"Unicorns, Hippogriffs, and Bisexuals"
Peg Duthie
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, TN
22 July 2007

As a number of you know, I'm a geek. However, what many of you may not know is that there are actually three definitions of the word "geek" in Merriam-Webster's current collegiate dictionary. The first definition -- supposedly the primary one -- is "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake." The second definition is "a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked." Then finally we get to "an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity."

Well. I'm not in the business of decapitating hapless poultry or reptiles with my teeth, but, I do get odd looks and nervous laughter every now and then when I wax enthusiastic about things like Harry Potter conferences, and especially when I talk about preparing academic presentations for them. Before I go on, let me assure you that this sermon will be spoiler-free: I haven't read the new book yet, and I'm married to a man who follows the saga only through the movies, so I won't even be able to talk about Deathly Hallows at home until 2010.

At any rate, last week was a fascinating week to be a Harry Potter fan -- or, indeed, anyone interested in how human beings think and talk about truth and evidence. The last book in the series went on sale yesterday morning -- an event that had generated so much build-up that some of my friends had taken to referring to it as "Pötterdämmerung" and the "Apottercalypse." However, in spite of the massive, multi-million-dollar embargo the publisher had attempted to enforce, a digitally photographed copy of the book -- all 700-odd pages of it -- was uploaded to the Internet last Monday afternoon, and quickly made the rounds. Within 48 hours, there was a full-blown, ferocious debate raging among online Potter fans over whether the photographs were real or whether they were part of an elaborate, exceptionally well-executed hoax.

There were highly intelligent, knowledgeable people weighing on both sides, and there was also a lot of hysteria in the mix. There were detailed analyses of what people considered to be technically, logistically, and creatively possible. There were hypotheses about the motivations of the author, the publishers, the newspaper reviewers, and anyone else remotely qualified to participate in a conspiracy. There were passionate arguments over people's expectations regarding the final book, particularly regarding whether their expectations were reasonable, and how much those expectations might skew their perceptions of what the author actually decided to write.

Some of the fiercest fake vs. real debates centered on whether certain characters in the bootlegged version of the book were "in character" or not -- or, put another way, whether the author stayed "true" to those characters given her portrayal of them in the earlier books. One of the things I find truly magical about the Harry Potter books is the range of interpretations that can be applied to the major characters and events in them, and the extent to which this happens, even when the Apottercalypse isn't upon us. The story is told primarily from the point of view of an adolescent boy, and what I've seen a number of astute and inventive readers do is to take the individuals and events shown through his eyes and reimagine them from the perspective of another character. Now, this is not an exercise unique to Harry Potter: writers have done this to Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, Little Women, Wizard of Oz, and many other well-loved tales, and some of these alternate tellings have become classics and prize-winners in their own right. What I like about it in Harry Potter fandom is that there's so much of it going on, among people with very diverse assumptions about human behavior, that you can get radically different readings of a scene based on who's analyzing it, and that both readings can pass for plausible if you happen to know which postulates Person A and Person B are working from.

I once had a teacher in college who told me to always seek out more than one translation when reading Aristotle or other authors writing in languages foreign to me, because every translator comes with his or her own presets, and no matter how neutral they may want to be, they have to make choices about which word or phrase in English best corresponds to the original text, and many of these choices are going to slant the text toward one direction rather than another depending on how they understand -- or misunderstand -- the original in the first place. And the difficulty with reading something in translation, of course, is that if you aren't familiar with the original language, you may have no idea what kind of shading or styling is going on, or even that there may be an agenda to beware of, unless you have another version to consult. For instance, the many different versions of the Bible -- and if you want to look up people getting really riled up about whether a document's fake or real, you can start by Googling "biblical hoaxes," which will give you more than a million hits.

Now, one of the less entertaining facets of authenticity debates is how much it hurts when you are telling the truth as you see it, or asking questions you think need to be asked, and the people you encounter either don't believe you or don't respect what matters to you -- and it's worse when they think they know where you're coming from. This is actually a major, recurring theme in the Harry Potter books, where you have characters disagreeing about what things mean or how significant they are, and friendships end up in peril because of this. It was a recurring motif on Sesame Street when I was a kid. Mr. Snuffleupagus: Big Bird could see him. Kids could see him. But until the mid-1980s, none of the grown-ups on the show could see him, and I always felt so bad for Big Bird and his rotten luck. What changed in 1985 was that a lot of child abuse scandals broke into the news that year, and the writers of Sesame Street realized that what children needed was the message that adults will believe them when they tell the truth, even if that truth isn't immediately visible or confirmable or palatable.

Real-life, however, is not as easily adjusted as a children's television show, and part of the difficulty is that there is so much we don't know about each other. At every memorial service I've attended at this church, I've been left almost dumbstruck at how much goes on in other people's lives that we don't find out about except on milestone occasions, because their lives and ours are so full, and there are so many things that don't get talked about in the course of ordinary, everyday conversation. Earlier this morning I called you to worship with "the wonder of being together, so close yet so apart -- each hidden in our own secret chamber."[*] There are so many secret chambers in this sanctuary: not necessarily secrets that people are keeping on purpose, but the sharing of our histories and what's in our hearts is not something that always fits the format of "Joys and Concerns," or covenant groups, or Wednesday night dinners, although those things all can help. We necessarily have to pick and choose what we find relevant to the connections we create with each other, and sometimes things stay unknown because they demand more groundwork -- more set-up -- than just casually chatting over coffee and a biscuit.

One of the things I don't tend to bring up in casual conversation is that I myself identify as a bisexual woman. It's not a secret. It's not something I'm ashamed of. But neither it is relevant to my competence, my character, my committee work, or whether I can bring deviled eggs to this afternoon's choir party. I don't spend every waking moment thinking things like, "Oh, these hard-boiled eggs just aren't bisexual enough." Nor is it relevant to my marriage, other than the fact that my husband knows I'll sometimes discreetly ogle the same pretty women he does. It does not mean I want to sleep with everything that moves, or that I would act on it even if I did, any more than any monosexual person would, be their orientation straight or gay, or that I feel an immediate kinship with every other individual who identifies themselves as bisexual. Some of them are promiscuous. Some of them are celibate. Many of them are married and monogamous by choice, as am I. If someone tells you they're bisexual, the only thing you can take for granted is that they've acknowledged being attracted to men and women. In and of itself, it does not automatically tell you the choices they've made or the decisions they're going to make in terms of relationships; there's no way to tell that when someone's straight, or gay, or lesbian or transgender. You may have assumptions you're working from, based on people you've met in these categories, or of stories you've heard and seen, but I would urge you to recognize that they are assumptions, that people often don't fit the categories society makes for them, and most important, to not let assumptions -- well-intentioned or not -- get in the way of getting to know and love people for who they actually are.

On the one hand, I'm blessed, and I know it, because this whole issue is indeed irrelevant to pretty much all my friends and colleagues. Even so, I'm hammering at this particular point because there are times -- even here -- when I end up feeling that bisexuals are the Snuffleupagi of sexuality discussions -- that people either don't believe we really exist, or that they believe they know us better than we know ourselves. When I attended General Assembly in 2003, one of the most controversial speakers was advice columnist Dan Savage, who's notorious for asserting that bisexuals are basically "cowards, liars, and cheats" who are mostly heterosexuals wasting gay people's time. When this church conducted its search for a settled minister a couple years ago, several people indicated on their surveys that they would be okay with a gay or lesbian minister but not a bisexual one. I don't know who they were, and I'd just as soon not find out, because I don't want to assume they're operating from the same definition of "bisexual" -- whatever it happened to be -- that caused them to answer that question that way three years ago. When I mentioned feeling distressed by this to a gay neighbor, he said "the only issue I'd have with a bisexual minister is whether they'd be monogamous." [gesture of frustration] It's like when religious conservatives talk about not wanting gay people to teach Sunday school, and you want to point out to them, "Dudes, they already are." If you've participated in any sort of intercongregational gathering, be it district conferences or General Assembly, you have almost certainly met a bisexual minister or director of religious education, and it was almost certainly a nonissue in terms of whether they were doing their jobs well or not.

Which brings us to the problematic heart of the matter, so to speak: in an ideal world, the distance between preconceptions and reality wouldn't be something to angst about. However, in the world we do live in, we do have to collectively cope with that distance, and it's hard when it comes to issues like love and religion, and it's all the more complicated when people of our kind claim to be speaking for us. There are bisexuals who make me crazy when they go around proclaiming "oh, everyone's 'bi,'" or that bisexuality is somehow superior to monosexuality. It makes me want to reach for the nearest roll of rainbow-colored duct tape and get to work. Not incidentally, I also get twitchy when Unitarian Universalists speak that way about our denomination: to say that other people are UUs and "just don't know it yet" pushes the same buttons that go off when someone tells me my life can't possibly be complete until I accept Christ as my saviour. Let me be absolutely clear: this is not to slag those of you here who are Christian as well as UU. I'm not objecting to Christianity and I'm not even objecting to evangelism: I can respect the desire to share "good news" and to offer people options they haven't considered. What I don't appreciate is someone who doesn't yet know me well assuming I haven't thought long and hard about what I believe or who I truly love and defining me by what they think they know about me rather than actually engaging with who I am.

But to know somebody -- to build a real connection, the kind where it's even appropriate to talk about loaded topics such as sex and religion, or about weird literary obsessions -- that takes time, and timing. Earlier this decade, there was a campaign among Unitarian Universalist churches for UUs to become more articulate about our faith, and one of the concepts that got bandied about was the "30 second elevator speech" -- that is, if you're on an elevator with someone, how would you answer the question, "What is Unitarian Universalism?"

On the one hand, it's a useful exercise, and in this town, it's definitely not a bad idea to be armed with something to start with when someone says at a barbecue or hockey game, "So, what church do you go to?" At the same time, if someone gets to the point of asking me what UUs believe, that conversation has never ended under 30 seconds. 30 minutes, maybe, but not 30 seconds. Part of this is because I feel obligated to warn them that I don't and cannot speak for all Unitarian Universalists, many of whom are neither technically "Unitarian" nor technically "Universalist" in the "one God" and "all are saved" traditional definitions of those words. I like to point out that, except for the Seven Principles, I don't actually know what any given Unitarian Universalist holds as true until I actually interact with them. There are definitely ideological trends within our congregations, given what our core principles entail, but within our own congregation we have individuals who are quietly pro-war, pro-death-penalty, anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, or some other minority stance, and whose interpretations of the Principles allow for that. And even when there's a consensus on theology, there isn't always agreement on policy, and doesn't that make for interesting meetings when that happens.

But the messy, multifaceted complexity of Unitarian Universalism is also what makes this denomination my spiritual home. It is so much more than the jokes made about it on Prairie Home Companion and The Simpsons and elsewhere, and I have seen first-hand how our churches help people develop their gifts and give them strength through difficult times. One of the things I've learned from being active in this church, and in talking about this church to other people, is that letting people know who you are can make a tremendous difference in someone else's perception of the worlds you belong to. As much as I dread and despise being pigeonholed, there's a plus side to it: finding out that I'm Unitarian Universalist is what it's taken for some people to ask what the heck it is, and to consider whether it would enrich their own lives. "Unitarian Universalism" isn't a particularly compelling concept when it's just an eleven-syllable mouthful unattached to anyone they personally know, but when it's something they can associate with someone they like and respect, or who at least amuses them, it becomes something they can consider taking seriously. It's no guarantee that they will, but being out and about as a Unitarian Universalist helps our faith be visible and real to people who might need it in ways that commercials and press releases will never achieve.

Along similar lines, I cannot stress enough that, if you can, when you can, being open about what and who you love -- whether you're bisexual, straight, gay, lesbian, or none of the above -- that can help someone else be brave, even if all you're doing is living "as if you like yourself." To quote more of the Marge Piercy reading, "You cannot tell always by looking what is happening." There is no telling who you may be helping by being present, by paying attention, and by bearing witness. It's not the rock stars or the actors or the politicians or any of the other "them"s out there that are real to your neighbors and colleagues. In most cases, it's going to take someone they know and trust to start them towards recognizing that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people aren't imaginary, freaky creatures from a galaxy far, far away, but real live people with real feelings, real families, and real joys and sorrows specific to their lives. It's not only up to you, and heaven knows there's a gadzillion other variables in the mix, but if you can, when you can, how you can, the stories you own and the stories you share can help other people discern and redefine new strands in the fabric of our lives' design.

All of that said, because we're human, and because language and understanding both have their limits, there will always be secret chambers among us and points of disconnection, no matter what our sexual, religious, or literary orientations happen to be. Our closing hymn this morning [**] has the line, "Disappointment pierced me through." But then it continues, "Still I kept on loving you." May we each say "yes" to life and to truth, and in doing so, help others say "yes" to love. Amen and alleluia.

[*] "We Gather In Reverence" by Sophia Lyon Fahs (#439 in Singing the Living Tradition)
[**] "Just As Long as I Have Breath" - text by Alicia S. Carpenter (#6 in SLT)