For Michael, "homosexuality is lust". He never bothers to identify in what particular way gays are challenged by lust that heterosexuals are not. He asserts that it is so, but his assertion is empty. He writes: "It became clear to me, as I really thought about it – and really prayed about it – that homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within. We cannot see the truth when we're blinded by homosexuality. We believe, under the influence of homosexuality, that lust is not just acceptable, but a virtue. But there is no homosexual 'desire' that is apart from lust."
I don't know of any particular gay intellectual or gay-rights activist who has ever said that "lust is a virtue" as Glatze claims, at least not in the sense that he takes it. Note that Glatze is putting his own spin on the gay community's, painting a multicolored spectrum of opinions in black and white. My own particular take, spelled out in my book Soulfully Gay (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007), is that homosexuality is essentially an expression of love (same-directed Love) and is one of ways that God makes himself present.
At its best, the gay-rights movement has affirmed three essential spiritual principles. Not every gay person will agree with all three of these principles (and others would prefer to substitute a term for God such as Emptiness, Spirit, Divinity or Higher Power), but something like these three principles are fairly universal elements to be found in the work of mainstream gay spiritual writers, philosophers, and theologians since the homophile movement of the 1950s.
First, God's presence is encountered by the whole person: a being entire in body, mind, and soul. It will not do to repress or deny any part of our integral humanity in order to meet God part way. Merely physical, purely intellectual, or airy spiritualizing are not effective ways of meeting God.
Second, aspects of traditional religion have frequently broken the relationship between God and human being by severing the connection between body and soul. Repressing and denying the natural instincts, sensations, feelings, and desires of the body actually dishonors God's good creation.
Third, gay liberation heals the split between body and soul, allowing a person to own (rather than psychologically repress) their inner nature and therefore connect to God more fully, honestly, and integrally. The body is not denied, hidden, and obscured by the mind or spiritual fancy. The individual's physical body is integrated into a larger whole (for Christians, the Body of Christ).
With this understanding in mind, you can see that "lust" has nothing in particular to do with sexual orientation or liberation. Lust is uncontrolled, overmastering sexual desire or appetite. Lust is what happens when sexuality of any sort, heterosexual or homosexual, is allowed to run wild over prudence, common sense, health, and mutual respect.
Lust is not the same thing as passion. Passion is feeling our inner drives intensely and wholly. Passion fuels life and gives us our direct encounter with our own inner drives, the given of human experience. Only passion misdirected in either heterosexual or homosexual ways is appropriately called lust (for example, an insatiable sexual addiction that harms body and soul is lustful, whether its a man addicted to sex with women or to men).
Sexual attraction means admiring the beauty, sometimes passionately so, in another person. This is the thrill sung by poets for millennia, including the Song of Songs in the Bible. In contrast, lust means treating our fellow human beings merely as disposable sex objects, instead of seeing the beauty in our fellow human beings as penetrating all levels of their humanity.
In my opinion, Michael Glatze's account of his spiritual journey is best read not as an account of one man coming out of his homosexuality. The editorial provides no evidence except empty assertions that Glatze has fundamentally changed his attractions, desires, or even his behavior. Glatze makes no claim to have discovered a passionate yearning for the female sex, only a claim that he cultivated a revulsion towards his homosexual inclinations.
So please don't read Glatze's story as a story of a gay-rights activist turning straight. Instead, consider the story an account of one young man's journey out of lust and into (perhaps) a more principled and disciplined existence in which a man who used to engage in morally problematic behavior learns to tame his baser impulses.
As a man in his thirties, Michael may be belatedly discovering that sex is not all about pornography, cheap thrills, and back-of-the-magazine sex lines. He thinks he's discovered something important about his homosexuality. In truth, he has only come to a wider degree of maturity in his ability to give sex a limited and honored role in his life. He is learning a lesson about growing up that is available to all persons regardless of their sexual orientation.
As for his stock narrative as a Reformed Gay, including all his terrible misunderstandings and misrepresentations of homosexuality, Michael's is now a familiar tale. His story, replete with its truly offensive and defamatory attacks on an entire class of human beings and its tone deaf reading of gay culture, is best forgotten and forgiven.
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