Swish (22 page)

Of course, the Exodus community is not the only one with its shibboleths. Show me a homosexual man who can’t complete the sentence “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are         
,” and I’ll show you a homosexual man who was raised by wolves. (The answer, in case you are a homosexual man who was raised by wolves, is “starving to death.” Now put this book down, go rent
Auntie Mame,
and don’t start reading again until you’ve watched it at least six times.)

After dinner with Jon I stopped at the LifeWay Christian Store. This was not my first visit to an evangelical bookseller; when I was in eighth grade, as an exercise in sociological observation, my family had spent a weekend at Heritage, USA, the theme park created by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Everybody there said please and thank you all the time, the ceiling of the mall was painted sky blue so you felt like you were outside, and the Tammy Faye Bakkery (would that I were joking) sold really good cookies. When I found the music store I was very excited until they told me that not only didn’t they have Heart’s new album (
Bad Animals
) but they had never even heard of Heart. The bookstore, fortunately, yielded better results. True, they didn’t carry
Magician’s Gambit
(the sequel to
Queen of Sorcery,
which I had finished in the car on the way up, and I was going
crazy
not knowing what Eternal Belgarath and Prince Kheldar had been up to while Polgara the sorceress had been rescuing Garion from the palace of Salmissra the Serpent Queen), but they offered a number of other fascinating books, each one more outré than the last; I finally selected a slim volume called
Satan’s Mark Exposed,
about how bar codes are instruments of the devil, because the guys in one of the sketched illustrations were really cute.

The tables in the LifeWay Christian Store were piled high with soothing titles like
He, Watching Over Israel
and
Worthy Is the Lamb,
but farther toward the back I was thrilled to find
Satan’s Mark Exposed.
My copy had long since gone the way of all flesh, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to replace it. As I skimmed the familiar lines, however (“By way of electronics, Antichrist will be able to invade the privacy of your home as you have devotions! In the Tribulation Period Christians will suffer persecution and have nowhere to hide! The day will soon come when all hospitals will refuse admittance to a mother with a sick child because neither bears the Mark of Antichrist!”), I was distracted by the bubbling of three teenagers looking at bracelets.

“Totally
get the FROG one,” said a dark-haired boy wearing a “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt.

“FROG?” said the blond boy beside him.

“Um, Fully Rely On God,” said the girl.

“I want this one,” said the blond.

“Um, the rainbow one?”

“Don’t get that one.” Scorn filled the dark-haired boy’s voice. “People will
totally
think you’re
gay.”

I wanted to yell at them for being uncharitable at a Christian conference center. I also wanted to hide so they didn’t see me. Not that I really thought they would beat me up among shelves of inspirational literature, but still I was afraid; of exactly what, I couldn’t say. I stepped behind a display rack and, ashamed of my cowardice, turned my Exodus conference name tag around so it didn’t face out. I bought a notebook (I’d filled up the old one) with characters from something called Veggie Tales on the cover—I was at a loss to say what a cucumber, an asparagus, and two unidentifiable vegetables, all dressed as gangstas, had to do with Jesus—and left, making sure to take the path that kept me farthest away from the teenagers. The ex-gays may be delusional, I thought as I made my way back to my room, but they’re better Christians than a lot of people we call sane.

Before leaving New York I had decided to bring along episodes of television shows on DVD, in case of sleeplessness or suicidal ideation. I had searched Kim’s Video for
Oz,
HBO’s violence- and gay-sex-filled prison drama, but somebody had checked out the seasons with Chris Meloni
(naked
Chris Meloni, to be precise), so I picked up the 1980s version of
The Twilight Zone
instead.

Back in my room after my visit to the LifeWay Christian Store, in an effort to regain the equilibrium that had vanished with the real-world homophobia I had just witnessed, I put the first
Twilight Zone
DVD in my computer. I was hoping for the feel-good episode in which a present-day teenager saves an eighteenth-century girl from execution as a witch, but instead the first episode, entitled “Shatterday,” began with Bruce Willis (oh, my God, he has hair!) as an asshole in a bar who picks up the phone (oh, my God, it’s a rotary dial!) and accidentally calls his own home, where the phone is answered by Bruce Willis. The two Bruce Willises spend the rest of the week dueling over one life; in the end the kinder, more responsible one triumphs, and the selfish and inconsiderate Bruce fades into nothingness. I hated the new Bruce for being perfect when the old Bruce was defective like me.

But that’s what the Exodus delegates are after, I thought. They want their imperfect selves to fade into nothingness and be replaced by new, flawless Bruce Willises with upturned collars and feathered hair.

In
Man of La Mancha,
the Wasserman-Leigh-Darion musical based on Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote,
Cervantes tells his antagonist, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” Cervantes speaks these words in prison, knowing that within the hour, in all likelihood, the flames of the Inquisition will be licking at his calves.

So what are the ex-gays doing but seeing life not as it is but as they think it should be, even as they hear the kindling begin to crackle? They are fools and heroes wrapped up together, straining with all their might to change something unchangeable. They are trying to rid themselves of something they see as immoral and pathological and unholy, and from that perspective, I believe, they are among the noblest people on earth. If a serial rapist—to make a fraught comparison—were to struggle with all his heart and all his soul and all his might against the inclinations that impelled him to violate others, if he were to go to therapy and church and hope and beg and pray to be relieved of his desires, I would laud his efforts and support him as best I could, even as I grieved that the continued urge to rape, studies indicate, is not something that can be gotten rid of. Serial rape has nothing to do with homosexuality, but if I lived, like the ex-gays, in a universe in which the two were morally equivalent, I would be sitting right now astride my ragged, scarred horse, spear in hand, galloping toward the windmills.

The statuesque figure of the speaker at the next morning’s session made it difficult for me to believe that she was not in fact a drag queen. Kathy Koch (author of
Finding Authentic Hope and Wholeness
) told us that her sermon was called “Mordecai and Esther: Teamwork to Transform,” which I was excited to learn, as Mordecai and Esther are characters at the center of the fabulous Jewish holiday Purim.

“Purim” is the Hebrew word for “lots,” referring in this case not to a selection system based on chance but to a combination of math, logic, and astrology used long ago to schedule important events (weddings, coronations, the slaughter of all the Jews in Persia). The bare bones of the Purim story are as follows:

In the city of Shushan, Mordecai the Jew refused to bow down to the wicked vizier Haman, and so in retaliation Haman convinced the king to order the extermination of the Jews on the date he had selected by lot. But Mordecai had an ace up his sleeve: his cousin Esther happened to be married to the king. She had thus far neglected to mention to her husband that she was a Jewess, but in her people’s time of need she revealed her secret to him and begged him to save them. The king could not rescind an order he had already given, but he issued a new decree that the Jews be allowed to arm and defend themselves, which they did, to great effect, and at the end of the day Haman swung from the gallows he had erected for Mordecai.

Kathy Koch, alas, gave an insipid sermon, explaining merely that we all need to be both Mordecai and Esther. We need to Mordecai—she actually turned the name into a verb—by
instructing
and by
remaining present.
And we need to Esther by
choosing a Mordecai,
someone who will instruct us and remain present in our lives for a long time.

Purim is my favorite Jewish holiday. We celebrate our deliverance by dressing in costumes and putting on masks. We read the Book of Esther in synagogue and whenever Haman is mentioned we boo and shake noisemakers and overpower the sound so as to blot out his memory under heaven; every time Kathy Koch said “Haman” I had to resist the impulse to hiss and stamp. On Purim it is considered a mitzvah—a commandment, a good deed—for us to enfeeble our evil inclinations by getting so drunk we can’t tell the difference between “blessed be Mordecai” and “cursed be Haman.” (The last time I fulfilled this mitzvah I slammed my hand down next to my plate in the middle of dinner with friends and slurred, “I’m smarter than everybody at this table put together!” Since then on Purim I have stuck with Diet Mountain Dew.) Purim is the only holiday that will still be celebrated after the coming of the Messiah.

There are innumerable explanations for the custom of masks, all of which explanations pretty much work together. For example: we pretend to be other people to represent a world turned upside down, a world in which Haman can decree the murder of the Jews one day and perish along with his wife and children the next. And/or: we assume different faces so as to understand that true reality and the reality we perceive may be different things. But my favorite interpretation is that we don physical masks in order to cast off the psychic masks we wear every other day of the year. If we put on a face that we acknowledge as false, then underneath it we can liberate our true selves.