The Catholic League, The Theater, The Protest, and Me

November 9th, 2008 · 5 Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article in The New York Times that marked the tenth anniversary of both Matthew Shepard’s death and Manhattan Theater Club’s premiere of Corpus Christi, a play by Terrence McNally that reimagines the story of Christ as a modern-day parable performed by gay men.

My story (and Jason Zinoman’s review of a recent Corpus Christi production) prompted an angry press release from The Catholic League, an organization that protested the play when it premiered in 1998.

Here’s what Catholic League president Bill Donohue said about my work:

On October 19, Mark Blankenship said those who protested the play in 1998 offered ‘stark reminders of lingering homophobia.’ So when anti-Catholic homosexuals like McNally feature Jesus having oral sex with the boys, and Catholics object, it’s not McNally who is the bigot—it’s those protesting Catholics. One wonders what this guy would say if a Catholic made a play about Barney Frank showing him to be a morally destitute lout who ripped off the taxpayers. Would he blame objecting gays for Catholic bashing?

Spurred largely by the Catholic League, over 150 people complained to Clark Hoyt, public editor of The New York Times, about my story and Mr. Zinoman’s review. Today, Mr. Hoyt reflects on this response in his weekly column.

Mr. Hoyt called me on Thursday to alert me that his piece was going to run, and he gave me the chance to respond. As you see in his column, I clarified that I was only asserting the homophobia of people who threatened violence against Mr. McNally and Manhattan Theater Club.

To expand on my response, let me provide the context for the quote that offended Mr. Donohue. In my story, I wrote:

For American gay culture this month marks a doubly somber anniversary

Ten years ago, on Oct. 12, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, died in a Colorado hospital almost a week after two men viciously beat him and left him tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyo. That same night Terrence McNally’s play “Corpus Christi,” about 13 gay men who perform the story of Jesus, had its final preview performance at Manhattan Theater Club; due to weeks of protests and bomb threats, ticket holders had to pass through metal detectors before taking their seats.

In retrospect the events seem linked. Beyond the coincidence of timing, both were seen as stark reminders of lingering homophobia, and like Mr. McNally’s play the events in Laramie eventually found life in the theater.

I feel it’s clear that I’m calling the protests and threats homophobic, and not simply dismissing all offended Catholics. Frequent readers of this site will know I get offended by things all the time, and I acknowledge anyone’s right to be outraged by a piece of art or journalism, on whatever grounds they choose. But when metal detectors are required to shield us from a person’s offense, it has become hateful and dangerous.

I respect Mr. Hoyt’s suggestion that Mr. Zinoman and I could have mentioned the reasons a Christian might be offended by Corpus Christi. Because it notes the grounds for legitimate dissent, Mr. Hoyt’s column adds a valuable dimension to the discussion of the play.

Mr. Donohue’s press release does not. By taking a small snippet of my story, erasing its context, and escalating it to grotesque proportions, he promotes anger instead of mutual understanding. By calling Mr. McNally anti-Catholic and referring to supposed “blow jobs with boys,” he proves he still hasn’t read or seen Corpus Christi.

I wrote my story for the same reason I created The Critical Condition: I want to spark conversations about relevant issues in popular culture. If Mr. Donohue (or anyone else) wants to debate me about anything I’ve written, then I’m happy to participate. But I can’t react to rage. We learn things when we talk to each other, not when we yell.

Note: After writing this post, my opinions about some of these things changed. For continued discussion of this topic, please go here.

Tags: Media

5 responses so far ↓

1 Roommate Joe // Nov 9, 2008 at 5:47 pm

Bill Donahue has never, in however many years he’s been blubbering his nonsense and giving Catholics a bad name, grasped the difference between ideas and actions. The fact that he equates allegory (however provocative) with criminal actions like making bomb threats not only proves his cluelessness, but it makes Catholics look like they’re afraid of being challenged intellectually.

It IS a symbol of lingering homophobia. HE is a symbol of lingering homophobia. Also high blood pressure.
2 Karen // Nov 9, 2008 at 9:33 pm

I was a little surprised that Corpus Christi 2008 was not generating the same response it received 10 years ago, and I thought maybe, just MAYBE, we had evolved into better human beings. It is amazing that in 10 years, the same blustering fool is still spewing the same hate in the name of God. When he pops up, he is always a nice reminder why I left the Catholic Church almost 20 years ago and why I will not raise my kid anywhere near the Catholic faith.

At any rate, congrats at writing a piece that got his panties in a bunch! This makes me all the more proud to know you.
3 Elizabeth // Nov 10, 2008 at 12:53 pm

I dramaturged a production of Corpus in 2003 in Cincinnati — and hoo boy, was that ever fun! The Catholic League showed up. They have lots of colorful banners and they sing hymns at you and stuff. Thing I remember most is the teenagers who’d been brought down there by their parents looking at us with this kind of nervous curiosity — wondering what we were like, those of us doing what they’d been taught never to do. I hope they remember.

The company wound up engaging with a local visual artist who made some stunning collages out of all the thousands of postcards we received. We left the death threats on there.

All in all, it was one of the most spiritually moving experiences of my life.

For my part, I appreciated Hoyt’s piece. As a liberal Christian who supports a secular society, I often feel like I encounter, in the arts, non-religious people claiming openness that falls short — not out of ugliness, but as a reaction to all the ugliness that comes along from those at the far, conservative end of the religious spectrum. I recently saw The Quality of Life at ACT, for example, and you had all those hundreds of agnostic Bay Area folk laughing and loving themselves for seeing a play about religious people, when I felt the father was a poor, two-dimensional attempt at treating conservative Christian feelings as possibly genuine. I don’t mean to attack the playwright, who seemed to be struggling honestly to get this guy to seem real. I take it more as evidence that many people in the arts and in secular, liberal America (a place I gladly inhabit) really have no idea how anyone could believe in these religious things, and it strains their imaginations. Much as I loved our production, the teeny bit of theology that McNally sticks in there is pretty darn elementary and doesn’t respond well to the “abomination” argument.

None of this is to say that Donahue is much more than a guy who really likes attention. I mean, the writing on the mass-produced postcards we received wasn’t even grammatical; he’s not doing it out of thoughtfulness or sincerity. However, I suspect that whatever he really is holding onto, at core, is sincerely meaningful to him.
4 Michael // Nov 10, 2008 at 5:13 pm

Hear, hear, Elizabeth!

My impulse, which may not be helpful, is actually to draw some internal distinctions. I have divided feelings about every single issue here, but here goes:

although his thinking seems crude and prejudiced, unfounded by any real experience of the play, there is nevertheless a pattern of feeling in Donohoe’s response worth discerning, I think. I wonder if Donohoe is in part reacting to a) his own blurring of bomb threats with legal protests of the original production of Corpus Christi and b) Mark’s implicit linking of those bomb threats with the ideas that led to the killing of Matthew Shepherd. He misread Mark’s article as a comparison of the protesters to the murderers–and, understandably, he wants the right to protest a play whose ideas he finds offensive without being accused of being a murderer in his heart. Nobody said that he is–but that’s what he may have sensed as an implication, in a slippage of ideas that is his own, but also possibly an understandable confusion.

What. after all, is the appropriate way to reply to a play? To a form that has no room for audience response yet touches on core issues for you?

I mention this in part because, painfully, I find some of the same kind of odd slippage of issues in McNally’s writing of Corpus Christi, a play in which McNally’s personal history and that of the Jesus of the gospels and that of persecuted gay men everywhere are mixed–I admit to a degree of inchoate discomfort with that, with the claiming of the martyr’s mantle or the role of savior (the theological issues in McNally’s play are undeveloped, and that adds to the potential for misunderstanding); so I’m stuck defending in principle a play that I have never loved (although I’d be interested to see it, especially in a mixed-cast production), that, even if it has innocent intentions, seems at some level confused, if not as confused as its opponents.

More slippages surround this quarrel. Here are
two distinctions that nag at me:

first, is the objection to a portrayal of Christ as sexually active (a theme that has been surfacing in scholarship lately) homophobic or erotophobic? What if it’s more the latter? (Remember protests of the film of The Last Temptation of Christ?)

And second, although the historical and cultural importance of Matthew Shepherd’s death is that it awakened a nation to the horrors of gay-bashing, there is, however, reason to suspect that the actual murderers were not primarily motivated by homophobia so much as a drug-addled grab for money. How important is that? What is there to compare?

All of these distinctions wrinkle and compromise the easy comparisons here.

At the same time,Mark, it is almost impossible to write so as to forestall all options for misunderstanding. You were right to weigh in. But it’s great to have a space like this in which to continue the conversation.
5 Joseph // Nov 10, 2008 at 11:17 pm

Mark -

This is a truly phenomenal story. One for the memoirs!

The way I see it, you’re not a REAL critic until the Catholic League protests your opinions. Congratulations.

j

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