Swish

by Joel Derfner

  But that’s what the Exodus delegates are after, I thought. They want their imperfect selves to fade into nothingness and be replaced by new, flawless Bruce Willises with upturned collars and feathered hair.

  In Man of La Mancha, the Wasserman-Leigh-Darion musical based on Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Cervantes tells his antagonist, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” Cervantes speaks these words in prison, knowing that within the hour, in all likelihood, the flames of the Inquisition will be licking at his calves.

  So what are the ex-gays doing but seeing life not as it is but as they think it should be, even as they hear the kindling begin to crackle? They are fools and heroes wrapped up together, straining with all their might to change something unchangeable. They are trying to rid themselves of something they see as immoral and pathological and unholy, and from that perspective, I believe, they are among the noblest people on earth. If a serial rapist—to make a fraught comparison—were to struggle with all his heart and all his soul and all his might against the inclinations that impelled him to violate others, if he were to go to therapy and church and hope and beg and pray to be relieved of his desires, I would laud his efforts and support him as best I could, even as I grieved that the continued urge to rape, studies indicate, is not something that can be gotten rid of. Serial rape has nothing to do with homosexuality, but if I lived, like the ex-gays, in a universe in which the two were morally equivalent, I would be sitting right now astride my ragged, scarred horse, spear in hand, galloping toward the windmills.

  The statuesque figure of the speaker at the next morning’s session made it difficult for me to believe that she was not in fact a drag queen. Kathy Koch (author of Finding Authentic Hope and Wholeness) told us that her sermon was called “Mordecai and Esther: Teamwork to Transform,” which I was excited to learn, as Mordecai and Esther are characters at the center of the fabulous Jewish holiday Purim.

  “Purim” is the Hebrew word for “lots,” referring in this case not to a selection system based on chance but to a combination of math, logic, and astrology used long ago to schedule important events (weddings, coronations, the slaughter of all the Jews in Persia). The bare bones of the Purim story are as follows:

  In the city of Shushan, Mordecai the Jew refused to bow down to the wicked vizier Haman, and so in retaliation Haman convinced the king to order the extermination of the Jews on the date he had selected by lot. But Mordecai had an ace up his sleeve: his cousin Esther happened to be married to the king. She had thus far neglected to mention to her husband that she was a Jewess, but in her people’s time of need she revealed her secret to him and begged him to save them. The king could not rescind an order he had already given, but he issued a new decree that the Jews be allowed to arm and defend themselves, which they did, to great effect, and at the end of the day Haman swung from the gallows he had erected for Mordecai.

  Kathy Koch, alas, gave an insipid sermon, explaining merely that we all need to be both Mordecai and Esther. We need to Mordecai—she actually turned the name into a verb—by instructing and by remaining present. And we need to Esther by choosing a Mordecai, someone who will instruct us and remain present in our lives for a long time.

  Purim is my favorite Jewish holiday. We celebrate our deliverance by dressing in costumes and putting on masks. We read the Book of Esther in synagogue and whenever Haman is mentioned we boo and shake noisemakers and overpower the sound so as to blot out his memory under heaven; every time Kathy Koch said “Haman” I had to resist the impulse to hiss and stamp. On Purim it is considered a mitzvah—a commandment, a good deed—for us to enfeeble our evil inclinations by getting so drunk we can’t tell the difference between “blessed be Mordecai” and “cursed be Haman.” (The last time I fulfilled this mitzvah I slammed my hand down next to my plate in the middle of dinner with friends and slurred, “I’m smarter than everybody at this table put together!” Since then on Purim I have stuck with Diet Mountain Dew.) Purim is the only holiday that will still be celebrated after the coming of the Messiah.

  There are innumerable explanations for the custom of masks, all of which explanations pretty much work together. For example: we pretend to be other people to represent a world turned upside down, a world in which Haman can decree the murder of the Jews one day and perish along with his wife and children the next. And/or: we assume different faces so as to understand that true reality and the reality we perceive may be different things. But my favorite interpretation is that we don physical masks in order to cast off the psychic masks we wear every other day of the year. If we put on a face that we acknowledge as false, then underneath it we can liberate our true selves.

  The Hebrew name for the Book of Esther is Megillat Esther, which can be taken, I believe, to mean “to reveal what is hidden.” The fact that God’s name never appears in the Book of Esther is to be understood, say the sages, as an indication that, though His hand is invisible—hidden—His work is revealed everywhere.

  Purim is a holiday of secrets, of masks, of divided selves, of mystery, of revelation. What better topic for a sermon at the ex-gay conference?

  But that’s not what Kathy Koch chose to talk about.

  If I had any inclination to believe there was anybody up there watching out for us, nudging us in this direction or that at moments in which our choices could bring us to happiness or to despair, I would find powerful support in what happened later that day. Expecting the evening session to be just as tedious as all the other sessions, I had resolved to skip it, yet I found my steps taking me not back to my room to watch more of The All-New Twilight Zone but to the auditorium. Had I followed my original impulse, I would not have been present at one of the most extraordinary events it has ever been my privilege to witness.

  I would have missed the ex-gay musical.

  Acts of Renewal, according to the emcee, was a theater troupe led by Mr. and Mrs. Jim Shores, both instructors at North Carolina’s Montreat College. He taught students in the Environmental Studies Department, with a focus on marine biology; she taught in the Worship Arts Department. Acts of Renewal had been performing original theatrical entertainments around the country for over a decade, but they had chosen to wait for the Exodus conference to premiere their first musical, The Promised Land.

  The action of The Promised Land concerned four people who had decided not to accompany Joshua into Canaan with the rest of the People Israel because they found crossing the River Jordan inconvenient. There were two women, a Lesbian and a Woman Who Judged Her Husband for Engaging in Homosexual Behavior, and two men, a Fag and a Seemingly Respectable Man Who Proved Later to Have a Distasteful Secret Involving Anonymous Sex in Dangerous Parts of Town (these are my own designations for the characters; their actual names were Jered, Hannah, Zerubebel, and Tiffany). As the lights went up, the Seemingly Respectable Man Who Proved Later to Have a Distasteful Secret Involving Anonymous Sex in Dangerous Parts of Town suggested to the other three that they all consider crossing the Jordan that night; they responded by singing a song from West Side Story, but instead of “Tonight, tonight/Won’t be just any night,/Tonight there will be no morning star,” they sang “Not tonight, not tonight,/We cannot cross tonight,/Tonight is just a bad time for me.” The Lesbian couldn’t cross, she sang, because she had to call her girlfriend; the Fag was going to frost his hair; they all needed at least six more weeks of counseling. They brought the number to a rousing finish (“With work and therapy, I’ll get it right,/Just not tonight!”) and then, as the Seemingly Respectable Man Who Proved Later to Have a Distasteful Secret Involving Anonymous Sex in Dangerous Parts of Town stood dumbfounded, the three other members of Acts of Renewal made what may have been the most brilliant transition ever conceived in the musical theater and broke into, “Tomorrow! Tomo
rrow!/We’ll cross it tomorrow!/It’s only a day away!”

  I stared agape, my mind unable to compass the number of ways in which this was so very, very wrong.

  The show went on for half an hour and included ex-gay versions of songs such as “Too Darn Hot,” “Cry Me a River,” “They Call the Wind Maria” (“They Call My Sin Desire”), and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (“Biceps Are a Boy’s Best Friend”). The musical-theater writer in me grew more and more perturbed to see Acts of Renewal take such brazen liberties with other people’s intellectual property; of course I had no certain knowledge of this, but I found it impossible to imagine that they had gotten permission from the writers of these songs to change their words, especially not Stephen Sondheim (gay), Frederick Loewe (gay and dead), and Cole Porter (gay, dead, and bitchy).

  As the performance drew to a close, the characters saw God wading across the Jordan toward them, and, singing a stirring finale, stepped into the river to meet Him halfway. The curtain calls lasted for a very long time.

  During the applause I found myself thinking of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when Baroque music reached its zenith in the persons of Handel, Porpora, and their contemporaries. All important opera roles were sung by sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, some of them women, some castrated men. Both women and men sang male and female roles; the audience didn’t care as long as the voices they heard were thrilling. Furthermore, opera plots could be more complicated than that of any Ludlum thriller, so it was entirely possible to have, say, a male singer playing the part of a woman whose character has disguised herself as a man to rescue her male lover, played by a woman, from captivity at the hands of a sorceress, played by a man.

  Baroque opera had nothing on Acts of Renewal.

  Two gay men claiming to have become straight men were playing the parts of two gay men in an attempt, via a medium strongly associated with gay men, to convince an audience of gay men and lesbians to become straight men and straight women; they were aided in their efforts by 1) a lesbian who claimed to have become a straight woman, playing the part of a lesbian and 2) the everstraight wife of one of the two gay men.

  The members of Acts of Renewal did not have the acting chops to pull this off convincingly.

  To my dismay, on my way into the Men’s Panel discussion before lunch the next day I ran into Rob, the dumb high school teacher from Cádiz. If he sat next to me my ability to take notes would be severely hampered, but in the end I was too slow-witted to escape his company.

  In an uncomfortable attempt to make conversation before the panel started, I asked him how he had made his way from South Carolina to Spain. He proceeded to tell me a dizzying story of military service and international travel and degrees at institutions of higher learning. The more he talked the more I suspected he might not actually be dumb. As an officer in the navy, he told me, he had started studying American Sign Language; eventually he became fluent and, after teaching math at a school for the deaf, got a job as an ASL interpreter. He joined a deaf church, where he participated in the van ministry (I had a wild image of Rob trying to save the souls of the deaf church’s SUVs but then I realized he meant he’d just ferried the churchgoers to and from the services). I kept waiting for him to say something that would indicate some lack of generosity or other-directedness somewhere, but I waited in vain.

  Then the panel began, interrupting our conversation, and it was just too dreary for words. There were five men on it, all of whom had the same kind of story as everybody else here: they had been molested, they had had terrible relationships with their fathers, they had gotten married, they had cheated on their wives, they had joined the gay community, they had left the gay community. Two of the panelists had excellent highlights (the whole time I was at the conference I didn’t see a single person with bad highlights). Nobody said anything in the panel discussion that I hadn’t heard before: brokenness, molestation, struggler, peer rejection, father wound. One of the men with highlights said he had decided to leave the lifestyle after he had been having sex with another man and Jesus had appeared at the foot of his bed. “I’ll go wherever you go,” Jesus had apparently announced, which I thought was the best setup ever for a scene from a porn movie, but that turned out not to be how the encounter had progressed.

  As the panel broke up and people headed for lunch, Rob asked me why I was taking so many notes. Terrified he would find me out, I began to stutter: “Um, I, uh, I want to be able to look at this four months from now, um, and say, ‘Oh, my GOD, that’s what he meant!” As soon as I said “GOD” I regretted taking the Lord’s name in vain at the ex-gay conference, but Rob didn’t seem to mind.

  “I don’t understand your struggle,” he said. “I mean, you just up and came here?”

  After my near miss with Jon (“But what are you dissatisfied with?”) I was prepared for this. I gave Rob facts that were true, but I made specious connections between them. “I’ve just been a real asshole to people,” I said, “cheating on my boyfriend, treating him like dirt. And I want not to be like that anymore. I want to be a better person, but it’s hard to find support for that in the lifestyle. So I figured I’d come here and see what I could learn.” I had cheated on my boyfriend and treated him like dirt, true, but that had been years ago, before we were officially boyfriends. Now we were so boringly faithful we might as well have been living in Levittown.

  I was beginning to feel uneasy, though, so to deflect Rob’s curiosity I started asking him questions about himself. He had acted out, he said, in April, when, while on vacation in Boston, he’d learned that his mother had been diagnosed with leukemia. “I just wanted someone to hold me,” he said. “The strugglers I knew in Boston didn’t answer their phone. I knew where the cruising spots were, so I picked up a guy at a rest stop and went back to his apartment. I didn’t really want to do anything, but I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t stop myself. We did stuff I’d never done before. The only things about homosexual sex I can’t stomach are oral sex and anal sex. I’ve never done anal, but that night I had oral sex, and it was no good. It didn’t make any sense. Where was the emotional connection?” I was so caught up in trying to figure out what was left if you ruled out oral and anal sex that I couldn’t answer the question. “The next night I talked to two strugglers about it and they were terrific. At the end of the conversation we had a big group bear hug. It felt good and right, not like the night before.” I noticed a touch of gray in Rob’s circle beard and sideburns, and in the tufts of hair showing between the parted collar of his shirt. I realized with a start that he was actually incredibly hot.

  “What was it like in the military?” I asked. Rob started talking about traveling and radio software and safeguarding command codes and completely ignored my real question, which was, In the military was there lots of hot gay sex?

  “So somebody could have captured you and tortured you for the command codes?” I asked.

  “Only if they tickled me.” Oh, my God, he was flirting with me!

  As we left the now-empty room, Rob suggested I come visit him in Cádiz. “You’d really like some of my international friends,” he said. I thought, I could totally have him if I wanted.

  My attempt to eat dinner alone that evening so I could take notes in my notebook with the gangsta cucumber and the gangsta asparagus and the two unidentifiable gangsta vegetables on it was foiled by the appearance of a stocky dark-haired man who exclaimed, as he sat down across from me, “Veggie Tales rocks!” Such an opener did not incline me to conversation with him, but I was trapped.

  When in our introductory exchanges I mentioned to David that I was Jewish, he said, “Me, too!” I raised my eyebrows, amazed to find another Jew here. “Well, actually, I’m…let’s see…how should I…” Oh, no, I thought. No. Anything but—“I’m a Jewish person who believes.”

  He was a fucking Jew for Jesus.

  It can be difficult for gentiles to understand why Jews tend to loathe the Jews for Jesus more than we loathe anyt
hing else upon the earth, including neo-Nazis and going camping.

  But imagine that you’re one of the Chosen People, and that your identity is based on the idea that you have a unique relationship with God. For thousands of years your people has been persecuted for being different; you could have changed that at any point by accepting Jesus, but you didn’t, because it would have meant giving up that relationship with God, and if inquisitions and pogroms and genocide have been the price you’ve had to pay, then so be it.

  Now imagine that along come these folks who say, We get the unique relationship with God but we also get to be just like everybody else! We can enjoy the cachet of being different and relax in the comfort of the majority at the same time! We get to have our cake and eat it too! We get to be the Chosen People and not pay for it!

  What are you going to think? You’re going to think that it’s a cheat, an outrage, an insult to human decency and to every Jew who has ever been slaughtered for refusing to bow to a graven image.

  So when David revealed himself to me as a Jew for Jesus, my first impulse was to spit in his face. “I don’t understand that,” I said finally, and realized immediately how rude it sounded. “I mean, can you explain that to me?” Hardly better. “I just mean…not make me understand but talk to me more about it.” Please, God, I prayed, help me not commit murder here in the LifeWay Ridgecrest cafeteria.

  “The short answer,” he said, “is that I was absolutely pierced in the heart by Christian friends who convinced me.” Some friends, I thought. “The long answer is that I was just unfulfilled by Judaism. I just felt something was missing. And as I started to look at Christianity, I felt like, well, okay, either Jesus was a liar and a lunatic, or he was the real thing. And too many people believe in him for him to have been a liar and a lunatic. So I realized he had to be real.”