LGBT History Month in the UK: My coming out story

LGBT History Month in the UK: My coming out story

I grew up in the Southern United States quite aware, because I had two cousins who lived in California, that we Southerners were about ten years behind the times when it came to popular culture. Whatever my relatives were listening to or wearing in the early 70’s didn’t drop across the Mason-Dixon Line until I was in college in the early 80’s.

When it came to politics and morality, the South was a world unto itself: Southern Democrats, known as Dixiecrats, had a stronghold in local governments in states where Black people were still kept from voting even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I know this because my parents were frowned upon by other white people in Starkville, Mississippi, where we lived from 1969 to 1972, when my mother drove our maid, Thea Bishop, who was African-American, to the polling station each Election Day before taking her home after work.

I remember my family going on vacation to the Bay Area during the summers of 1967 and 1972, when Flower Children dotted the streets of San Francisco. Their long hair and hippy clothes and androgynous style so captivated my father that he toured the city with his camera ready and aimed at this wild life in their natural habitat. The only way you could distinguish between the males and the females was by their beards—men’s beards tended to be a bit fuller. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in December 1960, I was a child in the 60’s—not a child of the 60’s—and, sure enough, long hair and unisex clothing featured prominently in my Southern high school and college yearbooks from 1977 to 1983, a full decade after the “summers of love” on the West Coast.

The AIDS crisis forced me to grow up.

In 1985, I started seminary, in Washington, D.C., dimly aware of “the homosexual disease.” Herpes was all the rage among the sexually-active, of which I was not one, but I knew and laughed at the jokes, which were often at the expense of gay people. Only we didn’t call them “gay people” but rather “queers” or “fags” or “homos.” If you really wanted to put somebody down, you merely had to call them a “homo” or “faggot.”

Then I heard through the grape-vine that one of our seminary professors, the Rev. Dr. Joe Weber, who taught New Testament, Greek, and Orthodox Theology, had died of AIDS and that he had been secretly gay and homosexually-active. Publicly he had been married to his wife for many years, and they had a couple of grown children, whom I caught a glimpse of at his memorial service attended by many of us from the seminary, following his death from what was reported to be some rare form of pneumonia. Dr. Weber had gotten sick half-way through the semester and had to quit teaching us first-year students about the Jewish roots and different developments of the various gospels (of which there are more than four, we learned to our surprise).

The only good news about our professor’s illness was that we New Testament students did not have to endure being divided into small groups to work together on biblical research projects, for which the members of each group would earn the same grade—regardless of how much time or energy or intelligence each student contributed to their group’s final outcome. Our fierce sense of unfairness at this common-fate grading scheme helped to unite us newcomers—only to discover that previous generations of New Testament students had suffered the same common fate—and so our protests, official and unofficial, proved futile. Thus imagine our initial feeling of liberation when the academic dean came to our class one day to announce our professor’s medical absence and then distributed a revised syllabus, with the remaining lectures to be given by other members of the faculty and our final grades to be based on the usual method of written examinations—with each student earning their own grade.

Six months after Dr. Weber’s funeral, rumors about his real death and real life started to spread. Like any secret functions in a familial organization, the chain of action and reaction quickly became toxic: we students blamed “the administration” for, supposedly, lying about our professor; the gay students blamed the non-gay students for protecting the supposed lies; and the whole situation exposed the religious and moral hypocrisy that shamed individuals to go into the closet. None of us wanted to admit that we—individually and communally—were responsible for perpetuating homophobia, heterosexism, anti-gay discrimination, fear and hatred against anyone perceived as “different.”

This is what forced me to come out. To choose, for the first time, to relate differently—with acceptance and affirmation—to people—those I knew, and all the ones I didn’t know I knew—who identified—or who needed the freedom to explore their identities—as being other than strictly heterosexual.

I am grateful to every gay person and gay-friendly person on my seminary campus and in the More Light Presbyterian Church where I interned for three years who sat me down, told me the truth of their lives, opened me to the truth of my life, and turned me to identify Jesus as “different”—as queer as any of us.

The decade after Joe Weber’s death, I went to see the AIDS quilt when it came to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was living. I remember finding his panel, one of the many thousands of panels by that time, and reading his name and touching the symbols from his life that had been sewn onto it. I trust that he knows how many lives his death changed and how much those lives have worked together to help change the church and the nation—congregation by congregation, state by state.

Thank God, once you come out there’s no going back.