The Summer Begins

Lotus FlowerBack in the winter Brian and I decided that we wouldn’t plan a real "vacation" this year. Last year, of course, we had our trip to Ireland, but we thought we’d take 2010 and try to pay some stuff off and get a little more financially sound before spreading our wings and leaving America behind for an extended period of time once more.

So now, the summer is beginning; for me, starting next week that means 3-day weekends and a generally more relaxed (if not incredibly busy) work environment. Hopefully it also means these random cold snaps are behind us, but it’s Oklahoma, so I’m not holding my breath.

With no major getaways or adventures planned, this summer looks to be a mellow one. This is just fine with me, as we’ve been put through the ringer for the last six weeks, and I, for one, could use at least ten weeks without an agenda. I’m not talking about it much anymore, because I don’t really know what to say, but I’d call our asses still firmly kicked. Vegas helped, a little, but the last month – for me at least, I’m not speaking for Brian – has seen me staring into space an awful lot, and occasionally breaking down in tears when the wrong song comes on my iPod.

No matter what else, though, I always believe there’s room to hope. Believe it or not, and however I may come across, I really consider myself a glass-half-full kind of guy. I happen to think the empty half of the glass is the funnier part, but not the more important. All this is to say that grace has been all around us in all kinds of ways of late.

Yesterday two friends found themselves with an extra ticket to the Conan O’Brien show in Dallas, and texted me to see if I could take the afternoon off and come along. Brian encouraged me to go, so I threw caution to the wind. I met up with them, we drove down to Dallas, caught the show, and drove back, talking endlessly about music and sharing stories from high school.

Then tonight Brian and I are driving back to Dallas once more for the first night of the Wildflower Festival in Richardson, where we hope to catch sets from two of our favorite bands in the world – Toad the Wet Sprocket and The B-52s. We caught the Bs when they came through on the True Colors tour in 2008, and it was one of the best live shows we’ve ever seen. We got to see Glen Phillips in Petaluma, California, in 2007 on the "Various and Sundry" tour with the Watkins Family, Grant Lee Phillips and Luke Bulla, and it was amazing. But we’ve neither one of us seen Toad live, which is a shame as they tour only intermittently, haven’t recorded new music in over a decade, and since "Dulcinea" is a "desert island album" for both of us. I haven’t slept more than 4 hours a night all week – really, to be honest, I’ve *barely* done that in five weeks at all – and so I scored myself one of those 5-hour energy shots for later. You might want to keep an eye on my Twitter feed tonight; it could get hilarious.

So, summer’s beginning. I’m finishing final finality on my novel and working on a new major creative project and new stuff for This Land and the Gazette. The garden is taking off. My brother and his fiance just bought a new house. In a couple weeks two of our dearest friends are welcoming their first child into the world, and we cannot wait to meet him.

Things are still hard; there are still shards everywhere. But the sun’s peeking out and grace is everywhere. We have love, and music, friends, and thunderstorms, and enough to get by. Amen, and amen, and amen.

George Rekers Has Been A Very Naughty Boy

Okay; before we get started, you have to read this article. In case you’re not up on this whole story.

Done? All right. We’ve got a lot to cover:

I mean, really? It takes a lot of crack to compare yourself to Jesus Christ when you get caught with a GAY MALE PROSTITUTE YOU SORRY SACK OF SHIT WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH HARM YOU’VE WROUGHT IN THIS WORLD WITH YOUR EFFED UP HYPOCRITICAL TEACHINGS? AND THEN TO TRY TO COVER IT UP WITH AN OBVIOUS LIE? WHAT THE FUCK, GEORGE ALAN REKERS?

Whoo, sorry. I had a little moment there. Seriously, though, that guy can suck it. All of NARTH can, really. I know some people who’ve done ex-gay therapy through people with ties to NARTH; it hasn’t ended well for almost any of them. Or, I should say – more than a few of them ended up in psych wards, and a whole bunch more ended up perpetual Peter Pans with a permanent resentment toward the church, authority and responsibility of any kind. Many developed drinking and/or drug problems. Even more had trouble establishing loving, healthy, and trusting relationships with anyone for a long time; some never did. And not a single one of them – NOT ONE - ended up straight, or even well-adjusted. There but for the grace of God go I.

I mean honestly – are we commanded to love well, or just to love correctly? Is love between two people just an IKEA diagram – Phlange A goes in slot B, at Time C? Is that all God has planned for us? Or are we meant to be broken-hearted, open-minded and compassionate? 

And how many times is this going to have to happen before the great gathered mass of saints gets it? THIS STUFF DOES NOT WORK. IT’S NOT MEANT TO. It only serves to stunt an individual’s emotional development and turn him into a hypocrite of the highest order, or, at best, an unfeeling, discompassionate Pharisee incapable of imagining a relationship with God outside a strict and unbreachable pattern of behaviors, left to wonder why, if they can do it, why everyone else can’t, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to come to judge the rest of the world by a harsher measure than the God they claim to serve.

I went through hell and back trying to come to grips with my sexual orientation; so did my husband. So did almost every single gay person I know. Much of that hell was meted out at us in the name of Christ’s love by some of the people we loved and trusted the most. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life healing from that struggle; that I’ve come as far as I have is, for me, a testament to the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in my life (said the guy who just told NARTH to suck it; we’re still a work in progress here, people). Straight people, you have absolutely no idea.

Whether they mean to or not, even if what they say is in almost direct opposition to it, what these groups do is single gay people out as different, as less deserving of God’s love than straight people. They say that we have to go to some extra measure of penance and sanctification that "normal" people do not. Sometimes they’ll say "we’re all sinners," but there’s not a NARTH for guys who are assholes to their wives. There’s no reparative therapy for that. There’s no "ex-I-don’t-have-a-kind-word-in-the-world-to-say-to-anyone" ministries (and believe me, I’m first on the list for that one). I once asked someone I went to church with if he believed in the idea of marital rape; if he believed it existed at all. At the time he was trying to get me to come to a group for guys who were "struggling" with their sexual desires in the church. His answer: "You know, I don’t know if I do or not. I guess I’ve never really thought about it." 

Uh, then I don’t want to come to your group for unhappy gay dudes.

And let me just end this by saying the following:

In the last decade of my life I’ve heard it said on more occasions than I can count that my struggle was about gratifying the desires of the flesh – basically, I wanted to have sex and so I performed a whole bunch of mental and theological gymnastics in order to get some. This could! not! be further from the truth. What it was about, if you might indulge me to sound a little melodramatic, was answering the cry of my heart. I’d heard gay people and homosexuality singled out so much as awful and unacceptable in my life, that my heart needed to know I was accepted by God for exactly who I was.

I wish George Rekers knew that. I wish he’d had the safe space I had – the safe space I took, and was given - at 20 to come to peace with who he is. It takes a damaged person to pick up a prostitute, then lie about it, and compare himself to Jesus Christ in the midst of that lie. I can’t begin to imagine what decades of spewing this kind of hatred – which, in the end, he was only spewing at himself – while practicing it on the side must do to a person. I hope his life opens up for him to allow him space to be safe in the knowledge of who he is.

ANYWAY. Here, watch this; as ever, Derek Webb makes my point better than I can: 

2, 3, 21, 36, 37, 49

Fortune

This is taped to my computer at work; I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time the last two weeks staring at it. Right now, this is for all of us. I’ll be back on Monday with some (hopefully) good news and, if I’m feeling up to it, a dirty joke or two.

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