MENNONOT: Issue #3Published: September, 1994 [Editorial] [Interview] [Forum] [Humor] [Pleasure with Pain for Leaven] Editorial: Congregational purge alertSheri Hostetler Some snippets: We at Mennonot figure it's about time for us to issue an official Purge Alert. A wave of homomophobic hysteria has broken on the cozy little island of Mennoland, with the result that at least three of the only ten or so churches that accept openly gay/lesbian members are under attack from their conferences. While Mennonoters are under no illusions that this publication has the power to stop a conference from expelling congregations accepting of gays/lesbians, we thought we might as well not let it happen without a bit of squawking from our corner.
AS WE ALL KNOW, the standard response from moderate to liberal Mennos on the issue of gays/lesbians in the church has been to "dialogue," that is, to presumably speak and listen to each other with respect. In reality, there has been precious little listening on the part of those who want to uphold the anti-gay/lesbian status quo. Back in the early 1980s, when a group preparing a study on sexuality for the Mennonite Church wasn't seen as giving the right answers (because the group left it up to people to discern answers), that group was disbanded, according to John Lindscheid. A sexuality study was instead instituted with the authorities decreeing in advance that the conclusion would have to include an anti-gay clause. The Brethren/Mennonite Council for Gay/Lesbian Concerns has, for years, been denied space at church conferences to explain what they see as their Biblical views on homosexuality. So, delegates who have never had to meet and talk with out gay/lesbian people and whose primary input, more than likely, comes from conservatives who threaten to leave the conference (taking their bags o' dollars with them), of course vote for anti-gay resolutions. And this is dialogue? We Mennonoters have a modest proposal: If we are indeed going to expel congregations for questionable conduct/beliefs, why not allow all of us—including Mennonots—to define what are purge-worthy sins? Our list is on page 14. We invite you to squawk with us.
Interview: movement artist Scott LehmanSome snippets: One of the joys of doing Mennonot is that I get to meet people I would otherwise never know existed. Scott Lehman is one of those people. I knew I had to interview Scott when I received his letter (published in the Spring 1994 issue of Mennonot) in which he described himself as a "born and bred Menno, practicing Quaker/Buddhist, militantly queer, urbane, Goshen College dropout, sero-positive fag, tantric initiate, full-time art history student, bizzarre often nude performance artist." My interview with Scott ended up being more like a conversation with an old friend. During that time we talked about our upbringings, jello salad, bodies and shame, spirituality and Mennnonites (in which Scott said "the only thing I glean from Mennonite spirituality is an obsessive desire for simplicity"—a man after my own heart). We also talked a lot about Scott's art. Even though he
has a voice you could float out to sea on, Scott has chosen an
art form—movement —that is virtually wordless. In the
following interview, Scott describes how he uses simple gestures
and movements to create sacred spaces and rituals that—at
their best—heal both the performer and audience. Mennonot: You have said to me that you felt love coming from your home community, and you had a sense that you could maybe stand in front of them and say "This is who I am" and still feel accepted. Lehman: Yes. I feel there is unconditional love in my home community. It's a hope, it's a dream, it's an image that I hold dear: That if I were to stand in front of that congregation and spell it out... I'm sure it would create dialogue. I would really like to believe that the people would love me unconditionally. Mennonot: That love must have been something you felt from that community growing up there or saw around you? I'm asking you this because a lot of people who flee those rural Mennonite enclaves oftentimes can have kind of bitter feelings about that community. And I don't pick that up from you. Lehman: I think we also might have talked about how when people leave they tend to look back and idealize and romanticize, and I might be a victim of that. Mennonot: It's kind of a joke at the Mennonite church I go to that we can't do anything without bringing food into it. You imagine two Mennonites making love with zwieback between them. Lehman: Wow, what a great image. This is fabulous. Have you ever seen 9 1/2 weeks? Mennonot: Oh no, a Mennonite 9 1/2 Weeks. Lehman: Shoo-fly pie. Mennonot: Can you imagine how sticky? I guess that would be the point. Lehman: Just don't get it in my hair, honey, please. Mennonot: How would you describe what you do? Part dance? Part mime? Lehman: I call myself a movement artist. What I do is movement. I don't like to use the word dance because people think of modern dance, ballet, jazz. And movement is such a broader label. Everyone moves... I want to do things people know already. But it's the sequencing, it's the juxtaposition and the attention I put on it that raises it up out of a mundane, ordinary level. Mennonot: Can you describe that one performance piece you told me about earlier? I still think about that. Lehman: That was probably one of the most powerful things I've ever done. That, Sheri, was one of the shifts around dealing with shame around my body, and the shame of showing my body in front of people, and the shame of making myself vulnerable to a lot of people. In that piece I staged a shaving ritual, where I had four men shave my body, and we photographed that. And we showed those pictures during the performance... Then, when the slides end, I stand up and I'm in a lab coat. There were some scenes earlier in the piece that made some very literal references to death and dying and disease. And it was really exquisite how I was able to peel that lab coat off my body just like a cocoon. The buttons stayed buttoned, and the opening on the top was just large enough for me to squeeze out of. And I just squeezed out of it and let it drop to the floor, and I'm standing in front of the audience, full front, nude as the day I was born. With my body shaved. And in essence the only thing separating me from the audience is a thin layer of sweat. Mennonot: Didn't you tell me that after that experience you decided you were going to go back to school? Lehman: That one ritual, which was called Exposure, led me to create a whole evening of rituals that had that same attention and dramatic power and healing capability... That performance was the major shift for me to start thinking about my life in terms of years instead of weeks or months.
Forum: Menno female sexualitySome snippets: How the Peace Church helped make a lesbian out of meKay Stoner It's been said, "Scratch a faggot, and you'll find a Catholic or Jew underneath." The same might be said for dykes, only my version reads, "Scratch a lesbian, and you'll find a Menno or COB underneath." When I came out as a dyke at the age of 24, I expected to enter a world totally unlike any I'd known before. Frankly, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew precious little about the lesbian community (actually, I didn't know there was one), and I'd been repeatedly assured while growing up that women who lived without men were desperately lonely and unfulfilled. Lesbians were different from everyone else. They were angry women who couldn't get dates in their formative years, or who had been irreparably damaged by something a man did to them once upon a time. Now such women were to be tolerated in the Church (and accepted in theory), but only if they abstained from their "tendencies." The rare mention of a lesbian community was inevitably tied in with the "fairy bar" in Lancaster, where patrons' car tires were routinely slashed. Little did I know, but there were ample similarities between the lesbian life I came out to in 1990 and the Menno/Brethren life I thought I'd left for good two years before. There were so many parallels, in fact, it sent goosebumps up my arms. It was disconcerting. Here I'd been expecting a brave new world, filled with priorities and sensibilities totally unlike anything I'd ever known. Au contraire. The world I entered was almost too similar for comfort to the one I was trying to get out of my system... ...There's a common thread we share, one of heritage and conditioning. For we each claim 1,000 years of oppression as our legacy, as well as persecution at the hands of those who one group calls "the mainstream" and the other calls "the world." We're variations on a theme—a tradition of standing in our truth and paying a dear price for it. For each of the 1,000-plus pages in the Martyr's Mirror, there were 9,000 women destroyed by the Inquisition. Nine million "witches," healers, hags, maidens and crones were annihilated by the same powers that locked the Anabaptist heretics in metal ovens and had them drawn and quartered in the town square. All this for keeping to one's faith. All this for obeying the voice that speaks within. But it continues even today, for some of us. LIKE SO MANY OTHER LESBIANS and gay men, I knew I was "different" ever since I was a little girl. No amount of peer pressure was able to make my dates or boyfriends more attractive to me. (Even an eventual marriage to a man didn't "cure" me.) The friendships I had with other girls were always tinged with an emotion I didn't yet understand, but that made their parents nervous and made those girlfriends increasingly uncomfortable around me. There was something in me that would not conform to the sensibilities I was expected to have, and no amount of "lezzie" jokes could shame it out of me. Although it was years before I understood why I really chose to leave the Church, I was nevertheless forced to choose between the inner voice that called me to the company of women on every level of my being and the Church's heterosexual agenda. Like the Anabaptists that came before me, I was given the choice between the home of my origin and integrity of spirit. I left behind me the approval and social support of my church, as my ancestors left behind them their homes and land — each of us, hundreds of years apart, deciding in favor of the Great Unseen. For me, coming out and living openly as a lesbian was as vital to the salvation of my soul as my forebears' embracing of pacifism and Anabaptism was to them. Both choices, in their own way and in their own day, smack of blasphemy — but only to the outside observer. To the ones making the decisions, anything less is a violation of the soul. But my choice didn't come without a price. After coming out, I realized that I could no longer live wherever I wanted to. My parents had hoped (and, I think, still do) that I would move closer to their home. But that's easier dreamed of than done. For they live in Pennsylvania, the state with the highest number of homophobic-induced homicides. "Queer bashing" doesn't make it into the newspapers much, but when a transvestite was shot between the eyes just around the corner from my apartment in Philadelphia, it confirmed what I felt: that as long as I am different from the stereotypical norm, I am not entirely safe. If this danger was so close to home in a major city where my rights as a lesbian were protected by law, I shuddered to think what it would be like in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, where my lesbian friends couldn't even say "dyke" or "gay" without flinching. When I chose my next home with my lover, it was in a carefully screened locale, where we were assured people were more accepting. It reminded me all too much of accounts in the Martyr's Mirror of dispossessed Anabaptists wandering from one village to the next, looking for a home and a place to worship as they felt called. THIS SORT OF EXPERIENCE makes fine fodder for a persecution complex. And my Peace Church upbringing endowed me with nothing less. Now it seems like the same song, 94th verse, as my childhood training kicks into gear with each new report of anti-queer violence. The proverbial tapes switch on in the back of my head, whispering "Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you. . . for so persecuted they the prophets (or heretics) before you." I've been taught well that the highest form of self-expression is often greeted with violent attacks from the "world" and that suffering comes as part of the package when you live true to your conscience. Coming out and being harassed on the street (whether by word or action) was perhaps less traumatic for me than those not raised to expect it. So the attacks from outside my lesbian community, even when they came from the Church itself, seemed more like validation than discouragement. The community of faith that wished I wasn't "like that" seemed to have forgotten it had planted seeds of dissent in me far deeper than its words or deeds could penetrate. And while the M/B church community may not have encouraged me to choose this lesbian life, it did provide me with valuable tools that enabled me to do so. It may not have taught me to "get with the girls," but it taught me to listen to my heart, my conscience, to be honorable and honest and just with those around me, and to follow the guidance of higher things not seen or heard by others. And that, more than anything else, has made it possible for me to come out as a dyke and to live this life to the best of my God-given ability—regardless of what the rest of the world has to say about it. A Mennowoman's angry manifesto on sexualityKaye L. Brubaker As a shy MennoNerd, I am most vocal in cyberspace. My "angry manifesto" below erupted during a discussion of celibacy on the electronic mailing list, MennoLink. I had ventured that the Catholic tradition of celibate vocations is not so much a statement that sexuality is evil, as a way of protecting families from the inevitable conflicts between the demands of church vocation and the demands of family life. Another MennoLinker responded with a quote from Tertullian: "The gateway to hell is between a woman's legs," pointing out that this prevalent attitude probably colored the development of the priesthood and was indeed already present before the New Testament canon was completed (see I Tim. 4:3-4). That set me off, and I dashed off the following message: What about us, Mennonites and Mennonots, here and now? What about our views on women and sex? I am angry at a culture that teaches little girls that their sexuality is bad and dirty, so secret and private that they never learn to enjoy and appreciate their sexual nature. I am angry at a culture that lets women live their whole lives without experiencing orgasm. I am angry at a church that "disciplined," sent packs of admonishing elders, kicked young women out for wearing blue instead of black yet ignored (ignores?) men and boys who abuse their daughters and sisters. I am angry at a church high school that obsessed about necklines and hemlines, far out of proportion to its concern for girls' spiritual or intellectual gifts. I am angry at the Mennonite concept of "modesty," defined as how women must dress and behave in order to protect men from the "gateway to hell" of women's sexual nature. The message about sex as I received it growing up Mennonite: Sex is something that men (not women) enjoy so much that they can't control themselves, given the invitation or the opportunity. To indulge this animal drive (outside of marriage) would be sinful for the man, but doubly so for the woman because she probably tempted him. Therefore, women must dress and behave so as not to tempt men. Now, men might try to tempt young women. (How they might do so was always a mystery, because the idea that sex might feel good to me as well as to him was utterly beyond me. Candy, maybe? Flowers?) So we must be ever vigilant, alert to glances, comments, hands, not let things go "too far." If God blessed a girl or woman with physical beauty, she must not flaunt it, and if God didn't, she must not try to improve herself. A man must be prepared to "go gently" with his unspoiled, innocent bride on their wedding night. (How is the guy supposed to know what to do?) I don't know precisely where I got all this. My parents were generally silent on the issue (as are many Menno parents on many issues -- including anger, but that's another topic for another issue of Mennonot). Probably by osmosis, by my own interpretation of the rules, and from some almost explicit remarks in Christian Family Living class in high school. CFL was our answer to sex education; our poor teacher had a hard time saying the word "sex" without clearing his throat first. Ahem.
HumorO.J. Simpson, professed heterosexual, arrested for murderTop ten reasons to consider joining a Mennonite churchReferral Form for Congregational ExcommunicationPleasure with Pain for LeavenStepping into the futureClick the above to take a step into the future with Ross L. Bender. Issue #3 marked the first of a regular column by Ross L. Bender. Ross lives in Philly, teaches ESL at Penn, and attends the West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship. The title of Bender's column comes from a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne: Pleasure with pain for leaven, summer with flowers that fell, remembrance fallen from heaven, and madness risen from hell. You can email Ross at rbender@sas.upenn.edu. |
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