Secrecy and Honesty
The following is an anonymous submission to Reaching Out:
I am many things to many people. So many that in some ways I often forget myself. I was raised to believe that the world is a scary place, which is why lies are the only way to survive. As an adult, I crave honesty as if it were hot tea on a cold, dark day.
I was raised in the Catholic church. My family attended Mass once every Sunday and shelled out extra money for my sisters and I to attend the parish school. From kindergarten through 8th grade, I took it all in. I sang in the church choir. I marched in the church sponsored pro-life campaigns. I cried when I missed my chance to see the Pope on his visit to my city. I knew all the words, all the motions, all the right things to be a Good Catholic.
While my family looked like the Good Catholic Family from the outside, inside we were torn apart by violence. My parents were not good at being parents. I saw church as a way out of my adrenaline filled, fight or flight existence. I also saw church as a way to ‘force’ my parents into good behavior. Church was my haven, my salvation, my peace, and my love.
I held onto that refuge until I was raped at fifteen and felt like I wasn’t good enough for the church anymore. I wasn’t pure, I hadn’t followed the rules, and I no longer deserved the beautiful divinity the church shined into my life. For all that I had poured into my church, the leaders had taught me all the rules without any of the grace. I had been in love with the church, not in love with God.
By the time I was eighteen, I realized I was bisexual. I began an intense and deeply committed relationship with another woman. I had no crisis of belief over this realization, though my upbringing told me I was broken and inherently wrong. As I thought that I no longer had any belief, there was no conflict. I was ready to fight for the right to say the church itself was a corrupted system, though I couldn’t quite eradicate my desire to believe in the divine.
At the same time, my mother was dying of cancer. My girlfriend was around our house a lot, accepted as my “best friend.” And here, finally, is the first crisis of imbalance between secrecy and honesty.
For all that my family was unhealthy, they were still my family. Faced with the impending and inevitable of my mother, I felt I didn’t have much time left to come out to my family. I couldn’t put it off indefinitely without the real risk of missing the chance to come out to my mom. And coming out to mom meant telling everyone — I knew there was no way she was going to keep it to herself. More than anything, I craved feeling known by this woman who had birthed me — and so I told her, and she told the rest of them.
In my unhealthy family, coming out didn’t go well. Though my parents had also stopped going to church by then, they still held onto “Good Catholic Values.” My family believed that I was broken. Sin filled. The priest was called in to talk with me — I didn’t listen. Everyone spent as much of my time as possible explaining to me why my path was carrying me to Hell — I told them I didn’t believe in Hell anymore. Rules were made about how and when I could see my girlfriend — I frequently broke them.
At my mother’s funeral, a Catholic Mass, my girlfriend was seated in the last pew in the church, farthest from the aisle, in my family’s attempt to deny what I knew to be true about myself. The priest had issued ultimatums regarding the situation. I wasn’t to talk with my girlfriend while in the church. I wasn’t to come within touching distance. So, on one of the hardest days of my life, I was alone in church. I sat with a family that wouldn’t accept me, in front of a follower of God who condemned me, and I shed tears without end.
I could have chosen to keep my secret, but my need to be known drove me to honesty.
A few years after the death of my mother, my girlfriend and I went separate ways. It wasn’t easy or amicable, but our connection has never evaporated. Many years later, she is my best friend. I love her in ways that I’m too limited to express. After our separation, I found myself falling in love with a man. Eventually, I married him. He’s a good person and I love him deeply. We’ve been married for almost 20 years, and we’re still good together.
In the middle of those changes, I began to realize that no matter my thoughts on the church, I needed God. I started feeling my way through building a relationship with God that didn’t depend on another human being interpreting God for me. My eyes were opened. I found God in the depths of the woods, while I sat quietly and listened to the trees talk in the wind. I found God in the majesty of the rolling grasses along the highways of my travels. I found God in the love and affection my friends showed me. The more I looked, the more I saw the Divine — and it was Beautiful. My soul had been starving, and God fed me unceasingly.
Back while I was still in a romantic relationship with a woman, I didn’t seek out a community of believers. I couldn’t fathom of a group that would accept my sexuality and faith, and I was no longer willing to give up one or the other.
Marrying a man, though, took some of the pressure off my sexuality. With “proof” that I had been “fixed” my family has conveniently forgotten that my best friend used to be my lover. With a person of opposite sex by my side, legally married in the eyes of the law and God, I had a convenient excuse to just let go of my sexuality. I didn’t need to work out the balance of secrecy and honesty, because the decisions were made. My husband had been a long-time friend of my girlfriend, so he knew about my past. He has never felt threatened by it. Rather, he loves and respects who I am. It became simpler to find a church group. There was no need to share the secrets of my past in order to be honest about my present.
Those things are true, but only to a point. Because I am still myself — a bisexual woman, married to a man, who believes in the Christian God. And sometimes, I encounter fellow believers who make clear their harsh, judgmental positions on sexuality, marriage, and the intersection of it all with faith. Most often, those moments sneak up on me, so I’m unprepared for the crisis of secrecy and honesty.
Too often, I find myself at a loss for the next steps and so I stay silent. And each time I am silent, I leave feeling unknown. My secrets boil up inside me and threaten to choke me. I try to take comfort in knowing that at some point, I may be a bridge between two views. Or that by keeping silent in the moment, I will have time to process my thoughts and feelings so that in the future I can respond in a way that still meets my standard of behavior. But really, it just feels like lies and unknowing and I become The Secret.
Every once in awhile, I have the opportunity to share with someone my belief that my relationship with a woman was good in the eyes of God. It is the closest I can bring myself to saying: I am bisexual, and I am loved by God just the way I am. I am not striving to be different, praying to be changed, or cultivating a life that won’t allow me to “slip into sin.” I’m simply loving people the way I was made by God to love people.
Still, I hide. I currently work with a conservative organization. The work is good and the people are kind, but they wouldn’t hear this truth about me very well. So I swallow the truth back down and write my words anonymously. The desires of my heart — to be known and loved — go unmet by many of the people who call me ‘friend.’ The church we had been attending for seven years has closed, and I have been putting off finding a new one.
I want to walk into a church that welcomes and supports the LGBTQ+ community, but I am so afraid. I’m afraid that community won’t accept me. I’m afraid that my work will learn about the church community and reject me. I crave the honesty of just being God’s creation and worshipping God in fellowship with others. The secrets keep me home, instead.
I am comforted in knowing that God knows my heart. He Sees me, Hears me, and Loves me. For the rest, I am still left trying to balance my secrets and my truths.
Reaching Out is a publication dedicated to gathering LGBTQ stories from people of all faiths under one roof and around one table. Please share this with all your Medium friends and hit that 👏 button below to spread it around even more!
