I first met Adele on my blog, when she posted a really smart comment using the screen name Existential Punk. I followed a link to her site, where she described herself in her profile as being “a doubter, a betrayer, a traveler . . . redeemed by the grace and beauty of God.” That was enough to convince me that we had a few things in common, so Adele and I struck up a little friendship on the blogosphere.
I’d always wanted a gay friend. But, as embarrassing as this is to admit, I wanted the sort of gay friend who would give me fashion advice and add some diversity to my clique, the kind of gay friend who would make me look edgy and open-minded, not the kind who would actually challenge my thinking or stereotypes.
As a fellow writer and friend, Adele inspired me to reexamine some of my assumptions. The more we talked, the more I learned about what life is like for gay and lesbian people who are followers of Jesus. The more I learned, the less I felt I knew. The less I felt I knew, the more I listened.
“People tell me that I’m an oxymoron,” Adele said in an email. “They tell me that I have to choose between being gay and being a Christian, that I can’t be both.”
Adele grew up in a moderately religious home in Cincinnati, where she attended a private Catholic school. Even as a child she had crushes on other girls, but she repressed those feelings in order to fit in. As a sophomore in college, Adele responded to an altar call at a conservative charismatic church. Her born-again experience led her to attend a Christian graduate school in Virginia Beach, where she fell into an on-again, off-again physical relationship with another woman. Counselors told Adele that the relationship had to end because it violated Scripture.
“That’s when I determined to try to pray away the gay,” she says. “I got involved in an ex-gay ministry where the purpose was to heal me of my homosexuality so that I could attain the ideal — marriage to someone of the opposite sex. I attended conferences where I received anointing oil and splashes of holy water. I bought mountains of books and tapes. I fasted and prayed. I begged God to heal me, but no miracle occurred. I felt like a failure. I became deeply depressed and tried to kill myself, which twice landed me in a psychiatric hospital for over a month. It’s not that I really wanted to kill myself; I just didn’t want to live this awful life. Sometimes I self-mutilated by hitting myself because I seethed with so much loathing and disgust for myself. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t change.”
After struggling through counseling, Adele moved to Los Angeles, where she lived a double life, pretending to be straight around her Christian friends while secretly pursuing gay relationships on the side. It wasn’t until her thirties, Adele says, that she made peace with both God and her sexuality. She blogs about her experience on a site called Queermergent.
“For a long time I despised God and the Bible,” Adele told me. “The Bible has always been used as an excuse to treat me with hatred and revulsion.”
I thought about the signs I’ve seen at protest rallies on TV, signs that say things like “Turn or Burn: Luke 13:3,” or “AIDS Is the Cure: Romans 6:23,” or “God Hates Fags: Genesis 19.” I could see why opening the Bible might make someone like Adele wince.
Sometimes when I want to put myself in Adele’s shoes, I imagine an alternate universe in which Christians have chosen different biblical stones to throw, condemning women who uncover their heads or people with tattoos. I imagine TV preachers claiming that 9/11 happened as a result of God’s wrath on the gossipers and the greedy, and churches raising funds to support an amendment to the constitution making remarriage illegal for people who are divorced. I imagine people carrying signs that say “God Hates Gluttons” or “Stone Disobedient Children” or “Shellfish Are an Abomination.” When it comes to Scripture, we tend to pick and choose in ways that are favorable to our own interests.
That’s when I realize that if anyone’s an oxymoron, it’s me. Or maybe it’s anyone who claims to follow Jesus.