All over the world, somewhere between 2 and 5% of young people growing up realize that they are sexually and romantically attracted only to members of their own sex. Traditional societies in most parts of the world have asked these people to suppress this reality as unthinkably wicked. To add injury to insult, they have also asked these people, at maturity, to feign a heterosexual relationship, after misrepresenting themselves to a member of the opposite sex by saying that they are interested in such a relationship. Wherever such relationships are encouraged, women who want to marry a man have no guarantee of getting a genuinely interested male partner; they may get a concealed gay man instead. Men who want to marry a woman may be similarly tricked into taking a partner who secretly finds them sexually repellent. Religions that principally strive to uphold love and justice have been the main enforcers of this system of arbitrary fraud, which has gay and heterosexual victims in equal numbers. These religions have done this not deliberately, but as a result of misunderstanding – misunderstanding that has extended to misinterpretation of their own sacred texts.

 

Not long ago, the rejection of gay relationships by Christianity went without question. Since the 1950’s, however, biblical scholarship and an increased understanding of gay relationships have completely changed this situation. Two old self-fulfilling prophecy deadlocks between Christianity and its gay children, the rebellious “you reject me therefore I’ll reject you” and the self-hating “you reject me therefore I’ll reject myself” were seen through by Rev. Troy Perry and other pioneers of gay-positive Christianity (not to mention the Society of Friends who decided to accept gay relationships many years earlier), and an infusion of first-hand knowledge about gay lives and loves transformed our perspectives on the scriptures.

The key to this transformation was that the unmistakable presence of love in gay relationships could not be reconciled with scriptures clearly aimed at loveless acts. Therefore these scriptures could only reasonably be understood as criticisms of other phenomena, such as temple cult prostitution or exploitative sexual surrogacy (using the same sex as a rough, second-rate substitute for the opposite sex). Numerous statements made by Jesus validated this focus on love as the basis of scriptural interpretation, especially “you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind (and) you must love your neighbour as yourself – on these two commandments depend the whole Law and the prophets also.” The idea that every one of the Laws of Moses was dedicated to this love and reverence left very little room for miscellaneous, inscrutable commands that forbade loving actions.

 

The ancient Hebrew Law (often termed “Mosaic law” in honour of its putative authorship by Moses) was, of course, replete with many seemingly inscrutable commands, including such famous prohibitions as those against planting mixed crops in the same field and against mixing two types of thread in a single cloth. Although Christians were released from the letter of these commands, instructed by examples such as Jesus’ saving of an adulteress from stoning and Peter’s revelation about the potential ritual cleanliness of the gentiles (symbolized by his vision about being commanded to eat meats considered unclean by the Mosaic laws), they were still left with the problem of considering how such seemingly inexplicable prohibitions could ever have been valid. The problem was all the more poignant because Jesus himself defended the law as divine work, saying that “not one dot or stroke” of it (perhaps originally “one yowd or khiriq,” two small symbols in Hebrew writing) would pass away “until everything is accomplished.” If God were an author of impossible-to-explain, apparently arbitrary prohibitions (despite statements from Jesus such as “the sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath” and his defiance of arbitrary prohibition by allowing his followers to pick grain for eating on the holy day), then perhaps a divine prohibition against all homosexual acts could still exist, even though it obstructed and mischaracterized love, and tended to force people into insincere pseudo-heterosexual marriages. Certainly, some fundamentalists, who envision God as an all-powerful celestial despot with the right and power to make unexplained demands for anything God has a whim to demand, are only too happy to accept a stray anti-homosexual law that exists independent of any revealed tie-in with the general promotion of divine love. Their happiness with this goes well beyond the common religious acceptance that God has a knowledge and a scope of vision infinitely surpassing our own (“my thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways – it is YHVH who speaks – yes, as high as the heavens are above the earth are my ways above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts”), and goes on to accept unquestioningly that God, who otherwise seems to have taken some pains to communicate with people, would not bother to try to explain such prohibitions. But, as Jesus said, “no one lights a lamp to cover it with a bowl or to put it under a bed. No, he puts it on a lampstand so that people may see the light when they come in. For nothing is hidden but it will be made clear, and nothing is secret but it will be known and brought to light.”

 

A greater understanding of the Law of Moses, indeed, contradicts the will to kowtow to the arbitrary and to unthinkingly salute the inscrutable. Many of the otherwise difficult-to-understand laws in the Mosaic canon are clearly linked to the overall theme of “monotypic ideality:” “the renunciation of unnecessary diversity of sensual experiences in favour of the ideal.” The phrase used to connote this idea in scripture is one rather difficult for most modern people to understand, namely, the injunction to “circumsize the heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16). Monotypic ideality specifically supports the promotion of monotheism in a polytheistic time and place, and might be roughly summarized as “getting people to see that it is better for them to be a holy people, one whose members know that they do not need to grab and mix every possible experience and apparent worldly advantage, even going into the muck and filth, or into incest and bestiality, or into the eating of unlikely creatures, or into worship of multiple made-up bronze gods.” The Mosaic prohibitions against a man “lying with a man as with a woman,” when they are considered in the context in which they arise, are clearly based on the underlying conception of a typologically definitive man whose ideal situation would be heterosexual marriage, but who has diverted himself to lying with other men out of sensual rapacity, motivated by the same factors as might motivate a man to sexually invade a beast (an act mentioned in the very next line of scripture after this prohibition in Leviticus 18). These scriptures, so long used to condemn homosexuals, are not related in any way to the situation of typologically distinct men who are intrinsically barred from the ideal of heterosexual marriage by a lack of the required heterosexual impulse, and who instead are best fit for an ideal of the gay relationship. Like the New Testament scriptures written by Paul, the Mosaic scriptures against men-with-men are directed against surrogacy, the common ancient and modern Middle Eastern/Mediterranean practice of the exploitation of “soft” men or boys by heterosexuals as surrogates for women.

 

Although it has become trendy among gay and other queer-identified academics recently to deny the existence of innately non-heterosexual men, or equivalent women, or to say that we are artifacts of a verbal definition of “the homosexual” and therefore don’t exist in societies that lack this concept, the plain truth underlying the existence of gay people as such is borne out in most of us by our obvious lack of viable heterosexual potential: we could possibly fake heterosexuality, or perhaps some of us could get into it to a very limited extent if we were desperate or determined to explore everything, but it is really not in our nature. No verbal definition or any other thought process did that to us. It is simply the way we are. Whether or not we could ever successfully perform a sex act with a person of the opposite sex, we don’t have the potential to experience the enduring sexual love that is the basis and reward of a loving relationship with members of the opposite sex. If we had sex with a partner so unnatural to our own natures, our feelings would not be much different from those of the person who has sex with a beast (apart from our guilt at having to tell lies to an innocent human partner in order to involve them in such a situation). Such an act would be an insult to its unwitting heterosexual co-participant, such as the woman in a socially forced marriage involving a gay man. It would be a fraudulent imitation of the potential of a real relationship. The principle of monotypic ideality laid out in Mosaic law inevitably directs us away from this fraud and towards finding our best loving potential in same-sex relationships. Not only, then, are we not condemned by these scriptures, but we are strongly directed to pay attention to our own ideality as God ordained it to us, and not to settle for anything less than our full loving potential. This is not self-willed attachment to our lusts of the flesh, as some fundamentalists would have it, but is rather, simply, a respect for love, a determination not to mix or confuse love with fakery. Herein lies the basis of a gay-positive orthodox Judaism.

 

People with no understanding of gay relationships or their potentials have great difficulty conceiving that the Mosaic scriptures against men lying with men might be specific to surrogacy and not applicable to gay men. The reason is that these scriptures seem so plain, so straightforward, and so simply vehement. In the minds of naïve readers, a picture is created of a man lying with a man, and then this picture seems to be branded with condemnation. “What could be easier to understand?” they ask. The problem with this simple interpretation is that life is sometimes more complex than the simple pictures that can be taken of it. Actions consist not just of what they look like, but also of their motivations and their consequences. A picture of someone giving a hungry child a piece of bread to eat may look good, but what if the bread is poisoned because the motivation is to kill the child? You and I may not be able to recognize the difference between the charity we seem to see and the homicide we are actually watching, but if we believe in God, we know that God knows the difference. God knows motive and consequence; God is perfectly aware when the same simple picture can represent two different situations. To take the Mosaic commandment as a simple picture encompassing every similar action is an oversimplification based on a denial of divine insight.

 

So how, then, could God actually condemn gays if that were truly God’s will? What kind of a scripture could be written that willful gay people couldn’t dodge around, if they were really condemned? The answer is obvious: a scripture giving an insightful and fully realistic condemnation, one going beyond an external view that also coincides with completely different phenomena. The situation of gays and Christianity would be entirely different if there were a divinely inspired scripture saying, “God knows that men-lying-with-men and women-lying-with-women can lead to rewarding relationships of love, trust and mutual support, and that the partners involved may by nature be unable to build such marital relationships with members of the opposite sex, but nonetheless this is considered evil and if you participate in such a relationship, you should be killed.” The commandment might go on to explain, “your built-in preference for this sort of relation is merely a whimsical cosmic torture exercised at God’s lordly pleasure and should not be taken as a license to love accordingly.” (Note that God, as all-seeing, would not have any access to the common fundamentalist denial that same-sex preference is predominantly an intrinsic characteristic.) The existing scriptures make it perfectly obvious that we are not dealing with such a macabre deity, but rather with a loving God. The same-sex acts that are condemned are perfectly clearly represented, explicitly or in context with nearby scriptures, as acts with no loving content or potential, exploitative in motive, commission and consequence. Many opposite-sex acts of the same unloving and exploitative, lustful (in the older sense of the word) nature are condemned with equal force.

 

So why, then, was there no contrastingly clear support of more loving same-sex relations as there was for loving heterosexual relations? The answer here must surely be that gay relationships as we know them today were not present, or at least not apparent, in order to become the subject of evaluation. Even though the potential for such relationships has clearly always existed and may have been realized sporadically in ancient history, the gay relationship, like democracy and the stock market, is for the most part a creative social construction that requires considerable social sophistication to come into being. The unavoidable difficulty of the gay relationship is that it, like the interracial marriage, is a minority phenomenon easily crushed by social prejudice. It can therefore be made to disappear, or at least to seem to disappear, for prolonged periods of time. Even individual gay people are easily rendered silent by social prejudice, leaving their reality out of the public sphere of discourse and understanding. It is thus not surprising that the bible that did not comment on the unrealized potential for loving same-sex relationships. There are many other obviously good, unrealized potentials that the bible did not comment on – for example, the potential for a law categorically banning slavery (The scripture “In Christ there is neither slave nor free” hints at this, but not strongly, as it seems to describe an equal status limited to dealings among Christians, and could be taken to suggest that the inferior status of a slave be temporarily ignored in religious meetings but otherwise preserved. The limitations on slavery in Deuteronomy 15 are limited to fellow-Hebrew slaves; foreigners are not included, as Deut. 20 makes clear.)

 

We do not normally expect scriptures to deal with unrealized social potentials. For example, we know that an all-knowing God, transcendent of spacetime, could at any point in biblical history have produced a scripture lauding elective democracy as fulfilling Jesus’ ideal of servant leadership among equals, and could even have complimented the future English, French and American peoples for their roles in developing such institutions. Nonetheless, we would find such an anachronistic scripture completely out of keeping with the rest of our known scriptures, including those with prophetic content. Likewise, then, the anomaly of an ancient scripture explicitly supporting the same-sex loving relationship (David’s famous comment about Jonathan’s love “surpassing the love of women” is encouraging, but ambiguous in context. Similarly, the profound devotion of Ruth and Naomi is touching, but there is nothing to suggest the two of them ever did any amorous touching). We find scriptural support for same-sex relationships mostly by deeply understanding the principles of love and honesty that are explicitly given in scripture.

 

The apparent condemnation of same-sex sexual acts in the Quran is fundamentally similar to that found in the Mosaic laws. It is complicated, however, by an extra degree of emphasis on the story of Lot. In Jewish and Christian scripture, the story of Lot is told in detail, but the frank accusations of male sex with males are missing. At most, the scriptures may have an obscure, veiled reference to a possible intention to commit same-sex rape. Any connection between the story as written and a general condemnation of same-sex acts withstands scrutiny so poorly that even most Christian and Jewish fundamentalists have abandoned this line of argument. In the Genesis version of this story, angels disguised as humans visit Lot in the wicked town of Sodom, where he lives under some suspicion as a resident alien, and are perceived as a threat by the locals. Lot’s house is besieged by a mob demanding that the visitors be sent out so that the mob can “know” them. The Hebrew verb “yadha” used to indicate this demand in the text happens by chance to be ambiguous, usually meaning ‘to know’ in the regular sense but sometimes serving as a euphemism for having sex. Lot refuses to send out the strangers to the mob and offers to send out his virgin daughters instead, presumably to be raped by the crowd. The angels rescue him from doing this by blinding the crowd. Lot’s (unlawful in Judaism) offer of his daughters was often interpreted in traditional Christianity as suggesting that the mob intended to sexually violate the angels, although, as many commentators have noted, this conclusion does not in any way logically follow from the sequence of events given. It is just as possible that Lot was hoping that the unruly mob, which would otherwise commit unspecified acts of violence against the strangers in his house, might decide to sate their aggressions by means of sexual violence directed at the daughters. Even if same-sex sexual acts were actually threatened by the mob, these acts could only have been acts of same-sex rape, and rape is always condemned. It makes no religious difference which sex is sexually violated in such an attack. Lot’s daughters were lower on the social totem pole than his visitors not just because they were women and humans, but also because they were family, not protected guests. (They also went on almost immediately to commit incest in a later story, perhaps making them unwholesome characters for the writer of the parable-like stories of Lot.) As for the men of Sodom, it seems much more reasonable that they were motivated by xenophobia and hostility to unauthorized strangers than that they were moved by a strange form of mass sexual aggression (which has no remotely known parallel in any gay milieu). They appear to be the equivalent of modern people who set fire to refugee centres. This interpretation is completely consistent with traditional interpretations of the story prior to the Christian era.

 

John Boswell thoroughly investigated Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Sodom story in Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (University of Chicago Press, 1980). He found that this story is referred to at several later points in Jewish scripture, and the sin attributed to the Sodomites is generally characterized as a violation of the hospitality laws protecting travellers, not as a sexual sin. Only at a much later point in history does a connection between homosexual behaviour and the Sodom story enter into circulation in some non-scriptural writings. Boswell also pointed out the correspondence between the Sodom story and the later story of Gibeah (Judges 19:22 ff.), in which virtually the same events were described again without attracting a traditional interpretation of same-sex lust. (Such an interpretation, however, has unrealistically been written in recently by translators of the New International Version and some other relatively interpretive, speculative modern bible translations. Other original aspects of the story, such as the description of the Benjaminite assailants as “sons of Belial” [the devil] may also have been suppressed in such translations, giving a clue that the text has been tampered with).

 

In the Quran, unlike in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, the same-sex idea is strongly stressed in connection with Lot. The Quran, as a series of lectures (“Quran” is often translated as “lecture”), often repeats key stories several times, and the story of Lot is one of these recurring themes. It generally occurs in a fragmentary form as one of a series of brief examples of what happened to societies that rejected their divinely ordained prophets. Here is a composite version of the story, with surah (Quranic chapter) names in square brackets:

 

“And we (God) sent forth Lot to his people. He said to them: ‘You commit indecent acts that no other nation has committed before you. You lust after men and assault them on your highways. You turn your gatherings into orgies.'” [The Spider] “You commit the carnal act, in lust, with men instead of women. Truly, you are an impious people.” [The Heights] “‘Are you blind that you should commit indecency, lustfully seeking men instead of women? Surely you are a senseless people.'” [The Ant] “‘Will you fornicate with males and leave your wives, whom God has created for you? Surely you are great transgressors.'” [The Poets]

 

“But his people’s only reply was: ‘Bring down God’s scourge on us if what you say is true.'” [The Spider] “Their only answer was: ‘Banish him from your city, him and his followers. They are men who would keep chaste.'” [The Heights]

“‘Lord,’ said he, ‘deliver me from these degenerate men.’ And when our messengers brought Abraham the good news (about the birth of his son), they said: ‘we are about to destroy the people of this town, for they are wicked men.’ Abraham said, ‘Lot dwells in it.'” [The Spider]

 

“‘We know well who lives in it,’ they replied. ‘We shall deliver him and all his relatives, except his wife, who will remain behind.'” [The Spider]

 

“And when our messengers came to Lot, he grew anxious about them, for he was unable to offer them protection. He thought, ‘this is indeed a day of grief.'” [Houd]

 

“His people, long addicted to evil practices, came running towards him.” [Houd] “The townsfolk came to him rejoicing.” [Al-Hijr] “He said: ‘These men are my guests; do not disgrace me. Have fear of God and do not shame me.’ They replied, ‘Did we not forbid you to entertain strangers?'” [Al-Hijr] “‘My people,’ he said, ‘here are my daughters: they are more lawful to you'” [Houd] “‘Take them, if you are bent on evil.'” [Al-Hijr].

 

“They replied, ‘You know we have no need of (Pickthall translation: ‘we have no right to’) your daughters. You know full well what we are seeking.'” [Houd]

 

“They (the angels) said, ‘Lot, we are the messengers of your lord; they shall not touch you…In the morning their hour will come.'” [Houd] “We (God) put out their sight and said, ‘Taste my punishment, now that you have heard my warning.'” [The Moon] “When the sun rose a dreadful cry rang above them. We laid their town in ruin and rained clay stones upon them.” [Al-Hijr].

 

The Quran retells several other biblical stories with altered details: for example, a different account is given of the story of Joseph in Egypt. The newborn Jesus delivers a speech from the cradle that is not recorded in Christian scripture. In the Quran, Jesus is just a man, albeit an important prophet, and (according to traditional interpretation of an ambiguous passage) is not crucified but instead ascends to heaven intact. The explicit same-sex reference in the story of Lot (the word “Sodom” is never mentioned) is in keeping with this general trend towards revised or reinterpreted Quranic versions of earlier scriptures. The traditional Muslim interpretation of the discrepancies among the scriptures is that the Jewish and Christian scriptures were incorrect or incomplete, since the divinely composed books of scripture originally given to these people were not compiled into written form immediately and were therefore corrupted with accidental or willful errors. The traditional Christian interpretation is that Muhammad, who is not accepted as a true prophet (just as Islam does not accept Paul as a true prophet), had only a partial knowledge of Judaeo-Christian scriptures and could produce only rudimentary versions or novel embellishments in the Quran. My own view is that these age-old contentions about which religion is correct are not relevant to the consideration of the scriptures regarding same-sex sexual actions, and the balance of this article is written treating the Quran as valid scripture, and the well-attested hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) as having their customary Islamic significance.

 

There are actually two sides to the traditional Islamic condemnation of same-sex sexual activities. The specific condemnation of the people to whom Lot was sent is one of these; the other is the issue of zina, or sex outside of marriage (sometimes translated as “indecency” or “fornication”). The sole Quranic quotation linking same sex activity to zina without mentioning Lot is from the surah “Women”: “if two men among you (commit zina), punish them both. If they repent and mend their ways, let them be. God is forgiving and merciful.” The injunction against zina, like the Mosaic laws against same sex activity, is clearly based on a scenario in which two men who ought to restrict themselves to marital sex, the opposite of zina (implying that this better option was perfectly plausible for them), lustfully had sex with one another instead. In doing so, they did something equivalent to adultery or premarital sex, which are also described as zina. That is to say, they were indulging in sexual extras or diversions, not in acts that worked for the good of their potential or current loving relationships. The word zina is consistently used to denote these breaches into deleterious extramarital excess. It is clear that this point of view can be applied without problem to same-sex surrogacy, which is just such a sexual diversion for an ordinarily heterosexual person. If applied to lesbians and gay men, for whom sex within heterosexual marriage is only possible in an atmosphere of deception or dishonesty, it has the strange effect of sanctioning this ugliness for them while banning their honest relationships. The Quran does not appear to sanction this situation; it says, for example, “brothers, fear God and speak the truth.” There is no religious sanction for homosexuals to feign heterosexuality. It also says, “God has never put two hearts within one man’s body.” The idea, entertained by some naïve young gays, that marriage alone will somehow make them heterosexual, is not plausible. It seems much more reasonable overall to conclude that the ban against same-sex extramarital or premarital sex is exactly that – an injunction against such activities by people who are, will be or could be legitimately heterosexually married.

 

The ban against zina is further reinforced by Quranic statements such as “blessed are the believers who restrain their carnal desires – except with their wives and slave girls, for these are lawful to them – and do not transgress through lusting after other women” and “worshippers…who restrain their carnal desire (save with their wives and slave-girls for these are lawful to them: he that lusts for other than these is a transgressor)…shall be laden with honours and shall dwell in fair gardens.” It is clear that such statements, although referring to believers in general, address only a subset of people. Women are obviously not addressed. The injunctions are directed to men alone; the men in question appear to be free heterosexual males who would commonly own slaves. The question is whether the statements are nonetheless intended to extend to men of all sorts. That there might be more than one recognized, fundamentally different type of man is suggested elsewhere in the Quran: the surah “Light” states that women “can reveal their splendour” to a limited number of people, including “male attendants lacking in natural vigour.” Although this description may seem to suggest ancient court eunuchs, it is now well known that the very rare individuals who are born as eunuchs, as well as men made eunuchs early in life through castration, often experience strong heterosexual desire and may well have sex with women, even though they cannot impregnate them. On the other hand, any woman is perfectly safe from interference if she reveals her splendour to a typical (i.e., non-bisexual) gay man. It would make little sense to prescribe to any man lacking natural vigour with women that he should regard wives and slave girls as his legal mates. Moreover, it seems illogical that statements about restraining one’s desires in favour of one’s wives and slave girls could apply to those who have no desires for wives and slave girls in the first place; to try to fake a desire for such things would hardly qualify as restraint. It seems impossible to believe that an all-knowing God would enjoin gay men, via the Quran, to restrict themselves to a desire that God knows full well they do not experience. On the other hand, it is perfectly understandable that heterosexual men would be asked to restrain themselves in this fashion.

 

Some readers may nonetheless find it simpler to deduce that all men are being addressed by the statements about legal sex partners, since women are clearly excluded and nothing is immediately said that seems to suggest a division among the men being addressed. This problem with this deduction is that it ignores a fundamental ambiguity in the philosophy of categories (taxonomy) that affects all public statements. I apologize in advance that parts of the rest of this paragraph may be difficult to read, but I can see no way around this issue. Whenever a category of natural objects is being cited, it can be cited either in a prototypifying (or normatizing or idealistic) way, or in a circumscriptional (or all-encompassing) way. To use an example from my own technical field, if one says “yeast” protypically, one means a few fermentative species that cause bread to rise and produce alcohol in wine. If, however, one says “yeast” circumscriptionally, one also includes several hundred additional fungal species with small budding cells and no leavening or fermentative capacity whatsoever. This sort of linguistic ambiguity is often found in statements about men, as is best illustrated by sayings about rough-and-tough places “where men are men” (or “where men are real men”). In such phrases, the first word “men” is circumscriptional (indicating all men) and the second is prototypifying. Every circumscriptional natural category includes plenty of exceptional and marginal items – for example, a person born with both male and female sexual organs could not be excluded from “all men.” Prototypifying categories, however, automatically exclude or minimize the unusual cases. The Quran, which is often explicitly directed towards men of Mecca and Medina, would not have succeeded in being a beautifully written, plain-language book if it had gone off on tangents about all sorts of unusual and exceptional cases every time it addressed its main audience. In order to be rhetorically effective, the Quran had to be spoken clearly to its prototypical, normal audience. Therefore, one does not expect an immediate, extended side-track about what rare categories of men, hermaphrodites and so on ought to do with their marital lives when Mohammed is reciting to an audience of typical Arabian clansmen at the time of the hejira. Words such as “believers” and “worshippers,” in statements about sexual restraint, were clearly addressed to mature Muslim, heterosexual men. This does not mean that the precepts given cannot edify other kinds of men, such as non-Muslims or pubescent youth, but it does entail that some of the heterosexual injunctions may be specifically intended for heterosexuals.

 

With regard to liwat, the sin of the people Lot was sent to, the Quran, like the Mosaic law, seems to present a simple picture of men with men, and an apparent blanket condemnation. Again, the context is violence. To put it mildly, none of the kind, loving, supportive or uplifting qualities commonly found in gay or lesbian relationships are seen in the same-sex relations that are depicted. Inhospitality and rape are unambiguously connected. The men involved are unquestionably heterosexual and mostly or all married, as seen by the mention of their wives “whom God has created for you.” In Islam, however, the contrast between these violent acts and the constructive, loving acts seen in gay relationships does not immediately put these two types of acts into different religious categories as it does in Christianity. The reason is that Islamic scripture, while supportive of love in many of its forms (ranging from friendly to parental to marital) does not appear to root the basis of all scriptural evaluation explicitly in love as Christian scripture does. Similarly, Islamic law does not appear to relate as consistently as Mosaic law does to the theme of the holiness of optimal relationships based on self-restraint. Such optimal and balanced relationships are generally favoured in Islam, of course, but the rhetorical construction of Islamic law is not conspicuously attached to this common thread in the way that the rhetoric of Mosaic law is. It is more or less taken for granted by many interpreters that God’s commands in Islamic scripture and the Prophet’s hadiths may well be self-standing; no correlation with general moral themes is strongly expected of every single commandment, although such correlations may of course be found in profound insight. Indeed, God has laid out in Islam several constructive formulas that simply appear to give the ummah, the community, common direction: the qiblah or direction of prayer, the timing and length of Ramadan, the month of fasting, the times of daily prayer, and so on. A blanket injunction against homosexuality, at first sight, seems a plausible addition to this catalogue of community-structuring admonitions. Even loving relations that maximized a non-heterosexual person’s moral potential and prevented false heterosexual pretenses could perhaps be banned by such an injunction.

 

The main problem with this scenario, although its possibility must be admitted, is that it seems far-fetched. Especially given the traditional connection between zina, extramarital sex, and same-sex activities, a connection between the apparent ban on homosexuality and the general scope of moral matters seems much more plausible. It is unlikely, for example, that anyone would claim that the Islamic ban on adultery was an otherwise unexplained constructive injunction not connecting with moral responsibilities, so why make this claim for same-sex activities? It seems likely that the sexual injunctions in the Quran all relate to the ethics of relationships. The Quranic passages condemning the people of Lot clearly suggest that if these people had better judgement, they would desist from same-sex activities and restrict themselves to heterosexual acts. One thing that all non-bisexual gay men and lesbians know, however, is that a gay person cannot acquire heterosexual potential through an act of judgement or wisdom. The matter in question is not one of free will or cognition. One can certainly, in the name of religious obedience, acquire a will to fake heterosexual interest, even to the point of trying to fool oneself, but somehow this does not seem to be what the scriptures are aiming at. At the same time, it would seem very strange to reinterpret the Quranic passages as suggesting that the people of Lot were gay men who lacked the power to turn away from their same-sex interests. It is much more traditional and more psychologically realistic to infer that the scripture attributed free moral choice to these people, and condemned them for choosing wrongly. The passages only make sense if they refer to people fully capable of ordinary heterosexual lives. Once again, as in the Judaeo-Christian situation, it really appears as if two different situations are being conflated together by traditional scriptural interpretation: a situation, mentioned in scripture, in which people who have ordinary levels of heterosexual potential are being condemned for deliberately and wantonly choosing to engage in aggressive or otherwise unsavoury same-sex actions, and a situation, not mentioned in scripture, where a people who through no choice of their own have no or insufficient heterosexual potential for true heterosexuality and conventional marriage, and whose same-sex actions would ordinarily be connected with behaviours that would otherwise be considered meritorious, are associated with the former scenario through mistaken identity.

 

The idea that traditional Muslim societies would normally confuse the heterosexual deviation of same-sex surrogacy with all same-sex sexual activity is strongly reinforced when one knows how common same-sex sexual exploitation has traditionally been in many middle-eastern and north African countries. Some Arabic, Turkish and Persian-speaking societies have traditionally carried over the ancient Greek de facto tolerance of using malakoi, “soft” men or boys who are willing to take the passive role in anal sex, as surrogate women. The survival of these customs into modern times is abundantly documented, for example in Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer’s Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies (Harrington Park Press, New York, 1992). This book contains some scholarly writings, but also contains several personal accounts in which western or western-educated gay men with post-gay-liberation cultural assumptions recount their attempts to establish sexual liaisons with men informed by traditional middle eastern assumptions. They are greatly surprised to find out that the great majority of their partners consider themselves heterosexual and will only take the sexual role that they consider to be masculine, i.e., the penetrating role. There is generally no question of an equal relationship ever being formed or even contemplated. Consider these quotes from David Reed, who tried to carry on a North American style promiscuous gay lifestyle in Pahlevi-era Tehran:

 

“Men with beards will improve their (passive) gay sex life by shaving. Remember that Iranians, many of whom sport beards, want female surrogates for sex…” (Schmitt and Sofer, op. cit., p. 65)

 

(An Iranian “trick” or sexual contact, if given a pile of sex magazines to look at in Reed’s apartment) “will pick up Playboy, never Playgirl. He will turn to photos of women’s rear ends (and)…he will point to the woman and point at you. He does not ask if you like her; he asks if you will be her.” (Schmitt and Sofer, op. cit., p. 66)

 

(See also update footnote at the end)

 

Comments like this from a single person could just be the grousing of one disgruntled westerner, but all other accounts support the same general scenario, and the specific vocabulary connected with the sorts of actions and people involved are given in several languages and dialects – for example, the Moroccan zamel or the Persian kuni, indicating a malakos or catamite. The sexual acts that take place are often technically illegal under religious or civil law, but are seldom prosecuted or popularly considered to be worthy of special attention if kept quiet. In any case, for example, in the highly traditionally influenced Islamic Republic of Iran Penal Code (1982), acts of this nature could only be successfully prosecuted if attested to by four male, Muslim eyewitnesses, or confessed four times, or otherwise elaborately evidenced. Prosecution is thus reserved for the utterly careless, the flagrant, the unlucky or the politically persecuted.

 

It has often been pointed out that this common surrogacy is correlated with the extreme isolation of women in traditional Islamic societies. There is minimal interaction between young men and unrelated women prior to the beginning of marriage arrangements. Just as many heterosexual men in western prisons begin to find their younger and smoother fellow-inmates interesting, especially face-down, single heterosexual men in Middle-Eastern countries, lacking an alternative sexual outlet, have traditionally often exercised the option of turning to malakoi as a substitute. As the Kinsey report showed in 1949, this practice is by no means unknown in Christian societies as well. Its proliferation in Christian areas, however, seems to have been partly obstructed by the long-standing European tradition of labelling both participants as deviants (originally as “sodomites,” later as homosexuals), whereas Middle Eastern societies appear to have been more likely to accept the active partner’s (generally true) assessment of himself as an ordinary heterosexual person.

 

Apart from this ordinary surrogacy, there is also an ultra-aggressive form in which a man may be raped for pure reasons of violence and domination. The Quranic accounts of the people of Lot strongly suggest that such violation was threatened, even though the accusation “you lust after men instead of women, you are truly an impious people” suggests that ordinary surrogacy may also have been a general social trend, unless the people were incredibly violent with one another all the time. Both the violence and the general trend to wholesale sexual rapacity appear vividly in certain versions of the Lot story, e.g., the previously quoted version from the surah “The Spider:” “You commit indecent acts which no other nation has committed before you. You lust after men and assault them on your highways. You turn your very gatherings into orgies.”

 

Surrogacy, known in traditional gay American parlance as “rough trade,” is not necessarily so very violent, and it may therefore mystify some people why religions would impose such heavy interdictions upon it in general, when it might be taken as an often harmless and temporary sexual outlet. Books could be written in explanation of this matter, but even a brief sketch may serve to convince many people that such bans are not anomalous. Taking the active role in sex is commonly taken to indicate and substantiate male power, whereas being penetrated is considered to indicate unmasculine submission. The more a society divests women of social power, the more a surrogate submission seems to transform a potentially powerful man into a powerless virtual woman. Since God is conceived in such societies as male and powerful, and as identifying with men and their power, such a crushing of a man’s masculinity seems virtually to be an attack on God. Hence reactions like the hadith “whenever a male mounts another male, the throne of God trembles.” To complicate matters, and to give some substance to this otherwise theoretical male power concern, surrogacy also entails a taste for young, smooth men or boys, and it may treat them roughly, as men in conservative societies often treat women. Young men or boys may therefore be raped, or more-or-less coerced, tricked or bribed into serving the passive role, and they may experience all the psychological dislocations that victims of rape or child sexual violation often experience. Surrogacy by nature treats the passive partner as an object, as something other than what he or she is; it is therefore an alienated act right from the outset, and can easily add indignities and injuries to its basic penetration if the controlling partner is so inclined. Arno Schmitt, in Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies, points out that the act of penetrating a malakos is expressed in Arabic with the instrumental expression lata bi, not the cooperative lata ma?: that is, one sodomizes by means of a sexual object, not with a partner. People in western countries, unless they have done extended prison time, have mostly seen so little surrogacy that they may be unaware of its intrinsically dehumanizing and potentially violent nature. The writers of scripture, however, lived in areas where surrogacy was common, at least among some peoples. It is no surprise that they commented on it and condemned it.

 

In same-sex relationships among gays, by contrast, penetration may not occur, but if it does, it is generally simply considered to be an act of loving intimacy that has no influence on the masculinity or the femininity of either participant. No one is placed in subjection; penetration does not force anyone into a role (although the theatre of roles may be toyed with as an intimate game, as in the “butch” and “femme” roles that lesbians have sometimes assigned themselves). Sex is not an act of usage, and both partners are respected; there is no intergradation into actual coercion or rape. One’s powers and integrity are left intact or even built up.

 

When homosexuality is not hidden and people freely tell researchers and pollsters the truth about themselves, the proportion of gays and lesbians in the population does not appear to change significantly over time. Surrogacy, however, can become a fashion. Eva Cantarella, in her Bisexuality in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992) documents the dramatic spread of this habit from ancient Greece to Rome. The widespread habit of using sex for any exploitative purpose tends to degrade relationships as a whole – for example, a married man chasing boys on the side engages in shallow and unequal, self-gratifying relations with both the boys and with his spouse. The contagion of selfishness and degraded personal integrity entailed by such fashions is difficult to combat, especially when linked to the innate addictiveness of the sex drive; hence the severe penalties often proposed by religious scriptures. An Islamic example is the hadith “if you see two people who act like the people of Lot, then kill the active and the passive” (an injunction that would contradict the much milder command about male-male zina in the Quran, unless ‘acting like the people of Lot’ were an aggravated offense like mixing surrogacy with violence) while a Judaeo-Christian example is “if a man also lies with mankind, as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; [the responsibility for shedding of] their blood shall be upon them.” (Note how well an application to surrogacy fits the wording of the Levitical passage, whereas the “as he lies with a woman” is unfitting if an application to gay men is intended.) Similar penalties tend to be prescribed for adultery, which can also become fashionable and addictive (“If a man is caught sleeping with another man’s wife, both must die” [Deut. 22:22]). The extremity of the penalty reflects the impotence of any lesser penalty to deter the sexually rampant, exploitative transgressor.

 

Such extreme penalties in ancient times may well have reversed social trends towards surrogacy or adultery, and may have relieved traditional relationships, which were intended to be mutualistic, of this consumerist, sensualist fashion pressure directed against them. On the other hand, such penalties have no ability to influence the number of people in each generation who experience themselves as non-heterosexual and who can only find marital-level love with members of their own sex. If such people are imperilled by these penalties, they can only respond by increasing the degree to which they conceal themselves and the degree to which they are forced to retreat into pseudo-heterosexuality. It seems unlikely, even bizarre, to suppose that the intention underlying these penalties could be to launch the back-handed attack on heterosexual sincerity that inevitably ensues when a lot of non-heterosexuals are pushed into pseudo-heterosexuality. The penalties are intended to support heterosexual marriage, not to create farcical versions of it – which is all they can do if they are applied to gay men and lesbians. So applied, such penalties literally become attacks on the heterosexual family – fundamentalists who believe that they support the family could not be more completely mistaken. Let anyone from any religion consider whether he or she can conscientiously deny the following principle: “a heterosexual person entering in good faith into marriage deserves a truly heterosexual spouse.” How many sincere heterosexual wives and husbands in past centuries have been the victims of the unavoidable apathy in relations that is invariably caused by the pressuring of gay men and lesbians into heterosexual marriage? Who, if anyone, would knowledgeably promote the conditions that lead to the formation of such pseudo-relationships?

 

Surrogacy and its attendant descent into the use of people as objects clearly violates the potential of people to reserve their sexual powers for constructive, harmonious relationships. Possibly some Christians have wondered if the importance of enduring love in marriage is de-emphasized in Islam, with its traditional tolerance of up to four wives and its relatively easy divorce (now also available in secularized western countries in any case). Whatever the situation may be in traditional society, which often deviates from religious precepts (for example, the common Islamic African practice of “female circumcision” has no backing in scripture or written religious tradition), it would be very hard to justify a claim that Islamic scripture and religious thought in any way devalue the genuine harmony and mutual interest of husband and wife. Indeed, such harmony is called a sign of God in the Quran: “By another sign he gave you wives from among yourselves, that you might live in joy with them, and planted love and kindness in your hearts.” If one were to ask Muslim thinkers, “should husband and wife in a marriage be able to partake of a genuine heterosexual union with each other, or is the perpetual, unwilling mimicry of this state by one partner an equally desirable situation?” there is little doubt that all would agree that the potential for real, honest, mutual sexual relations in marriage is preferable (notwithstanding that disease or accident may take away the ability to have sex at some later point in life). To quote the Quran again, “women are your fields; go, then, into your fields as you please.” There is undoubtedly a clear contrast between the alienation of surrogacy and the mutuality of marriage in Islamic precepts. Only a person biased against Islam would be likely to suggest otherwise, i.e., to suggest that heterosexual love is irrelevant to Islamic marriages. It must be noted that arranged marriages, even if not based on “falling in love” beforehand, are still generally expected to engender loving harmony, not just in Muslim but also in Hindu societies. Therefore, the mere fact that a marriage has been arranged by parents, with or without the consultation of the bride or groom, is not by itself an indication that emotional commitment is not supposed to matter in these marriages and that they are merely perfunctory constructions of social convenience. (The construction of pseudo-relationships based on social convenience may happen, e.g., the classic nightmare story of the teenage bride given to the rich and cruel elderly man, but such things are a greedy violation of the ground-rules of arranged marriage and would not be recommended by any religious authority.) Once again, we are discussing social ideals, not realities as seen from ground level. Many kinds of marriages may develop discord, but this does not mean that they began as alienated arrangements or were intended to be that way.

 

The inescapable conclusions of the discussion above are that the Quranic passages about the people of Lot refer to essentially uncaring sexual actions wilfully undertaken as deviations by persons with normal heterosexual potential, and that the whole moral question of whether sexual actions are destructive or supportive of valuable relationships is as important in Islam as it is in Judaeo-Christianity. Therefore, Islam does not fundamentally differ from Christianity and Judaism in regard to the impact of its apparent bans on same-sex relations. Although Judaism, Christianity and Islam have traditionally not authorized same-sex marriage (except perhaps in eastern Europe in the first dozen or so centuries of Christianity, as John Boswell has pointed out in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Villard Books, New York, 1994), neither have they traditionally dealt in any way with the reality of gay persons with negligible potential for standard heterosexual relationships; this reality was always obscured, in scripture-writing periods of history, by the much more socially prevalent reality of surrogacy. The realistic and honest choices for gay persons in traditional societies, assuming that these people do not want to take the traditional route of faking heterosexuality or becoming furtively promiscuous (or both), are to become celibate, or to attempt to form gay relationships that are de facto marriages. The route of faking heterosexuality is very difficult to undertake for anyone with any scriptural understanding, because any sex undertaken to support this fakery is in fact surrogacy, using a heterosexual partner as an object with the aim of proving one’s own heterosexuality or of producing progeny, pleasing the family, avoiding execution, etc. This loveless, exploitative use of sexuality is quite obviously, to the insightful gay person, the very thing condemned by seemingly homophobic scripture. Only a naïve person or the most abject hypocrite could engage in it.

 

Perhaps with some view to this moral bind, conservative religious thinkers throughout the sphere of the “Religions of the Book” (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and controversially Bahá’í) who have begun to understand this problem in recent years have often recommended celibacy to people of gay inclination. Because of the strong integration of sexuality in normal human existence, however, celibacy is not an ordinary ascetic renunciation like forswearing coffee or alcohol. It is a highly cognitively involved form of focused religious dedication that is really only painlessly adopted by the few, and that is realistically best reserved for those exceptional people whose potential as human beings is maximized by it. After all, it does not merely consist in giving up sex, but also in giving up the loving relationship that is the centre of most peoples’ everyday lives, and for religious people, the central human complement to their relationship with God. As the Quran says, “we (God) created you in pairs.” This statement, clearly not just directed to the usual prototypical men, must be reasonably known to apply to lesbians and gay men as well – it certainly appears to do so in real life. The most straightforward and consistent way for the religions of the book to deal with gay persons who could bring out the best in themselves and their partners through gay relationships would be to include them in marriage or to give their relationships an equivalent status. This would in no way be a violation of scriptures against surrogate exploitation and violence; in fact, it would prevent the same phenomenon from occurring in pseudo-heterosexual disguise. The problem of homosexuality vs. zina/extramarital sex in all these religions would thereby be solved. In the meantime, all those people, whether heterosexual or not, with a special gift of taking God as their sole spiritual companion, could renounce ordinary life and take up celibacy in the traditional manner.

 

When the idea of legitimate same-sex marriage is raised, the seemingly proscriptive scriptures will undoubtedly be read again and, as with the Mosaic scriptures mentioned above, a protest will surely arise: “but those scriptures are so clear, so plain: they show an unequivocal picture of man with man and state that this is evil. There is no hedging, no qualification, no road out.” In Islam in particular, this impression is amplified by the overall idea that the Quran is written in “plain Arabic” for everyone to understand and memorize, and that it should in no way be turned into an academic document full of hidden caveats and qualifications. Any rethinking of scriptural interpretation, a practice called ijtihad, has been controversial for centuries, even in connection with learned religious scholars. Thus the temptation to cleave to a blanket condemnation of homosexuality as the plainest interpretation is hard to resist, even when one knows that the seemingly beneficial gay relationships one sees in the westernized world are not exactly what is described there. Again, however, the counterargument must be that simple pictures of two different actions can look the same; that giving a child bread laced with poison is not the same as giving a child good bread, even though a visual description of the transfer of bread would be the same in both cases. To take the act as an image, and to abstract away the real motive and the real consequences (“real” is stressed because one can idly imagine that gay relationships will always have horrible consequences, but this phantasm is not matched by reality) is, in effect, to yank scripture out of its context in full reality and to impose one’s own desire for simplicity on it. Islam has a particularly strongly developed point of view on the problems that images may pose for people – several hadiths suggest that pictures may seem to imitate life and even to feign God’s power of creative animation. People searching for simplicity in worship may thus turn to images instead of to God, who cannot be represented as an image. To take a full-bodied scriptural passage composed by a divinely informed author aware of motive and consequence, and to turn it into an image of itself, where only the picture matters, and then to reattribute that oversimplified picture to God, is a kind of idolatry or image-worship. It is a sin, an act of turning religion into superstition. The realities of the two completely different kinds of same-sex sexual activity – of heterosexual surrogate exploiters with their free-willed choice of oblivious and potentially destructive usage, as opposed to gay persons with their innate, God-given potential for same-sex but not opposite-sex loving harmony, cannot be ignored by the conscientious adherent of any religion. God does not brush realities under the carpet of convenience, and humans who interpret God’s word have no license to do so. It can be quite simply seen from the plain Arabic on the page that the people of Lot were not, by any stretch of the imagination, folk who intended supportive, loving gay relationships that were their best option given that honest heterosexual marriage was impossible for them. None of this ordinary, simple, everyday gay reality is present in the plain scripture at all.

 

Religious authorities who want gay persons to accept the traditional, pictorial views of the same-sex scriptures in question have to consider the position this simplicity puts some people in. The actual loving and supportive qualities of gay relations, and the dearth of potential for heterosexuality in the partners, may be known not only to the gay people themselves, but also to their friends and family. In saying that God finds every act of same-sex love lustful (in the traditional rapacious sense of the word), exploitative, violent, personality-destroying, and a deviation from heterosexual nature, these religious authorities are in effect telling all these people that God is either accidentally or wilfully ignorant of the obvious reality of the situation. Such an accusation is completely unacceptable to any religious person – a God who does not know the truth is not God. Thus any person, gay or otherwise, who has experienced the reality of loving gay relationships and then accepts the fundamentalist point of view, has been driven not only into faking heterosexuality, but also into faking worship. In general, only gay persons who have had bad experiences – acts of surrogacy, unrewarding contact with the gay bar scene, or unsuccessful relationships – or the friends or family of such people, could adopt the fundamentalist point of view and still remain a sincere Christian, Jew or Muslim. No one who has known the full reality of gay relationships could realistically imagine that God was too unperceptive to understand this reality.

 

In any case, the forces in very conservative forms of Islam that insist that religious writing not be interpreted, and that everything in society except science should remain as it was in Islam’s first three centuries, ignore the fact that these writings often give examples in which they interpret themselves and explain themselves at a deeper level. For example, as pointed out in the (admittedly difficult language of the) Book of Power (currently offline), “Muhammad the Prophet, upon whom be peace, was often frank about the underlying protocols assumed in his hadithic exclusions, and did not present himself as rendering arbitrary taboos or random flecks of divine micro-regulatory opacity. For example, after he had forbidden the eating of donkey meat, he granted an exemption to a family which was recently beset by famine but which had donkeys that earlier had been fattened with good fodder. As the Sunnan Abu Dawud (a collection of sayings of the prophet) entry has it, he said, ‘feed your family on those fattened donkeys of yours, for I forbade them (donkeys) on account of the animal which feeds on the filth of the town.'”

 

Mohammed, then, at first categorically and clearly banned eating donkeys, but later distinguished between clean donkeys and filthy donkeys. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has traditionally simply not dealt with gay relationships because it has not been able to make the parallel distinction between these clean relationships and the filth of common, exploitative same-sex surrogacy.

 

The prevention and obliteration of gay relationships owing to social prejudice, which is often misguidedly based on dislike of surrogacy or on uncomprehending adherence to scriptures intended against surrogacy, has created a vacuum in visible manifestations of supportive gay relationships, and has also fostered pseudo-heterosexual fakery that perpetuated the false idea that heterosexual potential was universal. This situation, like slavery and monarchial despotism, went on for centuries with apparent religious justification, but the truth has now come out. Regardless of all the violence that will be done to gay people around the world in upcoming decades, this truth can never be buried again.

 

O thank you O God Baruch Adonai Y’Allah through whose mercy and benevolence love has been given to us.

 

For a more detailed and less academic look at the interactions between gay relationships and Islam, see all the confrontations and reconciliations play out in fictional form in the book excerpts starting at the blog post, A Same Sex Marriage in the Sharia Zone 

 

 

Update footnote:  After writing this essay, I moved to Amsterdam for a few years, and there, my barber was a young gay Moroccan man who was always pleased to chat with me while he worked.  He knew I was gay as well.  One day he gave me a comment that I thought was a great illustration of the juxtaposition between the traditional views of his original culture and the values of his new one.  He said, "The problem with the gay community in Western countries is that they're all 'women,' you know?  I mean, it's fine for them, but in Morocco, I could always get a lot of real men, you know, married and all, and I liked that."  My translation of that was that he was fond of surrogate relations, as a zamel, with heterosexual guys, even though these events couldn't lead to a relationship (except, possibly, 'repeated visitor').  He didn't conceive of other gay guys as 'real men.'  It takes some thought for those of us raised eurocultural to see this paradigm clearly from the inside viewpoint.  We have no way of knowing how many of his partners were self-suppressed gay men, vs. bi men looking for an alternative outlet, vs. actual straight men who had learned in youth that flipping a willing guy over was a responsibility-free alternative pleasure.  I don't think the straight and married bi men involved, in particular, would have any realistic chance of reconciling their pleasures with the Quran.