FEROCIOUS ROMANCE: WHAT MY ENCOUNTERS WITH THE RIGHT TAUGHT ME ABOUT SEX, GOD, AND FURY [ハードカバー]

When Donna Minkowitz, a contributing writer to the Village Voice, Ms., and Out (among others), got in drag as a 16-year-old boy (complete with baseball cap and fake mustache), she soon found herself surrounded by taut-bodied, sweaty men in tight-fitting T-shirts and well-worn Levi's embracing and holding hands. But she wasn't sneaking into a gay bar: this was a Promise Keepers convention, where "family men" were enslaving themselves before their master, Jesus, as they learned to ask forgiveness for their sins and demanded the return of their traditional patriarchal role from their families.

In her brave new book, Ferocious Romance, Minkowitz investigates the Religious Right, and in so doing draws some unexpected parallels between that culture and the diametrically opposed worlds of the S/M community, ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and Sex Panic!; she also finds herself identifying with many of the people she meets. This is a poignant journey in which Minkowitz comes face-to-face with the very people she has protested against as an activist; the experience leads her to explore her relationships to organized religion, women, feminism, sex, friendship, romance, and rage. A thoughtful and unconventional memoir--at turns harrowing and enlightening--that hits straight at the reader's heart and mind. --Kera Bolonik

Minkowitz, a lesbian activist, brings a refreshing lack of rancor and an appealing open-mindedness to encounters that would normally be fodder for the most extreme rhetoric of the culture wars. In pursuit of an article for the Village Voice, she set off to engage the religious right, her perceived enemy, mostly by infiltrating their ranks at rallies. To her surprise, she was almost wooed. In chapters alternating between experiences with Christian groups (e.g., the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, the Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family) and her life among her own set (S/M workshops, gay rights marches), Minkowitz details how she came to feel an affinity "with people who cackle, ululate, and bray their praise of God." Minkowitz, who calls herself "Dionysian," feels at home with what she sees as the eroticism of charismatic Christianity ("my people, gays and lesbians, have been known to get pretty ecstatic themselves"). Her writing, never strident or polemical, is both earnest and breezy, and sometimes funny. After a while, however, it becomes clear that Minkowitz is content to keep her account subjective and impressionistic: she offers little contextual understanding of the differences among Christian groups or of the wider ramifications of their beliefs?or, for that matter, of her own. She concludes by offering a purely personal notion of virtue: "I could see there was no redeemer. No enslaver. Only other people. I approached them with great joy." Minkowitz's book is notable for its generosity of spirit more than for its depth. In the end, she seems to view conservative Christianity as just another a lifestyle choice. Agent, Jed Mattes.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Intrepid Village Voice reporter Donna Minkowitz thought she knew what she was getting into when she set out to go undercover among the religious right. She was going to observe "the enemy" close up, on its own turf. But Minkowitz, a feminist, lesbian, and "sex radical" who has won awards for her coverage of gay issues, found something else entirely -- a guide to some of the stormiest contradictions within her own soul.

Sex and love, good and evil, rapture and safety -- the religious right, it turns out, is as obsessed with these matters as Minkowitz is, as many of us are. During her adventures with the Christian right, Minkowitz finds all-women Pentecostal services that are as sexually supercharged as her own experiences having group sex with strangers in a lesbian backroom bar. The Promise Keepers, trying to be good in an age when "good" men are branded as sissies, alternately move Minkowitz to tears and provoke her mirth when she disguises herself as a teenage boy to join one of their all-male gatherings.

With hilarious, sympathetic writing, Minkowitz explores the things she and the Christian right have in common -- from their intense sense of "victimhood" to their desire to be loved at all costs. If the Christian right wants a God willing to die for them, Minkowitz wants a lover willing to suffer pain. "Because I have fallen in love with a masochist," she writes, "I think I have entered the Garden of Eden."

On this rollicking trip to hell and back, Minkowitz reexamines staples of gay life she once revered -- like Sex Panic!, a group that wants to applaud all that is "evil" and "transgressive" in sex. She wonders why she ever embraced the idealist assumption that gays are inherently freer, sexier, and "better" than straights.

And the more she visits the Christian right, the more she discovers that neither she nor they have been getting what they're looking for. Whether "getting slain in the spirit" with adherents of the Toronto Blessing, which Minkowitz calls the "punk-rock version of evangelism," or being given a female makeover by Total Woman Ministries, or engaging in mutual confessions with executives from Focus on the Family, Minkowitz comes to understand that both she and they have been using sex and God, not being saved by them.

In the end, Minkowitz discovers a very different kind of ecstasy. It is not the ecstasy of overcoming the Other; it is not the frenzied search for safety. It is an embrace of all the dangers and beauties that our deepest selves can offer. Here is a tour of the extremes of body and soul in America that may exhilarate and shock while it enlightens, but will remain indelibly stamped in the memory long after the last page is turned.