Coming Out on Top
My journey from debilitating religious anxiety to being an out and proud gay man.
What to Expect
- Drinking the Grape Juice
- When World(view)s Collide
- Stealing the Show at Dinner
- Today—The Need for New Narratives
Note: I have met many out and proud queer folks who are also Christians of varying denominations. I acknowledge and affirm their experience and sense of the world, and encourage them to live as best as they know how. The story below is based on my own experience, research, and reflection on questions of religion and sexuality.
A Religious Mindset
I grew up in a good Southern Baptist church. I went on Sundays. I went on Wednesdays. I went early, and I stayed late. From the very beginning, I was enchanted by the stories of the Bible.
Adam and Eve made sense. Noah made sense. Jonah and the big fish made less sense, but it’s a fun story anyway.
The Bible’s characters, plots, and symbols were ingrained in me from early on not by overbearing parents, but by my affinity for books, for learning about the true nature of the universe, and for the sense of stability they gave.
I now recognize this sense of stability as a type of narrative stability—there was a large story with many characters, and my life could be interpreted as another cohesive plot within that story.
So, I threw myself into Christianity. I read commentaries, theological works, and church histories to flesh out the stories I had always known. In short, I was chugging the holy grape juice.
Everything came together so nicely. Sure, there were some theological debates along the way, but what’s a good story without a little conflict?
So I thought.
The real conflict, however, had been playing out deeper in my mind and body for years at this point.
While I distracted my mind with abstract arguments about the nature of the divine or the place of free will in human lives, almost every night ended with a despairing prayer to take away every queer part of myself.
When World(view)s Collide
Sleep-paralysis-inducing religious anxiety aside, I decided to go to a Baptist university upon graduating high school and study (you guessed it) religion. The abstract deliberations still held their sway, particularly the debates between protestant and Catholic theologies. So here I was, a completely traditional theologian in the making.
I would be the one to set the record straight, so to speak, on the conflicts that divided Christendom.
Again, so I thought.
After a semester—one single semester—I abandoned that plan and switched to a double major in philosophy and history.
I still focused on the conceptual pieces of religion but became more and more aware of just how much I did not fit into the overarching, cosmic narrative that everyone around me fit into so nicely.
I began studying some of the research on sexuality and Christianity and, while there were many studies suggesting that they could work together, none of them could convince me to abandon what billions of Christians held as a clear teaching of the church: that being gay was a ticket to hell.
Well, that sure won’t work.
Since I couldn’t fundamentally change how I thought about Christianity, I was left with a choice between accepting my fate as a denier of desire or abandoning the Christian narrative.
I began reading up on ethical theories and how sexuality could even be a moral issue. Moreover, I began to develop other qualms with the Biblical story on issues totally unrelated to sexuality. (Insert any number of examples from the Old Testament here.)
The more I thought, the clearer it became to me that my sexuality had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I was a good person or not. Now, my good Baptist upbringing taught me that my goodness didn’t matter anyways, but that, too, didn’t compute for how I was beginning to see the world.
In the end, I opted to abandon my faith even if I was never going to muster up the courage to come out simply because I couldn’t make sense of it anymore.
My story was falling apart.
Stealing the Show at Dinner
Here I am, an atheist. I never imagined that it could happen to me, of all people. However, that’s the power that narratives have over us. I couldn’t imagine a Christian story with a gay character. Therefore, I had to make a decision as to what narrative frame could better accommodate me—as a gay man.
That choice, however, was not entirely planned.
I had just got back from summer vacation. My friends and I had planned a dinner at one of their apartments to celebrate our being all back together and the start of our senior year.
As it turned out, dinner would be much more eventful than I had anticipated.
On our way to their apartment, one of my girlfriends (in a gal-pal way) expressed her romantic feelings for me, and, being the person that I am, I couldn’t just simply tell her “no” without a good reason. That reason, of course, was that I was far more interested in Shawn Mendes’s new Calvin Klein photoshoot than having a girlfriend.
After an adrenaline-fueled conversation, we eventually pulled ourselves together and made it to dinner.
Everyone talked and finished preparing the table, silverware, and food. I took my seat at our small rectangular table, squished into a tiny spot on the back wall of the kitchen. I’m already a jittery person, but I must’ve been physically shaking at that point.
Everyone began cutting into the chicken and talking about how nice it was to be together again while I, the newly-minted homosexual, was steadily sweating as I pushed my food around my plate.
“Well, I came out,” I said.
The next few hours consisted of a series of smaller coming-outs to other friends. One moment in particular that stands out is the hug I got from another girl I had thought about “straightening out” for. Lucky for both of us that didn’t pan out.
The next few days consisted of coming out to other people, my male roommates, and a few of my professors who had helped me along the way.
The next few months, even up to a year after, consisted of coming out to friends from back home.
Within the next year or so, I came out to family members—a considerably tougher task. My parents, however, could not have been more loving and accepting of me for who I was. While I don’t regret how my story played out, I do realize that I shouldn’t have been concerned about their reaction in the slightest.
Luckily, I hardly experienced any pushback for my sexuality, at least from people I was close to. Sure there was the time a guy hanging out in our dorm felt it necessary to talk about how uncomfortable gay men made him. Sure, some of my religious professors counseled against the decision to leave Christianity for a good gay life. Sure, I still heard sermons about homosexuals brainwashing children. However, the vast majority of people, Christians might I add, simply accepted me for who I was.
Since that time, I have experienced a sort-of flourishing as a person. I graduated from college, got a big-person job, found love, and moved out of my parents’ house.
My story was rather easy after the intense decade-long internal struggle over my sexuality. I do consider myself incredibly lucky for being surrounded by so many understanding people, but the psychical drain growing up in the Christian South is hardly an easy thing to overcome.
Today—The Need for New Narratives
How many of you were surprised by anything in the story above? Probably not very many. That would make sense given the primacy of the Coming Out Narrative in the storytelling of the queer community. For the past few decades, it has clung on as the defining queer story because, well, it’s the moment when we define ourselves as queer people.
However, don’t you wish this was the last one ever written?
I don’t mean that queer folks should stay closeted, but that queer folks shouldn’t be made to feel the need to be closeted in the first place. We shouldn't have to come out at all. Of course, practical concerns make it necessary for many to pass as straight at the moment—but that’s the problem.
As queer people, we need more than coming out. We need stories that tell us how we can live our lives, what our possibilities are, what things we can value, and how we can exist in a world where we don’t feel at home.
Just as the Bible functioned for me as a kid, we need texts that can shape how we see the world—from our perspective.
We need new narratives that simply present our lives without sensationalizing, without assuming the primacy of the Straight Mind and our relationship to it, without having a standard plot structure based on sad closeted gay kids, those kids reaching a breaking point, and those kids coming out.
This post isn’t about dismantling the Christian story. Although leaving the faith was what worked for me, the very thing that makes us queers queer is our ability to bring together disparate aspects of our identity that the world says don’t belong together.
This post is about sharing one more queer story in hopes that it can help someone else begin to craft their own narrative telling of their life.
For anyone out there struggling to come out, there are other people like you, we have left our former lives feeling totally incoherent and fractured. And that’s fine. It gets better.
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