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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Jesus Loves Me (Just Not In That Way)
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I’ve struggled with myself most of my life. I grew up in a Christian home, with a good Christian mother. I grew up believing in Christian ideals: equality, and justice, freedom and compassion. And I grew up confused, because I wasn’t the way I was told I should be. Girls have never been- or women, I should add- fascinating to me. Their stereotyped banalities stacked already against them, I never found a reason to seek an interest in their physicalities.
Which is not to say that as a boy I always knew, either. I was more comfortable with men, and boys, but what boy isn’t? It wasn’t until one year in church camp, before I was old enough for erections but not before I’d heard jokes and rumors. I was staying up late, sitting at the camp fire with another boy, Aaron, and the night was cold and the fire perhaps built too weakly for fear it would break out of our inexperienced control. And Aaron curled against me for the cold, and my heart beat like horses’ hooves at play, and I was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the crush of his body against mine, and I knew that was right- that was me. Of course, it was years before I understood what that meant. My good Christian mother wasn’t exactly campaigning for grandchildren at that age, so her admonitions of chastity worked easily against my growing desire. I won’t bore you with the trivialities of my self-discovery, my coming out and its resulting backlash. I won’t even bother to explain why I’ve tried to tow the line I have, save to say I believe in the God of my mother. Her solution, or rather our minister’s, was conversion therapy- designed to convert me into a heterosexual. And at first I laughed: I was supposed to avoid doing “gay” things like hang out at art museums, operas, symphonies or discotechs, and was instead instructed to participate in sports. I told my mother, “They’ve got it- I’m attracted to men precisely because I haven’t played with enough balls in my life.” She didn’t laugh. But I tried the therapy. I dated women from the church- even brought a handful of them home- though I was never able to really enjoy it. And at eighteen months I slipped. I woke up cold, shivering, in fact. I got in a hot shower, but no matter how much I turned the handle, I couldn’t get warm. I bundled myself like it was winter in Michigan (even though it was spring in Colorado) and went outside, for a walk. I stopped in a bar, thirsty, and perhaps convinced that a shot or two of bourbon could be enough to warm me. I ended up drinking with a man with a moustache that made him look old enough to be my father; he said he was having a fight with his wife, and that there were just things she couldn’t understand. At the end of the night he touched my hand, and I felt that warmth again, and I knew. I didn’t try to take him home- he had a wife and I have a conscience, plus he had that moustache- but I knew the truth, and it set me free. The next day, I read in the paper that the American Psychological Society had passed a resolution against telling patients that their sexual orientation could be changed. Of course, I’d never thought to thumb through the research, or even the APA’s prior policies, or I might have found the Shidlo and Schroeder study. They found that out of 202 men who had gone through reparative therapy (as conversion had been called in its youth), 88% failed conversion, and only 3% reported a successful shift in orientation. And for me, that sealed it. I made an appointment with my counselor, an (to use their parlance) ex-gay minister. I told him everything, and he said that there was another, less-traveled path: celibacy. I smiled at his naivety, and asked, “What kind of living would that be?” He didn’t have an answer, but as I turned to leave told me I’d be damned to Hell. I said, “Here I’m damned if I do or don’t- but yours ain’t the only shop in town.” He started to mumble about how the Unitarians, Episcopalians and others were going to Hell, too. I nearly called him the bigot he was proving himself to be, but I thought better of it; after all, we still had the same God, and the same savior who we wanted to emulate. I decided the best victory would be to beat him at that game instead, and bid him a good life, and left. |
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