15 for 15 VIII: Why I Must Be Out

"You must remove any mention of your sexual orientation from your paperwork, resubmit for assignment elsewhere, and not mention it in any interviews with churches."


       --ELCA Official, recommending the only way she saw me being able to get a first church


I.


I am resuming my series of 15 meditations on 15 years of being out today, because on this of all days, I understand more deeply every LGBTQ person's obligation to be out, if they can:  because we can.


This ability is definitely not available to everyone.  But if there are to be fewer people of all ages who are forced by our society, by their religions, employers, civil governments, families, friends, and other major factors of their lives to be in the closet, those of us who can be out must be out.


One year ago today, Justin Aaberg took his life in Andover, MN, not 20 miles from the gay mecca of Minneapolis.  I cannot, nor can anyone, ever know the despair that Justin felt that led him to the point of ending his life.  Organizations such as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which lead in suicide research and prevention, caution against drawing too strong a line between being bullied, harassed, raped, humiliated, and taunted, and one's suicide.  


The reasons for suicide are complex.  But it cannot be disputed that Justin suffered significant ill treatment, not because he was gay and out, but because those who could have helped prevent this abuse did not, and because those who abused him were pushed in that direction by their parents, their religions, their popular cultures, and yes, in some cases their educational system and civil governments.


Because Justin can no longer be out, I must be, because I still have a voice, and that voice must both speak and be heard for my own dignity and that of others.


Because Justin was out when he could be, he was able to be a friend to those who, along with him, underwent this kind of abuse at the hands of those who knew all too well what they were doing, and did not stop to consider what they were doing meant to someone who did not deserve such treatment.
That kind of friendship is vital to those who live in fear and persecution.  It sometimes does mean the difference between life and death.



II.


I have not always been able to be out.  And because I have not always been able to be out, I must be out now, whenever I can be.


At some point in my life, it no longer became possible for me to acquiesce in this system of oppression that said I had to be in the closet.  The closet was never a safe place, because it has its own side affects, and sometimes what is meant to save actually can help to kill.  But the closet remains, its door ajar, every time a new person comes along and I face the challenge of opening or closing that door.  It becomes all too easily a default position for one's whole life, even in our country, where homosexuality is no longer criminalized in our laws.


Still, in dozens of countries throughout the world today, one can literally be put to death for being gay.  Uganda is not the only country that has contemplated, or even passed, strict laws against homosexuality.


In the countries in which one's life is literally at risk for being LGBTQ, the closet may be one's only means of survival.  When it is, it should be used.


But for those of us who have passed the age of majority, live on our own in countries that do not actively seek our destruction, and can make choices about where and how we live, I at least put the question to those who are not out but could affect much positive change in their circumstances if they were:  Why not be out?


Ultimately, the choice is up to each person who could be out whether or not actually to be out.  There regrettably still are consequences, in employment, in housing, in family life, in vocation, and in other fundamental aspects of our lives, to being out.  Being out is not simple, and is sometimes problematic.


That said, I am convinced that the more people who are out who possibly could be, the less these systems of oppression will have the opportunity to tell us who we are, where we can work, where we can live, whom we can marry, and what we as human beings are worth.


And the more who are out here, where we can be, the more support there will be for those who are being persecuted throughout the world, and the more voices speaking from a place of personal authenticity will be raised to shout to the world that such violence against people cannot continue.  


This is why we must be out.


III.


I have paid my own price in being out in terms of my vocation to the ordained ministry.  I actually did hear the words spoken above, by an official of my denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), that if I wanted to live into the vocation for which I'd been educated, trained, and in which many people over the years have supported me with their prayers, money, time, and energy, I would have to forsake the part of my personhood that got me there.  I would have to deny the animating energy that puts life into my living.  I would have to be dishonest, and that was that.  


Yet that was much higher a price to pay than not getting a church, indeed, much too high a price for me to pay.  And true to her word, to this day, not one church has interviewed me to be their pastor.

The same person later told me, after the rules of the ELCA were changed to allow open and partnered LGBTQ people as ministers, that she deeply regretted ever having to say such a thing.  I can understand that regret.  But I’m not the only one who has been told these things, and the church should be the last place to encourage duplicity.  


Beyond the actual harmful messages that those in the ELCA and in many other church bodies have told and still tell those who are LGBTQ, these churches yet have to atone for encouraging their own ministers of the Gospel to lie in order to become ministers of the Gospel of truth.

And the church ought not to be in the business of making liars out of its leaders.

IV.

On the civil and societal front, being out is key to ever securing our rightful place at the table of full citizenship, and to make it impossible for political leaders to use me and people like me as political fodder to scare their like-minded constituents into getting them elected and re-elected.  

In Minnesota, my home and current state, we are now known for the wacky anti-gay politicians that we are producing.  Rep. Michele Bachmann, and her unfortunate husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, are using LGBTQ people and the fear of some around same-sex marriage in order to help launch their presidential campaign.  


But I have a deep feeling that if he could be out, Dr. Marcus Bachmann would be out.  


Instead, he runs a clinic that seeks to change LGBTQ people by telling them that they do not have to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, in fact, that these ways of living are wrong and contrary to God's word, and that they are even "barbarians."  One man went undercover to discover and communicate the truth of what Bachmann's clinic practices, which you can read here.


Because Dr. Marcus Bachmann, and other purveyors of anti-gay "research," "therapy," and anti-gay religious-based rhetoric, such as Dr. George Rekers, whose research helped ruin lives while he got to vacation with paid gay companionship, cannot be out, I must be out.


For in order to stop such therapy from having legitimacy in the eyes of many as it still does now, those many must know who we really are as LGBTQ people.  And when they cannot know who we are from us, they must take the word of people who wish us erased from the pages of history, from the present, and from the future.


V.


There are many reasons to be out, and many reasons why I feel I must be out.  But being out and coming out, as a complicated, ongoing, and life-long process, still presents times when I could say that I'm gay but I don't, because in the moment it feels too hard to do so.  In offering to elderly people why I am not married, for example, I don't say it is because I cannot marry, or because I don't have a boyfriend, but simply that I am not married, end of story.


These sorts of moments, which are moments of truth that pass as the proverbial ships in the night, are so important because they are where real change happens, and where, once frankness defines the basis of a discussion, real connection can possibly happen on more than an intellectual level.


Of all the reasons why I must be out, perhaps greatest reason is the prospect of those deep, personal, and connected conversations, and the relationships that can ensue from them.  


My hope, for myself and others, is to find the strength in the most difficult moments to speak out the truth of our lives to those for whom that truth might effect the most ultimate good. 


Together, we can achieve that good, for ourselves as individuals, and for those whose voices cannot be heard.  

15 for 15 VI: The First Time, or I'm Finally Out!

The day had to come.

Earlier that day, I was agonizing, as I did every day, over the guy I was in love with but didn't, or couldn't, tell.  When he told me that he was in love with another guy, I told him how I felt about him, and there it was.

Out.

Finally.

I.

But the one to whom I am out and whom I love loves another.  I want to laugh and cry and vomit.
                                                                                                    --May 6, 1996

Those were the hardest years of my life, so far, both preceding and following that statement.

Since that time, I've come to think that emotional puberty, which happens around age 20, is harder than physical puberty.  I went into a cocoon, psychologically, and to some degree physically as well.

Like many young men of that age, I grew out my hair, on my face as well as on my head.  I actually had hair to grow out back then.

Along with this growth of hair around me, I continued growing barriers around myself psychologically to keep people out.  I became so good at it, that by age 21, I could say that I hadn't kept any friends consistently since I was a kid, and although I made friends in college, it would be some time before I worked on those friendships at all.  Mostly, I was insecure, overly-competitive, and didn't want anyone to know I was gay.

It all ended that night.

II.

My view of the world has changed so drastically, I can't.  This is the night I have been waiting for for so long...


I knew after that night that something more than my sexuality had come out.  I had come out, started to destroy the cocoon of secrecy that I'd built around myself with hundreds or thousands of "saves," putting my mind to work several moves ahead of where a conversation might be going so that I would not have to answer certain questions or lie.

The piano had been my adolescent lover, and the eccentric pianist Glenn Gould had been my "virtual" lover, long before the idea of virtual had come to my mind.  I was safely hidden behind an intellectual exterior in which I could be busy thinking about things, or practicing the piano.  I became enveloped in the works of Ayn Rand, who, from her physical and emotional grave, egged me on to be different and alone.  Being an individual was the most important thing to me, so much so that when I went to college, I wanted to do an "individualized major," which at the time was kooky, although has caught on since.

Through all of the nights that I had gone to sleep for 10 years wondering if I was hopelessly lost, or if I was "the only one," I knew in those moments, on that night 15 years ago, that I was never going to be the only one again.

The first time I came out was like returning from a long, lonely exile in a foreign land, whose customs I sort of knew, and whose language I spoke with great difficulty because I kept tripping over the words, but whose food I didn't enjoy, and whose oppressive culture I could not wait to escape.

This feeling of exile, of not being welcomed in your homeland, is perhaps common to a lot of people for a lot of reasons.  People can challenge this feeling only in the company of those who are "like" them, or perhaps in books, movies, other media, or characters of their own making.  But it's not the same as connecting in person, with real, live people whom you know are enough like you so that you don't have to mouth a barely familiar language that everyone else seems to know fluently.

My whole perspective on the world changed, because that night I no longer had to think in terms of dynamic equivalence, translating the lives of others, and particularly the loves of others, into something that made sense to me in my own mind and deeply felt experience.   My world changed that night because it finally became my world.

III.

I'm so confused and elated and nervous and sick and ecstatic.  Sleep seems light years away.

A million feelings went through my mind and heart all at once, so powerful that I felt like I was going to go insane or literally explode, internally combust, go up in the flames of gay fabulosity before I knew what those even could be.

I felt, in that moment, that I had crossed over a threshold of experience that I thought I would never cross, and entered a world I could only sense existed, but had been there all the time.  And what I wanted felt further out of reach than ever, because my feelings were not returned.

Feelings are a funny thing--substantial, but not quantifiable; ephemeral, but lasting; they are the ultimate paradox.

And feelings seem to give us permission to act in any way that we wish.  I did that, and was not proud of how my feelings affected the object of those feelings.  Objectifying another, especially one about whom we feel strongly, seems impossible to avoid, but in the cold light of long reflection, I would have acted quite differently.  At that time, though, I simply could not.  One learns not to repeat certain mistakes, even though some of those mistakes seem to fall into a pattern of action that, no matter how many times one tries to reason his or her way out of them, seems to keep coming back the same way.  It is almost like an addiction, and the effects can perhaps be just as harmful.

Still, I came to value those feelings only by finally experiencing them, and putting them out there in the world.  If they are returned, that is somehow a bonus, but there is no way in which one can or should force another person to feel what one does not feel.

Being forced into feeling what one does not feel is precisely the aim of the closet.  It is not only a place of privacy and safety, but it is a place that often compels people to feel that that is the only place in which they can be safe.  And that is not right.

IV.

Many first times have come since that one those many years ago:  first lovers, first boyfriends, first poems, first culinary delights, first times being without a home, being on my own and unsure of what to do next, first trips to Europe and Africa, first times walking the streets of Paris and New York and San Francisco, dreamlike places that I never thought I'd be, but that have come to define my personality and my life in ways similar to this lived sexual orientation.

First times are indeed very special, even if they aren't anything special in and of themselves.  I remember the first time I changed a headlight on a car, the feeling of accomplishment that I had, and the feeling of empowerment.  First times can, but do not always, empower us to try for higher levels of experience, and  make us realize that what never seemed possible actually is something we just haven't tried yet.  Of course, that doesn't go for everything.  Like eating liver.

Tonight, I celebrated these many years of being out, and all the gifts and challenges that have come with it, at the lovely Nicollet Island Inn restaurant in Minneapolis.  Here was one of the fabulous courses with which my table was adorned:

The colors, the flavors!  This was living.  And this is what life can be like:  a colorful, delicious feast.

For we are called to the great feast, to the Gospel feast, to the feast of honesty and integrity that adds all of the flavor to life.  Facing one's areas of pain and struggle honestly, and for a long time, can yield much greater treasures that can be bought and paid for with money.

And you are always welcome at my feast.

15-for-15 V: Who I Am, or Identity, Equality, and Value

I know who I am.  More or less.

I.

It's easy to say that sexuality is just a small part of our lives, that it's not "who we are."  It's also easy to say that sexuality is our entire life, that it's all we are.

When I say that I am gay, and thereby oppose the words that headline the first entry in this series, I equate myself with my sexual orientation, I own that part of myself, and I use it to define myself.  I am Chris, but saying that is not quite the same way of defining self, because "Chris" doesn't have a definition in itself.

Saying "I am cold," similarly, describes a passing state or feeling.  "I am rich," or "I am poor," too, might get at something true for a while, which shapes who we are and how we are, but these descriptors are not necessarily identity characteristics.  Our "net worth" does not come in how much money we have in the bank the day before the stock market crashes and wipes out our assets.

Yet people debate the extent to which sexuality is a passing phase, essential to our beings or a choice, or a product of our doing.

I think that sexuality is a very big part of our lives, because it affects how we relate to ourselves, others, our society, religions, and to every huge factor in our lives.  Sexuality goes far beyond those with whom one has sex, far beyond one's private domain, and indeed beyond one's "personal preferences" or "lifestyle choice."  The term "lifestyle choice," in fact, has always been both nebulous and insulting, highlighting an ornamental, act-based idea of sexuality that somehow people might chose out of boredom with the "normal" way of life.  It doesn't get at such a large part of what I think is connoted by the term "sexual identity"--the source of one's passions.

What "turns you on"?  What "floats your boat"?  What gets your blood pumping, and what paints your sky? What brings a flush to your cheek, or a spring to your step? Sexuality is in our blood, and blood is thicker than water. The sinoatrial node might physically produce the electrical force behind the beating of our hearts, but sexuality is the metaphoric animating principle behind that and every aspect of our creative lives.

Sexuality goes a long way beyond T & A.  (Especially if you're gay.)

II.  Defined by Difference?  Enlivened by Equality?

Being different gives a person the opportunity to spend a lot of time thinking about things that people who are not different probably don't think much about.  Some might take exception with my use of the term "different."  But when you're defined in ways that lead to a different set of rules for how you can live your life, you're different.

Difference, in the case of sexual identity, means that you do not necessarily follow the life patterns and roles that are set in place for you when you're born.  The consequence of that difference is that society sets out for you the same expectations, but a different set of rules.

I'll be the first to own that sometimes those of us with this difference of sexuality, or any difference, spend too much time thinking and talking about it, and not enough time living it.  That is because justice has not yet come for many of us, and because our siblings in difference around the world and on our own shores are still being mocked, beaten, assaulted, shamed into self-hatred and worse, and indeed put to violent death.  We think about this difference because our world won't let us forget.

In thinking about this difference, we often talk about "equality."  Frankly, the more I think of it, the more insulting the idea of asking for "equality" is.


It is insulting to argue for equality, because we are equal, and we don't ask anyone else to be equal to us. I would never look at someone and say, "Prove that you are equal to me."  People who don't realize that LGBT people are fully equal in our humanity and our relationships are fully equal in their legitimacy will not do so because we say they are.  

We spend so much time defending, and that leaves less time actually to live.

My leap came when I realized the value of my own feelings, at least to myself, not that they were equal, but that they were valuable.

III.

Sexuality is a value.  And one person's sexuality is no more a value than another's.

Sexuality is a value in what it does to enliven and paint the skies of our lives.  It is also a value in how it challenges and points out our brokenness.  Everyone has a broken aspect to their sexuality.  This is one of the chief reasons why same-sex attraction scares people--because thinking of it as an attraction that is fully broken, wrong, diseased, or criminal, gives people who think like that a way to avoid confronting their own brokenness.

It's hard to name all of the discrete experiences of our lives that name our sexuality in one way or another.  Holding hands in the movie show, as one old song put it, is something that people without a difference would not think twice about doing, and might indeed take pleasure and gain social status by being seen "together."

One can name one's sexuality in any number of subtle ways, in a look or a few carefully placed words, in whose names one mentions casually in conversation, in pictures that adorn one's public spaces, or in the stories that we tell about important experiences in our lives that involve other people.

People who cannot be public about their sexuality find any number of ways to avoid it becoming known.  My most potent memory from my high school years involved sitting in the library on a study break with some guys who began talking about how a girl was admiring another guy's ass.  I interjected, without realizing that I was in danger of totally outing myself to some of the not nicer people:  "Oh, she could do better."  Snap!

This comment did not escape their attention.  One shot back with a look on his face that I've seen a couple of other times, in dangerous situations where they see the gay within you and don't like what they see. The words exploded, "Oh yeah??  Who??!"

A breathless moment passed.  It seemed like they had gotten me, and that all I had feared would now come to pass.

From out of nowhere, the word came into my head and out my mouth with as little thought as I had given when I initiated this crisis just seconds ago:

"Me."

And with that, they laughed their asses off, and I breathed an internal sigh of release.  Way too close for comfort.

That's such an innocuous experience, and yet given the context of being forced to avoid saying any little thing that might "tip them off," I had just dodged what I feared would be metaphoric and literal bullets.

Just imagine all of the experiences, in all of the years, that all of those who do not want to be "found out" go through, and the weight that puts on one's shoulders.

Every experience that one might have to pass through in order to stay in the closet is an experience in which sexuality makes itself known outwardly in our lives.

Who I am, who you are, is partially defined by the weight we carry, what we do with it, and what we let it do to us.

But we are also defined by what lifts us.

And someday, hopefully within my lifetime, the widest part of our society will support the enlivening force that takes us through each day, that connects with the Holy Spirit and taps us into God, that is our muse for writing, singing, and creating beautiful things, the enlivening force that makes our relationships live, and our words take flight, that sends our rockets to the farthest reaches of physical space, and gives us the energy to dream a better world, while living with greater fulfillment in the one we have.

Who will we be then?

15-for-15 III: Honesty

"It's not lying if they make you lie."
                  --Brian Kinney (Gale Harold), "Queer as Folk" (Showtime)


I.


Now, be honest.  You might not rejoice in the death of Osama bin Laden, but is there no part of you that was at least relieved to hear that he had finally been killed?  And if relieved, grateful?  A seed of inappropriate glee, perhaps, that would taint you as someone who can't quite live up to the great martyrs of peace of the past?


The last thing most of us would want is for people to know all of our true feelings all the time, because a lot of those feelings could affect our relationships, jobs, and general reputations should they be known.  So we have to be selective in what we tell others.  Honesty, true, unadulterated, 24/7/365 honesty, is nearly impossible to have within the recesses of our own minds and souls, and quite impossible to achieve in dealing with others.


But some level of honesty, with others, about ourselves and our views, is absolutely essential to who we are.  We must select what we will present, and in presenting, create the "I" that others see through their eyes.


Honesty is central in coming out of the closet, but it is not simple.  It begins with people being honest with themselves about their true feelings, and that may lead into a crisis that may or may not resolve itself with becoming honest with others.  Some may come out, at an early age, without any complications in their own minds--I've met people for whom this is the case.  But for many others who are gay or lesbian, a wide variety of complex factors and fears affects this kind of honesty with others.


II.


Foremost are the factors of one's fear of losing close relationships with people they think might not take this news well and decide to end the relationship.  And this has indeed happened with a number of people who have come out as gay or lesbian, particularly before the last two decades.  It has happened with me.


At one time, not long ago, and indeed still to this day, the economic factors of losing one's job or not being able to gain employment were key to keeping people in the closet.  I worried, and am not proud of doing so, that I would be disowned if my parents knew I was gay, and I did not see how I could pay for college if I were to come out when I was still in high school.  I sensed anyway that I would become like Stephen King's Carrie had I come out in high school, with a bucket of blood hanging over my head at every turn, ready to end forever any cool factor that I had built up.


The fear of being beaten or abused has also been central to people not coming out, for this is still a realistic fear for many who are young, and more who have moved on into their own lives, yet live within tight restrictions on their expression within those lives.


Even in a society as tolerant as ours, we are far from living in a "safe" place as openly gay and lesbian people everywhere we go.  Where we might choose to hold hands, might give in public the most innocuous signs of affection towards those for whom we feel affection, things that I would guess every heterosexual person takes for granted, is still greatly limited, in many cases only in those establishments that openly accept or cater to gays and lesbians or the neighborhoods immediately around them.


In vast parts of our country, we're still sitting in the Stonewall Inn on June 26, 1969, when the police could come in at any moment and take everything in our lives away at their whim.  Police raids have famously happened within the last few years in Fort Worth, TX, and Atlanta, GA, hardly small and conservative towns.


The fear of not being able to follow out one's calling in life, whether as a pastor, a professional athlete, a teacher, an actor or actress, musician, business person, or in many other walks of life that still carry a heavy expectation of being heterosexual for the sake of those for whom the business or organization is run, still keeps people in the closet and in relationships that begin as relationships of "convenience," though might develop into more.  


One of the hardest things to do is to be honest with oneself about the hard things within oneself, let alone to be frank with others.  But both are essential, I would say, to living other than a life of quiet desperation, in the words of Thoreau.


III.


I first was compelled to be honest with myself about being gay because of an overwhelming sexual attraction I had to someone, who although I didn't know, I knew was gay.  I saw him every day on the bus that I took from the St. Paul University of Minnesota "farm" campus to the main campus in Minneapolis, on the east bank, when I was there in the summer of 1994.


Perhaps it was his mannerisms that first tripped my nascent gaydar.  Perhaps it was the sticker on his bag that said "I fuck to come, not to conceive."  But soon I heard him talking about being gay to someone else on the bus.  That cinched it for me.


I remember getting off that bus and walking behind him, trying to come up with even a lame pick-up line.  But I was afraid of sex, and afraid of contracting HIV, which in 1994 could still be a death sentence for many who were living with it, before the arrival of most anti-retroviral drugs.  Fear of many kinds kept the lid on a boiling pot of hormones and emotions for yet another period of time when it could have come off.  The result was the journal entry that I shared in my first entry in this series.


Later, I was compelled to be honest with others about what I felt, because I learned that those feelings went beyond mere sexual attraction.  I learned that I had feelings for someone else that were just like those feelings that I had watched in most every movie ever made, and that were described in the vast majority of songs ever written.  If people could make those movies, and sing those songs, then I deserved to value and honor those feelings in myself, as imperfectly even as I expressed them at that time, as well.


I became honest with others when my heart connected, perhaps for the first time, to my head, and I could no longer deny that I, too, had a claim to my feelings and had needs that issued from them, and not only from my penis or my brain.  I still hadn't experienced anything that I longed to experience physically, but I knew what it was that I wanted, to be with another man, and what I could never have:  a Jane to my John, a Mrs. to my Mr.  


As deeply as I had tried to feel romantic attachments to girls, and then to young women, nothing could connect with my deeper reality.  No kiss with a girl could do anything more for me than leave me feeling weird, and that wasn't fair to either of us.  No amount of visual stimulation could have any effect beyond moving my retinas from one part of a page or screen to another.


For a long time, I thought there was just something wrong with me, that I needed to try harder, and I'll be honest, I never prayed to God that things were different--I didn't even think to do so.  Some have described this feeling as noticing at some point that you had boarded the wrong airplane, flying to the wrong destination, yet without any way to alter the course.


It would be a long time before I sat back and enjoyed the flight.


IV.


The quotation above, which the character Brian Kinney says several times in the TV series "Queer as Folk," resonates with me on many levels.  Lying, and the moral approbation that might be attached to it, is morally wrong only so long as you have any other option at all.  It is like the legitimate defense of killing only when one's life is in immediate danger, only in the case of outing oneself, it's everything that attaches to one's life, and in some cases, one's physical life itself.  This is a fear that some gay and lesbian people carry with themselves every day.   


I tend to judge those who have not come out most especially when I do not remember what it was like before I came out.  It's easy to cast such stones when you forget that you were once (and perhaps sometimes are still) afraid of being hit with them yourself.


If everyone who could come out would come out, in all circumstances, to all people, all the time, there would be no closets, not because there wouldn't be anyone in them, but because there would be no need for them.  That area of privacy in one's life is there almost exclusively because of the possible repercussions and fears that I stated above.


"It's nobody's business but my own" only so long as were that business to be made known, there would be negative consequences.  Inconsequential business has no need of privacy.  Otherwise, why not put up that picture of your hottie love muffin in the office, like everyone else does, or talk about your weekend, or mention your wife or husband in your sermon, or talk about that experience that changed your life and the person who was there to hold your hand when it happened?


But reality remains:  it's not safe for everyone to come out in every circumstance at all times. The closet is still a place of cold refuge for many, many people.


V.


I do carry a rather unattractive chip on my shoulder about the consequences of honesty I have faced in my own calling to being an ordained Lutheran minister, as one who is yet neither ordained, nor a Lutheran minister.  I have the same training, with the same professors and mentors, as dozens of my seminary colleagues who are now ordained and in church calls.  Yet, my last four years of waiting for even an interview for a first call in my present denomination looks like this:

• Make sure you file everything on time.
• Thank you for filing everything on time and completing your requirements.
• We approve you for ordination and think you will  be an excellent pastor.  You have wonderful gifts for ministry.
• Why did you have to put your sexual orientation in your paperwork?  Nobody else does.
• No church will give you an interview unless you "fly under the radar," "don't lead with your sexual orientation," and "feel things out as far as their attitudes go before you say anything about being gay."
• We don't have any churches for you, but your name comes up all the time in our conversations about churches looking for first calls.
• That church would be great for you, but it is not a first call church.
• We gave that church to someone as a first call even though it wasn't a first call church--it just fit them.
• There are no churches at the moment that would be open to someone like you.
• We're afraid of even recommending you to that church, so why would you want to interview there?
• Any church would be lucky to have you as its pastor.
• The bishop has said that he can do nothing for you.
• The bishop has your paperwork and will follow up with you shortly.
• You're too outspoken.
• All of the bishops admired your integrity, but they cannot do anything as long as you say you will not be in compliance with the rules.
• There are too many other candidates waiting for a first call for you to be considered in our synod.
• We gave that church to someone who wasn't in our synod because it was a good match for them, even though we have several other candidates waiting for call.
• You have demonstrated maturity, compassion, and extraordinary patience throughout this process.  We admire your consistent positive attitude.
• A lot of people are affected by the economy because pastors are not retiring since they have lost their pensions.  But we still placed 5 of 6 candidates whom we received in the Fall draft in first calls.

It goes on like this, and it is little wonder that a part of my spiritual life has atrophied.  But, to be honest, that is also my responsibility to say "enough is enough," and move on with my life.  


Honesty has not been the best policy in my dealings with the church, and something seems wrong with that.

Thankfully, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has moved into a new period of honesty in which it can value the honesty of its clergy and commissioned lay persons and stop forcing its pastors and candidates for ordination to lie about being gay or lesbian, as it did for more than 20 years.  Before August 21, 2009, a pastor could be brought up on trial for publicly admitting he or she was gay or lesbian and in a relationship, and a church could be completely removed from the ELCA in an expensive and embarrassing church trial; thankfully this is no longer the case.  


Yet the pre-change reality remains in the ELCA, and no change has happened in many other denominations.  And gay and lesbian persons are by no means the only people who are disadvantaged in the current ELCA system of approval, call, and ordination.  

VI.

Being honest, as being a bully, is not a simple issue.  It's not the picture of George Washington and the cherry tree, or of "Honest Abe," whose early business practices, though unsuccessful, were apparently unflinchingly honest.  These stereotypes of being honest are not such that any mortal can attain, just as no human besides Jesus could be sinless, and I question what that meant for Jesus.

The issue of marriage, beyond being an issue of civil rights for gay and lesbian people, is an issue of honesty:  being able to be publicly honest about who your better half indeed is, as well as being honest about the limitations and realities of any marriage.

The main argument that I would lift up in favor of same-sex marriage is not even equality, because we are equal, and to debate our equality and the equality of our relationships is an insult.  I think a better argument is to state the honest reality:  that conservative moralists are imposing unreachable expectations on those marriages that they do allow, while at the same time, by opposing same-sex marriages, they suggest that these "traditional" marriages could be blown over by the first stiff gay wind to hit them.  I want to think heterosexual relationships are stronger than this.

There are also a vast number of people who vote against same-sex marriage, and a vast number of politicians who introduce this as a wedge issue into political discourse, who are far from being honest about their motives.  


Each Minnesota legislator who has voted in favor of advancing a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, as in all 30 states that ban same-sex marriage in their constitutions, and each citizen voter, should face a crisis of honesty on their position against same-sex marriage.  Is a same-sex marriage going to "destroy" opposite-sex marriages, or are a host of factors already in place, from no-fault divorce, to economic injustice, to exceedingly high societal demands, threatening these marriages?  


Bad relationships, impossible demands of perfection, and economic adversity, among other things, destroy marriage, not gay and lesbian relationships.  


VII.


Perhaps death is the most honest thing there is.  There's no saying it is anything that it is not.  There may be many varieties of death, but when someone is stone cold dead, that's that.  Which is why it is so important to live your life while you have it.


I wonder sometimes what it would be like if honesty were more constitutionally a part of who we are.  It's not a natural human state, but must be taught by instilling a guilty conscience as constant punishment for not being honest.


Being who one is honestly should not entail being guilty.  Some things about ourselves could benefit from change.  Sexual orientation is not one of them.


What, for you, are the most difficult things to be honest about with yourself, dear reader?  And what in your life has initiated a crisis of honesty in dealing with others?  I think we all have substantial experience in debating these questions within ourselves, and some of these parts of ourselves have forced us into our own versions of the closet.  Closets are not just for people of a particular sexual orientation:  there are endless varieties of closets.  


My hope is that we might someday very soon reach a new level of honesty in our national discourse on sexual orientation, race, gender discrimination, and a host of other issues that can get better only when we start being honest with ourselves and with others about what we think and how we feel, without descending into banning people's relationships constitutionally, breaking off relationships because we disagree, and falling deeper into a pit of partisan tar.

My NOH8 Story on a Day of Silence or Meditation on my Namesake

Back in February, I had the chance to attend one of the most wonderful gatherings of LGBTQ people I've ever had the chance to attend: the Creating Change Conference, in Minneapolis. What made this gathering so great was that it best represented the whole "tent" of queerdom: young and old, men, women, and people who didn't cling to one binary gender, gay, lesbian, bi, and a rainbow of transgender persons, genderqueer, poly, allies, intersex persons, you name it, and persons from the group were beautifully, wonderfully represented.

Among the activities that weekend was the opportunity to become part of the "NOH8" campaign, the brainchild of young gay celebrity photographer Adam Bouska, originally in response to the Prop 8 campaign (which likewise spawned this blog), but now reaching far beyond California and the issue of anti-gay prejudice.

For a mere contribution of $40 (far from a pittance for many people, and an unfortunate bar to the full representation of people who would best represent this campaign), anyone could feel like a supermodel for justice for a few seconds, and come out with a professional portrait of their own activist selves.

At first, I didn't think I could justify this price and this indulgence, as cool as it was. But then I looked at my special shelf, and saw on it my clerical collar, gathering dust, and my Great-Grandfather's watch, a prized heirloom that my Father has let me take care of. Both of these items are very special to me, the one a signature part of my vocation to the Lutheran ministry, and the other, a prized possession of one after whom I was named. The combination of the two inspired me to have that photo taken, and to represent fully who I am to this cause for freedom and equality.

What follows is the description that I provided Adam in helping to understand the meaning behind this pose. I don't know that it will gain any kind of wider audience, and so I share it here for the few of you for whom it might be of interest. I love my vocation, and I love my Great-Grandfather, even though we could never have met. I respect his hard work and dedication to his profession, which the watch honors after 30 years of service. And I am proud of his name, Elsworth, which is my middle name and my Father's middle name, as I am of the man who gave it to me.

Love should never keep one from being honest about love; yet that is what Prop 8 does. May that proposition, in time, fall to the ground as an embarrassment to those who supported it, as much as the pride I feel in opposing it with my whole being.

"My pose for the NOH8 campaign was filled with symbolism both personal and of wider-reach. This pose represents family, time, tradition, my personal and our communal struggle for equality and justice. I wore around my neck my Great-Grandfather's watch given to him for 30 years of service in 1953. I also wore one of my clerical collars.

My calling is to the ordained ministry of Word and sacrament in the Lutheran church, the faith into which my Great-Grandfather was baptized on his deathbed. Yet being openly gay has prevented me from getting a church and being able to wear the collar as an ordained person.

Time, literally entangled around my neck, is therefore represented on at least 3 planes in this image: 1. The time of tradition, weighing physically and metaphorically on my vocation (as it has on many others); 2. The time (4 years) I have been waiting to become a pastor; 3. The duration of our movement for Gay and Lesbian rights, which began in America around the time that this watch was presented to my Great-Grandfather.

I never knew my Great-Grandfather, but am proud of his work and love him. I am, along with my Father, his namesake. Our middle name, Elsworth, was his only given name. Yet past, present, and future meeting in one place on this point is bittersweet. I have encapsulated this experience in the following poem:

Time Entangles Our Necks

Time entangles our necks,

breathing life and death

past years of pressured peace and silenced dreams.

Great our Grandfathers'

wishes, ambitions for

Their Unseen, a gleam

of semen stretched

through several faltered

beams of forced omission.

Faith of our fathers,

stopping still

cockblocking their sons,

frockboxing their daughters

behind a god who pressed in law

what certain ancient lawyers saw.

Faith remains, lifeglue,

more than a living,

or escape from dying,

shining too from the

eyes of the future who

know what the sins

of the past could do:

a lasting screw.

If our great grandfathers only knew.

Ideas Percolating: The Church, HIV/AIDS, Poetry & Community

I.

I had a few good new ideas at the beginning of the year, most of which seem to have passed on for want of development and conversation. The main energy this year was around community. It's time I got my butt in gear and started to write about them.

The element of community was central in the Anoka/Hennepin School District controversies that I briefly joined in the fall. The District has made its position quite clear on matters of LGBT equality, e.g., having been sued into allowing a lesbian couple to walk together in a high school pep rally last January, canceling performances of a play written by youth for youth for 7th and 8th grade students in Anoka because an anti-gay adult complained about a segment of the play where a young person comes out, and denying any connection between anti-gay bullying and any of the suicides of the previous year in the District, which went against testimony they received over a period of several months in their meetings.

While I continue to support the cause for justice for students in this District, I pulled back from involvement as it became clear that my involvement wasn't directly helpful. But I have other ideas in the works that may be. Time will tell how those will pan out.

Perhaps this community orientation, the need for one community to call itself on how it treats a segment of its population, helped illuminate other thoughts.

II.

Here are three ideas I wish to resurrect with the Easter season:

1. Positive portrayals of Christianity are vital to communal well-being, especially for young people. The voice of condemnation, which belongs rightly to no person, has been too prominent for too long in the church's voice in our society among others. Challenge of culture is one thing; condemnation, or condemnation veiled in "concern," is another. Does one condemn the condemners? This is a good question that begs some further consideration. Progressive faith voices have leveled challenge against judgmental Christianity and judging Christians, but it's still yet to stick on a wider level. But we owe our society the best voices that our faith can provide, and those voices do not preach hate in any form.

2. HIV prevention needs a new focus on the role of community. It's not enough to tell someone to wear a condom, to scare people into abstinence or safer sex by telling them what will happen if they don't, or by shaming people about sex and sexuality. The latest study from the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York, Gay Men and HIV: An Urgent Priority, highlights the rise in HIV contraction by gay and bisexual men over the last 5 years (particularly between 2005-2008), and one of the highest risk groups is, bingo, "among white MSM (men who have sex with men), the bulk of new infections are occurring among men in their 30s and 40s" (p. 6), which happens to be my age/race group.

The report offers some ideas for this rise, among which are the factors of social isolation, homophobia, and drug use. I could offer them my perspective on why for some of us staying HIV negative seems an ever-increasing struggle, and for others a lost cause. There are a lot of assumptions and judgments around HIV that still carry the prejudices of the 80s, the ideas of "innocent victims" (or victims at all), of certain people deservedly being punished for having the "wrong" kind of sex or for being "promiscuous," and of honest discussions about sex, its meaning in our lives, and our actual practice of it being still to a great degree taboo. These prejudices and judgments must continue to be challenged as they are killing us.

Can we have an honest conversation about barebacking among gay/bi males? It would involve us being honest about the judgments we have around sex and, more importantly, around each other. Gay men can, it's no secret to ourselves or others, be fairly judgmental at times about whom we would choose to relate to from within the gay universe. Age is a factor, money, accomplishment, ability to exclude or include certain people, HIV status, and most certainly body type. These are not hard and fast reasons for being included or excluded in one group of gay men or another, but they often do influence who will talk to you.

The reasons why people have unsafe sex are not just because we're stupid, uncaring, amoral, disgusting people who (according to some with whom I don't agree) flout God's laws and bring upon ourselves and others destruction, and not just because people outside of the gay community are spewing homophobia. Some of that homophobia comes from within, and needs to be faced honestly and together in smaller and larger levels of gay community, and some of it comes from within ourselves, and must be honestly faced there, with a leading edge of grace in both situations that is sometimes harder to use with oneself than with others.

Can you imagine having an honest conversation about some of these issues in church? Now that we have finished fighting the battle for whether or not Gay and Lesbian people can become pastors or have our relationships blessed in the ELCA, to what further conversations about sexuality, which have been forestalled around these other issues for so long, could the church aid in shedding its grace and commitment to honesty? Long and still a proponent of much homophobia, not only does the church have AIDS, as we have said even in our churchwide assemblies, but the church helps to cause AIDS and HIV transmission, and that still needs to be faced.

There's much more to say on this, for another time. But think about how, if you're HIV negative, HIV is not just someone else's burden, and how, if you're HIV positive, you can work claim the support that was there for you in the community during the hardest years of the AIDS holocaust. That support is there, if only from people like me, who don't always know how best to lend it.

3. Poetry can help build, enliven, and liberate community. This idea came to me as part of a Lutheran Poetry Project, which still has yet to be realized. It came to me as a way to put my own negative energy around being marginalized in my long wait for a call into something positive, and something that all those who have felt marginalized by the church could tap into. You don't need to be a professional poet, published, recognized, lauded, or even much cared for, in order to write poetry, and put your situation out there in your own voice. And your voice may be the one that speaks a needed word of truth and consolation to another who is struggling out there in the night.

I heard something last year that I've not been able to verify, but I would not have difficulty believing to be true: African-American women typically wait 5 years for a first call in the ELCA. Is there a way to verify this? There are not a lot of African-American women who are in training to be pastors in the ELCA.

I had a very dear friend in seminary who was an African-American woman who passed away before the end of her seminary training; she would have been a spectacular pastor, and indeed was to me and many others in our year as neighbors in the seminary apartments at PLTS. I miss her terribly, especially her wisdom and strength. The loss for the church of her ministry is as well incalculable. But are there women like her whose voices are ready to be engaged, yet are being left to the side? That, too, is an incalculable loss for a church in need of its best, strongest, and most graceful voices.

What could these voices, the many besides my own who have felt dishonored in waiting so long for the church to implement or even realize our love and capacity for ministry, have to say to a church that is struggling to define its future in a landscape that does not see Jesus or the church as central, as some have called "post-Christian"? Christianity is itself now marginal in a way that it probably has been at many times in the past, yet is only coming to our consciousness in the last 40 years as being marginal, forgotten, unnecessary, even many times either unhelpful or hurtful to Christians and those who believe other creeds or faiths or profess no particular faith alike.

The stone that the builder rejected will become the cornerstone. This was as true for Jesus himself as it is for his disciples along the way and today whose voices are being forced out of the church due to neglect or more aggressive challenge of the central truths of their lives.

Yet these voices may yet become those who have the most to say as we continue to live lives of faith and honesty, perhaps redefined in some ways in this new age, but close as always to the heart of Christ, which beats most strongly for those most forgotten.

These voices could speak powerfully through poetry, and perhaps are. An effort to bring these voices together into one prophetic source is sorely needed.

III.

All of these ideas have community, our interrelations with others, as well as our self-community, the internal dialogues that we carry on with ourselves, at the center, and see that how we talk together will determine how we as individuals will fare. For far too long in the past, and with renewed vigor in the present through the Tea Party, society has been seen as nothing more than a bunch of individual blips moving past each other on an increasingly complex and desolate screen.

How can new landscapes of conversation and interrelation help inform our future together and individually? I'll be thinking of some of these things more out loud here, and would be grateful for your thinking through them, perhaps in conversation, or at least in your own way.

Our only way forward as a country, church, as families, and as individuals, is with more, not less, care for community. My hope is to stir up a few new directions in finding some ways to approach that building of community. I'd value your effort in this direction as well.

My Ideas Should Not Depend on Yours for Their Validity

Another nocturnal walk brings another epiphany: My ideas should not have to depend on your believing them as I do in order for them to have validity, and vice-versa. It seems so simple, something that I have heard countless times, but tonight it is clicking in a new way for me.

A friend of mine, Matt, helped me to realize this today when he wrote in his blog about why he does not, shall we say, see religion in the same way I do. Check him out at www.themindofmatt.com. We agreed, however, that we can respectfully agree to disagree, and remain friends, indeed are even more respectful as a result.

We live in a time, of which we are reminded every 9/11, indeed every day, of extremely dysfunctional political, philosophical, and theological relationships. The red states (counties, cities) are getting redder, and the blue states are getting bluer, and I think that makes all of us both red and blue in our own way. The culture wars ratchet up, and only seem to be getting more intractable day by day and year by year. Congress deadlocks, court decisions are discounted as "activist," families are torn apart, and friendships seem impossible to form with those who don't believe exactly as we do.

It hasn't always been this way, and it doesn't have to be this way.

I.

Here is the epiphany: 1. Ideas (religious, political, or otherwise) become dangerous when we have to force them on others to validate them for ourselves; 2. If my beliefs do not depend on your believing them in order to gain their validity, and vice-versa, we can respect each others' independence of thought.

Let's play with this a bit. Suppose you are a Bible-believing Christian who does not allow for homosexuality as a variation of human sexuality because the Bible disapproves of it in at least seven passages (more, according to our friends at the Westboro Baptist Church). The Bible clearly states that a man who lies with a man as with a woman commits to'evah, an abomination, and the blood of the both shall be upon them; they shall both be put to death.

Short of actually working to carry out that rather horrific scene, what is wrong with believing this? As it turns out, plenty, if this belief is, as it often is, forced on others. Because this belief has had countless political consequences as a result of being "forced on" those who do not believe in this way. Parents have disowned their children, or rejected them, students have beaten and sexually abused other students, school districts, the military, churches, and other institutions have imposed a strangling code silence, and states have prevented marriage, all in the name of upholding the beliefs of some.

What would it look like to be truly "neutral" with regard to these beliefs?

It would look neutral if, and only if, I say to you that I believe this, but I am not going to impose this belief on you through curtailing your civil rights, insulting your personhood, tearing apart your families, firing you from your jobs, and preventing you from voicing your views. Why? Because you let me do the same as I let you: speak the truth as you see it.

Many things in the Bible are to'evah, not least of which is what comes almost immediately before Leviticus 20:13, the verse quoted above about men lying with men as being an act punishable by death. The act of which I am thinking is quoted more often throughout the Bible than "a man shall not lie with a man as with a woman."

Here it is in Exodus (21:7): "Anyone who curses his father or mother shall be put to death." Again, in Leviticus (20:9), "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head (NIV)." Again in Proverbs (20:20): "If a man curses his father or mother, his lamp will be snuffed out in pitch darkness."

Even Jesus finds this verse important enough to repeat verbatim in Matthew (15:4) and Mark (7:10): "For God [or Moses, in Mark] said, 'Honor your father and mother,' and 'Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.'" Jesus says this!! Nice, good Jesus.

How many children have cursed their fathers or mothers for any number of reasons? And how many of those children have we put to death, or driven to death by saying that we must hate their sin of cursing their father or mother, while loving them as sinners?

How many preachers are advocating that children, or adult children, be put to death for this cursing? How many "ministries" exist to "cure" children of cursing their fathers or mothers?

How many children are thrown out in the street for cursing their fathers or their mothers? And how many schools impose strict policies on their students and staff never to curse their fathers or their mothers?

I imagine the number is pretty low.

I wouldn't hate you for believing that your children should be put to death for cursing you. I'd think it an awfully strange thing to think, and I would oppose your imposing that thought on your children in a way that would damage them. I'd probably even say it's a good thing my Mom or Dad didn't toss me off a bridge at numerous points during my growing up. And I'm sure your Mom and/or Dad, or Mom & Mom, or Dad & Dad, would say the same thing about you.

II.

Why, I ask, must we force our views on others? Must we insist that if you do not believe as I do, that we should have nothing to discuss further? Must we insist that everyone throughout the world should live as we do, and should believe the same beliefs in the same way? Because there are indeed a large variety of beliefs, which, as long as they do not end up building walls of shame, walls of isolation, and literal walls around others, as long as they do not lead us to fly into towers or start wars, as long as they do not lead us to codify laws and policies to restrict others from expressing their own beliefs, as long as they do not lead us to think ourselves better people or more worthy of living than others, as long as they can be spoken in a way that do not start riots throughout the world, why not speak them?

I respect you, and you respect me, when we can agree to disagree on some things.

Building conversations on this basis, rather than on the basis of forcing each other to believe as we do, can build relationships, tear down walls, and save lives.

I cannot believe that my ideas are so weak that they must depend on your assent to them for validity, or vice-versa. I believe what I believe, from my experience, from what faith has been given me, from what my own human mind has been able to reason out, and there you have it: a thoughtful conclusion.

III.

I can see many ways in which people would disagree with me, or see this stance as being naive or untenable.

For one, people do, out of both fear and a will to dominate, impose their beliefs on others in countless ways. Whether it be through weakness of character or joy in domination, people seem invariably to fight to be right. I myself like being right and being agreed with when it comes to something that I find important. But, for example, because my friend Matt does not believe that this bread and this wine is the body and blood of Christ, that does not prevent me from believing that the elements are the real presence of Jesus Christ, the son of God, the savior.

For another, particularly from a religious point of view, those who do not believe as we do transgress, indeed break the law, that we ourselves must live by in order to have the kind of life that we feel we must live. But, for example, are heterosexual marriages so inherently weak that they cannot tolerate people living in same-sex marriages? Are same-sex relationships so inherently desirable that they will entice those who would otherwise be out making babies to stay home and make whoopee instead? Are your children so weak of mind and character that they will glom on to every view expressed to them, and try out every possibility floated in their direction?

It seems to me asinine, not to mention disproven by experience, that people will try everything and become anything to which they are exposed. If this were the case, we'd have a nation of rapists, drug addicts, and especially murderers, given the amount of this activity that is shown on television, let alone video games. I worry about how certain song lyrics and video games that extol violence against women give young people the impression that it is OK to rape. But I also fear the stance that mentioning a fun weekend at Valley Fair with your gay boyfriend will have any impact on a whole class of children's sexual development.

This is not merely a plea for tolerance, but for allowing others to live the lives that are given them, and trusting that, given plenty of lessons in respecting others, they will carry out that respect themselves.