"Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury"

All of us have something in us like the desire to exploit starving boys, the desire to abuse little girls. The impulse to beat up prostitutes, menace wimps, degrade lovers, just because it feels so mysteriously satisfying to treat people like dirt. Do we get anywhere by not talking about it? No. But embracing it uncritically doesn't get us very far, either. Bowing down and adoring the worm within the soul, as Benderson does, is not the solution -- is it?

I became a gay activist to get away from the violative monster within me. But it hasn't worked. Not gay liberation, not feminism, not even sexual liberation can ease that howling monster, or deliver it from me. I can neither soften it nor expel it. I can't quench that fire.

Sex and love are bound up with it, I don't know why; but they make us want to surrender ourselves to the monster, or sacrifice people to it.
Sex Panic! wants us to stop fighting the process. If morality didn't exist, why would unethical conduct trouble us? And if sex is always good, then it can never hurt us.

Moralists fear all of sex, because touching the Other makes them remember the monster. Sex Panic! fears none of sex, so it can pretend that no monster exists.

--Donna Minkowitz

Donna Minkowitz, "Ferocious Romance" again

Upon disguising herself as a 16-year-old boy to infiltrate a Promise-Keepers meeting:

Garlington, who once participated in an authoritarian church movement known as "shepherding", tells us that "God created us with an innate desire to see someone or something as superior to ourselves. We were created to worship. It's like God programmed you to be a worshipper." It turns out that his anti-macho preachings stem from a belief that men must humiliate themselves before God. His problem with macho men is that they just don't deprecate themselves enough.

At Garlington's behest, we all sing "I desire to worship and obey." Then Garlington bids us to abase ourselves "in whatever way the spirit moves you." Some kneel, some bow, some prostrate themselves fully -- a favorite posture of the Promise Keepers, it turns out. It's very weird. Men around me start to moan about their sins. "I am not worthy..." "Oh, God! Have mercy, Father God! Have mercy..." "Oh, God, I give you my love. I give you my life. Helpless. Yes, Lord, closer to you." Why do they think love and morality have anything to do with humiliation? Why do they believe God wants them to lick His boots?

Later I remember a weird fact about men: They like to abase themselves. I keep mistakenly telling people this conference took place in St. Augustine, Florida, not St. Petersburg. It's just that all this weeping, mortification, red faces, sorrowful confessions, and paroxysms of hangdog shame are a part of a historical male trajectory that dates back at least as far as that most male and ecstatically hangdog of saints, Augustine. Honey, I have sinned! As we usually conceive of it, repentance is male, not female. Women aren't supposed to sin to begin with, but men are expected to do things for which they'll have to say they're sorry later.

No wonder the Promise Keepers seem to enjoy addressing God as though he were their dominatrix. For one thing, it makes it okay to have been bad. For another, it is a great relief to bow at last before the Phallic Mother or some better man than you. Affirming your worthlessness before God and women is a release, if you're a man. It means you can stop worrying about who is on top. You can stop worrying about whether you're even half the man you are supposed to be. "Father, we yield ourselves to you," I'll hear a 25-year-old Promise Keeper pray on the Washington Mall two years later, "to receive your forgiveness and grace and to feel your righteousness." All the verbs sound so female, or at least what men imagine as female.

And another one!!

"Men, I hold this against you. You have forsaken your first-love passion for Jesus Christ." ...Garlington shouts that we need to have "a passion for his presence and a hunger for his word."... Without this original homoerotic passion, we have "sexual immorality," Garlington says. It's a fascinating formula. First-love passion for Jesus makes you free from any lower-grade passions like adultery and oral sex with men. But we haven't lusted in our hearts enough yet for the Son of Men. "Christian men are addicted to pornography. Christian men are addicted to sexual abuse. Say, 'It's my fault.'" The crowd says, rapidly, "It's my fault." ... "I'd like to ask you all to protrate yourselves now, if you're physically able."

All around me on the dirty grass men obey. They put their faces on the ground in a very cramped space ... "I'd like you to be silent like a dead man," Garlington bids us. Noiselessly, "I'd like you to first of all tell him of the love in your heart that is for him." ... In shame, men stick their butts up in the air, like Moslems praying to Mecca. Men are trying to weep without making any noise. "And now, I'd like you to privately and in your own hearts pray out a prayer to him of confession and brokenness, and how far you have gone from your own first love." The man next to me starts to moan, "oh, God!" and make crazy little desperate noises that may or may not be tongues. Others sob with their need to just reach Him, mucus dribbling from their noses.

Animal sounds, repentance, and love all around me. Men shake with prayers full of their own unspeakable vileness, and their tender longing to be changed. There's so much desperation mixed up with their desire to be good, it's hard to listen to. Sometimes "being good" is only about the desire to be let back in. If I obey, then he will love me. But they also sound like they're repenting some real wrongs. It is ugly, beautiful, weird. "What we have done," Garlington says. "Our abuses. Giving. Getting."

...This kind of love is not enough, I see. The "first-love passion" of it all is wonderful but it lacks something; the "brokenness" and abandon and surrender are gorgeous but not enough, not nearly enough for real loving. If the only way to meet the Other is to do exactly what they want, what good is love? Later in the rally we chant "NO MORE ABUSE! NO MORE ABANDONMENT," which is wonderful, and we watch moving videos of fathers apologizing for abusing their children. Why, then, are we asked to tongue the dirt to win the love of our Father in Heaven? Why should a vow to stop abusing others require abusing ourselves? Does someone have to get abused for love to on, to be shared?

These men seem to think so.

They really do want to be good; they are so fervent to be good that I sometimes want to kiss them. ... But their desire to be good is tied up with so many painful things that it often comes out incoherently. Their morality has little content, except abject need. And their love has little content but the same.