It’s been a week since the Orlando shooting, and this particular shooting hit me hard. So hard that I’ve had to spend most of the week in silence, trying to wrap my head around this great sorrow. These have been big emotions for me, so big that I didn’t think I was big enough to contain them. Yet, nature being what it is, I had no choice but to figure it out.
I haven’t said much about the issue because, quite frankly, I didn’t know what to say? What can I possibly say that hasn’t already been said? But this morning I read the story of Donnie Romero of Stedfast Baptist Church, and that article linked me to the story of Pastor Roger Jimenez of the Verity Baptist Church. You’ve probably already read them, but they were new to me.
To most of the country, probably most of the world, the sentiments of these pastors are horrific, but believe it or not these are the types of “prayers” I grew up with. I grew up in evangelical churches with pastors who hated everybody and prayed violence, pestilence, and all manner of ugliness against those who didn’t share their world view. Those of us in the pews thought almost nothing of it.
The difference is, I’m not in that place anymore. I can actually see these comments for what they are… ugly and evil. Which got me to thinking: “Why?” How is it that under the tutelage of men like Donnie Romero and Roger Jimenez I didn’t end up like them?
Like most people, I started life very young; though it wasn’t long before I outgrew that. Boy did I outgrow it. And as I grew, things changed: sometimes drastically. But since I was with these changes as they were being made, I didn’t notice many of them. Age got away from me, and now, quite surprisingly, I find myself too old to be too young to die.
Oh well! That’s how life is supposed to go right? Is it not: Death; entropy; decay?
Looking back, I see an arch spanning most of my young-adult life. A curse, a blight upon my personage that now I call a gift. Whaaaa? What benefaction could be so versatile as to masquerade as a curse, only then to expose itself as a gift? Believe it or not, it was (and still is) my sexuality. In particular, the unique way it developed as I grew into it.
My story’s typical. You’ve heard many times before. In fact, I can see your eyes drift off while you fantasize about how much better the last episode of Breaking Bad would be if only they let you help write it.
This isn’t about that.
I was born in a hospital in Whitefish Montana and, not at all ready to leave the comfort of home. I fought it for hours according to my mom. I was born into your typical Conservative Christian family: bigoted, ignorant, and armed. But that’s their right given to them by Jeezuz when he handed down the Constitution to Moses when he was having dinner with George Washington.
When I was six, my mom divorced, got “born again,” and started hanging around with a “Jesus-People” community. When I was nine, she met the man who was to become my stepdad, who was Seventh Day Adventist; and we converted. At the age of ten, my stepdad picked up steaks and moved us dead-center Wyoming as a Bible salesman for the SDA church.
Throughout these formative years, most of the people I came into contact through my mom and stepdad were very much like my family… bigoted, paranoid, and so narrow they could look through a keyhole with both eyes. For all intents and purposes, I was on a trajectory to become just like them.
Growing up, I took to The God thing. When my mom joined the Jesus Movement, despite my age, I was a proud Jesus Freak. When she joined the Seventh Day Adventist Church, I read all of Ellen G. White’s books, along with the Bible stories books. God was my thang, and I wanted to be a prophet. I was ready to embrace it all: the bigotry, the anger, the narrowness, the fear mongering—all in the name of God.
However, something else was growing with me. Some alien organism that kept me from being like everyone around me; that made me “different.” And it was that “different” that forced me to be different, whether I wanted to or not.
There was always a part of me that could not embrace the bigotry of my family, because I would have to turn it against myself. There was a part of me that could not embrace the narrowness and hatefulness of God, because that would mean I would have to let God hate me too.
From the moment I became conscious of myself, I had to make unconscious choices to break away from the attitudes of those around me—or slip into self-hatred. By experiencing their vitriol, I grew keenly aware of what hatred looked like on the receiving end: how it felt, the way it hurt (physically and emotionally). In high school I had beer bottles thrown at my head; I was whisked away from parties because of threats of violence. I had a high school friend tell me that I was never welcome in his home (or with his friend) again… and this was after four years of partying, getting stoned, sharing the toilet to throw up in. Pastors kicked me out of churches, friends were told by their parents not to associate with me… and all this was happening while I was pretending to be straight.
I would then go on to spend fifteen years in various forms of reparative therapy: Exodus International, Living Waters, and Metanoia. None of it took. I yelled at God, I cursed God, I begged God… and finally, I gave up on God.
It’s only recently that I look back on all this that I can see what happened. My “struggle” with homosexuality, just like the butterfly’s struggle to free itself of the cocoon, gave me the opportunity to choose compassion, by experiencing hate. It gave me the opportunity to choose openness, by experiencing bigotry. It gave me the opportunity to see God’s true potential, by experiencing his pettiness.
That alien presence living inside of me wasn’t alien at all. It was me, desperate to experience myself. And it learned how to do that, in large part, by being forced to look at it head-on, and then abandon, what was ugly in my surroundings.
To be clear, I know a lot of bitter—bigoted—bitchy—queens… this isn’t about them.
I can look into people’s eyes and see so much more than color, gender, height, weight. I can see my enemy and realize that there’s more to them; that they have a story, complete with drama. I can learn to embrace others because I know what it’s like to be an outcast. I can be a safe place because I know what fear and vulnerability feel like. I can forgive because I know what it feels like to be human.
Would this still be true of me if I wasn’t blessed with this obscenity? I don’t know. Things evolved as they evolved, into what they are. But this gift has helped mold me into a man that, on most days, I like… and wouldn’t mind spending a significant amount of time with; a man that, despite his foibles, makes me want to be a better man. And if there is a God, this is the man I plan to take to him… to say, “God, this is me, and I wouldn’t change that for anybody… not even you.”