Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With The Right Taught Me About Sex, God, And Fury - Softcover

In her brave new book, Ferocious Romance, Minkowitz investigates the Religious Right, and in so doing draws some unexpected parallels between that culture and the diametrically opposed worlds of the S/M community, ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and Sex Panic!; she also finds herself identifying with many of the people she meets. This is a poignant journey in which Minkowitz comes face-to-face with the very people she has protested against as an activist; the experience leads her to explore her relationships to organized religion, women, feminism, sex, friendship, romance, and rage. A thoughtful and unconventional memoir--at turns harrowing and enlightening--that hits straight at the reader's heart and mind. --Kera Bolonik

Chapter One: The Toronto Blessing

"He is offering you everlasting life, not membership in an institution!" the pastor shouts into a crowd of four hundred people, who scream back their defiance of all institutions and memberships therein. I knew I'd feel at home here, with people who cackle, ululate, and bray their praise of God. The Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, one of the most popular religious-right churches in the world, has been kicked out of its own denomination for being too "extreme."

There's an excited, expectant atmosphere in the room, very much like at an early gay liberation meeting. A diffident young man walks up to the lectern and asks ardently whether any of us are here for the first time. We Toronto virgins raise our hands, and by doing so, get to feel like we're immediately participating in the life of the group. The man calls out countries, states, and provinces of origin, so we can stand and be clapped for being from wherever we are. Those who've been here a few days longer than the virgins are invited to participate in an even more direct way: "If there's anybody here that's been particularly touched by the Father lately and would like to testify," says the shy young man, "we need a few people."

I've come to Toronto because I like people this warm -- ecstatic, extreme, and cheerily fey people, to be precise. My own people, gays and lesbians, have been known to get pretty ecstatic themselves; but I've also discovered that our alleged enemies, the religious right, like to go out of control and get crazy as much as we do. They just do it in their own way.

The way that the evangelicals' God was manifesting his extreme and disquieting self at the Canada airport sounded admirable and terrifying at once. There were magazine reports that, among other things, these people had "vomited in the Spirit," which sounded like a punk-rock version of evangelicalism. I had to see it.

The airport church lies in a dreary suburb of Toronto called Etobicoke, not far from the runways. Shining in a gray industrial park no one would visit for any other reason, burning perhaps dangerously close to the chemical plants and airline fuel reserves, the church's ecstasy has become a major source of passion (and contention) for evangelicals all over the world. Since the Holy Spirit began showing up regularly at services in 1994, more than a hundred thousand religious-right folks from America have visited the Toronto airport to acquire some of TACF's "fire."

It is perhaps not incidental that John Arnott, head pastor of TACF, is a former travel agent. Special deals have been arranged with nearly all the hotels and rental car companies at the Toronto airport so that people can combine a week's vacation with a pilgrimage to the church whose people come unbridled with the spirit of the Lord.

The denomination that kicked them out, the Association of Vineyard Churches, is itself considered "extreme" -- at least by progressive critics of the religious right and by Christians (both progressive and conservative) who don't like to see too many miracles happening in church.

Many evangelicals fear the Toronto Blessing as much as progressives fear the religious right. "The power behind them...is demonic, not divine," read a pastor's typical letter in Charisma magazine, the journal of record for Pentecostals. Another letter called the Toronto churchgoers "immature and carnal."

As the diffident man speaks, two women are dancing by themselves in the wide side aisle. One, a flush-faced fiftysomething, looks a little mad, twirling a pink streamer and scampering lightly on her feet like some sort of ecstatic elf. The other is a vigorous, Gray Pantherish old woman in a T-shirt and painter's pants, who looks as though she's just come back from painting signs for a peace demonstration. The Gray Panther gestures rapidly with a baby blue triangular flag, as though she were an airport worker signaling to a plane. They both look crazy, but I sort of envy them. At different times in my life, I too have wanted to be inhabited by gods and dance ecstatically; what's happening in this church is what I prayed would happen to me as a teenager (although I was a Dionysian, not a Christian, and I prayed that the spirit would enter me through eros, or through drugs).

The Torontans constantly speak of God's anointing being on them, but if they take themselves too seriously, it doesn't show in how they dress. (I can't call them Torontonians, because so many of them have come from other towns.) The male pastors and most of the band are wearing jeans, and the women in the audience wear dresses and slacks in which they can move (a few of them even have on jeans). Standing in front of me is what appears to be a lesbian couple with their children, holding their palms out to God and shaking to His beat.

"Step by step, we're getting stronger!
Little by little, we're taking ground!
Every prayer a powerful weapon!
Strongholds come tumbling DOWN and DOWN
and DOWN and DOWN and DOWN!"

Everyone shouts on the downs. This song's a little frightening, but it's also -- dare I say it? -- empowering. The content is basically the same as that of the chants I've chanted at my favorite political demonstrations. The verses go like this:

"We want to see Jesus lifted forward!
We want to see Jesus lifted high!
That all men might see the truth and know
He is the way to heaven

"We want to see -- [clap! clap! clap!]
We want to see -- [clap! clap! clap!]
We want to see Jesus lifted up!"

The Toronto worshippers talk and sing all the time about Jesus (and by extension, themselves) being "lifted up," and all their oppressors, who command the "strongholds," being cast down. Next the congregation sings another song about "Jesus...on a white horse" coming in to vanquish the people in power and claim the heavenly throne for us.

"Whoa...oh, oh, oh! [hoofbeats!]
Whoa ... oh, oh, oh! [hoofbeats!]
He rides in majesty
Majesty, majesty
In majesty he rides."

A country ballad, it sounds a little like the Kenny Rogers song in which "the coward of the county" beats up all the men who've raped his girlfriend.

The new, gleaming church we're sitting in is the size of a rock-concert hall, and sunlight pours in from eight weirdly angled geometric windows, a strangely modern touch. A portion of the ceiling is mirrored so that we can watch ourselves being overcome, then raised. Long strips of red tape line the floor in a huge, empty area at the back of the hall, which I'm told will be used later when we get "slain in the spirit" and need a space for our eloquent bodies to fall.

As the music ends, three people from the audience rush up to testify. Linda Hinton, a young woman in a long denim jumper, tells how all her life she'd been plagued with "unforgiveness towards men." She doesn't say why, but that "it was very hard for me to talk to men, or even to look at them for more than two seconds." The formerly diffident announcer, a TACF staffer named John Busmo, by now has acquired the air of a confident TV game-show host: "So, would you say the Lord has set you free?"

She would. The next testifier, Vivian Ramspacher, also suffers from female troubles. "I just want to trust in the Lord, but part of me would always hold back. I would hold the stress in my stomach so that I couldn't eat very much." But at a service last Tuesday, Vivian, who's visiting from Richmond, Virginia, lay on the floor "and the Lord used me for two hours!" Since then, she says, her eating disorders have evaporated.

Busmo comments: "Often we see the Lord as being very similar to some of the key figures in our lives." Vivian couldn't trust in the Lord,