We were in Chicago in early 2010 for the weekend, a belated anniversary trip from my brother, with my brother and his wife.  I had brought a book with me (I know – that’s how good it looked) and I read it on the way in and out of the city, and any spare minute in the hotel room.

It was Take This Bread by Sara Miles and it rocked my world.  It was about a lesbian (who was an atheist) who randomly walked into a church, took the Eucharist, met Jesus – and stayed a lesbian.

Finishing the book left me with 2 options – do I dismiss this utterly compelling conversion story, or do I rethink what I’ve always believed?  It felt very self-righteous and arrogant for me to decide her encounter with Jesus wasn’t genuine, that her turning her life upside down to literally follow him wasn’t real.  And yet, if her relationship with him was real, and she was still ‘choosing’ to be a lesbian – how did that work?

Was it possible that homosexuality and Jesus could co-exist?  How could someone who represented everything ‘sinful’ follow Jesus?

I couldn’t reconcile everything I had been taught with the truth of this story.  And because I had already started down the path of questioning and rethinking my beliefs, it was much easier for me to seriously reconsider everything I had been taught about ‘The Gays’.

*****

A few months before that, the large city where our church was located had a non-discrimination ordinance up for a vote.  We showed up to church one morning to se a Vote No sign in the church yard.  I asked if that was legal, and when the lawyer elder said it was, I told him to mark me down as someone who disagreed with the placement.

At that point I didn’t really know if I agreed or disagreed with gay marriage and ‘special rights’, like the ordinance.  But I knew that I didn’t think the church should be in the business of restricting civil liberties, and I thought that sign put up a huge ‘no gays wanted’ message, which I thought was anti-Jesus.

After that, it was a slow drip of progressive theology, blogs and books that slowly helped me understand what equality really was, the downside of not having it, and the myth of ‘choosing’, but it all still felt theoretical and nothing that really concerned me.

*****

When I was in high school, I would watch Will and Grace on Thursday nights.  I remember one night watching it and having my mom question why I was even watching that kind of show.  I remember saying ‘I don’t really like watching this because I don’t want to get used to gays or think it’s normal.  But it’s so funny.’

*****

At the end of last June, my husband and I were in Chicago for a work trip and squeezed as much vacation time in as we could.  We went to a Blue Man Group show, and wanted to go out to eat afterwards.  The Briar Street Theater happened to be right next to Boystown, and after almost accidentally going into a gay strip bar, we ended up at a nearby restaurant.  This also happened to be the day that the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, and a couple of days before the Pride Parade, so rainbow flags were flying everywhere.  And as we sat and ate one of the best meals I’ve ever had, I realized that the me of 5 years ago probably would not have even walked down that street with all ‘the gays’.

*****

I understand those ‘no baking cakes’ type of people.  That’s the environment I was raised in.  You vote with your dollars.  Spending money at a restaurant would have been an endorsement of their ‘lifestyle’.  Walking down a street filled with rainbow flags would legitimize their existence, so you just didn’t.

By this point I was for full civil equality, opposed efforts to discriminate, and strongly disagreed with how the evangelical church as a whole treated gay people.

But I didn’t know exactly what it should look like for a church to embrace all people.  I still wondered how people who sincerely believed it was a sin should handle non-straight people in their churches.  I was wary of advocating for full inclusion in the church because I didn’t know how to handle that tension.

And then I received Pastrix for my birthday last fall.  As I read through Nadia’s experiences and learned about her church, the thing that struck me over and over was, ‘if they are not welcomed as they are at church, then where should they be welcomed?’  If LGBTQ people are not good enough for church, then something is wrong with church.

“It was important to me that the House for All Sinners and Saints be a place where no one had to check at the door their personalities or the parts of our stories that seemed ‘unchristian.'” – Pastrix

I still have books to read and I haven’t settled every little argument in my head.  But what I do know is that there is a long destructive history here, and I was formed by the worst of it.  I have to acknowledge that and do what I can to ensure I don’t perpetuate it.

I don’t know that I’m any closer to an answer to Kenny’s question about why this matters to me, except to say that I know what it’s like to be in a group of people, anxiously wondering if your real self is welcome.  I deeply empathize with people who feel shame for existing in a way that people don’t understand.  And when those experiences are engineered and sustained in Jesus’ name, it just pisses me off.

We need each other.  We need our stories of damaged and damaging.  We need our opposing viewpoints and the tension and the wrestling they should bring.  We need to know the effects of our beliefs, the good and the bad.  We need to know how our lives impact other people, how our money and our votes change people’s lives.  When one segment of the population is rejected, it does damage to all of us.

“This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than ‘inclusion.’  Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing ‘them’ to join ‘us’ – like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own…..I continually need the stranger, the foreigner, the ‘other’ to show me water in the desert.  I need to hear, ‘here is water in the desert, so what is to keep me, the eunuch, from being baptized?’  Or me the queer or me the intersex or me the illiterate or me the neurotic or me the overeducated or me the founder of Focus on the Family…..We all can be converted anew by the stranger…” – Pastrix

Gays, AIDS, and the Church

My Story: Part 1
Fear and Silence: Part 2
The Religious Right: Part 3
Oh, the Humanity: Part 4
Modern-Day Colonialism: Part 5
Africa, Russia, the Past, and Now: Part 6
The ‘Gay Agenda’: Part 7
The Rest of My Story: Part 8
Resources: Part 9