Modern Kinship

A Queer Guide to Christian Marriage

David Khalaf, Constantino Khalaf

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780664264611
• eBook ISBN: 9781611649116
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Same-sex marriage may be legal in America, but its still far from the accepted norm, especially in Christian circles. So where can LBGTQ Christians who desire a lifelong, covenantal relationship look for dating and marriage advice when Christian relationship guides have not only simply ignored but actively excluded same-sex couples?

David and Constantino Khalaf struggled to find relational role models and guidance throughout dating, their engagement, and the early months of their marriage. To fill this void, they began writing Modern Kinship, a blog exploring the unique challenges queer couples face on the road from singleness to marital bliss. Part personal reflection, part commentary, and full of practical advice, Modern Kinship explores the biblical concept of kinship from a twenty-first-century perspective. This important resource tackles subjects such as dating outside of smartphone apps, overcoming church and family issues, meeting your partners parents, deciding when and how to have children, and finding your mission as a couple. Modern Kinship encourages queer Christian couples to build God-centered partnerships of trust and mutuality.

CHAPTER 1

LONG LINES FOR THE
TUNNEL OF LOVE

Let’s all pause for a moment and reflect upon how the roller coaster called dating is, on the whole, a nauseating ride. Most of us, gay or straight, wait for our turn to ride the Tunnel of Love, only to discover that the line isn’t so straightforward: it zigzags through the amusement park that is our lives, past Missed Opportunity Land, through Bad First-Date Town, and disappearing into the Emotional Baggage Grotto for who knows how long. And even as some people inexplicably keep cutting in front of us, we continue to wait in line with no guarantee that we’ll ever actually make it onto the ride.

That part of dating is universal, but there’s something uniquely challenging about the LGBTQ Christian dating experience. There are factors that seem to make our line a little bit longer, that make the wait outside a little bit hotter. These challenges aren’t insurmountable, but if we hope to make it to the Tunnel of Love, it’s helpful to take an honest look at the path we have to navigate to get there.

The most glaring disadvantage for LGBTQ Christians who want a partner who shares their faith is the dating pool. Imagine a Venn diagram in which one massive circle is the Christian population, and another, much smaller circle includes the LGBTQ community. The sliver of overlap between the two is small enough to make the dating pool look like a dating puddle. This won’t come as a surprise to many of you who have thrown your hat into the romance ring. No matter how many profiles you swipe through on Tinder, the reality is that it’s slim pickings for queer Christians committed to finding someone who shares your faith.

Before we started dating, we both tried out dating apps for a while and found them to be more entertaining than actually productive in finding a suitable partner. Thankfully, we still have single friends to entertain us by sharing dating profile pictures of, say, men posing with their ventriloquist dolls or offering unsavory close-ups of body parts. As for genuinely suitable matches of people seeking committed relationships grounded in faith, there were maybe a few dozen matches in each of our respective metropolises—Los Angeles and New York—and we already knew most of them. Dating puddle, indeed.

But do we really need five thousand choices, or even five hundred? In his book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explores the idea that too much choice has conditioned us to be “maximizers,” people who seek out the very best option rather than a perfectly satisfactory one.¹ The result is that we become hypercritical consumers, always on the hunt for the next best thing and never content to make a decision. That might be a great way to shop for a TV, but not a romantic partner. The smaller dating pool of the LGBTQ Christian community harkens back to a time when folks lived in isolated towns and were perfectly content to choose from the four or five people of marrying age in their community. Perhaps limited choice has its benefits.

Another challenge unique to the LGBTQ experience is the coming-out process. What many people fail to understand is that coming out doesn’t happen all at once. There is no gay correlation to a bar mitzvah or confirmation, in which you read the sacred texts of Oscar Wilde in front of friends and family and then receive a rainbow flag from Ellen DeGeneres, who drapes it about your shoulders as a disco band strikes up “I’m Coming Out.” There isn’t a public notice in the newspaper (although many people do make the announcement on Facebook). Coming out necessarily takes place in stages, over time, throughout someone’s life.

The difficulty in dating is that many LGBTQ people find themselves at different stages of the coming-out process. Self-acceptance is a long journey for many LGBTQ people of any faith (or none), and it’s difficult to navigate a relationship while one or both of you are still reconciling your sexuality. It’s such a common problem among friends in our community that we’ve given it a name: the Self-Disclosure Discrepancy Theorem. The theorem states that the more disparate you are in the coming-out process, the more stressful your relationship will be. A couple in which one person is completely out and the other is completely closeted will necessarily face conflict in even the simplest acts, such as going out to eat in a public place.

When we first started dating, this was a source of stress in our relationship because I (David), having struggled through years of reparative therapy, was still coming out to some people in my life. I felt pressure (mostly self-imposed) to come out faster than I was comfortable, and Constantino was uncertain he wanted to invest his time and his heart in a man who might bolt at a moment’s notice. It was an emotional tug-of-war that we managed to work out only with a lot of compromise and communication.

Being at different stages of self-disclosure doesn’t doom a relationship. However, it’s important to talk about it up front and also to have ongoing discussions about expectations for the future (“When will we go to church together as a couple?” and “When will you tell your parents about us, if at all?”). You might date someone more closeted than you and discover that the stress and limits it imposes upon the relationship aren’t worth it. And if you’re the one who is mostly or fully closeted, you may be better served working on integrating your sexual identity into your life before you choose to enter into a relationship.

Ultimately, what prevents many of us from even getting in line for the Tunnel of Love is our baggage. Emotional baggage isn’t unique to gay Christians; virtually everyone experiences sexual brokenness or dysfunction in some form or another. But whereas most people come to dating carrying an emotional tote bag or a suitcase, many LGBTQ Christians come with the entire nine-piece Tumi set. Many of us carry a deep-seated shame because we have separated ourselves from our sexuality to the point where it is something foreign or despicable. A relationship won’t heal these wounds; rather, it will intensify them if they aren’t addressed.

Researcher Brené Brown writes in her book Daring Greatly that shame is so powerful it’s often the single greatest barrier in preventing meaningful connection: “Studying connection was a simple idea, but before I knew it, I had been hijacked by my research participants who, when asked to talk about their most important relationships and experiences of connection, kept telling me about heartbreak, betrayal, and shame—the fear of not being worthy of real relationship.”² (We’ll talk more about shame in chapter 4.)

The shame I developed from years of reparative therapy still causes me at times to form walls and push Constantino away. The unworthiness Constantino feels from treatment by his parents still causes him to develop narratives about our marriage that aren’t true. We carry these wounds into relationship, and it does no good for us to pretend they’re not there.

When you finally nab a seat on the Tunnel of Love, make space for that baggage. Seek out counseling if you notice your baggage getting in the way of intimacy and vulnerability. Be aware of your sensitive spots, and be able to communicate when they’re triggered. Otherwise, you’ll be apt to hop off the ride when it has barely begun.

I dated very little before meeting Constantino, and never seriously. Dating was more like a rogue mission, performed with the secrecy of a covert military operation. I never told friends or family; in fact, I barely admitted it to myself. Whenever I met some guy I liked, it was much easier for me to think we weren’t dating but just hanging out frequently. Alone. And making out.

My reservations about dating grew out of my sense that it was a rebellion against God, as my six years of reparative therapy had taught me. Even as I came to believe God would bless a same-sex relationship, dating still felt shameful. It meant that not only was I admitting to my attractions, but I was actively pursuing them.

Emotional baggage has always been my roadblock to relationship. Long before reparative therapy, I had developed the belief that feelings were weak and to show or feel them was something to be embarrassed about. So I threw my feelings into the basement of my heart, locked them inside, and left them alone to take up scrapbooking, or whatever feelings do when left unattended. It turns out that emotions don’t pursue self-actualization or higher education on their own; rather, they warp and atrophy until they become something like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.

Those covert operations weren’t really dating; they were play-dating. I was seeing what it was like to pursue romance without allowing myself any emotional connection to the men I went out with. When I allowed myself to feel, the overwhelming emotion was shame. No matter how thick the chains I wrapped around the basement doors, shame would eventually wriggle through the cracks and I would cut off ties with the men. This cycle repeated for years.

Enter Constantino. We traded a few messages on OkCupid while he was living in New York and I was in Los Angeles. I flirted in the way that was safe to do when someone lives nearly three thousand miles away. Neither of us had any interest in long-distance romance. But then he decided to fly out to California for a social weekend organized by members of Q Christian Fellowship (formerly The Gay Christian Network). I decided to go too, and I agreed to pick him up at the airport to carpool to the event in Pismo Beach.

It wasn’t love at first sight because love, along with all of my other feelings, was safely locked away below, beside the rusty garden tools and jarred peach preserves. But there was a connection. I felt instantly comfortable with him, so much so that throughout that weekend people thought we were dating. For me, the word that kept coming to mind when I thought of Constantino was teammate. I remember it clearly because it was such a strange word for someone I had just met and was not in the least bit romantic. But I realize now that what I needed then wasn’t romance; it was someone who would be on my side, willing to sit with me patiently as I unpacked my emotional baggage.

Later that year, Constantino moved to Los Angeles for work, and the friendship we had started eventually blossomed into romance. It was not a smooth ride; our relationship sputtered forward in fits and starts like a rusty jalopy. Constantino brought some of his own baggage, but it was mine that kept causing us to stall. At times my religious reservations and emotional unavailability seemed as if they would doom us. I showed him my basement and pointed out the thickness of the chains and the heavy lock on the door. It’s useless, I wanted to tell him. Just be on your way.

But he didn’t run away. Nor did he try to wrench open the doors. Instead, he sat down and waited. He earned my trust by the way he listened to me—really listened, without just waiting for his turn to speak. He inspired me with the way he tended to other hurting gay Christians in our area and formed a safe space for them to explore faith. And he attracted me with his infectious smile and romantic notions of what a good relationship could do and how it could serve not only the two people in it, but the community around it.

With time, my basement doors would creak open, and a feeling would peek its head out. Constantino would see it, engage it, and honor it for what it was. And when it ran back inside he didn’t go chasing it down. He’d just sit and wait some more. Sometimes he’d pace, and occasionally he’d look between the cracks of the doors and call into the basement, getting at my emotions when I least expected it. He has made me cry before with just a gentle stare.

Now that we’re a few years into marriage, my emotions more often live upstairs in the readily present parts of my heart. But the basement is still there, and when they feel threatened they go scurrying back to the dark recesses with which they’re most familiar. Marriage doesn’t heal your wounds (in fact, intimate relationship can often trigger them). There are days and even weeks when the basement snaps shut, when the feelings hide and regret having ever come out into the light. But next to the doors, I keep a chair just for Constantino. It’s comfy and worn from years of use. Given enough time, the doors will reopen. It’s there we reconcile. It’s there I love him all over again.

God’s a Wingman, Not a Matchmatcher

While not everyone suffers the same emotional unavailability, nearly all LGBTQ Christians have at some point struggled with integrating their faith with their sexuality, especially in the context of dating. We’ve heard many stories of women and men who, when they enter the dating arena, shed their faith like a jacket at coat check because it no longer seems to fit. As one of our blog readers put it, “My concept of God hasn’t grown to encompass my new beliefs about sexuality. I decided to start dating and let my belief systems follow when they’re ready. As a result, I can’t seem to make myself pray, or even generate much interest in God as a concept.”

What does it look like to invite God into the mess of dating? Those of us from evangelical backgrounds probably shudder at notions of purity rings, accountability partners, and prayer groups. Gay and straight alike, the church has poisoned our concept of what it looks like to incorporate God into the dating process. We have been taught that we must be washed and waiting, standing like virgin wallflowers at a school dance until God pulls us onto the floor and allows us to dance (stiff-armed) with someone he (always “he” in that context) has chosen for us.

God as divine matchmaker is not a model that has worked well for many straight couples, and there’s no reason to think the LGBTQ community will fare any better. What if, instead, we thought of Jesus more like our wingman? A wingman is not a matchmaker—his job is not to find the right guy or girl for you. A wingman’s job is simply to help you navigate the dating field, holding you back when you’re about to step on a mine, keeping distractions away when you decide to make a move, and buying you a drink when the attempt falls flat. He’s there to revel in your successes and commiserate in your failures.

It’s not easy. When we have spent our entire lives hearing that same-sex relationships elicit divine wrath, asking God to be a part of the process sounds like madness. An important first step for many LGBTQ Christians is to reframe God not as an antagonist, but as an ally. That requires getting to know God again.

If we want to invite the Spirit into the dating process, we may first need to meet the real Jesus for the first time, free of the filters our churches put upon him. Our God is not a distant, angry deity, but someone who personally knows human angst. God is that “hangry” guy who yells at trees when he’s having a bad day, and who ugly-cries at the sight of his dead friend (even when he’s about to bring him back to life). Jesus, fully human, must have longed for romance at some point in his life. Too often we think of Jesus’ suffering only in the context of his death on the cross rather than the lifetime of ups and downs that formed his human experience. The Bible gives us but a window at Jesus’ thirty-three years on earth, but even then, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for Modern Kinship
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Rachel Held Evans
• Introduction: What Is Modern Kinship?
• 1. Long Lines for the Tunnel of Love
• 2. The Journey through Uncertainty
• An Interview with Austen Hartke: Dating as a Trans Man
• 3. Complications in Coupling
• 4. Sex, Shame, and Spirituality
• An Interview with Emmy Kegler: A Queer Woman, a Pastor, and a Soon-to-Be Wife
• 5. In Search of Support
• An Interview with Rosemary Jones: Living as Bi When Your Marriage Looks Straight
• 6. Engagement Pains
• 7. The Brideless Wedding
• An Interview with Gabriel Mudd and Geoff Bleeker Mudd: Interfaith and Interracial
• 8. Forsaking All Others
• 9. Who’s the Wife?
• An Interview with Rachel Held Evans: A Nonqueer Perspective
• 10. On the Other Side of Vows
• An Interview with Julie Schwartz Gottman: Lessons in Marriage from the Expert
• 11. Intertwined in Intimacy
• 12. A Long Business
• 13. Contemplating Parenthood
• An Interview with Paula Williams: Transitioning after Forty Years of Marriage
• 14. Relationship as Mission
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Excerpt from Inclusive Marriage Services, edited by Kimberly Bracken Long and David Maxwell