53. journaling

Hi friends. Sorry, it’s been a while so any readership I once had has probably drifted on to more active pastures. As far as a quick update for those of you who care, I’m currently temping at a company in Minnetonka processing mail and customer rebates and for a couple of weeks while their receptionist is out sick. It’s thrilling. But it’s a job.

Let’s see, what else. I’m in the middle of the fall piano teaching semester and being challenged by my more advanced students, and am feeling slightly inadequate. But it’s good, and keeping me honest.

I’m gearing up for this year’s NaNoWriMo, trying to work on a few other short stories before NNWM commences, and kicking around two plot ideas for the Big Write. Got a few leads, but we’ll see what happens come November 1st. 50,000 words in 30 days. If the math is correct (and yes, I can do basic math, friends), if I consistently write about 1,700 words a day I should be able to meet the challenge, with extra time left over for editing. But for sure it’s going to kick my ass. Writing short stories is one thing; being able to hold a reader’s interest for an entire novel is a horse of quite a different colour. If you’d like to add me as a writing buddy, please do! My user page can be found here.

As you might have gathered from my last post, I’m venturing into queer theory and gender studies. Sociology and psychology have always been serious passions of mine, which led to my becoming a storyteller; but given some recent conversations I’ve had over the past couple of months, GLBT studies is (are?) becoming a real area of research interest for me, especially coming at it from a Christian perspective. I want to be able to better understand and articulate my own experience and relate it to my faith, as well as really plumb the depths of my own experience, put it into context, and not take anything for granted; challenge my assumptions—or, as Rumi put it, plow the earth and get moving.

My entry point was suggested by my friend Sand who writes over at his blog, FuckTheory: Judith Butler’s seminal treatise, “Gender Trouble.” I just started it today and haven’t even finished the preface yet, and am already astounded. She writes at the beginning (this is her writing in 1999 on the original 1990 text):

As I wrote it, I understood myself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation to certain forms of feminism, even as I understood the text to be part of feminism itself. I was writing in the tradition of immanent critique that seeks to provoke critical examination of the basic vocabulary of the movement of thought to which it belongs . . . In 1989 I was most concerned to criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory . . . It seemed to me, and continues to see, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion.

This very much echoes my current sentiments about the gay rights movement right now, that a good part of the movement has a dominant heterosexual framing.

So that’s the start. I’m also getting into Eve Sedgwick’s “Between Men.” This feels like learning to read all over again.

48. bias

The assumption of male gender superiority is a significant aspect of the historical and cultural context of the biblical passages that seem to discuss homosexuality. Old Testament scholar Martti Nissinen has concluded from his cross-cultural research that “ancient Near Eastern sources in general are concerned with gender roles and their corresponding sexual practices, not with expressing a particular sexual orientation.” Thus, generally in the ancient Near East, sexual contact between two men was condemned as a confusion of gender roles. The cultural emphasis on male gender superiority also appears in Old Testament narratives and laws. Old Testament scholar Phyllis Bird concludes, “In the final analysis it [prohibition of homosexual behaviour] is a matter of gender identity and roles, not sexuality.” The same attitude is present in the New Testament, reflecting its Greek and Roman cultural context. New Testament scholar Victor Paul Furnish states that Romans 1:26–27 presupposes “that same-sex intercourse comprises what patriarchal societies regard as the properly dominant role of males over females.

Rogers, Jack. (2006). Jesus, the bible, and homosexuality. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Pr.

019. change?

I was reading an article this afternoon by Hank Hanegraaf titled Does Homosexuality Demonstrate that the Bible Is Antiquated and Irrelevant? on the Christian Research Institute’s website. (Yes, the name “Hank” should be red flag enough, let alone the alliteration.) Here’s an excerpt from the end of the article:

More people already have died worldwide from AIDS than the United States of America has lost in all its wars combined. This is but the tip of an insidious iceberg. The homosexual lifestyle causes a host of complications including hemorrhoids, prostate damage, and infectious fissures. Even that merely scratches the surface. Nonviral infections transmitted through homosexual activity include gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis. Viral infections involve condylomata, herpes, and hepatitis A and B.

While there are attendant moral and medical problems with sexual promiscuity in general, it would be homophobic in the extreme to obscure the scientific realities concerning homosexuality. It is a hate crime of unparalleled proportions to attempt to keep a whole segment of the population in the dark concerning such issues. Thus, far from demonstrating that the Bible is out of step with the times, its warnings regarding homosexuality demonstrate that it is as relevant today as it was in the beginning.

What I see here again is an equating of homosexual with promiscuity. There is little discussion it seems concerning those of us who consider ourselves “conservative homosexuals.” Who don’t engage in promiscuous sex any more than straight Christians and have a goal of a life-long monogamous relationship.

I wonder what would Mr. Hanegraaf have to say to that?

016. namaste

Here’s another excerpt from the Virginia Mollenkott interview on Speaking of Faith in 2006. She was responding to the mainstream Evangelical position of most churches and theologians to advise homosexuals to either pursue change (through prayer or other means, including ex-gay ministries such as Exodus International, Love in Action, or JONAH) or life-long celibacy. As Krista Tippett said in her preface, “For [Mollenkott], to exclude homosexuals from marriage is to deny their full humanity, and she doesn’t believe that restricting marriage to a man and a woman is true to the spirit of key New Testament symbolism about marriage, such as the often-cited image of Christ as the bridegroom and the church as the bride.”

Here’s what Virginia Mollenkott had to say.

Well, if, you know, namaste, what the Hindus say, “The holy place in me salutes the holy one in you.” When you dearly love somebody and you make love with them, you’re not just making love to another body. This is your avenue to love the maker, the Creator of us all. I think that’s the important thing about comparing marriage to Christ and the church, that it opens you up to the entire human race, not just to this one person.

It’s not just what nuclear marriage has so often been depicted, as you and me and baby makes three, and we pull everything in over the top of us and we don’t care about anybody else’s family because we’re a family and we’re number one to each other. No, it’s that loving one other opens us up to loving the entire human race, all of whom have this place in them, this divine light in them, the light which lightens every human being born into the world, according to John, chapter 1. And to me, that’s — this is transcendent, this is beautiful. And to tell somebody they cannot have access to this worshipful act is tragic.

006a. story part ii

In case you didn’t get to read the first part of this, it was a story from Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman. In it, a man made of pillows has the job of helping the people whose horrible, awful lives lead them to commit suicide. He goes back in time to when that man or woman was a child, tells them how terrible their life is going to be and helps them commit suicide in a way that looks like an accident, the reason being that parents have an easier time dealing with the tragic accidental death of a five-year-old as supposed to a five-year-old “who has seen how shitty life is and taken action to avoid it.”

So after one last job, the Pillowman decides to go back and visit himself as a little boy. He tells his whole life story, about his job and how awful it is that he has to do this, and the little Pillowboy just wants to help and make people happy, so he pours the can of petrol (gasoline for you state-side folks) the Pillowman brought over himself and lights himself on fire. And as he burns the Pillowman starts to fade away, but as he does so he hears the screams of all the hundreds of thousands of children who came back to life and lead cold, wretched lives because he wasn’t there to prevent it; and the screams of their self-inflicted deaths “which this time, of course, would be conducted entirely alone.”

Apart from being horribly disturbing, it’s a fitting beginning for telling my story. Not that I’ve led a cold, wretched life. In fact, my life has been quite happy. But it’s hard looking back on myself as a happy six-year-old, before I stopped smiling in photos, knowing that that little boy would grow up to be gay, fall in love with a man and most likely have sex with him. Little boys don’t do things like that, not at that age anyway—and especially not when it’s you. In the same way (though not quite as personal) it’s weird looking at my younger sister from when we were kids, and knowing that she would one day fall in love with a man, marry and have sex with him. This thought occurred to me the other day, as slightly twisted as it is. Even looking at pictures of people at weddings as they grow up, looking at who they were and seeing the adults they’ve become who are starting a family of their own.

So here’s the issue that it raises (and why I started out with The Pillowman). By the gauge of society and my faith, my sister and her husband have a conventional and “normal” relationship. My parents love her husband, like the son they never had. (They probably see him more than they do me—and let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly a “normal” son. Apart from being the first-born male, I don’t “do” family very well.) They will probably have kids someday. Then I’ll really be an uncle. (Shit.)

Me, on the other hand—I will probably find a guy and fall in love with him; have to tell my parents that I’m gay (still haven’t done that) and risk either being disowned by them or face enormous pressure to go into an ex-gay ministry and turn straight or basically renounce my faith because a true Christian doesn’t persist in a “life of sin”; probably leave my church (because I honestly can’t see going to service on Sunday with my boyfriend and not hold hands with him); and face stares and whispers for a while, at least until homosexuality becomes more mainstream.

Maybe I’m over-reacting, but this is how it looks in my head.

As I stated in my first post, my family could best be described as non-affiliated evangelical fundamentalist—mainstream Christian, in other words. Was raised with the Bible, went to church every Sunday, and was taught right from wrong. The final word was the Word of G-d, and my father. We never really talked about homosexuality as a family apart from seeing images of hateful Christians on TV and the flamboyant gays they were screaming at with those awful signs. I recall driving past some protesters with signs bearing “FAGS BURN IN HELL” as a kid and not really understanding what any of that meant. I don’t think my parents ever gave me a real answer on that. But gays couldn’t be Christian so that wasn’t even an option in my mind. My dad taught at a Christian community college in a small town in the Midwest where there were no gays that we knew of. This was in the mid- to early 1990s.

Okay. So, happy child.

For the most part I was happy, but I was also very angry. I blamed my firey temper on my red hair and Irish ancestry. Much of the focus of that anger was often at my dad with whom I still have a hit-and-miss relationship. We didn’t get along very well. Maybe I resented him for working so much. He tried to spend as much time as possible with us, but he was away a lot and when he was home he was grading or practising (he’s a professional trumpeter too). I have memories of going to the park with him and family vacations, but the two of us never really connected. Maybe it’s because we’re so similar, something I hate to admit because it’s getting truer every day. I have a degree in music composition, and it’s one of the few areas that my dad and I can connect with. We can look at music scores together that we’ve written, and I still value and seek out his opinion on anything that I write. There isn’t as much much tension between us now. I’m learning to see the things that he does for me as expressions of his love for me, but I think I still resent him for not being more of a “father” to me when I was a kid.

Though they made a lot of mistakes, my parents really did the best that they knew how with the knowledge that they had. In fact, my mom and dad are the first generation in their families to not have pre-marital sex or get divorced. Their family backgrounds aren’t so fortunate. My mom’s dad left my grandmother, my mom and her brother to be with another woman. I refuse to have anything to do with him, though my mom has reached out to him and his second wife.

My dad has the strangest story of all. He’s a middle child of three siblings. His own upbringing was pretty chaotic and painful as a farm kid in rural Pennsylvania, with an emotionally distant and by today’s standards a physically abusive father, and a mother who killed herself when he was six. He was never able to grieve her properly, and actually has a lot of repressed memories from that period. It’s only in the past decade that he’s really been able to go back and put her to rest properly. I’m not sure of the whole story, but his dad remarried and his stepmom had a son who did some cruel things to my father. It’s a miracle that he came out of that as well-adjusted as he is, but that’s a testament to the mercy and grace of G-d.

What that meant for me is that I got shortchanged in the years that most sons bond with their fathers and getting that male imprint. That may be a large reason why I’m gay now, and to be fair, he didn’t know what to do with me since boys were more or less left to their own devices when he was growing up in the 1950s and that’s all he knew. But our relationship has always been strained. He never sought me out or attempted to have a relationship with me, leaving me to go off by myself to write or create or read. He asserts that I never seemed very interested, and I don’t doubt it. I was always an independent-minded child.

Looking back now, there were signs of things to come. For example, I identified more with the villains or the anti-heros in stories rather than with the one who gets the girl in the end. I played with Legos and would make up stories,  and the male characters were always doing things together (though at the time I didn’t think of it that way). I enjoyed looking at pictures of shirtless guys (but never drew attention to that). But no one showed me any of that. No pedophile uncle or stranger came along and molested me. I was into guys in the same way that boys are often secretly fascinated with girls. But my culture, family and church held a different standard and so I kept it hidden.

There were a lot of couples, weddings and babies. My dad played for many of them, and I went along. They were always telling me that I’d be up there one day, with the girl G-d had for me, but it wasn’t something I aspired to at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I swore I’d never get married. As my teen years drew on, the interest in girls that everyone talked about didn’t come. The first couple of years of puberty were pretty uneventful sexually.

Emotionally and spiritually it was a much darker time.

One night at an AWANA retreat a couple of the guys in my cabin decided to play a prank on me. It upset me a lot, and I’m still not even sure what inspired me but I waited until everyone was asleep and at midnight got up out of bed, stood in the centre of the room and proceeded to curse every guy who had offended me. It’s still a vivid memory for me, the feeling of power and the inviting of something dark into my life. I got into magick at this time, but thankfully G-d never let me get too far down that path.

The next couple of years were pretty tense, marked by frightening outbursts of rage directed at my sisters and my parents which were no doubt demonically driven because there were some terrifying dreams as well. My parents tried to get me under control but nothing worked. I hurt so many people who just tried to love and help me, but I couldn’t hear any of it. At one point my father tried exorcising demons out of me and I laughed in his face. Not one of my proudest moments.

If there were a few characteristic of my life then, it’s how unhappy, selfish and lonely I was. Outwardly, everything was fine. I was on the drama and music teams in youth group and played for church regularly. So many lessons I learned that have made me the crazy, creative guy I am today! Inwardly though, I was dead. Spiritual things were of little to no importance, and there was something vaugely different about me that I hid from everyone that alienated me from everyone else—including G-d.

It was about that time that two changes started working in my life. One was that being around other kids who seemed to have a passion for G-d ignited for the first time an interest in the spiritual. It seemed important, and I began to see that maybe it wasn’t just about avoiding hell; that it could actually impact everyday life! I began to study the scriptures with friends in small bible studies and groups; had church Sunday morning and youth group Wednesday night; got involved with a Precepts study and gained an understanding of ancient middle eastern customs that has transformed my view of the old and new covenants, as well as the Passover traditions that became communion.

About the same time that I was getting involved with youth group that adolescence began to set in. I noticed that my guy friends were going through kind of the same thing, but they were becoming more interested in girls. As long as I can remember, I’ve never been interested in women much beyond seeing them as people, and then once I started developing sexually it really became apparent that I was into guys. At the time there was no vocabulary for me to make sense of any of that. The word “gay” never even came to mind because it wasn’t even a possibility.

There was this one guy in youth group, Peter, who always made me lose my cool. If there’s one moment I can point back to of when I knew I was gay, it’s the first time I saw him with the new eyes that being a teenage guy affords. When he came around, my heart started racing, my palms sweat; it kind of made me dizzy, and it ached in that one part of my chest when you want something so badly. Thank G-d I’m practically blind because I could just take off my glasses when he was around. That made it rather interesting when I was at the piano helping lead music. I could be totally focused, and then he’d walk in.

Men and women got married. That’s what the Bible taught. Ephesians 5, Genesis 2, and Jesus were pretty clear on the subject. Guys were just friends, which honestly was pretty vague. Hanging out? Playing sports? Video games? I was an intellectual and an artist. None of that made any sense. Now I understand masculine psychology better, but still it’s not a part of me.

Regardless, even as a kid I felt it was something to hide, and then as a teenager I learned to dissociate those feelings and essentially lock them away, learning to blend in. Being involved in AP classes at school and seriously pursuing the piano and music study was a good mask. When other guys were starting to date, I was practising piano 3-4 hours a day and buckling down with hours of homework at night. Perhaps my friends knew something was up, but a high school friend told me recently that most people back then thought I was the ultimate band geek! Even now, it feels like someone else feeling something, and I’m not a part of it.

To be continued…

Next time: college in a nutshell, therapy, and last summer.

001. Out

I blog on several other sites, but this will be the one where I deal with more “sensitive” subjects from the comfort of my anonymous chair.

So here goes.

I am many things. An artist. A composer. A writer. A some-time cook. A fan of public radio. Irish-American. A Christian.

I’m also gay.

If you know me, this may come as a bit of a shock but not much of a surprise.

Now, lest images of drag queens and leathermen marching down 5th Avenue in pride parades come to your minds, I assure you—that is not me. If TV pictures of shrill, effeminate gay men vociferously demanding gay rights and gay marriage offend you—that is not me. If associations with AIDS and promiscuous sex-addicts in bathhouses cause you alarm—that is not me. If you hear “gay” or “homosexual” and immediately think of limp-wristed, lisping, swishy non-conformists—that is not me.

I am, by all accounts, normal. I work a 9-5 job in education administration. I work in the arts and love attention, but I keep a low, quiet profile. I attend religious services regularly and am a member of a mainstream church in Minneapolis. Hang out with my friends, most of whom are straight, and almost all either dating, married or getting married.

It just so happens that I am also attracted to men. Apart from that, there is nothing that really sets me apart from “straight” guys.

It’s been a difficult process coming to this realisation, but looking back I’ve always known in some way. I’ve always been “into” guys and upon the onset of adolescence that attraction became much more apparent, though I lacked the emotional vocabulary to make sense of any of that.

I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home by two loving parents who tried their best to instil conservative Christian values in me and my two younger sisters. But a young Christian man just wasn’t gay so for a long time I tried to convince myself that my attraction to men was just “a phase” and that I just needed to find the right girl, because that’s what young Christian men did—they dated and then married nice Christian girls.

Later on (over the past three years), the fact that I’m homosexual became something shameful to hide, to overcome, to loathe.

And nobody knew. I made sure of that.

Until a friend of mine came out to me with her feelings for me and I knew that not telling her would be a disservice, both to myself and to her. Leading on nice girls when there was no chance of me ever being attracted to them was unfair. Sure, there may be disappointment and pain, but it at least gave them the chance to move on and find a guy would could genuinely love and care for them, and ultimately be totally attracted to them. So I did it. I told her.

“I’m gay.”

And that was just the beginning.

~ Muirnin