As must be obvious to anyone who still passes by here anymore, I have proven to be an unreliable blogger. I started QFC in late 2007, flush with the excitement of a new adventure about to begin in New York (to say nothing of my then-new MacBook which I couldn’t keep my hands off of). This runs in our household, apparently – Ultimate Concern has proven likewise erratic in his posting as well, though I hope he can redouble his efforts while in the UK this summer.

As I’ve said on these pages before, to anyone reading, I have been reconsidering the wisdom of making this blog – in name if not in content – so focused on religious matters. If I ever start another one, I want it to be broader in scope than what is suggested by “Queer for Christ.” It was just such a damn cool URL I couldn’t resist it. But it is time for someone else to have it now.

Dedicated readers (all 4 or you) also know that I’ve been working on writing a play for the past few years (it’s called The Jesus Project) and last night I heard it read by actors for the first time. It was an amazing and focusing experience, one that I will never, ever forget. And though it was exhausting and sometimes frightening, I want to do it again and again – which means, I guess, that I want to devote my time and energies into becoming a playwright. Not that I think I am ready for prime time just yet – far from it. I learned as much about my weaknesses as I did my strengths, sitting at that table last night, listening to some gifted actors breathe some life into the words I had written.

So I have a lot of work to do. And a lot to learn. Given my limited attention span and brain capacity, that doesn’t leave much room for blogging right now. I want to keep working on The Jesus Project, maybe try to organize a workshop here in NYC. Also there are other ideas bouncing in my head that I want to begin working on, and a few auditions I’d like to go to. I also have a wonderful day job raising money for Outreach at St. Luke in the Fields.

I expect to have a personal website up and running soon, to help me stay in touch with friends and also to promote my work as a writer, actor and consultant. That URL will probably be terrymilner.com. Clever, no? Also I am on FaceBook (for now, anyway, I am always flirting with unplugging from it) so you can find me there too.

So WQFC is signing off, friends. I want to say a special word of thanks to other bloggers like Tobias the Brilliant, Luiz the Young, and especially Grandmere Mimi the Young-at-Heart, with whom I have enjoyed a warm correspondence and one very special visit. (Maroon’s closed down, Mimi!) And of course to MadPriest, who has always been so encouraging and supportive. Ahem. I have enjoyed your writing and your friendship immensely, everyone.

And finally I owe a huge debt to my best editor and best friend, Gabriel. He keeps me writing, and reading, and thinking. This has been fun!

I am actually considering posting it on this blog, a scene at a time, for your comments and consideration. Not sure whether it would be of interest to you all, or what might be gained. A play is not for reading, it’s for performing, so what to do?

Anyone still reading, I invite your comments!

Do NOT mess with this little girl's MAHATMA! She is a bad ass!

Rick Warren causes all of us pain, in some very real ways. How then, as Christ-followers, are we to feel when we see him on that stage? Is this a cynical ploy to court right-wing evangelicals? Is Barack that calculating? Is this realpolitik as usual? Or is it rather something more inspired, more Christian, than anything the rest of us could ask for or imagine?

I spent much of the 1990′s as a campaign organizer and also a volunteer field representative for the Human Rights Campaign in a conservative southern state. It was there that I was introduced to single-issue identity politics. I also buried several close friends and cared for others during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I marched, boycotted, participated in civil disobediences, came close to being arrested with Urvashi Vaid, and am proud of everything I did. It was necessary then to speak out and act against unjust policies, and it still is.

Something else happened to me along the way, however. I renewed my long-dormant Christian faith by being confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I met the love of my life (now a seminarian and candidate for holy orders in the church), and, yes, grew a bit older and maybe a little wiser. And it became harder for me to see the world solely through the lens of my own self-interest. I began to realize that the decades of polarization and division, into red and blue communities, pro-choice and pro-life, had exacted a price all out of proportion to the small, incremental gains in civil liberties for LGBTQ people they helped bring about. We don’t have marriage equality. We don’t have federal legal employment protection or equal inheritance or immigration. We got a court to say we weren’t felons, that’s about it.

Still, all of that work was essential in the political climate of the United States that has been steadily polarizing around issues of economics, morality and sexuality for a very long time. If you read what he has written in his amazingly candid memoirs, Barack Obama is clearly not interested in the old way of doing politics in America: coalition building around lowest-common-denominator issues.  He is, in short, not going to be the liberal equivalent of George Bush, i.e., President of a plurality of the people who showed up on Election Day. He is trying to truly unify a country in deep trouble. I think we need to give him the benefit of the respect he has earned from us, at least until after the Inauguration.

If he had to pick an evangelical, we all might prefer that the President Elect pick Tony Campolo or Jim Wallis or Brian McLaren to deliver the invocation at his inaugural, but none of these choices would have the effect of bringing huge numbers of conservative evangelicals down from their battlements in the “culture wars” in order to break bread with the rest of us on Inauguration Day. Barack has done something truly, radically hospitable in a way that I believe is more Christ-like than any other choice he could have possibly made. And he is paying a price.

When was the last time that all Americans, of whatever background or orientation, could say without hesitation that the sitting president was “their” President, and mean it? Can we imagine, in other words, a politics that is not so divisive that it forces us to subject each and every decision our elected leaders make to a litmus test based on our own self-interest? By all means, we have to advocate for specific legal reforms and policies that recognize our full equality and humanity. When Rick Warren starts writing gay rights legislation and dictating reproductive health policies to the Obama administration, then I’ll take to the streets. But I voted for a man I think is going to do great things to change the conversation on a whole range of issues, and I think he deserves a chance. We talk a great deal about “transformation” in progressive Christian circles…are we willing to allow ourselves to be transformed in a way that at least allows a space of civility, to consider the wisdom of this decision, rather than the reactionary hysteria that my queer brothers and sisters in variousnational organizations are, predictably, letting fly? I pray not.

Inviting Rick Warren to the national liturgy that is the Inaugration of our president is not a retreat from the policy positions that led us to support Barack, it is simply Barack acting decisively and courageously in a way that I see as truly, uncomfortably…Christian.

As you can see from the most recent post, my thoughts and energies are more and more turning toward my work as an actor and writer, and that work is not really well described by the words “Queer for Christ,” even though they still describe me pretty well. And it is fun and provocative, sure, but is it reaching people who might be looking for reasoned discourse on matters of faith and sexuality, or is it a turn-off to those folks?

I’m just thinking out loud, here. Comment if you like.

When I returned to New York last year and began dusting off the cobwebs of my theatrical career, my best instincts told me to get back into training before I started looking for work. It had been years – decades, in fact – since I had been to an acting class, and the training I had was mostly squishy and vague. So I was determined to send myself to boot camp – to find a training program that would help me become a more disciplined, more intentional, more muscular artist.

Because of its reputation, name recognition, and geographic convenience (it being five blocks from where we live), I gravitated to the Atlantic Theatre Company’s Acting School, which purports to teach the acting technique developed by founders David Mamet and William H. Macy. Muscular artists, indeed. At its core, the technique exhorts actors to stop trying to pretend to be people (characters) they are not, but rather to walk onstage or in front of the camera with no other intention than to accomplish the objectives of the character in the story, using the words of the playwright. No displays of false emotion. Less “acting,” more “action,” with the belief that what an audience really wants when they pay their money is the experience of watching the actor’s dynamic striving to accomplish something important, something difficult. And in so doing, the audience and the artists collaborate in accomplishing the most heroic goal of all: to contribute to the increase of human understanding.

The classes were agonizing the way your first few trips to the gym after years of sloth can be agonizing. One of my teachers there last fall, Jordan Lage, fairly personified the stoic, no-nonsense approach to acting and dramaturgy Mamet preaches, and a tougher drill sergeant you could not find in a New York acting studio. Meaner, less intelligent, and less talented, maybe, but none tougher. And the first chance I had to put these new techniques to the test in an audition situation, I got the part. Boom. Wow. Thanks, Mr. Mamet. And thank you, Jordan and Tamara.

When you take class at Atlantic, you are invited to read some of the essays on drama, acting and philosophy Mamet has authored over the years, and I ate most of it up with a spoon. I loved what he said in True and False, for example, about the pretension and disingenuousness of many theatre academics. I knew from experience the terrible results of hack drama teachers (and directors) inflicting their half-baked pseudo-psychological oversimplifications of Stanislavsky, or Strasberg, or you-name-who, on fragile and impressionable young hearts and minds. I shared his disdain for these people.

I had just begun reading his Three Uses of the Knife when Mamet published his recent essay in the Village Voice, titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” I became aware of the piece only after reading Charles Isherwood’s piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, awarding Mamet’s current Broadway offering, November, the title of “Most Irritating Play of the Season.” In his column, Brantley could not resist a reference to Mamet’s previous piece in the Voice, in which (he said) Mamet had come out as a conservative.

When I read the title of the piece, my first reaction was to ask whether Mamet ever a “brain dead liberal?” I had never thought so, and I’ve read a lot of his essays and plays, and seen many interviews with him as well. He always seemed to be too intellectually rigorous and logical a thinker to be a brain-dead anything. I also found him to be a person of some faith, and was happy to hear he walked a spiritual path, something I could relate to in his life. It also gave some human warmth to his otherwise cold, logical, utterly unsentimental Spockish affect (is it just me, or does he look more like Leonard Nimoy with every photograph?). And as he says himself in the Voice, he never followed liberal orthodoxy or wrote about people who did.

I agree with one point Mamet makes in his essay, or at least one I think he makes, namely that most ideology is really prejudice masquerading as reason. To be a reactionary ideologue, no matter what your stripe, is to be brain-dead indeed – and there are plenty of those around.

A great thesis, but unfortunately almost no synthesis ever followed. The promise of an “election season essay” worthy of David Mamet went utterly unfulfilled, and I am sorely disappointed. What we got instead sounded irritatingly like a caller on a right-wing talk show complaining about his property being rezoned, his taxes raised and his money being confiscated by a meddling and intrusive government. Mamet could have made a groundbreaking argument for a kind of postmodern, post-conservative libertarianism I suspect he really espouses, but instead he just sounds like a guy who always pretended to be a liberal because all his intellectual, artistic friends were, but who simply got too tired of thinking too hard and gave up (or, in the words of a close friend of mine, he simply accumulated enough “fuck-you money” that he no longer needs to care). After all, it’s a lot easier to give in to the greed and self-interest Mamet has now embraced as natural and “human” than to continue to work for something better. Some of us think of that effort as building the dominion of a loving and just God on Earth, but regardless of how you look at it, the arc of the moral universe is long, and it is our duty as human beings to traverse it as best we can, rather than giving up and grabbing every individual advantage in the process.

Mamet say he is no longer a liberal because he has given up on the notion that human beings are basically good at heart. What a bizarre statement. Since when did anyone become a liberal or a progressive (or what have you) because they thought that? Speaking for myself, I believe in teaching and preaching a social gospel, and electing a progressive, active, enlightened government precisely because I know human beings are prone to greed, lust for power, and all the other evils Mamet seems to think a good conservative should embrace as part of the natural order.

Mamet also attacks liberals for being anti-military and anti-corporations. It is truly a brain-dead liberal that sees things in such absolutes, I will concede. But Mamet is equally brain-dead in his critique, since most “liberals” I know would never advocate dismantling the military or dissolving all corporations. It is the power that these institutions have amassed in this country that we progressives work to curtail. Not the use of military power to bring about lasting peace (as in Central Europe, for example) nor the promotion of healthy economic competition and fair dealing (as shown by the long-term peace and prosperity we enjoyed when Democrats held the White House). To say that you are no longer a liberal because you’ve learned to love the military and the corporation is to deny a self-evident truth: that these institutions must be carefully monitored, managed and regulated because history tells us they tend toward absolute power, oligarchy, feudalism and fascism – products of the greed and self-interest that is, yes, unfortunately part of our broken humanity.

My friend Les is fond of saying that the difference between a liberal and a progressive is that a liberal sits in his living room grieving for an imperfect world, while a progressive goes out and tries to change it. Some see this dichotomy writ large in the current Democratic Presidential primary. Whatever the case, Mamet doesn’t seem to have ever been either one, really. He claims to have had a change of mind, but goes on to admit that anyone who has read his plays probably knows he was pretending all along.

I applaud anyone who points out the shortcomings of the self-righteous and the hypocritical, especially their own, and in his critique of liberalism Mamet does make some valid points. But when he includes a reference to his nickname for National Public Radio (“National Palestinian Radio”), he betrays not a philosophy, but a prejudice. Not a change of mind, but an admission of guilt.

And that is very disappointing.

Well, I actually have no idea if he did or not. But if not, what in the name of David Livingstone does THIS statement by Akinola mean:

“I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence.”

Now I understand the Nigerian Church’s moral position so much better! It seems to go like this: “Christianity has a monopoly on the truth. If you are not a Christian you are going to hell. Muslims say the same thing about their faith, so we both understand and respect each another’s desire to kill one another. You Northerners just don’t get it.”

It gets better. Akinola’s spokesman later said that Akinola’s reference to violence quoted above involved a time in 2006 “when Nigerian Christians were being slaughtered because of some cartoons published in Denmark.”

“The Western press should learn from the Danish cartoons saga that articles they publish, whatever the motive might be, can be responsible for the death of many innocent lives hundred of miles away,” he said in conclusion.

So now, not only does Akinola bear no responsibility for the violence in 2004, apparently no one else in Nigeria is, either! It’s the Danes! Now I get it.

Listen, I realize it’s easy for me to write about this from the relative safety of my New York apartment. I have no idea what it is like to live in Nigeria and face death for my religious beliefs. But I do know this: the root of all religious violence is the claim of exclusivity, that your tradition has a monopoly on truth. If Peter Akinola, and all the other Anglican separatists in the world fear the Northern liberals because we have departed from this theology, one that invariably breeds violence, then we are well rid of one another. Well rid, indeed.

Terry