(Not So) Straight from the Seminary

Lately every time I open my mouth I find myself surprised. Surprised by the volume and conviction and tone and passion with which I have been saying things. This is not the voice of that same person who used to carefully weigh each word to make sure it pleased all of her listeners. This, rather, is the voice of someone who has learned that she has something important to say, and that not everyone (or even most people really) are going to agree with it, but she is going to have to say it anyway. Because it is true, and truth is beautiful.

Today my dear friend M and I drove to a Christian college not so far from here and shared our stories in a Human Sexuality class. Had you known us in college, this would probably be a shocking statement. We were not the kind of people you would expect to go around talking about our sexuality, or much of anything controversial for that matter, in front of crowds of people. But it seems that is exactly the kind of people we have become, and I cannot tell you how liberating it felt. Afterwords we were so full of the power of our own voices that we wanted to burst into classrooms all across campus and announce that we were there to talk about being gay, and share with them our winding journeys of how we came to peace and then even thankfulness for that. Then, we wanted to drive right on back to our undergraduate campus and start shouting our stories from their podiums too! That’s how empowering it was, just to stand before a crowd of students not unlike those we sat silently next to during all those years of Christian education, and tell them that we are gay and we love God and women and life and yes even ourselves, most of the time anyway. Our elation wasn’t so much about the student’s reactions, which were entirely a mixed bag with some peeking out from their own well guarded closets to thank us shyly, other smiling warmly, and some smirking and refusing to look at us as they brushed past us at the end of class. Nobody stopped us to say their life was radically changed by what we had to say, but I think that’s fine because our elation was not about what they heard but rather about what we were able to speak. With conviction and grace and even a good bit of humor we stood up there and said this is who we are, and how we have come to be here, and we are not ashamed. And even more, we are grateful.

It had been raining all day, but as we were driving back home and celebrating our voices the clouds lifted and this incredibly soft but brilliant light broke through the clouds and reached down towards the ocean beside us. And maybe it was because we were feeling sentimental and maybe even a little tender towards our faith and all the bumps it has taken these past few years, but I swear we both noticed at the exact same time that it was almost as though God was painting those broad,  brilliant strokes of light across the sky in celebration with us and our triumphant speaking of our truths.

I want to raise the bar again. When we were first coming out, we learned to lower our standards and take what we could get. We tried to look grateful when you said “I disagree, but I still love you.” Hell, most of the time we even were grateful. But right now I don’t give a damn whether or not you agree with me, or with us, or with any of this. What I want to know is, the next time you hear somebody saying that I am somehow less because of who I love, will you speak up for me? What I want to know is, if I raise my glass in a toast to her will you celebrate with me? If I march for our chance to have the same legal rights that you do, will you march next to me? If I grow weary of this fight and need a place to mourn all that it has cost, will you cry with me? If your church says there is no place for us in heaven will you stand up for me? I want to raise the bar again. I don’t want to know your theoretical beliefs about my sexual orientation. I want to know that when you look at me, you see a human being and not a theological debate. If we throw another party in celebration of our love it’s not enough for me that you show up and look dutiful. I want you to dance. And if you can’t dance with us, or laugh with us, or speak up for us… if I haven’t ever seen you smile when you look at us together, then I don’t want you there. Do you hear me? Are you listening? I don’t want you there. Because your silence may not be costing you anything, but it is costing us everything.

I was seventeen when the Holy Spirit called me to the high mission of saving Liz. This was not something that I took lightly. She was the first atheist our little Christian high school had ever seen as far as I knew, and rumors followed her like gnats on horse shit.  The most common one was that she’d been kicked out of her Catholic all-girls boarding school for making out with the other girls on her rugby team behind the bleachers. I didn’t care. I knew my mission and I was not backing down. She was Sicilian with olive skin, short hair, and even shorter plaid skirts. On Wednesdays we always had to wear our hideous blue plaid uniform skirts to chapel because it wasn’t right for girls to worship god in pants. Liz always came with hers hemmed up to the soft curve of her butt cheeks so they would send her home to change and she wouldn’t have to go to chapel.

It was around that time that the sight of her started making my heart jump around inside my white polo uniform shirt and my stomach tie up in strange unfamiliar knots, and that is how I knew that I had been called… guided by the holy spirit to the mission of ensuring Liz’s salvation. I left my old circle of friends who ran a “Lambs of God” Bible study during lunch on Thursdays, and ventured out into the world of Liz. She taught me how to sing Your Body Is a Wonderland back before hardly anyone had even heard of John Mayer, and also all about the advantages of driving under the influence of marijuana compared to alcohol. She never convinced me to try either, because my school had done a fine job of teaching me that there was only one quicker way to lose your salvation than drinking and doing drugs and that was sex, but I believed what she told me about driving under the influence for a long time after that. I believed just about everything she told me that year.

I started spending nights at her house, to advance the cause of Christ of course, and she started fixing my hair for me and spraying me with her perfume before we went out. God, I loved how she smelled. At night, she couldn’t fall asleep unless I told her a story, so I’d stay up watching for her breathing to grow slow and heavy as I told her some variation of the story of us.  Her bedroom was lined in Absolute adds and mine was filled with Bible verses and I could not imagine a more perfect union. She was raw and dark and angry and she didn’t believe anything they taught us in Bible class, so instead we sat in the back row and I tickled the soft skin of her arm because it was her favorite. And also because I believed that if she couldn’t hear the love of God, then the next best thing was for me to show it to her. Or at least that’s how I justified it to myself anyway. One day our Bible teacher made us stop because she said it wasn’t right for two women to touch like that, and I didn’t understand but I also didn’t argue because I wouldn’t start arguing with Bible teachers for at least five more years after that.

Our physics teacher was from Zimbabwe and didn’t speak much English yet, so every day we would tell him we had some sort of meeting or appointment and he would let us leave class early. We’d sneak into the girl’s bathroom and sit on the floor under a painting of the Fruits of the Spirit and talk until the bell rang. One day she told me that she felt like she was walking around with a huge hole in her heart, and I wanted to tell her that sometimes, I felt that way too. But I didn’t because I knew that good Christians were always supposed to have it all together. Besides, they had taught me how to respond to this very thing in Bible class, so I parroted back the answer they had given me and told her that it was a God-shaped hole, and only He could fill it. Secretly, though, I think I believed that I could too.

I never did learn anything about physics that year, except that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. A little while after that, they started teaching us that Catholic families like Liz’s weren’t really Christians and wouldn’t go to heaven and that’s when I stopped listening. I didn’t know a lot about theology back then, but I already knew enough to know better than that.

By then, my Spirit-led mission was really getting complicated because I couldn’t remember exactly what I was trying to save Liz from anymore. That was also about the time that the fighting started between us. This went on for months until our English teacher, who was also the school’s 100% unlicensed, untrained “counselor,” decided to intervene. He locked us in his tiny office and left us there, telling us he wouldn’t let us out until we worked it out. I don’t remember much of what we said except that I was crying and she was not, and that at the end she told me: “This isn’t going to work. I can’t give you want you want from me, because in two months when I graduate I am going to leave this place and I am not ever going to look back, and you aren’t ready for that yet. Do you understand me?”

I nodded that I did but really I didn’t, because I couldn’t figure out what it was she thought I wanted from her. I decided she must have meant that I wanted her to love Jesus, and I didn’t realize until much later that she had probably understood long before I did that what I really wanted from her didn’t have anything to do with Jesus.

I saw her only once after graduation. She’d gone to Wellesley and I’d gone on to yet another private Christian school, but I drove the three hours home as soon as I heard that she was back home. Wellesley had kicked her out for trying to slit her wrists one day after class, and although this didn’t scare me, the way it made me feel to see her again certainly did. We met for coffee and made small talk while we both tried to pretend that we weren’t terrified. She called once more after that, to say that she was doing better and had been trying to help out a friend who was sad, and that it had reminded her of me. I knew enough by then to be grateful that that was the way she remembered my misguided high school mission.

The next time I tried to call her the number had been disconnected and a few weeks later our English teacher told me that Liz had joined the marines and was driving Humvees in Iraq. I think he loved her too, though I am pretty sure neither of us realized it at the time. That was at least four years ago so I don’t think she could still be deployed out there, but a few months ago I saw a movie about a woman soldier who had her hand blown off while driving a Humvee in Iraq and it made me cry anyway. I’ve come out since then, and finally learned to tell the difference between falling in love with a woman and being called by Jesus to convert someone. I don’t really even believe in the later anymore, or at least not the part about converting someone to believe the same things I do. But I still wear the same kind of perfume that Liz used to share with me back in high school, and every time someone tells me that they like the way it smells, I tell them thank you and I remember that before it was mine, it was hers.

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. These are not tears of joy, although there have been plenty of those too these past few years. 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. We were giddy and terrified and hopeful and probably drinking a little more than we should have. 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. There is only so much of other people’s distaste, judgment, 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. Where I constantly have to 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 there because we are together.

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 insisting 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. Even as we all begin to drift our own ways and find our own corners of the world in which to settle and begin our families, I will never forget these years that we shared. 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. 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. I wouldn’t trade that. Not even for all the love and simplicity that I have lost.

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 to 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 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 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?