The Michael Eric Dyson Reader

by Michael Eric Dyson

  We must find remedies, too, for angst-ridden black preachers. Many of them stir anxiety in their congregations because of their own conflicted theology of sexuality. The visiting minister I spoke of earlier was bewitched by the erotic double bind that traps some ministers. He preached a theology of sexuality that satisfied the demands of black church tradition. But he was also moved by erotic desires that are rarely openly discussed in black churches, or in the seminaries that prepare men and women to pastor. The sexual exploitation of black women by black preachers, and the seduction of preachers by female members, rests on just this sort of confusion. (Of course, it also rests on a gender hierarchy in black churches where women do much of the labor but are largely prevented from the highest leadership role: the pastorate. The ecclesiastical apartheid of the black church, which is more than 70 percent female, continues to reinforce the sexual inequality of black women.) In many cases, both parties are caught in the thralls of unfocused erotic desire. Such desire doesn’t receive reasonable, helpful attention. It is either moralized against or it lands on the wagging tongues of church gossips.

  As a very young pastor—I was all of twenty-three years old—I sometimes participated in the sort of sex play that mocks healthy erotic desire. Once, after assuming the pastorate of a small church in the South, I received a call from a desperate female parishioner.

  “Reverend Dyson, I need to see you right away,” the soft, teary voice on my phone insisted. “It’s an emergency. I can’t discuss it on the telephone.”

  It was seven o’clock at night. Since I lived nearly a hundred miles from the city where my church was located, it would take me at least an hour and a half to reach her home.

  “All right, Ms. Bright (not her real name),” I replied. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I told my fiancée Brenda, with whom I was living, that a member needed me to come immediately. I tore up the highway in a frantic race to Ms. Bright’s home. I was a young, relatively inexperienced pastor, new on the job, and eager to please. When I arrived at Ms. Bright’s home, her parents greeted me at the door. Judging by the surprised look on their faces, her parents had no idea of their daughter’s distress, or her urgent request to see me. When she appeared a few minutes later, I didn’t let on that I’d just zoomed to their house to help relieve their daughter of whatever problem she had. To them, I guess it looked like I had come courting on the sly. After all, neither of us were married, and Ms. Bright was only a few years older than me. Although I was in a committed relationship with Brenda, my members didn’t know that we were, as the ’70s R&B hit goes, “living together in sin.” (Already living in the Bible Belt, perhaps on its buckle, I was caught in the cross fire between sex and soul almost before my career as a pastor began.)

  Ms. Bright suggested that we go upstairs to her room to talk. We excused ourselves from pleasant chitchat with her amiable parents. We soon found ourselves alone in her stylish, sweetly scented bedroom. I felt awkward. I’d never spent time alone with her before outside of the few occasions we spoke in church. Besides, I didn’t know what signal my presence in her boudoir might send. But I soon found out what was weighing on her heart and mind.

  “Reverend Dyson, I think I’m in love with you,” she blurted out.

  I was genuinely startled. I had never been a Don Juan. And despite the crude stereotypes of ministers as lotharios out to bed every woman within speaking distance, I certainly hadn’t been promiscuous. I could count the number of girlfriends I’d had on one hand. And I’d never been led to think of myself as irresistibly handsome. I wasn’t a guy, like many I’d known, for whom women seemed to pant and pine. I was just Mike Dyson, the poor kid from Detroit who worked hard, studied long, and mostly lived out his sexual fantasies with a few beautiful women.

  “Well, Ms. Bright, I, um, I, well, I’m very flattered,” I barely managed. By now my yellow face was flushed and my eyes were boring holes in the floor. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Then it hit me. My pastor, Frederick Sampson, knowing that the advice would one day come in handy, had given me a stern warning.

  “Never let a woman down harshly, Mike,” Dr. Sampson said. “Always be gentle and considerate.” Eureka! Here was my out.

  “You know, Ms. Bright, what you’ve said makes me feel good,” I uttered with more conviction. “I’m truly honored that a woman like you would even be interested in me. But you know I’m in love with Brenda.”

  I saw the disappointment in her eyes. Quickly extending Sampson’s rule, I was determined not to make Ms. Bright feel foolish.

  “But if I was available, you’re the kind of woman I would definitely like to be with.”

  And I wasn’t just blowing smoke, as they say. Ms. Bright was a very intelligent, inquisitive woman, as our few conversations revealed. She was also a beautiful woman; a tall five feet ten inches, she dwarfed my five-foot-nine-inch frame. She had flawless chocolate skin, an incandescent smile, a sensuous voice, and a voluptuous figure.

  “Really?” she replied.

  In retrospect, I guess that gave her an opening. And despite denying it then, I probably wanted her to find it. Although each of us had been sitting on chairs in her room, Ms. Bright stood up and, well, descended on me. Standing directly above me, she confessed that she’d spent a great deal of time daydreaming about me.

  “I just can’t get you off my mind,” she said. “I really think I’m in love with you, Reverend Dyson. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  As the words rolled off her tongue, which I began to notice more and more, she began to run her fingers through my hair. I was embarrassed, ashamed, almost mortified, and extremely turned on.

  “Well, I don’t know either, Ms. Bright,” I muttered. “I guess, well, I don’t know, I guess we’ll just have to . . . ”

  Before I could finish, she was kissing me. Before long, we were kissing each other. Our tongues dueled with more energy than we’d been able to devote to resolving her problem. Except now, it was our problem. I wasn’t in love with her, but my lust was certainly piqued. Talk about not letting a woman down roughly; I certainly wasn’t flunking that test. But I felt bad for cheating on Brenda. I yanked myself free from Ms. Bright’s luscious lip lock and came up for air, reaching as well for a little perspective.

  “Look, Ms. Bright, I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I said through my heavy breathing. “After all, I’m your pastor, and I should be counseling you, not trying to get down with you.”

  She simply smiled. Then, before I could protest, she was out of her blouse. Next her bra fell to the floor! The queenly, regal pose she struck, part Pam Grier and part British royalty, made me feel like a lowly subject. And gawking at the sheer magnificence of her breasts, I was glad to be in her majesty’s service. We groped each other like high school teens stranded in a hormonal storm. After nearly a half hour of this pantomimed intimacy, guilt suddenly overtook me. Better yet, the thought of having sex with her parents able to hear the bed creak and groan quenched my erotic fire. I recovered what little pastoral authority I had left—I think it was mixed up with my jacket and tie on the floor—and insisted that we quit. So we fixed up our clothes. Ms. Bright retouched her makeup, and without saying much—what could we say?—we went back downstairs to make small talk with her parents. After fifteen minutes or so, I bid them farewell and drove home far more slowly than I’d driven to my appointment. I was more disappointed at myself than angry at Ms. Bright. Despite what she said—and even she probably didn’t really believe it—I didn’t think Ms. Bright was in love with me. She simply had a crush, though, admittedly, it was a big one. Plus, she had a healthy dose of sexual desire, a subject we should have been able to talk about, not only in her house but in our church. We should have been able to refer to sex education classes, sermon series, Sunday school discussions, Sunday night forums, and a host of other ways that erotic desire might be addressed in the black church. Some churches are doing this, but they are far, far too few in number.
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br />   I was flattered that Ms. Bright wanted me. At the same time, I was ashamed that I’d given in to wanting her. I’d come to pray. I’d ended up the prey—the willing prey, as it turned out. Maybe Ms. Bright had seen the desire in my eyes, which failed to be disguised as pastoral concern. Maybe she was simply the first to act on what she knew we both wanted. Maybe she was just more honest.

  On my way home, I couldn’t help thinking of the visiting preacher. I got a lot more humble. Still, I kept thinking about my erotic encounter with Ms. Bright. Despite trying to feel bad about it, I found myself getting aroused all over again. I hadn’t yet figured out that it’s all right to enjoy erotic desire—to own up to the fact that you can be horny and holy—as long as you don’t live at the mercy of your hormones. But if we can’t talk about sex at home, and we can’t talk about it at church, black Christians end up lying to ourselves and to the people to whom we’re sexually attracted. And too often, we end up being much more destructive because of our erotic dishonesty.

  Because so many black Christians have taken up the task of being sexual saviors—of crucifying the myths of black hypersexuality and sexual deviance—we abhor out-of-bounds sexuality. This social conservatism expresses itself as a need to be morally upright. Beyond reproach. (Unsurprisingly, gangsta rappers are high on the list of sinners. If its detractors actually ever listened to more than snippets of gangsta rap lyrics, they’d probably have a lot more grist for their critical mills.) Oh, if it was only that simple. If the black church—for God’s sake, if any religious institution—was erotically honest, it would admit that the same sexual desire that courses through rappers’ veins courses through the veins of its members. If many of the black ministers who wail against the sexual improprieties of hip-hop culture would be erotically honest, they’d admit that the same lust they nail rappers for breaks out in their own ranks. And there aren’t too many sermons pointing that out.

  The standard religious response has been: “Of course we have the same desires, but we fight them and put them in proper perspective.” That’s partly true. The desire is certainly fought. Why, you can see the strain of erotic repression on unmade-up faces, in long dresses that hide flesh, and in the desexualized carriage of bodies (notice the burden is largely on the women) in the most theologically rigid of orthodox black churches. But that’s just the point: mere repression is not the proper perspective. We’ve got to find a mean between sexual annihilation and erotic excess. Otherwise, the erotic practices of church members will continue to be stuck in silence and confusion.

  Neither are there many sermons that assail ministers for exploiting women. To be sure, there are women who think they were put on earth to please the pastor. For them, embracing his flesh is like embracing a little bit of heaven. Pastors should study their books on transference and help spread light on this fallacy. Of course, there are just as many women who simply get in heat over a man who can talk, especially if they’ve dealt with men for whom saying hello in the morning is an effort. So let’s not romanticize the put-upon, helpless female who’s charmed by the wiles of the slick, Elmer Gantry–like, minister-as-omnicompetent-stud-andstand-in-for-God.

  Too often, though, there are women who come to the minister seeking a helping hand who get two instead. Plus some lips, legs, arms—well, you get the picture. The black church is simply running over with brilliant, beautiful black women of every age, hue, and station. Pecan publicists. Ebony lawyers. Caramel doctors. Mocha engineers. Beige clerks. Bronze businesswomen. Brown housewives. Redbone realtors. Yellow laborers. Coffee teachers. Blueblack administrators. Copper maids. Ivory tellers. Chocolate judges. Tan students. Often these women are sexually pursued by the church’s spiritual head, so to speak.

  This fact makes it especially hard to endure the chiding of black preachers, veiled in prophetic language, launched at the sexual outlaws of black pop culture. In reality, the great Martin Luther King Jr. is the patron saint of the sexual unconscious of many black ministers, but for all the wrong reasons. For most of the time he lived in the glare of international fame, King, as is well known, carried on affairs with many women. He wasn’t proud of it. He confessed his guilt. He said he’d try to do better. But he just couldn’t give it up. Plus, he was away from home for 28 days of most months. Lest too many critics aiming to bring King down a notch or two for his moral failings get any ideas, bear in mind that he spent that kind of time away from his wife and children, under enormous stress and at great peril to his life, leading the war against racial inequality.

  Many black ministers have absorbed King’s erotic habits, and those of many white and black ministers before and after him. But they have matched neither his sacrifice nor his achievements. Not that such factors excuse King’s behavior. But they do help us understand the social pressures that shaped King’s erotic choices. One must remember, too, the ecology of erotic expression for civil rights workers. The wife of a famous civil rights leader once told me civil rights workers often went to towns where their presence reviled whites and upset many complacent blacks. She said it was natural that they sexually fed off of each other within their tight circles of sympathy and like-minded perspective. That squares as well with King’s comment that a lot of his philandering was a release from the extraordinary pressures he faced. That’s probably a large part of the story, though it can’t be the complete story. King’s behavior apparently predates his fame. His philandering was a complex matter.

  In some senses, King’s erotic indiscretions were the expression of a Casanova complex, pure and simple. That complex is especially present in famous men whose success is a gateway to erotic escapades. Indeed, their fame itself is eroticized. Their success is both the capital and the commodity of sex. It procures sexual intimacy and is the gift procured by (female) sexual surrender. Then, too, for black men there is a tug-of-war occurring on the psychosexual battlefield. Black men occupy a symbolic status as studs. That stereotype is one of the few that black men refuse to resist. They embrace it almost in defiance of its obvious falseness, as an inside joke. (How many times did King tell white audiences that blacks wanted to be their brothers, not their brothers-in-law, even as white women flaunted themselves before him? King was even set to marry a white woman when he was in seminary, but she was sent away, and King was warned by a mentor that he would never be able to be a black leader with a white wife.)

  There is also a specific psychology of the ministerial Casanova. He believes he merits sexual pleasure because of his sacrificial leadership of the church community. Ironically, he sees the erotic realm as an arena of fulfillment because it is forbidden, a forbiddance that he makes a living preaching to others. (Yes, the cliché is certainly true that “That which is denied becomes popular.”) But erotic forbiddance is a trap. The very energy exerted against erotic adventure becomes a measure for ministerial integrity. It becomes the very force the minister must resist if he is to be erotically honest. Erotic desire both induces guilt in the minister and is his reward for preaching passionately about the need for the denial of erotic exploitation! Self-delusion and self-centeredness mingle in this arena of sexual desire.

  All of this sets up an erotic gamesmanship between minister and the potential—often willing—object of his erotic desire. One of the rules of the game is, “Let’s see if I can get him to fall, to act against what he proclaims as truth.” This is more than simply a case of Jezebel out to seduce the minister. It is a case of erotic desire being expressed in a way that reflects the unequal relation between male leaders and female followers.

  Many ministers who travel on the revival circuit—delivering sermons and giving a lift to the sagging spirits of churches across the nation—too often settle into comfortable habits of sexual exploitation. Their regimen of erotic enjoyment gets locked in early in their careers. They travel to churches, preach the gospel, meet a woman or women, have sex, return home, go back the next year and do the same. Even ministers who stay in place can roam their congregations, or the congregations o
f their peers, in search of erotic adventure. What it comes down to is that the Martin Luther King Jrs., and the Snoop Doggy Doggs of black culture all want the same thing. The Snoops are up front about it. Most of us in the black church aren’t.

  The same erotic dishonesty applies to another sexual identity: homosexuality. The notorious homophobia of the black church just doesn’t square with the numerous same-sex unions taking place, from the pulpit to the pew. One of the most painful scenarios of black church life is repeated Sunday after Sunday with little notice or collective outrage. A black minister will preach a sermon railing against sexual ills, especially homosexuality. At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sing, and to sign, his theological death sentence. His presence at the end of such a sermon symbolizes a silent endorsement of the preacher’s message. Ironically, the presence of his gay Christian body at the highest moment of worship also negates the preacher’s attempt to censure his presence, to erase his body, to deny his legitimacy as a child of God. Too often, the homosexual dimension of eroticism remains cloaked in taboo or blanketed in theological attack. As a result, the black church, an institution that has been at the heart of black emancipation, refuses to unlock the oppressive closet for gays and lesbians.

  One of the most vicious effects of the closet is that some of the loudest protesters against gays and lesbians in the black church are secretly homosexual. In fact, many, many preachers who rail against homosexuality are themselves gay. Much like the anti-Semitic Jew, the homophobic gay or lesbian Christian secures his or her legitimacy in the church by denouncing the group of which he or she is a member, in this case an almost universally despised sexual identity. On the surface, such an act of self-hatred is easy. But it comes at a high cost. Homophobic rituals of self-hatred alienate the gay or lesbian believer from his or her body in an ugly version of erotic Cartesianism: splitting the religious mind from the homosexual body as a condition of Christian identity. This erotic Cartesianism is encouraged when Christians mindlessly repeat about gays and lesbians, “we love the sinner but we hate the sin.” A rough translation is “we love you but we hate what you do.” Well, that mantra worked with racists: we could despise what racist whites did while refusing to despise white folk themselves, or whiteness per se. (Of course, there were many blacks who blurred that distinction and hated white folk as well as they pleased.) But with gay and lesbian identity, to hate what they do is to hate who they are. Gays and lesbians are how they have sex. (I’m certainly not reducing gay or lesbian identity to sexual acts. I’m simply suggesting that the sign of homosexual difference, and hence the basis of their social identification, is tied to the role of the sex act in their lives.)