Chapter 1
And thus, I begin.
I grew up with no particular religious upbringing, the offspring of two parents who had been driven from their respective churches because they could no longer stomach certain ideas portrayed therein. My mother, a psychologist, left when her Baptist church when a schizophrenic killed himself after a supposed "healing service" in which the Pastor and church members attempted to "drive the demons out." My father, the son and grandson of good Irish Catholics, left because he found the Church's attitudes to women to be odious, particularly after he fell in love. Because I was raised in Middle America, however, I was certainly steeped in Christianity and the odd mixture that is considered to be "Christian values." Christianity is virtually inescapable in America. To be patriotic, we are taught, is to be Christian -- we cannot pledge allegiance without reference to God, our patriotic songs are simultaneously hymns, our money, bizarrely, claims a spiritual reliability (this always struck me as odd, considering the famous dictate of "rendering unto Caesar." But I digress.) Likewise, Christianity is often held as a synonym for virtue or morality, both in the Calvinist work-ethic (hard work is rewarded, and one's rewards represent one's worth) and the much-mourned loss of "family values" -- a value based on negation, making it clear that single parents, working (professionally) mothers, and various other permutations of the 1950s nuclear family simply are not good enough.
I knew when I was quite young that somehow I would never easily slip into this niche. I understood in some way that I was "different" at the age of four, was able to identify that it had something to do with boys -- being a "real" boy, at least -- by age seven, and aware, if not able to admit, that I was gay by the time I was ten. Living where I did, I had no desire or pretensions of "flaunting" my deviance. As in one of Juliet's first lines, having a romantic relationship was "an honor I dreamed not of." I had no expectations of taking a boy to my senior Prom, or writing their names on my notebooks. All I wanted -- well, no, because of course I wanted more -- but all I asked was that I be permitted to drift through my small town alone with my books and sketch pads, keeping up a semblance of cordiality with my classmates and earning a GPA that would remove me to a different kind of place.
Yet my very presence was offensive to certain people, my very existence an insult to their Christian faith. I never "outed" myself, but rumors abound, and people knew. And thus it came to pass that one night, as I walked home alone, I was waylaid by three of my classmates in an isolated lot near one of the nine local churches.
I found out later they had been attending a Youth Meeting and that the next night, they attended a Christian rock concert. That night, however, they occupied themselves with beating me almost to death.
One of them wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the motif "WWJD?" What would Jesus do, indeed -- apparently, smash my homosexual kneecaps to pieces. Another one wore a necklace with a cross on it, which was the last conscious image in my mind before blessedly I lost consciousness while the vast majority of the cuts and blows were laid upon my body. Lest there be any confusion about what I had done to merit this, one of them wrote on my chest, using several words that would increase the rating of my little tale if I repeated them here, and declared I was going to hell.
Obviously I did not, as I am writing this now. I was knocked unconscious on a Friday evening and awoke early Sunday morning, a bit of irony that did not escape me. At my "resurrection," I had some vague awareness of pain and of sound -- my mother, and worse, perhaps, for its rarity, my father sobbing, a strange voice murmuring that "amputation may still be necessary," another strange voice asking if I was a Christian. I tried to answer -- not him so much, but to tell my parents to stop crying -- and missed my father's angry answer, but heard the voice coldly saying he would pray for my soul. My father snapped back that he might pray for me to walk, instead.
That same hospital chaplain -- for it was he -- came back when I had been awake for some hours. They still did not know if the damage to my leg was at all salvageable -- infection was still the real danger. After all, I had lain alone, hurt and bleeding, for several hours. But I had asked my parents -- so pale and gray -- to go home and sleep, or at least sleep here at the hospital, and not feel the need to keep a vigil, so at the moment he returned I was alone. Too groggy to be very coherent, but enough to realize uncomfortably that he was telling me God would forgive me if I stopped rebelling against His ways and bowed to righteous authority. He told me how close I had come to Hell -- perpetual flame and darkness, and loneliness. Around the morphine, it was unbearable, and I was too confused to call for help. I lay there helpless as he talked to me about abomination, and how this should be a call for me to mend my ways, these boys were "agents" in what would help me live a cleaner life, with his help and I should look upon them with humble gratitude. Thankfully, a nurse came in (if there was an agent of God in that room, in my mind it was she) and saw me crying and sent him out -- dragged him out, actually. I found out later that I asked, sobbing (how this would embarrass me) what I had done. She kept saying that I hadn't done anything, that some people had hurt me, and I hadn't done anything, but with the sanctioned word of God, heavy as incense in the air, it was hard to believe her.
This is not to imply that even then, I thought all Christians were like those boys in the alley, or that chaplain. Certainly I never believed that all Christians would have enjoyed assaulting me or rejoiced in my death. But there were enough to make the Christian American world even more frightening and isolating. Even when the convoluted message was "hate the sin, love the sinner," there was still no safe place, because I knew they were not separate. I could no more change my sexuality than I could my height. Therefore, there was no difference. I was hated, hated by the God who was supposed to love the world so much. And it was very, very lonely.
And perhaps even more unnerving was the lack of outrage. Where I live there are no hate crime laws -- the proposed bill was shot down by Christian groups claiming that it would give "special rights" to gays -- the "special right" not to be beaten or killed, I suppose. Just as for years the rationale for banning the "Diary of Anne Frank," was that it treated all religions equally, and as we know, some people (in America, white straight middle class Christians) are more equal than others. Not a single minister in my town condemned the act from the pulpit; unlike the Baptist football player who had been injured in a car accident the year before, I received no official sympathy from the school. Those fine salt of the earth Christian Americans erased me into nothingness, for the crime of having been gay, having been beaten, and perhaps raising questions about what Christianity meant -- when "love thy neighbor" meant "attack and assault the different one." I made them uncomfortable, and so I paid.
Ultimately, my leg did not have to be amputated. I walk with a limp, and likely will for the rest of my life, and my body is riddled with scars -- plastic surgery might reduce them, but insurance doesn't pay and I chose college instead -- but I am still one of the "lucky ones." I lived.
While I was in the hospital, one of the rabbis came to see me quite often. He did not care that I was not Jewish -- I got the impression that he was angry at the chaplain for reasons beyond what had happened to me, and wanted to prove that he could comfort without trying to convert me. Most wonderfully, perhaps, he read to me for hours -- my arms and neck were hurt and I was too weak to read easily myself, and books had always been my solace. Among other things, it was he who put the Philip Pullman trilogy "His Dark Materials," into my hands; book three was not out then, but by the time it was, I had met the people who readied me for Pullman's challenges. I remain surprised that this book has not been attacked more; it is far more subversive than Harry Potter, which has no more to do with Wicca than it does with algebra. But had I not been influenced by certain people, I may have seen only the condemnation, and not the proffered solution within.
And this book, with its laser-sharp focus on some of the flaws of organized Christianity, connects me to the next part of my tale. I now introduce two Christians who reaffirmed my world and reawakened my soul. Not by converting me -- I still feel far too unwelcome and unconvinced, and they forced nothing upon me. But by acknowledging -- embracing -- the dark corners of their faith and themselves, they brought blinding light into my shadowed world.
And thus, I begin.
I grew up with no particular religious upbringing, the offspring of two parents who had been driven from their respective churches because they could no longer stomach certain ideas portrayed therein. My mother, a psychologist, left when her Baptist church when a schizophrenic killed himself after a supposed "healing service" in which the Pastor and church members attempted to "drive the demons out." My father, the son and grandson of good Irish Catholics, left because he found the Church's attitudes to women to be odious, particularly after he fell in love. Because I was raised in Middle America, however, I was certainly steeped in Christianity and the odd mixture that is considered to be "Christian values." Christianity is virtually inescapable in America. To be patriotic, we are taught, is to be Christian -- we cannot pledge allegiance without reference to God, our patriotic songs are simultaneously hymns, our money, bizarrely, claims a spiritual reliability (this always struck me as odd, considering the famous dictate of "rendering unto Caesar." But I digress.) Likewise, Christianity is often held as a synonym for virtue or morality, both in the Calvinist work-ethic (hard work is rewarded, and one's rewards represent one's worth) and the much-mourned loss of "family values" -- a value based on negation, making it clear that single parents, working (professionally) mothers, and various other permutations of the 1950s nuclear family simply are not good enough.
I knew when I was quite young that somehow I would never easily slip into this niche. I understood in some way that I was "different" at the age of four, was able to identify that it had something to do with boys -- being a "real" boy, at least -- by age seven, and aware, if not able to admit, that I was gay by the time I was ten. Living where I did, I had no desire or pretensions of "flaunting" my deviance. As in one of Juliet's first lines, having a romantic relationship was "an honor I dreamed not of." I had no expectations of taking a boy to my senior Prom, or writing their names on my notebooks. All I wanted -- well, no, because of course I wanted more -- but all I asked was that I be permitted to drift through my small town alone with my books and sketch pads, keeping up a semblance of cordiality with my classmates and earning a GPA that would remove me to a different kind of place.
Yet my very presence was offensive to certain people, my very existence an insult to their Christian faith. I never "outed" myself, but rumors abound, and people knew. And thus it came to pass that one night, as I walked home alone, I was waylaid by three of my classmates in an isolated lot near one of the nine local churches.
I found out later they had been attending a Youth Meeting and that the next night, they attended a Christian rock concert. That night, however, they occupied themselves with beating me almost to death.
One of them wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the motif "WWJD?" What would Jesus do, indeed -- apparently, smash my homosexual kneecaps to pieces. Another one wore a necklace with a cross on it, which was the last conscious image in my mind before blessedly I lost consciousness while the vast majority of the cuts and blows were laid upon my body. Lest there be any confusion about what I had done to merit this, one of them wrote on my chest, using several words that would increase the rating of my little tale if I repeated them here, and declared I was going to hell.
Obviously I did not, as I am writing this now. I was knocked unconscious on a Friday evening and awoke early Sunday morning, a bit of irony that did not escape me. At my "resurrection," I had some vague awareness of pain and of sound -- my mother, and worse, perhaps, for its rarity, my father sobbing, a strange voice murmuring that "amputation may still be necessary," another strange voice asking if I was a Christian. I tried to answer -- not him so much, but to tell my parents to stop crying -- and missed my father's angry answer, but heard the voice coldly saying he would pray for my soul. My father snapped back that he might pray for me to walk, instead.
That same hospital chaplain -- for it was he -- came back when I had been awake for some hours. They still did not know if the damage to my leg was at all salvageable -- infection was still the real danger. After all, I had lain alone, hurt and bleeding, for several hours. But I had asked my parents -- so pale and gray -- to go home and sleep, or at least sleep here at the hospital, and not feel the need to keep a vigil, so at the moment he returned I was alone. Too groggy to be very coherent, but enough to realize uncomfortably that he was telling me God would forgive me if I stopped rebelling against His ways and bowed to righteous authority. He told me how close I had come to Hell -- perpetual flame and darkness, and loneliness. Around the morphine, it was unbearable, and I was too confused to call for help. I lay there helpless as he talked to me about abomination, and how this should be a call for me to mend my ways, these boys were "agents" in what would help me live a cleaner life, with his help and I should look upon them with humble gratitude. Thankfully, a nurse came in (if there was an agent of God in that room, in my mind it was she) and saw me crying and sent him out -- dragged him out, actually. I found out later that I asked, sobbing (how this would embarrass me) what I had done. She kept saying that I hadn't done anything, that some people had hurt me, and I hadn't done anything, but with the sanctioned word of God, heavy as incense in the air, it was hard to believe her.
This is not to imply that even then, I thought all Christians were like those boys in the alley, or that chaplain. Certainly I never believed that all Christians would have enjoyed assaulting me or rejoiced in my death. But there were enough to make the Christian American world even more frightening and isolating. Even when the convoluted message was "hate the sin, love the sinner," there was still no safe place, because I knew they were not separate. I could no more change my sexuality than I could my height. Therefore, there was no difference. I was hated, hated by the God who was supposed to love the world so much. And it was very, very lonely.
And perhaps even more unnerving was the lack of outrage. Where I live there are no hate crime laws -- the proposed bill was shot down by Christian groups claiming that it would give "special rights" to gays -- the "special right" not to be beaten or killed, I suppose. Just as for years the rationale for banning the "Diary of Anne Frank," was that it treated all religions equally, and as we know, some people (in America, white straight middle class Christians) are more equal than others. Not a single minister in my town condemned the act from the pulpit; unlike the Baptist football player who had been injured in a car accident the year before, I received no official sympathy from the school. Those fine salt of the earth Christian Americans erased me into nothingness, for the crime of having been gay, having been beaten, and perhaps raising questions about what Christianity meant -- when "love thy neighbor" meant "attack and assault the different one." I made them uncomfortable, and so I paid.
Ultimately, my leg did not have to be amputated. I walk with a limp, and likely will for the rest of my life, and my body is riddled with scars -- plastic surgery might reduce them, but insurance doesn't pay and I chose college instead -- but I am still one of the "lucky ones." I lived.
While I was in the hospital, one of the rabbis came to see me quite often. He did not care that I was not Jewish -- I got the impression that he was angry at the chaplain for reasons beyond what had happened to me, and wanted to prove that he could comfort without trying to convert me. Most wonderfully, perhaps, he read to me for hours -- my arms and neck were hurt and I was too weak to read easily myself, and books had always been my solace. Among other things, it was he who put the Philip Pullman trilogy "His Dark Materials," into my hands; book three was not out then, but by the time it was, I had met the people who readied me for Pullman's challenges. I remain surprised that this book has not been attacked more; it is far more subversive than Harry Potter, which has no more to do with Wicca than it does with algebra. But had I not been influenced by certain people, I may have seen only the condemnation, and not the proffered solution within.
And this book, with its laser-sharp focus on some of the flaws of organized Christianity, connects me to the next part of my tale. I now introduce two Christians who reaffirmed my world and reawakened my soul. Not by converting me -- I still feel far too unwelcome and unconvinced, and they forced nothing upon me. But by acknowledging -- embracing -- the dark corners of their faith and themselves, they brought blinding light into my shadowed world.