Gay Men, The Invention of Ecclesial Injustice, and Aspirations for Redress and Renewal

Abstract

Gay Men, The Invention of Ecclesial Injustice, and Aspirations for Redress and Renewal Joseph N. Goh (bio) The 2019 progress report of the Sustainable Development Goals states that despite notable developments registered in global efforts towards attaining gender equity (SDG5), these efforts are hampered and undermined by "insufficient progress on structural issues … such as legal discrimination, unfair social norms and attitudes, decision-making on sexual and reproductive issues and low levels of political participation."1 The understanding of gender equity in many parts of the world, however, is ordinarily limited to purposeful provisions for the sexual and gender empowerment of women and girls. For instance, the intended reforms in accordance with SDG5 in Malaysia—whence the case studies on gay men for this article are drawn—concentrate solely on female citizens in terms of the eradication of discrimination, violence, sexual exploitation, forced marriages and female genital mutilation (FGM), redressing unpaid reproductive labor, inaccessibility to leadership and ownership positions in socio-political and economic arenas, and attenuated accessibility to resources pertaining to technology as well as sexual and reproductive health and rights.2 While these reforms are indispensable in the pursuit of greater equity in Malaysia that is home to 32.6 million people,3 I argue that they ironically demonstrate a lack of inclusivity on numerous levels through a deliberate elision of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) issues.4 Malaysian leaders portray LGBTQ people as enemies of Islam, consumers of a deviant and immoral culture, satanic disciples, malady-stricken [End Page 360] miscreants, and hapless victims of western moral depravity.5 They dismiss LGBTQ rights, principally same-sex marriages, as antithetical to Malaysian values6 despite the fact that sexually diverse and gendervariant people are an indelible part of the history of the Malay Archipelago.7 Same-sex expressions are criminalized in both secular and Syariah (Islamic) laws.8 Protection against gender discrimination as enshrined in Article 8(2) of the Federal Constitution has been interpreted as exclusive of sexual diversity and by extension, gender variance as both non-normative genders and sexualities are often conflated.9 For instance, gay men are sometimes perceived as obsessively desirous of Gender Affirming Surgeries and transgender women are accused of being men who merely impersonate women. State-sanctioned exclusion of LGBTQ people is not executed exclusively in Malaysian politics and jurisprudence, but also in non-affirming ecclesial spaces. Akin to Malaysia's deliberate focus on women and girls in its SDG5 advocacies, such churches readily embrace and support gender-related social justice issues, insofar as they represent "decent" and "respectable" heteronormative and cisnormative issues, such as those involving women and girls who conform to socio-culturally sanctioned gender performativities. These efforts are undeniably crucial but deficient in ecclesial efforts towards more holistic gender equity in the country. Fueled by one-dimensional approaches to biblical interpretation, tradition and canonical legalities, non-affirming churches stand as unyielding bastions that participate in the ossification of what the United Nations refers to as "structural issues" of inequity which contribute to suspicion and discrimination among LGBTQ people. In this article, I showcase narratives from Malaysian Christian gay men that evince the injustice they experience in their own churches and their hopes for a more affirming praxis of communal Christianity in the country. "Aadesh," "Artisan," "Freddie," "Henri" and "Rainbowboy", whose selected narratives I feature, are English-speaking, educated, self-identifying gay men of various Christian denominations from Malaysia's Klang Valley who participated in a more expansive qualitative research project I undertook between 2012 and 2014 involving thirty Malaysian gay and bisexual men.10 While some of them continue to attend church services, others have ceased any form of ecclesial participation and formulated [End Page 361] individualized spiritualities or combined both, as most churches continue to act as sites of protracted oppression, intolerance and stigmatization for Christians whose sexual and gender identities are incongruous with ecclesial and theological heteronormativity and cisnormativity. I am not setting out to construct a gay-affirming or masculinist ecclesiology in this article, or generalize the experiences of Malaysian gay men. My intention is to accompany the discourses of a selection of Malaysians who are customarily silenced and disregarded due to condescending perceptions...