...but someone showed me this YouTube video earlier this week, and it's stuck with me. I'm feeling very ambivalent about this mode of protest (really? John-Charles, ambivalent about something?), but there's a joyousness to their defiance that I find attractive and infectious. If you don't want to be exposed to repetitions of the F-bomb and the finger, don't hit Play.
Let's charitably set aside the absurd hypocrisy of faulting others for being "hateful" as you joyfully belt out that you hate what they do and you hate their whole crew. (Homophobia is indeed detestable, but if you're going to one-up it morally, you need a different rhetoric.) What I like about the video is its playfulness. They're not screaming to heavy metal. They're not raging in the streets—not that there isn't a time and season for that. But they're also not wallowing in victimhood. They're responding to homophobia by flipping it the bird while they celebrate their lives. There's something healthy about that, I think.
The video reminds me of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, where Brother William and Jorge of Burgos are having their final intellectual face-off. In a move foreshadowing postmodern tropes of the 20th century, William champions laughter as a way to disrupt power. He tells the dour, self-righteous, murderous Jorge:
You are the Devil. . . . [T]he Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim . . . I hate you, Jorge, and if I could, I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowl's feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer.I see something of that same spirit in the video.
In a few days, a vigil is going to be held at the Los Altos, California, stake center to mark the ten-year anniversary of Stuart Matis's suicide. It will be a somber affair. Reverential. Mournful. I've participated in events like this before. No doubt there will be quiet singing: "As I Have Loved You," "I Am a Child of God." Maybe "We Shall Overcome," though that's probably more political than the organizers seem to have in mind. I applaud Mormons for Marriage and the Foundation for Reconciliation for organizing the event, and while I have some quite serious qualms about a minority asking for "reconciliation" with a majority who have just stripped them of a civil right, I hope, as I'm sure the organizers do, that the event may touch some hearts and minds.
At the same time—here comes the inevitable ambivalence—there's a part of me that would like to see someone hurl buckets of blood at the Los Altos stake center. There's a part of me that would like to see a new kind of protest emerge where people wait in line to shake the hands of General Authorities and leave their palms sneared in henna or somesuch in token of the blood they have on their hands. (Anyone out there up to it? Troy?)
And then again, there's a part of me that would like to respond to the anti-gay teachings and politics of church leaders in a more playfully defiant way. To flip the bird to Dallin H. Oaks while singing a bouncy, "F-ck you very, very mu - u - u - u - uch." Or to at least to savor the mental image of Elder Oaks, or Elder Hafen, or Elder Packer, being paraded around naked in public with his face painted and feathers in his asshole. (Photoshop, anyone?)
I wonder: Whose asshole would Jesus stick feathers in? If you're offended by the question, let me ask you this: Do you find that image more or less offensive than the image of Jesus telling gay and lesbian Christians at the last day, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire" (D&C 29:28)?
Like I said, I may regret this post later. [Read the rest of the story.]
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