“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel”, he says in his interview with Parade magazine this month.
	I couldn’t be happier that someone of Elton John’s caliber has the courage to out and confront the mainstream public with the idea of Jesus as a gay man. Granted, as I have said in previous blogs, this premise is not new. It has circulated for a while among Bible scholars who have studied Jesus’ lifestyle choices against the background of expectations for a man of his time.

Recently I read a blog called Transgender Jesus, by Kevin Cassell. Although Cassell doesn’t go as far as associating the displacement of traditional gender role with sexual orientation, we can use his article as a springboard to our discussion:

“Let me be clear that I am not associating the transgendered disposition of the kind exemplified by Christ with sexual orientation. I am not saying that he was gay, bisexual, or straight. Nor am I saying that he was a cross-dresser or a transvestite. What I am saying is that the Gospels repeatedly illustrate Jesus’s numerous “tendencies to diverge from the normative gender roles.” His intimate communion with women, on behalf of God, against the corrupt institutions of man reveals just how entwined his transgendered disposition was with his ministry,” Cassell explains.

Yes, the image of Jesus that we have inherited in the Gospels does not make him the ideal of masculinity for a man in first century Judea. Bear in mind among other things, he was single at thirty-three and on the night before his arrest, the Gospel of Mark tells us he was spending the night in a garden with a naked boy.

Today, what would you think if that were my story? The only reason we dare not think of Jesus in this way, the reason a premise like this offends us, is homophobia. In other words, if you are insulted by this premise, then you are a closeted heterosexual supremacist, one that deep inside believes that the only possible and “natural” way is the pairing of a man and a woman. Yes, heterosexual supremacists exist even among gay people who fail to recognize the incredible beauty and potential behind a gay Jesus concept. Is your mind secretly polluted with the old notion that gay love is wrong that the idea of the greatest religious icon in our civilization being homosexual is appalling?

I can’t walk on your shoes but I can offer you my perspective. Accepting that Jesus may have been “different” is the first step toward true tolerance. Jesus being gay, or not, is not important. What is important is to consider the possibility that he might have been. Not as we inscribe the subject today, but as whatever the appropriate terminology and definition might have been at the time.

And if he were, this doesn’t have to diminish his message or his image. In the end, look at the world around you. Look at the victims of hate and homophobia that have paid with their life for the sin of being different. Is it possible that Jesus could have been killed for the same reasons? Why does he get arrested when he is with a younger male companion to whom that night he was going to “teach the mysteries of the Kingdom of God”?

Jesus was a man who defied expectations. Like Cassell explains, he crossed the boundaries of traditional gender roles. Can these signs point to a better understanding of who he was? You bet. If we consider Jesus as text, because everything can be read this way, can the signs that point toward homosexuality be read with honesty and unprejudiced? Elton John has done it, in The Marién Revelation I have. Where do you stand on this matter and what are your arguments?