One of the phrases I keep seeing in the gay debate is about the "pain and hurt" that those who oppose same-sex relationships and ordaining lesbigay clergy feel as they see such practices rapidly becoming more and more commonplace in the Church. Christian homosexuals, like myself, and our straight supporters are constantly being reminded that we must try to appreciate the pain and hurt felt by those in the American Anglican Council (AAC) and other groups which oppose acceptance of same-sex relationships.

I'm as tired as anyone of these debates. After 52 years on the planet, it would be nice to spend one day in my Holy Mother the Church without being an "object", an "issue" of speculation, without standing in a room and being discussed in the third person by those who claim to be my brothers and sisters in Christ. But I feel a need to share some observations on this matter of the "pain and hurt" felt by some.

First of all, I am very aware of the feelings and emotions in the straight world. As a Christian homosexual child growing up in the small towns of Texas in the Fifties and Sixties, I was 100% closeted since that was the only way to survive. I was immersed in the teachings, traditions, moral values, emotions and feelings of the straight majority around me. On the other hand, because I was closeted, no one save God alone knew of my pain and hurt.
 

I saw and empathetically felt the shock and horror on my mother and father's faces the day I told them I was gay. I saw the rages thrown by friends who had been like brothers and sisters, but rejected me when they found out about me. I heard the screaming fits of the parents of some of my gay friends as they disowned their children and turned them out into the streets never to speak to them again. I saw grandparents go into seclusion for shame of gay grandchildren, never to emerge into society again. Most of these were good people who genuinely believed that there was nothing more evil or abominable than a homosexual. While I completely disagreed with them, there was no way to deny the devastating reality of their pain and hurt, especially because so many of them were people I had grown up with and loved all my life. While it is true that I can never really feel and comprehend another Human Being's pain and hurt, I feel that I have come as close to that as is possible. I have also discovered that my deeply felt awareness of this pain and hurt is not unique to me.
 

In my conversations on this matter with hundreds of homosexual persons, I have found this to be a virtually universal awareness among homosexuals. On the other hand, I find it rare indeed for straight people to have anything even approximating that same depth of empathy and comprehension when it comes to the pain and hurt felt by homosexuals. Much of that is the fault of homosexuals who, like myself, remained in the closet well into adult life. How can I fault you for not being aware of my pain and hurt if I have dedicated my life to concealing it from you?

 

All too often, I hear anti-gay people in the straight world speak of "homosexuality" as if it were something missing entirely from a person's life until the moment that a person has a same-sex sexual experience. Therefore, we gays are told that if we are in pain, all we have to do is "stop doing that" and then everything will be fine. That is not true at all.
 

I knew I was gay before I had my first gay sexual experience later in adult life, I knew I was gay before I entered the first grade, although I did not have a vocabulary to describe it and explain it to my own self it until I was about ten. By the time I was ten, I had read everything I could find in the Dallas Public Library on homosexuality, all of it written by straight people about gays, never by gays about ourselves. Let me assure you that what a frightened and isolated little gay boy found about homosexuality in the stacks of the Dallas Public Library in 1957 was not very encouraging. It was terrifying and it caused incredible pain and hurt. I was only a ten year old child living in a world nearly half a century ago that fiendishly punished anyone discovered to be gay. I dealt with it all alone during all those childhood years. I had no AAC or Concerned Clergy and Laity meetings where I could share my grief and pain and hurt.

In what follows, I don't want to get into a "suffering contest" with those who stand opposite me in the Church's debate on homosexuality. That would only serve to prove who can whine the loudest. All I want to do is to remind those who oppose me that, yes, I am very aware of your pain and hurt . . . . and to remind you that there is also some pain and hurt in the gay world. It is a pain and hurt that is rooted not in some aspect of the nature of being gay, but in the ignorance, hate, and fear that others have allowed to mold their responses to and attitudes towards homosexuals.
 

I'll use the AAC just as a convenient example of the various groups and individuals in the Church who oppose gay relationships. How many in the AAC live in fear of losing their jobs if they are discovered to be AAC? How many AAC parents fear that their AAC sons or daughters in college will be kidnaped and taken to a remote wilderness prairie, tied to a fence and tortured and pistol whipped and left to die alone in the cold as was gay college student Matthew Shepherd? Matthew was not an isolated case. Police and FBI records show how commonplace violence towards homosexuals is and it's growing. Before you say, "Well, inexcusable as such violence is, it just shows the kind of response that an evil like homosexuality tends to call forth." Remember that in this country, even today, we have a tradition of the same thing being done to African-Americans just because they're Black, not because being Black is evil. Gays and Blacks don't suffer because we are evil. We suffer because people have been falsely taught to hate and fear us.
 

How many AAC members just disappear one day from their jobs as school teachers with no explanation given to their students, never to be heard from again? How many AAC members with a terminally ill life partner of sixty or seventy years are denied access to that partner's death bed by remote relatives who haven't even seen that partner in decades? Because our relationships have no legal standing, even a third cousin can do that to us. How many AAC members have had that partner taken from them by those relatives and buried in a place that they are never told? How many AAC members have ever come out of an AAC meeting and been attacked by anti-AAC hooligans, beaten unconscious and then had their faces urinated on as I once was coming out of a political meeting in a gay bar? How many AAC members have to sit at family dinners or office meetings or in gym class while those who claim to love you tell jokes about you and laugh at all the ways they can think of to horribly kill you . . . and they don't even know they are talking about you and you are too afraid to speak out because you've already seen the horrible fate that awaits those who are discovered?

I've had plenty of people in the AAC and other groups with similar views on gays tell me that they are utterly opposed to any of the cruelties inflicted on gays as I describe them above. They use that worn out phrase, "We hate the sin, but we love the sinner." I have felt love and I have felt the emotion coming towards me from most (though not all) who use that slogan and believe me, the two are nothing alike. Those who use that slogan tell me that there is no way that they would ever even think of doing the slightest violence to me as a homosexual and that killing me would be the farthest thing from their minds.

Yet, these are the same people who constantly quote me Leviticus 20: 13 and tell me that I have to accept those words literally, at face value, and live my life according to them. That verse has two parts and reads as follows (NRSV), "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them."
 

If I have to accept the first part, the ban on same-sex activity, why is it that those who quote that verse to me feel they are exempt from the second part which requires them to put me to death if I disobey? The Levitical manner of execution for these "crimes" is death by stoning. Think about the process of beating a person to death with sharp stones while they scream in agony and beg for mercy. Think about doing it to some gay person you know and love. If you insist that the first part of the verse be obeyed literally, you must be prepared to obey the second part literally. I ask you then, is this a verse that is from the Sacred Heart of Jesus to our hearts? Is this verse a universally binding law of the Gospel message of love or is it merely one of the many culturally shaped local tribal taboos that have survived in the Biblical record?

Don't dismiss my words as extremist hyperbole. It's not just people like the Rev. Fred Phelps who want to kill all homosexuals to please God. (The Rev. Fred Phelps maintains a web page whose address is "www.godhatesfags.com" and there are plenty of other "Christian" web pages like it.) In the mid-1980s, a state judge in Dallas, Texas gave light, suspended sentences of a few years to two thugs who attacked and beat to death two gay men in a gay bar district and did so by their own admission simply because the two men were gay. At the sentencing, the judge said on the record that he was giving those murderers a light sentence because (and I quote), "After all, the people you killed were just a couple of queers." When I read that, I felt pain and hurt.

I personally know many people in the AAC and similar groups. They are all fine, decent, good people. I can't imagine one of them who would support such violence against gays. But when you attempt to build a moral system on ancient, primitive tribal taboos that are rooted in ignorance, violence, and fear instead of building a moral system that is rooted in the inclusive Gospel love of Jesus Christ, you cannot be surprised when that system produces murder and violence. The anti-gay forces can verbally distance themselves from the horrors their system produces, but I cannot. I am gay and always was and always will be. I have to live in the world that the straight majority in the Church has created for homosexuals. It is a life from hell. I know, because unlike those who created it and enforce it, I lived in it and faithfully obeyed its rules for 29 years.

Closeted homosexuals who live in that world have the highest rates of suicide, mental illness, and chemical addiction of any demographic group in the world. However, when those same homosexuals come out of the closet, reject that anti-gay teaching, and embrace their God-given sexual orientation and enter into committed same-sex relationships, their rates of suicide, chemical addiction, and mental illness fall to about the same level as that of the general population in which they live. If such relationships are indeed sin as some in the Church claim, then I challenge those who call it sin to show me one single other example where the embracing of a sin causes a person's mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual life to so drastically improve along with one's healthy relationship with one's soul, with others, and with one's God.

And as to this matter of "obeying" Lambeth and this matter of Archbishops who think primates are of the same stature as God and as to the Singapore consecrations: I am an Anglo-Catholic with a very, very high theology of the Episcopate. I pray for the day when bodies such as Lambeth and the Primates Meetings will indeed have more authority in the Anglican Communion than they presently have. But that day is not yet here. You don't change the rules in the middle of the game just because you think you're winning. Lambeth and the Primates Meetings are advisory bodies with no binding legislative authority anywhere in the Anglican Communion on any level. Apparently, there seem to be Anglican bishops who have no more understanding of the authority and history of Lambeth than they do of the homosexuals whom they condemn without even meeting them or looking them in the eye. None of the posturing and arrogance of any bishop who publically displays such a lack of understanding is going to convince me to let him become my moral mentor or my role model for the governance of the Anglican Communion.

But if some of the African and Asian bishops have missed that point and falsely believe that the resolutions and communiques of Lambeth and the Primates Meetings are legally binding on every Anglican, let them show us how to obey not by criticizing others, but by personal example. Let them implement as law in their dioceses all the currently active resolutions of Lambeth about women. And let them show us how they are obeying the 1998 resolution on Human sexuality by gathering together members of the homosexual communities in their own dioceses and regularly meeting with them to hear their life stories and perspectives. Let us hear how they are accomplishing this dialog which Lambeth promised on the parish level as well.

And if it happens that some of the Anglican bishops who supported the Singapore consecrations and, for whatever reasons, fail to establish this dialog with homosexuals in their local dioceses as they promised at Lambeth, let us rejoice to know that they approve of consecrating special bishops to minister to those who are in pain and hurt because the promises of Lambeth are being rejected in their local diocese. So surely they will be delighted should The American Church follow their example by ordaining homosexual bishops to enter their dioceses and minister to those homosexuals in Uganda and Singapore and other places where homosexuals live with pain and hurt because they have been awaiting the promises of Lambeth to be carried out, but they have been abandoned by their bishops who have rejected those resolutions of Lambeth.

We can run this debate as long as people have a stomach for it, but I grow weary of it because we homosexuals have already won. Why do I say we've won? Because most straight people in the Church know so little about us that they don't even know what victory consists of for us. We aren't fighting for the right to have sex or to see straights pass legislation that accepts us. We aren't fighting to get validation for our lives from people who won't even speak to us. Just like those polygamist wives whom the Church has accepted in Africa because to expel them in an African society that lets such expelled women and their children die in the streets is tantamount to a death sentence, we homosexuals are fighting for our lives. We are fighting to escape the upside down Alice Through the Looking Glass nightmare that has been created for us by a straight majority that neither has to live in that world or even come to grips with what that dark, demonic world does to its victim residents.

The only weapon that could successfully hold us down and kill us for the past 6,000 years was isolation. I was 18 years old before I met another Human Being who said he was gay. He was the first homosexual I ever knew for sure. It was another eleven years before the indescribable terror in my own heart was stilled enough to allow me to speak the same words to another Human.

But now, the Internet and the mass media have come not only to New York and Kansas, but to Africa and even the remote villages of Asia. Gays who once would have been doomed to live and die without ever knowing another open homosexual or speaking of their own sexual orientation are now being freed from that evil, soul destroying isolation. Gays once doomed to live out their lives in the unspeakable fear and isolation of the closet now can have a community of kindred souls that make known the lies.

I grew up believing that all homosexuals were the evil baby raping, drooling, satan worshiping trash that everyone said they were. How else could such loving and wondrous good people as my priests and parents and teachers and neighbors all revile and hate and fear gays so much? I simply assumed that for some unfathomable reason, I alone had escaped being as evil as the average homosexual.

But then I met another gay and he was a nice guy like me. And another and another and suddenly I realized that every word about homosexuals I had ever heard from every "authority" was a complete falsehood! And that's when I personally won the victory, by the grace of my Savior. That's when each homosexual wins the ability to stop hating love in our upside down world, to stop hating ourselves for being able to love. For every homosexual who has, by God's good grace, won the victory, these discussions aren't a debate. They are an offering by homosexuals to the Universal Church of the wisdom and insight with which Christ the Risen Lord has graced us and with which He now is gracing the larger Church. But so many, even bishops, continue to brag about their refusal to even listen to our testimony despite their solemn promises to do so. People who can't even keep their solemn word? Why would I accept moral guidance from such persons?

Yes, the vote at Lambeth went overwhelmingly against the work of the Spirit as concerns the homosexual Christian. But at the first Lambeth in 1888, the word "homosexual" would not even be mentioned. Thirty years ago, the idea that 70 odd bishops in 1998 would call for the ordination of practicing gays and the blessing of their relationships was laughable. Does anyone seriously think that the tide is going to somehow turn in 2008? The stridency of the anti-gay forces is based in the realization that for a century, the movement has been virtually one way and it's away from those who oppose gay relationships. And it will only continue in that one way until the whole Church has come to know what so many already know.

God has set before us life and death and told us to choose life. I lived the way the anti-gay forces demanded that I live for 29 years. It was indeed a life from hell, a life where true and Christian relationship with self, others, and God was impossible. Then Christ set me free from that tomb and called me into the light as He is doing every day with millions of homosexuals all over the planet. When you have walked down the road to hell and death and then been saved and placed on the road to life and diefication, there is no way that you would ever go back.

Lambeth and the General Convention have asked homosexuals prayerfully to give their testimony and for the whole Church to prayerfully put aside all prejudice and listen. I ask God's forgiveness that I rebelled and waited so long to give my testimony. I ask those who have been gracious enough to listen to my testimony to forgive my long-windedness as the flood gates have at long last opened.

To those who oppose me in this matter, I assure you that yes, to the best of my ability, I hear your hurt and pain. Hear mine and let us stand together as we offer all that hurt and pain up to the Holy One of Israel Who Alone can lift it from us.