November 12th Ministry Moment: "Growing Up Gay and Isolated"
"For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Phil and I am left-handed. 10 percent of the population is left-handed. Could those lefties that are here today lift up their left hands to indicate to the congregation the frequency of left-handedness? 500 years ago, left-handedness was considered unnatural and evil, and possibly caused by demonic possession. In fact, the word sinister is derived from the Latin word for left, whereas dexterous is derived from the Latin work for right. Even as late as the 20th century, children were having their wrists rapped by their teachers for writing with their left hand. Things have improved for lefties, with the exceptions of being able to share a baseball glove, writing in a spiral-wound notebook, or eating with a ‘righty’ sitting to one’s left. Besides being left-handed, I am gay. Once again this is approximately 10 percent of the population. Unlike being a leftie, being gay is still considered unnatural and evil by many and causes gay people to be “in the closet” about their gayness. What I am going try and explain is what it was like growing up gay and in the closet.
I am the fourth of eight siblings. My siblings and I grew up as thin but athletic nerds, with a tendency for overachievement. Since the oldest four were generally a grade apart, that meant that to the teachers, each following child was prejudiced to meet or exceed the skills or talents of the previous child to be considered living up to their potential. Unfortunately, I also had a speech impediment through second grade – I had a lisp. I also did not have the best eye-hand coordination and was seen as a klutz. I saw all these things of making me different from my peers, and not in a good way. As I grew older, I felt I was different from my peers in another way. I couldn’t give it a name until I was in the fifth grade, at which point I figured out that I was gay. Growing up in the age before the internet, finding reading material discussing homosexuality was limited to the library, and the year I figured out I was gay was the first year the American Psychiatric Association determined that homosexuality was no longer considered a mental illness. This caused there to be little information that was available providing any positive outlook. In TV and film at that time, gay characters were either an exaggerated stereotype befitting of ridicule or a sinister serial killer and either of them had to be dispatched by the end of the show. Since being gay was considered by much of the population to be “sick” and “abnormal”, I kept my mouth shut about my feelings. This included keeping my mouth shut around my family and friends, as I had no idea how they would react if I were to come out. As I entered adolescence, the energy that my siblings and peers placed into dating and romance I applied to classwork and after-school activities. I kept a full calendar of after-school activities including marching band, pep band, jazz band, cross-county, wrestling, Spanish club, National Honor Society, and interscholastic quiz bowl. Still being a bit of a nerd and not dating like my peers, I was more than a few times a subject of ridicule. Regularly being the subject of ridicule taught me to grow a thick skin and not show the hurt I felt. In fact, to blunt the attacks, I used self-deprecating humor to beat my ‘attackers’ to the punch. In conversations with grandparents, aunts, and uncles there were many long periods of embarrassing silence when asked if I was dating anyone. When I left for college, I chose a small school, a total of 300 men in a class, smaller than my class of 400 in high school, with an outstanding reputation in engineering. Yes, I said 300 MEN, as it was one of five colleges in the US that were not yet co-ed. And engineering students were not the most accepting of gay people. However, college life was on the whole better than high school.
I was free of siblings to be compared to in the way of academic performance. I was still not dating, but once again, I was able to direct that energy towards schoolwork and extra-curricular activities, such as Residence Hall Association, Student Activities Board, Pep Band, College Bowl, and Catholic Youth Group, and tutoring. All this time I remained silent of my sexual orientation and remained celibate, as I found out much later after graduation that most other gay classmates did. I started to date women my senior year in college. I thought that my only option to be a success was to appear like my straight friends. I was seen as quiet, polite boy who was interested in what his date had to say – what is considered in current parlance “a gay best friend”. I graduated college and came to work at Newport News Shipbuilding. I worked alternating shifts as a nuclear test engineer. Since I was not dating, I was willing to work overtime that peers were not as willing to work. I would work several months straight without a day off.
In my time by myself, I began to feel depressed and alone (a general feeling that came and went as I was growing up, thus the reason to keep busy and not be alone). In my free time, I purchased a personal computer to build up my skills on what I thought was going to be technologically the way of the future. In my search to maintain and improve my computing skills, I subscribed to a national computer system called CompuServe, which was basically a industrial sized computer bulletin board, as there still was no internet. This bulletin board had “channels” people to discuss with the channels’ members their hobbies and passions, such as computer programming, gardening, board games, etc. I discovered a channel dedicated to gay men. I sat silent there reading the conversations that were going on and realized I was not as isolated as I thought. After a few weeks lurking on the channel, I came out to others there.
It was the first time I indicated to anyone that I was gay. Members were welcoming and considerate. Many were there as I was, discussing their background and reaching out to the community. After about two months, I found a few people who were local to the Peninsula area, and one offered to take me on my first gay outing (as an acquaintance, not a date), to a gay bar in Richmond. The same night I was preparing to go out to Richmond, I found a man online who at the time was living near my parents in the Chicago area and that we had similar interests in history, humor, trains, and general outlook on life. I continued logging in in the days and weeks following our initial online meeting, looking forward to continuing our conversations. This expanded to hours-long phone conversations (before the days of free long distance).
This man and I decided to meet in Florida. It was January, and I didn’t want to discourage him with January in Newport News, and I didn’t think it was smart to meet him where the still closeted Phil might be spotted with an unidentified man. Our meeting would be the first time we would see what the other looked like, as personal computers at the time did not have the capability to send and receive photographs. This was my first date; my first romance. This is when I met Ed, who is still my only romance. We have been together since 1986. Since I met Ed and we decided to be together, I thought it was the proper time to come out to my parents, as I wanted Ed to be treated the same as my siblings’ partners. Fortunately, Ed and I were accepted by our parents and my family refers to us as the most stable and normal couple among my siblings. There are challenges about living as an openly gay person, but that is for another time. What I want you to get out of my story is that as a gay child and adolescent, I often felt alone with nobody to turn to about how I was feeling. Unlike a child of a race, ethnic, or religious background different from the majority of the population, the gay child does not have a parent who had undergone similar experiences while growing up. The gay child cannot assume their parents will be understanding or supportive. In fact, it is not unusual for gay adolescents who are found by their parents to be gay to be kicked out of their homes. A child knows that they are gay without having been in a relationship or being in love with someone. Gay Pride should be called Gay Courage, as celebrating pride is not that one is proud to be gay, but they were willing to tell others that they are gay and can live their true lives instead of living a life generally devoid of connection, love, and affection.
I spent my childhood and adolescence not knowing if I would be accepted or rejected. Growing up should be just that, growing up. A gay child is always questioning if and where they belong, all this analyzing occurring alone in the child’s mind. Gay children grow up always worried to be found out, always scared to be kicked out. They may hear negative and hurtful things told them by their families, their teachers, their church, their political leaders. Gay children read books, watch shows, and hear songs of love and affection through their childhood, but they do not see themselves in these books, shows, and songs. We live in a culture that says diversity is good, but then on the other hand, culture likes to point out the “others” who are not like “us”. This is mirrored in a line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some more equal than others.”
Parents feel their child may become gay due to exposure in culture. I knew I was gay at a young age. I learned about traditional gender norms from culture. That didn’t make me straight. My sexual orientation did not change due to this exposure even though at the time I felt the only way to survive was to “turn straight”, including praying to God to turn me straight. Unfortunately, a gay person cannot turn themselves straight, they can only isolate themselves from gay experiences, but still have the knowledge they are gay. A good number of homeless adolescents are gay. I believe there is a statistic that one in four gay children attempt suicide, brought on by the feeling they are isolated from their family and community. Parents need to externally show their children that they are accepting of gay people, that they do not recoil when they see same-sex couples holding hands or hugging in public. Love and affection are universal, and children of all ages are exposed to this in society without being exposed to “S-E-X”. Parents should not expect their child to know that they love their child unconditionally; they need to tell them. This will allow the child to see their parent as an ally and not a possible antagonist."
