One biblical story that turns up often in LGBT work to change religious norms is the story of David and Jonathan from the books of Samuel. Part of a larger story of King David’s rise to power, the story consistently, from beginning to end, portrays one man’s love for another man. That much is indisputable.
What is disputable is what kind of love this is. Is this erotic love, a man crush, or just a really good friend? Because the word “love” has a range of meanings, and because the text is at least 2000 years old and depicts events, either historical or imagined, from 3000 years ago, it is unwise to try to pin down the meaning in a definitive way. At least one argument about this story, Susan Ackerman’s When Heroes Love, tries to pin it down without pinning it down, noting that the story’s ambiguous portrayal of male friendship — it teases the reader with erotic possibilities, but never quite gets around to saying “they had sex” — is a way of highlighting the ambiguous situation of the story, in which David is both king (by divine election) and not king (the country is still under the political authority of the previous king).
Because of this ambiguity, should people want to use this story to strengthen the case for LGBT equality in Jewish or Christian contexts, we will find that the strategy just gets us back to the same argument it was supposed to settle. In Jonathan’s Loves, David’s Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference, I show how queer folk can relate to this story through music as a way of bypassing the argument between supporters and detractors of LGBT equality. Also, because I’m talking about music, it’s a way of connecting to the story that can work for all sorts of people, including those who maintain commitments to religions in which the Bible is authoritative and those for whom religion makes no sense at all.
Some might recognize the Daily Kos t-shirt I’m wearing in the picture. The site played a major role in making this book possible. The book is a revision of my doctoral dissertation and for a long time I was stuck on chapter one. I had an intuition that blogging a component of the the chapter would get me unstuck, an intuition that turned out to be correct. I start the book looking at a particular gay reading of David and Jonathan that’s largely dependent on the work of the lesbian theologian and Episcopal priest Carter Heyward — and it was this story that I wrote about her that was the turning point in my writing process. So, thank you for your help in getting me through a key stage of the process.
There’s a lot of music about this story — more than I could cover in the book. The centerpiece is music from the early seventeenth century, particularly pieces by Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Tomkins. You can hear them below.
You’ll see that this recording of Weelkes’ “O Jonathan,” is from a recording of music written for the death of Henry, son of King James, in 1612. Up until a month before I submitted the dissertation chapter about these pieces, the scholarly consensus was that this was the historical context for this piece. Donna di Grazia, however, exploded that theory by looking closely at the manuscripts, so I had to do a lot of scrambling to reframe the argument before I submitted it. I pretty much had a heart attack in the middle of the library when I read the article.
I also discuss the impact of performance choices on the meaning of the music. Based on the recordings I’d heard, I’d always thought of Tomkins’ version as one that shut down any potential homoeroticism. But upon hearing the following performance, which builds up the tension and releases it beautifully on the word “Jonathan,” I came to hear this performance as the most explicit affirmation of the consummation of David and Jonathan’s love — even more affirmative than some modern versions by gay composers.