Loopholes

The weltanschauung of the evangelical Christianity that I grew up with did not permit the coexistence of homosexuality and faith. Homosexuality was a choice. Consequently, anyone who chose to remain a practicing Christian would not reasonably choose to be gay; it simply was not possible, as the two choices were mutually exclusive. (This deeply-engrained belief was the reason why I didn’t conceive that I could be gay until I was 19 years old.)

This dichotomous frame of mind had some odd consequences. It meant that undergirding all conversations related to sexual purity was the assumption that the men were sexually interested in women (and vice versa). Jesus’ statement that looking lustfully at a woman constitutes a sin (read: heart adultery, see Matthew 5:28) was taken literally. Thus, throughout my upbringing, various evangelical institutions set rules to supposedly mitigate temptations of heterosexual carnal lust, in line with what Paul said in Ephesians 5:3 (“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people”).

One such rule was, “Don’t look at pornography”, as that was considered looking lustfully at women. Yet I was unsure how to classify what I was doing in middle school as I surfed the internet for images and videos of men having sex. At the time, I wondered whether what I was looking at was even considered pornography because it wasn’t women. It felt inherently wrong to me, but technically I was not lusting after women. So was I sinning? I couldn’t answer that with certainty. I was violating the spirit of the law, but not the letter of the law.*

A second rule was, “Don’t have sex before marriage”. For the first two years or so that I had sexual desire, a slew of church purity talks had convinced me that “sex” only meant a man and a woman engaging in vaginal penetrative sex (because no other acts were mentioned). Given the data received, I could argue that the entire catalog of all gay sex acts (as well as heterosexual oral sex and whatever else straights do) was not considered “sex”. Therefore, I reasoned, I could engage in sexual acts with another man without breaking the rule of “no sex before marriage”, as I technically wouldn’t be having sex.*

A third rule was how kids were housed at Christian camps. Girls and boys were always assigned to gender-specific cabins, or even gender-specific wings of the campsite. Strict rules were generally in place regulating the times when members of the opposite sex could be in or around the accommodations. The assumption was that campers would only want to fool around with members of the opposite sex and not with members of the same sex, and these rules would remove the opportunity to act on that temptation. But these rules are futile for kids with same-sex attraction—and may even facilitate encounters. It would be incredibly easy to “go to the bathroom” using the buddy system and then wander off into the woods with said buddy for a handjob. I was a good kid (and my gaydar is terrible), so I never participated in such activities growing up. But I know how easy it could have been.

A fourth rule was in my Christian fraternity in college. The national fraternity had set a rule that women were not permitted in members’ bedrooms past 12 AM, nor in the chapter houses past 2 AM. But there was no regulation on men who did not live in the house (or even men who did live in the house). Consequently, over the course of my final three active semesters, I had a handful of guys stay the night in my bed at the fraternity house, which technically did not break the rules. Once again, I had not violated the letter of the law, but I had violated the spirit. The regulatory framework under which the rules on visitors were established did not recognize that some fraternity members might be gay.

There’s a word for the phenomenon characterized in the previous paragraphs: heteronormativity.** In these cases, heteronormativity set heterosexuality as the baseline framework for these rules, not acknowledging the existence of non-heterosexual people. As demonstrated, heteronormativity can create some pretty comically glaring loopholes.











*The loopholes in the first two examples of rules were closed shortly after I started high school. In two separate purity talks, I received two messages: (1) it didn’t matter whether it was women or men that one lusted after, and (2) oral sex was also a legitimate candidate for “sex before marriage”. The first message definitively clarified that the images and videos I looked at counted as “pornography”; and the second moved all the gray-area sex acts to the “need-to-wait-until-I’m-married” bucket.

**I remember when I first learned the word “heteronormativity” during my second semester of college. As soon as the professor uttered the word, I immediately knew its definition before she provided it. I was all too familiar with the concept.