Thursday, 10 May 2012

• Covert Damage: Christians, Homosexuals and the Harm of Hate

  Here's what I saw today that got this post going:
  
  
  On the drive to Niagara Falls last Saturday, Jen, Morgan, and I had been talking about gender, sexuality, and religion, as we sometimes have when we've been together.  Jen is an avid atheist and social worker with a grad degree in gender studies, and Morgan would describe himself as an "atheist-leaning agnostic."  I love talking with them, because they're both so intelligent.  I told her about my coming out, and then my brother's; she's curious about how two boys from a devout Evangelical family end up coming out, one then becoming atheist.  I told her it's difficult to answer people's questions of, "How are your parents dealing with it?"  The assumed response will be one of two: "We don't talk to each other anymore," or "They're really great.  They actually just joined a local PFLAG group and are coming with us to Pride this year." 
  
  But neither one is true.  My parents certainly aren't PFLAG members and I can't imagine they ever would be, and they certainly wouldn't attend a pride festival with us, not Fort Wayne's, and certainly not in Chicago, where my brother lives.  On the other hand, they've never given us any indication that we'd be disowned.  The best way I can describe it is that we're all kind of learning together, in our own ways.  We operate in a precarious space, as any loving family with traditionally Christian roots in our situation would.
  
  "We lucked out," I told Jen.  "My parents never threw either of us out of the house."
  
  "That's really sad," she said, as we continued down the highway. 
  
  "Why's that?" I asked. 
  
  "It's sad that that's lucky."
  
  I thought about other non-straight friends I have who came from religious families.  Some don't have good relationships with their parents, and some don't have relationships with them at all.  One in particular stands to be disowned and forgotten if his parents ever found out.  I still remember the two girls in my youth group who were a couple for a short time, and hearing about the meeting they had with their parents and the youth pastor, and the other youth group members enlisted as spies to make sure they never did anything. 
  
  Side note, I remember a night when that same youth pastor had us split into groups and write down ideas for Wednesday nights on calendars.  I wrote down "America's Love Affair with the Gay Man" as a suggestion, thinking about the recent debut of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and other representations of queer people beginning to show up in the media.  When it actually came to that night, the youth pastor told us that we probably didn't know much about homosexuality, so he wasn't going to invite a discussion.  Instead, he'd just talk.  I don't remember the specifics of what he said, just that it was what you'd expect from a conservative Evangelical church leader, but I do remember his tone.  It wasn't quite angry, though there was a hard edge to it.  A kind of aggressive calling out of something he was frustrated with, the way he might be frustrated with any other sin or injustice. 
  
  I realized that Jen meant it was sad that my brother and I maintaining good ties with our family in spite of our comings out would be considered lucky, and not just the standard.
  
  Many stories I could tell, so many stories.  And what I want you to understand about the stories is that most of them were not black-and-white, overtly what-an-injustice experiences when they happened.  In fact, I'm sure I've mentioned before on this blog that I'd forgotten some of them happened for years, until they crept back into my view and asked me what I'd do with them.  I still don't know, because what I see isn't easy for me to classify.  I don't have memories of physical abuse from people who thought I or anyone else was an abomination, and I was never told that I, specifically, was going to hell. 
  
  Maybe covert damage is the thing we should really worried about, now that so much discussion of bullying and discrimination is going on.  We can see when one student punches another, and if we don't see that, we can see the bruises.  We can see scratch marks from a razor blade and sores from one's pinching fingers.  But it's more difficult to interrogate and understand the parts of our cultures that have created a larger mythology around the abomination of queer sexuality. 
  
  It's been difficult for me to understand the formation of the mythology in me, and I can imagine it'd be even more difficult to call it out if I were more firmly on the side of traditional Biblical sexuality.  I can tell you what I've told you before, about the youth pastor's lesson on homosexuality, or my other teachers in school, the proctology reports and sex partner averages in their lessons (in religion classes, no less), the links between queer sex and demonic possession I've heard more recently in my parents' church, the destruction of the ELCA church steeple in Minnesota, Hurricane Katrina... and the small things too, my friend joking and saying to me in high school, "Did you hear they're going to expel all the gay students?", to which I responded, "Oh no, Ben, but where will you go to school?", because the best way to fight against 'gay' as an insult is to throw it back, because 'gay' is the worst insult, because to be gay is to be an insult.  The small things, the gay slurs I heard starting in third grade, the jeers and accusations of which male students I'd slept with when I was in fifth grade even though I didn't know how gay sex worked back then, and my own queer sexuality growing concurrently like a weed, something I couldn't identify and couldn't stop, all those small things, and--
  
  --and Jesus led me like a lamb to the slaughter, I thought, asking me to lie down, my back to the cool stone of the altar, my jugular vein exposed to the priest's blade, just like Him. 
  
  --and I was implicit in my own oppression because that was the way I learned to view the world too. 
  
  I can tell you these things, and many people who read this will sympathize.  They'll have their own stories, or stories from friends and family members, or they'll at least be able to read what I write and acknowledge right off the bat that yes, this is a problem.  But some of my readers will rest on their idea that Christians have a responsibility to keep each other from sin.  They'll certainly feel sorry about what has happened, but that won't change their opinion that each queer person is called to lay down their torches, leave their lives of sin, and follow Jesus into celibacy or heterosexual marriage.  They may even imagine that they themselves have been asked to carry similar burdens, having gone through celibate periods of their own and not allowed to cheat in their marriages, because to them, queer sexuality is only physical, though heterosexuality has been framed as holistic, affecting one's body, emotions, mind and spirit.  They may read this, feel some sympathy for me and other queer people, but they will not accede to this heavy mythology, this covert damage.  I don't think their Jesus ever asked them to do that.   
  
  This is the sad reality of that low standard of treatment of queer people, that I can count myself lucky, after all the things I've been through, that I still have a family.  I can still view myself as lucky, even unresolved as I am about whether I'm worthy of the love people in heterosexual relationships give each other freely, or whether I'm just being stubborn and will some day be judged and punished because I was unable or unwilling to erase myself, eradicate myself, obey to the point of destruction, all things for Jesus and His kingdom and His glory, poured out like a drink offering, evaporating in the desert.
  
  I'm lucky because my damage is covert. 
  
  Have you or someone you've known been hurt by the battle between homosexuals and Christians?  What can we as Christians do to love our brothers and sisters in Christ who are gay?  What does scripture tell us to do?
  

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