Swish (19 page)

And it wasn’t just a handful of people who stood up and sang with him, not just pockets of Dennis Jernigan enthusiasts scattered throughout the hall. They
all
knew the song, and they all
loved
the song. “Taking my sin, my cross, my shame,” Dennis and the standing audience sang, “rising again, I bless Your name.” Around me, people lifted their hands in the air, and I saw that people all over the auditorium were doing the same thing, their faces breaking into wide grins. There were a few holdouts—the Slytherin kid was standing but did not smile and kept his hands in his pockets—but before long almost a thousand waving pairs of hands attached to a thousand rapturous open faces reached toward the heavens. I felt as if I were at a Madonna concert in an alternate universe, with an audience full of unstylish people who were not on drugs.

The lyrics to the song Dennis was singing were being projected onto large screens at either side of the stage, against background images of rushing waves and mighty forests and windblown fields of wheat. The words to a verse consistently appeared a line or two after the verse had started. Sometimes they were the words to the wrong verse. At one point the screens read “Rising again, I bless Your nam,” which pissed me off. “Spell-check
that
difficult?” I scratched angrily.

But as the song continued I realized that something deeper than bad spelling was at work here. What I saw on the upturned beaming faces around me was more than just the joy that subsumes people when they get lost in music they love. Yes, that joy was there; but underneath it was a sense of community, of belonging, of acceptance. A man across the aisle from me was sobbing, great, racking gasps of relief, and even the Slytherin kid had started singing along quietly. These people, I thought, spend fifty-one weeks of the year battling homosexual inclinations in isolation. Being here, they must feel like the cavalry has arrived to fight for them and to tell them God is on their side.

Very few Jews I know believe in God as anything but a metaphor. I might not have been able to say this before documents and photographs and film came flooding out of Germany and Poland in 1945, but since then, for many Jews, the only satisfactory answer to the question “What kind of God would allow the slaughter of thirteen million people?” has been “One who doesn’t exist.”

This perspective had its origins not in the Holocaust, however, but in the nineteenth-century repeal of anti-Jewish laws all over Europe. For millennia, God had been at the center of Jewish life, but as Jews began to mingle in gentile society they felt both less need for the attitudes that marked them as alien and greater hunger for a world beyond the study of Torah. Mainstream Judaism’s relationship with God became less intimate, more formal, and many strains of it have stayed that way. For a great number of Jews today, God is Up There somewhere, and the last time He bothered intervening directly on behalf of anybody down here was in Babylon, when He stopped the lions’ mouths and delivered His prophet Daniel living from their den. In the Book of Esther, chronologically the next book of Hebrew scripture after Daniel, the name of God never appears. Ever since the eponymous queen saved the Jews from extinction, we may have asked God for any number of things, but a lot of us have seen the requests as purely rhetorical.

Of course this is only one of many Jewish perspectives. There are all sorts of Jews around the world: devout Jews, fundamentalist Jews, mystic Jews, even charismatic Jews. But in America, even if you add them all together, evidently they’re still far outnumbered by the Jewish atheists.

And so at the Exodus conference I was deeply unnerved by all the men and women with their hands in the air; they were reaching up, I realized, absolutely certain that God was reaching down to take their hands and lead them through the wilderness and that, no matter how many times they stumbled, He would keep them from falling. If I believed that, I thought, then I’d probably try to change too, because such wonderful certainty might just be worth it. Unfortunately, I’m pretty much out of luck, because I believe that the Messiah is never coming and that the God of the Jews doesn’t hold anybody’s hand.

But these people appeared to have come home, and the thought that I didn’t belong there was unbearable, because it meant that I had no share in the comfort they felt. So I figured, oh, why the hell not, and raised my hands tentatively, not above my head but to the level of my ears, and burst into tears.

What the fuck?
I thought to myself as I sobbed. To this day I don’t know whether I was crying because I was feeling what they felt or because I wasn’t.

At the First-Timers’ Oasis immediately following the opening session I met Jon, who was totally hot and who did not have a moustache. “What brought you here?” he asked, his wife, Stacey, standing mute beside him. “What’s going on in your life?” (Stacey had never felt same-sex attractions and was known therefore in Exodus parlance as “everstraight.” It had not occurred to me that there would be heterosexual spouses in attendance.) Jon and Stacey, who lived in Los Angeles, had attended their first conference the year before but had come to the First-Timers’ Oasis tonight to lend their support to delegates who might be feeling overwhelmed.

“I’ve been gay for a really long time,” I said, beginning the cover story I had carefully prepared before leaving New York, “and there are things about my life I’m dissatisfied with, so I figured I’d come and check it out. I’m actually seeing a guy back in New York, and he knows I’m here, and he’s not happy about it. But I felt like I needed to come.”

The speech act as a whole was intended to deceive, but by saying only things that were true—there
are
things about my life I am dissatisfied with; for example, the fact that I am not the heir to an oil fortune—I would forestall any compunction.

Jon seemed to accept my explanation. “It’s important to realize,” he said, smiling broadly, “that
change
is different from
cure.”
A very very handsome man who could easily have appeared in the pages of a calendar a fifteen-year-old wouldn’t want his mother to find under his mattress walked by. He waved at Jon and grinned. “That’s Matt,” said Jon, waving back. “Whatever you’ve done in the lifestyle, he’s done more.”
Bitch,
I thought. “He’s a firefighter and an EMT. Now, a year ago,” said Jon, watching him, “I would have seen him and gone, whew!”—Jon lifted one eyebrow in a picture of lust—“but now I can look at him and think”—his facial expression changed to one of intense concentration, as if maintaining this thought required an Augean effort—“this attraction comes from the fact that I feel inadequate next to him, the fact that I feel less of a man, which I’m not.” Stacey’s expression did not change and she remained silent as the tomb. I wished for her to disappear so Jon and I could make out, but she did not comply. Very very handsome Matt walked past in the other direction, this time with a friend; both of them were laughing loudly.

I couldn’t believe how
happy
so many of these people seemed. I had expected them to be tortured, and instead they were far more at peace than I had ever been in my entire life. They needed but raise their hands in the air to access a comfort I would have sold my soul to feel for five minutes.

What if this was the right choice for them?

The next morning, when I found the site of the imminent “Process of Transformation” workshop, I was filled with dismay. Spending the day with evangelical Christians was one thing; spending the day with evangelical Christians in a low-rent conference room with a dingy carpet and painted cinderblock walls was more than I had signed on for. Unfortunately, however, since my other workshop options were “Understanding the Roots of Lesbianism” and “Parents in Pain: Waiting for the Prodigal,” I was pretty much stuck where I was.

On my left sat hot Jon, and on his left sat Rob, whom I had met at the morning session. (There were identically structured sessions every morning and evening, comprising music—Dennis Jernigan was gone, but his replacement for the rest of the week had poorly spelled projections too, so I felt a pleasing sense of continuity—a testimony by somebody who had grown out of homosexuality into the love of Christ, more music, and a sermon.) As I waited now for the Process of Transformation workshop to begin, I resented Rob for pulling hot Jon’s focus from me. Jon was a doctor. Rob, who taught high school in a suburb of Cádiz, Spain, was very tall and well built but had a taped-up Bible that had clearly seen a lot of use and was from my home state and dumb.

At the front of the room stood the workshop leader, a middle-aged man named Roy Blankenship who was shaped like a pear and wore the kind of spectacles my brother refers to as child-molester glasses. Roy Blankenship knew from personal experience, he confided to us during the introduction to his PowerPoint presentation, what it felt like to struggle against same-sex attractions. As he began the talk proper I found it difficult to pay close attention, partially because I was thinking about hot Jon but mostly because Roy Blankenship kept putting up slides that said things like “1. When Someone Has Not Yet Been Able To Forgive Either Their Self, Or Others” and it was all I could do not to leap up mid-presentation and copyedit his visual aids.

I persevered, however, and gained in the end at least a loose grasp of his point, which was, as far as I could tell, that homosexuality is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but the result of childhood trauma or deprivation. “There are three main causes of male homosexuality,” Roy said. “There are also fifteen other associated factors, but these three are central. The father wound”—I blinked at this locution but came to understand over the course of the presentation that it referred essentially to a dysfunctional relationship with one’s distant father—“rejection by the male peer group, and universal rejection of women because of an intolerable mother, though that last one is rare.” In order to start healing, Roy explained, you must first understand how you developed homosexual attractions, which leads in turn to a discovery of what emotional need was never met in your childhood. Once you know what trauma you’re compensating for, you can start addressing the
real
problem, which is not homosexuality but insecurity and self-loathing because your father never loved you or you didn’t fit in with other boys or your mother smothered you. Then, with continued hard work and a steadfast trust in Jesus, you can begin to heal.

I felt as if I were listening to a lecture by a member of the Flat Earth Society. I heard the phrases coming out of Roy Blankenship’s mouth, but my only response was wonderment that an otherwise reasonable-seeming person could string together these combinations of words. I kept thinking,
Did he
really
just say that?
and realizing that yes, he really had just said that. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to get angry, but it was impossible to do so, because I found what he was saying less abhorrent than simply nonsensical. I could as easily have taken offense at an argument that gravity is a fraud perpetrated by the Illuminati working in concert with the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.