Читать книгу Man Jesus Loved - Theodore W. Jr. Jennings - Страница 12

A brief word about terminology is in order. I have tended to use “gay” as a generic term to include gay men, lesbians, and bisexual and transgendered persons. The term “queer,” which has been used in more recent discussion, is actually much better in the sense of inclusivity but it still has the tendency to block rather than facilitate understanding among readers, both “gay” and “straight,” of my own generation.

I tend to use “same-sex” rather than “homosexual,” and to use “crosssex” rather than “heterosexual,” in order to break with some of the intellectual baggage that attends the more familiar terms.

The manner of designating a relationship that may very well be mediated sexually but about which mediation we can, in the nature of things, have no direct knowledge can present a bit of a puzzle. Of course such assessment is true for virtually all relationships that we imagine may be sexual. My friends tend not to be guests on talk shows and thus do not generally say whether or how they have sex, for example, with their spouses or life partners. And since I’m not an avid watcher of such shows, I am as generally incurious about my friends’ sex lives as they are about mine. The point isn’t to bash talk shows but to say that in general we don’t know much about who has sex with whom or how, even in relationships that we presume to be, in some way, sexually mediated or expressed. In general I have identified as “erotic” relationships in which sexual mediation may be supposed to be a feature of the relationship. I am not presuming knowledge of whether or how the people involved “had sex,” but rather that the relationship is the sort in which we may suppose, in analogous circumstances, that some or another sexual practice would be involved. We suppose that sex is or would be a “natural” or likely extension (in private presumably) of what offers itself to be seen in public. In this sense I call the relationships between Jesus and the man he loved (and that between the centurion and his “lad”) “homoerotic.”

1. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality in the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1955). Although Bailey’s work exploded the alleged biblical basis for sodomy statutes, the U.S. Supreme Court appears not to have noticed (Bowers v. Hardwick). Then as now, the reading of the Bible has important consequences for civil society as a whole.

2. See the discussion of relevant texts in chapters 10 and 11 below.