I do not merely support intimacy, I celebrate it. With deep sadness I read each AIDS-related obituary in Metropolitan Community Church's monthly bulletin Keeping in Touch. Each records the fact that at one point in the person's life, he misunderstood intimacy. Each could have been me.

I've heard your question now personally from both Episcopal and Metropolitan Community Church leaders, both of whom were over 55. I think that we should own our euphemisms. An academic article on men having sex with boys calls it "intergenerational intimacy." (G. Jones) Pick up any magazine or newspaper published for a gay audience to see that gay is about sex. I affirm same-sex intimacy without same-sex sex. I believe that the Bible does also.

It's true that fundamentalist Christians tend to speak as though heterosexuality and homosexuality are binary opposites. Pro-gay writers tend to see them as the ends of a scale, like Kinsey's scale of 0 to 6 with 0 heterosexual, 3 bisexual, and 6 homosexual. These are both oversimplifications, as gay philosopher of science Frederick Suppe explains well (Suppe [19...]). Here is a more complicated model that still oversimplifies Suppe's. Where are you on this plane?

                         ^ much heterosexual interest
                         |
                         |
                         |
no homosexual interest   |              much homosexual
interest                 |
             ------------+----------------->
                         |
                         |
                         |
                         |
                           no heterosexual interest

As you can see, it is possible to have strong sexual interest in both men and women, or in neither. A helpful chart of Kinsey's data shows that over time people move on these scales. (Whitehead & Whitehead)

2 September 1996. Copyright information is available.