[The first few seconds of this interview were not recorded.]

John Hilgeman  0:00  
And he was, at one time, a Jesuit priest, and has a master of divinity from Weston School of Theology. And we're going to be talking today about gay spirituality, religion, Jesus, just a whole range of issues. And Bob, maybe you can just kind of start off talking about, you know, just kind of give us a lead in this too. Okay, some thoughts that you have.

Bob Goss  0:25  
One of the problems I think, that many gay and lesbian people struggle with is what I call Christo-fascism. And what I mean by Christo-Fascism is that there is a particular cultural view of who Christ is that becomes a form of oppression that is used to attack, create violence, and do violence to gay and lesbian people, and not only gay and lesbian people, but anyone who is different, whether they be Jewish or of another religious tradition, or women, etc, anyone who is really marginalized. Now, the difficulty with Christo-Fascism is that it is based on a view of Christ, that Christ is normative for all people. Unfortunately, what they mean by normative is that Christ is male and heterosexual, at least that is presumption, If Christ is seen at all sexual, and this tends to buttress the particular social institutions, whether it be fundamentalist Christians or the more mainline traditional churches that have led to the oppression of various groups throughout history. Give you an example. Within the Roman Church, particularly at an early period of time, Christ as Lord became a very important image, and that buttressed the papacy, because one of the things as the Roman Empire faltered, the papacy picked up the accretions of the Roman emperor and took on a lot of the bureaucratic structures of the Roman administrative system. And the ideology of Christ becomes a form of maintaining and legitimizing the status quo. Now, one of the things that has been really stressed through at least the history of Christianity is that Christianity has been a very violent religious tradition. In fact, I think that it competes with Islam in terms of the number of people that have been put to death for the sword, by the sword because they've been different. The thing that I have difficulty with is that that does not do justice to specifically the historical traditions that we find in the gospel. We find Jesus to be very different from that. Jesus struggles for those who are really the outcast, the deviant, the socially unacceptable individual, the gay and lesbian women. And I think that the challenges that are put before gay {men)  and lesbian women is that we need to really look at, how do we appropriate Jesus as a symbol of liberation for ourselves, and that really gets us enmeshed into a gay spirituality. And we really need to look at what experiences make us gay individuals and how we perceive and experience Jesus. One of the things that I think that we need to look at is that what really is the psychosexual development of a gay man and a lesbian woman. And I'm going to focus on a gay man, because I don't want to speak for lesbian women. Being only a gay man. I grew up in a Catholic environment. Both my parents were converts. I went to Catholic schools. In the schools themselves, I learned that sexuality, as well as for my family, that sexuality was something you didn't talk about or even really deal with. We just kept it to the side. I was being socialized to be a heterosexual male, but I found in myself all through school and so on, feelings of being different. I encountered the media, again, all aimed towards specifically heterosexuality. Business world again, geared towards heterosexuality. All the forms of institutions that we have, cultural institutions, the political, economic are all geared towards heterosexuality, so I was socialized in that direction, but I always found myself in at attentions with those, what I call nets of power, nets of control, and in terms of struggling with that, it's it took me approximately 25 years to come to grips that I was different, and to accept that. that is the experience of being closeted. And it's built with that kind of struggle that is based with being different, and it becomes filled with self-loathing, self unacceptance. You want to hide your real feelings. You want to mask your feelings. It's a profound experience of alienation. And what you say and what you feel are two different things. We're socialized in that direction, and being gay is an experience of being closeted, at least it is in terms initially. We need to look at that, because that is part of our formation in terms of understanding how we can understand Jesus as a form of liberation. Now I think that for me, I look at that, that system that leads to that closeted spirituality, that closeted view of myself, and that unacceptance for myself, and I see that as active form of oppression. And in terms of that, I identify with the struggles that Jesus had with all systems of oppression within his time, specifically the religious system, the political system, the economic system of oppression that didn't allow him to venture outside those boundaries, and when he did, they crucified him. And I see that what is being said by that difference, that acceptance of those who are outsiders as basically, I see the cross as a form of real kind of self-loathing, that system, accepting the system's judgment upon yourself. Now the good news about that is that we can all come out of the closet. Some of us are freer to do it than others, and I'm not putting down those who are still struggling with being in the closet for whatever reasons that they are, and they should be encouraged and sympathize and support it. But I think the good news of the Gospel is is that God is in identification and in solidarity with those who are oppressed. And the good news of Easter is there is the hope of self-acceptance, because God accepts us and looking at that, we can see that coming out is a religious experience. 

KRJY Announcer  7:08  
KRJY St. Louis. 

Bob Goss  6:58  
It is coming to a self-acceptance of oneself, an integrated self. But it's more than that. It's realizing that we are ultimately lovable, that our sexuality is good, that our bodies are good, that we can celebrate our bodies. We can celebrate our sexuality, we can celebrate our expression. And that is healthy and good, but it has certain ramifications behind that, and part of that is that as we come out as gay Christians, as we come out as anyone, as gay, we begin to say that we've got to really struggle for liberation, because as we have gone through a struggle of personal liberation to accept ourselves, we're going to have to engage on an institutional level. And it's there that I have questions about some of the directions that the gay movement has taken in terms of traditional sources of oppression, mainly the churches. Give you an example. I was actively involved in Dignity Boston, and took that community from 50 people to well over 500 people. The problem with many of the individuals who were involved in Dignity was that they were attempting to reduplicate the experience of church for themselves, and they wanted to parrot exactly that experience of church down to the point where they could find self acceptance within that this is legitimate church, therefore it's accepting me, therefore I can accept myself. There's a wrong basis to that. The basis is that you have to find it within yourself and your own experience, that you are lovable, that God loves you as a gay person, as a lesbian woman, and that you are wonderful and acceptable, and that our experience is good. Now the issues become an issue. We don't need to parrot the church. We don't need to parrot churches. I think that, and I may get myself into trouble by saying other gay churches tend towards parroting the mainline churches, and that's the that's a mistake. My own particular opinion in this is that we need to create our own gay churches. We need to create our own base communities where, and let me define what a base community is. A base community comes from a term from South America, from Liberation theology, and that is where a group of people get together on a regular basis to share reflections from the Scripture and look at how they're oppressed and how they can work towards liberation and justice. We need to do that as a gay and lesbian community. We need to form structures that are based communities that are going to begin to say that this is an experience of grace and church and the spirit is found in our acts of love, our care for one another, and our outreach to other minorities who are being oppressed and others who need us, and we need to begin to struggle in terms of challenging all the ideology of hate that comes from the ecclesial systems. We need to have people actively writing theologies that gay men and lesbian women are graced individuals, and that our experience of life and sexuality is good. We need to begin to start struggling actively against campaigns of hate, and that means to actively look at some of our own experience of interdependence on other relations. Give you an example what I mean by interdependence. Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, in his life, was moved to non-violent resistance because he read the autobiography of Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy was moved to conversion by a parable or story or legend of Saint Jehoshaphat, who is a Christian saint. Saint Jehoshaphat is through linguistics have been and the story has been traced back to Mount Athos in the 11th Century, and back through Turkey to Armenia, back to Iran in the Sixth century, and the word Jehoshaphat in Persian is Bodhisattva, and translates from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva, and the Bodhisattva is the Buddha. So Saint Jehoshaphat is the Buddha, a canonized saint, both in the Orthodox and Roman traditions. Well, the interdependence that we see is that specifically Leo Tolstoy motivated Gandhi to rediscover his own tradition, the Bhagavad Gita and Buddhism in terms of specifically non-violent resistance. Gandhi had a major impact on Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King should be an example to many of us, gay and lesbian people, in terms of the non-violent resistance that is we need to take. Specifically, we need to look at active ways to struggle, to work towards peace and justice and acceptance of us with full equality and participation in all elements of life, so that there is no need for being closeted. I think that is part of the social parameters of what it is to have a gay spirituality. Now I will be challenged on that specifically by saying spirituality is an individual thing. Well, I think that is nonsense, because I think that spirituality can only be defined in terms of social parameters. There is no faith that's outside of society. God is to be found in the midst of society, and we need to actively struggle for justice. 

John Hilgeman  13:35  
Well, it's like the whole teaching of Jesus. Love God as you love your neighbor or love your neighbor as you love yourself and love God, you know. So it's good. It's all interconnected, loving God, loving neighbor, loving oneself and self-acceptance. I'm wondering, you know, as you, as you're talking about, you've studied, you've studied comparative religions, and you study comparative religion, so many people use Christianity and Judaism and Islam as bases for condemning gay people. But what about other religions? I mean, there's plenty of other religions in the world.

Bob Goss  14:10  
I think that it's really there's two-thirds of the world that does not condemn homosexuality because of religion. The Far East, specifically the traditions of India, Buddhism and Hinduism, and the traditions of China, Taoism and Confucianism, do not condemn homosexuality. They have ways of allowing it. There is no active campaign against it. There's no active fear threat. I have a friend who came out to his Tibetan Lama and told him he was gay. And the Tibetan Lama said, So what? That's the attitude that Buddhism has in terms of gay sexuality, it's not an issue. And I think that's why there is a preponderance of people who are gay, who have been in cult really becoming converted to Buddhism, because they find it a very sophisticated way of dealing with reality, but they also find it non-judgmental, I think with the case of Islam and the case of Judaism, there, and Christianity, they're much more family-oriented there, because the family becomes the structure for perpetuating Christianity, Judaism or Islam. So the family structure becomes a key sociological element in the reproduction of religion from one generation to another. Anything that threatens that family structure becomes a threat to those traditions. And I think that that in itself, specifically gay and lesbian relations, since they don't foster children, or we're not able to procreate children, we present a threat. 

Speaker 1  14:50  
And yet, oftentimes it's the gay relatives that take care of parents, aging parents take care of nephews and nieces, provide financially for different people in the family, and who enrich families by their very presence, by the presence of their lovers. And so lesbians and gay men, oftentimes very supportive of families, even more so than straight people, depending on the family. 

Bob Goss  16:30  
And I think that all through history is that we have many saints that are gay, and I can think of so many friends that have really lived heroic lives, taking care of their lovers as they die of AIDS. And the unsung heroes there, I couldn't see half of the so called TV evangelists or people on Mother Angelica television program doing anything like that, are getting their hands dirty to do that, but those are the unsung heroes that are our friends and associates, and they are good people, and they need to be recognized as good people and accepting people, because that's where our gay saints are to be found.

John Hilgeman  17:13  
Well, when Jesus talks about the judgment in his particular teaching, he speaks of visiting the people who are sick, and taking care of burying the dead and a lot of just concrete things, taking care of other people's needs. He doesn't talk about whether somebody slept with somebody else, or who wasn't their wife or their husband, or who was of the same sex or anything like that.

Bob Goss  17:38  
 He doesn't say anything about sexuality, period. I mean, there's one story about the woman caught in adulteress in John Chapter Eight, which is, again, a late addition to the Gospel of John. It's after the First Century. So if you exclude that, that wonderful story, you basically have Jesus say nothing about sexuality.

John Hilgeman  17:58  
I think too, that Jesus, in a sense, formed a different kind of family we have. I know there's a big emphasis in a lot of preachers and people talk about family and family values, and it's become a real political thing. You know, family values and the American Pie and, you know, American flag and apple pie, and which also includes going along with wars that kill off Arabs and, you know, seemingly as though their lives mean nothing and… And yet, Jesus Himself, according to the stories that we have apparently never married, at least there's nothing about him having married if he did, or if he had family, there's no knowledge of that. The emphasis in the 

Bob Goss  18:43  
or if he had a lover, 

John Hilgeman  18:44  
if he had a lover, that's true. 

Bob Goss  18:46  
I mean, we can't tell whether Jesus was hetero affiliated or homo affiliated. We really can't tell, 

John Hilgeman  18:50  
but what we can tell is that he formed, the kind of family he formed is people such as Mary  Magdalene, John, Matthew, just a whole bunch of people who, some of them outcast, informed a family of people who were unrelated. So if a family is to be a core value for Christianity, for a religion that looks to Jesus rather than looks to Paul or looks to Leviticus, then the kind of family that Jesus formed is the kind of family that would be the ideal, not the kind of family where you've got the husband, wife and the children and don't you dare be different from this particular family.

Bob Goss  19:35  
Yeah, I would agree with you that in Palestine of the first century, you have two primary social institutions. You have the state and the family, and economics is embedded in both, and religion is embedded in both. And I think that one of the things that is revolutionary about Jesus is the fact that he moved to a non biological family. Family to look at relationship being outside of the family to be created of men and women and inequality. Jesus was remarkably egalitarian. It's the later followers of Jesus in as you move into the Hellenistic church that put women back into their places. But it seems that very apparently, that the Disciples of Jesus were both men and women and who followed and had equal control. One of the little known facts is the fact that Jesus was financed through a group of wealthy women and who followed him and took care of the purse strings and everything. But I think that there's that kind of radical equality there that we find within Jesus that really makes him stand outside of his culture. Women are to be not to be treated as second-class citizens, but they're to be treated as equals to men, and that has very strong ramifications for women who are struggling for ordination within particular churches and are being denied that whether it be Baptist or Catholic, there is a very strong indication that women presided over assemblie, women presided over Eucharist within the traditions of the Church, The early New Testament churches, and we have less record of that as time goes on, because it becomes more patriarchal and more institutionalized. 

John Hilgeman  21:30  
I recall an article or an editorial in a religious paper a few years back that was decrying the fact that there were no women on, I don't know, the Supreme Court of Missouri, or the different, you know, judgeships in Missouri. And it really was the St Louis Review. And what really struck me as bizarre was the fact that, I mean, the Archdiocese of St Louis has absolutely no control over who's going to be appointed to positions, you know, of judgeships, and it's true, what they were focusing on was an example of sexism. But it was impossible for them to look into the mirror, for the attitude, to look into the mirror and see, you know, whether no women priests in the Archdiocese of St Louis, there's no women bishops, there's no women popes, and it's like the only reason for excluding women from our nation is biology, the only reason. And it's, it seems so obvious to me that it's discrimination, if it weren't discrimination. I mean, men are not excluded from any office by basis of their biology, but women are 

Bob Goss  22:43  
So I think the problem is that we take a cultural form, and we've done this through history, and we absolutize it, and that's wrong way of approaching knowledge. Knowledge and all cultural forms are relative. They're conditioned by their culture, and there's nothing that is absolute by any forms of knowledge. Now, when they take the whole notion of Revelation, you put it into a context of culture, it's basically you don't work at a literalist level, but you work at a level of metaphor. The problem is that within Catholic fundamentalism, or fundamentalism, or any type of literalism, period is that it fails to appreciate its sources, that its sources are symbolic, they're metaphorical, they're developed, that we can find five or six different levels within any particular gospel in terms of development, that there is pluralistic viewpoints, different christologies, different theologies, different ways that communities looked at one another. There is that kind of plurality from the beginning, but there's an attempt to homogenize, because difference provides threat, and we want to control. We as beings want to make things simple and have control over those and that is a form of idolatry. If we want to talk about idolatry, I think that one of the things that I call Christo-Fascism is the fact that we take this kind of literalist point of view and we use it to buttress our views of the status quo. Religion legitimizes politics. So religion, churches, Christianity legitimizes the act of discrimination of gay men and lesbian women. Case in point, Cardinal Law in Boston has gone repeatedly to try to pull back the Gay Rights Ordinance in the state that has passed, actively campaigning and working against that, that is an attempt to really interfere and try to change the situation, to go back to the situation of oppressing people and putting them back in the closets. I think that's wrong. It's morally. Wrong, and he needs to be stood up to. 

John Hilgeman  25:02  
What's very interesting is he's not, as far as I can gather, trying to change the law that allows people to be divorced and divorced people to remarry and to hold public office. But he is opposed to gay people. So if he's really concerned about upholding this certain morality, or whatever you think he'd be more concerned about, he'd be equally concerned about his other moral principles. 

Bob Goss  25:27  
Well, another point, in fact, an issue that's near and dear to me, in terms of people living with AIDS, because I do a lot of work with people living with AIDS. I have many friends who are HIV positive. Cardinal Law, as well as other Catholic bishops, Cardinal May is or Archbishop May is a little more sensitive and sensible on this issue, have not actively taken a stance against condoms. There's a way of dealing with that issue within Catholic theology, if you look at it as a health preventative issue, as opposed to a contraception issue. Cardinal Law and Cardinal O'Connors have actively campaigned against the distribution of condoms in prisons. They are guilty of genocide. They are guilty of passing on the HIV infection. They're also guilty of preventing AIDS education in schools, public schools where minorities, women of color, have actively contracted AIDS. I think that we have to hold those individuals accountable. I have to say that part of my gay spirituality applauds Act Up's attempt in Boston to close down the ordinations, the Roman Catholic ordinations of Cardinal Law. This past June, 2000 demonstrators demonstrated at the Cathedral. In fact, they had a ring of priests in front of the cathedral locked in arms. And then Boston policemen circled the cathedral because of this. I think that was an active demonstration that demonstrated that there is major opposition to his position on AIDS, which again, fosters that kind of violence that it has done to not only people living with AIDS, but people with color, etc.

John Hilgeman  27:17  
It's very interesting. They'll use the excuse that condoms are not absolutely 100% effective, and that's true. On the other hand, there are what they overlook is that people are going to have sex, whether or not you know these bishops think it's right or wrong, and people should at least know how to protect themselves, how to have sex in a safer way, without being as much at risk. And also, some condoms are very effective. Others are very defective, and this is information that people should be aware of, the whole range of things, and not just you know, give them only the information that we want them to have, or you know that the bishops want them to have, or any particular religious. 

Bob Goss  28:07  
The whole biologicalism is outdated in terms of the Roman Church, to give you an example, it's very based on a very narrow anthropology, a view of humanity that is based in Thomas Aquinas. Now Thomas, in his notions of sexuality and sin, will say that rape and incest are less offensive than homosexuality or masturbation because it's based on a view of humanity that is outdated, and it's based on a view that the male sperm is the little child that grows up and it has no sense of ovulation of women.

John Hilgeman  28:52  
Well, I hate to end at this point, because we could really continue quite a bit and but I'm going to have to. And this is John Hilgeman for Lambda Reports, and Bob Goss also has been our guest today, and we hope you'll join us again next week for another interesting discussion. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai