Archbishop Tutu, the apartheid of homosexuality, and being human

by Baden Offord

I am a queer academic, someone who has been fortunate enough to do a PhD at Southern Cross University on queer rights and activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia. Strangely, doing that PhD allowed me to marry my interest and passion in activism and my concern for human rights for all people regardless of their race, religion, sexuality, class, gender and so on. The root of my thinking has been the question: who or what defines being human? When I came across the question posed by two feminist human rights scholars: Are Women Human? I realised that that question could be re-framed to ask: Are Homosexuals Human?

Well, in the last week (mid-July) there have been many signals that suggest that homosexuals are often not considered to be human beings. A Four Corners report (ABC TV) on gays and lesbians in Townsville, titled "Hitting Material" (coined from the suggestion of a homophobic male on how gays should be viewed), showed the embedded nature of anti-homosexual feeling that stems from issues of masculinity and religious sanction. One night later, an SBS television program looked at the problem of homophobia in the USA. The story revolved around a gay man who, to protect his parents from embarrasement, kept his homosexuality hidden. He's murdered by two male friends who are so bound up in their masculinity that their own homosexual encounters are reason enough to be exorcised through violence and hatred upon a man who is known by them to be gay.

This story was chilling as it demonstrated the schizophrenic nature of our lives, between who we think we are (and must be) according to society, religion and culture, and who we really are. Somewhere in all this our humanity is lost. Asking the question: Are Homosexuals human? is not an academic question. It involves much more: it is asking us to think about what being human is all about. It is a deeply ethical and philosophical inquiry. It has political, cultural and social importance. But it matters so much because it affects the everyday lives of real people. It affects whether human beings, on account of their sexuality and love, are excluded from being full members of society. If homosexuals are not considered to be full members of human society, then they are pushed into the grand sweep of history that has determined human participation and belonging along the lines of race, class, gender, caste, religion and so on. History is a contest. It's about who is determined to be human and who is not. And history cannot be sundered from humanity.

So, last year, while I was thinking humanity and finishing my PhD, I wrote an article titled "The Apartheid of Homosexuality," which appeared in several journals and newsletters around the world. It was about the war against transgender, gay, lesbian and bisexual human beings all around the world. It was about human beings caught up in the matrix of hatred and hypocrisy that is flounced around about human sexuality. The inspiration for this article was the former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate whose political savvy and religious faith considerably helped end the darkest period of South Africa: the apartheid regime. Together with Nelson Mandela, he brought South Africa back to its collective humanity (and conscience), where race is not a determining feature of being regarded as human.

I had received this report from NewsPlanet on November 17 1998:

"South Africa's retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu is on a rare visit to the U.S., sponsored by the Denver-based PeaceJam which convened its Youth Conference this weekend. One student asked what injustice the Nobel Prize-winner would most want to reverse if he could, and Tutu asked if he could have two. After expounding on the need to forgive Third World debts, he turned to equal treatment of gays and lesbians. He called their persecution as unjust as apartheid, since sexual orientation is no more chosen than race. "For me it's a matter of human rights and a deeply theological issue," he said. "I believe they are as much God's children as anyone."

In following this up, I was lucky enough to meet with Tutu in Sydney last November while he was in Australia to receive the 1999 Sydney Peace prize. As an inspiration for my thesis and following his extraordinary role as the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, I wanted to ask him about his views on homosexuality and human rights.

I would like to share with PULP readers a part of the interview:

I began by asking Tutu why he had made his comments about an apartheid of homosexuality.

Tutu:     Well I mean I suppose mainly crucial questions have very many dimensions, but I was myself moved to be involved because I saw it as reflecting very much the sort of issues we were dealing with in racism. I said I would be totally inconsistent if I on the one side had opposed racism which penalises a person for something about which they can do nothing, the ethnicity, and on the other side keep quiet when people are penalised, and penalised really grievously, to the point of being killed, again about something that I believe is increasingly being shown is not a matter of choice. It would be a very bizarre situation for anyone to want to choose a way of life that they know has attracted so much hatred and homophobia. That was my major reason why for me it became a justice issue.

Q:         So would you agree with Amnesty International when it says that sexual orientation is a fundamental dimension to human identity.

Tutu:     Of course. Yes. How can you be fully human unless we act sexually. The trouble is of course that most people think of sexuality as genital, and don't realise that it is a far more embracing thing speaking about the whole person and as it were how one relates...

Q:         Dehumanising people seems to me to be completely antithetical to real social harmony. How do you bring the language of harmony into the area of sexuality?

Tutu:     Well you could approach it as it were from another angle. The Church teaches that, our Church certainly, originally it seems as if some churches taught that the main purpose for marriage was procreation and therefore any act of sexual intercourse was regarded as being fulfilled if the confirmation of it would be pregnancy... Our Church has taught that marriage has very many purposes, one is of the obvious procreation and the bringing up of children, but the other is the growth of the couple into full humanity as they become more and more like God, and the sexual act between these two is seen not just as a physical thing but it is part of how they begin to express their love for one another, learning more and more to be giving rather than seeking to receive, be more and more like God in that it was surrendering the one to the other. And it is seen as quite crucial in the process of their becoming increasingly more human, increasingly more God-like. Now, the question we then ask is, since we say celibacy is a vocation to be accepted only by a few, why do we without any sense of being inconsistent say for a certain section of society, about 10% of society, because they are homosexual, celibacy is not a vocation, it is an obligation? And if we say for the heterosexual the sexual activity culminating in the sexual act is part of how they grow into full humanity, why would for them is it so and strangely for these others it isn't so? I myself think that we are guilty of gross inconsistency and in a way living a lie, as the Church, because we are insisting that a very substantial section of society should be hobbled and you in fact make them [homosexuals] guilty of who they are and therefore you assist in the process of their dehumanisation... Because being dissatisfied with who you are is very corrosive.

Q:         Do you think there is a human rights consciousness all around the world from your personal experience? Do you think human rights language has become in itself, perhaps the primary way at the moment for human beings to work within an understanding of interdependence, because there's always that dialectic between the other and oneself in human rights.

Tutu:     You mean is it universal? It certainly is universal for the victim and one of the interesting things is have you ever met someone who was a gross violator of human rights who would claim brazenly yes I am a violator? None! Almost all of them claim the contrary, so that even in a negative way you see that there is an increasing consciousness about the centrality of human rights, everywhere. Victims even when they are not educated, sophisticated, know that there are some things that just can't be right, for instance for women to be raped. Now a victim of rape doesn't have to have been taught that there is a right she has to the integrity of her body, that she knows and the perpetrator knows in the act of doing this that there is a violation that is happening. But even more positively they see, I mean I haven't yet heard even the worst culprit say here I am, I'm a champion of the violation of human rights. They almost always try to give the opposite impression. So I would myself say there is a universality about [human rights] which is wonderful, it gives great hope for the fact that there may be a gradual increase in the consciousness of the culture of human rights. I would also say that in very many parts of the world people would be aware of what you're talking about even if they didn't know anything about the different ideologies that are in competition when you talk about human rights, when you talk about the right to life, the right to health, to a job, to food, to safe and secure accommodation, to the right of freedom of association, of speech and so on. I mean people in a sense don't have to be schooled, they have to be schooled about working to ensure that the rights are recognised and respected.

Q:         Do you consider yourself an activist?

Tutu:     Well I certainly know that many people [ask] when am I going to ease up? I think there's no way which you could be passive and be sitting back when you are aware that perhaps you may be able to make a contribution to making life slightly better for those who are having a rough time.

Q:         I asked that because in my thesis I ask the question is Archbishop Desmond Tutu a gay activist. Is it the same thing? In other words to be a real human being, to be engaged, is it to be activated? Is this too difficult to ask?

Tutu:     No, I have no problem because everywhere where I can, even yesterday in my sermon I was talking about how God is longing for us to help God make people realise that God is looking for a society in which there are no outsiders. We are all insiders, and I always include, I try and put opposites, rich, poor, educated, not educated, then gay and lesbian and straight, all. And I think that yes, perhaps sometimes because one has a bit of a prominence they will be likely to quote some of the things one says… I mean now, this guy is a Nobel Laureate and they tend to think that Nobel Laureates are oracles, and possibly because of our involvement in the struggle against apartheid and now the Truth and Reconciliation Investigation Commission, those tend to help give some kind of credibility … I hope I can use that for the benefit of the many who will tend to be marginalised, who tend to be without a voice.

Q:         I'm very grateful for this. The last question is simply this - after reading your latest book and after following your life, (it's a personal question actually), if I may, how do you meet yourself? I know you have a very strong faith. I'm not a Christian myself, I'm a lay Buddhist in many ways, but I guess what I'm wondering is how do you respond to life, to the fact that life seems to be one endless suffering for so many people and you've witnessed it very first hand?

Tutu:     I have in the latter part of my life been surprised that although I have experienced or seen people who have experienced very considerable suffering, that I go away not as one filled with despondency, but filled with a great deal of hope. Hope that people are in fact fundamentally good, and even a hard cynical world amazingly is attracted by goodness and compassion. I mean it [the world] looks at Mother Theresa, it looks at Nelson Mandela and so on. We don't talk in the same almost hushed reverential tones of a big tycoon or a military powerful figure as we do of the Mother Theresa, or the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. We do in fact seem to have an instinct for goodness and that may be due perhaps to my faith but it is also due to the people I have encountered who have nurtured my belief in human beings. Human beings are fundamentally good.  

Footnotes

1. Visit the Truth and Reconciliation Commission website at:
    http://www.truth.org.za/

Addenda

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