passion could not hide the morbid fem ininity of the Jew who suffered it— w illingly, as an act of human w ill. It was Paul’s genius to link ineffective and effeminate Jewish law and Jew s with unnatural
homosexuals worthy of death. It was Paul’s genius to exploit Christ
as the prototypical Je w — he suffered like a female, it was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration— and then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, a Christian nature: it dies, then rises. The son, born a Jew , was worthy of death— homosexual as Jew s are, effeminate as Jew s are, with their weak law and tenuous m asculinity. The son resurrected triumphed over the
father and over death. Those who were like him, Christians,
shared in the victory, got closer to the real God (the one who won);
got more masculine than that Jew who had died in unspeakable
agony on the cross because the resurrected Christ was more masculine. The crucifixion without the resurrection would have left Jews and their God the repositories of patriarchal religious authority. The resurrection turned Jews from patriarchs into pansies, except when it was more useful to concentrate on them as the killers of Christ. The simple, cruel, rather monotonous God of the Jews could scarcely compete with the trebled divinity: The Father,
The Son, The Holy Ghost—a father whose son superseded him in
range of affect, emotion, and bravery, and whose Holy Ghost was
purely and ideally phallic and all-penetrating. It was Paul, back on
earth, who established the social ramifications of this religion of
revelation rather than of law for the Jew s who might be queer
enough to cling to one god rather than his trebled usurper: like
homosexuals, you are worthy of death.
*
The Old Testament does not contain the bloodlust against homosexuals and homosexuality found in the New Testament. There is
no mention of lesbians at all. Lesbian acts are inferred to be among
the “doings of Egypt” prohibited in Leviticus. No textual reference
to Gomorrah suggests that it was destroyed because of lesbianism:
this too has been inferred. It is not women who are commanded:
“The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother,
sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, including the prohibition against
male homosexuality, are rules for effectively upholding the dominance of a real patriarch, the senior father in a tribe of fathers and sons. The controlling of male sexuality in the interests of male
dominance—whom men can fuck, when, and how—is the essential in tribal societies in which authority is exclusively male. The rules in Leviticus are blueprints for minimizing intratribal sexual
conflict among men. In chapter 18 of Leviticus, incest is broadly
defined and prohibited; adultery, male homosexuality, intercourse
with a menstruating woman, and intercourse with animals are also
forbidden. In chapter 20 of Leviticus, death by stoning is the sentence “for every one that curseth his father or his mother” (Leviticus 20: 9), for adulterers, for one who has intercourse with his father’s wife or his daughter-in-law, for male homosexuality, for
bestiality. Incest with one’s sister and intercourse with a menstruating woman are not capital crimes: the punishment is being cut off from one’s people. The heinous crime is not in the sexual
act committed per se; it is certainly not in any abuse of women per
se. The heinous crime is in committing a sexual act that will exacerbate male sexual conflict and provoke permanently damaging sexual antagonism in the tribe among men. For the Hebrews, sexual transgression that warranted death had the potential, if widely
practiced, to cause the erosion of the power of men as a class by
creating internecine sexual warfare within the class. The subordination of women was a means to male social cohesion. The regulation of that subordination through a regulation of male sexual behavior was straightforward and eminently practical: men were
supposed to sacrifice some measure of pleasure to maintain power.
Incest with one’s sister did not incite male-male conflict so much as
