This website has never really had a defined mission statement; most personal blogs don’t. Insofar as I have had a mission statement for Okay City, it’s been as a sort of repository of creative work I wouldn’t really put out anywhere else. Making fun of Sarah Palin and keeping notes on the garden; stuff that’s fun to share, especially when the few of you who comment here get in on the fun, too.
But I’ve never thought that a blog would be the place where I did the majority or the best of my writing, and this expectation has borne out. While I’m not really ashamed of anything I’ve written here, it’s not like I’ll be applying for a job with it anytime soon.
That’s my way of prefacing this: of late I’ve been doing some of the most difficult writing of my life. I’m returning very, very soon to GCN – I’ve got about 5 columns in various stages of completion. It was important to me to get ahead before the re-launch of the column – which won’t be called "Queer As Faith" anymore because I truly despise that title – so that I don’t get in danger of falling behind.
I’m telling you this here now in an expository way, a way that I’m not going to edit, because that’s what this blog is about for me; sort of me, unedited, unpolished. I’m going to find a better way to say this over at GCN, and you should put more stock in what I say there, because it’ll be more well-thought-out.
I haven’t written a "Queer As Faith" in almost three years. I had to stop, for awhile, because – I didn’t realize this consciously at the time, but – I had no clue what it meant to be a "gay Christian." My first real column is about how I still don’t know what that means. I felt I’d lost my voice and my joy for writing those kinds of pieces. I was worried that I wasn’t writing from a genuine place. Also, I was working on a novel – a different novel than the one I’m currently working on (and yes, I still am) – and it was taking a lot out of me, along with going to school full-time, working 30+ hours a week at one job and 15+ at another; writing anything not related to school or broadcasting or higher-ed P.R. was really not a luxury I could afford.
Those sound like excuses; perhaps they are. In the pitch and yaw of grad school and newly-married life I had to give something up, and QAF was the easiest, most obvious choice, and, frankly, letting it go for awhile kept me sane.
But God’s been perched on my shoulder since last summer, chirping at me to have another go at it. Telling me that what I do is unique and good and useful, and – Jesus help me, I believed it. And so I took a stab at writing something for GCN.
And it was awful. Everything about the experience. The writing was terrible, and saying what I was trying to say was really, really hard on me. It pulled on my heart in all the right ways, though, so I knew it was a kind of difficult that was worth persevering through. So I wrote everything I had to say, and it sucked out loud. So I tried again. And again. And finally I had something I liked. Then, I went back over and polished it. SIX DRAFTS LATER I came to something I felt like was "finished," whatever that means.
I thought, "Fine. Clog out, on with the process." So I came up with another topic and went through the exact same process again. Horrible, difficult, emotionally jarring first draft. Same basic thing on the second and third drafts. But in there I found some things to say that sounded correct, inspired even, and some things that really made me laugh. Six drafts later, something like a "final" piece emerged. Something I’m proud of.
Those two are done. Three more, plus an introductory piece I’m hoping to premiere next week, are in varying stages of this process.
Before QAF I wrote a column for the Wake Forest newspaper. In both instances I would literally just dash off whatever I was feeling or thinking about, spell-check it, then send it off: poof, done, gone. These pieces feel different than anything else I’ve ever written. They don’t sound entirely different, and the subject matter is mostly the same – my quirky little blessing of a life – but the process around them feels very, very different than any writing process I’ve ever been through. More measured, but more difficult. I feel less like I know what I’m doing but more confident that I’ll figure it out and get there.
I’m both excited and fearful about sharing this new work with the world. But because of how much I love the people who read this website, I’m going to share a little early taste with you now, because you guys really rock:
"…it’s off-putting when a person’s entire self-definition seems to come from being gay, as if that’s the only aspect of their existence that matters in any appreciable way. I think it’s off-putting because being gay is, at least in part, about sex, and really, most of us spend so little of our time actually having sex that to orient our lives around it seems maybe a little backward. At the very least, I think it’s fair to say that you don’t want to think about most of the people you know having sex any more than you want to think about them going to the bathroom.
Oh, I’m off to a ripping start, aren’t I? WELCOME BACK!"
