Transitions

A story of the evolution of a thought, in three parts.

I

Growing up, I didn't know if I knew anyone who was LGBTQ+. Middle school and high school happened throughout the nineties, and though there was still some AIDS conversations in hushed tones in the hallways at school, the judgment of homosexuality particularly (the rest of the gender and orientation spectrum being even more suppressed than it is now) was somehow tied into the disease. I lived a sheltered life, shared with friends who didn't know much about sexuality--or, if they did, they didn't bring it up around me. This meant that most of my understanding of sexuality and human relationships was narrowly confined.

I remember the first time my mom explained how gays have sex, and the disgust and disdain in her voice still echoes.* I don't know what inspired it, or if there's another way of reading that conversation. It was long ago, and I daresay that I may have misremembered what was said. Nevertheless, I logged away that response, incorporating it into my own. I absorbed the slang that derided homosexuality, feeling comfortable, in my youth, to call something that I found disagreeable as "gay" and generally relying on a sense of religious superiority whenever it came to the topic of sex--whatever the format. 

Because I grew up in Utah, the sex education I received in high school was not particularly thorough. I disliked the sex ed units in my health classes, if only because it was one of those "It doesn't pertain to me" kinds of things, having decided to worry about sexual intimacy only after I got married. That plan went through just fine, and I count myself lucky that I didn't make a mistake out of ignorance. In my case, abstinence only was a policy that I learned in school and at home and had incorporated into my purview. Success.

But when it came to "same-sex attraction" (a phrase that's a nonce taxonomy if ever I've heard one), there wasn't a lot of conversation about it. My mom's judgment I absorbed as my own, and I figured homosexuality was not only sinful, but something best left alone, undiscussed, and unconsidered.

II

When I went on my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I distinctly remember, over half way through my two-year tenure, one of the other elders saying to a newly arrived missionary, "One thing for sure, you'll be a little gay by the time you leave."

One of the things that, in retrospect, that makes me scratch my head a little, is the way in which missionary work in the LDS Church is organized. The concept is straightforward: Send forth the faithful to call the world to repentance. I get that, and it makes sense as both a biblical mandate and a demographic necessity, to say nothing of the spiritual implications. But, considering the Church's unequivocal stance on homosexuality (again, "same-sex (or -gender) attraction" is the preferred term), it's a little strange that the policy is to send a bunch of guys, aged 18-21 (or so), off to live in apartments with other guys. The age, of course, is the one when hormonal explosions aren't done, and there is a massive amount of mental energy in both entertaining and trying to repress a missionary's focus on people he finds attractive. One of my friends said that any time he saw a pretty girl, he'd hit himself on the head to try to knock himself back onto the purpose of his being there. He was always biking around, hitting himself on the head--so much so his companions would laugh.

In my mission, we had a code word for any attractive girl we saw (and, living in Miami, there were a lot of attractive girls about): "Hey, I just saw Chad!" or "Chad's buying some cereal right now." The seemingly innocuous statement would be interpreted by the other elder as "Check out the hot chick" and murmurs of appreciation were shared.

A missionary's schedule is pretty tightly defined, complete with wake up and bedtimes, but they're always given one day a week in which to prepare. They're (supposed) to clean the apartment, go shopping for groceries, and recreate--usually playing basketball at a church facility or, in my case, going to the park to play soccer with some of the other missionaries and/or members. The night before Preparation Day (or P-day, as we called it) was unofficially termed "P-day Eve", and we'd stay up late chatting. LDS missionaries don't have TVs in their apartments, and though they have iPads and other tech nowadays, I'm pretty sure they don't have a Netflix subscription. There wasn't a lot to do when four barely-out-of-teenagedom guys are hanging out at ten o'clock at night except talk.

We'd talk about girls.

Since elders aren't in the mission field to date--they're there to teach, preach, and baptize--having girlfriends or any sort of romantic interests was a strict no-no. In fact, one elder in my mission was sneaking out at night to see a girl he'd met in the ward. When the mission president (the man tasked with overseeing the missionary work in that particular part of the world) found out, he sent the kid home. That night. So, almost all of the conversations were talk and nothing but. We'd sit around, talk about how pretty they were. Girlfriends left behind. What we thought marriage would be like. Stuff like that.

And I remember, right at the very end of my mission, sitting on my bed, the other three roommates on the spare bed, the chairs, or the desk--chilling out, laughing, talking--and my companion standing up, declaring that homosexuality was impossible. "You bonked your head, and now you're thinking this way." He had just finished waxing poetic about all the benefits of the female form, and had worked himself into a place where, so far as he could tell, he'd come to an incontrovertible realization. We all nodded agreement: Gays were mentally disabled if they thought men were attractive.

And we would know: We spent almost exclusive time in the company of other men. We weren't supposed to go outside of our apartment without the companion as a shadow. We knew how stinky, stupid, loud, and sloppy other men were. It was pretty clear: Wanting to be around other guys was definitely a sign of insanity, but we weren't self-aware enough to recognize that we'd signed up to spend two years around other guys.

I remember laughing and agreeing with my companion. Yes, I thought, gays just don't get it. Guys have nothing to offer.

I had taught a gay man--he eventually decided not to take the discussions once we explained the Church's stance on homosexuality--and, odds are good, I probably worked with an elder or two who turned out to be gay. In not the first of many false assumptions I made because of a failure to think in large enough implications, I assumed that I had the right of this situation. My mother's opinion had become my own.

III

My first semester back from the mission, I took one of the literary theory classes that my major required. Unlike high school, where a teacher's reputation is fairly easy to check, thanks to older siblings, friends, and wardmates, I didn't know which teacher to take for this critical theory class. In the end, I picked one that fit my schedule and didn't think much about it. 

The class was one of the worst experiences in my college career. It also was one of the most important classes I could have taken, and I regret not appreciating and understanding it at the time.

The teacher was a returned missionary herself, but she had left the Church years ago, 'married' (this was in 2004-5; even the heinous Prop 8 was still in futurity at this point) her girlfriend, and taught in Utah Valley specifically because she felt that it was important for the demographic of the county to be exposed to a person like her.

She had an ax to grind, I won't deny that. She kept her critiques of the Church pretty muted (which, for me at the time, was a good thing; I probably wouldn't have handled it well, being unable to distance myself from the critiques), but her introduction of feminism and queer theory made me immensely uncomfortable. Coming from a patriarchal worldview, feminism felt immensely challenging and antagonistic, and I'll never forget the way she said, with a wizened surety, "Everyone's a little queer."

The irony, of course, is that critical theory begins by explaining that the rigid binaries of the system--governmental, societal, religious, it doesn't matter--are, by nature of being part of the system, not the inflexible duality we think of. This is the differance with an a that operates always already within the system. In other words, my allergic reaction to gender identity stemmed from an incorporation of gendered understanding that couldn't be sustained by any type of critical look; it wasn't that she was wrong, it's that what she said didn't fit into what I thought I knew.

I've reflected on her simple declaration a lot. As I've come to understand the world better (and, by doing so, recognizing that I don't understand the world at all), I see the truth to what she's said. There's so much more to humans, their relationships, their sexualities, their connections than I had dreamt of in my philosophy. I thought that one had to be everything--all of what one was, with no Venn diagram to muddy the picture. One was straight or one was not. One was male or one was female. That was it.

I had assumed that to be queer meant to be entirely queer. Now, however, I realize that it's much more subtle and nuanced than that. 

Many of the stories that Shakespeare wrote involve two men who claim to love each other. The most obvious example of this is probably Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, the former risking his life because of his love for the latter. Some readers turn this into a homosexual, one way attraction from Antonio to Bassanio. I think that reading is fine, but I do believe that Shakespeare is less concerned with physical intimacy that homosexuality would imply here. Antonio's love is pervasive, constant, and risky. That relationship--between two men--is queer by our modern standards. But it's natural, pure, and desirable for not only the time in which it was written, but crucial to a clear understanding of the play.

Relationships needn't be physical to be real and nourishing. I now understand my professor's comment less as an accusation about my sexual orientation, and more an observation of what makes us human: Loving people. There are different ways of approaching love and relationships, and each couple builds that differently. Sometimes, "bromance" is the easiest way to describe it. (I would argue that, when it's a similar situation of two straight girls being in platonic love, it'd be a "bramance".) I have friends who happen to be men who inspire me, make me feel like a better person, and whose presence I actively seek to have. While I don't have any physical attraction to them, I have an emotional or intellectual one. Not all of these men are even alive: I have a "man-crush" on Shakespeare and Milton. 

That class** helped to crack open my heart and realize that my ossified opinion was mistaken. 

Coda

This might be considered a "coming out" story, but that isn't the case. For one, I am cis-het male (and White as mayonnaise), and I'm not going to appropriate one of the most difficult things that members of the LGBTQ+ community have to go through. My intellectual arrival at the radical notion that people are people, and that's what matters, isn't remotely akin to embracing the person you are, despite every societal, religious, and (increasingly) legal reasons to stay closeted. 

With so much happening in the world in general, and within the LGBTQ+ community specifically, I felt like my own views need to be re-expressed. I support the LGBTQ+ community. I disagree with any societal or legal attempt to diminish it and anyone who identifies with that community. I have friends who are bi, asexual, pansexual, and gay. I have some wonderful lesbian friends. I don't even know how many LGBTQ+ students I've taught over the years, but I hope they will know that I'm happy that they are who they are. There's no reason to hate or discriminate against transgender people, and knowing that we have a trans in my school makes me proud and happy that there's a place for him/her (I don't know the preferred pronoun; haven't taught the student). 

I've pinned this as my first tweet on my Twitter profile because I think it matters: 

Gay people
Trans people
Godless people
Colored people
The most important word here is people,all deserving love & respect bc they're people 

My thinking has evolved, and I share this, in part, to hope that yours does, too.

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* Can I just say that my mom is a wonderful person? I can't claim to know what she was thinking when she said that, or if I'm misremembering. I don't know what she feels now about homosexuality or anything in this essay. She helped to teach me compassion, empathy, love, and an awareness of others in a way that I'd be poorer without. I do not mean for this autobiographical sketch to paint my mother in any sort of negative light. In sum: I love my momma and I don't think she's homophobic.

** It'd be easy to say that "college turned me into a liberal". That is true, insofar as that label signifies something worth accepting. But gaining a new vocabulary to better describe the world was the gift of college for me: Realizing how broad the world was didn't come from classes attended six miles south of where I grew up. No, the pathway to my liberal politics and worldview came from my LDS mission. That was where I saw the way that the cracks in the system break human lives--I knew a doctor from Cuba, who had legally immigrated here, and was a janitor, raising her family on that pittance. I saw how poverty can grip minority communities, perpetuating a laissez faire Jim Crow, perpetuated by forced economic realities. The scriptural injunction to "mourn with those that mourn" (Mosiah 18:9) became real to me while I lived in Florida, trying to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, it was the conservative stance against immigrants and immigration that created my first schism with conservativism. I regret to say that I voted for George W. Bush in '04, but I've never thoughtlessly voted since then, having learned my lesson. While I don't always agree with Harry Reid (and I'm most definitely not a Democrat), I find this quote of his emblematic: "I am a Democrat because I am a Mormon, not in spite of it."