Editor’s Note: This interview appeared within the print edition of America on May 8, 1993. 4 years previous, Mr. Sullivan—who’s openly gay and a practicing Catholic—had published the primary major article in the USA to advocate for the legalization of gay marriage (“Here Comes The Groom,” The Recent Republic, 8/28/1989), an argument he prolonged in two later books, Virtually Normal (1995) and Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (1997). Mr. Sullivan was the editor of The Recent Republic from 1991 to 1996, and is the creator or editor of six books. A outstanding public mental for over 30 years, he now publishes political commentary at The Weekly Dish.
Andrew Sullivan, 30 years old, is editor of The Recent Republic. English by birth, Mr. Sullivan studied modern history at Oxford University, where he was also president of the Union. He then won a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Michael Oakeshott, the British political philosopher. In a chat he gave on the Recent York Public Library earlier this 12 months on journalism and minorities, he expressed enthusiasm for the openness of American society—citing his editorship of The Recent Republic for instance of it. His writings have touched on themes, amongst others, having to do with Catholic thought and gay life. This interview took place in his office on the magazine, in Washington, D.C., March 19, 1993. The interviewer was Thomas H. Stahel. S.J., executive editor of America.
You’re each Catholic and gay and open about each, and it will be helpful to others within the church to know the way you bring those two parts of your life together, in view of official church teaching on homosexuality and in addition in view of your evident respect for the Catholic tradition.
Well, a part of what I’ve found frustrating is the notion that I’ve made some public announcement that I used to be these two things—which isn’t true. The actual fact of the matter was that each those things were a part of my life, as a human being, once I got this job. As a author, I had written about each areas of my life. As a journalist, my first material—and I’ve at all times found this—is trying to grasp oneself and one’s life through telling this stuff. That’s why I studied philosophy and theology and why I discovered myself drawn to writing about and wrestling with problems with sexuality. So it was what everybody else said, it was they that presented this matter as such.
It’s very hard to know where to start out in saying how you truly reconcile the 2 elements, and it’s something profoundly personal and personal. There have been two things I didn’t wish to do, nevertheless. One, I didn’t wish to lie about either. I didn’t feel that that was intellectually or spiritually worthy. And I didn’t intend to make a problem of this with the church either. It was foisted upon me. I used to be asked the questions. Because the editor of a public magazine, I used to be, to some extent, obliged to reply them.
Andrew Sullivan: “I don’t imagine that any Christian or any person attempting to live a lifetime of faith expects a life which isn’t filled with conflict.”
It was not as should you wished to issue a challenge, then?
No, in no way. And I even have not, in anything that I’ve written. I believe I’ve been extremely respectful of the authority of the church—I mean, authority because it is known within the church’s complex notion. That’s not what I desired to do. I’ve never challenged the church. I’ve at all times attempted to grasp its teachings on sexuality inside the context of the teachings of the church on broader notions of sexuality and usually.
Alternatively, after all, I do attempt to live a life that isn’t in complete internal conflict. But I don’t imagine that any Christian or any person attempting to live a lifetime of faith expects a life which isn’t filled with conflict. Considered one of the things I’ve tried to withstand is the temptation to resolve contradictions. There are some convictions which can’t be resolved or explained away that should be lived with. It might be, I believe, an insult each to the mental coherence of an ideal deal of the church’s teaching and to what I hope could be the moral integrity of my very own and plenty of other people’s lives, to say that contradiction can easily be avoided.
There was a moment once in a chat I gave on the University of Virginia, on the politics of sexuality. At the tip of the talk, a young kid, who should have been about 19, said, “I’m scuffling with this. I’m gay, and I’m within the church, and I don’t know what to do. Are you able to help me?” And I said, “No. I can’t assist you to. I don’t have the moral authority to assist anybody.” Undoubtedly, the actual fact of my existence, at some level, in the general public area, has provoked and prompted an unlimited variety of letters and an unlimited amount of interest from people in the exact same position—who want desperately to have a life that may be spiritually and morally whole. The church as presently constituted refuses to grapple with this desire.
I’m not being very coherent. If I were writing an article, I’d be more coherent.
Your argument, in any case, has to do with a contradiction that nevertheless can’t be avoided.
There may be a basic contradiction. I completely concede that, at one level. At one other level—and I confronted this, actually, with my first boyfriend, who was also Roman Catholic. Once we had a fight sooner or later, he said: “Do you actually imagine that what we’re doing is unsuitable? Because should you do, I can’t go on with this. And yet you don’t wish to challenge the church’s teaching on this, or leave the church.” And after all I used to be forced to say I don’t imagine, at some level, I actually don’t imagine that the love of 1 person for one more and the commitment of 1 person to a different, within the emotional construct which homosexuality dictates to us—I do know in my heart of hearts that can not be unsuitable. I do know that there are numerous things inside homosexual life that may be unsuitable—just as in heterosexual life they may be unsuitable. There are a lot of things in my sexual and emotional life that I don’t imagine are spiritually pure, in any way. It’s fraught with moral danger, but at its deepest level it struck me as completely inconceivable—from my very own moral experience, from an actual honest try to understand that have—that it was unsuitable.
I experienced coming out in precisely the way in which you’ll think. I didn’t really express any homosexual emotions or commitments or relationships until I used to be in my early 20’s, partly due to strict religious upbringing I had, and my commitment to my faith. It was not something I blew off casually. I struggled enormously with it. But as soon as I actually explored the potential for human contact inside my emotional and sexual makeup—in other words, as soon as I allowed myself to like someone—all of the constructs the church had taught me concerning the inherent disorder seemed just so self-evidently unsuitable that I could now not find it that problematic. Because my very own judgment of right and wrong was overwhelming, because I felt, through the experience of loving someone or being allowed to like someone, an unlimited sense of the presence of God—for the primary time in my life.
Inside the love?
Yes.
And inside the sexual expression of that love?
The mixture of the 2. the inextricable mixture of the 2. I mean. I felt like I used to be made whole.
Having made this discovery that you just were whole for the primary time, how then did you keep your respect and reverence for the church understood as a contrary tradition?
It’s very curious, I believe, because I’ve never felt anger toward the church. I do know I’m weird on this regard.
Many gay people do feel anger.
Enormous anger, enormous. They’ve left. The depth of the pain that’s been caused people—I mean, real pain—not only by the laity, but by the clergy too, is extraordinary. Truthfully and truly, there are few subjects on which the church is now, by virtue of its teaching, inflicting more pain on human beings than this subject—real psychic, spiritual pain. I’m undecided why I don’t feel anger. I even have at all times, I believe, assumed that I probably don’t understand enough to experience anger, that the church was never meant to be an ideal institution, that it was grappling and finding and struggling to seek out its way toward the reality of its own doctrine, the reality of its own mission.
Andrew Sullivan: “I’m drawn, within the natural way I believe human beings are drawn, to like and care for one more person. I agree with the church’s teachings about natural law in that regard.”
The official church teaching is at a loss to take care of homosexuality, for my part, because in line with this official moral teaching, homosexuality has no finality. Any comment?
It’s bizarre that something can occur naturally and don’t have any natural end. I believe it’s a singular doctrine, isn’t it? The church now concedes—even though it attempts to avoid conceding it within the last couple of letters—but it surely has essentially conceded, and does concede in the brand new Universal Catechism….
Have you ever seen it?
I’ve read it in French, yes.
What does it concede?
That homosexuality is, to this point as one can tell, an involuntary condition.
An “orientation”?
Yes, and that it’s involuntary. The church has conceded this: Some people appear to be constitutively homosexual. And the church has also conceded compassion. Yet the expression of this condition, which is involuntary and subsequently sinless—because whether it is involuntary, obviously no sin attaches—is at all times and in every single place sinful! Well, I could rack my brains for an analogy in another Catholic doctrine that may provide you with such a notion. Philosophically, it’s incoherent, fundamentally incoherent. Persons are born with all varieties of things. We’re born with original sin, but that’s in itself sinful—an involuntary condition, but it surely is sin.
The analogy is likely to be considered disability, but on the core of what disabled human beings may be—which suggests their spiritual and emotional life—the church not only affirms the equal dignity of disabled people in that regard but encourages us to see [that dignity] and to remove the bias of not believing a disabled person can lead a full and integrated human life despite the fact that they can’t walk or they experience another disability.
But the incapacity that we’re asked to imagine that [homosexuals] are about [sic] is key to our integrity as emotional beings, as I understand it. Now, I even have tried to grasp what this doctrine is about because my life is at stake in it. I think God thinks there may be a final end for me and others that is expounded to our essence as images of God and as people who find themselves called to like ourselves and others. I’m drawn, within the natural way I believe human beings are drawn, to like and care for one more person. I agree with the church’s teachings about natural law in that regard. I believe we’re called to commitment and to fidelity, and I see that every one around me within the gay world. I see, as one was taught that one would see something in natural law, self-evident activity leading toward this final end, which is commitment and love: the necessity and desire and hunger for that. That’s the sensus fidelium, and there is no such thing as a attempt inside the church right away even to bring that sense into the teaching or into the discussion of the teaching.
You see it even within the documents. The documents will say, on the one hand compassion, alternatively objective disorder. A document that may provide you with this phrase, “not unjust discrimination,” is contorted since the church is moving into two different directions directly with this doctrine. On the one hand, it’s recognizing the humanity of the person being; on the opposite, it isn’t letting that human being be fully human.
Andrew Sullivan: “There are a lot of sides to the Catholic temperament and sensibility, but one great strand is its ability to grasp the human experience and empathize with it.”
Would you agree that the acknowledgment of this issue inside Catholic family life will inevitably change the way in which the church expresses itself toward people who find themselves professedly homosexual?
I might, probably. My family is an interesting example. My mother is a really devout Catholic. My sister is a devout and practicing Catholic. Each are actually pillars of ethical and emotional support for me, and for gay people usually. That, I believe, is the authentically Catholic response. And the family is the important thing to broader change. I believe that’s how it would get resolved in society usually, because homosexuality—once you actually take a look at it in people whom you would like and love—is a really different issue from when it’s some abstract mode of being or some closeted, repressed mode of being, which is equally abstract. Once it is definitely human—well, there are numerous sides to the Catholic temperament and sensibility, but one great strand is its ability to grasp the human experience and empathize with it. That can overcome a lot, I believe.
In fact, there’s “‘Hate the sin, but love the sinner.” But as we’ve said, it’s now not that. It’s “Accept the condition, and reject the conditioned.” That’s what it’s.
Because the church’s present policy…
That’s the current policy. But that won’t hold, since it is intellectually incoherent. I even have searched in vain for a really coherent mental defense of the position that doesn’t merely come right down to “We’re sorry.”
Also, I believe that the competence and the change in gay society as a complete, in American society as a complete, will trickle in. I believe in a small way, someone like me has an effect on people: Well, here’s someone who looks like an actual human being, who’s responsible, who can do a job, who doesn’t appear to be depraved or dysfunctional or disordered in any greater than a usual sense. Do we actually think this person merits this particular censure, a lot that we couldn’t tolerate being in the identical march or organization or pew?
Should you had been a consultor to Recent York’s Cardinal John J. O’Connor, how would you’ve got advised him to act with respect to gays searching for to march within the St. Patrick’s Day parade? [ED: This conversation took place two days after St. Patrick’s Day.]
He’s in an not possible position. He really is. I believe there might have been a far clearer statement from the Cardinal that gay human beings are human beings and that the church fights for the dignity of each human being and fights for the dignity of each homosexual human being. He could have made that statement and distinguished it—nevertheless incoherently, but he could have distinguished it—from an endorsement of a specific political platform that approves something the church still believes is a sin.
Once, I remember, I used to be downtown late on a Sunday afternoon, and I desired to go to Mass, and I used to be wearing a gay T-shirt. The query was whether I could go to Mass wearing this T-shirt. And I did, because as a gay person, I’m a human being, and the church says that. The way in which that the Cardinal Archbishop of Recent York behaved, I believe, did not make that vital distinction—which, given the existence of bigotry, was an especially unnerving stance.
Andrew Sullivan: “What the church is asking gay people to do isn’t to be holy, but actually to be warped.”
Why would you’ve got characterised his position as “not possible”?
Since the church’s position is so incoherent. You possibly can’t really say, “We love gay people, but you possibly can’t be gay.” You could have to assume, in the event that they’re marching as gay people, that they practice. But after all the church is there defining gay people by a sexual act in a way it never defines heterosexual people, and on this, the church is in weird agreement with extremist gay activists who also wish to define homosexuality by way of its purely sexual content. Whereas being gay isn’t about sex as such. Fundamentally, it’s about one’s core emotional identity. It’s about whom one loves, ultimately, and the way that could make one whole as a human being.
The moral consequences, in my very own life, of the refusal to permit myself to like one other human being were disastrous. They made me permanently frustrated and indignant and bitter. It spilled over into other areas of my life. Once that emotional blockage is removed, one’s whole moral equilibrium can improve, just as a single person’s moral equilibrium in a complete range of areas can improve with marriage, in some ways, because there may be a form of stability and security and rock upon which to construct one’s moral and emotional life. To disclaim this to gay people isn’t merely incoherent and unsuitable, from the Christian perspective. It’s incredibly destructive of the moral quality of their lives usually. Does that make sense? These items are a part of a continuous moral whole. You possibly can’t ask someone to suppress what makes them whole as a human being after which to guide blameless lives. We’re human beings, and we’d like love in our lives in an effort to love others—in an effort to be good Christians! What the church is asking gay people to do isn’t to be holy, but actually to be warped.
Technically, the church is asking gay people to live celibately.
Right. But let’s take that for a minute. Celibacy for the priesthood, which is an interesting argument and one with which I even have a certain sympathy, is in an effort to unleash those deep emotional forces for love of God. Is the church asking this of gay people? I mean, if the church were saying to gay people, “You’re special to us, and your celibacy is to ensure that you to have this role and that role and this final end,” or if the church had a doctrine of another final end for gay people, then it would make more sense. It might be saying God made gay people for this, not for marriage or for youngsters or for procreation or for emotional pairing, but He made gay people in an effort to—let’s say—construct beautiful cathedrals or be witnesses to the world in another way. However the church has no positive doctrine on this in any respect. You see, that may be a coherent position at some level—that, for some mysterious reason, God made certain individuals with full sexual and emotional capability and required them to sublimate that capability into other areas of life.
So that you don’t really accept the analogy of homosexuality to a handicap?
Not likely. There are numerous ways during which that analogy doesn’t work. It’s not a physical handicap, clearly. It’s not as if there’s a physical impediment. It’s the possible analogy to a mental handicap that’s more interesting—because that’s the closest it involves what one might call an “objective disorder.” But in a mentally handicapped person, the acts that person commits under the influence of that handicap should not morally culpable. When an epileptic knocks someone out within the strategy of a fit, that act isn’t considered an intrinsic moral evil, as is known of a homosexual act. The acts of a retarded person are morally blameless insofar as they’re produced by their handicap. But with gay people, the condition is sort of a handicap, but its expression is an intrinsic moral evil!
Within the strongest terms one can use, the argument is intellectually contemptible. It truly is. It’s an insult to pondering people.
If that’s the worst possible construction that may be placed on the church’s present teaching, what’s the most effective?
Well, the most effective is that human sexuality is procreative, inextricably procreative, and that human beings are someway meant to be that way, and that any expression of their sexuality is expounded to Human Life |the title of Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical]. It’s a part of a continuous doctrinal argument. Undoubtedly, the impulse behind that reasoning isn’t merely biological but is to guard and promote human well-being as much as possible.
Do you see homosexual love as procreative?
It could possibly’t be procreative.
Not within the technical sense, but in some metaphorical or otherwise more significant sense than the merely biological?
By way of the opposite thing the church understands conjugal like to be about, insofar because it teaches one the disciplines of affection, yes, it’s procreative. Marriage in its broadest sense teaches us something, I believe, concerning the love of God for man…. that’s a part of it. The everlasting commitment of 1 person to a different teaches human beings—the church teaches—what love is. In that sense, the love of 1 man for one more man, or the love of 1 woman for one more woman, in that conjugal bond, teaches the exact same thing.
There may be also enormous capability, I believe, for gay peopie to adopt children. Again, the church doesn’t see that, in its try to care concerning the unborn—it’s never been so imaginative as to say, if we’re fascinated about adoption and caring for youngsters—-which is the vital other side of a pro-life stand—listed here are all these people capable of love. Why not put the potential with the necessity?
Andrew Sullivan: “No wonder people’s lives— many gay lives—are unhappy or distraught or in dysfunction, because there is no such thing as a guidance in any respect.”
What has been your individual experience of pastoral care inside the Catholic Church? Granted the potential for a difference between official teaching and sympathetic advice of a counselor or priest, have you ever been well treated?
Yes, usually. But I even have to say that I find it increasingly difficult. Once I had lost, at one point, my prime confessor who knew me, it was hard for me to reconstruct all of it for another person for fear of rejection. You never know what you’re going to get back. For a Catholic that sometimes is the good … I mean, I’ve heard stories about individuals who have been wounded, deeply, by brusque treatment, a whole inability to grasp what that is about. But, personally, I even have nothing but positive things to say.
My parish in Washington is the cathedral parish. I’m going there for Mass on Sunday, and the congregation should be about 25 percent gay—I mean, it’s the mid-city. There is sort of no ministry to gay people, almost no mention of the topic. It’s shrouded in complete and utter silence, which is the one practical way they’ll find to take care of it. Partly, after all—and here I’m not speaking of this particular cathedral or any particular congregation—due to great tragedy of the church in what it requires of its own gay clergy. I mean, this horrific bargain they should strike, which isn’t only are they required to be silent about their very own sexuality but, the repression is so great, they can’t even bring themselves to discuss it. It might bring up a lot emotion and difficulty that it’s best not even to the touch upon it.
This isn’t a defense of a non-celibate clergy. The gay priest, in a way, could be ideal. If the church were really true to its convictions, it will be perfectly comfortable with openly gay priests who were also openly celibate, because presumably celibacy is the one issue the church has with homosexuals. Possibly the church should say the ultimate end of all gay people is the priesthood—explicitly moderately than implicitly. That might be a final end.
Nevertheless it doesn’t. It’s crippled by its own internal inconsistency.
I believe that in every statement the church makes, given the forces inside our society as a complete, it needs to be extremely careful that its doctrines not be misunderstood—especially on this matter—for fear that it develop into an accomplice to all varieties of forces that, of all things, it really mustn’t be an accomplice to. Persons are beaten up. Persons are killed, actually, for his or her sexual orientation—on the streets, in bars, within the military. Slurs are made. This is definitely something the church should oppose.
It’s amazing that these distinctions should not made. If the church believed in its own position, it will always be making these distinctions, saying, for instance, “We will’t accept an explicitly pro-sexual-activity cohort within the [St. Patrick’s Day] march…. But we do imagine that gay men and girls are human beings, that they’ve dignity, that they’re to be protected, that bigotry against them is to be resisted, that violence against them is to be opposed in any respect levels.” There are methods during which you possibly can frame these questions. The church has an obligation to show each—if it’s going to show this doctrine.
But, you see, I believe the church, at the very best levels, doesn’t imagine this. I believe that on this doctrine, greater than many others actually, the church is affected by a crisis of its own internal conviction. Because homosexuality isn’t a latest subject for the Roman Catholic Church. It isn’t a distant subject. It’s on the very heart of the hierarchy, so every try to take care of it’s terrifying. But the very fact of the matter is, if the church is to operate in the fashionable world, the conspiracy of silence is ending. So something needs to be said. And the something that needs to be said needs to be coherent, or it would be exposed, as incoherence is at all times exposed.
There may be a lot within the church’s doctrine that might give us a capability—even inside the current doctrine—to present it in a positive way. I believe the lack to accomplish that suggests that, on the a part of the hierarchy, there’s an issue.
What are the nice and positive elements within the Catholic tradition that could lead on us to a more coherent position?
Natural law! Here is something [homosexuality] that seems to occur spontaneously in nature, in all societies and civilizations. Why not a teaching concerning the nature of homosexuality and what its good is. How can we be good? Teach us. How does one inform the moral lives of homosexuals? The church has an obligation to all its faithful to show us how you can live and how you can be good—which isn’t merely dismissal, silence, embarrassment or a “unique” doctrine on one’s inherent disorder. Explain it. How does God make this? Why does it occur? What should we do? How can the doctrine of Christian love be applied to homosexual people as well?
Now it might be this search will turn up all varieties of options and possibilities. There could also be all varieties of notions and debate concerning the nature of this phenomenon and what its final end is likely to be. But that it has a final end is very important. The church has to grasp—people within the church have to grasp—what it should be to grow up loving God and wanting to live one’s life well and truly, as a human being, capable of love and contribute and imagine, and yet having nothing.
I grew up with nothing. Nobody taught me anything except that this couldn’t be mentioned. And in consequence of the full lack of teaching, gay Catholics and gay people usually are in crisis. No wonder people’s lives— many gay lives—are unhappy or distraught or in dysfunction, because there is no such thing as a guidance in any respect. Here’s a population inside the church, and out of doors the church, desperately searching for spiritual health and values. And the church refuses to come back to our aid, refuses to hearken to this call.
“The church has to grasp…what it should be to grow up loving God and wanting to live one’s life well and truly, as a human being, capable of love and contribute and imagine, and yet having nothing.”
You already know, I see something just like the AIDS quilt. What a rare and spiritual thing that was, and this was done by people who find themselves denied any spiritual support. What has happened with AIDS is essentially the most extraordinary event for thus many individuals of my generation, who’ve seen a lot of our friends die. The spiritual dimension of this event is big, and the necessity for the church to offer some structure, some hope, some spiritual guidance and balm—and nothing! Virtually nothing.
The quilt was in Washington. It’s made by families, a lot of them Catholic, moms and dads and little children, who found someway in their very own lives a approach to sacramentalize the lives of their little children, and to go to the Mall and do it. That afternoon, I went to church. The Gospel was concerning the 10 lepers who were cleansed and the one who got here back to present thanks [Lk. 17:11-19]. This Gospel, on at the present time of all days—once I had read the names of my friends on a loudspeaker—with its notion of the double alienation of being a leper and a Samarian, like suffering a plague and being gay: It was too perfect.
The sermon was about modern leprosy and the way it was being cured. The bidding prayers had no reference to AIDS by any means, whereas 1 / 4 of the congregation had been stricken or had seen it directly in their very own lives. What’s the church for? Could it not see this?
For the primary time, I went as much as the priest afterward, and I said, “I just want you to know that I’ve just been to the quilt. It’s here in Washington. It’s essentially the most extraordinary event. I got here here to wish. I got here for what the church is here for, to assist me, and to assist me understand this. And also you said—with this Gospel—you said nothing! Don’t you understand how that must feel?”
He said, “Well, we prayed for the sick.”
“Sure,” I said. “But isn’t there anybody here who can witness to what is going on?”
“Well, you might be a witness to it.”
And I said, “Well, you ought to be the witness to it.”
In other words, there are basic, human, spiritual needs amongst gays that the church refuses to minister to, uniquely amongst all human beings. Even to ask the query “How can we assist you to?” or “How can we inform your moral and emotional life?” That’s the church’s first duty to its members and to the world at large, and it’s refusing to live as much as it to such an extent that folks should do it themselves. The quilt was an ideal cathedral, really, a spontaneous cathedral, but it surely was an indictment of the church’s inability to take care of it.
Andrew Sullivan: “I don’t imagine the church is an evil institution. I don’t imagine it desires to hate gay people. I believe the church just cannot cope.”
Do you think that the church’s denial is hard-heartedness, or fear and confusion?
The latter. I’m not indignant on the church, because I don’t imagine the church is an evil institution. I don’t imagine it desires to hate gay people. I believe the church just cannot cope. It’s like a family that can’t speak about this despite the fact that its own son or daughter is gay.
That’s why I believe the family is very important here…
Yes. If the analogy is complete, nothing may be healed until this may be handled.
Possibly the healing will come precisely from the families who take care of the problem more directly at the extent of human love.
Exactly.
One problem in that case is that the hierarchy, who’re the authorities, do not need to take care of gay children the way in which your mother did.
Also it’s incumbent upon gay Catholics, just because it is at all times incumbent upon the gay child, to say, “I’m here.” There’s a two-way street.
You already know, I see so some ways during which persons are attempting to say that, but they’re so petrified of the rejection that they’ll’t say it. I hearken to gay America, and I hear this great cry for spiritual help. It doesn’t sound like that a variety of the time. It seems like anger, or protest. Most of the movements are semi-religious. And take a look at their tenacity. Have a look at Dignity, take a look at what persons are doing to insist upon the spiritual possibilities, despite the disincentives.