Please Don’t Friend Me.
You’ll be disillusioned. Let’s keep up the façade.
Once a month, a close relative and I email. She and I are 17 years apart and different in lots of ways. Politics, religion. But we’re family and we both love dogs, travel, nature, laughing, books, wine. A long list.
Last year she casually asked if my daughter Taylor had a boyfriend. I’d been waiting and a little worried. Taylor is bisexual and has a girlfriend.
My relative is super devout, and her religion isn’t LGBTQ-friendly.
Worse. It’s the high octane homophobic kind, with “abomination” and all that hate crap I won’t tolerate. No matter how much I love you. I’ll end our relationship.
Although I don’t know about my relative’s particular church. To be fair, there’s degrees of homophobia in fundamentalism-land.
But this is what her religion says about the gays:
“We have maintained a strong position against premarital, extramarital, and deviant sex, including homosexual and lesbian relationships, refusing to accept the loose moral standards of our society. We commit ourselves to maintaining this disciplined lifestyle with regard to our bodies.”
Because LGBTQ and “deviant” should never be in the same sentence, I knew I’d come out punching if…
