Love Can Be Simple

What a group of teenagers taught me about writing a love story

When I was twenty, my girlfriend and I decided to move in together. We hadn’t been a couple for long, but we spent every night with each other, shuttling back and forth between San Francisco’s Presidio, where I lived with five roommates in a compact three-bedroom, and Mill Valley, where Kristyn rented the basement in-law of her friends’ house. The end of my lease was approaching, and I knew that wherever I ended up next, I wanted it to be with her.

We were holding hands in the dark of a movie theater while the trailers played when I suggested it.

“Really?” she asked, and I nodded yes, and we spent the next two hours smiling at each other, clasping and changing positions and reclasping our hands, until the movie had ended and neither of us had any idea what it had been about, our heads too full of our futures to take in anything else.

I told all of this to my friend, who was also my ex-boyfriend, while we sat across from each other in a Mission district café.

“Okay,” he said. “But you know you’re sinning, right?”

“Sinning?”

“Having sex without intending to procreate.”

We had just been talking about his dating life. He was not exactly celibate.

“What about you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m sinning, too,” he said.

It didn’t turn into an argument, and I still don’t know what was behind it. None of the years we dated included prayer books or handholding in church pews.

Much of our relationship had taken place long distance, me in high school in the Bay Area, him in college in L.A. We used to thrive on late-night heated debates, and in hindsight I see that most of the controversial things he said were based in conservative Christianity. I would protest, and eventually reach my limit and hang up on him. Then one of us would call back to say good night and I love you.

But this time, there was no follow-up conversation. We hugged goodbye at the café, and didn’t talk to each other again for six years.

***

My father was raised Catholic, my mother Southern Baptist. Disillusioned, they raised me without religion. In our household, there was a lot of compassion and kindness, plenty of conversations about making good choices, and no talk at all about sins.

Once I told my mother that I had been feeling guilty about not keeping better in touch with someone. She tilted her face in concern.

“Do you often feel this way?” she asked. “Guilty?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

Perplexed, she wondered why. She had been brought up guilt-ridden, to the extent that she still couldn’t step foot in a church without crying, and had resolved to raise me differently.

And she did.

I told her about Kristyn before there was anything between us. We were walking together on a trail in the East Bay town where I grew up. I said, “I have a crush on a girl,” and she said, “Oh, yeah? Tell me about her.”

So I told her. She sits in the front row. She raises her hand like this. When she talks, she sounds so thoughtful; she takes long pauses; everything she says is smart. She has dimples and wears glasses and last week, when we slid past each other in an aisle, she smiled at me and touched my elbow.

My relationship with Kristyn didn’t catapult me into a period of self-reflection or soul-searching. I didn’t grapple with what it meant, because it was the most obvious thing in the world: I met someone. I fell in love with her.

I remember being nervous telling some friends, and I remember the sadness I felt when I heard how my Catholic grandmother cried at the news. But now, over a decade later, every time my grandmother sees Kristyn she clasps both of her hands in her own. She looks at us from her chair in the TV room and tells us how darling we are. When, the Christmas before last, we told her I was pregnant, she said it was a miracle. She thanked God.

***

In October of 2011, I visited a Minnesota school that had chosen my first novel as a school-wide read. Champlin Park High School was part of the Anoka-Hennepin district.

“You may have heard about us in the news,” said one of the school’s librarians who was also the founder of the reading committee. She went on to explain that there had been eight suicides among students in the district over two years. It’s common knowledge that LGBT kids are at a higher risk for suicide, but education and intervention around this was complicated by a district-wide policy: staff members were forbidden to state a position on homosexuality, and therefore could not protect their gay students.

Now the district was being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. And I was being warned that there could be protests about my novel, which had gay characters. Fortunately, there were no such protests, but when my scheduled hour with the school’s Gay Straight Alliance arrived, I was grateful to have been informed about what they were facing.

These were kids who had lost their friends. They were kids we worried for.

We sat in a big circle in the library: a diverse and eager group of teens, their two brave faculty advisers, and the committed librarians who made this meeting possible.

The students told me that they read my book really quickly. They said the lesbian characters were their favorites. And then early in the hour, a girl raised her hand.

“I hope this isn’t a personal question,” she said. “But I might have heard somewhere that you might not be exactly straight.”

I laughed. “Well,” I said. “I have a wife, so yes, you heard correctly.”

And then our conversation shifted. The students wanted to hear about my life. They wanted to hear about San Francisco. I’ve always lived in the Bay Area, but as I described it to them I felt like I was describing an enchanted land. From what I’ve heard, Minneapolis has a thriving gay community. But even though these kids lived only twenty miles from the city, they lived under the reign of Michele Bachmann, who has represented their district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2007. Two months after my visit, Bachmann held a town hall meeting in Iowa as part of her campaign for the presidency and when asked by a high school student why same-sex couples couldn’t get married, replied, “Well, they can get married, but they abide by the same laws as everyone else. They can marry a man if they’re a woman or they can marry a woman if they’re a man.”

I had my own experience with that sentiment in the form of California’s Proposition 8, banning gay marriage a month after Kristyn and I had said our vows. But the students didn’t want to hear about that as much as they wanted to know if it was true that gay people were everywhere in San Francisco. If we held hands in public. I was a high school teacher at the time, and they asked if the school knew about Kristyn and me.

“Yes,” I told them. “Everyone knows.”

In spite of everything they’d been through, in spite of the fact that they went to school in a district that forbade discussion of a trait inherent to who they were, their faces shone with hope.

That night, alone in my hotel room, I decided that my next novel would be about two girls who fell in love. I didn’t know what the story would be yet; I didn’t know who the characters were. But I could give these teens something in writing that I wasn’t able to guarantee in life: a happy ending.

***

The book was going to be simple, the way that love can be simple.

I soon had a narrator, Emi, the daughter of academics, living in Los Angeles, interning for a movie studio, pining after an ex-girlfriend who broke her heart. I had always wanted to write a mystery, so I thought of a classic premise: a letter discovered in the house of a dead man. It only followed that the letter would lead Emi to new love.

The love interest, Ava, took time to get right. To extend the mystery, I wanted her to be a runaway, so I thought hard about what might drive her to leave. Holed up in my friend’s Portland, OR apartment while she was out of the country, I researched Los Angeles shelters and learned that many “runaways” are actually cast away by their parents or guardians. I found that 20% of homeless youth are LGBT kids, and when I sought firsthand accounts, I kept stumbling upon religion.

It was winter, and Portland was rainy and gray. I made tea and listened to the radiator’s hum as I streamed documentaries on Netflix, trying to learn about Christianity and its position on homosexuality. I learned about the history of Exodus, International, the now defunct gay-conversion organization; about Hell Houses, performances meant to warn people against sins by depicting the suffering of the sinners, a staple of which is a gay character who lies on a hospital bed in agony, dying of AIDS; about a Jewish lesbian whose brother cuts off all ties with her because his interpretation of being “born again” involves turning away from his past and the people in it.

These were far from nuanced examinations of Christianity, but they certainly were striking ones. The footage I watched felt shocking and real, but when I tried to apply the sentiments to my novel, it felt ridiculous. I talked to my mom on the phone about leaving her church and she described a loss of faith. When I got back home, I took a twenty-one-year-old former Jehovah’s Witness I knew out to lunch. I expected her to tell me that she didn’t believe in the doctrine she’d been taught all her life, but that wasn’t the case at all. She still believed in everything she’d learned in church, but her living situation had gotten complicated and she’d had to escape. Now she was in love with a man who was not a Jehovah’s Witness, and they had been living together in sin. They wanted to get married, but if she did, she’d be leaving the church forever.

This girl and I had spent a lot of time together over the past couple years—she’d been part of some of my film projects—and even though she wholly believed that the Apocalypse was imminent and she’d be forfeiting her place in paradise if she didn’t reconcile with the church, she was confused about other things.

“Like you,” she said. “I was always taught that being gay was wrong, but when I spend time with you and Kristyn, I don’t feel like you’re wrong.”

***

Eventually, I finished a draft of my book.

My writing group, four friends and I who went through an MFA program together, read an early draft, and it sparked a debate.

My deeply Christian friend was distressed and wrote me a thoughtful and passionate letter about faith and the Christian concept of grace. She wrote,

I suspect that if the “Christians” who are saying hateful things about homosexuality (or any number of other politically-charged issues) ever sat down and really read and studied the Bible (i.e. taking it within its historical context and not just cherry-picking verses to suit their needs), they would see how far their behavior is from the kind of love and compassion that Jesus and all of the prophets preached.

To her, the religion in my book sounded “like a cult, the kind of extremism that most churches are very wary of.”

Another member who spent her early adulthood in lesbian relationships had an entirely different view. She told us about being forced to wait outside of her girlfriend’s house, banned from stepping foot inside by the girlfriend’s evangelical mother. In her opinion, I had come pretty close to getting it right.

Soon after, another friend read it.

“Clearly,” she said, “you are writing from a place of hurt. And I understand that, but if it stays this way you’re going to alienate some of your readers, and I want everyone to read this book.”

I didn’t think of myself as bitter. I thought of myself as fortunate. But hearing this feedback made me wonder.

***

All around me were contradictions.

There was Kristyn’s Christian aunt, who told my mother-in-law that she had to sacrifice her morals to attend our wedding. And then there was my Christian aunt, who flew across the country to be there. Perhaps most strikingly, there was Michele Bachmann, presiding over the lives of the kids at Champlin Park, saying that she came to the decision to introduce a state amendment banning gay marriage through prayer, and then there were the educators who chose my book, chose me, and invited me to help them in their pursuit of showing these kids that they were valued. They wore crosses around their necks and asked to see photos of my wife. They mentioned their churches and invited me to stay in their homes.

Many of the details of my hour with the GSA kids have blurred now, but others remain perfectly preserved. Like the boy who told me that even though he’d known he was gay for years, he would never come out to his terminally ill mother.

I asked why, and he said, “She’s very religious.”

***

I thought I could fix my novel.

True, I needed Ava to have the kind of mother who would reject her in order for her to run away, but I could add other examples of religion, gentler and more loving examples, to show the other sides. Maybe Ava would feel a hollowness due to her new, godless life. Maybe Charlotte, Emi’s best friend, went to church regularly and would invite Ava to go with her, and Ava would see how inclusive other churches would be. Maybe Jamal, Ava’s best friend from the shelter, would quote Bible passages, beautiful ones about love and compassion.

Or maybe Charlotte could be Jewish. Maybe Emi’s mom could be Muslim. Maybe my book could be full of so many ways of understanding religion that any reader would feel represented.

In terms of inclusivity, I was really onto something.

Artistically, these were among the worst ideas I’d ever had.

I toyed with existing scenes. I wrote new ones. And then I came to my senses and I deleted that draft.

***

Throughout all of this, and still now, I’ve been trying to understand.

People don’t need religion to do good; nor do they need it to turn their backs on others. But the power of like-minded people in organized groups is a mighty one. The passage of Proposition 8 put the Mormon church in the spotlight. Of course, it was far from the only religious organization to support the campaign, but as over half of the 39 million dollars in support garnered by the proposition came from LDS members, it was the most prominent.

In the months that preceded our wedding and the month that followed, every time Kristyn and I went to my parents’ house, nestled in the foothills below Oakland’s Mormon temple, we had to choose between driving on MacArthur Street, where members of the church gathered to wave pro-Prop 8 signs, or down the hill past the temple itself, where I was convinced that each car that pulled in or out of its grounds carried people who hated us.

It took me a long time to shake that feeling.

A few days ago, in the throes of writing this essay, I emailed a Mormon writer friend who I didn’t yet know at the time of Prop 8 to ask her for her perspective. I knew that she had a gay brother with whom she was very close, and I knew from the way she spoke of my marriage and my child that she honored our family. She wrote,

When we are children, one of the songs we are taught in church says, “Jesus says love everyone, treat them kindly, too. When your heart is filled with love, others will love you.” And that, to me, is the core of Christianity. You treat others with love and compassion, you do the best you can personally, and that’s that.

So when I would attend church—a church that had taught me to be kind and love others and try to emulate the Savior—and hear hate and fear-mongering from a select few (not the majority, but certainly loud enough), for the first time in my life I felt like I was in the wrong place.

On election night, as the hour grew later and Proposition 8 was going strong, my parents closed the shutters to block the temple’s glow. I excused myself and went downstairs. Found myself sobbing in the bathroom.

My Mormon friend wrote, “It was a very hard time for me to be a member of my church.”

***

Ultimately, I decided that the relation of religion to same-sex relationships was too huge, too complex, to be relegated to one aspect of a character’s back-story.

I reworked and revised my novel, and the religious elements faded until all that was left were a few scattered sentences, an indication of what Ava endured before she left home.

It was the right call.

Because when I think about a love story, I think of how seeing Kristyn walk into a classroom felt like catching a glimpse of a beautiful future. Of driving back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge, from my place to her place, the music on loud, the windows rolled down. Of planning a road trip before we’d even kissed. Of kissing for the first time while holding a map of America, daring to imagine that our lives together could be just as expansive.

Because, since the beginning, it was meant to be a simple love story. A yes-there-are-gay-people-everywhere story. A yes-we-hold-hands-in-public story.

Because when I was nineteen and falling in love, “sin” was a word that didn’t occur to me.