First off, I have never met Eve Tushnet, but she seems like a perfectly lovely and charitable person; and, I admire her determination to live a life that is solely reliant upon the precepts set down in “The Catechism of the Catholic Church” with regards to those suffering with same-sex-attraction; only, after reading her book “Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith,” I have serious reservations about how she has chosen to deal with her own homosexuality - and more importantly, what she is recommending to others.
First of all, the problem starts right off in the title of the book itself: “Accepting My Sexuality..;” this is not “my sexuality,” and it is not your sexuality, it’s a wounded condition. In fact, it’s not a sexuality at all, as the Catechism rightly states - it’s a “disorder.” And, as the Sacred Congregation wrote, in its “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons:” the inclination itself “…is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” Therefore to “accept” homosexuality is to accept a moral evil.
Secondly, Tushnet disturbingly writes: “I’m in no sense ex-gay. In fact, I seem to become more lesbian with time—college was my big fling with bisexuality, my passing phase…” While I completely understand her ambivalence towards embracing the Catholic ex-gay therapy movement, by the way - which I highly recommend (in particular: Dr. Joseph Nicolosi,) I am gravely worried by her admonition that she has become “more lesbian.” Here, we must always remember the warnings of Our Lord: “But he said that the things which come out from a man, they defile a man. For from within out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and defile a man.” (Mk 7:21-23) In other words, if your heart still longs for that which you have outwardly given up, for example - through chastity, the evil of those desires still resides within. I know that when the Lord saved me from myself and my attachment to being gay - I wanted nothing more to do with the homosexual lifestyle; I just wanted to be emptied of all the lies and falsehoods I had been filled with; I was sick of it; I had a distinctly physical reaction, like the smoker who collects old cigarette butts in an attempt to quit, I was revolted by everything gay. I wanted to start anew. Reminds me of something St. John of the Cross wrote: “What souls must do in order to live in perfect and pure hope in God is this: As often as distinct ideas, forms, and images occur to them, they should immediately, without resting on them, turn to God with loving affection, in emptiness of everything memorable.” And, as Our Lord told the rich young man - “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come follow me.” Therefore, to become “more lesbian” is to become more unlike Christ; it is to become more of this world; it is to become further disordered; it is to remain unhealed; in order to be truly Christ-like, we must give all that up, humble ourselves, become empty, be remade into new wine-skins, so that we then can be healed and filled with the Love of Jesus.
Thirdly, Tushnet wants to somehow redefine the gay lifestyle for skeptical Christians, who, according to her, have been mislead by overly critical works; on this subject she wrote: “And—more problematically—these books tend to assume that gay communities are like fairy gold, which looks like real gold but turns to dead leaves overnight. So, too, gay communities are presented as attractive and perhaps even liberating at first, but ultimately hollow and worthless. There needs to be a book directed at people who still find beauty, mutual aid, and solidarity in gay life…” As someone who wrote a book that was highly disapproving of gay culture, I am proud to state that I found absolutely nothing “beautiful” in gay life. Now, there were moments when it seemed real and took on an illusion of beauty, such as when I held the hand of my dear friend dying at age 26 of AIDS, and his face became so peaceful and angelic after death, but later the certainty of it all hit me: the waste, the pointlessness of his death, and the continuing tally of other boys contracting HIV. In fact, I think Tushnet is fooled by the phantasms in gay culture because she has surrounded herself within a tiny enclave of intellectual gay elites who have all lost touch with the actuality of what it is to be gay in the modern world. For instance, what is beautiful about the fact that, according to the CDC, gay men account for 63% of all HIV infections in the US, and 72% if all infections for those aged 13 to 24; and they account for 70% of all syphilis infections?
Lastly, Tushnet makes some startling claims about what gay Catholics experience after embracing a life of chastity, on this subject she wrote: “I also talk about common problems with faithful, chaste gay Catholic life…I want to be equally real about the challenges of celibate gay life, including loneliness, lack of accountability, and anger at the Church.” From my own experience, in very early stages of my conversion, I did feel some of these emotions, but once I was finally healed of the homosexual spirit, through a series of deliverance prayers by a devout Catholic priest, I never once felt loneliness or any anger at the Church. Therefore, the symptoms which she describes are just that: symptoms. For the most part, these are indicators of an underlying lack in healing caused by the need to remain a homosexual. For, Christ will always heal us; and, He will do so completely. Even on the Sabbath, Christ took pity on the infirm man and asked him: “Wilt thou be made whole?”