I get in the car, I ride in the car, I take a poop in the car, The car starts to smell, I dislike the smell, The poop solidifies, The motion of the car turns the hardened poop into a dildo, The excrement dildo goes in and out of my anal cavity, I enjoy the car ride, Does this make me Gay?
I really would perfer more stories about the gaysex opensause linux movement. I've read all about the dirty tacos, and RMS'es queerness.. but I hunger for more.
Why would microsoft want to turn this great operating systems into something more like unix? Having it all bundled togather is what makes thier OS so great! just imagine if you had to configure everything yourself... all those options... It'd be a modular nightmare! I wonder why Linus doesn't bundle a webbrowser with the Linux Kernel? It'd make linux great like XP!
Talk show giant, Oprah Winfry was stopped by mall secutiry earlier today after reports that she was seen in the womens restroom giving oral sex Linus Tarballs. Oprah was quoted as saying "It was just oral sex, its not real sex right?" and "If the president can get some in the whitehouse, what wrong with me doing it in the mall". Linus could not be reached for comment.
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Some years ago I ran across a length of smooth, large-diameter rubber hose in a laboratory. It was 5/8" (16 mm) in diameter, with a ¼" (6 mm) inside diameter, with a wall thickness of 3/16" (4.5 mm). Being a complete enema nut, I immediately thought of some interesting uses for such a fine piece of tubing, and "borrowed" it.
I made a gigantic colon tube with it by rounding off one end of the tube. This was not such an easy task, but with scissors, fresh razor blades and such, I got it fairly well smoothed off.
I attached the other end of the hose to the bathtub faucet, and set the faucet for a slow flow of warm water. I lubricated the hose with vaseline, and laying on my back in the tub, I started to insert the hose into my rectum. To my surprise, it slid in easily, and further than I had ever gotten a tube in before. After letting the hose fill me for a while, I evacuated my bowels on the toilet.
When I felt empty, I got back into the tub, and repeated the process. This time I decided to try to slide the hose as far up into my colon as I possibly could. I relaxed on my back, and eased the hose back in. I let the water fill me for a moment, and then I started to twist and push the hose inward.
When the end of the tube reached the top of the sigmoid, I felt some resistance, and just gently pushed and pulled back on the tube while twisting it constantly. After a moment it slipped in farther. I could really feel the tube moving around inside me, and it was great. I kept gently pushing, and the tube moved farther until the tip was at the bend between the sigmoid and the descending colon, far down on the left side. I had a bit of difficulty getting past this point, but I pressed in with my fingers at that point on my abdomen, and worked my fingertips around in a circular motion, and the tube eventually moved up into my descending colon. Ahhh. I could feel even more sensation now.
I kept pushing gently, and worked the tube all the way up to the top of the descending fairly quickly, and then wiggled it through the splenic flexure (behind the stomach). Now the tube was passing across the transverse colon, and I was starting to get filled up. The sensation was incredibly stimulating, and I could feel the tube's progress across my belly with my fingertips. The tube made a firm lump whenever I felt the appropriate part of my colon. It was getting hard to make the tube progress farther, and when the tip reached the hepatic flexure, I pushed on the part extending from my anus until the loops inside me hurt.
I realized that I wasn't going to get it any farther up me than this, so I let the water fill me until I couldn't take any more. I then pulled the end of the tube from the faucet and let the water start to drain out. I had a marvelous orgasm at this point as the water gently ran out from the tube. When I could feel the end of the tube sucking at the interior of my bowels, I started to pull it out, slowly. I finished my evacuation on the toilet.
I worried that this might not be a safe procedure to perform, because it was at least uncomfortable, and at times fairly painful. I now know that when people are examined with a fiber optic colonoscope they are sedated, but that instrument hadn't been invented when I did this.
This same tube is now the hose on my high volume (1 ¾ Gallon) (6 Liter) enema setup. No, I have never taken (or even tried to take) the whole can. I really only did this whole procedure once, so you could say it was a once in a lifetime thing, but it was quite an experience. If I'd left the tube in, I could have gotten a high colonic irrigation, but I really hadn't even heard of colon irrigation before. I got somewhat in excess of 4 feet (about 130 cm) of tubing inside me, and because of the thickness of the tube and my ability to feel it through the abdomen I know it wasn't curled up inside me.
This tube was of a type made for vacuum use, it is very soft and flexible, but its wall thickness makes it resistant to kinking and folding up inside. I have several other large diameter colon tubes, but their stiffness makes it too hard to pass them around the many bends of the colon. The metric conversions are for those readers abroad who don't want to think in the old "English" units.
Different cultures come up with different ways of describing or categorizing sexual phenomena. When those descriptions or categories are imported by other cultures, interesting tensions arise between indigenous sexual cultures and the newly imported discourses. The term ?homosexual,? for instance, traces its origins as ?Homosexualität? to the activist Karl Maria Kertbeny?s political tract of 1869. This document was written in German against the backdrop of the impending unification of Germany, with the specific purpose of preventing the spread of Prussia?s stringent laws against sodomy to states like Bavaria that did not criminalize consensual sexual activity between members of the same sex. Thus ?homosexuality? and ?heterosexuality,? terms which went on to structure the world?s understanding of sexuality, clearly emerge from mid-nineteenth-century central Europe. In 1968, almost a century after the coinage of the term ?Homosexualität,? the German Democratic Republic began moving in the direction that Kertbeny had desired, decriminalizing consensual sexual acts between members of the same sex. A year later, the Federal Republic of Germany also decriminalized sex between adult men, although the age of consent remained higher for male-male activities than it was for heterosexual acts. (This was finally changed in 1994.) Since this liberalization, the vocabulary of sexuality has undergone considerable change, much of which was fomented in the United States. How has the Federal Republic of Germany, once an exporter of sexual vocabulary, taken to importing conceptualizations of sexuality? Some of the American vocabulary has been deeply foreign to German language and culture, but the word ?queer? will transfer quite well, grafting itself on to German roots.
A plethora of American concepts and words inundates the German sexual realm nowadays, with affects on sexuality that cannot be taken for granted. Among these concepts are: ?gay community,? [1] ?Stonewall,? ?Christopher Street Day,? ?Coming-Out,? ?the closet,? ?outing,? and ?queer.? These terms must have an effect on German conceptualization of sexuality, just as the terms ?homosexual? and ?heterosexual? have influenced the way the rest of the world thinks about sexuality. A concrete example of this cross-pollination can be seen, for example, in the work of Jim Baker, who with Ilona Bubeck has co-founded the ?Querverlag,? which has just published a directory of German gay and lesbian organizations called the Regenbogen Seiten. The vocabulary of ?quer? and the notion of ?Regenbogenseiten? both suggest American interference from the word ?queer? and the ideology of the rainbow flag. The index to this directory shows over a hundred organizations sticking with the indubitably German ?schwul,? plus 19 using the originally German if now international ?homosexuell? (which represents a considerable drop from earlier years), 46 using the word ?gay,? and another 22 using some form of ?queer? or ?quer.? Thus, while German words remain in the majority, there is nonetheless a sense that German inadequately describes contemporary sexuality, which motivates a strong interest in Anglo-American vocabulary.
In academic circles a host of words are considered untranslatable. The collection of essays entitled Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, edited by Sabine Hark, who has written some of the earliest German publications on queer theory, has a glossary explaining such terms as ?butch/femme,? ?closet,? and ?queer,? all of which appear in English and are not translated in any of the essays. The Humboldt-Universität in Berlin has a quasi-official program in ?Queer-Studien? [2] within the Department of Cultural Studies. [3]
Some institutions resist these foreign loanwords, of course. The department of Neuere Deutsche Literatur at the venerable Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg refused to let a visiting American professor use the words ?queer theory? in the title of his course because it wanted to keep the catalog German. The department settled on ?Homosexualität und Literatur,? recognizing the Teutonic nature of homosexuality. In their insistence on the term ?homosexuality,? the Freiburger Germanisten had for many years allies in the German government, which also exclusively used the word ?homosexuell.? The Bundestag only permitted vocabulary of ?schwul? and ?lesbisch? in the 1990s (Schenk 190).
Outside of the academic arena, many aspects of the American gay rights movement have also been imported by Germany. Some of these ?imports? should actually be considered German projections on to America. Since 1979, there have been gay pride parades in Germany called Christopher Street Day Parades, or CSD-Paraden, although relatively few parades in the English-speaking world are so named (Theis 290). Volker Woltersdorff observes that the emphasis on Christopher Street Day is producing a mythic history of the gay movement: ?die 69er Revolte in der New Yorker Christopher Street [wird] als ein Gründungsmythos der Schwulenbewegung inszeniert und alljährlich reinszeniert? (82). Sabine Hark comments upon the importance of the founding myth of Christopher Street for the German movement, bemoaning the fact that the acceptance of ?Stonewall? as the zero hour of gay and lesbian history devalidates any prior queer history indigenous to Germany (?Magisches Zeichen? 109). When Berlin?s Akademie der Künste hosted an exhaustively comprehensive exhibit on gay male history, it chose Christopher Isherwood?s title, ?Good bye to Berlin,? suggesting that even this remarkable demonstration of the significance of gay Germany was looking to the Anglo-American world for confirmation and legitimation. This is all the more ironic, given that it is unlikely that in the United States or England such a major exhibition would have been funded with public monies and with so little public outcry.
Moving from the level of politics and activism to the more personal and psychological level, one of the most fundamental stages of gay identity in the United States is the closet, which is an entirely untranslatable notion in German. One can?t speak of the ?Schrank,? in which sexuality is hidden. Indeed, most European houses don?t have built-in closets. One certainly can?t make verb forms comparable to ?closeted? either. English-language critical texts based on ?closet? as a noun and a verb, with frequent usage of the terms ?closeted? or ?closeting,? disintegrate in the process of translation, which must render these terms with the less metahorical language of ?verstecken,? ?verhüllen,? ?verbergen,? and ?verklemmt.? Certainly, sex between members of the same gender has often been hidden in German history, but the absence of the metaphor of the closet has lent this German hiding of sexuality an undeniably different character.
As Butler points out in the translated essay (originally written in English) that anchors Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, the metaphor of ?out? is completely dependent upon the metaphor of the closet (19). Thus it is not surprising that German imported the vocabulary of ?coming out,? as well as that of the ?closet.? Not only German has perceived this necessity, if Helga Pankratz is to be believed: ?So häufig und so selbstverständlich wird der Ausdruck gebraucht weltweit! ? Aber in jeder Sprache der Welt außer dem Englischen ist und bleibt ?Coming Out?, wenn wir es recht bedenken: ein Fremdwort!? (177). It is an American export article, she continues, one that has achieved the respectability in Germany of being recognized by the Duden. The ?Coming-out Erzählung? has become a term that is standard enough to receive academic attention by scholars such as Volker Woltersdorff. Even in the German Democratic Republic, it gained acceptance, becoming the title of a major film there on the subject of homosexuality: Heiner Carow?s ?Coming Out? was the last major film produced in the GDR. The film might have made a bigger splash, had the Berlin Wall not come down the very day that it was released.
Despite its success, the term ?Coming Out? is clumsy in German. While German is no stranger to separable verbs like ?coming out,? it has not proven possible to use ?aus kommen? to mean ?to come out? in the sexual sense. Thus Germans have stayed with the foreign term ?Coming Out? as a noun, producing sentences like ?Ich hatte mein Coming-Out 1989.? Fortunately, another Anglo-Americanism appeared on the scene to rescue the Germans out of this awkward linguistic situation: ?Outing.? Outing, which provoked enormous controversy in the Federal Republic, partially because of Rosa von Praunheim?s efforts to expose hypocritical public figures, flowed smoothly into German. It lent itself to an incorporation into German as the verb ?outen,? which could be used gracefully in a number of verb forms, including the reflexive ?sich outen.? Here was a way out of the problems with the ungraceful ?Coming Out.? One could ?out oneself?: ?sich outen? became the more fluent way to talk about openly announcing one?s sexuality. Indeed, in Germany ?outen? soon came to be used to reveal any unusual, surprising, remarkable, hitherto unsuspected aspect of a person?s personality, just as the verb ?to out? is used in the United States. Pankratz lists examples of people in the public eye ?outing themselves? as rollerbladers, sufferers of migraine headaches, lovers of classical music, or natives of the Vorarlberg (189). ?Sich outen? works more easily in German than ?Coming Out,? but it alters the understanding of sexuality, which is no longer the organic growth or development of the subject that one associates with ?coming out,? and instead has a somewhat violent relationship between subject and object that is associated with the controversial practice of ?outing.? [4] Indeed, one of the reasons that Pankratz ultimately likes ?sich outen? is its somewhat harder edge that comes from its connections to ?outing.? Pankratz points out that the reflexive verb, ?sich outen,? has become confusing for many native speakers of German, including journalists, who now use the word ?Outing,? without the ?sich,? for ?Coming-Out.?As an example, she cites the following sentence from an article about the openly lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge, ?Immer mehr schwule und lesbische Stars riskieren es, durch ihr Outing straightes Publikum zu brüskieren? (192). In addition to the striking use of ?straight? as an adjective, the sentence is remarkable because ?Outing? is no longer something done to a star, but rather something that a star does to herself or to her public.
A number of German cultural critics have made reference to a subtle distinction between ?coming out,? understood as a personal recognition of one?s sexuality, and ?going public,? understood as the public announcement of that sexuality. They point out the associations of the phrase with the stock market as an example of the kind of double meaning that gets lost in the wholesale importation of sexual terminology. While the distinction between ?coming out? and ?going public? makes sense to me, as does the analysis of the latter term?s economic meaning, I have to say that I personally have rarely, if ever, heard or read the phrase ?going public? in this sense.
Once one comes out, what does one become? Immediately after the 1969 liberalization of laws concerning sexuality, German terminology prevailed and one became ?homosexuell? or ?schwul.? The currency of the term ?homosexuell? is perhaps surprising, because it is today frequently rejected as overly clinical, medical, and pathological. But just as it was originally coined and embraced by activists, only to be appropriated by medicine, so too was it also embraced by the post-69 generation of gay activists. A great many student groups included the word ?homosexuell? in their names, including the ?Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe Bochum? (which appeared as a student group in 1970 and became a city-wide organization in 1971), the ?Homosexuelle Studentengruppe Münster,? the ?Homosexuelle Aktion Westerberlin? (1971). There was also a ?Homosexuelle AktionsGruppe? or HAG in Munich, which had to change its acronym, when a coffee firm of the same name protested. It became HAM for ?Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe München.? Various organizations came to represent the cause of gay rights on a federal level, including the ?Deutsche Aktionsgruppe Homosexualität,? founded in 1972, and the ?Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft? (1974).
Clearly, then, a large majority of the organizations that formed in the early 70s chose vocabulary having to do with ?homosexuality.? Rosa von Praunheim?s film, ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt,? which appeared at the Berliner Filmfestspiele in 1971, and appeared for the first time on television in 1972, used the vocabulary of ?Homosexuelle,? albeit with a great deal of alienating distance. Homosexuality also showed up in the chants of the street marchers, as in the following example: ?Brüder und Schwestern, ob warm oder nicht, Kapitalismus bekämpfen ist unsere Pflicht!? (Kraushaar 139). [5] As this jingle indicates, the groups using the discourse of homosexuality were on the cutting edge of left-wing radicalism, which is somewhat surprising given the current rejection of the term ?homosexuelle? by many activists.
Indeed, the ?Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft? started in Berlin as a replacement for the ?Internationale Homophile Weltorganisation? (IHWO), according to Wolfgang Theis (285). The word ?homosexuell? radically emphasized the sexual, while the term ?homophil,? which had been more popular in the 50s and 60s in the Federal Republic, had diluted the sexual with a vaguer kind of love: ?Die Verwendung des Begriffs ?homosexuell? in den Namen der neuen studentischen Gruppen war als programmatische Abkehr von der Praxis der bürgerlichen Verbände gemeint, die sich schamhaft ?homophil? nannten, weil die Betonung des Sexuellen nach ihrem Verständnis nur Vorurteile bestätigen konnte? (Theis 279-80). Thus, the word ?homosexuell? should receive more credit than it does. The Foucauldian attack on the role of medicine in the construction of sexuality probably led to a widespread discrediting of this term, which had become a medical, as well as a political, concept. But in the critique of the medical establishment, the activists who did promote this terminology have been forgotten.
In the early 70s, ?schwul? seems to have been used alongside ?homosexuell.? Praunheim?s film entitled ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt? states programatically, ?Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein? (Theis 280). Generally understood as a pejorative, gay groups tended to avoid using it in their official names, although there were some exceptions, for instance Frankfurt?s ?Rote Zelle Schwul? or ?Rotzschwul.? Within the community, however, the pejorative connotations of the word had less weight, meaning that it was used in exclusively gay contexts, rather than in contacts between the gay and straight world. The gay newspaper Schwuchtel appeared in 1975; in the following year, an early gay drama appeared, entitled ?Brühwarm ? ein schwuler Jahrmarkt? (Theis 286-7). Both the newspaper and the drama were intended for a primarily gay audience, which allowed for the use of the word ?schwul.? The tension between the title of Praunheim?s film and its first words underscores this point as well. The title, ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ?,? would serve to mediate between the film?s content, which was by, for, and about the gay male movement, and the general public. The vocabulary of ?Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein? then leads the public directly into an internal gay debate.
?Nicht der Homosexuelle ?? is of course more complicated than that, for the repeated use of the word ?schwul? not only introduces the audience to the film?s insider critique, but also forces the general public to confront its own negative associations with the word ?schwul.? As Volker Bruns notes, ?das Wort ?schwul? war ein so ungeheuerliches Schimpfwort, dass es selbst die ?Normalen? nur in Sekunden der Erregung über die Lippen brachten? (86). In 1975, the East German gay activist Michael Unger expressed the community?s desire to change the connotations of the word: ?Wir verwenden es seit langem als selbstverständliche Bezeichnung auch für uns selbst, weil wir glauben, dass es ursprünglich einmal eine saubere Bedeutung hatte und erst später zum Schimpfwort wurde? (Kraushaar 147-48). [6] In response to Unger, the Zentralinstitut für Sprachwissenschaft an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR confirmed that the word had a negative connotation and presumed that there was little chance that word ?schwul? would experience a positive reevaluation (Kraushaar 147). The magazine Schwuchtel pressed the point, by using an even more pejorative term to discuss practices, such as S/M and pederasty, that were taboo even within the gay community. The use of the word ?schwul? mirrored the appropriation of the term ?nigger? in the United States by rap groups like Niggers With Attitude and anticipated the reversal of meaning that took place when the word ?queer? came into use by academicians and activists in the 1990s.
By the end of the 70s, an increasingly self-confident gay movement in the Federal Republic began to replace ?homosexuell? with the term ?schwul.? In the 1977 the ?Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin? dissolved and the space it had occupied became the ?SchwulenZentrum? or ?Schwuz? (Theis 288). In the same year, the ?Nationale Arbeitsgruppe Repression gegen Schwule? was established in Hamburg (Theis 290). In 1978, 682 men revealed themselves as gay in the newsmagazine Stern (#41) in the article, ?Wir sind schwul? (Rimmele 138). In 1979 the student government of the Freie Universität in Berlin set up a ?Schwulenreferat? (Theis 287). By 1990, there was a ?Schwulenverband in Deutschland,? which attempted to unite gay political organizations. Shortly thereafter, the Bundestag began to accept the use of the word ?schwul? instead of ?homosexuell.? The term ?schwul? had been objectionable enough in 1988 that a Green Party proposal for a ?Schwulenreferat? had not even reached the floor, because of the word. The Greens refused to accept the word ?Homosexuelle,? killing the proposal for the time being (Kraushaar 204-5). The subtitle of the publically subsidized Berlin exhibit ?Good bye to Berlin,? ?100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,? was further evidence of the official acceptance of this term.
The demise of the word ?homosexuell? was related, on the academic front, to the general Foucauldian critique of medicine and its role in pathologizing same-sex desire. It also was a corollary of an increasing gap between gay men and lesbians. The word ?schwul? generally refers only to gay men, although this was not always the case. None other than one of the founders of the German gay and lesbian movement, Magnus Hirschfeld, is said to have referred to ?schwule Frauen und Männer.? And the Berlin group, Homosexuelle Aktion West, had in 1972 a ?schwule Frauengruppe? (Winder and Telge 11). But these are rare exceptions; the vast majority of German speakers regard ?schwul? as referring only to men. These exceptions, however, prove that the implicit masculinity of the word ?schwul? is a result of decision-making by German speakers.
This separatism has had some noteworthy consequences. In particular, gay male events have often been much more sexually explicit in Germany than they would be in the States where the sexes have worked together more closely. The catalog for the mammoth exhibit, ?Good Bye to Berlin, 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,? which was in fact quite astonishing in its concentration on men to the exclusion of women, was filled with graphic depictions of male sexual organs and acts that would likely not have been present in an exhibit with a strong women?s presence. Indeed, when gay male organizations in Germany have attempted to solicit lesbian participation and contributions, the issues of pornography and the power of images have always quickly arisen as stumbling blocks. [7] The loss of the inclusive term ?homosexuell? went hand in hand with the development of separate identities around the terms ?schwul? and ?lesbisch.? The lesbian movement intensified its involvement with feminism and the women?s movement, as the gay men went their own way. Any cooperation between the camps was seen as a coalition between precisely defined categories: ?schwul-lesbisch.? The Siegesäule, the gay and lesbian magazine coming out of Berlin, with the largest circulation of any gay/lesbian publication in Germany, has recently taken to styling itself as ?schwul-lesbisch,? in order to be more inclusive, although it had traditionally been ?schwul? and thus primarily male in its orientation, and to some extent remains so. Similarly the ?Schwules Pressearchiv? has called itself since August 1995 the ?Lesbisch-Schwules Pressearchiv? (Rimmele 132).
For those with a residual fear of the offensiveness of ?schwul? or with a hankering for the inclusiveness ?homosexuell,? there was always the prosaic ?gleichgeschlechtlich,? which began to show up, especially in bureacratic contexts, in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1989, Berlin established a ?Referat für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen.? In 1992, Brandenburg followed suit, with a ?Büro für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen? (Kokula 173-4). The term ?Lebensweise? is additionally interesting, for it suggests a deemphasis on the sexual aspect that the early proponents of ?homosexuell? had wanted to underscore, as well as a downplaying of the shock tactics that the initial champions of ?schwul? had utilized. In these cases, the speakers wanted the most neutral, least offensive official term possible, with the least taint of colloquialism. In addition, they seem to have wanted to avoid the use of loan words, like the Anglo-Saxon ?gay? or even the Greco-Roman ?homosexual.? The German language was up to providing terminology that adequately covered the needs of its speakers!
How about the Anglo-Saxon word ?gay?? In the Regenbogen Seiten, there are actually more organizations using ?gay? in their names than organizations using some version of ?queer.? This is probably a passing phenomenon, because ?gay? does not lend itself phonetically to appropriation in the German language the way that ?queer? does. In the Romance languages constructions like ?gai pied,? the title of the venerable, although sadly no longer surviving, Parisian gay magazine, can flow smoothly into the native language, but ?gay? is a difficult word to use in German. The ?ay? is not common at the end of a word, and the declension of an adjective ending with a ?y? is uncomfortable.
In English, the word ?gay? has a highly problematic positioning on two axes: the gay-lesbian axis and the gay-straight axis. When it is on the gay-lesbian axis it refers to men, but when it?s on the gay-straight axis, it at least attempts to represent homosexually-inclined men and women together. This uncomfortable double meaning has its reflections in Germany. As seen in the example of ?schwul,? Germans have been more inclined to force vocabulary dealing with sexuality into a specific gender. The effort at inclusiveness in the American word ?gay? has been something of a standing reproach to German groups. Dorothee Winden and Dieter Telge argue that the flood of documentaries out of the United States showing the cooperation between the sexes provided a model for many Germans. The concept of ?gay? as including men and women together eventually shamed German gay groups into opening up to women, as the move by the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft to include women in 1994 indicates.
The other half of the gay-straight dichotomy has fared even less well, if that is possible, in the Germanic realm than the gay-lesbian dichotomy. I?ve already cited the one reference to a ?straightes Publikum? (Pankratz 192). In general, however, there is not a good colloquial expresssion for heterosexuals that would correspond, say, to ?schwul.? Generally, it seems that gays and lesbians refer to ?Heteros? or ?Heteras? in a slangy kind of way, when they wouldn?t necessarily use the term ?Homos.? And while the words ?schwul? and ?lesbisch? have now achieved widespread currency, the terms ?hetero? and ?hetera? have not. This suggests that linguistically, German culture still finds the practitioners of same-sex desire as worthy of special note, while those who are in heterosexual relationships can pass by with relatively little scrutiny.
Some might object to the relentless dichotomization between men and women, gays and straights, going on here, and one of the objectives of the word ?queer? has been to escape such binary thinking. Although in many ways it had a militant edge to it, it blurred some of the boundaries that had existed, both along the gay/lesbian and the gay/straight axes. ?Queer? emerged as a word with a signficant new ideology in the States in the 1990s and arrived in Germany shortly thereafter. In 1989, Burroughs?s book with the English title Queer was translated into German as Homo, indicating that the term was relatively unknown in Germany. In 1992, the group Queer Nation made an appearance at the Berlin lesbian festival called ?Lesbenwoche,? identifying itself as follows: ?Queer Nation ? versteht sich als undogmatisches Aktionsbündnis von Lesben und Schwulen aller Rassen und Klassen, die sich nicht mehr mit der Assimilationspolitik der etablierten Homobewegung identifizieren können und buntere und radikalere Aktionsformen entwickeln wollen? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Sabine Hark?s essay ?Queer Interventionen? appeared in 1993 (in Feministische Studien 2), marking the introduction of the term to academic prose; it was reprinted in 1994 in a volume entitled Querfeldein: Beiträge zur Lesbenforschung, which is one of the earliest usages of the highly significant wordplay between ?quer? and ?queer? that I have located.
Since 1994, usage of the term ?queer? has blossomed in the Federal Republic. The symposium entitled ?Queering Demokratie? hosted by the Green Party?s Heinrich Böll Foundation from October 9-11 of 1998 in Berlin sparked an intensive confrontation with the concept of ?queer? in newspapers and weeklies like Freitag and Die Taz. The private television channel RTL reported in 1998 that at the Augsburg Christopher Street Day parade participants were chanting ?queer und hier,? which the news program helpfully translated as ?schwul und hier.? In the ?Querverlag??s Regenbogen Seiten one comes across such organizations as the ?Queer Strikers Frankfurt? (a gay bowling club), the ?QueerFlöten? (a gay and lesbian choir in Freiburg), and ?Queer Klagenfurt,? which seems to be an umbrella organization with various functions in Austria. Berlin has the aforementioned ?Queer-Studien,? Linz has a ?Queery-Box.? There?s ?Queerfilm? in Bremen, a ?Queerfilmreihe? in Freiburg, a ?queer-Filmfest? in Frankfurt, a ?Queer Film Festival? in Vienna, and a cultural festival called ?Queer im Ruhr.? You can tune your radio to a ?Queer Kanal? in Bremen, and a ?Queerfunk? in both Dresden and Kiel.
Many of the organizations that have used the term ?queer? in their names do not have an explicit agenda. When I spoke with founders of Berlin?s ?Queer-Studien? and Freiburg?s ?QueerFlöten,? they were unable to give a concrete explanation for their choice of a name. But nonetheless the term has significance. Part of the appeal of ?queer? seems to be the way it fills the gender gap left by the demise of ?homosexuell? and the rise of ?schwul,? thus authorizing gay and lesbian cooperation. The manifesto in Queer Nation?s 1992 statement at the Lesbenwoche specifically referred to an alliance between ?Lesben und Schwulen? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). According to Winden and Telge, ?Queer Nation? was the first integrated male-and-female political action group interested in issues of same-sex desire that had appeared in Germany in a long time (12-13). Freiburg?s ?QueerFlöten? was until recently the only integrated lesbian and gay choir in all of Germany, and there are plenty of single-sex choirs there. The ?Queer-Partys? of SO 36, a nightclub in Berlin, brought together men and women; the presence of parties at which both gay men and lesbians could come together was itself political. So threatening to the established gay and lesbian identities were these ?Queer-Partys? that they were accused of turning SO 36 it into a meeting place for hip bis, or ?hippe Bi?s? as they say in German.
While the founders of the Humboldt?s ?Queer-Studien? did not have an expressed ideology backing their name, other academics have thought about their terminology more strenuously. In their introduction to the series ?Querdenken,? which was published in 1996, Sabine Hark and Stefan Etgeten define the name of the series as an ?Experiment lesbisch-schwuler Zusammenarbeit, in der Konflikte und Differenzen nicht verdeckt, sondert fortwährend artikuliert und untersucht werden sollen? (?Zu dieser Reihe? 8). In their volume, Freundschaft unter Vorbehalt. Chancen und Grenzen lesbisch-schwuler Bündnisse, published in 1997, Hark and Etgeten situate the possible coalition between gay men and lesbian women specifically under the aegis of ?queer,? which they hope will be an end to separatism (?Zwischen Geschlechterschranke?). Perhaps because ?queer? counters the exclusionary force of ?schwul,? it has proven particularly attractive to women theorists. It was in the context of ?Lesbenwoche? and ?Lesbenforschung? that the term was first introduced to the Federal Republic. In general, many more women theorists have published on this matter in Germany than men. In a private conversation, Alice Kuzniar suggested that this may have to do with the impact of Judith Butler on feminist thinking in Germany. Butler is clearly related to the emergence of ?queer?in Germany. Gender studies and queer theory are of course ways of thinking often associated with the writings of Judith Butler, who has been such a success in Germany that one speaks of the ?Butler-Boom.? Her lecture tour in Germany in the summer of 1997 was a triumphal march through a happily vanquished land. It was like the Beatles ? 14-year-old girls fainting when they caught sight of her and so forth. Both of her public appearances in Berlin were completely packed. The public lecture at the Einstein Forum at the Staatsbibliothek filled two rooms to overflowing, whereupon loudspeakers were set up outside on the lawn for the fascinated public. All the serious newspapers carried reviews of her lectures. Butler?s tremendous success there fueled an enthusiastic sense of rebirth among feminist thinkers, which was lost on the gay male scholars who did not pick up on her as quickly.
In addition, ?queer? is seen among German intellectuals and activists, in a way similar to its reception in the United States, as opening up the possibility of talking about non-essentialist identities (Engel 77). It offers possibilities to those who are exhausted with the boundaries of their identities (Etgarton and Hark). In her essay, ?Queer Interventionen,? Hark describes queer theory as ?eine politische und theoretisch-konzeptionelle Idee für eine kategoriale Rekonzeptualisierung von Geschlecht und Sexualität, mit der problematisch gewordene Identitätspolitik überwunden werden sollen? (211). Woltersdorff refers to ?queer? as ?neue Identität beziehungsweise Anti-Identität,? including transsexuals and transgendered people (90-91). Discussing the establishment of the ?queer-Partys? at SO 36, Winden and Telge see ?queer? as appealing to young party-goers because of its inclusivity and its rejection of constricting labels: ?Mit dem Wort queer als Sammelbegriff für alles, was sich jenseits der heterosexuellen Norm bewegt, bieten die queer-Partys eine Identifikationsmöglichkeit, die weniger ideologisch-theoretisch bestimmt war, sondern dem eigenen Lebensstil entsprach? (21). Corinna Genschel see it as potentially including ?alle ?Perverse? als Dissidenten herrschender Politik? (79). Roswitha Hofmann finds that ?queer? is an ?expression of a new way of thinking and living? and ?Queer-Theory? the next step ?in extracting oneself from the categories of identity that many feel are too narrow? (115). Jutta Hartman also sees ?Queer Theory? as a ?confrontation with the constructedness and thus relativity of identities? (270).
Notable throughout the writings on queer is the ambivalence about the possibility that it could water down, depoliticize, and further commercialize sexuality. Engel is concerend that ?queer? often merely serves as a fashionable guarantor of a ?progressive attitude? (77). Genschel worries about the potential commercialization of the word ?queer.? This mistrust, born of the long-standing leftwing tendencies of the gay and lesbian movements in the Federal Republic, is perhaps connected to the American origins of the term ?queer.? The word has clearly been recognized as an American import since Queer Nation?s announcement at the 1992 Lesbenwoche that it was ?eine Bewegung, die seit Frühjahr 1990 in fast allen US-amerikanischen und einigen kanadischen Städten Fus gefasst hat? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Ralph Poole wonders if the ?queer-Szene? is ?ein amerikanisches Phänomen? (99). Many of the speakers at the Green Party?s Queering Democracy symposium were Americans and spoke in English. [8] An article from Die Taz asserts, ?unter dem aus den USA importierten Begriff ?Queer? soll nun die heterosexuelle Norm exorziert werden? (Krause and Meisel). The importation of ?queer? from America perhaps the effect of validating West German conceptualizations of sexuality over East German ones, as the Westerners had more contact with the American scene that produced this vocabulary (see Thinius).
While ?queer? has provided a good deal of food for thought for feminist scholars, some are concerned that it will dilute the specificity of women?s issues,once again subordinating women to the economically and socially more powerful men who will almost inevitably take over an organization that consists of both men and women. Lena Laps in any case sees the move from ?schwul? and particularly ?lesbisch? to ?queer? as parallel to the move from ?Frauenforschung? to ?Geschlechterdifferenz,? in that in both cases, there is a loss of particularlity in favor of generality. Women in particular disappear behind the universals that she sees in the terms ?queer? and ?gender.?
In addition to concerns about commercilization and sexism, many of these theorists and commentators are concerned that the use of ?queer? in German disconnects the word from its initial Anglo-American double-meaning of ?homosexual? and ?strange? or ?weird.? By eliding these two meanings, American queer theorists can pivot same-sex desire into a paradoxically paradigmatic marginality. With the fortuitous existence of the verb ?to queer,? one had the possibility for numerous linguistically pre-approved approaches to texts. Much of this is lost in the German appropriation of the word. Some have therefore argued for the use of the word ?pervers? as a translation of ?queer,? in order to emphasize the initial negativity of the term. But I think that, among queers, there have always been those who took pleasure in being queer, and I?m not sure that the same applies to ?pervers.? That is to say, I?m not sure that the issue is exclusively one of reversing the meaning of a word, but rather one of determining whose evaluation of the term is considered binding. In any case, Germans are familiar with the concept of reappropriating negative terminology and giving it a positive twist ? indeed that is what happened to the word ?schwul.? ?Schwul? would have been a model for ?queer? if the only concern were to make positive an initially negative concept.
Despite these concerns, ?queer? seems to be taking root in Germany. Unlike ?gay,? which has remained an entirely foreign word in German, the word ?queer? can fit into another linguistic matrix in German. ?Queer? is perhaps related to ?quer.? Hence the ?Querverlag,? with its series ?querdenken,? and the lecture series in Vienna with the title ?que[e]rdenken? (with the second ?e? in brackets). By mobilizing this linguistic family, queer theorists are able to discuss, as Poole does, ?verquerte Sexualität? (108). Antke Engel entitles her article ?Verqueeres Begehren.? The Humboldt-Universität hosted a conference on sexology entitled ?Verqueere Wissenschaft? in 1997.
This usage has exciting possibilities, not only for the development of German conceptualization of sexuality. The importation of ?queer? will facilitate German thinking on sexuality, but it will do so, not merely by forcing an American concept onto the German playing field, but also by allowing the German linguistic structures to contribute to this conceptualization. As ?queer? anchors itself in German ?quer,? the concepts of queer theory that arise in Germany will emphasize more the sense of crossing boundaries, a kind of reading or cutting against the grain that is inherent in ?quer? rather than the strangeness or making strange that is inherent in ?queer.? This is an exciting form of cultural cross-pollination, for it allows for cultures to affect each other while also recognizing cultural difference.
To observe that we live in a society that is suffering greatly from sexual confusion or, if you will, sexual misconduct, is not a novel insight. There is little need to provide a full set of statistics to demonstrate the consequences of the sexual revolution, for who is not familiar with the epidemic in teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, divorces, and AIDS? Our society has undergone a rapid transformation in terms of sexual behavior, and few would argue that it is for the better. Today, one out of two marriages end in divorce. Six out of ten teenagers are sexually active. The millions of abortions over the last decade and the phenomenal spread of AIDS indicate that our society has serious problems with sexuality. In the last generation, the incidence of sexual activity outside of marriage ? with all of its attendant problems ? has double and tripled ? or worse. We have no particular reason to believe that we have seen the peak of the growth in sexually related problems.
Statistics do not really capture the pervasive ills attendant upon sexual immorality. Premature and promiscuous sexuality prevent many from establishing good marriages and family life. Few deny that a healthy sexuality and a strong family life are among the most necessary elements for human happiness and well-being. While many single parents do a worthy and valiant job of raising their children, it remains sadly true that children from broken homes grow up to be adults with a greater propensity for crime, a greater tendency to engage in alcohol and drug abuse, and a greater susceptibility to psychological disorders.
These realities touch every realm of life. They affect people's ability to relate to friends and family; they affect people's ability to do well at their studies and their jobs; and they affect the whole of society, which needs stable and secure individuals to lead us out of our troubles. Those who do not experience love from family and friends tend to seek any semblance of love they can find ? and thus become involved in illicit sexual relationships ? and the cycle starts again. The multiple varieties of abuse of sexuality and the grievous consequences of such abuse are not only damaging the current generation, they are threatening to ruin the chances of future generations to live happy and fulfilled lives.
Twenty years ago, when the sexual revolution was in full swing, many argued that it would liberate men and women from the repressive view of sexuality pervasive in society; people would be free to make love without the strictures of marriage. Many pointed to Christianity as the source of sexual repression. But the Christian view of sex is looking a lot more like wisdom. Christians no longer need to offer apologies for their insistence upon sexual morality, for their insistence upon reserving sex for marriage. Some in high public places are now beginning to counsel abstinence before marriage and to extol faithful monogamous marriages. They have begun to see these as practices of great practical wisdom.
In a certain sense, Christian morality ? especially sexual morality ? is quite similar to natural or commonsense morality. One does not need to be a Christian to understand why certain sexual practices are wrong. Christians differ from unbelievers not so much in the understanding of what is moral as in their commitment to trying to live morally. A Christian understands that when he is doing wrong, he is not only violating good sense, he is violating God's law; he is failing to be the loving and responsible person, God made him to be. Thus, Christian apologetics about sex may not seem much different from commonsense apologetics about sex, but the Christian tradition has most faithfully preserved the common wisdom about sex. Clearly it is easy to ?forget? or become confused about the common wisdom about sex; Christians are blessed with the powerful aid of revelation and tradition to counsel them regarding sexual morality.
Yet, despite the fact that most Christian denominations have remained steadfast in their allegiance to traditional Christian wisdom in sexual issues, few Christians have not been deeply affected by the saturation of modem culture with a view of sexuality radically opposed to the Christian view. Ten minutes of watching MTV or of a soap opera; ten minutes of listening to any rock, pop, or country music station; one visit to the corner-store magazine rack; or two minutes at the beach should serve to convince anyone that our society has very little respect for Christian moral norms regarding sexual relations. Christians, too, have begun to lose sight of the understanding of sexuality advanced by their tradition. Thus, now is the time for Christians to offer apologetics for their understanding of the role of sexual relations within human relationships. ?Apologetics? is a term used to refer to the energetic attempt to explain one's position to others. But Christians, I think, need to be as concerned with providing apologetics to themselves and to fellow Christians about sex as with bringing their message to others. Both internal and external evangelization are necessary, for few, if any, can escape being adversely affected by the distortions of our times. Christians need to strengthen themselves as well as their compatriots.
Christians have to learn about their own tradition before they can become effective witnesses to those in the larger society who desperately need to encounter individuals who are in control of their sexuality and happy because of it. There are a multitude of Christian truths which can assist us in escaping the ravages of a disordered sexuality. The time seems to be ripe for making the most persuasive case we can for Christian morality. Certainly, many are ceasing promiscuous behavior because of their fear of contracting AIDS. But that is not the only reason for the growing disenchantment with the sexual revolution. Many find that their sexual encounters leave them lonely and looking for something more. There are increasing reports of sexual indifference, with many claiming to have lost an interest in sex, even with those whom they love. There seems to be an increasing weariness with premarital sex and abortion, and a growing interest in reducing both. Many are beginning to see that the call for more and better sex education or more and better access to contraceptives is not the solution. Rather, we need a better understanding of the relations between sex, love, marriage, and children. And it is this understanding that Christianity can provide. THREE TRUTHS OF SEXUALITY
Let us focus on three fundamental truths about sexuality stressed throughout the Christian tradition: that marriage is the only proper arena for sexual activity; that marriages must be faithful for the love of spouses to thrive; and that children are a great gift to parents.
Why should sexual union only take place within a marriage? It can hardly be denied that sexual relations create powerful bonds between individuals, even between those who do not desire such bonds. Those who have sexual intercourse are engaging in an action which bespeaks a deep commitment to another. Pope John Paul II uses an interesting phrase in his teachings on sex: ?language of the body.? He claims that, like words, bodily actions have meanings, and that unless we intend those meanings with our actions, we should not perform them any more than we should speak words we do not mean. In both cases, lies are ?spoken.? Sexual union means `I find you attractive?; ?I care for you?; ?I will try to work for your happiness?; ?I wish to have a deep bond with you.? Some who engage in sexual intercourse do not mean these things with their actions; they wish simply to use another for their own sexual pleasure. They have lied with their bodies in the same way as someone lies who says ?I love you? to another simply for the purposes of obtaining some desired favor.
But some who engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage claim that they do mean all that sexual union implies and that, therefore, they are not lying with their bodies. They are, though, making false promises, for those engaging in sexual intercourse outside of marriage cannot fulfill the promises which their bodily actions make. They have not prepared themselves to fulfill the promise of working for another's happiness, or of achieving a deep bond with another. Such achievements take a lifetime to complete; they cannot be accomplished in brief encounters.
The Christian insistence on reserving sexual union for marriage, then, has as one of its chief justifications a concern that sexual relations are meant to express the desire for a deep and committed relationship with another. That relationship can only be built within marriage, because marriage is built upon a vow of faithfulness to one's beloved. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, regularly condemns the sin of adultery. Faithful marriage is used as the paradigm for the kind of relationship which God's people should have with God. Those who are not faithful to God are likened to adulterers. Proverbs and the whole of wisdom literature harshly condemn the adulterous spouse. Most spouses are devastated at the mere thought that their beloved desires another, let alone that their spouse may have actually been unfaithful. Faithfulness is essential to create the relationship of trust which is the bedrock of all the other goods that flow from marriage.
We take vows in marriage because we realize that we are all too ready to give up when the going gets tough; we realize that our loves wax and wane. Indeed, society at large seems to have a fondness for marriage. After all, in an age where there is little moral pressure against living together outside of marriage, most still choose to take marriage vows. Couples realize that marriage vows help them express and effect their commitment to each other. But as the divorce rate indicates, modern society ultimately does not take these vows very seriously ? or at least modern couples do not prepare for marriage in such a way that they are prepared to keep their vows. PREPARING FOR MARRIAGE
A talk with a pastor, an ?Engaged Encounter? weekend, or a ?Pre Cana? conference does not prepare one for marriage. Real marriage preparation must occur for many years before we enter marriage. Young people enjoy the exercise of drawing up a list of characteristics that they would like their future spouse to have. But their time might be better spent drawing up a list of characteristics which they themselves should have in order to be a worthy spouse. They need to reflect upon their expectations of marriage; many may find that their expectations are largely selfish. Most of us dream much more about how happy our spouses are going to make us than about how much we are going to do for our spouses.
Since marriage requires loving, faithful, kind, patient, forgiving, humble, courageous, wise, unselfish individuals ? and the list could go on ? young people should strive to gain these characteristics. Marriages cannot survive unless the spouses acquire these characteristics. Certainly it would be foolish to require that individuals have all of these characteristics before they marry, for none of us do. Indeed, the experience of marriage itself undoubtedly helps foster these characteristics. But if we do not work at acquiring them before marriage, we will be acquiring their opposites ? selfishness, haughtiness, impatience: characteristics that are death to a marriage.
Although faithfulness is one of the cornerstones of marriage, it may seem odd to speak of the need to be faithful to one's spouse before marriage. But in a sense, one should love one's spouse before one even meets him or her. This means reserving the giving of oneself sexually until one is married ? for in a sense, one's sexuality belongs to one's future spouse as much as it does to oneself. A few generations ago, it was not uncommon for young people to speak of ?saving themselves? for marriage. While scoffed at today, this phrase is nonetheless indicative of a proper understanding of love, sexuality, and marriage. One should prepare oneself for marriage, and one should save oneself for marriage.
How does one do so? Obviously, by remaining chaste ? and that is not an easy prescription. For instance, it means being attentive to what provokes sexual thoughts and desires and avoiding these provocations. It means, most likely, dissociating oneself from many of the forms of entertainment popular today. Those who view sexuality as a gift which one offers one's spouse at the time of marriage cannot fall victim to the constant sexual stimulation that Americans face daily. We need to be careful what music we listen to, what movies and TV shows we watch, and what clothes we wear. We need to try to save sexual thoughts and sexual stimulation for the time when they will not be frustrations, but welcome preludes to loving union with our spouses. Sexual temptations are, of course, impossible to avoid, especially since our society provides temptations around the clock. Christ's teaching that lust in one's heart is wrong tells us that we must guard our inner purity as well as govern our actions.
Few people, Christian or not, think it sensible for those who are engaged to wait until their wedding night to enjoy sexual union. Many think waiting until marriage would make sexual intimacy too awkward. Most think that, since one is soon going to take vows, it makes little difference whether sexual intimacy begins before or after a ceremony which simply ratifies a commitment already felt.
What difference does waiting make? Well, certainly a vow is not a vow until it is spoken; unspoken, unratified commitments are all too easy to break. There are practical reasons as well. Father James Burtchaell at Notre Dame has written a marvelous book, For Better or Worse, explaining why it is best for couples to wait until marriage before they begin their sexual intimacy. He speaks eloquently of the period before marriage as an irreplaceable opportunity for lovers to get to know one another. Engaging in sexual intercourse creates a false sense of closeness; it creates a bond that may obscure elements in a relationship which need work. Courtship is a time for getting to know each other, for sketching out dreams and plans; for expressing worries and hesitations. The delight of sexual union can easily distract couples from preparation for marriage.
There is also a deeper reason, and that is the question of honesty and trust. Few of those who have sexual relations before marriage, especially Christians, can be fully open about their actions. This means that people engaging in such relationships inevitably are deceiving someone ? their parents, their teachers, and perhaps their friends as well. The ability to practice such deception does not bode well for one's integrity. A woman observes that her lover is good at deception and will file away this information. She will have reason to wonder in the future if her spouse is being honest with her ? after all, he had no trouble deceiving others whom he or she respected. Many Christians feel terrible guilt at violating their deeply held moral principles; after they are married, they may continue to have guilty feelings about sex. In a sense, they have programmed themselves to think of sexual intercourse as a furtive and naughty activity.
On the other hand, couples who do wait until marriage have a special kind of euphoria about their sexual union. Because they waited, they see sexual pleasure as a privileged good of marriage. They have an easier time developing a deep and abiding trust and consideration for each other. Their willingness to wait, to endure the strains of sexual continence out of love and respect for one another, is a great testimony to their strength of character. They have shown that sexual attraction is not the most important part of the relationship, and they can enjoy each other's company even when the delights of sexual union are not available to them. Such faithfulness and chastity before marriage ensure greater faithfulness and chastity during marriage. Because of pregnancy or illness or separation, all couples must abstain at some time in marriage; the acquisition of the virtue of self-mastery before marriage facilitates such abstention. THE CONTRACEPTIVE MENTALITY
Chastity before marriage ? and, consequently, chastity during marriage ? has been undermined by the widespread availability of contraception. Indeed, contraception seems to be one of the chief facilitators of much of the sexual misconduct of our time. There were fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer abortions, and a lesser incidence of sexually transmitted diseases before contraception became widely available. Contraception has made people feel secure that they can engage in sexual union apart from the obligations of marriage and child rearing. Yet contraceptives do not remove the responsibilities that come with the child-making possibilities of sexual intercourse, since contraceptives do not always achieve their purpose. We must help our young people to understand that they are not ready for sexual intercourse until they are ready to be parents, for sexual intercourse always brings with it the possibility of being a parent.
Getting young people to associate sex with child bearing is not easy, but it is necessary; in fact, it is important for adults to encourage young people to try to think like parents. It is good to get them thinking about what they would like to do with their children; to get them thinking about what they want to be able to provide for their children. Parents must convey to their children that they are not a burden to them, that they consider their children to be great gifts from God. Our society tends to look upon children as a burden; they are expensive, noisy, troublesome; they stand in the way of careers and adventuresome travel. This view, of course, has not stopped people from having babies, but one senses that many children are just another possession of their parents, or just another experience that adults wish to have. Many couples seem to want a few ?designer children? as adornments to their lives not as reasons for their lives.
God, it seems, has a preference for children; after all, one of His first commands was to ?be fruitful and multiply.? Throughout the Old Testament, having many children is listed among the signs of prosperity that indicate God's favor. Psalm 127 states ?Behold, sons are a gift from the Lord; the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one's youth. Happy the man whose quiver is filled with them.? Psalm 128 is one of my favorites; it states:
Happy the man who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways! You shall eat of your hand's labor; blessed are you, and it shall be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the recesses of your house; Your sons, like olive shoots around your table. Behold, in this way shall be blessed the man who fears the Lord.
God has arranged matters such that parents and children need each other. The experience of child rearing, like the experience of marriage, both requires and fosters many virtues. Having children generally does adults a lot of good; most find they become more selfless, patient, kind, loving, and tender when they have children. Learning to live with children has many of the same advantages of living with a spouse: it forces one to accommodate oneself to others, to acknowledge that one has constant tendencies to be selfish. Staying awake at night with children, dealing with their daily joys and sorrows, and learning to be a good example for them contributes greatly to the maturity of adults.
Recently, a relative of mine mentioned that he wanted to have a large family, but he didn't know how it would be possible to manage financially. He had noticed that I had a large number of friends who started their childbearing early and had lots of children. Few of the women are employed outside their homes. He wanted to know how they did it. I think I know the answer: they trust in God. They regularly live on the edge of things ? for the first few years, they experience occasional anxiety that another child will be an undue strain on the budget, or that they will not be able to afford a car or house large enough for the growing brood, or that they may not be able to meet food and medical costs. But after a few years, they find that their needs are fulfilled. To be sure, they learn to budget and scrimp and save, they are not ashamed to take hand-me-downs, and they often learn to live a life that is a little tacky around the edges. But they lack none of their true needs and often enjoy luxuries of which they never would have dreamed. So they come to trust God and live without a lot of obvious security. Trust in God replaces the standard American understanding of perfect security: accumulating enough money and material goods to serve as a buffer against the world. With trusting and light hearts, they proceed to enjoy their growing families and to soak up the love that flows in big families. Those with large families seem to have a special generosity and hospitality about them. Guests are always welcome and interruptions seem not to be an annoyance; members of large families seem quite ready to drop everything to help someone else. Slowly but steadily, they become better Christians.
Discussions of the Christian preference for large families always seem to broach a topic which is sensitive and controversial, namely, contraception. Although the belief that contraception is not in accord with God's will has, since Humanae Vitae, been identified almost exclusively with the Catholic Church, the fact is that all Protestant denominations were opposed to contraception up until 1930. Early in this century, the Anglican Church twice condemned contraception, before passing a resolution in 1930 that its use was morally permissible for married couples. Thus, acceptance of contraception is a relatively new phenomenon. Catholics have, perhaps, preserved the teaching against contraception more faithfully, but it is not a teaching exclusive to them.
In much the same way, Protestants have more faithfully preached the necessity of tithing, a doctrine not exclusive to Protestants. Many Catholics are now rediscovering the practice of tithing at the prompting of their Protestant brethren. They have found great spiritual growth through this practice and now regularly urge their fellow Catholics to embrace this time-honored way of expressing gratitude to God and of trusting in Him. Indeed, I think the doctrine on tithing has some similarities with the teaching that in one's childbearing, one must be generous with God. Some refuse to tithe since they believe it is foolish to give away money that they think they need for their own well-being. Yet those who are committed to tithing know that, on occasion, one must give to God what one believes one needs oneself. They give to God and His causes because they know He wants them to, and they trust Him to provide. Being generous in childbearing is not very different. Many a married couple will testify that they thought having another child would be an undue hardship, only to find that having another child was a source of wonderful blessings and splendid joy to them.
Oddly enough, NFP, or natural family planning, is one of the most effective means, if not the most effective means, of planning one's family. NFP, of course, is not the outmoded rhythm method, which was based simply on the calendar. Rather, NFP is a highly scientific way of determining when a woman is fertile, based on observing various bodily signs. The statistics of its reliability rival the most effective forms of the Pill. Moreover, NFP is without the health risks and dubious moral status of contraceptives. The IUD is an abortifacient: that is, it works by causing an early-term abortion. Ovulation still occurs, and, therefore, conception may occur; the IUD then prohibits the fertilized egg, the tiny new human being, from implanting in the wall of the uterus. Most currently popular forms of the Pill work the same way. Furthermore, the Pill and the IUD have proven to be dangerous to women in many ways ? and no one yet knows what the long term effects may be. So those who are opposed to abortion and those interested in protecting the well-being of women would certainly not want to use or promote these forms of contraception. The other forms, known as barrier methods, have aesthetic drawbacks or are low on reliability.
NFP no longer means ?not for Protestants.? Many non-Catholics are turning to NFP as a means of family planning precisely because they do not want to use abortifacients, and they fear the physical risks of contraception. They are finding that the use of NFP has positive results for their marital relationships, for their relationship with their children, and for their relationship with God.
Many find it odd that periodic abstinence should be beneficial to a marriage. Certainly, most who begin to use NFP, especially those who were not chaste before marriage and who have used contraception, find the abstinence required to be a source of strain and a cause of considerable irritability. Abstinence, like dieting or any form of self-restraint, has its hardships; but it also has its benefits. As spouses learn to communicate better with one another, as they learn to communicate their affection in nongenital ways, and as they learn to master their sexual desires, they find a new liberation in the ability to abstain from sexual intercourse. Many find that an element of romance reenters the relationship during the times of abstinence, and an element of excitement accompanies the reuniting. Spouses using NFP find that they come to understand and respect one another more.
Spouses using NFP become very good examples to their children, especially their teenagers who may be wrestling with new and powerful sexual feelings. One man told me that his practice of NFP assisted him in being a good witness for chastity among the young men at his place of work. They would tease him about being able, as a married man, to have sex on demand, but he responded that through the use of NFP, he was required to abstain. He argued that if, night after night, he was able to sleep beside the woman he loved and not have sexual intercourse with her, they could learn to refrain from sexual intercourse with their girlfriends. He believed that parents who practice NFP could much more persuasively urge their children to be chaste before marriage.
Another reason for the enthusiasm for NFP is that couples who use it experience a greater bonding than those who use contraception. There is a more complete giving of oneself to another in a non-contracepted act of sexual intercourse. This may be why divorce is nearly non-existent among couples who practice NFP
Couples who use NFP also claim that it brings them closer to God. They believe that God made the human body and that respecting the way the human body works is a way of respecting God. They believe that contraceptives are an obstacle not only to union with their spouses but also to union with God. They believe that God is the source of love and life and that He has privileged them with being the transmitters of life through an act of love. They feel that they are leaving God space to perform His act of the creation of a new soul, if He so chooses.
Christian teaching on contraception is indissolubly linked with the Christian understanding of the need for faithful marriages and for the reservation of sexual intimacy to marriage. We should never lose sight of the link between sexual activity and childbearing. If only those who were prepared to care for children engaged in sexual relations, the modern world would experience a radical change in its sexual behavior.
Christians need to explain why faithfulness and responsibility toward children are two of the defining characteristics of marriage. Men and women today are tired of unfaithfulness, tired of shallow and brief relationships. They crave something more meaningful, something on which they can rely. Young people are sick of divorce. There is virtually no one who does not know children who have suffered greatly from divorce. Certainly many of us, because of our own foolishness, weakness, or wickedness, or because of the foolishness, weakness, or wickedness of others, may not be able to form the marriages and families which we want and need. We must trust in the grace of God to provide for all those who turn to Him for aid. Christians, who have the wisdom of the centuries, should strive to live chaste lives and to form loving marriages and families, for such is vital to their eternal salvation and such may well be vital to the temporal well-being of the whole of society.
Six of the seven slashdot editors are sitting around the flat one day when Katz rushes in and says, "Guess what guys, I've won a trip to see the Pope!" Everyone gets all excited and chants, "We finally get to ask him, we finally get to ask him."
The next day, they are standing in front of the Pope, Katz out in front of the other six. All the other six start pushing Katz and saying, "Go ahead, Katz, ask him, ask him!"
The Pope looks at Katz and asks, "Do you have a question to ask me, young man?"
Katz looks up shyly and says, "Well, yes."
The Pope tells him to go ahead and ask. Katz asks, "Well, do....do they have nuns in Alaska?"
The Pope replies, "Well, yes, I'm sure we have nuns in Alaska."
The others all keep nudging Katz and chanting, "Ask him the rest, Jon, ask him the rest!"
The Pope asks Katz if there's more to his question, and Jon continues, "Well, uh, do they have, uh, black nuns in Alaska?"
To which the Pope replies, "Well, my son, I think there must be a few black nuns in Alaska, yes."
Still not satisfied, the others keep saying, "Ask him the last part, Katz, ask him the last part!"
The Pope asks Katz, "Is there still more to your question?"
To which Katz replies, "Well, uh, yeah.....are there, uh, are there any midget black nuns in Alaska?"
The startled Pope replies, "Well, no, my son, I really don't think there are any midget black nuns in Alaska."
At this, John Katz turns all kinds of colors, and the others start laughing, and yelling, "Katz screwed a penguin, Katz screwed a penguin!"
Slashdot Mirror
I get in the car, I ride in the car, I take a poop in the car, The car starts to smell, I dislike the smell, The poop solidifies, The motion of the car turns the hardened poop into a dildo, The excrement dildo goes in and out of my anal cavity, I enjoy the car ride, Does this make me Gay?
Fuck the kikes, I bet Taco is a kike!
Troll Power!
Troll Power!
Troll Power!
Amen, I guess there is always Usenet....
1. Troll Slashdot.
2. Make extensive use of my natalie portman love-sim.
How about a dildo for Godzilla?
Stop waiting so fucking long between story postings.
Oh Yeah - First reply to the FP.
I really would perfer more stories about the gaysex opensause linux movement. I've read all about the dirty tacos, and RMS'es queerness.. but I hunger for more.
You sir are a real pee-pee face.
IUrinateOnThisPost!
I bet you're a dirty linux shit stabbin hippie!
Go take a bath you filthy communist, you're the real terrorists of the 21st century!
IShitOnThistPost!
Why would microsoft want to turn this great operating systems into something more like unix? Having it all bundled togather is what makes thier OS so great! just imagine if you had to configure everything yourself... all those options... It'd be a modular nightmare! I wonder why Linus doesn't bundle a webbrowser with the Linux Kernel? It'd make linux great like XP!
TunaTaco plans on dropping his pants so Jkatz can play suck the sausage!
Keep Dreaming Perverts
Talk show giant, Oprah Winfry was stopped by mall secutiry earlier today after reports that she was seen in the womens restroom giving oral sex Linus Tarballs. Oprah was quoted as saying "It was just oral sex, its not real sex right?" and "If the president can get some in the whitehouse, what wrong with me doing it in the mall". Linus could not be reached for comment.
I dedicate this FP to baby jesus, in return I ask that you send TunaTaco crotch rot. Amen
The Jew-a-Nater its a Jew killing machine, it slices, it dices, it juliennes, it can even deep fry! This fabulous piece of technology is available to you now for this introductory low price of three payments of $19.95! Imagine you're very own holocause machine for those cost of a cheap mexican hooker! ACT NOW!
CALL 1-800-KILL-JEW
I bow to your first posting skills.
FP, this one is for all the logged in Trolls!
Would you like to pet me pecker? Huh? I promise it won't bite...
This FP is claimed in the name of Logged-In Trolls!
Death to AC terrorist scum!
Death to Niggers!
Death to Jews!
Death to Wetbacks!
Death to Slashdot Editors!
Some years ago I ran across a length of smooth, large-diameter rubber hose in a laboratory. It was 5/8" (16 mm) in diameter, with a ¼" (6 mm) inside diameter, with a wall thickness of 3/16" (4.5 mm). Being a complete enema nut, I immediately thought of some interesting uses for such a fine piece of tubing, and "borrowed" it.
I made a gigantic colon tube with it by rounding off one end of the tube. This was not such an easy task, but with scissors, fresh razor blades and such, I got it fairly well smoothed off.
I attached the other end of the hose to the bathtub faucet, and set the faucet for a slow flow of warm water. I lubricated the hose with vaseline, and laying on my back in the tub, I started to insert the hose into my rectum. To my surprise, it slid in easily, and further than I had ever gotten a tube in before. After letting the hose fill me for a while, I evacuated my bowels on the toilet.
When I felt empty, I got back into the tub, and repeated the process. This time I decided to try to slide the hose as far up into my colon as I possibly could. I relaxed on my back, and eased the hose back in. I let the water fill me for a moment, and then I started to twist and push the hose inward.
When the end of the tube reached the top of the sigmoid, I felt some resistance, and just gently pushed and pulled back on the tube while twisting it constantly. After a moment it slipped in farther. I could really feel the tube moving around inside me, and it was great. I kept gently pushing, and the tube moved farther until the tip was at the bend between the sigmoid and the descending colon, far down on the left side. I had a bit of difficulty getting past this point, but I pressed in with my fingers at that point on my abdomen, and worked my fingertips around in a circular motion, and the tube eventually moved up into my descending colon. Ahhh. I could feel even more sensation now.
I kept pushing gently, and worked the tube all the way up to the top of the descending fairly quickly, and then wiggled it through the splenic flexure (behind the stomach). Now the tube was passing across the transverse colon, and I was starting to get filled up. The sensation was incredibly stimulating, and I could feel the tube's progress across my belly with my fingertips. The tube made a firm lump whenever I felt the appropriate part of my colon. It was getting hard to make the tube progress farther, and when the tip reached the hepatic flexure, I pushed on the part extending from my anus until the loops inside me hurt.
I realized that I wasn't going to get it any farther up me than this, so I let the water fill me until I couldn't take any more. I then pulled the end of the tube from the faucet and let the water start to drain out. I had a marvelous orgasm at this point as the water gently ran out from the tube. When I could feel the end of the tube sucking at the interior of my bowels, I started to pull it out, slowly. I finished my evacuation on the toilet.
I worried that this might not be a safe procedure to perform, because it was at least uncomfortable, and at times fairly painful. I now know that when people are examined with a fiber optic colonoscope they are sedated, but that instrument hadn't been invented when I did this.
This same tube is now the hose on my high volume (1 ¾ Gallon) (6 Liter) enema setup. No, I have never taken (or even tried to take) the whole can. I really only did this whole procedure once, so you could say it was a once in a lifetime thing, but it was quite an experience. If I'd left the tube in, I could have gotten a high colonic irrigation, but I really hadn't even heard of colon irrigation before. I got somewhat in excess of 4 feet (about 130 cm) of tubing inside me, and because of the thickness of the tube and my ability to feel it through the abdomen I know it wasn't curled up inside me.
This tube was of a type made for vacuum use, it is very soft and flexible, but its wall thickness makes it resistant to kinking and folding up inside. I have several other large diameter colon tubes, but their stiffness makes it too hard to pass them around the many bends of the colon. The metric conversions are for those readers abroad who don't want to think in the old "English" units.
Jon
Safeway Cart Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
Like a sandal mark on the Savior's feet
Just keep rolling on it's a ghetto dawn
Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
Going, going, gone and the picture cries
It's a ghetto dawn
Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
Going, going, gone and the picture cries
Baby looks so bad with her TV eyes
Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
Past the Handy mart to the Savior's feet
Going, going, gone and the picture cries
Baby looks so sad
Baby looks so bad
It's a ghetto dawn
Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street
Like a sandal mark on the Savior's feet
Just keep rolling on to a ghetto dawn
Different cultures come up with different ways of describing or categorizing sexual phenomena. When those descriptions or categories are imported by other cultures, interesting tensions arise between indigenous sexual cultures and the newly imported discourses. The term ?homosexual,? for instance, traces its origins as ?Homosexualität? to the activist Karl Maria Kertbeny?s political tract of 1869. This document was written in German against the backdrop of the impending unification of Germany, with the specific purpose of preventing the spread of Prussia?s stringent laws against sodomy to states like Bavaria that did not criminalize consensual sexual activity between members of the same sex. Thus ?homosexuality? and ?heterosexuality,? terms which went on to structure the world?s understanding of sexuality, clearly emerge from mid-nineteenth-century central Europe. In 1968, almost a century after the coinage of the term ?Homosexualität,? the German Democratic Republic began moving in the direction that Kertbeny had desired, decriminalizing consensual sexual acts between members of the same sex. A year later, the Federal Republic of Germany also decriminalized sex between adult men, although the age of consent remained higher for male-male activities than it was for heterosexual acts. (This was finally changed in 1994.) Since this liberalization, the vocabulary of sexuality has undergone considerable change, much of which was fomented in the United States. How has the Federal Republic of Germany, once an exporter of sexual vocabulary, taken to importing conceptualizations of sexuality? Some of the American vocabulary has been deeply foreign to German language and culture, but the word ?queer? will transfer quite well, grafting itself on to German roots.
A plethora of American concepts and words inundates the German sexual realm nowadays, with affects on sexuality that cannot be taken for granted. Among these concepts are: ?gay community,? [1] ?Stonewall,? ?Christopher Street Day,? ?Coming-Out,? ?the closet,? ?outing,? and ?queer.? These terms must have an effect on German conceptualization of sexuality, just as the terms ?homosexual? and ?heterosexual? have influenced the way the rest of the world thinks about sexuality. A concrete example of this cross-pollination can be seen, for example, in the work of Jim Baker, who with Ilona Bubeck has co-founded the ?Querverlag,? which has just published a directory of German gay and lesbian organizations called the Regenbogen Seiten. The vocabulary of ?quer? and the notion of ?Regenbogenseiten? both suggest American interference from the word ?queer? and the ideology of the rainbow flag. The index to this directory shows over a hundred organizations sticking with the indubitably German ?schwul,? plus 19 using the originally German if now international ?homosexuell? (which represents a considerable drop from earlier years), 46 using the word ?gay,? and another 22 using some form of ?queer? or ?quer.? Thus, while German words remain in the majority, there is nonetheless a sense that German inadequately describes contemporary sexuality, which motivates a strong interest in Anglo-American vocabulary.
In academic circles a host of words are considered untranslatable. The collection of essays entitled Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, edited by Sabine Hark, who has written some of the earliest German publications on queer theory, has a glossary explaining such terms as ?butch/femme,? ?closet,? and ?queer,? all of which appear in English and are not translated in any of the essays. The Humboldt-Universität in Berlin has a quasi-official program in ?Queer-Studien? [2] within the Department of Cultural Studies. [3]
Some institutions resist these foreign loanwords, of course. The department of Neuere Deutsche Literatur at the venerable Albert-Ludwigs-Universität of Freiburg refused to let a visiting American professor use the words ?queer theory? in the title of his course because it wanted to keep the catalog German. The department settled on ?Homosexualität und Literatur,? recognizing the Teutonic nature of homosexuality. In their insistence on the term ?homosexuality,? the Freiburger Germanisten had for many years allies in the German government, which also exclusively used the word ?homosexuell.? The Bundestag only permitted vocabulary of ?schwul? and ?lesbisch? in the 1990s (Schenk 190).
Outside of the academic arena, many aspects of the American gay rights movement have also been imported by Germany. Some of these ?imports? should actually be considered German projections on to America. Since 1979, there have been gay pride parades in Germany called Christopher Street Day Parades, or CSD-Paraden, although relatively few parades in the English-speaking world are so named (Theis 290). Volker Woltersdorff observes that the emphasis on Christopher Street Day is producing a mythic history of the gay movement: ?die 69er Revolte in der New Yorker Christopher Street [wird] als ein Gründungsmythos der Schwulenbewegung inszeniert und alljährlich reinszeniert? (82). Sabine Hark comments upon the importance of the founding myth of Christopher Street for the German movement, bemoaning the fact that the acceptance of ?Stonewall? as the zero hour of gay and lesbian history devalidates any prior queer history indigenous to Germany (?Magisches Zeichen? 109). When Berlin?s Akademie der Künste hosted an exhaustively comprehensive exhibit on gay male history, it chose Christopher Isherwood?s title, ?Good bye to Berlin,? suggesting that even this remarkable demonstration of the significance of gay Germany was looking to the Anglo-American world for confirmation and legitimation. This is all the more ironic, given that it is unlikely that in the United States or England such a major exhibition would have been funded with public monies and with so little public outcry.
Moving from the level of politics and activism to the more personal and psychological level, one of the most fundamental stages of gay identity in the United States is the closet, which is an entirely untranslatable notion in German. One can?t speak of the ?Schrank,? in which sexuality is hidden. Indeed, most European houses don?t have built-in closets. One certainly can?t make verb forms comparable to ?closeted? either. English-language critical texts based on ?closet? as a noun and a verb, with frequent usage of the terms ?closeted? or ?closeting,? disintegrate in the process of translation, which must render these terms with the less metahorical language of ?verstecken,? ?verhüllen,? ?verbergen,? and ?verklemmt.? Certainly, sex between members of the same gender has often been hidden in German history, but the absence of the metaphor of the closet has lent this German hiding of sexuality an undeniably different character.
As Butler points out in the translated essay (originally written in English) that anchors Grenzen lesbischer Identitäten, the metaphor of ?out? is completely dependent upon the metaphor of the closet (19). Thus it is not surprising that German imported the vocabulary of ?coming out,? as well as that of the ?closet.? Not only German has perceived this necessity, if Helga Pankratz is to be believed: ?So häufig und so selbstverständlich wird der Ausdruck gebraucht weltweit! ? Aber in jeder Sprache der Welt außer dem Englischen ist und bleibt ?Coming Out?, wenn wir es recht bedenken: ein Fremdwort!? (177). It is an American export article, she continues, one that has achieved the respectability in Germany of being recognized by the Duden. The ?Coming-out Erzählung? has become a term that is standard enough to receive academic attention by scholars such as Volker Woltersdorff. Even in the German Democratic Republic, it gained acceptance, becoming the title of a major film there on the subject of homosexuality: Heiner Carow?s ?Coming Out? was the last major film produced in the GDR. The film might have made a bigger splash, had the Berlin Wall not come down the very day that it was released.
Despite its success, the term ?Coming Out? is clumsy in German. While German is no stranger to separable verbs like ?coming out,? it has not proven possible to use ?aus kommen? to mean ?to come out? in the sexual sense. Thus Germans have stayed with the foreign term ?Coming Out? as a noun, producing sentences like ?Ich hatte mein Coming-Out 1989.? Fortunately, another Anglo-Americanism appeared on the scene to rescue the Germans out of this awkward linguistic situation: ?Outing.? Outing, which provoked enormous controversy in the Federal Republic, partially because of Rosa von Praunheim?s efforts to expose hypocritical public figures, flowed smoothly into German. It lent itself to an incorporation into German as the verb ?outen,? which could be used gracefully in a number of verb forms, including the reflexive ?sich outen.? Here was a way out of the problems with the ungraceful ?Coming Out.? One could ?out oneself?: ?sich outen? became the more fluent way to talk about openly announcing one?s sexuality. Indeed, in Germany ?outen? soon came to be used to reveal any unusual, surprising, remarkable, hitherto unsuspected aspect of a person?s personality, just as the verb ?to out? is used in the United States. Pankratz lists examples of people in the public eye ?outing themselves? as rollerbladers, sufferers of migraine headaches, lovers of classical music, or natives of the Vorarlberg (189). ?Sich outen? works more easily in German than ?Coming Out,? but it alters the understanding of sexuality, which is no longer the organic growth or development of the subject that one associates with ?coming out,? and instead has a somewhat violent relationship between subject and object that is associated with the controversial practice of ?outing.? [4] Indeed, one of the reasons that Pankratz ultimately likes ?sich outen? is its somewhat harder edge that comes from its connections to ?outing.?
Pankratz points out that the reflexive verb, ?sich outen,? has become confusing for many native speakers of German, including journalists, who now use the word ?Outing,? without the ?sich,? for ?Coming-Out.?As an example, she cites the following sentence from an article about the openly lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge, ?Immer mehr schwule und lesbische Stars riskieren es, durch ihr Outing straightes Publikum zu brüskieren? (192). In addition to the striking use of ?straight? as an adjective, the sentence is remarkable because ?Outing? is no longer something done to a star, but rather something that a star does to herself or to her public.
A number of German cultural critics have made reference to a subtle distinction between ?coming out,? understood as a personal recognition of one?s sexuality, and ?going public,? understood as the public announcement of that sexuality. They point out the associations of the phrase with the stock market as an example of the kind of double meaning that gets lost in the wholesale importation of sexual terminology. While the distinction between ?coming out? and ?going public? makes sense to me, as does the analysis of the latter term?s economic meaning, I have to say that I personally have rarely, if ever, heard or read the phrase ?going public? in this sense.
Once one comes out, what does one become? Immediately after the 1969 liberalization of laws concerning sexuality, German terminology prevailed and one became ?homosexuell? or ?schwul.? The currency of the term ?homosexuell? is perhaps surprising, because it is today frequently rejected as overly clinical, medical, and pathological. But just as it was originally coined and embraced by activists, only to be appropriated by medicine, so too was it also embraced by the post-69 generation of gay activists. A great many student groups included the word ?homosexuell? in their names, including the ?Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe Bochum? (which appeared as a student group in 1970 and became a city-wide organization in 1971), the ?Homosexuelle Studentengruppe Münster,? the ?Homosexuelle Aktion Westerberlin? (1971). There was also a ?Homosexuelle AktionsGruppe? or HAG in Munich, which had to change its acronym, when a coffee firm of the same name protested. It became HAM for ?Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe München.? Various organizations came to represent the cause of gay rights on a federal level, including the ?Deutsche Aktionsgruppe Homosexualität,? founded in 1972, and the ?Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft? (1974).
Clearly, then, a large majority of the organizations that formed in the early 70s chose vocabulary having to do with ?homosexuality.? Rosa von Praunheim?s film, ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt,? which appeared at the Berliner Filmfestspiele in 1971, and appeared for the first time on television in 1972, used the vocabulary of ?Homosexuelle,? albeit with a great deal of alienating distance. Homosexuality also showed up in the chants of the street marchers, as in the following example: ?Brüder und Schwestern, ob warm oder nicht, Kapitalismus bekämpfen ist unsere Pflicht!? (Kraushaar 139). [5] As this jingle indicates, the groups using the discourse of homosexuality were on the cutting edge of left-wing radicalism, which is somewhat surprising given the current rejection of the term ?homosexuelle? by many activists.
Indeed, the ?Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft? started in Berlin as a replacement for the ?Internationale Homophile Weltorganisation? (IHWO), according to Wolfgang Theis (285). The word ?homosexuell? radically emphasized the sexual, while the term ?homophil,? which had been more popular in the 50s and 60s in the Federal Republic, had diluted the sexual with a vaguer kind of love: ?Die Verwendung des Begriffs ?homosexuell? in den Namen der neuen studentischen Gruppen war als programmatische Abkehr von der Praxis der bürgerlichen Verbände gemeint, die sich schamhaft ?homophil? nannten, weil die Betonung des Sexuellen nach ihrem Verständnis nur Vorurteile bestätigen konnte? (Theis 279-80). Thus, the word ?homosexuell? should receive more credit than it does. The Foucauldian attack on the role of medicine in the construction of sexuality probably led to a widespread discrediting of this term, which had become a medical, as well as a political, concept. But in the critique of the medical establishment, the activists who did promote this terminology have been forgotten.
In the early 70s, ?schwul? seems to have been used alongside ?homosexuell.? Praunheim?s film entitled ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt? states programatically, ?Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein? (Theis 280). Generally understood as a pejorative, gay groups tended to avoid using it in their official names, although there were some exceptions, for instance Frankfurt?s ?Rote Zelle Schwul? or ?Rotzschwul.? Within the community, however, the pejorative connotations of the word had less weight, meaning that it was used in exclusively gay contexts, rather than in contacts between the gay and straight world. The gay newspaper Schwuchtel appeared in 1975; in the following year, an early gay drama appeared, entitled ?Brühwarm ? ein schwuler Jahrmarkt? (Theis 286-7). Both the newspaper and the drama were intended for a primarily gay audience, which allowed for the use of the word ?schwul.? The tension between the title of Praunheim?s film and its first words underscores this point as well. The title, ?Nicht der Homosexuelle ?,? would serve to mediate between the film?s content, which was by, for, and about the gay male movement, and the general public. The vocabulary of ?Schwule wollen nicht schwul sein? then leads the public directly into an internal gay debate.
?Nicht der Homosexuelle ?? is of course more complicated than that, for the repeated use of the word ?schwul? not only introduces the audience to the film?s insider critique, but also forces the general public to confront its own negative associations with the word ?schwul.? As Volker Bruns notes, ?das Wort ?schwul? war ein so ungeheuerliches Schimpfwort, dass es selbst die ?Normalen? nur in Sekunden der Erregung über die Lippen brachten? (86). In 1975, the East German gay activist Michael Unger expressed the community?s desire to change the connotations of the word: ?Wir verwenden es seit langem als selbstverständliche Bezeichnung auch für uns selbst, weil wir glauben, dass es ursprünglich einmal eine saubere Bedeutung hatte und erst später zum Schimpfwort wurde? (Kraushaar 147-48). [6] In response to Unger, the Zentralinstitut für Sprachwissenschaft an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR confirmed that the word had a negative connotation and presumed that there was little chance that word ?schwul? would experience a positive reevaluation (Kraushaar 147). The magazine Schwuchtel pressed the point, by using an even more pejorative term to discuss practices, such as S/M and pederasty, that were taboo even within the gay community. The use of the word ?schwul? mirrored the appropriation of the term ?nigger? in the United States by rap groups like Niggers With Attitude and anticipated the reversal of meaning that took place when the word ?queer? came into use by academicians and activists in the 1990s.
By the end of the 70s, an increasingly self-confident gay movement in the Federal Republic began to replace ?homosexuell? with the term ?schwul.? In the 1977 the ?Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin? dissolved and the space it had occupied became the ?SchwulenZentrum? or ?Schwuz? (Theis 288). In the same year, the ?Nationale Arbeitsgruppe Repression gegen Schwule? was established in Hamburg (Theis 290). In 1978, 682 men revealed themselves as gay in the newsmagazine Stern (#41) in the article, ?Wir sind schwul? (Rimmele 138). In 1979 the student government of the Freie Universität in Berlin set up a ?Schwulenreferat? (Theis 287). By 1990, there was a ?Schwulenverband in Deutschland,? which attempted to unite gay political organizations. Shortly thereafter, the Bundestag began to accept the use of the word ?schwul? instead of ?homosexuell.? The term ?schwul? had been objectionable enough in 1988 that a Green Party proposal for a ?Schwulenreferat? had not even reached the floor, because of the word. The Greens refused to accept the word ?Homosexuelle,? killing the proposal for the time being (Kraushaar 204-5). The subtitle of the publically subsidized Berlin exhibit ?Good bye to Berlin,? ?100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,? was further evidence of the official acceptance of this term.
The demise of the word ?homosexuell? was related, on the academic front, to the general Foucauldian critique of medicine and its role in pathologizing same-sex desire. It also was a corollary of an increasing gap between gay men and lesbians. The word ?schwul? generally refers only to gay men, although this was not always the case. None other than one of the founders of the German gay and lesbian movement, Magnus Hirschfeld, is said to have referred to ?schwule Frauen und Männer.? And the Berlin group, Homosexuelle Aktion West, had in 1972 a ?schwule Frauengruppe? (Winder and Telge 11). But these are rare exceptions; the vast majority of German speakers regard ?schwul? as referring only to men. These exceptions, however, prove that the implicit masculinity of the word ?schwul? is a result of decision-making by German speakers.
This separatism has had some noteworthy consequences. In particular, gay male events have often been much more sexually explicit in Germany than they would be in the States where the sexes have worked together more closely. The catalog for the mammoth exhibit, ?Good Bye to Berlin, 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung,? which was in fact quite astonishing in its concentration on men to the exclusion of women, was filled with graphic depictions of male sexual organs and acts that would likely not have been present in an exhibit with a strong women?s presence. Indeed, when gay male organizations in Germany have attempted to solicit lesbian participation and contributions, the issues of pornography and the power of images have always quickly arisen as stumbling blocks. [7]
The loss of the inclusive term ?homosexuell? went hand in hand with the development of separate identities around the terms ?schwul? and ?lesbisch.? The lesbian movement intensified its involvement with feminism and the women?s movement, as the gay men went their own way. Any cooperation between the camps was seen as a coalition between precisely defined categories: ?schwul-lesbisch.? The Siegesäule, the gay and lesbian magazine coming out of Berlin, with the largest circulation of any gay/lesbian publication in Germany, has recently taken to styling itself as ?schwul-lesbisch,? in order to be more inclusive, although it had traditionally been ?schwul? and thus primarily male in its orientation, and to some extent remains so. Similarly the ?Schwules Pressearchiv? has called itself since August 1995 the ?Lesbisch-Schwules Pressearchiv? (Rimmele 132).
For those with a residual fear of the offensiveness of ?schwul? or with a hankering for the inclusiveness ?homosexuell,? there was always the prosaic ?gleichgeschlechtlich,? which began to show up, especially in bureacratic contexts, in the late 80s and early 90s. In 1989, Berlin established a ?Referat für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen.? In 1992, Brandenburg followed suit, with a ?Büro für gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen? (Kokula 173-4). The term ?Lebensweise? is additionally interesting, for it suggests a deemphasis on the sexual aspect that the early proponents of ?homosexuell? had wanted to underscore, as well as a downplaying of the shock tactics that the initial champions of ?schwul? had utilized. In these cases, the speakers wanted the most neutral, least offensive official term possible, with the least taint of colloquialism. In addition, they seem to have wanted to avoid the use of loan words, like the Anglo-Saxon ?gay? or even the Greco-Roman ?homosexual.? The German language was up to providing terminology that adequately covered the needs of its speakers!
How about the Anglo-Saxon word ?gay?? In the Regenbogen Seiten, there are actually more organizations using ?gay? in their names than organizations using some version of ?queer.? This is probably a passing phenomenon, because ?gay? does not lend itself phonetically to appropriation in the German language the way that ?queer? does. In the Romance languages constructions like ?gai pied,? the title of the venerable, although sadly no longer surviving, Parisian gay magazine, can flow smoothly into the native language, but ?gay? is a difficult word to use in German. The ?ay? is not common at the end of a word, and the declension of an adjective ending with a ?y? is uncomfortable.
In English, the word ?gay? has a highly problematic positioning on two axes: the gay-lesbian axis and the gay-straight axis. When it is on the gay-lesbian axis it refers to men, but when it?s on the gay-straight axis, it at least attempts to represent homosexually-inclined men and women together. This uncomfortable double meaning has its reflections in Germany. As seen in the example of ?schwul,? Germans have been more inclined to force vocabulary dealing with sexuality into a specific gender. The effort at inclusiveness in the American word ?gay? has been something of a standing reproach to German groups. Dorothee Winden and Dieter Telge argue that the flood of documentaries out of the United States showing the cooperation between the sexes provided a model for many Germans. The concept of ?gay? as including men and women together eventually shamed German gay groups into opening up to women, as the move by the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft to include women in 1994 indicates.
The other half of the gay-straight dichotomy has fared even less well, if that is possible, in the Germanic realm than the gay-lesbian dichotomy. I?ve already cited the one reference to a ?straightes Publikum? (Pankratz 192). In general, however, there is not a good colloquial expresssion for heterosexuals that would correspond, say, to ?schwul.? Generally, it seems that gays and lesbians refer to ?Heteros? or ?Heteras? in a slangy kind of way, when they wouldn?t necessarily use the term ?Homos.? And while the words ?schwul? and ?lesbisch? have now achieved widespread currency, the terms ?hetero? and ?hetera? have not. This suggests that linguistically, German culture still finds the practitioners of same-sex desire as worthy of special note, while those who are in heterosexual relationships can pass by with relatively little scrutiny.
Some might object to the relentless dichotomization between men and women, gays and straights, going on here, and one of the objectives of the word ?queer? has been to escape such binary thinking. Although in many ways it had a militant edge to it, it blurred some of the boundaries that had existed, both along the gay/lesbian and the gay/straight axes. ?Queer? emerged as a word with a signficant new ideology in the States in the 1990s and arrived in Germany shortly thereafter. In 1989, Burroughs?s book with the English title Queer was translated into German as Homo, indicating that the term was relatively unknown in Germany. In 1992, the group Queer Nation made an appearance at the Berlin lesbian festival called ?Lesbenwoche,? identifying itself as follows: ?Queer Nation ? versteht sich als undogmatisches Aktionsbündnis von Lesben und Schwulen aller Rassen und Klassen, die sich nicht mehr mit der Assimilationspolitik der etablierten Homobewegung identifizieren können und buntere und radikalere Aktionsformen entwickeln wollen? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Sabine Hark?s essay ?Queer Interventionen? appeared in 1993 (in Feministische Studien 2), marking the introduction of the term to academic prose; it was reprinted in 1994 in a volume entitled Querfeldein: Beiträge zur Lesbenforschung, which is one of the earliest usages of the highly significant wordplay between ?quer? and ?queer? that I have located.
Since 1994, usage of the term ?queer? has blossomed in the Federal Republic. The symposium entitled ?Queering Demokratie? hosted by the Green Party?s Heinrich Böll Foundation from October 9-11 of 1998 in Berlin sparked an intensive confrontation with the concept of ?queer? in newspapers and weeklies like Freitag and Die Taz. The private television channel RTL reported in 1998 that at the Augsburg Christopher Street Day parade participants were chanting ?queer und hier,? which the news program helpfully translated as ?schwul und hier.? In the ?Querverlag??s Regenbogen Seiten one comes across such organizations as the ?Queer Strikers Frankfurt? (a gay bowling club), the ?QueerFlöten? (a gay and lesbian choir in Freiburg), and ?Queer Klagenfurt,? which seems to be an umbrella organization with various functions in Austria. Berlin has the aforementioned ?Queer-Studien,? Linz has a ?Queery-Box.? There?s ?Queerfilm? in Bremen, a ?Queerfilmreihe? in Freiburg, a ?queer-Filmfest? in Frankfurt, a ?Queer Film Festival? in Vienna, and a cultural festival called ?Queer im Ruhr.? You can tune your radio to a ?Queer Kanal? in Bremen, and a ?Queerfunk? in both Dresden and Kiel.
Many of the organizations that have used the term ?queer? in their names do not have an explicit agenda. When I spoke with founders of Berlin?s ?Queer-Studien? and Freiburg?s ?QueerFlöten,? they were unable to give a concrete explanation for their choice of a name. But nonetheless the term has significance. Part of the appeal of ?queer? seems to be the way it fills the gender gap left by the demise of ?homosexuell? and the rise of ?schwul,? thus authorizing gay and lesbian cooperation. The manifesto in Queer Nation?s 1992 statement at the Lesbenwoche specifically referred to an alliance between ?Lesben und Schwulen? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). According to Winden and Telge, ?Queer Nation? was the first integrated male-and-female political action group interested in issues of same-sex desire that had appeared in Germany in a long time (12-13). Freiburg?s ?QueerFlöten? was until recently the only integrated lesbian and gay choir in all of Germany, and there are plenty of single-sex choirs there. The ?Queer-Partys? of SO 36, a nightclub in Berlin, brought together men and women; the presence of parties at which both gay men and lesbians could come together was itself political. So threatening to the established gay and lesbian identities were these ?Queer-Partys? that they were accused of turning SO 36 it into a meeting place for hip bis, or ?hippe Bi?s? as they say in German.
While the founders of the Humboldt?s ?Queer-Studien? did not have an expressed ideology backing their name, other academics have thought about their terminology more strenuously. In their introduction to the series ?Querdenken,? which was published in 1996, Sabine Hark and Stefan Etgeten define the name of the series as an ?Experiment lesbisch-schwuler Zusammenarbeit, in der Konflikte und Differenzen nicht verdeckt, sondert fortwährend artikuliert und untersucht werden sollen? (?Zu dieser Reihe? 8). In their volume, Freundschaft unter Vorbehalt. Chancen und Grenzen lesbisch-schwuler Bündnisse, published in 1997, Hark and Etgeten situate the possible coalition between gay men and lesbian women specifically under the aegis of ?queer,? which they hope will be an end to separatism (?Zwischen Geschlechterschranke?).
Perhaps because ?queer? counters the exclusionary force of ?schwul,? it has proven particularly attractive to women theorists. It was in the context of ?Lesbenwoche? and ?Lesbenforschung? that the term was first introduced to the Federal Republic. In general, many more women theorists have published on this matter in Germany than men. In a private conversation, Alice Kuzniar suggested that this may have to do with the impact of Judith Butler on feminist thinking in Germany. Butler is clearly related to the emergence of ?queer?in Germany. Gender studies and queer theory are of course ways of thinking often associated with the writings of Judith Butler, who has been such a success in Germany that one speaks of the ?Butler-Boom.? Her lecture tour in Germany in the summer of 1997 was a triumphal march through a happily vanquished land. It was like the Beatles ? 14-year-old girls fainting when they caught sight of her and so forth. Both of her public appearances in Berlin were completely packed. The public lecture at the Einstein Forum at the Staatsbibliothek filled two rooms to overflowing, whereupon loudspeakers were set up outside on the lawn for the fascinated public. All the serious newspapers carried reviews of her lectures. Butler?s tremendous success there fueled an enthusiastic sense of rebirth among feminist thinkers, which was lost on the gay male scholars who did not pick up on her as quickly.
In addition, ?queer? is seen among German intellectuals and activists, in a way similar to its reception in the United States, as opening up the possibility of talking about non-essentialist identities (Engel 77). It offers possibilities to those who are exhausted with the boundaries of their identities (Etgarton and Hark). In her essay, ?Queer Interventionen,? Hark describes queer theory as ?eine politische und theoretisch-konzeptionelle Idee für eine kategoriale Rekonzeptualisierung von Geschlecht und Sexualität, mit der problematisch gewordene Identitätspolitik überwunden werden sollen? (211). Woltersdorff refers to ?queer? as ?neue Identität beziehungsweise Anti-Identität,? including transsexuals and transgendered people (90-91). Discussing the establishment of the ?queer-Partys? at SO 36, Winden and Telge see ?queer? as appealing to young party-goers because of its inclusivity and its rejection of constricting labels: ?Mit dem Wort queer als Sammelbegriff für alles, was sich jenseits der heterosexuellen Norm bewegt, bieten die queer-Partys eine Identifikationsmöglichkeit, die weniger ideologisch-theoretisch bestimmt war, sondern dem eigenen Lebensstil entsprach? (21). Corinna Genschel see it as potentially including ?alle ?Perverse? als Dissidenten herrschender Politik? (79). Roswitha Hofmann finds that ?queer? is an ?expression of a new way of thinking and living? and ?Queer-Theory? the next step ?in extracting oneself from the categories of identity that many feel are too narrow? (115). Jutta Hartman also sees ?Queer Theory? as a ?confrontation with the constructedness and thus relativity of identities? (270).
Notable throughout the writings on queer is the ambivalence about the possibility that it could water down, depoliticize, and further commercialize sexuality. Engel is concerend that ?queer? often merely serves as a fashionable guarantor of a ?progressive attitude? (77). Genschel worries about the potential commercialization of the word ?queer.? This mistrust, born of the long-standing leftwing tendencies of the gay and lesbian movements in the Federal Republic, is perhaps connected to the American origins of the term ?queer.? The word has clearly been recognized as an American import since Queer Nation?s announcement at the 1992 Lesbenwoche that it was ?eine Bewegung, die seit Frühjahr 1990 in fast allen US-amerikanischen und einigen kanadischen Städten Fus gefasst hat? (LW Programm 52; cited in Laps 245). Ralph Poole wonders if the ?queer-Szene? is ?ein amerikanisches Phänomen? (99). Many of the speakers at the Green Party?s Queering Democracy symposium were Americans and spoke in English. [8] An article from Die Taz asserts, ?unter dem aus den USA importierten Begriff ?Queer? soll nun die heterosexuelle Norm exorziert werden? (Krause and Meisel). The importation of ?queer? from America perhaps the effect of validating West German conceptualizations of sexuality over East German ones, as the Westerners had more contact with the American scene that produced this vocabulary (see Thinius).
While ?queer? has provided a good deal of food for thought for feminist scholars, some are concerned that it will dilute the specificity of women?s issues,once again subordinating women to the economically and socially more powerful men who will almost inevitably take over an organization that consists of both men and women. Lena Laps in any case sees the move from ?schwul? and particularly ?lesbisch? to ?queer? as parallel to the move from ?Frauenforschung? to ?Geschlechterdifferenz,? in that in both cases, there is a loss of particularlity in favor of generality. Women in particular disappear behind the universals that she sees in the terms ?queer? and ?gender.?
In addition to concerns about commercilization and sexism, many of these theorists and commentators are concerned that the use of ?queer? in German disconnects the word from its initial Anglo-American double-meaning of ?homosexual? and ?strange? or ?weird.? By eliding these two meanings, American queer theorists can pivot same-sex desire into a paradoxically paradigmatic marginality. With the fortuitous existence of the verb ?to queer,? one had the possibility for numerous linguistically pre-approved approaches to texts. Much of this is lost in the German appropriation of the word. Some have therefore argued for the use of the word ?pervers? as a translation of ?queer,? in order to emphasize the initial negativity of the term. But I think that, among queers, there have always been those who took pleasure in being queer, and I?m not sure that the same applies to ?pervers.? That is to say, I?m not sure that the issue is exclusively one of reversing the meaning of a word, but rather one of determining whose evaluation of the term is considered binding. In any case, Germans are familiar with the concept of reappropriating negative terminology and giving it a positive twist ? indeed that is what happened to the word ?schwul.? ?Schwul? would have been a model for ?queer? if the only concern were to make positive an initially negative concept.
Despite these concerns, ?queer? seems to be taking root in Germany. Unlike ?gay,? which has remained an entirely foreign word in German, the word ?queer? can fit into another linguistic matrix in German. ?Queer? is perhaps related to ?quer.? Hence the ?Querverlag,? with its series ?querdenken,? and the lecture series in Vienna with the title ?que[e]rdenken? (with the second ?e? in brackets). By mobilizing this linguistic family, queer theorists are able to discuss, as Poole does, ?verquerte Sexualität? (108). Antke Engel entitles her article ?Verqueeres Begehren.? The Humboldt-Universität hosted a conference on sexology entitled ?Verqueere Wissenschaft? in 1997.
This usage has exciting possibilities, not only for the development of German conceptualization of sexuality. The importation of ?queer? will facilitate German thinking on sexuality, but it will do so, not merely by forcing an American concept onto the German playing field, but also by allowing the German linguistic structures to contribute to this conceptualization. As ?queer? anchors itself in German ?quer,? the concepts of queer theory that arise in Germany will emphasize more the sense of crossing boundaries, a kind of reading or cutting against the grain that is inherent in ?quer? rather than the strangeness or making strange that is inherent in ?queer.? This is an exciting form of cultural cross-pollination, for it allows for cultures to affect each other while also recognizing cultural difference.
You sir are a moron! IShitOnThisPost!
To observe that we live in a society that is suffering greatly from sexual confusion or, if you will, sexual misconduct, is not a novel insight. There is little need to provide a full set of statistics to demonstrate the consequences of the sexual revolution, for who is not familiar with the epidemic in teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, divorces, and AIDS? Our society has undergone a rapid transformation in terms of sexual behavior, and few would argue that it is for the better. Today, one out of two marriages end in divorce. Six out of ten teenagers are sexually active. The millions of abortions over the last decade and the phenomenal spread of AIDS indicate that our society has serious problems with sexuality. In the last generation, the incidence of sexual activity outside of marriage ? with all of its attendant problems ? has double and tripled ? or worse. We have no particular reason to believe that we have seen the peak of the growth in sexually related problems.
Statistics do not really capture the pervasive ills attendant upon sexual immorality. Premature and promiscuous sexuality prevent many from establishing good marriages and family life. Few deny that a healthy sexuality and a strong family life are among the most necessary elements for human happiness and well-being. While many single parents do a worthy and valiant job of raising their children, it remains sadly true that children from broken homes grow up to be adults with a greater propensity for crime, a greater tendency to engage in alcohol and drug abuse, and a greater susceptibility to psychological disorders.
These realities touch every realm of life. They affect people's ability to relate to friends and family; they affect people's ability to do well at their studies and their jobs; and they affect the whole of society, which needs stable and secure individuals to lead us out of our troubles. Those who do not experience love from family and friends tend to seek any semblance of love they can find ? and thus become involved in illicit sexual relationships ? and the cycle starts again. The multiple varieties of abuse of sexuality and the grievous consequences of such abuse are not only damaging the current generation, they are threatening to ruin the chances of future generations to live happy and fulfilled lives.
Twenty years ago, when the sexual revolution was in full swing, many argued that it would liberate men and women from the repressive view of sexuality pervasive in society; people would be free to make love without the strictures of marriage. Many pointed to Christianity as the source of sexual repression. But the Christian view of sex is looking a lot more like wisdom. Christians no longer need to offer apologies for their insistence upon sexual morality, for their insistence upon reserving sex for marriage. Some in high public places are now beginning to counsel abstinence before marriage and to extol faithful monogamous marriages. They have begun to see these as practices of great practical wisdom.
In a certain sense, Christian morality ? especially sexual morality ? is quite similar to natural or commonsense morality. One does not need to be a Christian to understand why certain sexual practices are wrong. Christians differ from unbelievers not so much in the understanding of what is moral as in their commitment to trying to live morally. A Christian understands that when he is doing wrong, he is not only violating good sense, he is violating God's law; he is failing to be the loving and responsible person, God made him to be. Thus, Christian apologetics about sex may not seem much different from commonsense apologetics about sex, but the Christian tradition has most faithfully preserved the common wisdom about sex. Clearly it is easy to ?forget? or become confused about the common wisdom about sex; Christians are blessed with the powerful aid of revelation and tradition to counsel them regarding sexual morality.
Yet, despite the fact that most Christian denominations have remained steadfast in their allegiance to traditional Christian wisdom in sexual issues, few Christians have not been deeply affected by the saturation of modem culture with a view of sexuality radically opposed to the Christian view. Ten minutes of watching MTV or of a soap opera; ten minutes of listening to any rock, pop, or country music station; one visit to the corner-store magazine rack; or two minutes at the beach should serve to convince anyone that our society has very little respect for Christian moral norms regarding sexual relations. Christians, too, have begun to lose sight of the understanding of sexuality advanced by their tradition. Thus, now is the time for Christians to offer apologetics for their understanding of the role of sexual relations within human relationships. ?Apologetics? is a term used to refer to the energetic attempt to explain one's position to others. But Christians, I think, need to be as concerned with providing apologetics to themselves and to fellow Christians about sex as with bringing their message to others. Both internal and external evangelization are necessary, for few, if any, can escape being adversely affected by the distortions of our times. Christians need to strengthen themselves as well as their compatriots.
Christians have to learn about their own tradition before they can become effective witnesses to those in the larger society who desperately need to encounter individuals who are in control of their sexuality and happy because of it. There are a multitude of Christian truths which can assist us in escaping the ravages of a disordered sexuality. The time seems to be ripe for making the most persuasive case we can for Christian morality. Certainly, many are ceasing promiscuous behavior because of their fear of contracting AIDS. But that is not the only reason for the growing disenchantment with the sexual revolution. Many find that their sexual encounters leave them lonely and looking for something more. There are increasing reports of sexual indifference, with many claiming to have lost an interest in sex, even with those whom they love. There seems to be an increasing weariness with premarital sex and abortion, and a growing interest in reducing both. Many are beginning to see that the call for more and better sex education or more and better access to contraceptives is not the solution. Rather, we need a better understanding of the relations between sex, love, marriage, and children. And it is this understanding that Christianity can provide.
THREE TRUTHS OF SEXUALITY
Let us focus on three fundamental truths about sexuality stressed throughout the Christian tradition: that marriage is the only proper arena for sexual activity; that marriages must be faithful for the love of spouses to thrive; and that children are a great gift to parents.
Why should sexual union only take place within a marriage? It can hardly be denied that sexual relations create powerful bonds between individuals, even between those who do not desire such bonds. Those who have sexual intercourse are engaging in an action which bespeaks a deep commitment to another. Pope John Paul II uses an interesting phrase in his teachings on sex: ?language of the body.? He claims that, like words, bodily actions have meanings, and that unless we intend those meanings with our actions, we should not perform them any more than we should speak words we do not mean. In both cases, lies are ?spoken.? Sexual union means `I find you attractive?; ?I care for you?; ?I will try to work for your happiness?; ?I wish to have a deep bond with you.? Some who engage in sexual intercourse do not mean these things with their actions; they wish simply to use another for their own sexual pleasure. They have lied with their bodies in the same way as someone lies who says ?I love you? to another simply for the purposes of obtaining some desired favor.
But some who engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage claim that they do mean all that sexual union implies and that, therefore, they are not lying with their bodies. They are, though, making false promises, for those engaging in sexual intercourse outside of marriage cannot fulfill the promises which their bodily actions make. They have not prepared themselves to fulfill the promise of working for another's happiness, or of achieving a deep bond with another. Such achievements take a lifetime to complete; they cannot be accomplished in brief encounters.
The Christian insistence on reserving sexual union for marriage, then, has as one of its chief justifications a concern that sexual relations are meant to express the desire for a deep and committed relationship with another. That relationship can only be built within marriage, because marriage is built upon a vow of faithfulness to one's beloved. The Bible, especially the Old Testament, regularly condemns the sin of adultery. Faithful marriage is used as the paradigm for the kind of relationship which God's people should have with God. Those who are not faithful to God are likened to adulterers. Proverbs and the whole of wisdom literature harshly condemn the adulterous spouse. Most spouses are devastated at the mere thought that their beloved desires another, let alone that their spouse may have actually been unfaithful. Faithfulness is essential to create the relationship of trust which is the bedrock of all the other goods that flow from marriage.
We take vows in marriage because we realize that we are all too ready to give up when the going gets tough; we realize that our loves wax and wane. Indeed, society at large seems to have a fondness for marriage. After all, in an age where there is little moral pressure against living together outside of marriage, most still choose to take marriage vows. Couples realize that marriage vows help them express and effect their commitment to each other. But as the divorce rate indicates, modern society ultimately does not take these vows very seriously ? or at least modern couples do not prepare for marriage in such a way that they are prepared to keep their vows.
PREPARING FOR MARRIAGE
A talk with a pastor, an ?Engaged Encounter? weekend, or a ?Pre Cana? conference does not prepare one for marriage. Real marriage preparation must occur for many years before we enter marriage. Young people enjoy the exercise of drawing up a list of characteristics that they would like their future spouse to have. But their time might be better spent drawing up a list of characteristics which they themselves should have in order to be a worthy spouse. They need to reflect upon their expectations of marriage; many may find that their expectations are largely selfish. Most of us dream much more about how happy our spouses are going to make us than about how much we are going to do for our spouses.
Since marriage requires loving, faithful, kind, patient, forgiving, humble, courageous, wise, unselfish individuals ? and the list could go on ? young people should strive to gain these characteristics. Marriages cannot survive unless the spouses acquire these characteristics. Certainly it would be foolish to require that individuals have all of these characteristics before they marry, for none of us do. Indeed, the experience of marriage itself undoubtedly helps foster these characteristics. But if we do not work at acquiring them before marriage, we will be acquiring their opposites ? selfishness, haughtiness, impatience: characteristics that are death to a marriage.
Although faithfulness is one of the cornerstones of marriage, it may seem odd to speak of the need to be faithful to one's spouse before marriage. But in a sense, one should love one's spouse before one even meets him or her. This means reserving the giving of oneself sexually until one is married ? for in a sense, one's sexuality belongs to one's future spouse as much as it does to oneself. A few generations ago, it was not uncommon for young people to speak of ?saving themselves? for marriage. While scoffed at today, this phrase is nonetheless indicative of a proper understanding of love, sexuality, and marriage. One should prepare oneself for marriage, and one should save oneself for marriage.
How does one do so? Obviously, by remaining chaste ? and that is not an easy prescription. For instance, it means being attentive to what provokes sexual thoughts and desires and avoiding these provocations. It means, most likely, dissociating oneself from many of the forms of entertainment popular today. Those who view sexuality as a gift which one offers one's spouse at the time of marriage cannot fall victim to the constant sexual stimulation that Americans face daily. We need to be careful what music we listen to, what movies and TV shows we watch, and what clothes we wear. We need to try to save sexual thoughts and sexual stimulation for the time when they will not be frustrations, but welcome preludes to loving union with our spouses. Sexual temptations are, of course, impossible to avoid, especially since our society provides temptations around the clock. Christ's teaching that lust in one's heart is wrong tells us that we must guard our inner purity as well as govern our actions.
Few people, Christian or not, think it sensible for those who are engaged to wait until their wedding night to enjoy sexual union. Many think waiting until marriage would make sexual intimacy too awkward. Most think that, since one is soon going to take vows, it makes little difference whether sexual intimacy begins before or after a ceremony which simply ratifies a commitment already felt.
What difference does waiting make? Well, certainly a vow is not a vow until it is spoken; unspoken, unratified commitments are all too easy to break. There are practical reasons as well. Father James Burtchaell at Notre Dame has written a marvelous book, For Better or Worse, explaining why it is best for couples to wait until marriage before they begin their sexual intimacy. He speaks eloquently of the period before marriage as an irreplaceable opportunity for lovers to get to know one another. Engaging in sexual intercourse creates a false sense of closeness; it creates a bond that may obscure elements in a relationship which need work. Courtship is a time for getting to know each other, for sketching out dreams and plans; for expressing worries and hesitations. The delight of sexual union can easily distract couples from preparation for marriage.
There is also a deeper reason, and that is the question of honesty and trust. Few of those who have sexual relations before marriage, especially Christians, can be fully open about their actions. This means that people engaging in such relationships inevitably are deceiving someone ? their parents, their teachers, and perhaps their friends as well. The ability to practice such deception does not bode well for one's integrity. A woman observes that her lover is good at deception and will file away this information. She will have reason to wonder in the future if her spouse is being honest with her ? after all, he had no trouble deceiving others whom he or she respected. Many Christians feel terrible guilt at violating their deeply held moral principles; after they are married, they may continue to have guilty feelings about sex. In a sense, they have programmed themselves to think of sexual intercourse as a furtive and naughty activity.
On the other hand, couples who do wait until marriage have a special kind of euphoria about their sexual union. Because they waited, they see sexual pleasure as a privileged good of marriage. They have an easier time developing a deep and abiding trust and consideration for each other. Their willingness to wait, to endure the strains of sexual continence out of love and respect for one another, is a great testimony to their strength of character. They have shown that sexual attraction is not the most important part of the relationship, and they can enjoy each other's company even when the delights of sexual union are not available to them. Such faithfulness and chastity before marriage ensure greater faithfulness and chastity during marriage. Because of pregnancy or illness or separation, all couples must abstain at some time in marriage; the acquisition of the virtue of self-mastery before marriage facilitates such abstention.
THE CONTRACEPTIVE MENTALITY
Chastity before marriage ? and, consequently, chastity during marriage ? has been undermined by the widespread availability of contraception. Indeed, contraception seems to be one of the chief facilitators of much of the sexual misconduct of our time. There were fewer teenage pregnancies, fewer abortions, and a lesser incidence of sexually transmitted diseases before contraception became widely available. Contraception has made people feel secure that they can engage in sexual union apart from the obligations of marriage and child rearing. Yet contraceptives do not remove the responsibilities that come with the child-making possibilities of sexual intercourse, since contraceptives do not always achieve their purpose. We must help our young people to understand that they are not ready for sexual intercourse until they are ready to be parents, for sexual intercourse always brings with it the possibility of being a parent.
Getting young people to associate sex with child bearing is not easy, but it is necessary; in fact, it is important for adults to encourage young people to try to think like parents. It is good to get them thinking about what they would like to do with their children; to get them thinking about what they want to be able to provide for their children. Parents must convey to their children that they are not a burden to them, that they consider their children to be great gifts from God. Our society tends to look upon children as a burden; they are expensive, noisy, troublesome; they stand in the way of careers and adventuresome travel. This view, of course, has not stopped people from having babies, but one senses that many children are just another possession of their parents, or just another experience that adults wish to have. Many couples seem to want a few ?designer children? as adornments to their lives not as reasons for their lives.
God, it seems, has a preference for children; after all, one of His first commands was to ?be fruitful and multiply.? Throughout the Old Testament, having many children is listed among the signs of prosperity that indicate God's favor. Psalm 127 states ?Behold, sons are a gift from the Lord; the fruit of the womb is a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one's youth. Happy the man whose quiver is filled with them.? Psalm 128 is one of my favorites; it states:
Happy the man who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways! You shall eat of your hand's labor; blessed are you, and it shall be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the recesses of your house; Your sons, like olive shoots around your table. Behold, in this way shall be blessed the man who fears the Lord.
God has arranged matters such that parents and children need each other. The experience of child rearing, like the experience of marriage, both requires and fosters many virtues. Having children generally does adults a lot of good; most find they become more selfless, patient, kind, loving, and tender when they have children. Learning to live with children has many of the same advantages of living with a spouse: it forces one to accommodate oneself to others, to acknowledge that one has constant tendencies to be selfish. Staying awake at night with children, dealing with their daily joys and sorrows, and learning to be a good example for them contributes greatly to the maturity of adults.
Recently, a relative of mine mentioned that he wanted to have a large family, but he didn't know how it would be possible to manage financially. He had noticed that I had a large number of friends who started their childbearing early and had lots of children. Few of the women are employed outside their homes. He wanted to know how they did it. I think I know the answer: they trust in God. They regularly live on the edge of things ? for the first few years, they experience occasional anxiety that another child will be an undue strain on the budget, or that they will not be able to afford a car or house large enough for the growing brood, or that they may not be able to meet food and medical costs. But after a few years, they find that their needs are fulfilled. To be sure, they learn to budget and scrimp and save, they are not ashamed to take hand-me-downs, and they often learn to live a life that is a little tacky around the edges. But they lack none of their true needs and often enjoy luxuries of which they never would have dreamed. So they come to trust God and live without a lot of obvious security. Trust in God replaces the standard American understanding of perfect security: accumulating enough money and material goods to serve as a buffer against the world. With trusting and light hearts, they proceed to enjoy their growing families and to soak up the love that flows in big families. Those with large families seem to have a special generosity and hospitality about them. Guests are always welcome and interruptions seem not to be an annoyance; members of large families seem quite ready to drop everything to help someone else. Slowly but steadily, they become better Christians.
Discussions of the Christian preference for large families always seem to broach a topic which is sensitive and controversial, namely, contraception. Although the belief that contraception is not in accord with God's will has, since Humanae Vitae, been identified almost exclusively with the Catholic Church, the fact is that all Protestant denominations were opposed to contraception up until 1930. Early in this century, the Anglican Church twice condemned contraception, before passing a resolution in 1930 that its use was morally permissible for married couples. Thus, acceptance of contraception is a relatively new phenomenon. Catholics have, perhaps, preserved the teaching against contraception more faithfully, but it is not a teaching exclusive to them.
In much the same way, Protestants have more faithfully preached the necessity of tithing, a doctrine not exclusive to Protestants. Many Catholics are now rediscovering the practice of tithing at the prompting of their Protestant brethren. They have found great spiritual growth through this practice and now regularly urge their fellow Catholics to embrace this time-honored way of expressing gratitude to God and of trusting in Him. Indeed, I think the doctrine on tithing has some similarities with the teaching that in one's childbearing, one must be generous with God. Some refuse to tithe since they believe it is foolish to give away money that they think they need for their own well-being. Yet those who are committed to tithing know that, on occasion, one must give to God what one believes one needs oneself. They give to God and His causes because they know He wants them to, and they trust Him to provide. Being generous in childbearing is not very different. Many a married couple will testify that they thought having another child would be an undue hardship, only to find that having another child was a source of wonderful blessings and splendid joy to them.
Oddly enough, NFP, or natural family planning, is one of the most effective means, if not the most effective means, of planning one's family. NFP, of course, is not the outmoded rhythm method, which was based simply on the calendar. Rather, NFP is a highly scientific way of determining when a woman is fertile, based on observing various bodily signs. The statistics of its reliability rival the most effective forms of the Pill. Moreover, NFP is without the health risks and dubious moral status of contraceptives. The IUD is an abortifacient: that is, it works by causing an early-term abortion. Ovulation still occurs, and, therefore, conception may occur; the IUD then prohibits the fertilized egg, the tiny new human being, from implanting in the wall of the uterus. Most currently popular forms of the Pill work the same way. Furthermore, the Pill and the IUD have proven to be dangerous to women in many ways ? and no one yet knows what the long term effects may be. So those who are opposed to abortion and those interested in protecting the well-being of women would certainly not want to use or promote these forms of contraception. The other forms, known as barrier methods, have aesthetic drawbacks or are low on reliability.
NFP no longer means ?not for Protestants.? Many non-Catholics are turning to NFP as a means of family planning precisely because they do not want to use abortifacients, and they fear the physical risks of contraception. They are finding that the use of NFP has positive results for their marital relationships, for their relationship with their children, and for their relationship with God.
Many find it odd that periodic abstinence should be beneficial to a marriage. Certainly, most who begin to use NFP, especially those who were not chaste before marriage and who have used contraception, find the abstinence required to be a source of strain and a cause of considerable irritability. Abstinence, like dieting or any form of self-restraint, has its hardships; but it also has its benefits. As spouses learn to communicate better with one another, as they learn to communicate their affection in nongenital ways, and as they learn to master their sexual desires, they find a new liberation in the ability to abstain from sexual intercourse. Many find that an element of romance reenters the relationship during the times of abstinence, and an element of excitement accompanies the reuniting. Spouses using NFP find that they come to understand and respect one another more.
Spouses using NFP become very good examples to their children, especially their teenagers who may be wrestling with new and powerful sexual feelings. One man told me that his practice of NFP assisted him in being a good witness for chastity among the young men at his place of work. They would tease him about being able, as a married man, to have sex on demand, but he responded that through the use of NFP, he was required to abstain. He argued that if, night after night, he was able to sleep beside the woman he loved and not have sexual intercourse with her, they could learn to refrain from sexual intercourse with their girlfriends. He believed that parents who practice NFP could much more persuasively urge their children to be chaste before marriage.
Another reason for the enthusiasm for NFP is that couples who use it experience a greater bonding than those who use contraception. There is a more complete giving of oneself to another in a non-contracepted act of sexual intercourse. This may be why divorce is nearly non-existent among couples who practice NFP
Couples who use NFP also claim that it brings them closer to God. They believe that God made the human body and that respecting the way the human body works is a way of respecting God. They believe that contraceptives are an obstacle not only to union with their spouses but also to union with God. They believe that God is the source of love and life and that He has privileged them with being the transmitters of life through an act of love. They feel that they are leaving God space to perform His act of the creation of a new soul, if He so chooses.
Christian teaching on contraception is indissolubly linked with the Christian understanding of the need for faithful marriages and for the reservation of sexual intimacy to marriage. We should never lose sight of the link between sexual activity and childbearing. If only those who were prepared to care for children engaged in sexual relations, the modern world would experience a radical change in its sexual behavior.
Christians need to explain why faithfulness and responsibility toward children are two of the defining characteristics of marriage. Men and women today are tired of unfaithfulness, tired of shallow and brief relationships. They crave something more meaningful, something on which they can rely. Young people are sick of divorce. There is virtually no one who does not know children who have suffered greatly from divorce. Certainly many of us, because of our own foolishness, weakness, or wickedness, or because of the foolishness, weakness, or wickedness of others, may not be able to form the marriages and families which we want and need. We must trust in the grace of God to provide for all those who turn to Him for aid. Christians, who have the wisdom of the centuries, should strive to live chaste lives and to form loving marriages and families, for such is vital to their eternal salvation and such may well be vital to the temporal well-being of the whole of society.
Six of the seven slashdot editors are sitting around the flat one day when Katz rushes in and says, "Guess what guys, I've won a trip to see the Pope!" Everyone gets all excited and chants, "We finally get to ask him, we finally get to ask him."
The next day, they are standing in front of the Pope, Katz out in front of the other six. All the other six start pushing Katz and
saying, "Go ahead, Katz, ask him, ask him!"
The Pope looks at Katz and asks, "Do you have a question to ask me, young man?"
Katz looks up shyly and says, "Well, yes."
The Pope tells him to go ahead and ask. Katz asks, "Well, do....do they have nuns in Alaska?"
The Pope replies, "Well, yes, I'm sure we have nuns in Alaska."
The others all keep nudging Katz and chanting, "Ask him the rest, Jon, ask him the rest!"
The Pope asks Katz if there's more to his question, and Jon continues, "Well, uh, do they have, uh, black nuns in Alaska?"
To which the Pope replies, "Well, my son, I think there must be a few black nuns in Alaska, yes."
Still not satisfied, the others keep saying, "Ask him the last part, Katz, ask him the last part!"
The Pope asks Katz, "Is there still more to your question?"
To which Katz replies, "Well, uh, yeah.....are there, uh, are there any midget black nuns in Alaska?"
The startled Pope replies, "Well, no, my son, I really don't think there are any midget black nuns in Alaska."
At this, John Katz turns all kinds of colors, and the others start laughing, and yelling, "Katz screwed a penguin, Katz screwed a penguin!"