What I’ve Chosen to Leave Behind
When I came out to my family a year ago — via group text, which tells you everything you need to know about us — I identified as two things that seemed to conflict with that reality: Catholic and Republican.
Having just passed that anniversary, only the former has stuck with me. I didn’t think that coming out would do anything except improve my dating life, now that I was being more honest with myself. And while it did that, albeit in stops and starts, the impact was far more profound than I could have guessed.
Maybe it was the historical moment. Maybe I underestimated the importance of understanding my sexual orientation. Maybe it was the byproduct of old-fashioned Catholic guilt. In any case, I can draw a line directly from the 2016 election to my decision to come out, and from there to personal growth I could have never imagined at the time.
I come from a family that’s fairly typical of the post-industrial Northeast, insofar as we are large (more than 30 first cousins on my mother’s side alone), geographically compact (nearly everyone lives within 150 miles of my grandparents’ home in Albany), and Catholic (they needed someone to work in the mills and factories).
Where my family is more unusual is our closeness. In spite of our size, we gather as a family twice a year, adding new members every time; my siblings and I have been able to maintain positive relationships with most of my aunts, uncles, and further extended family; and I can correctly place (most) my cousins’ birthdays on the calendar and in age order. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized this was unusual in the 21st Century, and frankly it has been off-putting to various friends and significant others over the years, even if none of us would trade it for the world. We support one another through everything, from weddings to funerals to picking me up from the hospital after a bike crash.
It is, in theory, an ideal environment for a gay kid. In theory.
Officially, the Catholic Church isn’t exactly thrilled with the way I turned out. Officially, my sexuality is an “intrinsic disorder” and a “condition.” Officially, I’m supposed to remain chaste, because the way I feel and express romantic love isn’t what the folks who wrote the Catechism had in mind.
I am blessed to have never had anyone try and convert me, to have an exceedingly supportive family, and to live somewhere without legal restrictions on my existence. But none of that prevented me from living in the closet for the better part of fifteen years. Like many of my fellow LGBTQ individuals, I realized around the age of 11 or 12 that I was fundamentally different from most of my classmates. My instinct was to hide from that feeling, to deflect it. On some level this was a survival tactic. I attended a conservative Catholic school in a diocese that didn’t allow female altar servers until 2006, where the word “faggot” was used liberally on the playground, where one of the favored recess games was a variation on football called “Smear the Queer,” and where George W. Bush’s social conservatism was trumpeted in a borderline violation of the Johnson Amendment.
I left that school after sixth grade for a public middle school, and we moved back to New York State a couple years later, two decisions that have left me in an eternal debt of gratitude to my parents. My middle school was perhaps one of the most diverse in the country and accordingly progressive, while my high school counts among its alumni a former college town mayor who was arrested for performing same-sex marriages in 2004. I went to a Jesuit university that has welcomed Fr. James Martin on several occasions, then lived in DC (fine, Arlington, whatever) for the second half of the Obama Administration, including the Obergefell decision. I had gay and lesbian friends, colleagues, and improv teammates. I hung out in Logan Circle and Shaw. I discovered Broad City.
Throughout all this, I remained closeted and dated women. Clearly there was something besides self-preservation at play here. The fact that Donald Trump’s election prodded me into coming out is, if anything, the opposite of that instinct.
It isn’t as though I was unaware of my preferences, urges, however you want to word it. I knew that I didn’t have crushes on the girls in my class, that it wasn’t lingerie ads that caught my attention, that something about how I was living felt like a fraud.
But to my mind, I was living the life that I was supposed to live. I have always been one of the “smart” kids, the “good” kids. I did well in school, took all the AP classes, rarely got into trouble, went to a good college, and worked with Important People in Washington, D.C. It certainly can’t have helped that I was a Jeopardy! champion in 7th grade. There was a sense of obligation, an idea that it was somehow my duty to live out an picture-perfect life as a result, and that meant a wife and kids. Through no one’s fault, I was simply built to think like this.
Catholicism, as taught to American schoolchildren in the 1990s and 2000s, is really not a good fit for this mindset. As others have discussed in this publication, it is a religion that emphasizes the experience of others and makes sure you know the world isn’t just about you and your universe. On the one hand, this is why Catholic parishes, schools, religious orders, and charities are such a positive force on the world. On the other hand, if you’re predisposed to self-denial and self-criticism — I had convinced myself by the age of eight that I was smart enough to completely avoid sin, thus making any errors all the worse — it can be utterly miserable.
If my Catholicism made it harder for me to come to terms with my sexuality, the addition of my involvement with the Republican Party made it damn near impossible. As with the Church, my party affiliation was largely a matter of family tradition: my grandparents voted against JFK in spite of his religion, several of my aunts and uncles worked in the party apparatus, and I liked Bob Dole because he and my dad share a first name. (OK, that may have been a coincidence.)
Growing up, I idolized Reagan, the Bush family, and yes, a pre-raging insanity Rudy Giuliani. By college I was fully supportive of the more moderate, McCain wing of the Republican Party, and while living in DC had the opportunity to work with and get to know some of the wonderful folks pushing for some semblance of marriage equality in the GOP.
Even when I came out, I stayed registered with the party and kept involved in the local apparatus. But unlike my religion, my political party never gave back. There was no sense of accomplishment, no peace of mind, no fulfillment that came from it. Good people kept leaving or being pushed out and exclusion reigned. Completing a process that began when I moved from DC to New York in early 2016, I deregistered from all political parties (becoming a “blank” in New York State parlance) this August. I have no regrets.
If I kept the politics section of this piece brief, it’s because this is a religion blog. Being a Republican, odd as it sounds, was truly an integral part of how I identified for a very long time. That über-progressive high school? I took great joy in requesting microfiche copies of National Review and subjecting my freshman English teacher to a longwinded comparison of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, including a tortured-yet-prescient critique of NAFTA. I was thrilled when John McCain picked Sarah Palin in 2008. (If my future husband is reading this, I’m sorry.) Somewhere I still have my Meg Whitman for Governor t-shirt. Point is, I didn’t leave on some flight of fancy.
But while that was a real part of who I was, the fact that leaving the Republican Party was so much easier for me than leaving the Catholic Church — which I don’t plan on doing — that it seriously clarified what is important to me. At first, I had the same reason for sticking with the Church as I did with the GOP: This is part of who I am, and I don’t want to let the intolerant jerks win and control the agenda. While I stand by the sentiment of that idea, it is perhaps a bit grandiose: no day soon will I have any influence over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or the RNC Platform Committee.
The reality, of course, is that identifying with any group that doesn’t fully support who you are is going to be tiresome. I cannot pretend that there aren’t huge categories of people who experience more severe, more exhausting discrimination than I do, but that doesn’t mean I have to endure it without it being worth my time and effort.
And that wasn’t happening with the Republican Party. It was with the Catholic Church.
My faith, I found out, means a lot to me. My faith means the intellectual heritage of Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Ávila. It means the fearlessness of Joan of Arc and Ignatius of Loyola. It means the radical compassion of Óscar Romero and Dorothy Day. It means the thousands upon thousands of nuns, priests, brothers, sisters, and laypeople who work every day to give back to the world around them. It means love, for everyone. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but nothing human is or can be.
Moreover, I know I am not the only or last Catholic kid to grow up ashamed of who they are, conditioned to think they are less than their family and friends, and made to feel that there is no place for them at church. That is simply untrue, and every time someone leaves Catholicism because of the institutional Church’s stance on LGBTQ rights, it’s another voice saying that no, there is no place in the Church for us. I know what it’s like to feel like that I am worthless, to consider myself a burden, to truly wish I had never been born. That is not my faith. I cannot do that to anyone else. I will not leave them behind.
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