Jesus in Drag

When I worked in state government, I had a gay friend who liked to go skiing at Afton Alps, Minnesota. He asked if I had any interest in going for a weekend. He had friends in St. Paul where we could stay, and he added the couple was gay.

We arrived in St. Paul on a Friday evening and had a good dinner with the couple. They were friendly and welcoming, but must have been curious why I would be spending time with their gay friend in Iowa.

Saturday was spent on the slopes. That night we went out to a bar the likes of which I had never seen.

Gay 90s was a mega-bar in downtown Minneapolis. Three dance floors, two restaurants, eight bars, drag shows, and male strippers. The couple recommended we sample each of the bars and then head up to the drag show on the top floor. Each bar was a different theme for different clientele – twinks, leather, bears, cowboys, bikers, retro, kinky, and BDSM.

I’d never seen a drag show or even a man wearing a dress. I was mesmerized by its unusualness. The make-up and costumes were over-the-top; the singing was good enough; and, there was a steady line of men who approached the stage to offer a tip.

When the show ended, the couple lingered to meet one of the performers whom they knew. When he arrived, he stood about two feet from me. I’d never been so close to a drag queen. I studied him as though I had a magnifying glass in hand. Nothing about this man said “man” to me. He was unrecognizable as a male human being. I even studied his face to find any trace of a beard. It looked like he didn’t have the follicles to support one. He was the perfect model of a female impersonator. The only give away was his Adam’s apple.

I didn’t recognize this drag queen as being a man because nothing about him matched what I knew about manhood.

It was the same kind of experience when I considered the Methodist version of Jesus of Nazareth.

I didn’t recognize Jesus as being fully masculine because nothing about him matched what I knew about manliness.

When I was a kid the only artistic renderings of Christ were those depicted in the graphic for this post. Caucasian, long blond hair, a slightly emaciated face, droopy eyes that conveyed otherworldliness, layers of colored robes, and an upraised right hand that was either a wave, a signal to stop, or an indicator Christ had the answer and wanted to be called upon. In nearly all of them a strange aura framed his head, which reinforced my perception that Christ was more odd ghost than ordinary man.

These features were combined nicely in the 1977 mini-series Jesus of Nazareth starring Robert Powell. Here, a white, non-Middle Eastern Jesus glides through Judea in a state of mind that can only be described as nothingness. His interactions with his disciples are eerie. He never smiles. His discourses are mushy, vapid bromides. Most remarkable is that this eccentric shaman actually motivates throngs of people to listen to him and follow him around.

I surrendered my soul to Christ at 14, though I struggled with the womanish persona in front of me. I wanted Jesus in my life but I didn’t want Jesus the Drag Queen, who didn’t resemble anything masculine. I wanted Jesus to match the manhood fantasy I nurtured as a little boy – noble, muscular, handsome, strong, daring, energetic, captivating, courageous, lighthearted, passionate, principled, and persuasive.

Instead, I was face to face with the Maybelline Man. Nothing about this Jesus was appealing, although how I perceived him seemed to correspond with how I perceived myself. This Jesus was thoughtful but detached, involved but not engaged, fit but not brawny, fine-looking but not handsome, firm but not tough, interesting but not compelling, educated but not cosmopolitan.

It seemed I shared these characteristics with Christ, so who I perceived myself to be challenged the inner masculine archetype I wanted to construct. It was an antagonistically affectionate relationship. I liked him because we seemed so similar and I disliked him because he was nobody I wanted to be.

I often wondered about the sexual Jesus, since sexuality and manliness are complemental. Of course, he had a penis but did he have any libido? Did he ever masturbate, or have wet dreams and spontaneous erections? Did he ever experience amorous feelings for a woman? Was he ever exposed to the erotic art of the Greeks and Romans in nearby Sepphoris? Did he ever see a naked woman? Did he have any sexual thoughts or feelings?

My answers to these questions compelled me to conclude that, at a minimum, Jesus was asexual, and at best he had little real-world experience of what it meant to be a man in a hypersexual culture. My aversion to the sexless Son of Man tended to shade my perception of Christians, too. When it came to sexual expression, they seemed to be tight-lipped and strikingly guarded in articulating their understanding of the proper scope of sexual intimacy, as though God’s solitary, unspoken guidance was the missionary position and nothing else.

I wrongly assumed that if Jesus were sexually unresponsive then his followers were probably sexually unexciting, too. And if these nice people thought sex was uninteresting, then they probably thought most of life’s adventures, in all their varied manifestations and impacts, were also monotonous. Maybe Christians really were as dull as I perceived them to be. I still grapple with the mindset that evangelical Christians are fundamentally lifeless and agonizingly legalistic, and strangely drawn to a man with pronounced female gender signifiers who has a spooky glow around his face.

[Yes, I admit this is blatantly prejudicial. Of course, millions of evangelical Christians have robust sex lives. It’s just that none of them want to describe what “robust” means for them. So, in a social conversation about sexual wellbeing, the safest approach is to limit the size of the buffet and then sanitize it. However, when the dominate culture asks why there’s only one meat, one vegetable, and one dessert, their answer is “ask God.” I’ll wrestle this head on down the road.]

What I wanted to believe about Christ’s manhood couldn’t take shape because it contradicted the unmanly images of Jesus that surrounded me as a boy. Indeed, he was all male but not quite a man.

Then I read the account of some Baptist preacher who had died and gone to heaven. Once there he saw Christ. He related that Jesus was the most masculine, muscular man he had ever seen. I felt much better.

My guess is that a lot of men don’t identify Christ as manly. Maybe because men don’t consider spirituality very macho. Many evangelical Christian men I know aren’t avid Bible readers, never go to prayer meetings, are impassive around enthusiastic worship, and shudder at the thought of standing in a crowd and giving even a brief testimony of what Christ means to them.

Another hunch is that a lot of men don’t relate to this Jesus. They can’t imagine inviting this Jesus to go bowling, fishing, hunting, golfing, or skinny dipping. They can’t visualize this Jesus watching a football game, playing tennis, biking, hiking, wrestling, or skeet shooting. They’re hard pressed to think this Jesus would enjoy watching a movie, listening to rap music, driving a race car, doing stand-up comedy, eating a porterhouse steak, or sharing a six-pack of beer.

And maybe most importantly, they can’t envision themselves relishing the chance to circle up with Jesus and listen to intricate parables, one after another.

Yet, let me be clear. Today, my conception of Jesus of Nazareth is not the Maybelline Man. I discarded that peculiarity a long time ago. I have fully embraced the masculine Jesus, a man who would engage in everything of interest to me.

The church needs to get rid of this androgyne we call Jesus. It needs to rebrand him as an authentic, unambiguous male, a man to whom any man could be drawn. Only then can the church expect to reap the reward of zealously devoted men who no longer need to strive to imitate the life of an emasculated mystic.