BJUnity

Life is neither good nor bad.
Life is life, and all we know.
Good and bad and joy and woe
Are woven fine, are woven fine.

All the travels we have made,
All the evils we have known,
Even paradise itself,
Are nothing now, are nothing now.

— “Universal Good,” from Candide, the Operetta, 1956

The good old days are gone but the sweetest days are now. All the stories I could tell you, joy or sadness, are nothing other than a witness to a combination of human experiences we all share in common. Growing up gay and fundamentalist is over for me. I am no longer a victim. But there are those currently behind the curtain of spiritual abuse systems who come to this website seeking refuge, encouragement, and healing. In witness to the universal truth that “nothing shall separate us from the love of God,” I stand in my power as a happy gay man and simply proclaim: We are not alone.

I was born in 1973 into the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana where, simply put, “right was right, wrong was wrong, men were men, and women were women.” Those were the days of revivals and Baptist Bible Blowouts and busing the poor kids into church and sweeping altar calls where people broke down in tears yearning to do the will of God in their lives. I lived passionately in this movement from birth to college graduation, attending church and Christian schools nearly every day of my life. I listened, I sang, I cried, and I prayed. I played the piano and sang in the choir and vacuumed the church carpet early in the morning and late at night. I surrendered my life to God and I even vowed I would become a missionary and be willing to be martyred in a distant continent for the cause of converting the world to Jesus Christ. I knocked on doors and I stood on street corners hoping to make some kind of eternal difference when the prediction was that Jesus Christ was going to return to the earth in September of 1988. I loved my parents, my church, and my fellow human beings. I wanted to do right so badly. I wanted to always do right until the stars fell down from the sky as the words of Bob Jones Sr. were often channeled into fundamentalist pulpits all around the world.

Try as hard as I may, I couldn’t do enough right. I was flat out gay and I knew it by the time I was four years old even though I had no words to name it. I knew it deep down inside when I entered an essay competition and titled my essay: AIDS: Sickness or Judgment? I hoped I wasn’t turning red in the face when the preachers — there were so many preachers — would say things like “wouldn’t it be great if we could banish the homosexual perverts to an island and let them kill each other off?” I secretly screamed inside when the church youth conference skits portrayed sissies and faggots as court jesters and I hoped to God I hadn’t made the mistake of accidentally wearing my pink dress shirt that day. I suppressed the really horrible things like the physical and sexual abuse cases I knew about, the pastor’s wife who shot her husband because he beat the family, the girl we weren’t supposed to talk to because she wanted to attend public high school, and the nice old people that threw a fit every time a person of color prayed in church. Like many of you reading this, I passively accepted the establishment which we were presented as an act of submission and obedience to the version of God that I thought ruled our world.

I followed the path of the faithful and entered Pensacola Christian College in 1990 where my roommates hazed me my entire freshman year. I woke up to being shaken out of my sleep at 3 am with all my bedding thrown into the hall. Upon entering the hall to look for my sheets, I was written up to the Discipline Committee where “loving” spiritual advisors doled out the appropriate punishment for being out of bed between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am. I was yelled at for shaking hands with a girl, written up for having my hair touch my ears, and forbidden to leave campus after being caught listening to an easy-listening radio station while doing my homework. The theme that year at Pensacola Christian College was that they wanted every student to be “broken” so they could be a vessel for God.

Moving on to Bob Jones University my sophomore year was initially a bit of a relief since there wasn’t nearly as much personal hazing. But the calm did not last for long as I soon discovered the racism that was tolerated in the dormitories (Confederate flags were hung in dorm rooms), and I watched students being routinely expelled for anything that made them a “spiritual liability” in the eyes of the University. Under the University’s spiritual watch-care, I was forced to leave a church congregation and cut off all contact with people from that church because the University disapproved of their music choices. I watched friends from interracial families have to declare which race they wanted to be to the University administration. And in my classes, one of my teachers suggested that my music composition homework was potentially inspired by Satan because of chord progressions that I had created. Upon a low average test score in another class, the teacher read the Parable of the Talents and chose the version where the low performing steward was cast into hellfire and outer darkness. She then suggested that we had abused our talents by failing her mathematics examination and then asked that we bow our heads in prayer. After my junior year, I was called into counseling by my hall leader only to be told that they were concerned about me because I had “neo-evangelical tendencies” and would be demoted from my spiritual position of Prayer Leader in the dormitories.

So, I’ll pause with the litany of bizarre experiences at this point and get to what many of you might be asking about now. Where’s the gay part? What did it mean for you to be gay at Bob Jones University? My answer is that I didn’t deal with much about being gay at all. The anti-gay rhetoric was so harsh from the chapel pulpit along with the hundreds of other prohibitions that I kept my sexuality successfully suppressed for my entire University stay. Thankfully, I graduated without being deemed a spiritual liability and I ran like hell. I didn’t join the Alumni Association, I didn’t keep friends from the University, and within a year, I left fundamentalism altogether.

Three years out of fundamentalism, I was finally in a space to deal with my sexuality and as a result of my own journaling, faith exploration, and creative endeavors, I came into full acceptance of my life as a gay man. The journey since then has not always been easy but it has been a journey of love. Where I found little common ground between family and friends from that time, I have sometimes found moments of love that far surpass our understanding of it. I still love my parents and pray that someday we will find more common ground but I know that is not necessary in the paradigm of love. Love always abounds where words and knowledge fails. I will say to anyone to always love yourself first, and in knowing what that means, you will learn to love another. That is the grace that I now know and live.

In the philosophical fable of Candide, the story begins with a simple philosophy that “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” This sounds a little bit like a Bible quote we memorized as kids: “And we know all things work together for good to them who love God.” Right? — Right. Except that when Candide, the bastard child, fell in love with Cunegonde, his wealthy master’s daughter, the best of all possible worlds fell apart. Then the nice people turned mean and then there were famines and inquisitions and natural disasters and wars. The best philosophies fell apart in the wake of evil circumstances and everyone lost heart in goodness altogether.

Many of us who lived through the good old days of fundamentalism have lost hope too. We knew some sweet and simple times. We knew some really good-hearted people and we still love them because we are “them” too. But the system still denies our very existence as lgbtq people and for that reason we have come back to the metaphorical gates of Bob Jones University, the bastion of fundamentalism and we say: We’re here, we’re together, and no one is alone. We’re here for anyone who feels stranded on their journey and we’re here to reconcile hearts together in the affirmation of the respect and dignity of every human being.

The layers of time and various philosophies and misunderstandings can seem impossible to work through for many of us. In my recent writing project, Fundamental Doubt: A Dialogue of Faith and Questions, I express this challenge in the following line: “Clarity clouded in layers of life and every sentiment a phase . . .”

But we are working through the layers and we’re coming together as people of all faiths and persuasions and sexual orientations to express the hope that we will all know the unity that becomes us. Ultimately, none of our arguments really matter because nothing will ever separate us from the love of God. Not our dogma, not our doctrine, nothing! I express this in my minimalist poem, No-Thing:

No-Thing New
No-Thing Novel
No-Thing Necessary
No-Thing Nominal
No-Thing Nay-Say
No-Thing (N)ever
No-Thing Nebulous
No-Thing Matters

In the story of Candide, most of the characters come back together after many years, weathered through all the pain and miseries they’ve suffered. They’ve seen the best of all possible worlds disintegrate but Candide realizes that they can make a better life if they work on it. They start with planting a garden together. What if we did the same? Really, really, really! What if we could all agree to find a plot of ground, perhaps inGreenville, and plant a garden together – lgbtq alumni, fundamentalists, evangelicals, and liberals all united. It would be a physical and metaphorical space where we could hope for a better way of being together. I end with the finale of Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide:

Let dreamers dream
What worlds they please
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers,
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground

We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!