If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I graduated from Fairborn High School. Well recently, after having spent several years packed away in a box in my mother’s attic, my high school yearbooks have resurfaced, and tucked away in my 1983 yearbook was a program for a production of Our Town, held November 12–13, 1982, the first production of the first year of the post-Baker/Parks Hills merger Fairborn High School.

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The Stage Manager (Dave Kraus)
and Professor Willard (Trina Kittle)
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Although I’d forgotten about this production for years and years, having seen the program again I do remember now. That Bob Stemen (about whom I’ve written previously) was in the play I remembered, but I had not remembered that Katrina Kittle was also in it. Well she was, as you can see from this photo of English teacher Dave Kraus and her in their roles as the Stage Manager and Professor Willard, although if you look at the cast listing (either to the right or in the PDF version of the program) you’ll note that Katrina was then billed as “Trina.”

Katrina’s one of just a few people from my high school years with whom I’ve had some contact since. Outside Dayton she’s probably better known as an author, but in Dayton Katrina remains an active thespian in community theatre. If you haven’t read her books, you should, and be sure to catch her in the Dayton Theatre Guild production of The Hallelujah Girls opening Thanksgiving weekend.

Although I’ve complained about parts of my time in high school, I enjoyed most of my classes and liked learning and most of my teachers. Dave Kraus, pictured above with Katrina, was one of my English teachers, and I don’t suppose it’s bragging too much to link to something else I found in one of my yearbooks, namely this note from Mr. Kraus praising me for having had, as a freshman, “the highest point total in all three of [his] predominantly sophomore Novels classes.” Yes, I was a nerd and good in school, for all that matters years later (as the Rev. Melvin Younger pointed out back then).

Tonight I saw the Dayton Playhouse’s production of Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, a play that reimagines the myth of Jesus. Corpus Christi first premiered eleven years ago, in 1998, and I first saw it six years ago in Cincinnati. That 2003 production was by Know Theatre Tribe (see archive.org’s copy of their Corpus Christi page) in an unconventional theatre space called Gabriel’s Corner housed in a church building. I enjoyed the play six years ago, but I enjoyed it even more tonight.

Corpus Christi has driven conservative Christians crazy since before its premiere, and tonight’s production in Dayton was no exception. The sidewalk into the Dayton Playhouse’s theatre was lined with protestors, quiet and polite but bearing signs complaining about the blasphemy of the play and promising to pray for all involved in it (I told the bearers of one prayer sign that I’d pray for them too).

I’m sure that these protestors, if at some point they google Corpus Christi and run across my little review here, will think my reference to Jesus’s story as “myth” just to be more blasphemy along the lines of McNally’s play. Yet I mean no disrespect to the historical Jesus (if there was one, and I’m inclined to think there probably was) nor to the idea of Jesus, nor do I think that Jesus, at least not the Jesus in whom I believe, would be offended by my talking about his story as myth. I don’t choose the word “myth” because I think the story of Jesus is made up or not real; instead “myth” comes to my mind in reference to Corpus Christi because of truth.

The truth I mean is not literal truth. Obviously Jesus was not born of a Brooklyn Jewish Mary in a sleazy pay-by-the-hour motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, to the sounds of johns fucking prostitutes. Bishop Forsyth of South Sydney needn’t point out that Corpus Christi is “unhistorical and untrue” — McNally isn’t asking anyone to believe that Texas was ever under Roman rule. McNally isn’t even asking people to believe that the historical Jesus was in fact gay (for someone who is asking people to believe that, read a post I wrote in 2004 about the book The Man Jesus Loved).

Bishop Forsyth and others outraged by Corpus Christi are quite right that the play is “unhistorical” but they’re quite wrong about its being untrue. The bishop and his fellow protestors need to read some Joseph Campbell and learn about the power of myths. For anyone who has ears to hear there is indeed truth to be found in Corpus Christi.

That truth is not primarily that Jesus was gay, although Sean Frost’s portrayal tonight of a 17-year-old Texan Joshua going to prom with a girl and then not wanting to do what was coming naturally to all his straight classmates that night certainly rang true to me — in high school I went through the motions of dating and even kissing girls and went to prom with a girl, but like Joshua, I never sealed the deal. I also spent too much time staring at boys on whom I had crushes, enough to attract the wrong kind of attention, just as Joshua does in Corpus Christi. And let me mention here that I found Mark Diffenderfer, who played the masculinely and aggressively gay Judas, to be quite hot.

No, the primary truth to be learnt from Corpus Christi is something one might expect even those protesting the play to agree with, for despite the liberties McNally takes, he remains faithful to the most important lessons taught by the Jesus of the Gospels. Love your neighbor, and realize that your neighbor isn’t just the person who shares your demographics and lives right next door to you but that the people who make you most uncomfortable, the lepers, the homeless, the faggots, the tall-haired Pentecostals, whoever, are also your neighbors.

People who focus on Corpus Christi’s literal untruths and protest the play miss this most important truth. What Jesus would want isn’t protection from blasphemy — as depicted both in Corpus Christi and in the Book of Matthew, if Jesus wanted protection from blasphemers, “Do you think [he] cannot call on [his] Father and … [have] at once … twelve legions of angels” to provide such protection? No, instead what Jesus wants is for us to recognize the divinity in each of us (shown beautifully in the introduction/baptism of each of the actors/disciples at the beginning of the play).

However, Corpus Christi focuses not only on Jesus’s message of love but also on the hatred his fellow men show to one another and to him, culminating in the play’s portrayal of the Passion and crucifixion of Jesus. Here I find Corpus Christi to be very true towards traditional Christian understanding — Jesus’s betrayal by Judas and his suffering and death were preordained by God — but I disagree (ironically, probably as opposed to the play’s protestors) with that traditional understanding and its depiction in this play. I do not believe that the only way an omnipotent God could forgive humanity was by sending a Son to Earth to be sacrificed to atone for our sins. Hello, omnipotent means all-powerful and an all-powerful God could damned well decide just to forgive us, couldn’t he? No, instead I think that the historical Jesus with his radical message of defying social conventions and loving everyone ran afoul of religious and secular authorities and got himself killed.

Yet despite my disagreement with the historical accuracy of the crucifixion in Corpus Christi, I think director Michael Boyd did manage to bring truth to its depiction nonetheless. The projection of photos of protestors from Westboro Baptist Church, of defaced pro-gay Christian billboards and of Matthew Shepard and the site of his death rammed home the point that just as the historical Jesus faced hatred from his fellow humans so too are we today endangered by such hatred, especially if we try to be true to Jesus’s message. Unconditional love of all God’s children is radical and dangerous and difficult and scary.

Corpus Christi at the Dayton Playhouse runs through November 22, so if you’re reading this post shortly after I’ve written it you still have time to see it. Unlike other productions Boyd’s includes no intermission but runs straight through, but I found it very powerful and thought the time passed quickly. You might not think you could find such good theatre in Dayton, but you can.

Beavercreek City Council member Brian Jarvis

Why did Mr. Jarvis and I have lunch? Because of a comment he made on esrati.com, a comment in which he said, “ ‘Gay’ is like having a propensity to an addicit[sic]’s to be hooked on crack, alcohol, etc. … it’s simply an unfortunate defect in the genes.”

As many queer folk (but not as many non-queer folk) might imagine, Mr. Jarvis’s comment caused quite a bit of consternation. David Esrati’s post, about the need for Dayton to face race, has 143 comments (as of my writing this) on it, more of which are about Mr. Jarvis’s comments on homosexuality than on David’s original topic.

My gut reaction to Mr. Jarvis’s comment was also to be offended — my first thought was, “Oh, really? Well, fuck you!” — but I recalled an earlier comment of Mr. Jarvis’s on that post (more pertinent to the post’s topic), in which Mr. Jarvis responded to something David wrote by suggesting it would be “good for a lunchtime discussion to see exactly where you’re coming from — tough to get into specifics in a sentence or two.”

And thus I told Mr. Jarvis that his comments had offended me and asked (challenged?) him to discuss them with me over lunch. To his credit, Mr. Jarvis agreed, hence our meeting today.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from our meeting, but I did make some assumptions, and, just as I told Mr. Jarvis on esrati.com that an assumption of his was wrong, my assumption as to where Mr. Jarvis was coming from was wrong, too. The bell Mr. Jarvis’s comments about behavior and addictions rang for me was the conservative religious “Love the sinner, hate the sin” one, and in preparation for our meeting, I pulled together some of my favorite Bible quotes that illustrate the complexities of using the Bible to argue what is right or good. (Queers aren’t the only folk who’ve been thumped by the Bible; people have used the Bible in America to thump slaves and people of color.)

Yet at our meeting, Mr. Jarvis was quick to make clear (actually this was about the only thing he did manage to make clear) to me that he was not coming from a religious context. Just as I had come to our lunch with printouts to give to him, so too did he come with printouts for me, and his were not quotes from the Bible. Mr. Jarvis told me that he had specifically steered away from using the term “sin” because of its religious connotation; he did not want to try to make a religious argument.

No, instead what Mr. Jarvis brought to our meeting was a printout of this Wikipedia article on “Biology and sexual orientation,” an article he’d spent quite some time reading because he wanted to understand what scientists had to say about homosexuality. Mr. Jarvis also told me that he in particular wanted to read evidence from peer-reviewed articles by scientists who’d tried to keep their own biases out of their work.

As it happens, I was not unfamiliar with the content of the article Mr. Jarvis brought, having found articles about the possible causes of homosexuality quite interesting. I’d already read about twin studies and birth order and the size of the hypothalmus and hormones in mothers’ wombs.

So you might think Mr. Jarvis’s turning to science would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? Well here’s where things stopped being clear and started being crazy. Despite our having read about the same studies, despite our both being fairly familiar with what scientists have had to say recently about possible causes of homosexuality, Mr. Jarvis and I have come away from our reading with two quite different conclusions. My understanding was that the scientists involved in these studies were not making judgments as to whether homosexuality was good or bad but rather were just trying to understand its causes. Mr. Jarvis, on the other hand, thinks these scientists have been writing that homosexuality is a defect, something along the lines of spina bifida or a propensity to an addiction to drugs.

Thus Mr. Jarvis seems genuinely perplexed that anyone, especially anyone who’d read the scientific literature, would be offended at his comments.

Given that Mr. Jarvis gets that certain words have certain connotations (hence his avoidance of the word “sin”), I’m genuinely perplexed that he doesn’t get that comparing being gay to being hooked on crack or alcohol has certain connotations. And after being shown my fun new “Addicts” page, Mr. Jarvis said he didn’t care if I publicized his having made such a comparison.

I tried to get Mr. Jarvis to explain how he’d come to the conclusion that scientists were arguing that homosexuality was a defect, like a disease, as opposed to just something that is, such as eye color or handedness. He kept pointing to passages that talked about the masculinization of the fetal brain. Okay, so perhaps my brain wasn’t masculinized in the same way as that of a heterosexual baby’s, but how is that a defect? The level of masculinization of my brain doesn’t lead to ambulatory problems, physical pain or paralysis, as in spina bifida. I asked if he considered left handedness to be a defect, and he answered no, although ironically, if we’re using Wikipedia as our source for scientific evidence, the Wikipedia article on handedness talks about prenatal testosterone levels. Is there some major life activity that’s impaired by homosexuality? No, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that scientists say it’s a defect.

An interesting strategy gay rights groups seem to have ignored came up from our debate as to whether homosexuality is a defect, like spina bifida, or something that just is, like handedness. I asked Mr. Jarvis if he thought people should be allowed to decline to rent to people who have spina bifida, and he said, no, that would be illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Well guess what? If scientists can provide clear evidence of homosexuality’s biological basis, Mr. Jarvis thinks that discrimination against homosexuals is therefore already illegal under the ADA.

Note that Mr. Jarvis did not say whether he thought that discriminating against people with disabilities should or should not be allowed, just that it is illegal. He told me that it was not his job to determine whether things should or should not be allowed. What if an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation came to a vote before the Beavercreek City Council, I asked. How would he determine whether to vote for it or against it? Well, he answered, the State of Ohio has no law against such discrimination and therefore he would vote against a local ordinance. Wow, I guess it’s good that Mr. Jarvis is not a state legislator and even better that he’s not a federal one, for how would he decide on state or federal laws?

Not by judging the effects of actions, apparently. I asked Mr. Jarvis how anyone was harmed by gay sex, as opposed to the clear harm that comes from robbing banks, another thing, apparently, like gay sex or doing coke, that one is born with a propensity towards. Mr. Jarvis could not say how people are harmed by gay sex, but it does not matter, he said. Really? Isn’t robbing banks wrong because of the harm caused by doing so? No, Mr. Jarvis said, the only reason robbing banks is wrong is because a majority of people in society has decided it is wrong.

So what, then, about the trends for ever increasing numbers of Americans not to have problems with homosexuality or even same sex marriage? In 20 or 30 years, when the majority of society no longer says homosexuality is wrong, will it no longer be wrong? That’s right!