My mother was Southern Baptist, my father is Roman Catholic. When I was a child, we alternated between churches. On alternating Sundays we had either guilt or hell and damnation. Eventually, we started to just go to the Baptist church because it was closer and my mother was much more interested and involved in her church. I was a Good Christian Boy. I can remember an elementary school teacher wanting us to write poems about love. I wrote about Jesus and his perfect love. If the doors to the church were unlocked, I wanted to be there. I was in the children's choir, attended Sunday School religiously, and asked to be taken to see the 700 Club television show as part of the audience as much as I could. One event my parents took me to was an Anita Bryant concert. There were people People were protesting outside. Anita talked about praying for those "homosexuals" outside. When I asked what "homosexual" meant I was just told that they were bad people who were going to hell.
As a teen I was called "precocious". I worked as a volunteer at a local Science Museum near where I lived in South Florida. I had a lot of time and energy to spare as I wasn't spending it chasing girls like most of the boys my age were. I figured that sooner or later I would become interested in girls. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't.
While working at the Museum, I became close friends with a lot of the other teens which worked there. There was one person I felt different about, though. I felt...closer. I couldn't really explain how I felt. We were inseparable during my Sophomore and Junior years. During my Junior year, my family moved to Virginia. I missed all my friends, but I missed John more than anyone else. As my father worked for an airline, I was able to fly to Florida quite often to visit. I spent most of the summer between my Junior and Senior year at John's house. That's when we became "more than just friends." I was very confused- happy, upset, all sorts of things at once. I didn't understand what was going on or why. I just knew that I was very happy when I was with him. On the way to the airport to go back home, I told him we needed to go back to being just friends. He had to fight very hard to keep from crying. Actually so did I.
After I got home I did a lot of thinking about how our relationship had changed over the summer. I went to the library to read books on the "subject" in dark corners, careful to have other books to throw on top if someone came near.
A couple of weeks later, John was visiting at my house. I remember waking up with him in my arms. He kissed me and looked me in the eye and said, "so much for the just being friends stuff." We both laughed. It was the first time I ever told someone I loved him. It was also the first time I could admit to myself who I was.
I had come to a turning point in my life. I was forced to re-evaluate all that I had been taught, all that I believed. This God of whom I had learned, he didn't know about love at all. They told me that he loves me, only to find out that he was going to send me to hell because of the love I felt for John. They told us that it is evil. I knew it wasn't evil. I could feel it down deep in my heart that some one caring for you as much as I did for him and he for me could not be evil. I remember the day I took my Bible, with its leatherette case, tabs for books of the bible, and highlighted passage... the bible I had care for so much and carried around with me all the time and threw it into the dirtiest, nastiest bin I could find. If that scene was ever in a movie, the bible would have flown through the air in slow motion as dramatic choral music played in the background and the camera panned over to my face after it struck the bin with a deafening crash. A single tear would fall down one cheek, but there would be a look of confidence and a sign of release on my face that glowed. So much for the melodrama...
This moment gets played out in the lives of millions of gay people as they come to that breaking point, the point at which what they have been told about gay people and what they know is inside them cannot stand diametrically opposed anymore. It shatters. Everything shatters... you, the world... God.
I was fed up with religion, never wanted to set foot inside a Church again, ever, not for any reason. A clerical collar was like a Nazi SS uniform to me. I was never going to be part of a church again. Never say never.
I joined a gay youth group. It met in a Big Scary Building. You see, no one wanted to let us meet at their place, none of the local gay groups. Too much liability. The guy who started the group, a college student, flirted with a local bar owner and talked him into letting us use a room in his Big Scary Building. The Big Scary Building burnt. We think he set it himself to get insurance money. Some one knew the minister of the local Unitarian Universalist Church and he let us meet there. I was going to have to set foot in a Church. I remember one day when the gay youth group was having a cook-out on the lawn of the Unitarian Church. Coincidentally, the Church was also having a cook out that day. We had rented a canoe to paddle around the polluted body of water across the street from the church. One of the Unitarians brought their kids over and asked if we would take them out in our boat. I was astounded. I thought to myself, "You do know this is the GAY youth group, don't you?" I looked around at our tee shirts with pink triangles and the boy- boy couples holding hands and the girl-girl couples holding hands. Yes, they knew. Pretty soon ALL the Unitarians were over by us because we had much better food (someone's Mom was a caterer), and none of them cared that we were gay. I was even more astounded. I joined the Church soon after. It felt good to be part of a group that supported me for who I was, and a Church, no less!
I never was more proud of my Church, though, than at the March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian and Bi Rights in 1993. Several of us from our Church loaded up into Lee Yate's circa 1972 Volkswagen van to attend the March. We put a large pink triangle on the back of the van. People would honk at us and wave as they passed, more and more often as we got closer to D.C. The night before the March, the city was filled with an energy I can't describe. I saw gay people of every description: a preppie looking couple complete with penny loafers, chinos and polo shirts; blue collar looking people; people in the military; schoolmarm types. The next morning, we attended a service at the All Souls Unitarian Church. I carried the Richmond Church banner at the beginning of the service and placed it beside others from all over the country, then squeezed into a pew. Bill Shultz, then the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, spoke to an overflow crowd- people were standing outside looking through windows. The crowd rose in standing ovation so many times I lost count. Each time we had to wiggle our butts to squeeze back into the pews. We then proceeded to convene at our spot for the march. This was no easy task. We looked for the yellow UU banners that we had been given to locate each other and eventually found our spot and each other. Then we waited. All day we waited. It was slow going due to the huge number of people marching. We finally got started and the President, Moderator and entire UUA board of trustees (who had suspended their business in Boston to be at the March) led a contingent of thousands of UUs from all over the country: gay and straight, young and old, people of all colors and backgrounds. By the end of the day, I was exhausted but still exhilarated. While Lee talked about the Van's air-fuel mixture (or something like that) I thought about the day that had become the most memorable in my life. I remember someone saying, "gosh, we straight people suddenly were the minority." I told them that this was what it felt like for me all the time. Except that at the March, the gay people welcomed the straight people being there. I remember the intense feeling of pride I felt. At least in that space, that time, we didn't have to hide who we where. We could be proud of who we were openly, and the homophobes were outnumbered 100 to 1 million. When we marched past some of them, oven though they had megaphones, their messages of hate where drowned out by thousands of UUs singing "We Shall Overcome" so loud that buildings next to us seemed to vibrate.
I was so intensely proud to be a member of a church which not only accepts me, but showed up in force to prove that "affirming the inherent worth of every person" isn't just empty words. That day was the most spiritual of my life. I had found my spiritual home.
This journey I had taken is one that many, if not most, gay people have travelled in their spiritual life. This journey leads people to radically different places. Some people decide perhaps that a spiritual journey isn't for them at all. For some, the journey does not take them very far, as they work to make repairs in the spiritual home they are born into. They either throw up some wall paper over the more ugly aspects, stay hidden in the closet upstairs, or some courageous ones get out tools and start to fix things up from the inside. Some people leave their spiritual home and set out to build new homes on the model of the ones they have left. Still others travel even farther, throw away the blueprints and start over from scratch. These people have created a new spirituality from the experiences of their lives.
In this study, I have focused on groups that are near my geographic location. I want to make clear that what I hope to accomplish in this ongoing effort is to not as much look specifically at individuals or individual religious organisations, but rather to use these individual stories to get a broader sense of the types of experiences that queer folk in many different places face that are unique to them as gay and lesbian people. What leads people down these many different paths? How do people find peace with themselves and with the Holy when they have been at odds with the definitions of both of these that the dominant culture has offered them? To help you gain a better understanding of these spiritual decisions people have made, I would like to take you into the spiritual lives of gay people which have taken different paths to find a spiritual home.
© 1998 K. Mark Demma