Many readers may know that the German philosopher Nietzsche was unjustly misrepresented after the war as the philosophical father of Nazism. The reality is that it was not he, but his sister, who was the fully-fledged Nazi; and unfortunately, she had sole publishing rights to his works after he died, and was successful in the very selective spin she gave to his writings. Her brother, who was strongly opposed to militarism and to anti-Semitism, also had a particular aversion to religion, and directed a great deal of his ire towards dogmatic Christianity. In fact, far from being a proto-Nazi whose views were abhorrent and stupid, Nietzsche had a lot of important things to say. He accused Christianity of having given human sexuality poison to drink: a charge that feels valid to me, although I would regard all three Abrahamic religions in their dogmatic forms as being profoundly sexually repressive. For example, all three forbid masturbation and sex outside of heterosexual marriage: and even the nature of sex within marriage is controlled by doctrines.
One of Nietzsche’s brilliant insights sheds light on a
particularly pernicious aspect of the suffering of lesbian, gay and bisexual
people who are in that early phase of resistance to the reality of our sexual
orientation. He wrote, "Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects
himself as one who despises." This reflection provides an acute insight into
what often seems to happen to us, usually when we are children, as we start to
become aware of being LGB in a profoundly homophobic environment, where we
have been taught that having homoerotic thoughts and feelings is shameful,
depraved and even sinful. So many LGB children across the globe still lack the
information needed to counter lies and prejudice about homosexuality, which
find their most virulent manifestation in the dogmatic forms of Christianity,
Islam and Judaism. Neither do children have the emotional maturity to cope with
such a conflict between their sexuality and their socialised guilt and horror
about it, without it having the potential to cause significant trauma.
When we as LGB people feel ashamed, guilty and anxious about
the raging pubescent sexuality that besieges us in our teens, it is usually the
case that turning to a sympathetic adult for support and advice feels like too
great a risk; and considering how some people react to such disclosures, and
the way that confidential information can find itself leaking out to the wrong
people, in many cases it probably is too great a risk. And so the conflicted
LGB teenager ends up trying to sort out this whole scary mess on his or her
own: with no-one to turn to for advice, and nowhere to turn to for information.
At this point, some readers may be scoffing, and objecting
that LGB characters commonly feature in popular TV soaps these days, with much
less stigma attached to being LGB, and plenty of opportunities for
sympathetically-received disclosure. Yet even if that were always the case
nowadays in Britain, it certainly is not in many parts of the world. And there
are many children growing up in Britain today who are being raised in religious
cultures that are very hostile to homosexuality: a number of whom are cocooned
further by being made to attend (taxpayer-funded) fundamentalist faith schools
by their parents.
When I was a teenager in the UK of the 1970s and early
1980s, having begun to realise I was gay at around age twelve, I found myself
in the very isolated and conflicted situation I describe above. Although my
parents were not religious believers, and were not homophobic – indeed, they
had a gay friend whom they very much liked - the vicious and obsessive
homophobia that poisoned the culture of my school, and ruined my schooldays,
gained the upper hand in my psyche. This brings me back again to the quotation
I picked out from Nietzsche: "Whoever despises himself nonetheless
respects himself as one who despises." Where can you go psychologically if
you feel so bad about yourself? If you feel such shame and guilt about powerful
feelings you have been programmed to believe you should not be feeling? What
place can you shift to that will make you powerful, moral, clean, “normal”
again? That place, as Nietzsche identifies, is “contempt”: contempt for one’s
homoerotic feelings and, insofar as these feelings are identified with our
deepest identity – which they normally are – we seek a paradoxical refuge in
contempt for ourselves as people.
This is a process that was described by the psychologist
George Weinberg in his influential 1972 book, “Society and the healthy
homosexual,” where he argued that it was not LGB people who had the pathology,
but anti-gay people and societies instead. He was the person who coined the
term “homophobia”, which was described as an aversion to LGB people and
homosexuality based on irrational fear. Weinberg wrote perspicaciously about
how lesbian and gay people internalise the homophobia in their environment, and
end up turning society’s hostility and loathing in on themselves as a result.
This is where Nietzsche and Weinberg converge.
It is surely challenging enough to be a common-or-garden
adolescent, dealing with body changes, hormone-related mood changes, minor
identity crises, family pressures, school demands and the Angst of finding some
kind of security and affirmation in what can be a hostile and competitive peer
environment, including attempts at teen dating if he or she is fortunate enough
to have the opportunity. My own adolescence was spent trying to avoid contact
with all but the most gentle of my peers, for fear of anyone finding out about
my sexuality, and because of a deep sense of being profoundly different from
everyone else to the extent that I usually felt very ill-at-ease in peer
company. There were one or two other reasons why I felt so different, but the
consciousness of my sexuality was without doubt the most significant factor. To
compound the turmoil, I had also developed a crush on a few of the boys at
school, and every day I experienced the joy and excitement of seeing them,
fused with a deep sense of guilt and self-loathing, and a feeling of anxiety
that one of them might discern what I felt for him.
My two refuges were music, where I enjoyed at least a
limited feeling of belonging and acceptance as leader of the school orchestra;
and school work, where I was able to hide behind the identity of the “academic”
who apparently wasn’t interested in anything but study. These are very flimsy
refuges, of course, and the tsunami was on its way.
The tsunami needed an earthquake to trigger it, and that
earthquake was the unmitigated disaster of an introduction to fundamentalist
Christianity. I must have been around fourteen when one of the few friendly
classmates invited me to visit her church. The convenience of door-to-door
minibus transport was even on offer. This was a time of unbearable loneliness
and social isolation for me, and particularly given my apparently hopeless
sexual orientation conflict, it was a time when I was extremely vulnerable to a
welcoming human community, to the possibility of a new identity, and to the
possibility of supernatural intervention to take my homosexuality away.
This was an evangelical church that cleaved to the absurdity
of claiming every word in the Bible was true and infallible, because it was
inspired by God. There were even books on sale by a faux-intellectual pseudo-philosopher
called Francis Schaeffer, who wrote hogwash that, to a neurotically preoccupied
fourteen-year-old, with its references to Aquinas, Sartre and Kierkegaard, had
the superficial appearance of being very profound and learned, and making
sense. I once read that Kafka described Christianity as a “chasm filled with
light,” and in the case of this fundamentalist form of Christianity I had encountered,
that was certainly true.
My literalistic reading of the Bible, and the teachings of
the church “pastors”, revealed that homosexual “acts” were a sin, as were gay
fantasies and the deliberate entertaining of any homoerotic thoughts. Not only
that, but the church taught that practising homosexuals would be condemned to an eternity of being burned alive in hell fire.
Whereas I had hoped for a divine rescue response as a result
of my encounter with Christianity, I ended up instead feeling a great deal more
guilt and anxiety, and a great deal more despair. The tsunami was starting to
contact, and I started having chest pains caused by anxiety, and agoraphobic
panic attacks whenever I went outside the front door. As is so often the case,
the anxiety started to look for new worries to attach to, and I used to lie in
bed awake at night, wondering whether I would be evaporated in my sleep by a
Russian nuclear attack.
It was becoming increasingly difficult for me to function
any more, and I was very worried about the chest pains, thinking there was
something wrong with my heart: which paradoxically increased my anxiety and made
the pains worse. Eventually, unable to make my way to school, or to function in
any way normally, and under pressure from my parents who were walking on
eggshells, I agreed to go to see the doctor. To my relief, she confirmed the
chest pains were being caused by anxiety, and I managed to persuade her to sign
me off school for a few weeks. There was still no question of telling anyone I
was gay.
At some point, I managed to struggle back to school, and
struggle through my O-levels. The religious trauma had not ended; and by this
point, I was in such turmoil that my capacity for rational thought and analysis
was being overridden by synaptic messages of panic and doom conveyed by chronic
and intense waves of anxiety. I became obsessed with the appalling concept of
divine condemnation and being burnt alive in a lake of fire for eternity, and
worried that, should I ever abandon these hard-line religious beliefs and end
up having sex with men, and the beliefs turn out to be true, such grotesque
everlasting torment could be my lot. Pascal’s Wager is pretty terrifying stuff
when it climbs off the philosophy text page and into empirical reality.
A new kind of emotion came to join the anxiety: depression.
Incapacitating clinical depression: not the kind of fairly common (albeit still
often intensely painful) depression that everyone has from time to time when
things go very wrong in life. This depression felt as though I had had liquid
lead injected into my brain, removing the capacity to experience any emotion
other than anxiety and an unbearable, heavy feeling of discomfort that defies
all description. These feelings went on for months and months. In the end, I
was dysfunctional, I was only managing to make it into school for odd days, and
my parents had become stressed out and dismayed at my refusal to seek any further
medical help. Eventually, the pain was so unbearable that I went to see the
doctor, told him about my symptoms, and told him I was gay. My recollection is
that he gently said, “Ah yes, well that’s something we can sort out.” It seemed
quite an extraordinary thing to say. Perhaps he thought some kind of aversion
therapy would be offered, combining gay pornography with electric shocks or
nausea-inducing drugs. Yes, that’s what used to happen for a time. Or perhaps
he had in mind a gentler solution: some counselling to help me come to terms
with being gay.
I was referred to see a psychiatrist, and I was extremely
fortunate. When I told him I was gay, he was very well-informed, and very
supportive. He prescribed some antidepressants that soon managed to alleviate
most of the anxiety and agoraphobia; treating the depression took a lot longer.
There was a coincidence – which I prefer to refer to as a synchronicity, in the
Jungian sense. Over the course of our consultations, the psychiatrist revealed
that he was also gay .... as well as a practising Catholic. He had obviously
also been through some turmoil in coming to terms with his own sexuality. Some
might regard him as unprofessional for disclosing this information to a patient,
but on the contrary: it was exactly what I needed. We had lengthy discussions
about the fundamentalist Christianity I had been subjected to, and the morbid
terrors to which it had given rise. These concerns could only be addressed on a
philosophical and theological level, and he offered information, lent me books,
and sought information from his own priest, all of which successfully released
me from the curse of evangelical Christianity. He was also someone who I knew
understood what I had been going through, and someone who was able to offer me
sound, practical advice. Despite my strong aversion to the hierarchy of the
Catholic Church and the behaviour of those who buy into its orthodox teachings,
Dr Thomas is a reminder that there are also liberal, compassionate, intelligent
and thoroughly good people of faith around as well.
This account ends with good news. I survived. With Dr
Thomas’s support, and with the support of my school which allowed me to stay on
for another year, and in particular with the help, guidance and friendship of
my very understanding and conscientious form tutor, I managed to take my
A-levels and secure a place at Brasenose College, Oxford, to study German and
Philosophy. (Where, incidentally, Dr Jeffrey John – hopefully soon to be
Britain’s first openly gay bishop – was the college chaplain, and where I
overlapped by a year with another great figure who has championed LGBT equality
– the Prime Minister, David Cameron.) I had come to understand at the deepest
possible level of experience just how destructive homophobia is to the young
human psyche, and how devastatingly evil and contemptibly false are the claims
of fundamentalist religion that terrify people into conformity and into
sacrificing their happiness, well-being and self-respect. I put my energies
into running Oxford GaySoc, today called Oxford University LGBTQ Society; into
campaigning for gay rights; and into inviting regular speakers to inform
members about the emerging AIDS/HIV crisis, so that we could learn how to
protect ourselves.
Any religion that teaches children they risk being tortured
for eternity by burning in hell for entertaining perfectly natural and joyful
sexual thoughts and feelings, and for at any time in the future enjoying sexual
experiences with a member of the same gender, is a religion from which children
need to be protected. Any religion that teaches children that gay and lesbian
people’s relationships are sinful and worthy of contempt and condemnation, is a
religion from which children need to be defended. There are children growing
up across the world, including in the UK, who are commonly taught such things
by their families and their religious communities. These children, and
particularly LGB children, need to be protected from such abuse, and we do not
protect them if we are silent, or if we buy into the current intellectually
dishonest, pseudo-liberal dogma that certain religions must be beyond
criticism. Whether it is fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Islam or
fundamentalist Judaism - though Judaism does not, however, teach the doctrine of hell
fire - we are dealing with belief systems that cause some degree of the kind of
suffering to children that I have described in this article, and that, I am
sure, a number of readers will also have experienced at first hand.
There must be no compromise with any fundamentalist form of
religion that peddles such horrific contempt for LGB people and poisons the
minds of the young. Until we identify and root out all the contempt we have
learned to feel for ourselves, and instead uncompromisingly direct it towards
the thought systems that have caused it, we will continue to collude with the vile
forces that oppress us. We must always strive to respect and love other human
beings as people, no matter what their creed: but we are under no obligation to
respect their false, cruel and bigoted beliefs, even if those beliefs derive
from an ancient book and tradition, and are, as a consequence, referred to as a
“religion”. Indeed, treating cruel beliefs with “respect” will only delay their
demise and demean us as LGB people in the process, as we are the detested objects
of those beliefs’ violent contempt.
© Gary Powell, 2013