Boswell Reviews
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell New York: Villard
Books, 1994, 413 pp., $25.00.
Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey by David
Schneider Boston: Shambhala, 1993, 239 pp., $13.00.
Lee, Rand, Book review.., Vol. 17, ReVision, 01-01-1995,
pp 39.
By Rand B. Lee Rand B. Lee is a writer and lecturer specializing
in issues of male incest, life-purpose clarification, and intuition
development. An amateur garden historian, he is founder and president
of the American Dianthus Society and co-editor of The American
Cottage Gardener, a quarterly. He holds a B.A. in religious education
from The Washington Bible College. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
with his blind husky, Moon-Pie.
These books, as different from one another as night and day, disturb
in precisely the same way: by presenting the vision of an exuberant
homosexuality embedded within traditional religion, neither doing
violence to the other.
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe is a scholarly history presenting
solid documentary evidence that same-sex union ceremonies, suppressed
since the fourteenth century, were once common in the Roman Catholic
Church. Street Zen is the biography, by a man who knew him, of
a much- honored gay Buddhist priest--a former transvestite, prostitute,
thief, and junkie--who died of AIDS in 1990. Boswell's
history demonstrates the astonishing elasticity with which normative
moral sexual roles were viewed by Christians throughout the first
millennium of Church history. Schneider's biography shows the
vitality with which a marginalized population can infuse a religious
body once it overcomes its prejudices enough to admit them to
its ranks.
Both books have much to offer the holistic thinker, even one who
is neither Christian nor Buddhist, as this reviewer is not. Just
as most Westerners now assume humans can thrive only by exploiting
nonrenewable global re-sources--despite the testimony of millennia
of evolutionary experience and the mounting scientific and technological
evidence that such ongoing exploitation is neither necessary nor
possible without making the planet uninhabitable-most Westerners
assume that same-sex attraction is incompatible with deep spiritual
practice or social stability, despite the fact that all three
have coexisted in the experience of millions throughout history.
Deep ecologists, scientists engaged in "pure" research,
and gender workers all know well the dangers of rigid conceptual
categories; anyone interested in mental cross-training will find Boswell's history and Schneider's biography welcome
category- smashers.
Both authors build their books with immense care. The multilingual Boswell quotes exhaustively from ancient documents
throughout his heavily foot-noted text, beginning with an exegesis
of how words we translate as love and marriage were used in the
Greco-Roman world; moving on to exploring and comparing Greco-Roman
heterosexual and same-sex unions; then examining how Christianity
affected Greco-Roman pairing attitudes. Only then does he analyze
specific heterosexual and same-sex ceremony documents. And Boswell warns the reader repeatedly of the dangers of projecting
onto ancient cultures (1) "the virtual obsession of modern
industrial culture" with romantic love and coupling patterns;
(2) "the almost universal [modern] expectation that romantic
love and marriage are inextricable, causally interrelated, and
largely coterminous"; and (3) "the salient horror of
homosexuality characteristic of the West since the fourteenth
century."
The backbone of Schneider's religious biography is numerous personal
interviews with people who knew Tommy (later "Issan")
Dorsey, first in his days as a professional drag queen, through
his time at Tassajara, to his stint as abbot of San Francisco's
Hartford Street Zen Center and founder of the controversial Maitri
Hospice for AIDS patients. While providing abundant evidence of
Dorsey's enormously nurturing personality and love of disciplined
service, Schneider is careful not to idealize him. Schneider does
not spare us Dorsey's salty speech ("Issan rhymes with piss
on," explains the newly named abbot), his smoking, his kvetching,
or his unsaintly death. Nor does Schneider gloss over facts he
appears to disapprove of, such as Dorsey's relationship with James,
his addicted younger lover, and with his teacher, Richard Baker
(who is repeatedly quoted in the book). When Baker, the Zen center's
abbot, resigned in 1983, having admitted to sexual impropriety
and neglect of his religious duties, Dorsey refused to vilify
him and in the end also left the center, actions which, Schneider
makes clear, continue to baffle many of Dorsey's admirers to this
day.
Both authors possess an unemotional style, perfectly suited to
their sensational material: Boswell's book is
as free of gay polemic as Schneider's is of hero-worship. The
works are not without flaw. Boswell' s attention
to detail, though laudable in a scholar, is at times excruciating
for the lay reader; I kept losing the thread of his arguments.
At one juncture of Dorsey's story, Schneider feels bound to warn
us that worse is on the way, which seems insulting both to his
subject and his readers. And while one comes away with a very
clear sense of what it was like to know Dorsey as a transvestite
junkie and a reasonably strong sense of what it was like to work
with Dorsey in the Zen Center kitchen, one comes away with very
little impression of what it was like to sit under Dorsey as a
student.
Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe shows us Western culture
in transition from an expanded spiritual consciousness of human
diversity to a severely limited one. Street Zen: The Life and
Work of Issan Dorsey shows us one man's role in igniting a new
expansion.
Source.
From: Lee, Rand, Book review.., Vol. 17, ReVision, 01-01-1995,
pp 39.
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