The Narnia Inside My Closet: Part 3

< Part 1  |  Part 2 >

In my first two posts, I wrote about my life growing up. I was a gay teenager who did not know how to process the fact that I was gay. The fact that I did not know anyone else around me who knew what I was going through put me even further into a rut.

The whole situation was actually quite simple: underlying my whole rejection of my own attraction to boys was my faith.

I could sense that somewhere in the Bible it said homosexuality was a sin—although I did not know exactly where. So naturally, I knew that whether it was my sexual orientation or my faith something would have to give. And after being part of an evangelical mission trip to France, I decided it was time to work through my questions and struggles….

That actually is not entirely true. It is not like I sat down one day and decided, “I think today is the day I will answer all of my questions about life.” Instead, I could just sense that something, some storm, was brewing in the near future in relation to my faith. And I decided it was best to take shelter ASAP.

This was partly the reason I chose to transfer universities. I decided that if I was going to struggle through figuring out exactly what I believed than I wanted to do it under the guidance and supervision of other Mennonites.

The transfer officially occurred in December/January of the 2009/2010 school year—I was a Junior at that time. But I actually did very little processing right away.

The university I transferred to was in a completely different area of the country, nestled in the Shenandoah Valley of the Appalachian Mountains; furthermore, I knew almost no one there so I needed to develop a network of support amongst friends before I would be ready to process anything. Thus, my first semester served me more than anything else a chance to settle into a place that would be my home for the next couple of years.

After coming back in the fall of the next school year, I joined the school’s LGBT advocacy club—which was mostly made up of allies (*the term typically given to people who are heterosexual but nevertheless support gay rights), since there were only four openly gay students on campus at that time.

This was a pivotal step for me in my journey towards accepting who I was. I was FINALLY in an atmosphere where it was generally accepted to be gay and Christian.

Now, I unfortunately must say that I was still conflicted at this point on whether it was actually okay or not. But that is why being a part of this group was so important. For the first time, I could hear other people’s stories—not necessarily of themselves, but of friends and friends of friends. This gave me the other perspective I was looking for.

All too often discussions on homosexuality are overly politicized to the point of simply being impersonal issues, without any consideration for the people who are gay. But invariably we are talking about real people with real feelings, who experience real situations in their everyday lives. And I think people forget that sometimes.

I sat in that group’s meetings seeing that things were not always as black and white as they seem. And by the end of the semester (in conjunction with various several other self-evaluations), I was ready to start viewing myself in relation to these people who are so fiercely debated.

Towards the end of that semester, one of the openly gay men on campus presented his senior show: a play composed of several shorter plays he had written around the theme of love. It was a commemoration of the many different facets of love composed from the stories of him and his friends, and the very last scene was his own coming out story.

He described how one night, a year or so ago, he had sat in his car in the school parking lot in the middle of night. There, he prayed one last time for God to change who he was; a prayer that would once again go unanswered. (Actually, you could say God DID change who he was: He went from someone who hated himself to someone who loved and embraced himself.)

I quickly realized two things in that moment: (1) he was not just talking about himself, he also represented me and my entire life up to that point; and (2) that God did not answer his prayer because it was not what God wanted for him.

In that moment, everything changed for me; but it was not a change that all of a sudden caught me off guard. It was a realization of a change that started months/years before that moment, which finally came to fruition. In fact, I was ready for the change; I was only looking for the opportunity to present itself.

I was quickly reminded of Psalm 139, which took on a whole new light for me. 

“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Ps. 139:13-14a)

I realized that people were gay because God actually wanted them to be gay, that God created them that way.

And so I came out, first to my closest friends and then (when I went home for Christmas) to my parents. But again, I do not like saying that “I came out.” I would rather say “I grew up,” because essentially that is what happened. It was not this greatly emotional catastrophe; it felt like a celebration—because finally, a big weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

I learned not to hate who I was, nor to be embarrassed about it. This is my life and why should I care what other people think about me? Does that ever actually change anything? I learned that the bottom-line is both me and God loved and embraced who I was—and at the very least, that is all that matters.