The Not Gay Christian Hero
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: LGBTQ, Christianity, Sexuality, Biography, Creative Non Fiction

For a Christian hero to have any kind of “gender trouble”—is a conceptual crisis.

Good men, they say, are only drawn erotically to women, and don’t have much to do with anyone who isn’t. Even to acknowledge the evidence would be to grapple with a new concept: that humans can feel in a lot of ways, and it doesn’t make them “bad.”

The current biography of Beza, published in 2015, is Theodore Beza: The Man and the Myth by Shawn D. Wright, professor of “Church History” at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His book has no discussion of Beza’s sexuality, and refers only in passing to “the more scandalous poems of his youth.”

Wright does find time to fan the flames of Christian culture wars. (“We must apply biblical truth to issues that affect our lives today — abortion, homosexuality, and countless other topics.”)

His book is labeled a biography, but in an email he assures me it’s a “study”—and he wasn’t, he explains, studying Beza’s “sexuality.” I’d written him asking why there weren’t any references to the subject. Not even even a footnote? That’s the sort of thing scholars might do.

Feeling plucky, I add: “You altered your subject’s life for ideological purposes.”

That’s when he un-biographies himself, explaining that “to explore the issue of Beza’s erotic poems and the entire genre of such poems in the Renaissance and early modern period, not to mention in classical Greece and Rome, was well beyond the purview of my study.”

I think that what he means is: he hadn’t figured out how to neutralize the material, so decided to keep quiet about it.

Beza was born in 1519 to a Catholic family of lesser nobility, the last child of seven.

He was sickly, as was his mother, who died when he was 3. His wealthy uncle took little Theodore to Paris, and paid for an extraordinary education—from a tutor who was secretly Protestant. Beza says he was one, secretly, since a teenager. But his allowance required him to be, publicly, Catholic.

He studied law for a profession, without much enthusiasm. Literature appealed to him more, and he started, a scholar notes, “writing provocative love poetry, and associating with a talented coterie of young French humanists.” I’m not yet finding the not-gay details.

Then it gets kind of gay? In the summer of 1548, Beza publishes a volume of poems in Latin, Poemata Juvenilia—‘poems of youth’—under a pseudonym, ‘Deodatus Seba’.

I love the one about a priest officiating a marriage between a woman and a very feminine (“minscing”) man.

He askt of bothe whiche was the wife?

But the poem that got Beza in trouble had a figure named “Beza” looking over two sexual futures: a woman, Candida, and a man, Audebert. He asks himself which he prefers. “How if I could cut myself in two parts and then one of them could revisit Candida and one could run towards Audebert?”

He has to choose — so he chooses the man.

Oh too hard necessity! But since, finally, it is necessary, I set you first, Audebert: and if Candida loudly complain, what then? She will fall silent with a deep little kiss.

In a 1974 paper, “English Writers and Beza’s Latin Epigrams: The Uses and Abuses of Poetry,” Anne Lake Prescott discusses Beza’s early poetry in some detail. Then a 1994 paper in the Journal of Homosexuality, “‘That Matter Which Ought Not To Be Heard Of’: Homophobic Slurs in Renaissance Cultural Politics,” by Winfried Schleiner, studies the Audebert/Candida poem.

He notes a detail that significantly complicates the plot. The “deep kiss” that Beza gives Candida is erotically loaded. He’s saying he’ll continue having sex with his girlfriend to cover up his preference for his boyfriend.

Schleiner writes: “The assumption is not only that Audebert has no reason to be concerned but that on the contrary he should feel gratified that his erotic and possibly sexual relationship with the speaker is of a different order.”

Weeks after publishing his sexy poems, Beza becomes ill.

Or as he’ll explain, “the Lord afflicted me with a very serious illness,” without being clear what leaves him bedridden.

His later Protestant narrative is: he knew God wanted him to stop being Catholic. “Therefore, I renounced myself with tears, I asked for forgiveness, I renewed my vow to embrace his true worship publicly — in short, I devoted myself completely to God.”

He gets married to a woman described in some sources as a ‘chambermaid’. Wright conceals the class difference, which strikes me as important. As he narrates:

He took as a mistress, or at least entered into a clandestine marital contract with, Claudine Denosse. ‘In order not to be vanquished by evil desires,’ he wrote, ‘I married, but secretly, telling only two or three friends who shared my convictions. I married secretly both to avoid scandal and in order not to lose that cursed money which I received from my benefices.

Beza reinvented himself as Greek professor and Christian theologian. Wright notes his subject had no theological training, yet “became one of the great Reformed theologians of the sixteenth century.”

And then he becomes a full-on Protestant, cultivating a warm personal bond with John Calvin. “I would not be a man if I did not return his love who loves me more than a brother and reveres me as a father,” as Calvin writes of Beza in 1551, “for I saw in him a man whose lovely spirit, noble, pure manners, and open-mindedness endeared him to all the righteous.”

It’s an interesting episode: a prominent Protestant cleric credibly accused of being gay.

Unfortunately scholars have not told the story. I try to think through the cast of characters that includes Beza, Calvin, Beza’s ex-chambermaid wife, and the entire Catholic and Protestant worlds looking on.

The plot would seem to go something like this: Beza publishes poems that could be seen as gay, then has a full-on anxiety attack? He’s bedridden and swears off off sexuality—such a familiar scene for many gay men.

With his growing Protestant fame, Beza must live with dread? The poems will surely be discovered. Finally, they are — with his “fictional” name, the “Beza” who chooses a male lover, being the proof.

As Prescott notes, “although Beza was on occasion defended he was almost never defended, as far as I know, by a recourse to a literary or imaginative understanding of poetry . . .”

Beza may maintain it was only the evil Catholic influence of his youth. Inconveniently, as Barbara Sher Tinsley explains, he had already said “he was converted to the ‘pure Gospel’ at sixteen.”

Why wouldn’t Beza’s gay poems suggest he might be gay?

Scholars dismiss Beza’s poem as imitation of classical models. Thinking over this issue, I email Helmut Puff, the scholar whose 2003 book Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600, hadn’t discussed Beza, but maybe he’d have thoughts?

“It is not hard to imagine that gay desire has been present in various forms throughout the history of Christianity,” he kindly replies. “What is hard for the historian to accept is the thought that people of the past felt, acted, and argued like we did.”

Yeah, like when they’re Christian historians.

“Beza wasn’t gay,” Puff adds, “at least not in the sense what this term conjures up for today’s Christians or readers in general.”

What was he?

“We know very little about Beza’s actual sexuality, other than that he was married. What we know is that he authored a Latin poem in which he engages literary themes and poetic models that debate whether the love of a man or that of a woman was preferable to the lyrical I (the poetic voice embraces both but expresses a particular love for Audebert). To take this poem — a poem that, as far as I know, has no equivalent in Beza’s other works — as a signal that he was gay would be to misread it.”

Doesn’t writing a gay poem suggest a poet might be gay?

Though not cited in discussions of Beza, John Boswell discusses these issues in his great book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980). Scholars, he notes, do tend to downplay the gay content of poetry if they can write it off as ‘imitative’ of previous models.

If Roman writers imitate Greek homosexual poetry, for instance, one is assured that such verses are simply imitations and that they do not represent real feelings.

Weren’t the Romans and Greeks influenced by earlier writings? That would, Boswell adds, seem to send us a quest to “discover the original people who alone experienced real emotions, bequeathing to the rest of the human race the motifs which are mechanically imitated in all subsequent literature.”

Or maybe it’s just a strategy to erase the gay. “Obviously,” Boswell writes, “imitation of homosexual themes is itself a significant fact.”

What case do scholars have for saying otherwise? Typically, themes poets choose—like heterosexual, or Christian—are thought to signal some interest in that material. As Boswell notes, “consciously maintaining a literary tradition in this context is taken as proof of the persistence of the sentiments which gave rise to the tradition in the first place.”

The issue comes up in many historic people from the time—like Beza’s contemporary, William Shakespeare.

I like the poet Don Paterson’s treatment of the issue in 2010:

However, the question: “was Shakespeare gay?” strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side. Now is not the time to rehearse them all, but the arguments against his homosexuality are complex and sophistical, and often take convenient and homophobic advantage of the sonnets’ built-in interpretative slippage — which Shakespeare himself would have needed for what we would now call “plausible deniability”, should anyone have felt inclined to cry sodomy. The argument in favour is simple. First, falling in love with other men is often a good indication of homosexuality; and second, as much as I love some of my male friends, I’m never going to write 126 poems for them . . .

Beza’s love poetry wasn’t nearly as extensive, but unlike Shakespeare’s sonnets, he oversaw their publication, if anonymously. As there was a real “Beza,” and a “Claudine” who might be read as the real “Candida,” one wonders if there was a real “Audebert.”

In the poem he’d chosen a male lover. There might be an unwritten sequel, then, in which Beza rejects him—to be good and Christian.

Beza leaves no record of much affection for his wife.

Not so with his true marriage—to John Calvin. “The two men were of one mind,” notes Bruce Gordon in a 2009 biography. “In Beza, Calvin found a young man who might have been himself, and he groomed him for leadership . . .”

Wright luxuriates in the bond between the two men. “Perhaps one of the reasons that Calvin was initially drawn to Beza was because of their common French heritage. They were also united in their on-going concern for their countrymen.”

The two men did have some different ideas—like on rebellion from authority. A scholar cited by Wright explains: “Calvin had counseled passive resistance; most political theory of the time required that a justified revolt must nevertheless be led by princes of the blood royal. Bèze removed both of those requirements for justified rebellion.”

Beza believed in democracy, arguing that even the authority of monarchs come from the people, and can be taken back, by force if necessary. Wright adds: “Beza’s ideas of rightful rebellion would impact not only Europe but the colonies of England in America.”

And that’s where gay history might be thought to matter? To everyone in this world. At the founding of America would be a gay Christian saying: fight for your rights.

Beza’s wife Claudine died in 1588. They had no children.

On the advice of friends, he married again to a widow, in view of having some help for his declining years.

After his death, Schleiner notes, a disciple of Beza’s writes a biography, and addresses the Catholic’s ‘Sodomite’ accusation, replying tartly: “Yes, he was like that, but only as long as it was his bad fortune to wallow in your stable, as long as he was a Papist buck.”

I find a bit more information in a footnote. In a second edition, that was replaced by: “Bèze was always an honest man.”