Essays: January 2005 Archives

Do you need some hope? Want to feel better about what you are? Read this article. It’s about what we are and what we’ve been through. I’ve said it in so many articles all over this side, in one way or another.

Everyday in this country, there are those who want to do things to our community, the ones we love, and to make us feel small and worthless. When you feel like that, look into yourself for strength because believe me, it’s there.

I have done things in my life that, looking back, seem almost impossible. I wonder how I had the emotional and psychological strength to get through it all. We all have things that we have to get through. We all have people in our families that dislike us, or those we love.

It’s a burden to carry for many of us. But there is a secret. You don’t have to carry that burden. The problem isn’t with you. The problem is with those who can’t see you for what you are and won’t accept you for what you are. You really don’t have to put yourself through that. If you do, that is your choice.

I still battle with it at times myself. I try so hard to make certain people accept me and they don’t want to because I’m gay. I wonder why I try. I think I try because it makes it easier for someone I love. But that is my choice, and because of that, I bear the burden of that.

At the end of the day, they will never know the horror we went through as our friends died. How do you really tell someone of that and make them understand? I imagine it’s like telling someone what war is like. It’s beyond their understanding. And that is what the war on AIDS was in the early 1980’s. It was a war.

More formidable than the disease, homophobia was our worst enemy. It spawn the reality to many of my friends who are now gone, that the only people left that loved them were people like me; their friends. Not brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers, or fathers. Just people like me who showed all of them that water, so many times, runs thicker than blood.

No matter what happens in our fight to gain equality, no one can ever take that away from us. These are our values. This is our family.

I rarely talk about my own religion, and what I believe. Many if not most of the people I am around from day to day do not believe in God or a divine power.

I simply know there is a God, because He has touched me. When I was fourteen years old, my sister’s sons died. They were three and four years old. I was very close to them. Our family was devastated by their loss. And to this day, I think of them and the men they would have become.

We had the funeral and were on our way to the cemetery for their burial. I was riding in the back seat along with my sister. My sister started to cry and turned to me for comfort. We had been through a week of the worst hell any family could ever experience. I was on my last leg. As my sister fell apart and turned to me for comfort, I remember looking out the window and saying to myself these exact words, “God, I can’t take anymore of this.” It sounds dumb now, but at that exact time, I felt a strength come over me that I had never felt before. I felt like I could move a mountain. All of my self doubts left in that instant and the message I received was equally clear; “They all need you. You can do this.” I said aloud, “My God”, and started to cry. My sister thought it was from my grief that I would say this but I was in total awe.

The presence of what was there was not me. It was undeniably much greater than anything of this world. And I knew in that moment that my life would be different. You see, from that point forward, I was different from most Christians in that I didn’t have to rely on faith and try to believe in God. I just did because I knew He was real.

One thing that I have learned over the years is that God has nothing WHAT SO EVER to do with ANY CHURCH.

I have stopped going to church because I realize that most people who go to church are the most judgmental bunch of people I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering. For the most part, I ignored it while going to church, but in recent years, it’s become intolerable. A lot of it has to do with the increased visibility of gay citizens and demanding to be treated as equals. How dare we demand equal marriage rights?

Ok, maybe I haven’t totally gotten over the time that a Presbyterian minister of our local church told me that Kent and I would not be welcome in his church. I told him we were a gay couple because I didn’t want any misunderstandings when we started going. I hate that I even felt that I had to make mention of it. But, as it turned out, it was for the best, because it would have been a problem.

I remember that after I told my brother I was gay, my brother talked to one of my uncles, who was a minister in the Church of Christ. My brother told him that I was gay. My uncle turned to my brother and said, “He is worthy of death.” My brother changed the subject and didn’t tell me this until just recently. This happened some ten years ago. I told my brother, “After surviving the deaths of my friends, my brothers, with AIDS, and going through long periods of isolation and depression because my family wanted nothing to do with me, do you really think that I care what he or anyone else feels about me anymore?”

Of course, that’s not really true. I care deeply what the people who really matter to me feel towards me. What came out in that comment was the anger of the message, which was all too familiar; Thank God for AIDS, along with many others that I will spare you of.

I just read an article where some Catholic parents want two adopted boys prevented from attending the school’s kindergarten because their parents are both gay men.

Some parents and parishioners have accused the Roman Catholic diocese in Orange County of violating church doctrine by allowing a gay couple to enroll their children in a church school.

The group demanded that St. John the Baptist School in Costa Mesa accept only families that pledge to abide by Catholic teachings, the Los Angeles Times reported in Sunday’s editions. Church doctrine opposes gay relationships and adoption by same-sex couples. (source)

It disgusts me that the children of this gay couple are in the middle of this. This has nothing to do with being a Christian or how to be a Christian. On the other hand, if we were the boy’s parents, I don’t think we would put them into that judgmental environment in the first place. The Catholic Church has made it perfectly clear how they feel about gay people. I would protect my children from the likes of them.

On a personal level, there are people in my own family who do not believe that Kent and I should be able to get married. I won’t name names and I would be less than truthful if I said it didn’t hurt. On a very very personal level, they are saying that we are less. Do I still call them family? Do I still wish the best for them even though they would deny us equality? As a man, I am free to tell them to go to Hell. As a Christian, that’s really not an option, just as it shouldn’t be an option for Christians to oppress homosexuals.

It’s an old argument that doesn’t have a resolution, which is why I wouldn’t expect a church to bless a gay relationship. I do expect the State and Federal Government to treat all of it’s citizens equally, especially since they are more than willing to give us equal treatment when it comes to taxing us. I do expect that the separation of church and state be respected in the making of law and of carrying out law. And, I expect a Christian to try to at least ask themselves, “What would Christ do?” Sadly, today that means not acting too much like a modern day Christian.

If Jesus were to come back tomorrow, do you really think he would go to a beautiful church to be with people of worship? If you think that, you don’t know him. There’s even been recent discussion that Jesus may have been gay.

As Christians celebrates the birth of Jesus this past weekend, few of them were told in their churches and Cathedrals anything about the sexuality of Jesus, yet a growing group of Biblical scholars believe that Christ may have had at least one sexual relationship with another male.

Noted Methodist theologian Rev. Theodore Jennings Jr. and Dr Morton Smith, a world renowned Bible scholar, say there is irrefutable evidence that Jesus was at least bisexual. Dr Rollan McCleary of the University of Queensland, in Australia, says he has discovered through his research that three of the disciples were gay. (source)

If that is true, those of you who want to condemn homosexuals to Hell may want to rethink that a bit. In today’s world, Jesus would cause trouble. He would stir things up. He would make you question your very purpose and reason for existence. His sexuality would not be relevant except to those of us who can only see a person in terms of sexuality. He would be found in an AIDS ward, a children’s cancer center, and other places where hope is gone; not in some church. THAT IS GOD.

But what do I know? I only spent the better part of an afternoon with Him when I was fourteen; an afternoon where hope was gone.