Dear Straight People, How Did Your Coming Out Go?
So in 2015 you made a video. You posted it on my birthday. Just a month after the rest of us got the right to marry legally here in the U.S.
In the style of a coming out video, you sat down and said you were here because you had something to say and were no longer afraid to say it. That you wanted to tell others like you that they were not alone.
To be honest, I watched your video and my faith nearly fell apart.
What I saw a couple years ago didn’t make me angry. There were no tears. No heart-wrenched prayers. There was only the empty ache and knowledge that the people I grew up with, whom I instinctively connected with wherever I found you, don’t feel that way about me. It was like living your whole life in a room believing it was a part of a beautiful castle in the hills, only to one day on your birthday open the door and find your room afloat on a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean.
But it has been a few years since I opened that door, and I have been wanting to follow up with you. To see how your coming out has gone.
It is tempting to see if our scars match. If you rub a hand up your arms and also feel a thousand tiny marks from a thousand desperate cuts. If your pillow is stained with the tears that accompanied you to sleep at night as you prayed the desperate prayers for change.
If your pastor sat you down in his office and calmly told your parents you were going to hell. If he called you inherently disordered and an abomination to your face. If your parents took you to a place that promised they could change you with enough prayer and fasting and faith in an all-powerful God and then told you the reason you haven’t changed is you don’t love him enough? After years of this did they finally admit they don’t actually know anyone who has changed? But then still insist you’re incapable of love?
Did strangers on the street call you slurs for the way you dress or did you get turned down for loans and apartments and jobs for the way you talk or laugh.
I was wondering if you were turned away from the hospital when you were sick. Or did you die like my friend’s brother, in a gurney, under the gaze of a disgusted doctor who refused to diagnose you as anything other than gay?
Did they kick you out of the military when you volunteered to lay your life down for the country? Were you expelled from your schools, your universities? Did they arrest you on the streets and in bars and restrooms and in your own home? Were you raped for your beliefs? Tortured? Were you murdered?
Did you have to sit in silence as your sobbing mother said you being this way was her greatest fear because it meant all the world would hate you and you were no longer safe? That she could not protect you from the ways they wanted to hurt you. Did you have nothing you could offer to ease her pain and fears except to quietly admit that you understood?
Have you seen videos of pastors around the country giving sermons about how people like you should be rounded up and killed? Did you agonize over how you could be a part of a religion that says such terrible things and yet realize if you leave you would just be proving their point, that you never were really one of them to begin with?
Did the people you love most in this world sit you down at sixteen and tell you to leave the house and never come back? Did they tell you they loved you, but they couldn’t be around you? Did they shut the door behind you and go about their lives as you sat on the front porch and wondered where a sixteen year old is supposed to go from here?
Is that the cost you have endured for coming out as believing marriage is only real when it is between one man and one woman?
Because you realize that is why the queer community came out to you first, right? The world assumed we were straight and cisgendered and would fall in love with a nice girl or boy you would approve of and we finally had to tell you we can’t. Not that we didn’t want to. Not that we didn’t think it was a nice idea or intellectually couldn’t get behind it. That we literally can’t. And we did this knowing full well all of the above could or would happen in return.
That is what it meant for us to come out to you. Did it end up meaning the same thing for you to come out to us?
Watching that video you made a couple years ago, I was shocked. Is that what you think it is like to be gay in this world? Like a mildly disagreeable political belief?
Because it is 2018 and you can still believe everything you said in your video and be President of the United States, hold a majority in both chambers of Congress, and four out of five seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. Likely the majority there too within a couple years.
Now I know that your point in the video is not that you can no longer control gay people’s lives like you used to, though of course in so many ways you can. Your point was that you believe there is a stigma against you for believing that you should be able to control us.
Where we live. What jobs we hold. Who we love.
So many conservatives still believe in the name of religion that the greatest bigotry in the country is directed at them.
So great is this prejudice, that you have to come out, tearfully, looking straight into the camera with a dramatic pause and say how much you wish you could change, but you just can’t.
The thing is, you’re not actually alone. Which was your main concern, I assume, since it was the title of your video. Not alone, either in numbers or power or actual good standing within your church.
And I am guessing your beliefs on marriage have not cost you as much as you expected. Certainly not as much as they have cost us.
Because of that disparity, that gulf between the consequences of those beliefs for you and the consequences for the queer community, I have to say, a lot of us saw your video as mocking. If not intentionally so, then at least in a callous, careless way. More interested in scoring a political point — no they’re the bigots! — than in how that might affect those of us your beliefs were about.
Here is what I think.
I don’t believe you are bad people. I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas. The idea that you don’t think I’m capable or deserving of marriage doesn’t surprise me in the least. Believe me, I’m used to you saying it.
I just think you made a video in very poor taste. I don’t believe you realize just how hurtful the way you said it was. Making it seem like the same outcomes were on the line for you as they are for us.
And frankly, that is just because you don’t know us. There is a whole world of lives that are lived after your sermon, your Facebook post, your throwaway comment at dinner. The consequences of so many of your beliefs are felt out of your sight, by people you will never meet. Or know deeply but never realize they toil under the weight of your convictions.
So my challenge is simple. Listen to us.
Not as a project. Not as pawns to be used when you say you “have gay friends.” But because you want to learn what you missed when you said you knew us enough to make that video.
I used to think I was afloat alone on driftwood in the sea. But I suppose we all are. And it is impossible to understand one another if we just let the currents pull us apart. My invitation is to join me on my little floating room I once thought kept me from the rest of you. I’ll put on a cup of coffee and we can talk. Heart to heart.
Then neither of us will be alone.
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