Uma mensagem cristã

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In her no-nonsense style, Annie Proulx said of Brokeback Mountain, “It is a story of destructive rural homophobia.” (...)

A reasonable hope of belonging to a safe place and to safe people is often an anxious prayer for many people. Who doesn’t desire to be safe in our own home, at work, at school, in our church, in our own skin? Yet this is not the real or perceived reality for most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people in our communities and congregations, even when “Will and Grace” airs on prime-time. Two-thirds of out LGBT youth in the U.S. were threatened or injured with a weapon at school last year. Matthew Shepherd’s crucifixion on a Wyoming stock fence, less than a year after the publication of Brokeback Mountain, still serves as a compelling symbol of the coercive, violent force of homophobia, and not only in the rural West. Wyoming is merely a metaphor.

I believe that the official rulings and language of our churches about something we call “homosexuality” only serves to strengthen homophobia’s hateful grip on our world. The recent United Methodist and Vatican rulings do not simply function as ecclesial decisions guarding ordination and church membership. Like judgments from the Inquisition, they are as lethal as a tire iron in the hands of violent men, for these rulings continue to isolate human beings from communities which are called upon to be life-giving. Couple this isolation with language that dehumanizes men and women as “innately disordered” or worse, and the self-hate and desperation often lead to death. Gay and lesbian teenagers in the U.S. attempt suicide at more than five times the national average. Annie Proulx noted the “fact that Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the [U.S.], and that the preponderance of those people who kill themselves are elderly single men.” Ennis and Jack managed to stay alive for each other as long as they could, the way soldiers do in war, not fighting for great causes or honor, but for those particular soldiers with whom they had become inextricably bound.

Brokeback Mountain, in addition to magnifying the destructive power of homophobia, also shatters a compelling myth in our divisive discourse about sexuality, the myth that we freely choose our “sexual orientation.” When Jack and Ennis were raised to despise “queers” and when they knew first-hand the life-threatening risks of getting caught, they would have been insane to make such a choice - in 1963 or in 2006. They chose this love like they chose to be wet when it rained or cold when it snowed. “Without a single polemical speech, [Brokeback Mountain] dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective ‘agenda’ concocted by conspiratorial ‘elites.’” (Frank Rich, N.Y.Times, 12/18/05). Hopefully the church can let this myth die.

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I wonder as I wander at the foot of Brokeback Mountain if the church has the capacity and courage to declare a Jubilee... a time and space in which it would listen to the sacred love stories of Jack and Ennis ... setting aside worn-out labels such as “homosexual” for words we understand: son, daughter, friend, neighbor, sister, brother, partner. Could we listen well to the flesh-and-blood stories of fear and desolation, joy, discovery, liberation, belonging, and love? Like the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in South Africa, could we bear to hear our own stories of crucifixion? Could we go to those places which have been off-limits to pulpits and pot-luck-suppers?

David Jenkins, professor na Escola de Teologia de Calder, Universidade de Emory, Atlanta