Out of the Closet

This revelation was destined to uncoil sooner or later. The first whip-cracks of a debate echoed on a Facebook thread attached to an article about David Kato’s brutal death in Uganda. Scriptures in use so far include Corinthians 6:9-20 and Mark 7:1-15. The Mark passage came from my hip-pocket; I recommend reading the whole chapter for context(find it also in Matthew 15:1-20). Soon, it will be impossible to gloss over the truth: I am a Jesus-following-ally. I am not a person who thinks it is ‘okay’ to be whatever sexual orientation you want, as if I did not care. I am also not a Christian who simply chooses not to hate; that is no longer enough, for me. I follow the Galilean who called us to make disciples and I believe he called me to stand-up with gay people and love them, fight for their spirituality with them. I am an ally now and I want to see a Church filled with people of compassion who will act on that compassion.

Six years ago I stepped into a chapel at Adrian College during UMC Student Forum. Someone mentioned a Reconciling Ministries service taking place that evening and I hoped to catch the end of it. New to Methodism, I thought that Reconciling Ministries had to do with broken families, death, estrangement and grief—I had it confused with Steven Ministries. As the door swung open, my eyes were assailed by every color in the rainbow, reflected mutely in the dim sanctuary. ‘Inclusiveness paraphernalia’ (as I call it) dominated the decor. An obviously male person in a dress motioned me over to the rear pew. Stunned, I obliged. Queerly enough, I cannot remember what was said during the rest of the service; I continued glancing at the brother in drag, his gaze (sorry... her gaze) fixed intently on the speaker. The dress was floral with a yellow background—it was quite lovely but not as striking as the painted toe-nails and sensible, white sandals. My discomfort became eerily salient. At the end of the service, I fell into the procession heading forward to be anointed with glitter. My reluctance melted away as I watched each person walking back toward the rear in turn: sparkling, smiling, glowing. I had a moment of clarity which has become vivid again—my often dull spiritual capacities were abuzz with Christ’s love for all people, and especially the disenfranchised.

Yet by daylight the assembly was divided. Students from all across the country represented our denomination and, as with politics, ideologies seemed to vary by region. Even now, whispering the words as I type, the buzz-words vibrate with cavernous reverberations. I found myself strung like telephone-wire between the staunch insistencies of the Southeast Jurisdiction and more liberal view-points. If I recall, there were real gay-people from the West region acting in their jurisdiction’s inclusiveness skit. Called upon by my campus minister to represent the MSU Wesley Foundation, I felt a deep responsibility to table my personal feelings and vote prayerfully on each piece of legislation. Corinthians 6, Romans 1 and similar scriptures were on my mind, as were passages like Luke 6:37 but especially Luke 10:25-30 and Matthew 22:34-40. The latter passage is Jesus’s big boil-down of all scripture, where he asserts that all of the Law hangs on loving God with all our being and loving our neighbor as we have loved ourselves. To make many hours of deliberation sound brief, I voted “still discerning” on each measure that involved sexuality. If my new friends from the Southeast and West were cock-sure, I was gun-shy. I knew that the apostle Paul believed that homosexuality was immoral but I could not see any reason to discount the influence of cultural bias, just as I could not for my Southeastern friends. Searching the scripture, I discovered that Jesus had warned against ‘sexual immorality’ (as it is translated into English) but it was cognitively impossible for me to know if he was implying homosexuality. Yet, if homosexuality might be a sin I did not, in any way, want to condone it; the natural consequences of sin are damaging. If sin hurts people, they need a church that loves them enough to show them the way to truth, not humor dangerous desires.

Some pivotal moments in life become an instant turning-point and others take residence in our memories, repeatedly reawakened. The pivotal scene of that weekend occurred on Sunday morning. I was visiting, for the last time, with a young lady from my small-group; she had been raised Baptist and found refuge at a Methodist church in Oregon when she came-out as lesbian. I cannot help but remember how beautiful she was for her own sake—the gilded image of her lingers with me, now, because it came so purely from my emotional and aesthetic senses—I knew precisely what she was: lovable in Christ’s eyes. We talked about how I had voted, for some reason, and I explained why I had chosen to vote “still discerning”. Droplets hanging in her dark-brown eyes, she looked at me and said she could tell how much effort I was putting into discernment. She appreciated my thoughtfulness. Then she hugged me. Even now, I am closing my eyes and trying to drift back into that hug: no teleonomics, humor or sex-- just 100% compassion. One could meditate on such hugs. Its warmth burrowed into me and stood guard as I slid back into the life I had lived before. I left the Reconciling Ministries pamphlet in my trumpet case, promising to join but never following through; I decided to wear glitter to the first Wesley meeting of the fall but chickened-out, fearing ridicule from an ex-girlfriend. I lived a life that was more concerned with resuscitating my public image, only to drive it further into the ground; I turned prideful, then co-dependent and eventually confused and unethical. I maintained, then, that I would “never know in this life-time” whether alternative sexualities were sinful. I treated my gay contacts with respect but never offered support. My personal feeling was that they were not sinning, so long as they lived in fidelity with one person. That is what always mattered to me and does to this day: faithfulness in partnerships.

Beautiful simplification that this is, that sincere hug has become the symbol of all that is right about choosing the path of inclusiveness. Nay-sayers are always quick to quote a Pauline letter and instruct me; they try to conclude my discernment with a quick bite, as if I had missed something in the scriptures. A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. If the fruit is black & white, I have already tasted and seen. I continued to taste and see. The lady from Oregon had faith that if I kept seeking I would reach the Truth. This January, after four years, I joined RMN.

My galvanizing moment came three weeks later. MSU Wesley Foundation was doing a series on taboo topics. I made the trip to Lansing to take-in a panel discussion on alternative sexuality. The panel consisted of a pan-sexual, a transvestite, an adamant ally, a man who identified as gay and another who chose the distinction of ‘queer’. I found an opening to ask about the spiritual lives of the panel—how they related to the divine. The ‘queer’ gentleman had mentioned at dinner that he grew-up in an evangelical church in the South which was, predictably, unaccepting. That rejection became salient to me in the expressions on his face as he explained his initial faith, how he had turned his back on the God that had seemed to turn a back to him, how he still prayed to that God occasionally but rarely and, finally, how he just could not envision returning to a church community. My heart splintered for him—not a clean break or some crystalline shatter but a nasty crunch underneath my ribs like someone had put their knee through the door in my ventricle. In childhood, he knew a God that cared for him. If he still prayed sometimes, some part of him was still looking for that Deity yet the only Deity he had known from his church of origin was rigid, indifferent to his confusion. Fig-leaf theology struck again and took away the Jesus in his nightlight. Faced with a room of Christian allies, this man still could not hurtle through the walls he had erected to protect himself from that bad theology—not that quickly. It so fanned my compassion, I could hardly sit-down. There was nothing I could do.

No one should be deprived of their spiritual life, the right to be in relationship with a Creator that works with them. At that point, just being in RMN was not good enough any more. I want to out myself and suffer in solidarity, to the extent that this is possible. It will take time and I will never fully understand their suffering, nor precisely what God wants, but I am going to be on my feet and by their side.

...by the way, I always do keep some glitter hidden with my prayer-stones.