The Pursuit of Deviant Happiness and Queer Spiritual Well-being Among Malaysian Gay Men: A Theological Proposal

Abstract

Although their intimate lives are often adversely affected by homonegative laws and conservative religio-cultural attitudes, many Malaysian gay men formulate affirming materialist-discursive strategies to pursue personal happiness. Some Christian gay men, for instance, challenge conservative ecclesiastical notions of same-sex attraction as iniquitous and generate life-giving spiritualities for themselves that contribute to a sense of inner joy and equanimity. In this article, aided primarily by Sara Ahmed’s provocative ideas on happiness, I analyse the lived experiences of a Malaysian Christian gay man, and theorise the notion of deviant happiness, which I suggest is a pathway to queer spiritual well-being. Then, drawing on the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s exposition of the beatitudes, I theologically propose that his active pursuit of happiness and well-being as a gay man participates in God’s own beatitude.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Mt 6:21)

‘A Hopeful Performative’

As a theological activist, an educator and a researcher who straddles the social sciences and the humanities, the many years of empathetic listening to the candid narratives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other queer (LGBTQ+) ¹ Malaysians continue to fuel my curiosity about the complexity of their everyday lives on various fronts. Conscious of the fact that ‘the focus on the quotidian life unveils the veneer of the ordinary and the commonplace to lay bare the intricate and difficult hybrid negotiations and struggles between hegemonic social forces and voices from below’ (Manalansan, 2005: 146–160), I am interested to gain greater clarity on the everyday intersectional lives of gay men by addressing the questions, ‘What does happiness mean and look like for those who identify as gay men?’, ‘How does being happy translate to wellbeing for them?’, and primarily, ‘What does a Christian theological interpretation of happiness and wellbeing for gay men look like?’

Sara Ahmed’s provocative ideas on happiness are exceptionally useful for my discussion. She refers to happiness as ‘a hopeful performative’ (Ahmed, 2010: 200), in that an incessant reiteration of the notions, potentialities and labours of happiness harbours a hopeful expectation of its eventual delivery. Happiness is thus a thoroughly human exercise of earnest hope. Although the pursuit of happiness is frequently taken for granted as an indisputable expectation for all human beings – and in some socio-cultural mindsets, an always attainable telos – this assumption frequently encounters interruption among LGBTQ+ people who are purportedly given to contrarian embodiments of gender, sexuality and sex.

Morally, conservative Malaysia is ‘a representative democracy with a constitutional monarchy’ (Luhur et al., 2020: 1) and comprises approximately 34,190,140 inhabitants of various ethnic, religious, socio-cultural and educational backgrounds. Malay-Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Hindus constitute 63.7%, 9.4%, 17.7% and 6.0% of the total population, respectively, while 3.2% are practitioners of ‘folk or traditional religions’, ‘religiously unaffiliated’ or ‘other’ (Countrymeters, 2024). LGBTQ+ communities do not receive legal protection on the basis of gender and sexuality (see Anis, 2012) and are subjected to various secular and Syariah (Islamic) penalties for anal and oral sex acts, and ‘crossdressing’ (consult The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia, 1997, 2006). Practices of conversion therapy are rampant (Tham, 2023). In general, Malaysian Muslim and Christian authorities officially disavow gender and sexual diversities, while Malaysian Buddhist and Hindu leaders remain largely silent on the matter. LGBTQ+ people are often popularly perceived as mired in a deplorable state of felonious intransigence, aberration and iniquity, and thus disentitled from any claim to happiness in their current state of being. ² Yet, despite the fact that many LGBTQ+ Malaysians often find their intimate lives adversely affected by secular and religious laws, as well as conservative socio-cultural attitudes, they continue to pursue religious practices and actively seek happiness as a personal goal.

I propose that in such an ethos, any aspiration for happiness among gay men is considered as deviance, and to speak of happiness by and for gay men becomes a queer matter, even if gay men themselves do not use the terms ‘deviant’ and ‘queer’ to describe their pursuits and experiences of happiness. Here, I use ‘queer’ to mean the antithesis of cisheteronormative patterns of attraction and affection, as well as the upending of society’s customary ordering of emotions, through which ‘queer lives remain shaped by that which they fail to reproduce’ (Ahmed, 2004: 152). I argue that in this queer space, such aspirations are not only the rightful entitlement of gay men but also borrowing from the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, reflective of ‘a natural desire [which] God has placed . . . in the human heart in order to draw [persons] to the One who alone can fulfill it’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1718). My purpose for drawing from the theology of the Catechism in this regard is twofold: First, the Catechism features a commendable biblically based introduction to ideas of human happiness and the possibility for human beings to take part in God’s own happiness. Second – and this reveals the first of my more prominent theological biases in this article – the aforementioned possibility is accessible to all human beings, their gender and sexual identities and expressions notwithstanding. I am keen to explore how an important theological notion by one of the most homophobic and transphobic Christian institutions in existence might be logically operationalised in favour of LGBTQ+ people as it pertains to Christianity. My interest here reflects Susan J. Hekman’s (1999: 147) affirmation that ‘we already have the tools to dismantle the master’s house: they are our own tools’.

This pursuit of deviant happiness is for gay men the doorway to spiritual well-being or spiritual health, defined here as a self-reflexive quest to comprehend more deeply the meaning, purpose and dynamics of human existence with the goal of achieving a sense of interior direction and fulfilment through counter-normative configurations. Such an endeavour often entails a sense of self-reflexivity in relation to ‘an individual’s relationship with [themselves], with others, and with the environment; [their] beliefs; the ability to overcome adversity; and the meaning of life’ (Hu et al., 2019: 1). Theologically, I propose that such pursuits participate in God’s own beatitude – God’s own happiness ³ – as ‘the goal of human existence, the ultimate end of human acts’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1719). This theological premise ‘underscores an intimate collaboration and symbiosis that [exist] between God and the human person, a sort of interminable, mutual human–divine communication that exists by virtue of the human person’s existence, and which does not exhaust or diminish God’ (Goh, 2018: 10).

This article joins a constellation of scholarship on LGBTQ+ people and matters pertaining to the practice of Christianity. In South, East and Southeast Asia, such studies concentrate on issues of – among many others – ministerial sensitivity and empathy (Ong, 2017; Yap, 2020), ecclesial injustice and inclusion (Goh, 2021a; Zachariah, 2017), biblical reinterpretations (Meneses, 2015; Ralte, 2017), affirming approaches to sexuality (Rajkumar, 2012; Wong, 2015; Yip, 2012), theological lessons from LGBTQ+ people (Goh, 2016; Siew, 2015) and creative confluences of gender, sexuality and Christianity among LGBTQ+ people (Goh, 2021b; Ichwan, 2021).

Aided by feminist philosophy, the Catechism and other dialogue partners, I conceptualise this article in terms of queer theological anthropology. First, I analyse and interpret selected narratives by ‘Freddie’, an upwardly mobile and urban-dwelling Hokkien-Chinese Malaysian educator in his early thirties who calls himself a ‘liberal Christian’ and identifies as a gay man. ⁴ While I do not take him to represent all Malaysian Christian gay men, as though ‘drawing on a supposed common essence’ (Hutchins, 2006: 124), I focus on his narratives as a valuable case study which bespeaks materialist-discursive strategies towards personal meaning-making amid the crushing reality of religious rejection, whereby ‘linguistic meaning and sociocultural processes can be understood as both originating, and being manifested, in physical being and materiality’ (Stoppard, 1998: 89). In other words, Freddie’s narratives articulate and render meaning to his embodied experiences as lived out in his everyday realities, and these embodied experiences condition and undergird such narratives. I do not claim any Malaysian or Asian autochthony for these experiences of sexuality and faith. Neither do I advance my arguments as unique to gay male experiences. Instead, what I showcase is a vignette of life and faith of a Christian gay man in twenty-first-century globalised and digitalised Malaysia.

Thereafter, I deploy my analysis and interpretation to act as the locus theologicus of my theologising, a method to ‘experience and speak of God’s grace and liberation in and through . . . bodies, both interpersonally and politically, [in order to] know God’s love and justice’ (Wu, 2000: 85). This method coheres with my theological conviction that ‘Christianity is an incarnate faith, centered upon the embodied Jesus as the revelation of God’ (Reagan, 2013: 57). The incarnation, which serves as evidence that Jesus ‘is present in the material form as the dynamic outpouring of God’ (Isherwood, 2024: 130), advises that human embodiment is capable of imparting divine epistemologies for human comprehension.

Deviant Happiness and Queer Spiritual Well-being

Sara Ahmed (2010: 21) defines happiness as the pursuit of particular objects which are valued and desired as ‘social goods’ and thus capable of ‘accumulating positive affective value’ and delivering happiness. This is the promissory nature of happiness: How one desires, feels about and believes to be happiness sets the aspiration, trajectory and measurability for its achievement and instantiation (Ahmed, 2010: 5). Yet, as she aptly points out, it is often the absence of happiness, of exclusion, ‘of being stressed, of not being extended by the spaces in which we reside’ (Ahmed, 2010: 12) and thus being curtailed, that one learns more about and yearns for happiness. Moreover, the arrival of complete and perfect happiness as it is hegemonically perceived is not the sole instructor, quantifier or indicator of a good life. LGBTQ+ individuals often discover that in some particular contexts, a transgressive demeanour which maintains resistance towards cisheteronormative norms and during which ‘the enjoyment of the negativity of shame, an enjoyment of that which has been designated shameful by normative culture’ (Ahmed, 2004: 146) can engender its own style of happiness that lies at odds with cisheteronormative conceptualisations of joy.

Freddie shares how his interactions with conservative Christians upon his conversion to Christianity at the age of 13 eventually convinced him that being gay is both sinful and unnatural, which led him in the direction of reparative therapy before he decided on an alternative life route:

I had demons, you know . . . They sat me in the middle of a sanctuary, pastors and senior leaders . . . they started to pray in tongues and started to cast demons out of me . . . really battered my confidence . . . my image of myself . . . I was really messed up . . . ‘Ef’ it all (forcefully), I’m in control of my life, I don’t have to feel this way . . . it’s also a choice for me to get out of this rut that I’m feeling about myself, and just have a normal and happy life, I can be happy, I’ve read so many stories about gay people . . . having a successful career, having someone to fall in love with . . . to come out of my self-pity, self-doubt and all that, to become where I am today.

What emerges strongly in this narrative is that instead of being a welcoming space, Freddie’s former church behaves as an active arena of theologically inflected homonegativity where his self-confidence and self-image are severely vitiated. This church does not act as an ark of refuge, security and affirmation for a gay man as linguistically and semiotically suggested by the physical ‘sanctuary’ in which he is seated for some semblance of an exorcism. During this melodramatic and demoralising ritual, Freddie becomes aware of the ludicrous unjustifiability of such an act and how he is thoroughly demonised as a gay man. Moreover, the realisation that he will never gain acceptance through ecclesial membership leads to the unsettling morbidities of ‘self-pity [and] self-doubt’ which encrust his life and steer its directions.

Nevertheless, Freddie musters the courage to liberate himself from an intolerant faith community in order to seek happiness through fostering rather than stifling his sexuality. The forcefulness with which he utters ‘“ef” it all’ ⁵ – an obvious allusion to a common expletive that is used in a denunciatory fashion in this context – suggests a definitive severing of ties with a condemnatory entity and the toxification of personal worth which it engenders, as well as an explicit rejection of the ‘presumption that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an unhappy life’ (Ahmed, 2010: 94) in both social and spiritual senses. It is in feeling a deficit of happiness that is generated by his former church through an in-house session of conversion therapy, contrasted with inspiring ‘stories about gay people’ that Freddie recognises a promise of happiness which aligns to his sexuality. The exorcism paradoxically becomes a grace-filled moment because it acts as the defining moment when he realises that happiness can be found within, not outside his identity as a gay man.

Freddie describes the materialist-discursive strategies which he applies in desiring and pursuing objects of happiness that are both within and beyond his reach, even if he does not articulate these strategies in such terms. He terminates an ongoing enslavement to the ‘rut’ of self-loathing and plots a new course of self-direction and self-determination in which ‘a successful career [and] having someone to fall in love with’ are desired and pursued as social goods. These strategies of deviant happiness pave the way for queer spiritual well-being, as they enable him to move towards meaningful and life-giving existence as a gay man in contradistinction to the standpoint of his former church on same-sex attraction.

In becoming aware that ‘to be constituted by discourse is not necessarily to be determined by discourse’ (Hutchins, 2006: 133), chiefly by his former homophobic church, Freddie deploys personal agency to be ‘in control of [his] life’ although he seemingly misses the reality that this agency can never be absolute or all-encompassing, as though one ‘can secure happiness when happiness is under [one’s] own direction [where the] fantasy of happiness is a fantasy of self-control’ (Ahmed, 2010: 208). He is nonetheless relentless in his pursuit of happiness, and one in which an unwavering faith in God is preserved:

Every morning I just wake up and look outside my window at the sky and say, ‘God, I’m just so thankful for being alive . . . In Jesus’ name I pray, amen’ . . . God is not going to judge me for who I am, because he will still love me for who I am, who he has made me to be.

Freddie’s unremitting relationship with God as a Christian despite the horrific experience of church-sanctioned reparative exorcism is due primarily to his belief that God created and unconditionally loves him as he is. It may also be a consequence of his capability to distinguish church from God. He thus looks to God to buttress the promise of happiness in his life. While his previous faith community condemns the proclivities of same-sex attraction in him, God is ceaselessly supportive towards him. Where his former church finds a diabolical infestation in his sexuality, Freddie espouses the notion of being created by divine design. An unjudging and unprejudiced God becomes for him a crucial constituting factor in the strategy of deviant happiness that attenuates his ‘battered [self-]confidence’, ‘self-pity’ and ‘self-doubt’. In expressing gratitude to God ‘for being alive’ as a gay man, Freddie actively toils towards interior acceptance and affirmation as qualities of queer spiritual well-being.

Gay Men and God’s Beatitude: A Theological Proposal

Henri Lefebvre (1987: 9) posits that it is in the everydayness of consumption and social alienation, the ‘set of functions which connect and join together systems that might appear to be distinct’ that one can embark ‘to decode the modern world, that bloody riddle [which may] reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary’. In the context of my theological discussion, I reinterpret Lefebvre’s ‘extraordinary’ as the intimate, radical, unequivocal and irrevocable presence, relationship and union of God with humankind, incarnated in Christ Jesus and in every living person who pursues and discerns the various manifestations of the good, just and holy in the ‘ordinary’, embodied experiences of everyday life.

I suggest that for gay men like Freddie, the pursuit of the good, just and holy lends itself to the pursuit of happiness – not one which is characterised by naïve optimism and anticipates a pain-free existence, or one that erroneously or knowingly leads to pernicious consequences, but one which reaches for inner joy and resides in a profoundly contemplative interpretation of human life, even as it is persistently marked by deficiency, pain and sorrow. This deviant pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of deep humanness – a deep-seated belief in and commitment to the core project of humanness as the realisation of humanness itself, the becoming more of oneself as desired and initiated by God, even if it never quite reaches its assumed optimal mark as visualised by the individual. It is a happiness that is deviant in every sense of the word as it queers popular depictions of what happiness should look and feel like, is paradoxically present amid its own absence as ‘an expectation of what follows’ (Ahmed, 2010: 29) and as briefly discussed earlier, relinquishes the simple fiction of regulated happiness. The quest for deviant happiness is a process of discernment towards queer spiritual well-being, and is itself a form of happiness, because the gay pursuer invests in a gradual realisation of humanness despite vehement politico-juridical and religio-cultural objections which threaten to annul and attenuate this realisation.

When refracted through the Catechism’s exposition of the beatitudes as a theological optic, the pursuit of deviant happiness and queer spiritual well-being can be understood as more than a gay man’s quest for personal joy and welfare. It is a partaking in God’s beatitude. The Catechism teaches that human beings are naturally drawn to happiness as this inclination has been infused in their ontological constitution as a vocation by God towards godself as the ultimate fulfilment of the desire for happiness (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1718). The beatitudes, according to the Catholic compendium, are personal and communal values that form the core teachings of Jesus. They elucidate ‘the actions and attitudes characteristic of the Christian life’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1717) that are good, just and holy. The practice of the beatitudes, manifested through the performance of spiritual poverty, an attitude of meekness, a longing for righteousness, the exercise of mercy, the living out of purity of heart, the observance of peace and the experience of grief and persecution (Mt 5:3-12; see also Lk 6:20-26), demonstrate a deep humanness which responds to God’s calling ‘to [God’s] own beatitude’ (Catholic Church, 1997: 1721), a deep happiness which enables the human person to take part in God’s life.

As a gay man of faith – the second of my major theological biases in this work – I admit to a keen vested interest in theologically assuaging the anguish of those who are ontologically denounced and disfigured by institutional religion on the basis of gender and sexuality. I hesitate, however, to apply the virtues in the beatitudes to Freddie’s vicissitudes in an enumerative fashion, even if simple parallels are demonstrably present. Instead, and inspired by the Catechism’s interpretation of the beatitudes, what I find particularly captivating and wish to focus on are the ideas of God’s calling to each human person to God’s own beatitude, and the human possibility of actively taking part in God’s happiness, including for gay men qua gay men – sans ‘rehabilitation’, ‘reform’ and ‘repentance’. According to the Catechism, human persons are created to forge a relationship with God (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1721). This relationship is not, I submit, one that is always conscious and intentional in the human psyche. The exercise of fellowship with God can sometimes assume a direct and conscious approach, but it can also take on more oblique and subtle forms. In other words, a relationship with God can be explicit – for instance, in one’s commitment to a regular prayer life – and implicit – as in one’s unexpected discovery and even unarticulated sense of the subtle presence of God in the unexceptional circumstances of everyday life.

It is the latter that I find particularly – albeit not exclusively – helpful for theologising deviant happiness and queer spiritual well-being. Participation in God’s beatitude is always a collaborative and an interdependent human-divine venture. The fact that ‘God [who] is present to [God’s] creatures’ inmost being’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 300) bestows upon human persons ‘not only their existence, but also the dignity of acting on their own, of being causes and principles for each other, and thus of co-operating in the accomplishment of [God’s] plan’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 306) suggests that human persons who genuinely work towards the realisation and actualisation of their deep humanness are in reality taking heed of God’s invitation towards God’s happiness and collaborating with God towards this end.

There is a decidedly intimate parallel between the practice of the virtues of the beatitudes and the pursuit of happiness and well-being in Freddie’s case, because both pursuits are acts of communing with God in God’s beatitude. The ordering of a gay man’s deep humanness towards that which are good, just and holy in whichever shape or form, including self-actualisation, is the ordering of deep humanness towards God. When gay men such as Freddie recognise their personal self-worth in God’s eyes, unfetter themselves from the deleterious pressures of self-deprecation and self-diminishment, and replace debilitating lifestyles with a dynamic of life-giving existence that aims to invest in myriad forms of spiritual well-being, they reveal the material-discursive strategies with which they become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1721). They are inserted ‘into the joy of the Trinitarian life’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1721) through a human-divine relationship which once again reiterates the reality that ‘interrelationship is at the heart of one’s being who one is’ (Helminiak, 1996: 323) – for both the human person and God.

Happiness can never be, however, a permanent point of arrival or completely within the domain of human control. Neither does it adhere to a specific template. Spiritual well-being can never be fully realised in one’s lifetime. In Freddie’s case, and that of many other Malaysian gay men, deviant happiness and queer spiritual well-being as human goals always exist in their precarity, partiality and situatedness. The project of participating in God’s beatitude is one that is perpetually incomplete. On the part of God, God’s call to God’s own beatitude is a standing invitation, an unabating calling, an interminable process that reverberates in the depths of human persons as they journey through life towards deep humanness, and in that quest, dis/uncover within themselves – in its innumerable incarnations – the presence of One who is ‘the source of every good and of all love’ (Catholic Church, 1997: para. 1723).