(Not So) Straight from the Seminary

I had the family over tonight- not the family who birthed me and then wounded me so deeply and with whom I am once again trying to give birth to something new- but rather the family I met here just over two years ago. I sent my wayward words out in the world and they answered and became something tangible and stable and beautiful for me to bump up against as I found my way into myself. It was beautiful to see them all, and to celebrate the engagement of two members of our group and the many beautiful lives and relationships that have emerged among the rest. But still somehow as I am left in my empty house after their departure I find tears in my eyes, and I am not talking about tears of joy. It may seem like a ludicrous thing to say at 25 but lately I have been feeling so very old. So old, in fact, that I was deeply surprised when I got carded at the grocery store today, although I know they card anyone who looks under 35. It’s just that it seems to me the past two years have aged me so deeply I cannot seem to fathom that the rest of the world might not notice. It seems that we were children when we met, just embarking on an adventure in a world where we had never believed we could fully live- giddy and terrified and hopeful and probably drinking a little more than we should. We had parties long into the night filled with laughter and ranting And at the center of it all there were the war stories from our first forays into love, our schools who would kick us out in the name of Jesus if the were given just one opportunity to see us for who we truly were, and worst of all from parents who sometimes wanted never to see us again if they couldn’t hide any longer from who we had become. It is these things that aged us. There was laughter tonight, but there was also sadness. Almost, even, a hardness. For some reason I couldn’t seem to shake one of the opening lines from Wicked where Glinda asks “are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them? This really has less to do with any of us being wicked, and more to do with the fact that after just a little over three years of being “out,” I am beginning to understand why some people have the impression that gay people are mostly a bunch of angry activists. There is only so much of other people’s distaste, judgement, and misunderstanding of you that you can take before you begin to get angry. Mostly though, lately, I am just tired. And counting down the months until I can put behind me this chapter of my life where I have to constantly look over my shoulder and worry that if I tell too many people the truth about myself, I will no longer be welcome in my own school. That has been worse even then the most difficult times with my parents, or the best friends I have lost, or the fact that when we think about what city we want to move to next we always have to pause and consider what our chances would be of being injured or even killed because of the person that we love. Whatever else I might do in my lifetime, putting myself under the thumb of an institution who reserves the right to discriminate against me and kick me out is something I will never, ever, do again. At least I know that much for sure, so the military can rest assured that I won’t be coming their way any time soon.

Looking around the faces in the room tonight, we did not have any wrinkles or gray hairs (or at least not many) to show for the past few years, but I think that you could hear it in our voices. Sadness, yes. Bitterness? Perhaps a little. But also wisdom. We have traveled weary roads and we have learned to survive. Not just to survive, but to live and breathe to speak up and out and over their noise and their silencing. We have found love and friendships and success in its many forms. And we have dug down deep within ourselves and found that we will keep fighting to make a place for ourselves in this world and to insist that our voices are heard so that there are spaces and voices for all the others who will come after us. We have reached out our hands to an ever growing network of people who have walked roads much like our own and said to them: come, walk with us… you are not alone, and there is space for you too. And for that very reason I would not change one single moment of it. I mean this. In class this week a teacher asked us what we were grateful for this year as Thanksgiving approaches and I said I was grateful for my friends who have become my family in these most difficult of years. But what I would have said, if I could have said everything, was that I am deeply grateful to be a lesbian, because it has connected me the most beautiful group of people in the world who have truly become my family even when my own family could not stand by me. And most of all, I am grateful because being gay has opened my eyes to countless other LGBT individuals from Christian backgrounds who have stories much like my own to tell, and I cannot believe that I am lucky enough to have a story to share with them and a life to share with them and that I get to make maybe just a little bit of difference in their journeys.

Highway 46 cuts across central California like the line between redwood rocky cliff revolution and concrete. I was born in the southernmost desert of this state, but my soul has always floated north. On the road that divides them, there is wide open space… and produce. Somehow, the in-between space has always made made me feel like I have to hold my breath.

Yesterday, we were driving back from a week up in Monterey, and the whole time we drove down Highway 1 along the coast of Big Sur I was able to live exactly in that present moment. It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel haunted by the past, or consumed with anxiety over our future. It could have been the cliffs with their rivers cascading into crashing ocean waves, or it could have been the fact that I had never been there before so there were no memories there to push their way in. But once we hit highway 46 and the waves faded away the past came crashing back, because northern California did not always represent this life and this love. It used to be about another one.

The last time I drove through there, I was on my way back from visiting this girl in San Fransisco, where we stayed during gay pride week in an 8×8 square hostel room that was more of a closet than a room. She was straight back then and so was I. Funny, how we stayed in a closet during gay pride week, bought matching pink sweatshirts, hugged tightly on the streets, and were offended when people assumed we were together. The irony of all of this was lost on us until much, much later.

We were Christian, and we were straight and that was the end of the story.

I don’t think this image cracked for her until much, much later. But it started to crack for me on the drive back home. As I passed row after row of almond trees and corn fields, I kept coming back to the memory of how that little room hadn’t been able to contain the static electricity that seemed to flow between us. While the city bustled around us preparing for the morning’s parade, we  lay there just barely touching, talking much too quickly about boys we had dated or almost dated as if that would erase what was happening between us. We fought the next morning, although I can’t remember over what. I think that somehow seemed easier than saying goodbye, or facing what was coming next. But I do remember making up over the phone, talking for hours while I made my winding way back down the state. And I remember her saying something about how we had only fought because we loved each other too much. This might have been the greatest moment of clarity we had that entire year.

We talked the whole way down until I lost reception on highway 46, and that entire time I could not shake the feeling that everything I knew was suddenly floating away from me. It would be at least another year before I could articulate what had happened, and several more before she could, but my body knew even then. My hands started shaking, and it was as though I was losing contact with the earth and everything I had ever known. The next thing I knew I was pulling over in front of a produce stand and buying a bag of sweet red cherries, still warm from the sun. Their earthiness somehow pulled me back in again, at least for a little while, and I tore hungrily through them as though the hard, slippery  pits at their center might contain some firm bit of truth that I could hold onto.

The next image I have is of cherry pits spilled everywhere in my car. Did I swerve to avoid hitting something? Was I nearly in an accident? I don’t remember, but I think so. I still have bruises anyway, from the months that followed.

I found those pits hidden in the crevices of my car for years to come, and they always reminded me of that sensation of falling off the edge of something terrifying in those last moments before the closet broke and could no longer contain me.

I am out now, and so is she, and we are both partnered to two beautiful women who we are in love with. We are all friends who double date and go out for drinks and dinner and sometimes poetry or music like grown up, well adjusted couples might. But sometimes when I’m around her I still feel like that old self, trapped in that little San Fransisco closet suspended somewhere between self discovery and absolute terror.

Driving down that stretch of road yesterday, I was overcome with the sudden urge to buy a bag of cherries. I think somehow I needed to pay tribute to that terrifying sensation I so intently ignored several years ago which had been trying to tell me that I was in love with a woman, and that it could maybe even be ok. I think I wanted to hold those slippery cherry pits and not spill them. To share their rich, sweet flesh with my lover and marvel at how far I have come from that scared, closeted self I was three years ago when my hands were trembling and I was first starting to forget how the breathe.

But the cherry stand wasn’t there anymore, or at least, it wasn’t where I remembered it being. So I stopped instead at this little roadside farmhouse with plywood for walls and a family who sat out front and sold me a little basket full of peaches, apricots and nectarines. The fruit had holes where the birds had tasted it first and given it their seal of approval, and in broken English the farmer proudly told me that this was because their fruit was pesticide free. I couldn’t argue with that, so I told them that was exactly how I liked it and then carried a basket back to my partner who was waiting in the car and handed her a nectarine, holes and all, because they are her favorite.

We drove on, and half an hour later after I spotted a sign for a cherry stand, exited the freeway, and pulled up in front of it only to discover that it has closed just three minutes ago. I was disappointed at first, but as I thought some more it seemed somehow appropriate. As if the universe was telling me that that chapter of my life had already closed, and I could finally lay it to rest because I had made it though it alright and so much more is unfolding on the road before me. I am not that girl anymore, that one who could not even hold the truth of herself let alone imagine sharing it with anyone else. And so I got back in the car and drove on. My lover pulled out two ripe apricots and we brushed the dirt from their sticky orange flesh and bit into them. They were sweet, firm and delicious, and they tasted like the truth I’d been searching for all those years ago.

For the handful of you who have stuck with us through our long, long writing dry spell, I am hopefull that the dry spell is about to end. I haven’t written much in the last year for many reasons, but mostly because I began to realize just how blurred the lines are between anonymous internet blogging land and the “powers that be” at my school. With this realization I began to edit and filter what I said here more and more, and consequently, began to write less and less. Because the point of this small internet space, afterall, was honesty, authenticity, and truth, wasn’t it? So here, of all places, I will not lie or edit myself.

But all of that is to say that pretty soon now, I won’t be lying or editing myself anymore, or at least not because I am afraid of being kicked out of my graduate program. I am have made the long ( and unexpectedly difficult) decision to transfer to a new school, and find a new beginning in a place where all of me will be welcomed. Or at least allowed to exist openly.

I am still wrestling with what it means to kiss goodbye two years of hard, excruciating gradute work and begin again at the beginning in exchange for the freedom to be authentic. It is a hard trade. It is also, I’d like to think, a worthwhile one. As I look back over the past two years I feel I have aged immensely. The girl who began writing here during her first months of graduate school in her earliest, most tentative phases of coming out is long gone.

They say your body regenerates itself entirely every seven or eight years. I wonder sometimes if trauma expedites that process, because I feel as though I am sitting here, writing from within a different skin than when I first began. My body has literally atrophied over the past few years, and I appear to be swimming in the clothes I wore when I first started school two years ago. I wonder if it has been the stress, or simply the fact that trying so hard to go unnoticed has caused me to somehow take up less space.

Although my body may have shrunk, my world has grown so much larger. It is filled now with people who know, accept and embrace all of me, my sexuality included. My family has grown to include so many people I would never have had the privledge and the honor of knowing if not for coming to this seminary and beginning this small blog. For that reason, I would never go back and undo that choices I made that have led me to this palce. I am not sorry I came, but I am also not sorry to be leaving. In the balance between these two places, I sit, preparing for what the future might bring. Or perhaps, more accurately, for what I might bring to my future, and to the future of my community.

My partner always says that we cannot sit back waiting, but must rather “speak into being” the things that we desire. And I believee that somehow, that is exactly what I did here. I so desperately needed a community, and a place where I could learn to accept myself… unable yet to speak, I anonymously typed it into being. And it has been so breathtakingly beautiful.

But now, we are in the beginning phases of speaking something new into being. I believe that myself, my partner, and my community will change this world. I believe that you will too, if that is what you desire. Because we are through with hiding, and we are through with accepting the status quo. Most of all, because we are alone no longer, and it is much, much harder to keep us silent that way.

Stay tuned for more.

I’ve spent the last hour sitting in Joe Van Gogh, a great coffee shop on campus, refilling on coffee every thirty minutes or so in an effort to stay awake.  I’m supposed to be staying awake writing a paper—I have four BIG papers due within the next two weeks. Yet instead, I’m browsing facebook.
I went on quickly, to put up a link on my status for the fantastically beautiful Keith Olbermann video, but my eye was caught by yet another status update of excitement about the passing of Proposition 8. It read: “ Jessica is we are not taking away their “rights” they already have them this is about the institution of traditional marriage!” The girl who wrote it was a friend of mine in college, my R.A.’s roommate my freshman year. Read the rest of this entry »

These are polarizing times. We as a gay, lesbian, and bisexual community have been dealt a painful blow and we are looking for someone to blame. Even as we are gathering together nightly in overwhelming displays of solidarity and unity, we are also pointing fingers every which way. Cries go out: blame a particular ethnic minority; blame a particular church; blame the organizers of the no on 8 campaign. But the sad truth is, over 5 millions individuals went to the polls last week and cast a vote to revoke our rights. While it is certainly arguable that they should have never had the opportunity to do that in the first place, that is what happened, and that is what they did. And while they might have come with various racial and religious affiliations, they also came as individuals. Individuals who, in all likelihood, all know at least one of us in some capacity, whether they are aware of it or not. And so, while it is tempting to paint a portrait of what should happen next with broad, sweeping strokes (i.e: challenge the tax-exempt status of the Morman church, change the views of specific racial minorities, etc), I see it more as pointillism.  Each of the two million or so estimated GLBT people here in California exist in small, overlapping social circles where we have the opportunity to bring to light our humanity, our love, and our quest for equality. We must each engage in the difficult work of having conversations. Yes, we will eventually wage more political campaigns, and I am sure there will be countless more demonstrations, but in the meantime, we are left with conversations. Conversations with our friends, our families, our coworkers; with people in stores and people on the streets. Conversations about who we are (i.e: people in loving, committed relationships), who we aren’t (i.e: a threat to kindergartens, a threat to churches), and who we hope to become (i.e: people who have regained the opportunity to legally marry). I am no idealist; I know this won’t change everyone’s mind. How could I think that when even my best friend of 7 years told me two weeks ago that she still wasn’t sure how she would vote on Prop 8? But I cannot help believing that it will change some minds…built some bridges…put a few dots of color on a painting whose final image we are not yet even able to envision.

We as a community seem to be alternating between devastation and numbness. Words fail me. How do you describe what it is like to have your state vote against your marriage…. against your entire community’s beautiful, beautiful marriages? For some reason, the sadness there is so deep it seems as though words would not even do it justice.

And so, instead, I would like to write about our marching. Because, while they seem to have imagined that taking away our right to marry would just make us shut up and disappear, it has done quite the opposite. Last night, an estimated 5,000-10,000 of us gathered in Los Angeles to show the world that we are still here. We took to the streets to look in the faces of the people who voted to take away our marriage rights, and were surprised to find those people largely missing. Whoever they were, they certainly weren’t around last night. Instead, by and large, the thousands of citizens we encountered greeted us with high fives and friendly honks. Even the police blocked traffic to allow us to pass peacefully through they streets of West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood. Perhaps they suspected that our tentative hopefulness could easily turn to rage. That our chants of solidarity and determination were preferable to any other way we might have expressed our wide array of emotions surrounding the news of our deep loss. Whatever their reasoning, I am grateful. It was surprisingly healing to be able to stand up in front of my state and say… We will not be silenced. We will not disappear. We will not give up. And we will not even allow you to crush our spirits. You may spit on us, you may take away something we consider to be core to our humanity, and you may cover our community in tears, but still, like dust, like air, like love itself…we rise.

And so, I am left with an unquenchable desire to continue taking to the streets and marching. I’d march this state from border to border if I thought it might make a difference, carrying on the chants we shouted throughout Los Angeles last night: “What do we want? EQUALITY! When do we want it? NOW!!” Who’s with me?

A conversation has been happening on the God’s Politics blog that Sojurners does on the issue of New Monasticism and Diversity. The conversation has been interesting, and super important, but I find it at least a little disheartening.

You can check out that conversation here.

It’s a bit weird in how it’s set up, but its basically an archive of all the blog posts, with the beginning blog that incited the conversation at the bottom of the page.

And here is the comment I wrote on the most recent blog, Beilers’ “Will Christians Lead or Follow on Questions of Diversity?”. It pretty much sums up why I find the conversation, though valuable, disheartening:

“I just recently picked up on this conversation, I often find myself too busy to keep up with blogs, but I’m glad I’ve stumbled upon this conversation, so much so that I’d even like to put in my two cents.

First of all, I’m thrilled that this conversation is being had! Too often, I think, we assume that the new monastics, in their radicalness, are ahead of the game in issues of diversity–and many times that may be so… but not necessarily, and this conversation seems to point out the complexities of this issue of diversity—what defines reconciliation, who defines it, how do minority communities feel, etc…..

One wrench I would like to throw into this conversation is the expanse of which we define diversity. I have been disheartened (but not at all surprised) that the scope of our notions of diversity have centered on racial and ethnic issues. Now, to be fair, the thread IS called New Monasticism and race, and I think that race is a VASTLY important issue, especially in light of what the NM movement is trying to do.

Yet I think this post Belier, and others who’ve posted, have rightly asked what diversity means and how far it reaches–what about economic diversity, about more nuanced ethnic diversity (it goes beyond black and white!)–what about women as leaders within the new monastic community. One of the bloggers drew our attention that most of the people in the limelight in the NM conversation are white males. This is problematic–not only because of the white part, but the male part as well……

But, I’m frustrated with Beiler, and with ALL the other posts and comments on this whole long thread. Not ONCE is sexual orientation mentioned. If we are going to speak of diversity, isn’t it fair to speak of all the ways in which diversity is manifested? To leave out a major category of diversity is to reproduce a hegemony.

Now, I know the whole gay question is one a lot of people aren’t comfortable with…. its something people believe is wrong, or that they’re unsure and uncomfortable about. Fair enough.

But, like it or not, there are gay and lesbian (and bi, and transgendered, etc…) Christians who care about the same things many new monastics do and who feel entirely abandoned by the NM movement. I’m one of them.

I’m not asking that everyone agree (though that would be nice, or that people stop struggling with this significant theological issue—but know that its more than an issue, and that there are some of us who are now struggling in a different way (not with integrating our sexuality and our faith, but with dealing with the Christian community that ignores or rejects us), and getting very exhausted by continually being left out of the conversation. Many of us were so excited when the New Monastic movement started—FINALLY, we thought, there is going to be a movement that cares about the radical things we care about–about social justice, about reconciliation, about Christian community. And, in many of ways, we were right. But, we didn’t expect that we weren’t going to be invited to the table.

I found the title of this blog post very illuminating–Will Christians Lead or Follow on Questions of Diversity? Sure, we’ve finally gotten around to talking about racial reconciliation—something many thoughtful people have been doing for a long time. But, the struggle for LGBT equality (or even voice) has been happening for a long time, yet gets nearly ignored in these conversations–in this case, completely ignored.

I worry that the answer to Beiler’s question is that we are following. I hope that this is not the case, and that, regardless of our personal beliefs, we can let ALL of those who have been ignored and marginalized into the conversation.”

Still I Rise

by May Angelou

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.