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By Root 317 0

only child. We lived that year in a big old farmhouse on a horse farm we rented. The horses used to wander on their own business—nameless, cared for by others. In my new game I marked off some portion of the yard by the abandoned chicken coop and named it Hell, and I’d play devil, racing about the perimeter with my pitchfork, poking at souls, meting out punishments, keeping them in line. With a girl who lived down our road I’d play a game in which we took turns dying and going to heaven, which I imagined as a kind of garden with a maze, a rose garden, where I would meet a blond and milk-pale Jesus. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses…But that game, which was soon forbidden to us by a relative who said, “You mustn’t play that, it might come true,” was a game of images, of peace and stillness. My game of Hell was an enactment of energy and ferocity, of power and defiance. I think I have responded to the religion of prohibition in this way ever since.

Perhaps if my grandmother had lived, and if we’d stayed in Tennessee, my two religions would have merged, and I would have grown away from the images I was originally given, or felt oppressed by them. But because I was split off from that world, the landscape of my childhood and of the songs seems permanent to me, sealed, untouchable, a mythic landscape of hymns, with their rivers and flowers, their cherry trees and blood and moons. We moved away from my parents’ families, on to suburbs in Arizona and Southern California and Florida, and into a succession of increasingly polite Protestant churches which finally evaporated into a bland social gesture which was easily set aside. My mother, late in her life, found a religion of imagery again in an Anglican church so high and so influenced by the architecture and pageantry of Mexican Catholicism as to be a kind of spiritual theater. I came, after a while, to seek the images of comfort and challenge and transformation in art. My mother, with her love of painting and music and beauty, had helped me to look there, but I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition.

The explanations were never good ones—the world as trial by fire, proving ground to earn God’s love or His forgiveness for having been human—and it was apparent to me even at an early age that the notion that anyone around me actually understood God’s will or could articulate it was patently ridiculous. There’s a wonderful line in Charles Finney’s quirky book, The Circus of Dr. Lao, which I read as a kid, an Americanized version of a speech of Hamlet’s: “There are more things in heaven and earth, madam, than even a lifetime of experience in Abalone, Arizona, could avail you of.”

The prohibitions were worse than the explanations. They suggested that the divinity had constructed the earth as a kind of spiritual minefield, a Chutes and Ladders game of snares, traps, and seductions, all of them fueled by the engines of our longing; the flames of hell were stoked by human heats. As if desire were our enemy, instead of the ineradicable force that binds us to the world.

I cannot be queer in church, though I’ve tried, and though I live now in a place where this seems to be perfectly possible for a great many people. Here in Provincetown we have a wonderful Unitarian church, with a congregation largely gay and lesbian, and it pains me a bit to have to admit that when I have gone to services there I have been utterly, hopelessly bored. There’s something about the absence of imagery, an oddly flaccid quality of neutrality in the language of worship. I long for a kind of spiritual intensity, a passion, though I can certainly see all the errors and horrors spiritual passions have wrought. I don’t know what I want in a church, finally; I think the truth is that I don’t want a church. My friend Phil has sweetly and politely informed me that it’s a spiritual experience for him to be in the company of his fellows, worshiping together at the U.U., and that my resistance to it is really a sort