Each year in the parochial high school that I attended, we were required to participate in a retreat. The one in my sophomore year was particularly meaningful. It began with the playing of a song by Billy Joel called "Just the Way You Are". We were asked to listen to the words in that song and imagine that Jesus was singing them to us. I can't describe how good it felt to do that. We all have our faults and we know it, but to think about the fact that there is someone who loves and appreciates us just the way we are was comforting beyond measure. Few groups of people need to hear that message more than the LGBTQIA community. It's time to reflect on PRIDE month and I'm not sure I can put all of my thoughts into a single reflection, so I will break it down into two parts.
Intolerance and Fear
While working in a daycare in 1992, I sat with two female co-workers - ages 60 and 20. The 60-year-old began to talk about how disappointed she was to find out that a famous actress she liked was a lesbian. The 20-year-old said, "I don't care if somebody is gay. I just don't think they should "flaunt" it. The 60-year-old replied, "Things were different in my day. If something was right, it was right, if it was wrong, it was wrong." A third co-worker looked at me and asked if I was okay. "You look sad," she said. "Oh no, I'm okay." I quickly told her, but that wasn't true. I was sad - very sad - about the way the others were talking about gay people, but I couldn't say so. Speak out in defense of victims of prejudice and hatred and you run the risk of having some of that hatred directed at you. What's even worse is that in this case, someone may also suspect that you are one of them!
A Homophobic Environment
My life at age 13 could not have been happier. I became religious at that age. I always believed before, but in the Spring of my 13th year I really fell in love with Christianity, and my faith became the center of my life. Our teachers encouraged us to think about what we wanted to do with our lives and I seriously thought about becoming a nun. I began praying the rosary every day. I offered my life to Jesus, asking him to do with it what he pleased. Mom began to think about enrolling me in a parochial high school. For the time being, I was still enrolled in public school.
To know what a homophobic environment is like, all you had to do was attend Blue Mountain Middle School in the early 1980's. Gay people were like the untouchables in the caste system in India, worth less than anyone else. Like the Lepers in Jesus's day, they were considered to be "unclean". and you did not dare go near them. They might violate you, or pass their "disease" onto you. No one said that directly, but that was the general attitude. If a student wanted to insult another student, he called them "gay". If students didn't like something, they called it "gay". There was anxiety about doing anything that even appeared gay, so students avoided touching each other, and did not express affection. There appeared to be no gay people in that school, or at least none who were willing to be open about it.
"Oh my God! Could I be gay?"
L - G - B - T........... Q - that letter represented the world that I was suddenly thrust into a few weeks before my 14th birthday. It was very confusing. I had already had several crushes on males before that time, but suddenly, I began to feel attracted to other females. "Oh my God! Could I be gay?" When I first began to ask that, I couldn't stop crying. I broke down in cooking class and the teacher took me aside to ask what was wrong. I had to make something up because I was too ashamed to tell her what was really going on. The next day I was crying so uncontrollably that I couldn't go to school. I pretended to be sick, but in reality I was just too upset. I tried to pray about it, but I could barely get the words to come out of my mouth. "Blessed mother, please pray for me," I said. "I'm afraid that I might be.......I'm afraid that I might be.....I'm afraid that I might be a homo...........a homo........a homosex......ual." It seemed like such a dirty word. Does any fourteen-year-old deserve that kind of shame? Does any fourteen-year-old deserve that kind of pain? I felt alienated from all of my peers. I had two best friends at the time who I talked with about almost everything, but I couldn't talk to them about that. I didn't want to gross them out and make them feel uncomfortable to be around me. It seemed like a nightmare. I never thought about killing myself, but I can understand why someone in that situation would.
LGBT in the Family
My mother and my brother, Al, were the only two human beings on the face of the Earth who knew anything about what I was going through. When Mom and I were talking about it, it was then that she revealed to me that my father's brother, Uncle Joe, and his close friend, who we called Uncle Jimmy, were gay. I pretended to be surprised, but I wasn't. When you start to hyperfocus on issues about sexual identity, you start to notice things not just about yourself but about others - things that you wouldn't have thought much about before. Mom had become good friends with Uncle Joe a short time after her young marriage to Dad. While Dad was at work, Uncle Joe would take walks through the park with Mom as she pushed my brother Jos in a baby coach. Uncle Joe eventually got drafted into the Korean War. His tomb stone reads that he was in the Navy. While he was overseas, Uncle Joe wrote a letter to Mom telling her that there was something he wanted to tell her but there was a possibility that it may result in her not liking him anymore. In that letter, he told her that he was a homosexual. Mom, of course, did not stop liking him or being friends with him. A short time later, there was a picture contest that took place in Uncle Joe's unit. All the young servicemen presented pictures of their girlfriends. Everyone had to vote for the woman they thought was the most beautiful. (I assume that they were not allowed to vote for their own girlfriend). Not having a girlfriend, Uncle Joe presented a picture of Mom, pretending that she was his girlfriend. Well, guess who won the beauty contest? How excited Uncle Joe must have been to write home to Mom and tell her that it had been decided that she had the best legs in the unit!
Rejection From the Religious Community
One of the reasons why I love Christianity so much is because it tends to be a champion for the Underdog. Any other group of people who were treated like outcasts by society would be embraced and empowered by Christian churches. The fact that some of the discrimination and rejection that is directed toward the LGBTQIA community is coming from religious sources is something that truly breaks my heart. It was also the main reason why my questioning experience was so terribly difficult and painful.
At that time, my parish had a pastor who I will refer to as Father Simon. Father Simon was an old-fashioned, "fire and brimstone" priest. He once gave a homily about Hell. He often became fixated on the issue of sexual sins, which he viewed in a completely black and white manner. He would begin his homily with the expression of a despicable view of human nature. "God had to make eating pleasurable because if He did not, man would be too lazy to feed himself. In the same way, He had to make sex pleasurable, because if He did not, man would be too lazy to reproduce." With all due respect to God and Father Simon, I have to disagree. If sex were not pleasurable there would only be one difference that it would make. That difference is that the only people who had babies would be the ones who really wanted them. However, that is beside the point of this writing. He went on to say that any sin that involved sex was a serious sin and a serious sin that we did not repent of would carry us to Hell. He then discussed and condemned every sexual act that did not take place within the context of marriage, including masturbation. During these sermons, he would be especially condemning of homosexuality. To emphasize how bad society was getting, he once referred to a gay actor receiving an award. "Most people thank their producers, he thanked his lover!"
A nearby restaurant had a shelf that made free Bible tracks available to all, and as a religious person, I was always interested in looking at them. One was about homosexuality. It stated that homosexuality was a sin and said that it had been determined that homosexuality was a learned behavior, and any behavior that can be learned can be unlearned. Welcome to the concept of the homosexuality "on/off" switch - the belief that people can turn their sexual orientation on or off like a light switch. Believe me, there are many people who wish that it were that simple!
The result of all of this was that less than a year after I offered my life to Jesus, I had to worry about whether I was an abomination in his sight. I carried this fear with me into the parochial high school I attended - Nativity BVM. I remember listening to a description of the heavenly banquet and had visions of myself being excluded from the table. It seemed so unfair. How could I be excluded from God's kingdom because of something I didn't choose, didn't want and couldn't control?
"Oh My God, It Doesn't Matter!"
The psychological pressure and pain continued to build. It triggered my OCD, which made matters even worse. While struggling with all of that, I began to think about how good it would feel to have the knowledge to be able to alleviate all of that discomfort for people experiencing similar things. Just before my fifteenth birthday, I began to seriously think about it for the first time....becoming a counselor. I then had to find the way out of my own distress alone. It appeared that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel coming from the confessional. There was, but not for the reasons I thought.
My first attempts to communicate to the priest in confession about what I was going through seemed to completely fail. I couldn't get them to believe that I was actually experiencing homosexual feelings. "Well, girls tend to be affectionate with each other," one would say. Another responded, "Well, its normal to be curious about other people's bodies as you grow up." If they didn't believe that I was homosexual, how could they "absolve" me from that "sin"? I finally knew what to do. On Good Friday that year, a few months after I turned fifteen, I made confession with Father Simon. I described it exactly as I believed it to be. At the end of a list of other sins, I said, "...and I have been having homosexual thoughts and feelings about other girls and women." Father Simon paused for a moment, and then replied, "Well, the next time you have those kinds of thoughts, just handle it in the same way that you would handle any other impure thought. Just try to think about other things."
"What did he just say?" I asked myself. "Did he say 'the next time I have those thoughts'? How can that be? I'm not supposed to be having those thoughts...but he expects me to have them again! And what he asked me to do about them is exactly what I have been doing all along..." Then the reality of the situation finally hit me. It didn't matter whether or not I was gay because being gay in and of itself is not a sin! There's only one thing in this world that is better than having a sin "forgiven", and that is finding out that there was no sin committed in the first place! In an instant, I felt the love and healing of Jesus himself pouring down into me from above. It is amazing how he arranged for this breakthrough would be facilitated by someone like Father Simon! I would always remember that day as being one of the happiest in my life. Regardless of what the truth was about my sexual identity, it would not make me a sinner, and in the eyes of God, it would not make me less worthwhile than anyone else. And that was all I needed to know. By that point, it was only important what God thought, not what my homophobic peers thought.
Silent Advocate
No longer worried about the feelings I thought were homosexual, or even paying that much attention to them, they faded and went away. I started becoming interested in males again, and stopped thinking that I was gay. However, the experience taught me something that I will never forget. It taught me what it feels like to be gay in this society. It taught me a lesson about compassion and understanding. As I grew older, I began to question whether that happened simply by chance. I question whether it was just coincidental that I went through that kind of pain such a short time after getting close to Jesus and offering my life to him. I now suspect that that experience and the lesson it taught me may actually have been a part of God's plan. I became concerned about the LGBTQIA community because Jesus is concerned about it. I think it may have happened because it bothers him that people are being treated so badly - sometimes even in his name! I would never have "chosen" the painful questioning experience that I went through for fifteen months as a teenager. However, after coming to understand why I went through it, God knew that I would be glad that it happened. From that early adolescent period in my life, there would forever be a special place in my heart for the LGBTQIA community. I didn't have the courage to openly advocate for them because I was afraid of others' reactions. However, I would forever be praying about the discrimination that targeted that community. Over and over again, I would ask Jesus, "Please help our world - and our church - to grow in love and understanding of them."
"I see the girls walk by Dressed in their summer clothes I have to turn my head Until my darkness goes.."
Lyrics from "Paint It, Black!" by the Rolling Stones (1966)
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