to a denial of heterosexuality. His non-sexuality queers the Church as a family, since the asexual unmarried priest cannot be the patriarch. Just as the very impetus for the series is the loss of the patriarch, St Bartholomew’s as a political institution is as dysfunctional as the Fisher family itself. David comes out of his own personal closet to discover that the institutions that have constructed and controlled him exist in a macro-closet of anxious hatred and fear.

The window of St Bartholomew’s stands in opposition to the lack of religiosity in the Fisher funeral home’s chapel of rest. The Fishers’ stained-glass window has an absence of iconography, but instead features a painted blue sky with clouds. No two-dimensional 162

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patriarchal icon stands over the dead, and until this final episode in season one Christ as an iconic figure is completely absent. When we do discover the church window, we still do not see Christ but Christ’s representatives in fabricated patriarchy. David’s knowing glance emasculates the construction of Christ as heterosexual. This is nothing new in the history of religious painting and iconography.

The Christian visual arts are full of homoerotic longing in their depiction of the perfect musculature of many of the saints (and of St Sebastian in particular), as well as that of the near-naked Christ

‘penetrated’ on the Cross. This homoeroticism is what Robert E.

Goss describes as ‘Christian homodevotionalism’ (2002: 128), in which Christ is not worshipped as a patriarch but as a male lover.

This brand of ‘queer liberation theology’ has its origins in the feminist movement’s attack on the patriarchy of the Church in the late sixties and early seventies. Already by this time the Reverend Elder Troy Perry had established (in 1968) the first Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles with a specific mission to integrate spirituality with sexuality, and its deliberate targeting of a gay and lesbian congregation. By the eighties, and with the death toll arising from AIDS mounting, the gay/lesbian Christian theology espoused by the Metropolitan churches had taken on the hue of AIDS activism, and the theology, like the theories of sexuality that underpinned it, turned queer. The politics of the theology also found spiritual brothers and sisters in other activist organisations (particularly against racism), which helped to mould the theology into one not only of compassion but also of affirmative action. Christ the champion of the oppressed provides a hero figure for gay men whose Christian faith remains intact despite the Church’s attempts to silence and evict them from the ‘family’. The homoerotic gaze looks at the suffering Christ, or Sebastian, and sees the literally penetrated male, either by the sword or the arrow. Christ is penetrated for his beliefs and for his work for social justice. His scars are wounds that gape back at the heterosexist masculinity that inflicted them in the first place. Constructing Christ as a penetrated male completely subverts ‘heterosexual phallocentrism’

(Goss 2002: 137) and denies the Protestant Church in particular its idea of Christ as heterosexual. David’s gaze at the church window does not pick out Christ the penetrated male but his representative on earth seemingly penetrating another, younger male. And thus the challenge to Christian phallocentrism is passed on through the 163

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generations. David Fisher’s newly queered Christianity challenges both homophobia and erotophobia. Through one blink and a flicker of a smile, he subverts the Church’s role in the ‘strict economy of reproduction’ (Foucault 1998: 36).

Subversion, though, is temporary. In the first episode of season two, David reveals to Keith that, after the congratulations for his pulpit speech in the last episode, ‘most people wouldn’t make eye contact’ (‘In the Game’, 2:1). The fall-out for David is his transfer from St Bart’s to St Stephen’s as a parishioner and loss of social status as a deacon. In St Bart’s, church and state, though having no formal coupling in law, are represented as being ‘coterminous’ (Boyd 1974: 180). This can be read by the positioning of the national flag beside the pulpit and equal to it in the space it takes up in the frame.

Despite the legality of homosexuality, the Church still reads the Bible in the Judaeo-Christian, anti-Hellenic tradition of assuming criticism of homosexuality in the Book of Leviticus (18: 22; 30: 13) because of its attack on the city of Sodom. Reading Leviticus in this way, though ignoring wide-ranging scholarship on the misrepresentation of hospitality as homosexuality, restores a civic function to Church teachings on the subject in the absence of condemnation in law.

Placing the flag alongside the pulpit thus layers onto a particular homophobic reading of the Bible a quasi-endorsement by the state.

What St Bartholomew’s presents us with, then, is not a set of Christian leaders who are acting as agents of repression in homophobic persecution. Father Jack is not married, like Jesus, of course, but his seeming asexuality is potentially deviant in the heterosexist Protestant institution. The only other priest we see connected to this particular church is Revd Donald Clark, who is being interviewed by David for the position of associate priest (‘Brotherhood’, 1:7). Clark, too, presents as someone who is gay-friendly, berating ‘most Christians’

for ignoring ‘the gay kid who gets strung up’. His politics are radical and inclusionary of gay issues, and thus he is seen by the conservative lay deacons as liberal and a threat to their middle-class, white, homophobic security. Though Clark is not gay, he is a widower, and thus is placed outside the heteronormative construction of the Protestant priest. Without a wife he is as asexual and emasculated as the Catholic priest. Therein lies yet another danger.

The reaction to him comes largely from David’s co-deacon, Walter Kriegenthaler (Frank Birney). He is suspicious of the man because 164

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he is Father Jack’s choice for associate priest. In this episode it is revealed that Walter was the principal opponent of Father Jack’s appointment. What is behind all the fears of the Church, of course, is its move to homonormativity, in the form of gay marriages that Clark might be capable of, and of which Jack was accused for having blessed a same-sex union of two lesbians (‘Knock, Knock’, 1:13).

Whether either priest is gay or not is not the issue. The move to the acceptance of homosexuality within the Church is a blow to centuries of theological assertions of Jesus’s asexuality and his post-Reformation reincarnation as heterosexual.

Ironically, the reaction of the Church against Clark’s potential radicalism and the threat to its heteronormative rituals (such as marriage) is averted by David himself, as his closeted-ness and fear push him to reject Clark. David says no because Clark is honest. For David to be honest would deconstruct his assumed heterosexuality within the social world of the Church and lead to his exclusion, certainly from his deaconship and possibly from the congregation.

What happens here for David is a kind of inverted ‘homosexual panic’

(Sedgwick 1990: 19). Homosexual panic in its forensic sense, according to Sedgwick, is often used in defence of gay bashing by

‘legitimising a socially sanctioned prejudice’ (20). David panics at Clark’s reference to the ‘gay kid who gets strung up’ and reads it as his ‘knowingness’ of his own orientation. One can also read into David’s question ‘were you so honest with all the other deacons?’ his assumption that Clark might also be gay, for he firmly believes in the self-recognising and exclusionary subculture of the gay world.

David reads Clark’s honesty and recognition as a kind of sexual advance. The only way to protect his dishonest closeted-ness is to eliminate the threat by panicking in the same way as Kriegenthaler and rejecting Clark as an associate priest. The rejection is a form of gay bashing which David inflicts on himself.

Nowhere is ‘homosexual panic’ more in evidence than with the gay bashing of Marc Foster (Brian Poth) at an ATM (‘A Private Life’, 1:12). He becomes a victim because of his physical intimacy with another young man on the street. Marc’s character is very similar to that of the real-life Matthew Shepard, who was left for dead in Laramie, Wyoming, victim of another gay bashing, and subsequently the subject of Moises Kaufman’s 1998 play
The Laramie Project
(based on the collective testimonies of the townspeople), a version 165

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of which was televised by HBO in 2001. Throughout the episode David conjures up the ghost of Marc to haunt and taunt him about his own sexuality. This ghost, like David, was a Christian who hated his sexual orientation. He says: ‘It’s not what God intended. God challenges us like this,’ as if homosexuality was an original sin to be rejected. David, in this conversation in the mortuary over the dead man’s body, adopts the pro-gay stance faced with the neo-conservative Christology of the ghost. Marc’s ghost attacks David’s assumed position by declaring it ‘liberal propaganda to justify your own depravity’.

The ghost brings to an end the conversation with a warning of the doomsday scenario facing gay men in heteronormative religion: ‘No matter how nice you fix me up, I’m going to hell.’ What is interesting in this sequence is that David’s internalised homophobia is projected outwards onto another character, albeit one of his own imagination.

David then finds space to separate himself from his homophobia momentarily in order to take up a positive position towards his sexuality. The open-air interment of Marc Foster reveals how the

‘homosexual panic’ has spread throughout the community in the absence of any restorative or retributive justice. There is no mention of a police investigation into Marc’s death and the two murderers would appear to have escaped justice. At the funeral, however, the absent murderers are held up as society’s heroes as a motley collection of white men (and a few wives) protest at the funeral. They carry placards with inscriptions such as ‘No fags in heaven’, and ‘Homos in Hell’. Perhaps the most interesting of all the placards is ‘God’s wrath on fags, Gen 19: 1–26’. The reference is to the demands by the men of Sodom for Lot to bring out his visitors so that they might

‘know’ them, and clearly the southern Californian evangelicals protesting at the funeral have followed the millennial mistake of understanding ‘know’ as homosexual relations rather than as hospitality (see Boyd 1974: 168–169; Goss 2002: 185–203). The placard title, though, uses the colloquial ‘fags’ but the biblical

‘wrath’, thereby using the language of Scripture to endorse prejudice at its very basic level of name-calling and insult. And yet, despite this perverted universalising of the perpetrator of anti-gay violence as victim and the actual lack of justice for the real victim of the crime, all the while using Christian discourses as means of endorsement, David manages to maintain his faith. But this faith and his own struggle with negotiating a path between it and his sexuality is not 166