I was in my tiny London box of a bedroom getting ready for work in the
West End. It was a Wednesday morning, between Christmas and New Years’ Eve,
2012. This is a strange time of year for me. In 1999, at the age of 17, I spent
this week on the Mid North Coast, 600km from my Sydney home, living on a
campsite with a group of evangelical Christians, telling children and teenagers
the enduring good news that Jesus loved them. I did this for ten years.
While planning the 2007 evangelism trip I met Andy. Kind, intelligent,
musical, dedicated to God, he quickly became one of my closest friends. He
stayed my friend for the two and a bit years I dated an atheist. With amazing
empathy, he listened to whatever I threw at him.
And then on that Wednesday morning in 2012, we caught up via skype, and I
asked him how his Christmas was, and he said, “Oh, really nice, until I told my
family I was gay.”
Sorry, what? I type.
Yeah, not a typo, He replies.
Something was
wrong here.
Having grown up in the Anglican Church, I confess that in my late
twenties, I carried some unquestioned narrow opinions on sexuality. I had no
problem accepting that people, out there, in the world, might be gay. For
goodness sake, I worked in theatre. But Christians. They weren’t gay. It was
something I assumed could not be possible.
Later, in Sydney, Andy would tell
me he also had assumed being gay was not an option. He was twelve when he
started experiencing what most churches will only describe as same-sex
attraction. Believing this was sinful, he worked to push those attractions
aside.
While at uni, he dared to ask his
closest Christian friends to pray for him. He never said he was gay, or even
that he was same-sex attracted, instead, he told them that previously he had
found gay porn a temptation. He’d struggled with it. He’d ask them to pray that
the struggle wouldn’t come back. But the reality was the struggle, or
temptation, or whatever you want to call it was always there. It never went
away.
At some point he was going to have to admit he wasn’t a straight man with
a misplaced inclination for gay porn. He was, in fact, gay.
Never having heard his quiet prayer to be released from the temptation of
gay porn, not having known he’d spent years seeing a councillor in an attempt
to banish his same-sex attraction, Andy’s seemingly nonchalant typed coming out
message that January morning took me by surprise. I didn’t know what to do with
the information he was telling me. What did it mean for our friendship, for his
faith? Andy assured me that identifying as a Christian remained his priority,
which meant he had to reconcile two supposedly competing and incompatible
aspects of who he was.
Earlier this year, at the start of the Easter break, I drive round to
Leichhardt to see Andy, and ask how the process of reconciling his faith and
sexuality is progressing. We’re both back living in Sydney. Two years have
passed since he began telling people he was gay, since his grandfather said he
would go to hell, since a Baptist minister told him it would be best if he
never spoke to anyone about his sexuality and a theology student told him he
was questioning if it was time to ‘hand him over to Satan’.
I sit on the low brick wall at the front of Leichhardt Uniting Church
waiting for him. A sandwich board on the footpath lets me know the church is
open, and that justice is found here. Andy texts to say he is running late, but
he turns up within five minutes carrying several packets of black sheets that
will be used to cover the windows of the church during the candlelit Maundy
Thursday service that evening. We leave the sheets inside the church, then head
next door to the church owned residence where Andy lives.
In the kitchen he shares with twenty-two other adults, Andy flicks the
kettle on and offers me left over gluten free vegetarian lasagne. I decline. We
take our Earl Grey back to his room. I sit on the only chair, and Andy sits
cross legged on his bed opposite me. It’s my turn to listen.
Andy’s Christian story begins in a similar way to that of many children
born to church going parents. He grew up in a Christian family, as had both his
parents. There was constant exposure to Christian influence. His family,
however, always encouraged him to question what he was taught, and not to take
everything for granted.
“I think,” Andy pauses, “I think
I was a pretty snobby kind of Christian, a culture Christian.”
“A snobby Christian?” I ask, “As
in, what you thought about God or how to do church was right and other
Christians were wrong?”
“Perhaps. Well, probably more
that I thought being a Christian was definitely better than not being a
Christian”. He laughs, “That I was enlightened”.
Like other enlightened Christian
boys, Andy knew God required a strict sexual ethic, but unlike the others,
feeling like he was attracted to guys and not girls, was going to make life
trickier.
“So what did you do?”
“I spent a large chunk of my
life trying to get rid of that side of me, and trying to understand where it
had come from, and what on earth I had done wrong. I believed, theoretically,
that God loved me, that I was a Christian. But I also felt that I was gay. So,
I reasoned that therefore, I had to not be gay because I couldn’t be both”
Andy is not alone in having felt
that because love for God was his number one priority, the fact that he was
gay, had to be silenced. At my own church, I am told there are some people who
identify as same-sex attracted, but when I asked to be put in contact, I was
informed they didn’t like to talk about it. I can only wonder what stories they
might be able to share.
Psychologist Stuart Edser in his 2012 book Being Gay, Being Christian: You Can Be Both,
writes of his own pain in reconciling faith and sexuality. As a psychologist he
sees many people who experience depression, guilt and shame because they are
gay. His writes that just as we can’t be sure how many gay and lesbian people
there are in wider society, we can’t really be sure how many are in the church,
yet there is no reason to think or believe gay Christians don’t, or can’t,
exist. He references several surveys which have tried to determine the
percentages of gay and lesbian people in the general population. Most are not
conclusive, but suggest around 3% of people are homosexual, however some report
up to 10%. When I consider that over a hundred people attend my church, chances
are that there will be someone who doesn’t fit the heteronormative ideal, and
even if it’s only one person, does not everyone in the flock of one hundred
matter?
Before
finding his home at Leichhardt Uniting church, Andy had been going to an inner
city Baptist church. He started attending this church in 2006 after moving to
Sydney to study at the Conservatorium of Music. Though he made friends and was involved in the
activities of the church, his unfading, but unspoken, attraction to men always made
him feel more sinful and less loved than everyone else. Christians believe
we’re all inherently sinful, but Andy felt that his sin, the sin of who he was,
was worse than the secret failings of others. Yet unlike other character flaws
like greed or lack of compassion, the fact he was attracted to men seemed
impossible to control.
On
the recommendation of his church, Andy went to counselling, with the goal of
understanding, and overcoming, his same-sex attraction. He didn’t call himself
gay. In fact, he didn’t think anyone was actually gay, just that some people
had been conditioned to think they were. The theory being that without the
right kinds of male influences in youth, the need for male affirmation had
become sexualised.
“Did
this help?”
“A
bit, because it made me feel less like the way I felt was my fault. But it
didn’t solve anything. People would assume I must have had a bad relationship
with my dad, been neglected or abused. But my relationship with my dad was
great, so the only other theory the counsellor had was peer pressure.”
Without
experiencing any real results, Andy persisted in counselling, in asking for
prayer, in hoping for change. At the end of 2009, changes did start to come his
way, but not in the way he’d expected. Instead, Andy found opportunities to
leave Australia.
Andy
travelled the world with many varied motivations. He went to South East Asia to
take part in humanitarian projects helping with community development; he want
to Germany to attend language schools; he moved to London for teaching
experience. One of the unexpected, though perhaps not all that surprising,
outcomes was the opportunity to experience different expressions of
Christianity, and as a consequence rethink his own faith. The snobbery he had
felt in his secure, educated, mostly middle class existence began to fade.
“I
met a lot of different types of Christians. They practiced Christianity differently.
They had different theological understandings to me.”
“How
where they different?”
“Oh!”
Andy, makes a long exclamation that is part sigh, part a gathering of thought.
“Experience of the Holy Spirit. That was a really big one. I couldn’t understand
why so many of these really solid, so called bible believing Christians, who
really had their faith built around an academic understanding of Scripture,
could brush away so much of experiential faith.”
The Christians
Andy met while travelling, were all experiencing their faith within the bounds
of their own cultures. All these people were living and worshipping in
different countries, in different spaces and with different influences. But
they were united in experiencing the Holy Spirit as a reality in their lives. Belonging
to God was perhaps bigger than belonging to a particular denomination, and physical
local church.
The process of analysing his
faith enabled Andy to reconsider the expression of his sexuality within the
context of that faith. When Andy came home in 2012 he wanted to get on with
being committed to the church, to mission, to serving his community, to caring
for those who were in need. But now having seen so many other types of church,
as Andy sat back within the walls of his Sydney church, it didn’t feel like
home anymore. He wanted to be able to talk honestly about his sexuality, and
for it to be ok for him to admit who he was. He wanted to stop cagily talking
about a weakness for gay porn, and stop pretending he was still looking for the
right woman to cure him of illicit desire, and be his wife.
Over
the winter his church took a break from regular weekly bible study meetings and
ran some topical sessions. Working with a local ex-gay ministry organisation,
his church hosted some sessions on Christian responses to homosexuality.
Curious, Andy went. On the final night the main speaker, a man now married but
who had previously identified as same-sex attracted, said he’d never met a
same-sex attracted man who’d had a good relationship with their father,
implying that the key to a successful ministry was to first deal with the
broken relationship.
Andy
was uncomfortable. People had been
telling him this for years now, and it ignored the complexity of his situation.
At the end of the session, he walked away from his friends and went to confront
the speaker.
“You
can’t use that line with integrity anymore. You’ve now met a same-sex attracted
man who has a great relationship with his dad. Me”
Reflecting
on the talk, it occurred to Andy that this man, who was married, was confessing
to the fact that sometimes, just like everybody else, he still had to resist
temptation, to be careful with the material his eyes strayed upon while he was
online. That sometimes, the lure of gay pornography still called. People in the
audience had nodded along, but suddenly Andy thought, hang on, most men, would
be choosing to turn away from graphic pictures of women, not men. And maybe if
the attraction is still there, even though you married a woman, and had
children, maybe you’re not ex-gay at all. Maybe you’re actually gay. Andy was
done with lying. He wasn’t going to change, he’d tried for fifteen years, and
he’d had enough. He was gay.
After this Andy
spent around six months reading and considering the passages of scripture that
seemingly spoke against homosexuality. Still cradling his now cold cup of tea,
Andy looks at me.
“At that point I
thought, this is just kind of like a disease or something, perhaps like being
born disabled. It’s something that’s not necessarily part of the natural order,
but, something that just is, and therefore we find a way of dealing with that.”
I simply nod.
“I thought, you know, people weren’t designed
by God to move about in wheel chairs, they’re designed to walk on two legs,
but, we’re in a world where bad things happen. People can be born disabled,
through no fault of their own, through no external circumstances either, and we
find a way of coping.”
For a while Andy
framed his homosexuality within this context. Ideally he would have been
straight, but he lived in a fallen world, and he was gay. He would admit to it
and live with it. He would be different to everyone else. He would choose to be celibate which would be
tough, but that seemed the only way forward. The alternative, seeking a gay
relationship surely meant leaving the church, and in his heart, Andy knew he
wanted to stay. The church, well more accurately God, was his first love.
“I thought, God
wants me to live a holy life, so that’s the kind of life I will live.”
Andy
began to accept who he was. But this reasoning pathologises homosexuality in a
way that, long term, isn’t particularly helpful. Celibacy is a difficult
calling. Whether freely chosen for the sake of committing to mission, or in the
case of the Catholic Church, entering the priesthood, or because you’re single
and believe the only right expression of sexuality is within a heterosexual
marriage, it is a difficult road to walk.
If your community does not support you, or is structured in a way that
implies single life is somehow less valid, committing to celibacy will not only
be difficult, it will be isolating and unappealing.
Andy
went to see his minister to talk through his concerns. The conversation was abrupt. If he wanted to
stay in the church and stay on ministry teams, he was to be celibate. Andy
laughs dryly as he tells me the line from his minister was “the day you enter a
relationship with another man is the day your relationship with this church
ends”. He decided to leave before that happened.
Many people might never have
stepped into a church again. But Andy searched for a church that welcomed gay
and lesbian people, and he found Leichhardt Uniting. The church website
advertises that they are a safe and affirming church, welcoming people who
identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex. The church leadership seek to be loving and
supportive of all the people in the congregation, regardless of their
background, status, ethnicity or sexuality.
The reverend Dr John Hirt, who
leads the congregation at Leichhardt knows several ministers who are quick to
acknowledge they have friends who are gay, or that there are gay and lesbian
people in their churches. However, it often transpires these people are on the
periphery of parish life. Dr Hirt, however, strives to include gay and lesbian
people in all aspects of church life, to demonstrate that he believes all
members of his congregation are equal in the eyes of the Lord. If people in his
congregation have gifts and talents that can be used to serve the community, if
they live in a way that demonstrates the reality of their love for God, if it
appears that the Holy Spirit is shaping the character of an individual, these
are the things Dr Hirt looks at, not their sexuality.
Being welcomed by Leichhardt
Uniting gave Andy a place to continue living as a committed Christian, without
feeling ashamed of his sexuality. He met
and talked with other gay Christians. One couple, have been
together for a decade. There are gay Christians on the leadership team, leading music,
contributing to decision making and planning. They readily admit that being able to
be so involved at church keeps faith at the centre of their life.
In a community that so happily
recognises gay and lesbian Christians, Andy finally felt he
was allowed simply to be. Rather than be questioned for even daring to think he
might be gay, or might want a relationship one day, Andy could be supported in
coming to terms with the tricky passages on immorality, and the apparent sinfulness
of homosexuality. He grappled with definitions of sin. After much prayer, bible
reading, meditation and reflection, it seemed sin was something that was
damaging. Either to himself, to others, to his relationship with God or to his
ability to witness. According to this understanding, being gay did not seem
sinful, and ultimately nor did the prospect of going out with another man. He questioned
what he believed about salvation. He was not saved by not being gay. He was
saved through faith in Christ.
“Do you ever
feel angry at God?”
“No, not angry. I used to feel disappointed
that I couldn’t be straight. Now I’m disappointed in the response I sometimes
get from other Christians,” Andy looks down. “Sometimes there is a happiness in
ignorance. Sometimes you can go along to church and think you’re thinking about
things, but you’re not really.”
It’s now dark
outside. My tea is finished. The Maundy Thursday service will be starting soon.
I want to give Andy so many hugs to make up for all the years where, because he
felt unable to talk about his sexuality, I wasn’t able to be as supportive as I
would have liked to have been. It’s a
good thing I have this life and the next to make it up to him.