Shocking!

The fall of Ted Haggard, evangelical megachurch superstar, has me thinking about transgression. It is easy to think of transgressions as alien and bizarre, yet apparently easy to commit them. That combination of unthinkable and easy is what fascinated Camus and Gide – it seems like the leading edge of existence, which is perhaps itself unthinkable yet easy.

I haven’t struck anyone since I was a child, but I remember that it was sort of wonderful. I am not naturally a violent person, and I found myself, when it came down to an actual fistfight, very timid at first to land a solid blow, moving my hands slowly and feeling out the space between myself and my enemy as if to prove by a stepwise approach that the air between us could actually be crossed – unreal in a way to someone who had not only not hit anybody or been hit but had never kissed anyone or been kissed either. I would reach out my fist for what was really a kind of love-tap in the truest sense of the phrase – it meant something profound to feel the fabric of someone else’s shirt. I’d loosen up a bit, and even land a few punches, still awkward but growing into the happy sense that I could reach out and touch someone.

I was slightly too big to be elaborately bullied and had too few friends to make terribly many enemies, so my fights were few. But I remember them somewhat fondly. Now, fisticuffs don’t compare to amicable touching, and I wouldn’t go back. And I never developed a desire or had an excuse to fire a gun. But I can understand how it could be terribly thrilling to do violence, particularly for people who are profoundly isolated.

Now of course, violence is only one kind of transgression, and not the one Mr. Haggard is accused of. But sexual transgressions, at least in their early stages, must feel like a gun shot. Ages of silence and disbelief, then a cannon shot! And adrenaline coursing through the body, which shakes and sweats and weeps.

What is sexual transgression? For someone like myself, in a traditional marriage, most of the sexual possibilities would be destructively transgressive. But that is just one possibility, and transgression is in the eye of the beholder and is often a matter of degree. If Haggard had slept with a middle or upper class white woman who was not his wife, he might well have made it through with his high position – and his marriage - intact. But sleeping with a male prostitute was going several steps further than he needed to if he wanted to destroy his life – any man would have done. Any non-white or poor or lower-class woman would have done. Videotaping sex with an otherwise acceptable mistress would have done. Keeping a collection of vanilla porn or writing himself private naughty stories would have done.

And what about your average unattached American? Everyone seems to have their own standard, but somehow that does not utterly deflate the power of transgression. Many young people who “experiment” sexually do it entirely or partly for the thrill of doing things they feel their superego would tut at. Nearly everyone I ever dated tried to shock me – or perhaps to establish themselves in a position of sexual strength – by telling tales of transgressive sex. In other words, the idea that it was transgressive was very much a live one and a powerful one.

The pope of the church of transgression
Taught oddballs to love their obsession.
"Golden showers," he said,
"As they baptize the head,
Will release every ounce of aggression."