Being Called, Being Gay

Discernment for Ministry in the Episcopal Church

Gregory Millikin, Gregory L. Millikin

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781640650121
• eBook ISBN: 9781640650138
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Offers insight into the issue of vocation and ministry for a large number of prospective clergy
Along with the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church has been in the vanguard in opening up the option of ordination to holy orders for partnered gay and lesbian people. As a result, many gays and lesbians are considering an option, which just a decade ago, would have been impossible. The question then becomes, "Does God want me—in my full integrity as a gay "out" person—as a priest in the church?" This is the first book to look at the issue of discernment in the Episcopal Church while simultaneously taking seriously the dynamics for a gay person seeking to discern his or her future in the church.

1

Awakening

“Here I am.” (Exod. 3:4)

On Mount Sinai, Moses, the eighty-year-old shepherd toiling with his flock, finds a burning bush. Moses approaches the bush, and the voice of God calls out to get his attention: “Moses! Moses!” Moses responds with the Hebrew word hineni, or in English, “Here I am.”

So begins the journey of Moses, a call narrative in and of itself that indeed began many years before when the infant child was placed in the basket down the Nile. But now at this ripe age in Exodus 3, Moses is drawn into dialogue with God about his vocation. And Moses, in all his Mosesness, will struggle, debate, question, and wrestle with this calling. But he will do so with a great degree of honesty—with himself, and with the LORD God.

• • •

Honesty might be the most important word in this book about sexuality and call. It is the word that marks the intersection between the two topics, the intersection I am keen to inspect in these pages. In fact, in all honesty, the journey of discovery with respect to one’s sexual identity runs parallel to that same person’s call to serve God in any capacity. They are both journeys of discovery, and they are both marked by a great need to be honest with oneself.

To begin, it may be helpful to examine these two parallel tracks one by one. Let us start with the honesty needed in the realm of sexuality. The general assumption about human sexuality is that we, female and male humans, usually start figuring out our sexuality at puberty (typically ten to thirteen for girls, twelve to fifteen for boys). That may in fact be true; but the reality is that many children, encouraged by their increasingly culture-savvy parents, start to explore their gender and sexual identities at incredibly young ages. It is now believed that children begin to be aware of gender identification somewhere between twoand-a-half and four years old.¹ I know of at least two families in my life in the last ten years who have processed the unexpected awakening that their toddler-aged son is choosing to wear dresses. In an age of Frozen, there are some little boys who feel they can best express themselves (at an age where expressiveness is pretty difficult) by dressing like Princess Elsa.

Will these two boys grow up to be gay or bisexual men? Are they on a path toward transitioning to women? The answer is of course joyously unclear. This is their reality now. Anything could happen, but the remarkable realization is that the parents are not panicking or showing any sign of distress. This might not have been the case as recently as fifteen years ago perhaps. For my parents’ generation, the boys may have expected punishment if they did not submit to wearing the heteronormative shirt and shorts. But now, the boys, guided by the wisdom of their parents, are being honest with themselves: their wants, their desires, their inclinations. This is the path children take when sexual attraction or activity is not even a glint in their eye; a child’s behavior or proclivity gives us a clue into the complex sexual identity still gestating inside each of them.

Alan Downs in his book The Velvet Rage describes the often painful awareness in the gay child of being different than the others. He uses the second-person narration to draw the reader into a place of familiarity and solidarity:

But perhaps starting at the ages of four to six, your parents realized that you were different. They didn’t know exactly how or why, but you were definitely not quite like the other children they had known. It may have had little or no influence on their love for you, but they may have treated you in a different manner than your siblings, or differently than your friends’ parents treated them. You too began to understand that you were different. The understanding was only dim at first. But as those early years progressed into adolescence, you became increasingly aware that you weren’t like other boys—maybe not even like your parents.²

At a certain point, probably puberty, things kick into high gear for children. Identity flowers into attraction and impulse. It is unlikely that a sixteen-year-old male or female, for example, would not have some sort of semblance of an idea of where his or her attraction lies—even if it is, well, complicated. And for the LGBT+ population, by about age sixteen, no doubt, these boys and girls have experienced an all-too-chilling feeling and raw emotion: I am not like the others. Downs continues:

Along with the growing knowledge that we were different was an equally expanding fear that our “different-ness” would cause us to lose the love and affection of our parents. This terror of being abandoned, alone, and unable to survive forced us to find a way—any way—to retain our parents’ love. We couldn’t change ourselves, but we could change the way we acted. We could hide our differences, ingratiate ourselves to our mothers, and distance ourselves from our fathers whom we somehow knew would destroy us if they discovered our true nature.

And we didn’t hide our true selves just from our parents. As best we could, we hid the truth from everyone, especially from other children. Children, probably more than any other people, are keenly aware of differences from one another, and often torment one another they perceive as different. . . . It was this early abuse at the hands of our peers, coupled with the fear of rejection by our parents, that ingrained in us one very strident lesson: There was something about us that was disgusting, aberrant, and essentially unlovable.³

For a queer child, the most powerful of bittersweet feelings is that sense that he or she is not like the other children in some way. This exposes that great human wound in the LGBT+ community that, unfortunately, separates them from heterosexuals in modern society. For on the one end of the spectrum, the consequences may be minor at best. Maybe the young person has to be more discreet in conversations with friends. Maybe the teen has to endure gay-related epithets from his or her friends for a period of time. Maybe the dreaded high school locker room will just be a stress pot for those few teen years.

Chris Glaser, an out Presbyterian who describes his path in ministry in Uncommon Calling, paints it this way:

We grow up feeling bad about our sexual urges and our bodies because this early silence speaks louder than the subsequent words of assurance. A child assumes that what can’t be talked about must be bad. Expression of sexual feelings among children and adolescents is usually met with parental anger or anxiety, because of parental protectionism and because of adults’ own negative feelings about sexuality. All those children then grow up feeling bad about their sexuality and their bodies and become adults with similar attitudes.⁴

This is just the positive upbringing. Because, on the other end of the spectrum, the situation can be downright dire. The child may be ostracized by his or her family; some may be abused, neglected, or kicked out of their homes; and most tragically, some, such as young transgender women, are killed at alarming rates in hate crimes.⁵ At the very least, it would be impossible to find an LGBT+ person who at one point in his or her life did not experience some kind of feeling or emotion of being “different” that resulted in any one or more of these scenarios.

The average LGBT+ young person has had to do some extra growing up. Most have had to address their sexuality in a public way, such as with inquisitive family members or friends. They have had to move from a place of closure to disclosure, the most culturally familiar being the practice of “coming out” from the proverbial closet. But a coming out process (no matter how stressful, dramatic, emotional, joyous, or any adjective in between) has to necessarily be preceded by a coming out to oneself. It is that penetrating, soul-searching realization that can happen very early, that startles a person not yet fully formed as a human being into a major reality check: my life is not going to follow the path of my friends and family. And at some point, perhaps after years of living with that notion inside their head, the queer person comes out to herself or himself. A light switches from “straight” to “not-straight,” let’s say.

• • •

I knew something was up from about nine years old. Let us just say that puberty started early, and as my hormones signaled a sexual awakening like every other human being on the planet, my veins were decidedly filled with “nonstraight” blood. By about age twelve, I knew my attraction to others was clearly not bound by gender. Therefore, I knew I was not straight. I knew I was not in the majority around me; I was not like the others. But it was later—far later—before honesty set in.

Like most young persons struggling with their sexuality, I learned to bottle it up. Downs explains, mixing tenses and person grammatically:

We decided whatever it was—at the time we still may not have known what it was—must be hidden completely from view. Although we are older now, we are still driven by those insatiable, infantile drives for love and acceptance. In order to survive, we learned to become something that we thought would be more acceptable to our parents, teachers, and playmates.

We made ourselves more acceptable to others in a variety of ways. Perhaps you learned that you could win approval by becoming more sensitive than the other boys. Maybe you learned that you could win approval by displaying a creativity that the other boys refused to show, or you learned to win approval by excelling at everything you did.⁶

In 2001, I went on a beach retreat in college with a bunch of friends, about fifteen altogether, a mixture of men and women. We stayed in a rental house together on Marathon Island near Key West, Florida. At some point on that trip, for whatever reason, the “light switch” I mentioned flipped over finally—some twelve years after I first felt different.

What happened was fairly innocuous. I had to share a bed with three of my male friends in this coed house rental. We approached this with democratic aplomb in this overcapacity vacation home: one of us takes the floor, the other three take the bed, and we all rotate position over the seven days. On day four, it was my turn to lay in the middle of the bed between two male friends. There, with flesh upon flesh innocently and platonically, I lay still like I was in a coffin, staring at the ceiling. I was terrified to touch either man by mistake or proximity error, for fear of arousal—emotional or otherwise. And yet, in this terror, in which I did not sleep, but only panicked, I felt another pervasive mood wash over me: maybe I want that to happen. The next day, as we all laid out on the beach, swam in the Gulf of Mexico waters, and chugged our margaritas, I removed myself from the crowd. I floated in the ocean on my back, head facing the beach several hundred feet ashore. Watching my friends chat and laugh, I floated and floated. The confusion of emotions from the night before was overwhelming. Was I resisting something primal about myself? Beyond that, how was I to decipher what was lust, and what was real emotion?

And then, on those gentle waves, as I drifted out to sea seemingly forever, I came to the conclusion that was, up to that point, the most honest thing I could conclude about myself: I was not straight. Not straight. So what does that mean? Gay? For a kid from the suburbs of Richmond, that was the only possibility, and it was also a dirty word. The effeminate boys in middle school were teased and called “faggot,” I can distinctly remember. Even as far as into college, my roommates and I played video games and used the epithet in disgust to one another if we were to meet an unfair ending in Goldeneye or Super Mario Kart. I am certain I participated in that bullying and improper behavior. The realization in the great irony that I would be one of those “gay boys” was overwhelming; would I be bullied now too? Would the jocks suss me out? Would I continue to “pass” for straight?⁷ Over the next several weeks and months, I sat with this information swirling in my head. The term “bisexual” became something to wrestle with, even though at the time it signaled some shadow assumptions, which I would later come to learn with some remorse. In reality, for much of the world, bisexuality is incredibly misunderstood and misrepresented. For many people, gay as well as straight, bisexuality is code for promiscuity, indecisiveness, inability to commit, and a halfway-house to just plain gay. More on this in the next section. But at the time, “bisexual” seemed the most logical description, even if I would come to regret using it to describe myself openly that summer of 2001. The heart of the matter was this: I was not straight. A new chapter in my life focused on honesty promptly began that summer.

• • •

Sexual identity really came into focus scientifically in the last seventy years. Without question, the pioneer in queer studies was Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist at Indiana University who in the 1940s switched gears to study human copulation. Sexual psychology was essentially born as Kinsey and his team unearthed a hornet’s nest in human anatomy and physiology. In his seminal work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), he worked like a taxonomist on human sexual behavior; one of his breakthroughs was about homosexuality. Kinsey noted that an amazing percentage of males in his studies had engaged in homosexual experiences at some point in their lives, and still others had unrequited attraction for the same sex. For some, it was in addition to their sexual desire toward women. Sexuality was clearly much more fluid than society had shaped it to be. This led him to the creation of the “Kinsey scale.” The Kinsey scale was further explored in his subsequent companion book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

The Kinsey scale works on a spectrum, from zero (0) to six (6), that measures human sexual attraction. Someone who is a “0” is exclusively heterosexual; a man only desires sexual intimacy with a woman, for example. Someone who is a “6” is exclusively homosexual, entirely uninterested in sexual relations with the opposite sex. Granted, without the construction of the Kinsey scale, we might assume that a majority of society is either a 0 or a 6, with a growing number of people perhaps being a “3”—someone who enjoys an attraction to men and women with absolute equality (a 50-50 bisexual). The reality is that Kinsey’s scale hypothesizes along a logic that most humans in society fall between 0 and 6. More people may be a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 than they would be a 0 or 6. It was simple math and logic to Alfred Kinsey. There are four bisexual-like options in the scale versus the three “cut-and-dry” options of gay, straight, and 50-50 bisexual.

Furthermore, a person may move along the spectrum at various points in their life, Kinsey assert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Mary D. Glasspool
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Awakening
• Chapter 2: The Historic Moment
• Chapter 3: The Process
• Chapter 4: Living with Authenticity
• Chapter 5: Priesthood and Sexual Identity
• Chapter 6: No and Not Yet
• Chapter 7: Yes
• Conclusion
• For Further Reading
• Acknowledgments