Coming out remains a significant event for many queers. Mona West reads the Hebrew Exodus account as a story of coming out, exile, and transformation. The Exodus tradition reminds queers that the �silence of the closet equal death� and that the dominant culture tries to cut queers off from their past by rendering them invisible and silent. Like the fleeing Hebrews, many queers have faced the challenge of journeying into the wilderness, accepting exile from their religious enslavement and oppression. The wilderness becomes a revelatory location of spiritual renewal and transformation. Just as the ancient Israelites retold the story anew to each generation and made themselves the subjects of their own history, West notes that it is the retelling of the stories of our own coming out and wilderness transformations that ignites subversive memories of movement of queer lives from enslavement to freedom, from death to life.
The story of the Hebrew Exodus has been read from a variety of social locations. In the political history of the modern Western world the biblical Exodus has functioned as a story of revolution. It was central to the communist theology of Ernst Bloch, used in a defense of Leninist politics, and invoked in liberation theologies of Latin America.(1) For African Americans it is a story of deliverance and liberation. Reading the same Bible that their slave owners read, African Americans used their experience to find themselves in the story of the Exodus and have continued to construct a way of reading and appropriating the biblical text that grows out of their particular worldview and social experience.(2)
From the social location of American Indians, however, the Exodus is a text of terror. Inevitably the God of liberation becomes the God of conquest. American Indians read the entire narrative of Exodus/Conquest from the perspective of the Canaanites, who were driven from their homeland and annihilated and whose religious heritage was an abomination in the liberator God's eyes.(3)
For those who identify with the Israelites, at the core of these readings of revolution, deliverance, and liberation is the realization that Exodus is ultimately a story of transformation. Yahweh claims that this group of slaves Moses has led out of Egypt has become Yahweh's treasured possession, a priestly kingdom, a holy nation (Exod. 19:1-6). Indeed the experience of exodus and wilderness wanderings transforms the habiru - known in the ancient Near East as the aliens, the strangers, and the marginalized - into a people with a common religious history and experience of God. Walter Brueggemann points out that the word habiru is related etymologically and sociologically to the biblical term "Hebrew." From the root abar, meaning "to cross over," the Hebrew is "one who crosses over boundaries, who has no respect for imperial boundaries, is not confined by such boundaries, and crosses them in desperate quest of the necessities of life. The Hebrew is driven by the urgent issue of survival."(4) It is these habiru that would eventually be transformed into the nation of Israel.
Bernhard Anderson has called the Exodus Israel's creation story. It is the crucial event by which Israel "became a self concious historical community."(5) Exodus was an event that gave Israel an identity, and it was an event around which Israel ordered the past and anticipated the future.
In essence, Exodus is a coming-out story. The habiru risk the security of their closets of slavery in Egypt (Exod. 16:3; Num, 11:5-6) in order to come into their full identity as God's people. This identity did not happen at the crossing of the Red Sea. The story tells us that they wandered in the wilderness for forty years. During this time of trial and rebellion, they discovered more fully what it meant to embrace this new identity.
Once in the promised land, the Israelites found that their journey to self-discovery as God's people had not ended. No longer oppressed and enslaved, Israel was challenged to live fully and responsibly out of this new self- this new identity called forth by God. Compromising that identity eventually led to exile - the loss of promised land and a fragmentation of the work God had begun in them so long ago.
What follows is a queer reading of the Hebrew Exodus. From the social location of gay and lesbian Christians, the Hebrew Exodus is indeed a coming-out story. Ken Plummer, in his book Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds, claims that gay and lesbian coming-out stories exhibit elements of "grand stories" that have to do with journey, enduring suffering, engaging in a contest, and establishing a home. He states, "Certainly, over the years, from fieldwork, interviews and reading I have heard within the elements of these narratives over and over again the substance of the lesbian and gay coming-out stories. Here are men and women engaged on a voyage of discovery to be true to their inner self."(6) The themes of enslavement, exodus, wilderness wanderings, promised land, and exile parallel the stories of queer Christians who risk the security of their closets to find wholeness in relation to God and the believing community. Just as the Exodus was a crucial event for the Israelites, "the most momentous act in the life of any lesbian and or gay person is when they proclaim their gayness."(7)
A queer reading of the Exodus will also consider the Exodus tradition. The Israelites kept the story of the Exodus alive through its telling and retelling so that future generations could participate in its power and reality. Queers also tell their coming-out stories to keep their history alive and make way for existing and future generations to enter that history and identity.
Enslavement and Exodus: Silence Equals Death
Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. He said to his people, "Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land." (Exod. 1:8-10)
Queers identify with the nature of the oppression experienced by the Hebrews found in the first chapter of the book of Exodus. The dominant culture (the Egyptians) fears them because of their otherness and because of their numbers. Queers hear echoed in the words of the pharaoh such phrases as "don�t ask, don�t tell," "love the sinner, hate the sin," "self-avowed, openly practicing." When we come out of our closets, we make our pharaohs nervous. We become too many. We become a threat to national security. When we come out of our closets, we experience the threat of genocide. There is a calculated effort on the part of the dominant culture to "deal shrewdly" with us - to get rid of us. Queers experience this in the form of physical violence, hate crimes, and denied access to goods and services.
When the pharaoh's plan of increased labor and oppression does not work, he resorts to infanticide. In the face of the pharaoh's effort to rid himself of the Hebrews at any cost, queers are left wondering what our pharaohs will attempt if a gay gene is discovered and a person's sexual orientation can be determined in utero. But the pharaoh does not have the last word. The Hebrews refuse to be silent. They cry out, naming their pain and suffering, refusing to accept things the way they are. Yahweh hears and responds. Ultimately they are delivered from their enslavement by risking coming out of the closet of Egypt.
Joretta Marshall defines closet as "a descriptive word that corresponds to the dynamics of hiding a part of one�s self-identity or choosing carefully to be open and out."(8) In gay and lesbian experience, closets isolate, enslave and eventually kill us physically as well as spiritually. Because the Exodus is the crucial event in the formation of the identity of Israel, it is appropriate to draw the parallel that to stay in Egypt would be to stay in the closet. In their encounters with Moses at the very beginning of the story and throughout their experiences in the wilderness, the Israelites were constantly faced with the decision to accept Yawheh's offer of liberation, which meant coming into their full identity as the people God intended them to be. Walter Brueggemann claims, "It is important that this people now formed in covenant was not originally an ethnic community. They were in fact 'no-people.' Yahweh evoked and convened a community of people that did not exist until that hour. They are, until then, only Hebrews, habiru, socially mariginal masses without status or identity."(9)
Queers are aliens and outsiders in a hostile environment. Because of sexual orientation, queers are excluded from the rites and sacraments of the church. As "openly practicing, self-avowed homosexuals," queers are refused ordination, denied participation in the eucharist, and often excluded from the worshiping community. The church or the state does not sanction queer unions. Queers are made outsiders and kept outsiders by the dominant culture through demonization as sexual outlaws. Much as in biblical times, rules of religion, purity, access to goods and land, and access to God are formulated and regulated by those in power. Those who do not conform pose a threat to the dominant culture. They are alienated, kept on the outside, considered an abomination. Queers are the twentieth-century equivalent to the habiru of the ancient Near East: the strangers, the boundary crossers, the ones who cross over in order to survive.
"Silence equals death" is a powerful adage in the queer community. It speaks of the necessity to be made known in a culture that denies queer existence. Unlike race and gender, sexual orientation is not visibly identifiable. Queers can "pass" as members of the dominant culture since it is assumed by the dominant culture that everyone is heterosexual. Many queers choose to pass in this culture, to keep their sexual orientation hidden - closeted - for fear of rejection by family and friends, job loss, and physical violence. This closeted experience produces death, not only death to the existence of a queer community but also death to the individual. Maintaining a dual identity kills many. Queers die through addictions and often at their own hands when the only way out of the closet is suicide.
Coming out of the closet is a powerful, liberative act for queers. It is life giving. It is risky. It is the ultimate act of boundary crossing. Queers have refused to be silent. Like the Hebrews, queers cry out against the dominant culture, refusing to accept outsider status. In the act of coming out, queers cross over and discover a new identity and a new name for God. Like the habiru of the Exodus, who go on to experience wilderness, promised land, and exile, queers embark upon a lifelong journey when deciding to come out. It is a journey that is often dangerous and exciting, and ultimetely life giving and transforming.
If the habiru of the Exodus had not trusted in God and had not risked their passage into freedom, they would have died in Egypt. When queers risk the passage out of the closet, risk trusting in God, a new self is discovered that is able to enter into relationship with a God who was thought to regard queers as an "abomination."
Wilderness Wanderings: The Paradox of Freedom
The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim; and Israel ceme to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt.The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." (Exod. 16:1-3)
The wilderness wandering has both negative and positive connotations for the Israelites. On the one hand, wilderness is the place where they experience hunger and thirst. It is a place of rebellion and struggle, a place of fear and grumbling. On the other hand, wilderness is also the place of covenant and the sustaining power of God. In the wilderness Israel experienced the paradox of freedom. While the Israelites have left behind an old way of life characterized by bondage and oppression, they have difficulty embracing this newfound freedom. On the heels of the crossing of the Red Sea and with the song of Miriam still ringing in their ears, at the first sign of difficulty they long for the life they knew in Egypt. They realize being free is one thing, living free is quite another. In the words of Bernhard Anderson, "freedom in the desert was a poor substitute for slavery in Egypt."(10)
In their boundary crossing as the habiru, the Hebrews left behind the familiarity of an old identity, the false security of a well-known closet, and the structures of life in Egypt. On the other side of the Exodus, they find themselves faced with the vastness of the wilderness, that ambiguous place of middle passage. It is a time of great vulneratbility and a time of trust. They learn that claiming a new identity requires a journey that is liberating but also painful because it requires a letting go of the old in order to find the new.
Brueggemann claims that the aliens of the Exodus become citizens of a new community through the covenant they make with Yahweh. The strangers, aliens, and outsiders gain new status as covenant partners.(11) Through the lens of their experience of oppression, the Hebrews have the opportunity as covenant partners with Yahweh to create a community in which the stranger will be welcome. It will be a community characterized, not by rules of the empire and the dominant culture, but by justice and righteousness as they are articulated in covenant living.(12)
In his exploration of exodus and wilderness as biblical symbols of coming out for gay and lesbian people, John McNeill states the following about the paradox of passage from Egypt to the desert: "The central paradox of a passage is always both loss and gain; in a time of passage we become vulnerable to both personal loss and unexpected grace. Every passage begins in disorientation and the threat of loss. It matures into a second stage as we allow ourselves to fully experience and to name the loss. In the reluctant, gradual letting go of the old self and gingerly admitting in of the new self, we are losing ourselves and finding ourselves."(13) Gay and lesbian people experience a paradox of freedom when they choose to come out of the closet and begin to embrace their queer identity. They have spent lifetimes constructing closets that would shield them from an oppressive heterosexist society or allow them to survive within it. Like life in Egypt for the Israelites, queer closets become familiar, small enough to control yet ultimately constricting and limiting. When this constructed identity is left behind and queers are faced with the vastness of the freedom of the wilderness, there is often desire to go back into the closet because of the pain of dealing with family and religious systems that will not acknowledge the truth of their existence. At the first sign of difficulty some gays and lesbians want to return to Egypt. In the midst of navigating this new identity, even in the midst of outright rebellion, God is present, providing sustenance along the way and exhibiting a willingness to struggle with the people to give birth to this new identity.
The coming-out process for gay and lesbian people is often a forty-year wilderness experience. Therapists and theologians have noted that there are stages in the coming-out process that move one through a sense of loss and grief and ultimately to integration and transformation.(14) Part of the coming-out process involves an awareness of the larger gay and lesbian community. As queers come out of their closets and traverse the wilderness of their newfound freedom, they realize they are not the only ones - there is a larger community with the shared experience of coming out.
While covenant making in the wilderness is a unique experience for the Israelites and their relationship to Yahweh, parallells can be drawn for queers with regard to their concious participation in a larger community with shared values. For gay and lesbian Christians, wilderness wanderings are often about reconciling their queer identity with their religious tradition - a tradition that more than likely has taught them that being queer is sinful and an abomination to God. Part of the "covenant" process for queer Christians at this stage in their journey is coming to a place of inner peace about their spirituality and their sexuality. When queers are able to embrace both of these as essential parts of themselves and good gifts from their Creator, they are indeed transformed from aliens and outsiders into covenant partners with God.
Many live out their covenant relationships in the context of reconciling or More Light (open, affirming) congregations in mainline denominations or the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, which is the world's only denomination founded solely for gay and lesbian people. These communities of faith are indeed shaped by the experience of oppression and a passion for justice that welcomes the stranger.
Promised Land and Exile:
Destinations That Fuel the Journey
Then the LORD said, "I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites." (Exod. 3:7-8)
Promised land is integral to the story of liberation told in the Exodus. It is the destination that fuels the journey. The promise of land keeps the Israelites (and the story) moving forward to a literal place that will complete their journey begun in Egypt. The realization of this promise is also key to the establishment of their new identity as the people of God.
Roy May, in his book The Poor of the Land, points out the significance of land in the Bible and in the struggle for liberation in Latin America. Land is more than physical dirt. Although it is a material reality, it is also " a place, an identity, a history and a future...It signifies physical and existential well-being and security."(15) Promised land as a place of physical well-being and security for the Israelites meant that those who were once aliens, outsiders, and boundary crossers become insiders, grounded, landed, the ones who establish boundaries with the making of homes and communities. Security and well-being exist in the ability to survive throug the production of food and offspring. Eventually Israel becomes a great nation in the land, able to offer the security of military protection as well as the influence of a world empire.
The land is also a place where Israel is grounded spiritually as well as physically. It is literally the place from which they worship Yahweh, and it is a place that continues to call forth an identity in relation to Yahweh. Now that Israel is in the land, they must live responsibly as Yahweh's covenant people.
In the story of Israel's coming out, promised land becomes areality, but for queers it is still hoped for, at least from the standpoint of physical well-being and security. Gay and lesbian people are still longing for a place of security to be totally out of the closet without the fear of physical violence - a promised land beyond gay ghettos. Queers long for a land where gay and lesbian relationships are granted equal status under the law so that they may become grounded, establish homes, and enjoy the security of spousal benefits, inheritance rights, and family privilege in medical decisions. In the midst of this longing, gay and lesbian people are able to experience the existential well-being and security of promised land through their transformation into covenant partners with God. Coming out, crossing over the boundaries of silence and homophobia, gay and lesbian Christians come home to God. Promised land continues to be integral to stories of queer liberation. Its reality is the destination that fuels the journey toward a society of true liberation.
A word should be said here about the conquest traditions that have been troublesome to interpreters of the Exodus story. According to some of the biblical traditions, the Canaanites had to be annihilated in order for Israel to take the land. There are other theories of gradual settlement of the land that can also be supported from the biblical text. Some years ago Norman Gottwald posited a theory of a peasant revolt, which claims that the Israelites provided the religious impetus for a revolt of those Canaanite peasants who were being exploited by the Canaanite city-state structure. In essence, the pharaoh's fears of Exodus 1 come true for the Canaanite overlords. This theory "softens" the conquest narratives and makes the Exodus story more palatable for those who would identify with the Canaanites, but as Robert Allen Warrior reminds us, this story does not solve the narrative problem: "People who read the narratives read them as they are, not as scholars and experts would like them to be read and interpreted."(16)
In a queer reading of the Exodus, it is important for gay and lesbian people to caution against becoming the oppressed-turned-oppressor. When persons begin to experience some measure of freedom and liberation, that "privilege" is often used to oppress others. In marginalized communities this is called "lateral violence." Gay and lesbian people know all too well the abuse of those who read biblical narratives as they are. Like the conquest traditions, Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10 have been read without the benefit of historical-critical scholarship, which indicates these texts do not address homosexuality and sexual orientation as we understand them today. Instead they have been read "as they are" and used as "clobber texts" that fuel hate and violence against the queer community.
In the land, Israel faced the biggest challenge of all: living as a true community of justice and righteoussness. The prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible report that ultimately Israel fails to meet the challenge and eventually loses the land and is exiled - made to live in a foreign land, enslaved once again. Yet, in the midst of exile there is the hope of restoration and a new promise of a future characterized by God's righteouss rule.
Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have noted that while the Exile signaled loss of the land and posed a crisis for Israel in terms of people's relationship with Yahweh, it was also a time of great creativity and change. It was during this period of Israel's history that most of the canon of the Hebrew Bible took its final form and new theological ideas such as vicarious suffering and resurrection of the righteous dead began to take shape. Life on the marigins caused Israel to see the world and Yahweh with different eyes.
John Fortunato uses exile as a biblical symbol for gay and lesbian spiritual renewal. He claims that part of the coming-out process involves letting go and grieving the heterosexist ideal of marriage, kids, a great job, and a house with a picket fence. Because queers do not fit into this myth of the dominant culture, they are exiles. When gay and lesbian people are able to break free of this myth and embrace exile as a place of spiritual renewal, true transformation occurs.(17) Melanie Morrison claims that for gay and lesbian Christians, exile can be a revelatory place on the marigins. Life at the marigins "can be a place of ferment and creativity, a place in which to discover a sustained urgency to imagine new structures, new ways of relating, new forms of speech."(18)
Conclusion:
Exodus and the Power of Telling the Story
"A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstreched arm." (Deut. 26:5-8)
Not only is the Exodus a coming-out story for queers because it articulates an event of liberation and transformation; the Exodus also functions as a coming-out story because it keeps a tradition alive for future generations. Walter Brueggemann has identified Exodus as a dynamic text that demands a fresh hearing from every generation. He claims that it is a liturgical text, shaped, remembered, and appropriated in its telling. In its telling, the text makes oppressed persons subject of their own history.(19) In the telling and retelling of the Exodus event, future Israelites were able to claim that liberative event as their own and participate in the covenant community. The telling and retelling of the story made it possible for other Israelites to know about their history and their ancestors' faith. This function of the Exodus tradition is much like the function of queer coming-out stories. Queers tell their stories so that their story will stay alive. Queers tell their stories so that others may be strengthened and encouraged to risk coming out. Ken Plummer quotes Adrienne Rich in her foreword to an anthology entitled The Coming Out Stories:
"Cultural imperialism...[is] the decision made by one group of people that another shall be cut off from their past, shall be kept from the power of memory, context, community, continuity. This is why lesbians, meetings, need to tell and retell stories like the ones in this book.In the abscence of the books we needed, the knowledge of women whose lives were like our own, an oral tradition - here set down on paper - has sustained us. These stories, which bring us together and which also confirm for each of us the path and meaning of her individual journey, are like the oldest tribal legends: tales of birth and rebirth, if death and rebirth; sometimes - too often - of death without rebirth."(20)The Exodus tradition reminds the queer community that indeed silence equals death and to claim the power of their stories makes a way for life. It takes the stories of everyone to shape a tradition that makes oppressed persons the subject of their own history. The Exodus tradition reminds queers that they are on a lifelong journey that is dangerous and exciting. The Exodus tradition reminds queers that the dominant culture will try to cut them off from their past, that silence will not protect, and that it is their stories that will sustain them.
NOTES:
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