The Cross in the Closet (16 page)

“I had to understand for myself what it felt like to come out. I had to feel the apprehension and fear that people face every day when they come out. It may not make sense, but understanding that was essential to this whole thing.” My voice is shaking, and my body stutters and quakes as I talk. It shatters my confidence.

“Tim, you threw me under the bus,” his says, his tone sharper than before.

“I’ve been throwing people under the bus for years, people who did nothing to me except believe differently.”

“Don’t get all self-righteous on me.”

“I know you probably won’t understand this right now, but this is the first time in my life I’m
not
being self-righteous. I have been a bully and a bigot. What we were taught about these people wasn’t right!”

“Don’t give me that. We aren’t talking about gay, here; we are talking about you lying to me. I never thought you would do that. I trusted you!”

It isn’t difficult to see where this conversation is headed, and I brace myself for the crash landing.

“I love you, brother,” I say, “but I had to do this. And I don’t regret what I have done, not for a second, because it is the first time I’ve truly understood the path I was headed down. I was wrong all along. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

“Listen, Tim, you are my little brother and I love you, but you have to understand that I’m not just your brother anymore. I’m a husband, and your actions have hurt my wife.” He lets the words sink in. “We need to step back from this whole thing—and from you, for a while. Maybe when you are all done with your year, we can sit down and work things out.”

“I understand. I really do. It sucks but I get it,” I say, choking back emotion.

“I know you do, Tim. I knew you would.”

“I love you, man,” I say.

“I love you too,” he says.

And then we are disconnected from the call, but more so, from each other. My older brother, my blood, has removed himself from my life. Maybe it was naiveté, but I never thought it would come to this. At least I hoped it wouldn’t. I sit in the middle of the driveway, unable to stand. I allow myself to grieve. I wonder if my pain is anything remotely akin to the pain my gay and lesbian friends felt when they were rejected by their family members. Sure, my brother emphasized my “choice” to lie to him—and mine was a choice—but in so many other stories I have heard, parents reacted to the “choice” to be gay. In either case, the sadness and crushing isolation of this moment overwhelms me.

Shawn finds me, hours later, in the corner of Tribe, four beers in. He sits next to me on the couch and puts his arms around me. My head on his shoulder feels right and comfortable. It is not something I would have done with any man before all of this, but I feel utterly vulnerable and know that with Shawn I am in a safe place. I can fall apart in his arms and trust that his only intention will be to comfort me. He is that type of saint, a hero to me. I begin to cry. No one else is around, so I feel safe to talk.

“What happened? How did they find out?” he asks in a soothing voice.

“Exactly how we thought it would happen. My brother’s friend.”

“Tim, you aren’t perfect, and you slipped—but this project isn’t over.”

“The whole thing is over now,” I say. “I’ve lost my brother, and my mission.”

“Why would you say that? Why would it be over?”

“Because my family knows.”

“You barely see your family,” he says, rubbing my back.

“But they’ll tell people.”

“Tim, your project isn’t over. It’s only just begun. You may not have the same relationship to your brother or your mom that you did before this, but you can’t stop what you are doing. You have to keep going. You have to keep going for me.” His eyes express something I have not seen before. “We don’t need you to rescue us. We need you to rescue yourself, so you can be the example.”

“An example? I don’t feel like I could ever be an example.” I sound pathetic.

“You already are. I believe in you, but you need to believe in yourself too.”

“I’ll try,” I meekly whisper.

I look across the main room to the bar and see Will wiping down the counter. He is looking at me and smiles as we make eye contact. I feel urgently thankful that he is a part of my life again, and that Shawn is here to comfort me.

“You have a kind heart, but you need to stop beating yourself up. Take advantage of this time while you have it, and keep searching—”

“But I lied to them,” I say.

“And I lied to my family about being straight, all those years,” he says.

“But that’s different. That was your process.”

“Maybe. But this is your process. It’s unique and messy, but it was meant to be. I know God led you to this. I’ve always felt your conviction was proof of that.” He hesitates before continuing. “I love you, Tim.”

“I love you, too, Shawn.” I do. But I also feel guilty, knowing that I cannot love Shawn the way he needs to be loved, the way he deserves to be loved.

I feel something else in his words. Does he love me…or is he falling in love with me? I dismiss the thought as soon as I think it. That is the last thing I want to happen right now. Two seasons have passed me by and I know I am past my homophobia, past my irrational fear of gay men. That alone is a small miracle. To be held by Shawn in a gay bar, and to love him as much as I do, this is evidence enough for me. But I know I have to go deeper, despite the consequences. I have a little over six months left and so much yet to discover.

Shawn tries to get my mind off of my brother. He tells me stories, we dance with some of the other guys, he tells me jokes, and when I smile his face lights up. He knows I am in pain, and I know he is in pain because of my pain. How did I get so lucky as to find someone like Shawn to spend time with, someone so intensely empathetic and encouraging? I don’t know what I would do without Shawn, but my thoughts stray back to my brother. I don’t know what I will do without him in my life, either. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.

—Anne Lamott

In the short time I have worked at Revive, the café is living up to its name. I feel more alive, working and talking with people every day. It is freeing. It is convenient. Working as a barista suits me, and I love making coffee in a café that has such a great vibe. It is almost a dream, or at least feels like it. I am fully trained now, and I was even sent to train with a professional barista named EJ at a café in east Nashville. He taught me how to make latte art, hearts and spirals. Inadvertently I even learned how to draw the male anatomy. Steamed sex, 2 percent—it makes the regulars smile.

The other positive side of working at a gay café attached to a gay bookstore is that I get discounts on everything. I even get free movie rentals, all of which have gay themes. Obviously. Last night I watched a movie called
Latter Days
. It is about a Mormon missionary that moves next door to a player. They fall in love, and there is this line where the missionary is talking to a lady on a bench. He tells her that when he used to read the Sunday comics as a kid, he would put his nose up to them, so he could only see thousands of tiny dots. None of it made sense, he says, until he pulled the paper back from his face, and he would see the whole story, and the story was beautiful, and funny, and good. He tells the woman on the bench that life is like the comics. It is a mass of dots that don’t seem to make sense, but he likes to think that God looks at us from above, and everything makes sense. From this close we can’t expect everything to make sense. The spiritual insight in his words caught me off guard, but then again, things are catching me off guard every day. The credits rolled, and I was sad. I want to share the movie with some of my Christian friends, but they would probably dismiss it out of hand because “homosexuals cannot be Christians.” Too bad for them. The movie was great. I returned the movie and clocked in for my shift, and the hours pass in conversation and coffee grounds.

“I’m going to smoke, if that’s okay with you,” I say to my supervisor, Brent.

“Sure. Take your lunch,” Brent says, staring at the computer screen in front of him.

“Bitch, I love you!” I say, walking to the door.

He smiles. “Bitch, I love you!” he says, still fixated on the computer screen.

I walk outside. The cool spring air is refreshing, and I light my cigarette, leaning against the patio’s railing. It is nice having a job; in this economy, it is something no one takes for granted. I exhale the smoke and look around, shifting the clove from my right hand to my left. The sunset is beautiful, a tapestry of orange and red, and from my vantage point the view is especially vivid. Cars pass, stirring the leaves and debris of the gutter, and I pull out my phone and text Shawn to ask how his day is going.I have lived with the label of gay for almost six months but am still plagued by questions. I have realized that this whole thing is really just a process, just seeing people for who they are instead of as labels. There is so much more to a person. Take Brent, for example. He is not particularly spiritual, but he told me today that he would love to go back to school for theology. Theology,
really
? Most Christians don’t even like studying theology, unless they are trying to justify their own point of view.

I hear music next door. It is karaoke night at the LGBTQ community center, and I am curious if gay karaoke is any different from the karaoke I go to every week. Well, maybe not much is different. Maybe just the song choices are different. One might expect to hear more pop and techno on a gay karaoke night than at the average bar.

Another song starts, replacing the Britney Spears song before it…and I recognize it. I can’t make out the words, and I cannot put my finger on what the song is. The words are muffled by two sets of doors separating me from the other space. But
that song
—that song sounds so familiar. I exhale the smoke and try to figure out the name of the song playing. It is loud, upbeat, and dramatic. I have heard that song a million times! I just do not know what it is.

I look at the Pharisee, and his face betrays worry.

Don’t go in there. It’s just karaoke night. Stay here.

But I have to. I am drawn, like a moth to a flame. And I am desperately searching my memory for the name of that song.

Nothing is worse than not being able to remember the name of a movie or song you know. It is like my brain has just been struck by an intense, albeit temporary, bout of Alzheimer’s. I peek inside the café: a regular is sipping his coffee and reading the newspaper. Brent’s face is still angled down at the computer monitor. I am not needed. It is my lunch break, after all, so I shouldn’t feel bad about leaving work to go next door for a few minutes.

I open the door to the community center. The music gets louder, but the words are still muffled. Not remembering is like having an unreachable itch.

I look back and see the Pharisee reluctantly following me inside. He does not look happy—but then again he rarely looks happy.

I swing the door open and step into the large meeting room. About thirty people are gathered, all of them singing along with the woman on stage… No, not a woman. A man dressed as a woman. He looks like a young Barbara Bush, wearing a black skirt and blouse, an earthy pink suit jacket adorned with a broach that looks like a shiny leaf, and matching pink heels. His wig is short but feminine, and he is wearing a necklace that looks like a string of fake, gold pearls. His eyes are closed. The crowd is engrossed.

I take a few steps further into the room. The crowd is not acting like a typical karaoke crowd. Their hands lift into the air and their eyes are closed. They are focused, almost trance-like, on the words coming out of their mouths, and all of them seem to know the lyrics to the song. It is magic.

They launch into the chorus. Goose bumps spread over my body, and I am engulfed by shock.

I know this song! I have known it since I was a kid. I have not heard it in years, but I remember it as clearly as ever. The chorus begins and a part of my world collapses.

“Our God is an awesome God. He reigns from Heaven above, with wisdom, power, and love. Our God is an awesome God…”

My jaw feels disconnected from my face. It hangs open as if fixed that way. I am in absolute awe. I cannot move. I cannot think. I cannot do anything but stare: stare at the at the crowd of strangers gathered for a normal karaoke night but frozen in a moment of intense worship. The drag queen on stage repeats the chorus three times before starting the next verse, and all the while, a grand epiphany ripples like electricity through every inch of my body. All my life, I have been taught that gays cannot worship God. Cannot know God. Cannot love God. And I believed it. I believed it so absolutely that I doubted every word I heard this year from Samantha and Matthew, Mel, even Shawn. I sat silently, listening to them but judging them, as if I knew something they could never know. And now this. My pride and my paradigm crumble at the feet of a man dressed like a young Barbara Bush, singing “Our God Is an Awesome God.”

A man has noticed me. He sees the shock on my face and walks over to shake my hand and introduce himself, but I can’t give him my attention. The song ends and another one begins. Part of me wants to hear Britney Spears, part of me wants to hear Cher. Those parts of me desperately want that last song to be a fluke, a funny coincidence, so my beliefs do not have to change.

Again my spinning thoughts are brought to a standstill as the crowd begins to sing “Here I Am to Worship,” my favorite praise song to sing in church. But this is
not
church! This is a community center in the heart of Nashville’s gayborhood.
This is unreal.
I am a lazy bastard, really, and I wonder how I will ever process this moment.

I collect myself enough to nudge the man next to me.

“Does this happen often?” I ask him.

He seems intrigued by my response to the music. “Yeah, actually. Most of us go to church together, so no one really minds when Bill starts in with the Jesus music.”

I feel the Pharisee next to me and I see his mouth unhinged, like mine. He looks as if he is in pain, and I put my arm on his shoulder.

The man next to me smiles, and I feel like God is smiling at me.

I am a witness to something that defies everything I held to be truth. I am humbled. Not just humbled. I feel crushed and broken, utterly foolish for insisting this was not possible. The crowd launches into the chorus, and the drag queen on stage really gets into it. He sings the way I sing at church. I know where his heart is. I
know
he is being real, and I can no longer question him, discredit him, or hate him. He is my opposite, but now we are the same. My heart softens, knowing the words that are coming next. I sing with them this time, or at least I try. I mouth the words, half singing, half speaking them under my breath, still too surprised to lift my voice above a whisper, but no one notices. We are all lost in the intensity of the moment.

“Here I am to worship. Here I am to bow down. Here I am to say that You're my God. You're altogether lovely, all together worthy, all together wonderful to me…”

Thirty minutes pass like one minute or a thousand minutes, and for those thirty minutes I sing praise song after praise song. I hear as many praise songs as I would on Sunday mornings at church, and I feel the same spirit, too. I feel a burden lift and a question answered. A Britney Spears song comes on at last, and I walk out of the community center. I have gone a few minutes over my half-hour break. I look inside and see Brent still staring at the computer screen. Our one regular has left, so I know there is no rush. I light up another cigarette and sit.

The Pharisee sits next to me, finally silent. He cannot say anything. He saw what I have seen. I can hear his breath sink deep inside his chest like a stone in water. Or maybe those breaths are my own.

I have been taught that I need to
be
Jesus to the people I meet, that I need to live the love and the faith and the commitment of my God, so that others can see Him, too. If it is true that we can be Jesus to each other, then I will never see Jesus the same way again. Tonight… Well, tonight, I saw Jesus in drag, and now I feel incapable of hate. I know these feelings will lessen and diminish as time passes, that my freedom from hatred is similar to my three-week freedom from masturbation after watching the
Passion of the Christ
, but I hope it is not temporary. I hope I will remember these goose bumps and this shock, and I hope I remember how beautiful it is to live inside this tension.

My clove is almost burned away, an inch of thick ash still clinging to the filter, like my ideologies cling to my heart. I toss the clove into the can by the door. I toss the clove and I toss my ideologies with it. I was wrong. I step into the coffee shop, back to work, but I feel different.

Somehow my year in the closet just got a little bit easier, and all because I saw Jesus in drag.