The Gay Precept: how Buddhism views homosexualy - Chiang Mai Cylife

Contents:

• GERMAN GAY EX-MONK MARRI PARTNER CHURCH
• THE GAY PRECEPT: HOW BUDDHISM VIEWS HOMOSEXUALY
• THE GAY CHURCH

GERMAN GAY EX-MONK MARRI PARTNER CHURCH

” In this later perd, we see a newfound homophobic ristance to the re that, the reactn’s vrl, speaks to the role this re uld really play for men mtg themselv to each other: The Patriarch’s words acknowledge the realy that no matter s tentn, the re enabled the space for sexual timaci between men. While other religns and cultur teach that homosexualy is sful, Buddhist monk Kodo Nishimura is spreadg the word that Buddhism preach that all people n be liberated equally wh no exceptns. So, Nishimura, 33, who is also a makp artist and an LGBTQ+ (lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr, queer and others) person himself, published a book English tled "This Monk Wears Heels: Be Who You Are" Febary.

Nishimura wr the book that he gaed a strong realizatn that there was nothg wrong wh wearg makp or beg open about beg homosexual after he saw how people were livg their liv while beg te to themselv. The notn that SSB has arisen nvergently so many different leag only mak tuive sense om a heteronormative world view which ‘heterosexual’ behavur is amed as the ‘natural orr’ for sexually reproducg speci, and ‘homosexualy’ is viewed as a recent aberratn whose existence mt be explaed and jtified12.

Evolutnary blogists have long sought to unver the adaptive origs of 'homosexual behavur' an attempt to rolve this apparent Darwian paradox: how has SSB repeatedly evolved and persisted spe s prumed fns sts? ”In the time of the Buddha, there were no homosexuals, so our great teacher did not mentn anythg about this; hence is difficult to discs the subject om a Buddhist pot of view.

THE GAY PRECEPT: HOW BUDDHISM VIEWS HOMOSEXUALY

The lecturer then went on to elaborate on Thuriya’s exposn regardg why homosexualy uld be ed by bad karma:”This might sound sexist to you, but Buddhism the hight physil state one n be reborn to is that of a man. Surely there are lots of gay people who live enjoyable liv wh plenty of material posssns, a partner they love, children they re for and the eedom to be who they really are. If gay people often are faced wh tolerance, if they are kept om achievg certa liberti life and if they stggle wh themselv bee of their preference, uld be nsired they are not at ease and unable to fd peace, ” he explaed.

If I, pecially beg a straight man wh Mlim roots, was to publicly announce that homosexualy led to sufferg and was fact ed by sexual misnduct, I would be nsired a ‘gay hater’. ” To expand on the first statement, om s eighteenth-century begngs, works the Gothic mo have often been preoccupied wh perversn and nce; transgrsive or “aberrant” sexualy; genr stabily and permeable inti; and the paranoia, persecutn, and vlence of homosexual panic. The queer, homosocial, and homosexual them turn implite the liv of the three bt-known male thors of the early Gothic—Horace Walpole, William Beckford, and Matthew Gregory Lewis—their works formg a plited rponse to the emergg velopment of homosexual and heterosexual subjectivi as well as the btal, stutnalized homophobia of the late eighteenth century.

Walpole’s antiquarian love of fakery (evinced by his famoly papier-mâché stle, Strawberry Hill), on the one hand, and his probable homosexualy and the homosocial them of his Gothic works, on the other, prent a nearly irristible opportuny to lk the Gothic’s unorigal and queer characteristics through “mp. Signifintly, this is also the perd when English homosexual subcultur were beg visible (if only as objects of attack) (Crompton xiv) and genr difference was begng to be dified (Haggerty, Men Love 172).

THE GAY CHURCH

For stance, fops—who, as Gee Haggerty and others have argued, were not so much “homosexual” figur as “sexually nfed genr misfs” (45)—were nsired to offer only “imatn[s]” and “artificial” versns of the “natural Behavr” of a “te gentleman” or to reproduce each other, “displayg a Samens [... The visns of thorship offered The Monk—a homoerotic “mania” that nnot be nquered but mt nohels be ntrolled—timate that Lewis explored a radil alternative to the origary thor, not by qutng s “masculy” but by refigurg s sexual orientatn, as were, and s relatn to the homosocial, patrileal, lerary tradn to which is heir. The se of Lewis’s imative mos of lerary productn as a queered alternative to the Romantic solary geni maps out larger qutns for histori of thorship, for gay and lbian studi, and for queer theory: How has the “sexualy” of thorship been figured and to what ends?

Yet like The Monk’s better-known homoerotic moments, this episo foc on imatn as a performative strategy that pots up the distctns and ntui between drag and closetg articulatns of male homosocial sire. Acrdg to Macdonald, Lewis translated or wrote parodi of more than two dozen of the os, cludg one which bee a favoure “wh gay and bisexual poets of the neteenth century, ” Byron publishg his own versn Hours of Idlens (87-8).

Though Macdonald sists that, unlike the origal o, Lewis’s schoolboy translatn is not perastic, the narrator’s adulatn of a “beteo striplg” is, he fds, “ankly homoerotic” (Macdonald 90; Macdonald and Scherf 15). More relevant than the homoerotic ntent of the origal Anacreontic text, or even the wdow to Lewis’s boyhood fantasi that his translatn might offer, is that this appropriatn entered Lewis early on to the perd’s “cult of classil learng, ” which often valued the posive reprentatn of relatnships between men (or men and boys) Greek and Roman lerature (Haggerty, Men Love 12; Macdonald 87).