58. truth

Where does our story begin today?

It begins with me waking up at 6am with my best friend at the Hotel Minneapolis, where I stayed the night because I was in no state to drive. She’s been staying in Rochester with her dad for the next few weeks and came up to Minneapolis with another friend of her’s from Iowa. She just left her husband and decided to get some room to breathe, decompress and put some distance between her and her husband. So the three of us had dinner last night and then crashed in their room.

The sad thing is that they’ve been married eleven years, and have tried to do everything to make things work. Even sadder is the fact that up until last week, when she left, he thought things were at least starting to get better, though the truth was that she was the one doing all the work and the changing, and was emotionally drained from trying to keep him happy. She hadn’t realized how unhappy she was or how bad things had gotten until another friend of her’s asked point blank why she was still with her husband. So, last Wednesday, we spent most of the day while he was at work packing up her things and moving her out.

The hardest thing about ending a relationship is often the fear of letting go of the idea of what it was, of losing everything that was good about it, and of that part of your identity dying, especially if the relationship lasted several years. Like, eleven years.

Or twenty.

In my last entry, I described the awfulness that ensued on my birthday that led to the loss of a good friend and my faith in God. Frankly, the whole business with Seth was only the final blow that knocked me off the fence and into facing the truth of my situation, which is that I’d basically been holding into a faith for the sake of being with him. He and some other friends are in the process of starting a church geared towards those who have been hurt or rejected by the Church, including GLBT Christians and those who are interested in the Christian faith but haven’t been afforded a place in the community. But the result of that conversation on my birthday made me realize that I haven’t been a Christian for a long time—possibly ever.

Driving back to my house this morning, I realized that this whole thing has felt like the death of a twenty-year-long relationship. At the age of eight I began to identify as a Christian, and since then the church has been my community. My whole identity has been wrapped up in the reality of God, of theology, and of a Judeo-Christian morality and ethic. My decisions have been made based on whether what I’m doing is the will of God, or whether a given activity or project would glorify God. It took me nearly ten years to finally come out because of what the Bible taught about homosexuality. So to turn around after nearly twenty years of living with this feels like the end of a marriage that hasn’t been working for a long time, and the children are all out of the house now and we’re trying to find a reason to stay together.

This honestly wasn’t a huge surprise. As early as 2006 I was beginning to question the validity of the Bible, whether it was true and if it mattered whether it’s true (and if it wasn’t true, what that meant), and really wasn’t finding satisfactory answers to these questions in my Christian community. In fact, quite the opposite. “Down that dangerous road lies emptiness and misery,” was the general response. So I shut up because it was easier than enduring the looks and the remonstrations about “enduring to the end” and “praying for faith.” When I came out, I started with the Bible and seeing what it really had to say about gays, because what God had to say about this was important and I wasn’t satisfied with the idea that I was broken or that God had given me these desires only to bury them. That’s a whole other post, but what I found wasn’t assuring, though not in the way I feared. I realized what a malleable and flimsy thing translation was, and how every Biblical translator has an agenda that works its way into the text. So how could I really believe anything that it had to say?

A few months ago while temping I listened to the This American Life episode “Godless America,” in which Julia Sweeney tells the story of her journey from being a committed Catholic to atheism, which is an excerpt from her show “Letting Go of God.” I’d heard the This American Life story a while ago, and at the time felt rather superior to her story. I went to a Christian liberal arts college; had a degree in Biblical and theological studies; studied and discussed theology; and had been going to church all my life and had even studied other worldviews in depth and was convinced in the rightness of Christianity. It offered all the answers to life’s persistent questions. Atheism was the ultimate cop-out, a failure to deal with layers of complexity, rejecting God rather than face the questions.

But if I had to be honest, in that smugness was also fear—fear that maybe there was something to her experience and what she was saying. I’d grown up my whole life with God, with Him being there, listening to and watching over me, and the idea of Not-God was, well, unsettling. It meant turning my back on everything I’d ever believed and been taught by my family, in my many years of Christian education, and by the Church. It meant that everything in life is just coincidence; that we’re here by chance and there’s no one minding the store. It meant that everyone at my church was essentially believing a myth; that there was no one looking out for or listening to people unjustly thrown in prison, or being tortured, or suffering. Worse, it also meant that this is all there is—that there is no afterlife, no Eternal Life, no salvation.

So on my birthday, Seth rebuffing me for the final time was the last straw. Since there wasn’t a future with him, there was no reason to call myself a Christian anymore since I was staying in it for him, which is a terrible reason to do anything. I felt like Anna Kendrick’s character in Up In The Air, having relocated her entire life to Omaha for a guy who ultimately dumps her by text message, and feeling completely adrift; or like George Clooney’s character in the same film, thinking he’d finally found the woman of his dreams and that this new vision of his life was actually going to work, and showing up at her door to surprise her—only to discover that she was married, with children.

One of the big things I’ve lost since leaving the church is the community. For as long as I can remember, the church has provided a central locus that gave shape and direction to my life, from the AWANA program as a kid, to youth group as a teenager, to adult choir and orchestra in church, to weddings, funerals and everything in between. It was a way to commemorate and ritualize the important moments in life, like chapter breaks in a novel that organize an otherwise an uninterrupted and nebulous blur of days and years and shifting memories. There really isn’t another community that offers that kind of stability—but that isn’t a good reason to accept an entire belief system, is it?

A few days ago I did some searching on agnostic groups that might exist in my area, and came across another site that I’d heard about, again, on This American Life—Meetup.com, a site that exists to bring together different groups of people interested in the same things. There was a group called “Former Fundamentalists” that met for coffee on Sunday mornings, so I decided to check it out this morning. That ended up not happening as I got completely lost due to some poor directions and ended up giving up and going to Caribou instead to write about this whole misadventure.

While driving over to find the little coffee shop, I started thinking about this new direction in my life. I’m always suspicious about my own motives, and have been questioning whether I’m choosing agnosticism for the right reasons—and mainly whether it’s because of Seth, the guy I’ve been foolishly in love with for the last year. After all, it’s equally absurd to reject a belief system because a man done you wrong as it is to stay in it for him. There, in my living room, getting ready to go out and meet up with these fellow agnostics and former fundamentalists, I had to admit to myself that, yes, I had decided to reject Christianity because of him; that I was angry at him, and am still angry at the institution of the church itself; and that I hadn’t found a church that was both accepting of gays and lesbians and also rigorous and uncompromising in its approach to faith and theology.

There’s also the fact that I really liked the church that Seth and my friends were putting together, and was really excited that it might be a place I could finally belong to. However, he was to be the senior pastor, and seeing as I still have and probably always will have feelings for him, I could never go there while he’s a mainstay. Seeing him hurts too much. But that’s life. An added bonus is that my dating pool is that much bigger for dating other agnostics and “nones” (as they’re called).

Sometimes it’s the right move to leave a relationship if it’s abusive or unhealthy, or if it was disingenuous to begin with. But what if you realize that you were the problem to begin with, or even that maybe you’ve been letting other voices alter and shade your perceptions of that relationship, making it appear worse than it ever was?

Le sigh. The pursuit of truth is neither an easy nor a comfortable road.

57. invidiousness part i

… and why I hate Valentine’s Day so much.

Truth be told, it’s because I’ve never been able to take part in it. Or rather, had a positive experience that would refute the notion that it’s anything more than a tawdry, vulgar pseudo-holiday dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade to torment those who are miserably single [he said with a permanent scowl etched into his craggy, careworn face].

It’s a day when happy, coupled people blissfully buy into the spurious notion that there’s one day in the year when we should all be extra attracted to each other, and men go out and make grand, sweeping gestures to their girlfriends (or boyfriends) to make up for the fact of how neglectful they are towards their significant other the rest of the year.

Or maybe that’s just me and that damned speck of mirror-glass in my eye.

Yes, I’m one of those peevish, vituperative, curmudgeonly people who begrudge the fact that others are happy and having a wonderful time today, and wish they would all just collectively go fuck themselves and remember that there are those who aren’t blissfully happy; who (full disclosure) desperately wish that there were someone to brainlessly buy into this farce of a “holiday” with, and maybe for a few, fleeting hours forget how cheap, bloody and cruel life is the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year—or, on a more positive note, spend an evening with that “special someone,” maybe have a nice dinner and feel part of the universal experience of romantic love.

And, naturally, fuck each other silly at the end of the night.

Another reason that I begrudge Valentine’s Day so deeply and with such contempt is that a year ago today I woke up with the guy I spent the majority of this past year pining, crying and agonizing over. Let’s call him Seth. (No, really, that’s his name.) He was the first man I have ever been in love with, exacerbated by the fact that I knew he didn’t feel the same way about me. Shortly after our first sexual encounter, he basically told me that flat out, breaking my heart the first time. Before that, I found the idea of unrequited love silly and self-abasing. “Get over it!” you’d hear me say, doling out advice to inconsolable, anguished friends whose predicament I now find myself in. “He/She is not worth the pain you’re putting yourself through!” The funny thing about it though is that you can’t stop caring, or wishing, or hoping. It’s wholly irrational, but you hold out for the slim chance that maybe, just maybe, the veil will be drawn from their eyes and they will suddenly see you for the loving, caring, perfectly compatible person that you are.

And so Seth and I became what is affectionately referred to as fuck buddies. He was more or less using me for sex, apparently under the misguided notion that we were just having fun. Or some shit like that. And every time I hoped that maybe, just maybe, I’d get through to him; that he’d see that we could be more than friends; that, even beyond the whole sexual compatibility element, we got each others jokes, wanted the same things, had a similar approach to life and faith and intellect.

As Bobby Fisher might say, “No dice.”

This Valentine’s story concludes a few weeks ago, on my 28th birthday, with me drunk and sobbing in a friend’s apartment. Everyone had left Seth’s apartment (where the birthday party was being held), and I was too drunk to drive. Two other friends of mine live in the same building, but have a cat, and I am extremely allergic to cats, so normally this would end with us in his bed, having sex and me spending the night. It was not to end thus this time.

Seth had been on a blind date a week previous with another guy, and wasn’t sure how it was going to go, or even if it would go anywhere. My heart sank when he talked about this, but again I held out for the hope that it wouldn’t work, that it would just be another dalliance and that if I hung around long enough that he’d fall for me as I had for him. On that February 2nd though, he said that he was starting to like the guy more, and things were getting more serious between them. I was trying desperately to put a brave face on it and not let it bother me.

Flash back to earlier in the summer. I had just ended a relationship with my second serious boyfriend (let’s call him Nick) and was starting to date a new guy (we’ll call him Jack), and the night that I’d told everyone about Jack, as we were leaving, Seth asked if he could kiss me before things got too serious. And so, still being madly in love with him, we made out in the stairwell of the apartment.

Back to the night of my 28th birthday, eventually it got late and everyone decided it was time to call it an evening. It was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere, and he said I could crash there, but that I would need to sleep on the couch since he was starting a relationship with a new guy. And that’s when it began.

For weeks prior to this, I’d been agonizing over whether to confess my feelings to Seth or not. Some good friends who knew about the whole fuck buddy situation said that there was no way he couldn’t feel the same way, at least on some level, because nobody could do those things and be totally detached. Right? And I was determined not to let him be the biggest regret of my life.

So there in his apartment, drunk and enraged, I spewed everything at him that had been building over the weeks and months—how stupid I’d been to have let him play with my heart that way, how he’s not worthy of me, how I deserve better than some guy who can fuck me whenever it’s convenient for him to get his goddamn rocks off but then toss me to the curb once something “real” comes along, as if I were that cheap and disposable. On top of it all, he’s slated to be the pastor of a fucking GLBT-friendly church. I told him he’d do this again to someone else, that he’d play with some vulnerable guy’s affections who’s desperate to find a good Christian gay man, take advantage of him, and break his heart too. I called him a monster, a user, and a whole host of other awful things. No sense in being a writer if you can’t use them as a scalpel.

That night I also told him I no longer believe in God; that the church is a sham, and that he’s living, walking proof that none of it rings true. He listened quietly, tried to explain himself (which I’d have none of), and then left the room. Upon which I called my friend who lives upstairs, asked if I could crash there, and then spent the next hour sobbing on her couch. I’d hated myself for what I’d done, and hated him at the same time that I loved him.

But I also knew that the friendship, the relationship, was over.

Since the 2nd, I made it my resolution to do away with my old sexual morality, because chances are I’m never going to find a soulmate, and impersonal hookups are about as close as I’m probably going to get to the intimacy that I desperately crave. In the last few weeks I’ve had more sex than I have in my entire life, but it hasn’t filled the void, and I knew going in it wouldn’t satisfy. Maybe I’m just trying to get Seth out of my system.

So you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump on the Valentine’s Day bandwagon and celebrate the triumph of romantic love with the rest of the callow world. Last night, a guy that I’d been seeing and talking to for a few weeks decided to call things off. It was a mutual decision; I’d been sensing that we weren’t any more than just friends, but it still came as a bit of a crushing disappointment, especially considering that, even if it wasn’t going anywhere, that perhaps for once I could temporarily shut my eyes, not be alone on Valentine’s Day and believe that maybe, just maybe, love and romance really are possible. But, as usual, he turned out like all the others. This man too “disappoint me.”

I’m still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.

022. mercuriality

Both my jobs are taking quite a toll on my blogging and personal life, so my posts here will be a bit spotty for the next few days. I have entries planned but no time to write them for now.

See you on the flip side of insanity.

013. giving back

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
– Ambrose Redmoon

Last week I was invited by a friend to attend the final seminar of the Landmark Forum. For those of you who don’t know, this is a four-day intensive seminar that is designed to help people realise their life goals by helping them see the blind spots in the way that they view the world. The way that they explain it is that these blind spots unconsciously hinder us from realising those goals in the way a hundred pound weight strapped to the back of an Olympic runner might keep him (okay, or her) from realising the goal of winning the gold medal. Through a number of exercises and seminars, the Landmark Forum seeks to help people see what that hundred pound weight is and how they can take it off.

The trouble is in seeing what it is.

One of the big things that they stress is taking responsibility for your past and not making excuses for it. Now, you may have been molested as a child. That alters the way that you see the world. No one would argue with that, nor that it was your fault.

However, that doesn’t give you the right to see yourself as a victim, or use that event as an excuse for not moving forward in life. It doesn’t give you the right to define yourself by that event—not because it wasn’t an awful thing, but because your moving on and becoming the best version of you possible isn’t worth hanging on to that and not making something amazing of it.

I was talking with my guy tonight and we were having a conversation along these lines. I was sharing with him the things I’d learned in that evening, and I realised after we hung up that I’d been doing the very things I was talking about. That I’d been rehearsing the litany of negative events in my life over and over, like Orual in Till We Have Faces. It’s a vicious cycle, and unless someone comes along to say “Stop it,” we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.

And we unconsciously put ourselves in situations in order to fulfil those prophesies we set for ourselves—to fail, or be victimised, so that we can say, “See!”—instead of taking responsibility and saying, “No, this is my life.”

An obvious parallel is Joseph from the book of Genesis. If ever there was a victim, it was him. He had so much going for him. He was the youngest son, the favourite of his father Isaac; and then his brothers sold him into slavery and told their father that Joseph had been killed by a lion.

Now, if you recall the story, Joseph kind of had it coming. He was cocky and full of himself. He had the gall to tell his brothers that he’d been shown in a dream that they’d one day be bowing down to him. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of a prick like that? (That’s not to excuse what his brothers did. Selling your brother into slavery is wrong. Wrong.)

So he’s sitting there, sold into slavery in Egypt. I think he figured out what he’d done and why his brothers hated him. So then he had a choice. He could either blame others for his situation, or take responsibility and make the most of what he’d been given. And he did. His master, Potiphar, “saw that the Lord was with Joseph and caused all that he did to prosper.” And Potiphar made him overseer of his whole house and all he owned.

Then Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, who took the high ground and refused; but it was her word against his (a slave) and it was back to prison for him. Again, he could have whined and complained and recited his litany of woes. But he didn’t. He took responsibility for his situation, and the jailer “committed to Joseph’s charge all the prisoners who were in the jail; so that whatever was done there, he was responsible for it . . . because the LORD was with him; and whatever he did, the LORD made to prosper.”

I won’t tell you the whole story, but it ends up with Joseph as second command in Egypt, and in a twist of divine irony his brothers did indeed come before him to plead for grain for their family. Complete reversal of fortunes. Joseph does play with them a little, and he could have taken advantage of the situation and killed them for what they did to him in the past, but in the end he tells them who he is and he is restored, alive, to his father Isaac.

When Isaac dies, his brothers figure he’s going to take revenge on them all. But Joseph utters one of the most powerful statements in all of literature—”Do not be afraid, for am I in G-d’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but G-d meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people’s lives.” It’s incomplete to merely view Joseph as having taken responsibility for his life, as the Landmark Forum suggests people do. I strongly believe that G-d places us in situations to be his effective agents on earth; and regardless of what happens to us, if we take responsibility for our lives insomuch as we see ourselves as having a divine calling and open ourselves to the possibilities of being used in incredible ways, and that the things that happened to us are G-d’s way of equipping us to help someone else, we don’t have time for pity parties.

I’ve gone through so much of my life reading into what other people say, and with my expectations of what they should do instead of giving up that need and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Giving up the need for revenge, because the people who did me wrong back in the day are not going to control the course of my life or keep me in the prison of anger. Not letting the past define me and reciting the litany of my woes and using that as an excuse for not taking responsibility for my life. I am beginning to see how G-d has used the events in my life to bring me to this Now.

He asked me tonight, “Why were you even thinking about going to that when you’ve said all of this?” I don’t know why I was considering going to the Landmark Forum. A change? To take a step? Turns out the biggest step I’ve taken is pursuing him.

We really had some huge breakthroughs tonight. It was incredibly exciting (and frustrating for a while). I was feeling pretty smart, the guy with all the answers. I felt like a therapist who’d just seen his patient make a major breakthrough.

Then, driving home I realised that the things I’d been saying were the things my parents, friends and therapists had been saying for years, and had taken me up until quite recently to grasp. That I need to take responsibility for my life and not blame others. That everything in life happens for a reason and we can either choose to see ourselves as passive victims or as active participants who see life as the chisel that is making us into men out of blocks of stone (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis). That the blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.

I don’t have life figured out any more than anyone else. But I can share what few insights I have and hope that they’ll make some difference. I saw my guy make a huge step tonight, and I’m incredibly proud of him for taking ownership of his life and am deeply humbled to be a part of the process for him. I’m looking back now and seeing how every painful shouting match, every patient conversation my parents had with me, the hours spent with my psychologist, my psychology classes—everything—probably led up to this point.

It would be easy to puff out my chest and say that I did it all. But that would be an arrogant lie. I was positioned here by a much wiser hand. If all those years spent crawling around in the dark were to help him realise his full potential and drop the hundred-pound weight and the blinders from his eyes, it was worth the pain.

He asked what he can possibly do for me. Tonight I realised that so much has been given to me already, and I’m finally giving back. He helped me see that what I have has been given to me, and that he’s such an incredible gift. I really do love him. He taught me something tonight—that it was me lying on the therapist’s couch, not him. And I’m just beginning to realise that.

A happy, healthy little boy named Michal Katurian, on the eve of the night that his parents were to start torturing him for seven consecutive years, was visited by a man made of all fluffy pillows and a big smiley mouth, and the man sat with Michal and talked to him a while and told him about the horrific life he was to lead and where it was to end for him . . . and the man suggested to Michal that wouldn’t it be better if he did away with himself then and there are avoided all that horror?

And Michael said, “But if I do away with myself, my brother will never get to hear me being tortued, will he?”

“No,” said the Pillowman.

“But if my brother never gets to hear me being tortured, he may never write the stories he’s going to write, might he?”

“That’s true,” said the Pillowman.

And Michal thought about it a while and said, “Well, I think we should probably just keep things the way they are, then, with me being tortured and him hearing . . . ‘cos I think I’m going to really like hearing my brother’s stories.”
— Martin McDonagh, “The Pillowman.”

006b. story part iii

So apparently a few people were concerned about my state of mind after reading the McDonagh story. Rest assured, I am not depressed or suicidal or anything. I chose to begin with that because of the overall theme of The Pillowman—if, knowing what pain and heartache we will go through in the journey to growing into adults, we would choose that path anyway; if the pain now is part of the happiness then.

If I shared with my happy seven-year-old self that one day he would grow up to be a gay man and all that means; experience the confusion and anguish of disappointing your parents, your friends, your church and G-d; and spend many dark years feeling like a freak, not knowing who or where you are as an individual—would he still go through with it? Is the pain now part of the happiness to come?

Picking up where I left off—college. This’ll go a bit faster.

Going to a conservative Christian college poses its own unique challenges. It has its own culture, just like any place. At a secular university, I probably would have been spotted right away by the GLBT crowd, thrown out of the closet and begun my college life as a gay student. And gotten into a lot of trouble that would have probably led to me losing my faith entirely through essentially sinful living.

Instead, though unsaid, the pressure is to hook up with someone of the opposite sex as quickly as possible. “Ring by spring” as the saying goes. I discovered a bevy of distractions though—working as an accompanist and piano teacher; taking as many credits as possible each semestre; and joining too many music ensembles (which made for some interesting Christmas concerts logistically).

The hardest thing about that college was how many attractive guys there were. In fact, most of them were. Walk into a classroom and there’s eye candy everywhere. Not that there weren’t plenty of attractive women as well, and that should have been a dead give-away—that it was the guys that my eyes were drawn to instantly. One summer I took tennis and spent most of it outside with several very muscular (and incredibly sexy) guys who, naturally, had to lose their shirts. I won’t tell you how I managed to deal with all that pent up sexual frustration.

By my sophomore year, I had a clue what was going on. I wanted desperately to tell someone, to find out if this was normal, if I could be “fixed.” But I also knew that I rant he risk of being kicked out if they found out that I was gay. So I did what any conscientious Christian guy with same-sex feelings would do. I hid. I tried hard to be attracted to women; tried fantasising about girls in an attempt to force myself straight. But invariably a guy would enter the mental picture and it was all over.

The next two years were a blur of activity and productivity. I wrote two full-length operas in that time span, and scores of other pieces for my musical friends. Self-medicating with busyness works well until you have to stop. By the end of my college career I was so burnt out that I couldn’t stand music any more and had resolved that my educational stint was done.

In 2005 I visited a friend in England who I had a bit of a crush on as an undergrad. She was doing post-grad work there, and of anyone I could see myself possibly marrying her and white-knuckling it. However, upon spending time with her I realised that it was the idea of her that I loved—the intellectual artist-philosopher that I idealised. But I wasn’t attracted to her.

By this time most of my friends were married or on their way. I lost my job in April of 2005 and about the same time was involved in a major accident (that wasn’t my fault), so much of my energies were directed toward survival and making ends meet. G-d provided both a job and a new car, and for a few months saw a shrink to deal with my anger. Surprise, surprise, my parents were at the centre of a lot of it, but there was also the issue of unvalidated feelings. You’d think that there, in the confidentiality of that setting, I could feel comfortable telling my therapist that I was having feelings for men. It wasn’t until journaling one day that I really grasped the idea that I could be gay. And that scared me so much that I quickly shut the door and never went back. Probably a big mistake, but I picked up a lot of valuable tools, such as cognitive therapy and metacognition.

Got back into theatre with a friend of mine who I’d done some work with in 2004. With a few of his friends we founded a theatre company and put up a couple of productions that weren’t the greatest, but it led to some more work with the same director. That all eventually led to the work that I’m doing now, writing for companies and theaters throughout the Twin Cities.

Fast forward a couple of years to February of 2008. I got laid off again due to budget cut-backs and was once again jobless. That previous summer I’d come out to a girl friend of mine who expressed her own feelings for me, and in that moment I knew that I couldn’t lead her on any more. It was hard because several weeks earlier I’d attended a session on spiritual healing with another friend of mine and was actually prayed over by a husband and wife. That was the first time I’d told anyone that I struggled with same-sex attraction, and I thought it was over. But the feelings were still there, and I was just as attracted to guys as ever. So, at 25, I told my friend that I was gay.

At that point I still held out hope that I might just be bisexual. I had feelings for another friend of mine, and one night after a rehearsal actually told her so. She confessed that she too had feelings for me, and like a complete dolt left it at that. So she was probably very confused—but then, so was I! I had a major crush on one of the guys in the cast. Then she started dating a mutual friend of ours, and I was super busy stage managing so again I let it go.

So back to the summer of 2008. I’d just moved into the apartment I’m at now, and had been job searching and applying anywhere there were openings. A lot of friends were kind enough to help financially and I never would have survived without that. I’d come out to a few more friends, at least telling them that I was 99.9% sure that I was gay. But it wasn’t until working overnight at Target, when I had scads of time alone, to think, and surrounded by some very attractive males, that it really sank in—I’m gay.

It wasn’t until that point that I even considered some of the theological ramifications of this realisation. The Bible condemned homosexuality. I’d been taught that my entire life, so therefore the Bible was now condemning me and my feelings. I didn’t choose to be gay. I’d fought it for years, and couldn’t anymore. The Bible condemns sin, and I am definitely a sinner; but there was no way out of this. Was G-d testing me to see how much He actually mattered to me—whether I could be willing to live a celibate life to His glory, alone? But then why allow me to have these desires in the first place? From the first post, I think I’ve made it clear that it wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, “I think I’ll try being gay.” I’ve always had feelings for men. It wasn’t until adolescence that they became sexual.

So I set out to try and figure it out. I knew that I didn’t fit the stereotype of a gay male, and had no desire to either. Culturally, I identified as a straight man. (From my very first post, I now identify as “mainstream gay,” practically indistinguishable from straights.) I wasn’t promiscuous and had no desire to be. But I wanted to be with men, physically.

That’s been the past few months. I’ve been having a conversation with a now good friend from another blogging site. His insights have been invaluable in accepting and learning to love myself again, and gaining right perspective on my own orientation. I made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to let the gay culture define me. It was the subculture-orientated gays who ran contrary to the Bible—sex addictions, multiple partners, drugs, alcohol, cross-dressing.

G-d made me a man (and not a woman) was my reasoning. I’m male, and am going to embrace everything about that. So apart from the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality there seemed to be no reason why I couldn’t be attracted to other men and still be masculine, provided that I follow the same guidelines that straight Christian guys do—don’t lust after another man, treat guys with respect as brothers in Christ. The only difference is that the Bible advises men and women to marry rather than “burn with passion” (1 Cor 7:9). There is no such provision outlined in Scripture for gays.

When it came to getting a handle on this theologically though, there was absolutely no consensus among scholars. The conservative Christians sounded too dogmatic, and the liberals seemed too open-minded. There had to be a balance somewhere because I was stuck in the middle wanting to not be condemned to hell for liking guys and also not wanting to live the life of a celibate monk. Because let’s face it: I was not granted that gift.

One of things I addressed was my frustration with masculinity as it is currently expressed by most western males. It seemed equally fragmented and distorted as the campy subculture-oriented drag queens; so I started researching the history of masculinity as traced by sociologists and anthropologists. That will be another post.

One final thing I’ll add is that it’s incredibly lonely being a Christian who is gay, and that’s one of the most crippling things of all—not being able to tell your Christian straight friends that you’re not like them after all. So several weeks ago I joined what is known as the Gay Christian Network. Its mission is to “serve Christians who happen to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and those who care about them.” I’ve found that a lot of guys have a similar story to mine in terms of a conservative religious upbringing and then coming later to realise their same-sex feelings and the confusion that arises from that. So it’s been incredibly helpful. Still haven’t found much in the way of off-line community here though.

One guy on there pointed me to a ministry called Inclusive Orthodoxy, founded by a fellow by the name of Justin Cannon. There’s a booklet on there titled The Bible, Christianity, and Homosexuality. It’s an in-depth study of all the famous references to homosexuality in the Bible, going back to the original texts and looking at them in the context of word usage and the culture in which the documents were written. It helped me come closer to terms with who I am right now and the possibility of being in a committed relationship with a Christian guy.

I haven’t looked, but I’d be curious to read a response to Cannon’s study from the reformed theological community: D.A. Carson, Os Guinness, R.C. Sproul, John Piper and the like—all theologians I admire and respect.

If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to ask. There are probably many holes in this story, things I’ve left out or unaddressed.

One more thing. Unlike many gay Christians, this issue does not define me. I’m not looking to identify with the gay community, even the LGBT Christian community. This is a very private thing for me, so don’t expect to see me in gay documentaries or publishing gay literature. It doesn’t interest me and there are more important things to spend time on or campaign for.

Shalom aleichem,
Muirnin

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.