In a feature, Holiday Homophobia: Is it Christian to Reject Gay Partners? ABC news interviewed Marilyn Bowens, a lesbian African-American minister, who recounts her experiences of exclusion from family events.
“My mom would host a big family gathering with my sister, nieces and nephews – everyone,” said Bowens, now 56 and living in New Haven, Conn. “She always wanted me to come home with my children, but not invite my partner to come.”
Bowens is a lesbian, coming out well into adulthood after a heterosexual marriage that produced two boys, now age 20 and 27.
Today, she ministers to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and challenges the church in her new book, “Ready to Answer: Why ‘Homophobic Church’ is an Oxymoron.”
Another interviewee with more conservative views grapples with moving toward the “loving” part of “love the sinner but hate the sin.” Generally, not always, that movement will lead to a more thorough re-examination of views down the line.
The best book to get at the underlying issues here is Kelly Brown Douglas’s Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. The subtitle of Douglas’s book signals that it is an example of womanist theology, which may be new to many readers here. Womanist theology, theological reflection from the perspective of African-American women, arose in the 1980s as both an outgrowth of and corrective to feminist theology. A very early formulation was Dolores S. Williams’s explication in a 1987 Christianity and Crisis article, Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices. As a work of womanist thelogy, what Sexuality and the Black Church offers is not a sociological description of attitudes to sexuality in Black Churches – she clearly makes theological and ethical prescriptions for reform from a distinctively African-American voice. For more on the relationship of Black Theology to African-American churches, see James Cone’s For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church.
Douglas opens her study with an examination of the impact of White culture on Black cultures within a general framework of power dependent on the philosopher Michel Foucault. Douglas does not explicitly engage the many debates surrounding the meaning of Whiteness as a social analytic category. But it is clear that in Douglas’s work, White culture does not simply refer to what predominantly caucasian communities do. Rather, Whiteness is a cultural sign of privilege that has expanded over time to include groups, such as the Irish, Mormons, and Jews, whose status as “white” is generally taken for granted in American society today. Douglas, however, is clear that she holds individuals responsible for creating new ways of relating.
What is particularly significant for Douglas is the way African-Americans internalize the messages of White culture. She discusses various sexual stereotypes that emerged in Southern Plantation culture, and demonstrates their staying power through discussions of the Moynihan Report, the Anita Hill hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial. In the latter cases, her concern is less with the ultimate verdict than with the cultural narratives surrounding the cases, seen most blatantly in Time’s darkening of Simpson’s mugshot.
But Douglas does not present the legacy of racism as an excuse for homophobia or misogyny in the churches. Douglas clearly offers the analysis of the negative impact of White culture on Black sexuality as a prod for transformation – a challenge she poses to everyone. For African-Americans, she presents the impact of this legacy as an opportunity to reflect more explicitly on sexuality in church settings. White people need to become cognizant of this legacy and take responsibility for transforming patterns of privilege.