that his pacifist God nailed in exemplary masochistic sexual passion
*The sadism o f this deicide establishes a basis for attributing to the Jews
the most vile acts of cruelty, all tinged with sexual sadism: slaughter of
infants to use their blood is a charge that, with rape, reappears cyclically.
to a cross had to offer converts masculinity: otherwise, C hrist’s
suffering would not play in Peoria. The sexual brilliance of the
passion could not hide the morbid fem ininity of the Jew who suffered it— w illingly, as an act of human w ill. It was Paul’s genius to link ineffective and effeminate Jewish law and Jew s with unnatural
homosexuals worthy of death. It was Paul’s genius to exploit Christ
as the prototypical Je w — he suffered like a female, it was his passion, an ecstasy of agonized penetration— and then to have the resurrection of Christ symbolize a new nature, a Christian nature: it dies, then rises. The son, born a Jew , was worthy of death— homosexual as Jew s are, effeminate as Jew s are, with their weak law and tenuous m asculinity. The son resurrected triumphed over the
father and over death. Those who were like him, Christians,
shared in the victory, got closer to the real God (the one who won);
got more masculine than that Jew who had died in unspeakable
agony on the cross because the resurrected Christ was more masculine. The crucifixion without the resurrection would have left Jews and their God the repositories of patriarchal religious authority. The resurrection turned Jews from patriarchs into pansies, except when it was more useful to concentrate on them as the killers of Christ. The simple, cruel, rather monotonous God of the Jews could scarcely compete with the trebled divinity: The Father,
The Son, The Holy Ghost—a father whose son superseded him in
range of affect, emotion, and bravery, and whose Holy Ghost was
purely and ideally phallic and all-penetrating. It was Paul, back on
earth, who established the social ramifications of this religion of
revelation rather than of law for the Jew s who might be queer
enough to cling to one god rather than his trebled usurper: like
homosexuals, you are worthy of death.
*
The Old Testament does not contain the bloodlust against homosexuals and homosexuality found in the New Testament. There is
no mention of lesbians at all. Lesbian acts are inferred to be among
the “doings of Egypt” prohibited in Leviticus. No textual reference
to Gomorrah suggests that it was destroyed because of lesbianism:
this too has been inferred. It is not women who are commanded:
“The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover” (Leviticus 18: 9). All of the
sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, including the prohibition against
male homosexuality, are rules for effectively upholding the dominance of a real patriarch, the senior father in a tribe of fathers and sons. The controlling of male sexuality in the interests of male
dominance—whom men can fuck, when, and how—is the essential in tribal societies in which authority is exclusively male. The rules in Leviticus are blueprints for minimizing intratribal sexual
conflict among men. In chapter 18 of Leviticus, incest is broadly
defined and prohibited; adultery, male homosexuality, intercourse
with a menstruating woman, and intercourse with animals are also
forbidden. In chapter 20 of Leviticus, death by stoning is the sentence “for every one that curseth his father or his mother” (Leviticus 20: 9), for adulterers, for one who has intercourse with his father’s wife or his daughter-in-law, for male homosexuality, for
bestiality. Incest with one’s sister and intercourse with a menstruating woman are not capital crimes: the punishment is being cut off from one’s people. The heinous crime is not in the sexual
act committed per se; it is certainly not in any abuse of women per
se. The heinous crime is in committing a sexual act that will exacerbate male sexual conflict and provoke permanently damaging sexual antagonism in the tribe among men. For the Hebrews, sexual transgression that warranted death had the potential, if widely
practiced, to cause the erosion of the power of men as a class by
creating internecine sexual warfare within the class. The subordination of women was a means to male social cohesion. The regulation of that subordination through a regulation of male sexual behavior was straightforward and eminently practicaclass="underline" men were
supposed to sacrifice some measure of pleasure to maintain power.
Incest with one’s sister did not incite male-male conflict so much as
did intercourse with one’s daughter-in-law or with the wife of one’s
father. Therefore, the punishment was not death by stoning. The
prohibitions in Leviticus on sexual practices are without exception
shrewd and pragmatic in these terms. All of the prohibitions further the aims of male dominance in the patriarchal tribe and contribute to the stability of male power. This is true too of the oft quoted prohibition of male homosexuality: “Thou shalt not lie with
mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination” (Leviticus 18: 22).
This means sim ply that it is foul to do to other men what men
habitually, proudly, m anfully, do to women: use them as inanimate, em pty, concave things; fuck them into submission; subordinate them through sex. The abomination is in the meaning of the act: in a male-supremacist system, men cannot simultaneously be
used “as women” and stay powerful because they are men. The
abomination is also, perhaps most of all, in the consequences of the
act in a rigidly patriarchal tribal society: sexual rivalry among men
meant trouble, feuds, war. The Jews were a tribe perpetually at
war with others; they could not afford war among them selves. *
And from the real beginning—once outside of Eden— the Jew s
reckoned with the anarchistic evil of fratricide: Cain and Abel,
Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers— all were tragic stories
of brothers torn apart by jealous conflict over the blessing that
showed they were the beloved, and these struggles to be the bestloved had huge historical consequences for the Jew s. Actual carnal sex, the patriarchs recognized, would have made it worse, not better, intensified the conflict. Sexual acts among men threatened the social harmony on which the power of men depended, a social harmony made tenuous enough by the kind of sexual lust that male
*A more complex martial society, which the Hebrews became, could