The Cross in the Closet (3 page)

I looked back over at Josh and he smiled, obviously in his element. Within seconds of our entrance people began greeting us with hugs and hellos. It was a shock. The feeling of acceptance rushed over me like a tidal wave that I had not seen coming. Before I sat down, seventeen people had introduced themselves. I was staring at them, tongue tied and grinning like a real moron. On stage, a man announced as “Pimp Daddy Supreme” belted out a classic Steely Dan song, while another man wearing a black leather hat adorned with a skull and crossbones toggled the lights on and off, and played air guitar as needed.

“That’s Bad Boy Breeze,” Josh said, pointing to the man in the black hat. “I work with him at Wal-Mart.”

“I thought he looked familiar,” I said, having visited Josh at work countless times.

“Tim, in this place, everyone is familiar.” He patted me on the back reassuringly, sensing my discomfort. “It’s magic, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know how to respond.

At the end of the night, I left, confused. Not just confused but overwhelmed. The people I met had sunk into me somehow, becoming a part of me. I felt protective of them.

“No one ever told you growing up that queers and atheists are actually loving people?” Josh asked, smiling, as we walked out the door. The derogatory labels jumped out in a way they hadn’t before.

“No,” I answered, shaking my head. I thought about the young activist who told me he loved me, and it occurred to me again that he had really been honest. My head didn’t stop shaking the entire way home.

Two years passed quickly after the first time I found myself in that little bar, and I spent those two years attending
Lesbaoke
more faithfully, even, than church. I had found a new home, where everyone was the epitome of loving, and where the voice inside of me was forced into silence. The regulars at that bar became a family of sorts, tied together by something stronger than blood: a combination of cheap beer and the rocking hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. And while those were two of the best years of my life, they were also two of the hardest. In our dive, I became a witness to countless victims of my kind of religion. None of them spoke negatively of God; it was always the Christians who’d maligned them. I was not as outspoken a Christian as I had been in the past, at least not at karaoke, but these instances of hurt I witnessed made me feel guilty, and I did not know why.

“Tim, can we talk for a minute?” The tug on my sleeve was delicate and dainty. Elizabeth, a fairly recent newcomer, looked upset, and I nodded yes and followed her onto the covered patio in the back.

“What’s up?”

Her face looked fluid, like she was a shape-shifter, barely able to hold her form.

“How can you be a Christian?” Her voice was shaky, and I could see she was falling apart. “How
can
you, and still be so happy to be here? I don’t know any Christians that would be. They’d shun this place like it was contaminated.
Fuck
!” She stomped her foot and lowered her eyes.

“Their loss,” I said. “Lizzy, what’s wrong?”

Looking up at me through watery eyes, she said, “I came out to my family yesterday…” Tears began rolling down the softness of her cheeks. I knew she was on the verge of a breakdown.

“What? What happened?”

She reached up to wipe her eyes, allowing the sleeves of her sweater to slide down her wrists, and I could see that the silky white skin of her hands had already been stained by what I could only guess was smeared eyeliner. She had been crying a lot, apparently.

“My dad told me to get my stuff out of his house, and that he wouldn’t pay another dime for the education of a ‘faggot daughter’! And my mom told me to come back when I was ‘fixed’…” Her face found my shoulder, and my arms wrapped around her comparatively tiny body. She felt delicate, like papier-mâché that had not fully dried and was still soft to the touch.

I betrayed her, then. Without even thinking, I betrayed the soft creature crying endlessly on my shoulder.

It was a subtle betrayal, but a cruel one: I was silent.

She did her best to compose herself. “Now I have to leave. I’m moving to a friend’s. She’s my only friend that my dad doesn’t have any control over. I’m going to Texas tomorrow…” Her voice trailed off.

Tell her what Leviticus says about homosexuality. Read her Romans 1! Go on, Tim, it is your responsibility as a follower of Christ to help her see the error of this choice.
The voice inside me had a distinct tone. It didn’t sound like me. It didn’t even sound like it knew me, yet it was powerful and opportunistic. It was a voice of rejection, telling me to reject Elizabeth. I realized that I hated Lizzy. Not because she was a bad person, but because she liked other women. That one facet to her being was enough to spark remarkable animosity toward her, animosity I could not comprehend.

The Bible tells us to love one another as ourselves. How could this voice be Jesus? And if this voice wasn’t Jesus, what voice was it? Whatever it was speaking to me, I knew it wasn’t guiding me in love, and that could only mean one thing. The voice had to die.

Elizabeth left the bar with tears still in her eyes, but they were tears of goodbye, not anger at my lack of understanding. Had she been oblivious to my inner turmoil? I stood silently, staring blankly at the door she had just walked out of. The din from a Styx song caught my ear but not my attention. Nothing could steal my attention; gut-wrenching feelings of shame brought tears to the corners of my eyes. I found my way to a booth and sat down.

And that’s when I saw him for the first time, sitting across the table from me, smirking like a schoolyard bully. He looked like me, dressed in khakis and a black button-up shirt, but he seemed to bleed arrogance. I wiped my eyes and shivered.

“Who are you?”

Why didn’t you tell Liz the truth? Why did you waste an opportunity to help her see her choice for the sin that it is?

I felt heat. It began in my toes and moved slowly upwards.

Cat got your tongue?

“You can’t be serious. I hurt her enough with my silence! I should have held her, cried with her, loved her, but I didn’t. That wasn’t Jesus.”

How do you
know
it wasn’t Jesus? Sure, Jesus died for her sins just like anyone else, but she’s not His child. You were right to think what you were thinking. Go get your Bible—there’s still time to run after her.

I felt his words in my bones, in the very marrow of my bones. He was manipulative. He felt wrong. I felt like I had that day at Liberty, standing off against Soulforce.

Someone had to say what Patrick couldn’t.

That day broke my heart.
I
was supposed to be the one who loved, not the one that rejected a group of people because they were gay. I was wrong to offer such empty condemnation. I should have disagreed differently.

No, you weren’t wrong. You just weren’t committed enough.

I shook my head and wiped the sweat from my forehead. No, I wasn’t right. I had not been right then, and my condemning silence with Liz wasn’t right, either. The memories of my theological instruction flashed through my mind like images on a television. But I didn’t see myself in these images; I saw the condemnatory creature, the Pharisee, who sat across from me.

And then it dawned on me, and a weight lifted from my shoulders:
I might have been wrong all along
.

The figure across from me shook his head, judging my thoughts as quickly as I thought them. But the Pharisee’s finger was fixed, pointing cruelly at me. I stood up, but he remained seated, smirking. I was repulsed. I had to get rid of him.

You can’t.

I had to! Something drastic needed to happen, something that would test my beliefs on a foundational level…And then it came to me: Walk in Liz’s shoes—the shoes of the very people I had been taught to hate. Live with the label of
gay
.

The implications of the idea were overwhelming. To do so would ruin my life. But what kind of life did I have, if such a barrier existed between me and the people I knew I should love? I felt the idea growing, rooting itself in me, like the decision had already been made, and I could almost see the path that was in front of me. I was meant for this. It was a calling I neither wanted nor understood, but I could not ignore the overwhelming sense of divine affirmation in it.

I needed to come out of the closet as a gay man.

My brother’s face betrays concern, and it seems impossible to force the words from my mouth. He’s not just concerned, he’s worried. Each second passes as if time has been slowed, almost to a stop. My thoughts race incoherently, and my mission appears only in glimpses before diving back beneath the chaotic surface of my consciousness.

Andrew and I share similar features, but we are opposites in stature and personality. Whereas I am the typical husky American, my brother appears carved from marble. The lines of his face angle downward and his eyes are an expressive blue. He is confused. Years of learning have taught me to understand, at least, his mannerisms.

Over the past three months, I’ve stood in front of my bedroom mirror and practiced the speech, for this exact moment, no less than five thousand times, and I thought I had it memorized. But fear has wiped my memory of anything I hoped to say. My palms are sweaty, and even though it is the middle of winter, a bead of sweat forms on the crease of my forehead. I feel nauseated, my stomach a pot left unwatched and about to boil over. No amount of preparation could have prepared me for the moment that I look my only brother in the eyes and tell him I am gay.

My sister-in-law, a recent addition to the family, stands next to her husband in the kitchen of their house, rubbing his back empathetically. She eyes him protectively, bracing herself for the moment I finally speak.

The second hand on the clock above the entryway reaches each marker with the force of a hammer strike. The dog drinks loudly from his bowl, lapping up water with a curled tongue and an animated jerk of his head. Friends are on the covered porch nearby, smoking cigarettes and laughing about something, I wish I knew what. The dishwasher clicks, switching cycles on the first load of dirty dishes from our pancake breakfast. Loads two, three, and four are stacked neatly in the sink; leftover syrup drips over the edge of the top plate. I feel my subconscious preparing for another attempt at my speech.

Still nothing audible escapes my lips. I cannot speak. Finally, out of nowhere, it happens.

“I’m gay!”

Those two simple words are sharply punctuated by the silence that follows them. My lips sting as I realize that my hand has smacked them closed. I am in shock. Two words, and no immediate response from my brother. My life has changed forever. Waiting to say the words was one kind of hell, but waiting for my brother to respond to them is a second hell that makes me long for the first. My eyes are on the verge of releasing salty, wet tears, and the fear inside me is growing. I feel cowardly as I lean against the counter, petrified, one hand still covering my mouth.

“Are you joking with us, Tim?” My brother’s voice sounds different. It is not his normal voice. It wavers and almost cracks as he speaks, and I can tell by the look on his face that he is trying to decide whether or not I’m serious, hoping that the next words out of my mouth will be
Got ya!
or
Just kidding!

“No, Andrew. I’m not.” The words are slightly mumbled through my hand, but they are understandable. My resolve is weakening, but the words I’ve spoken are out of my control now. They are alive as I am alive, and they cannot be undone. Even if I were to take it all back and tell my brother about my experiment, the wound of this moment would always remain. My body begins shaking as I wait for the backlash.

I never anticipated that coming out as gay would feel this raw, this emotional, this terrifying. It isn’t a fear that life won’t go on; rather, that life won’t resolve in some way. The questions and the stereotypes, and fear for all of the relationships I might lose, consume me. I don’t want to lose my friends, and I don’t want my family to hold me at arm’s length. I do not want to be the black sheep of the family, or the
different
gay brother or son. I want to be me. But having been raised in a conservative religious home, I know these hopes aren’t reasonable. Living in the culture of the “Bible Belt” makes the prospect of feeling simultaneously normal and gay likely impossible. I cannot imagine what coming out would be like if I were really gay. One year may seem like a long time, but a lifetime…That would be more than I could ever adjust to.

The look on my brother’s face as he processes my revelation is proof. Nothing about this year is going to be easy.

Then my brother’s wife, Maren, looks at me with the grace of a sister, and Andrew’s face takes on a beautiful look of sympathy and protectiveness. I don’t know why he’s looking at me that way, but it is not threatening. I have never seen it before, and it surprises me, knowing what he must be thinking. Then I feel guilt; not just because I’m intentionally allowing him to go through this with me, but because I am selfish. I am selfish because I treasure that look on his face and what it shows me—I really am important to him. In some indescribable way, I feel that he actually needs me.

Is he afraid of losing me? Why that look?

Why now?

For the moment my nerves calm and my fear abates. My sister-in-law moves next to me and playfully grabs the scruff of my neck. “Were you actually afraid we were going to push you away for being gay?” she asks as her hand rubs my still very rigid back. I can feel my pulse. It hasn’t stopped racing since I told Andrew and Maren that we needed to talk.

“Honestly, I didn’t know how you were going to react,” I reply, still shaking.

Andrew moves next to me and puts his arm around me. I’m in the middle of these two people, and I feel like I hardly know them. Have I been too hard on them, assuming that my brother would react to my coming out the way I might have if he had come out to me? I don’t know what to think. Surprisingly, neither of them asks questions. I have been told most family members ask questions after finding out for the first time that a loved one is gay. But they do not ask me how long I have known or “felt this way,” and they do not ask me if I have a boyfriend. Instead, they just let me be. It is a beautiful thing that in spite of everything I believed would, or at least could, have happened, in our case, blood really does run thicker than dogma.

I hear the sliding doors to the porch open. The sound is a salvation of sorts, as I am ready to go outside and smoke a cigarette. The group of friends walk into the kitchen and immediately engage my brother and his wife in conversation. I slip quietly out to the porch.

It is cold, too cold for anyone without a jacket. I am without mine but unwilling to go back inside without taking a few minutes to myself. I put the cigarette in my mouth and reach for my lighter, but something comes over me before I can light it. I feel physically sick, like I am neck-deep in a pit of quicksand, like I have just committed a murder and am waiting to be found out. My worry turns into nausea, and my nausea becomes a forward movement to the screen door, which I wrench open just in time to vomit into the bushes. My nerves manifest themselves into a bought of physical sickness.

And then I see him, the Pharisee, standing at the bottom of the steps with a disapproving look on his face.

Why are you lying to them? We both know you can’t maintain this lie.

Leave me alone.

I just don’t understand why you think lying to your family is going to accomplish anything. You know lying is a sin, just like homosexuality. Now you might as well be gay.

His continual use of the word
lie
is intentional, but I’m too overwhelmed to pay him any attention. I look down at the throw up on the winter-stripped bush and start to cry. Deceiving my brother is the hardest thing I have ever done. I feel like I’ve stabbed myself in the heart.

Six months of planning hasn’t prepared me in the least.

I had not heard from Lizzy since that fateful night at karaoke. I didn’t need to, though. I had made an unorthodox decision, a path inspired by her conviction. Something about my thinking was wrong, something about my immediate desire to preach at her instead of comfort her…It had to be wrong, or I would not have felt so guilty. But making the unorthodox decision to come out as gay and actually coming out are two entirely different monsters, and the second was much more intimidating to face. It was late June 2008, and my course had set.

The idea was simple enough, or so I thought: come out as gay to my family, friends, and church, and see how the label of
gay
would affect my life. It would be the ultimate chance to test everything that two decades of programming in the Independent Baptist Church had taught me.

I’d lived in Nashville since I was two and loved it. Like most Southern cities, we lived at a much slower pace. It was a place where iced tea was the drug of choice and being a member of this church or that was more prestigious than belonging to a country club. It was also a place filled with people who thrived on bringing faith and Republican politics into conversation whenever possible, and I was an expert at injecting my extreme brand of faith into even the most mundane small-talk.

Growing up I was the little boy single-handedly responsible for the success of the clip-on tie industry. I was the kid who logged more hours in church than most pastors. Television shows like the “Power Rangers” were off limits because of the worldly music (not the violence—go figure), as were the movies like
Free Willy
because of their “environmentalist, liberal agenda.” I was never allowed to believe in Santa Clause or the Easter bunny, and not once on Halloween did my parents allow me to dress up to go trick-or-treating. They said it was an “evil“ holiday, and I was too young to protest. None of this really mattered, though. I’d just wanted to be normal, even though I was not quite sure what normal really was.

One of the earliest Sunday school lessons I remember was “Sodom and Gomorrah.” I could not have been older than seven or eight. I stared in awe at the display board showing the destruction of the city, rendered in felt. The Sunday school teacher placed the “fire reigning from the heavens” pieces on the board with care, like she treasured them. Each piece, including the people, looked like something you’d see in a science fiction movie. It was a disturbing image…until the felt buildings fell off the board. They only stuck half of the time, and my laughing always got me in trouble.

Memories from my childhood had plagued me since that night at the bar with Liz, but none of them held the same novelty as before. Now I saw them for what they might actually be: the spiritual boot camp that taught me how to use the Bible to hurt instead of love. I had been raised a Bible thumper, a homophobe; my decision was not an easy one.

Acting on an idea is not as simple as one might think, especially one that is as deep as adopting the label of gay. I hadn’t expected it to be an effortless process, or anything; I just thought that the mental hurtles I’d have to jump would be a little bit shorter. I thought I would meet the most resistance externally, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I suffered through anxiety, insomnia, and a heightened sense of nostalgia for the things I might lose. I was unraveling before the journey even began.

My first week of sleepless nights followed my decision to move forward with the experiment. I became an insomniac zombie, obsessing over every nuance of the experiment. Not only did I suffer insomnia, I became a hermit. My lack of contact with the outside world worried my best friend Josh, who hadn’t heard from me since karaoke, and it didn’t take much waffling before I drove to his house to tell him everything. It was his fault I’d started going to karaoke, after all—and I was going to make him participate, whether he liked it or not!

After some brief small talk, I hesitantly told him. “By the way, I’ve decided to ‘come out’ to my family and friends.”

“What? But you aren’t gay!” He looked shocked, and the confusion on his face almost lightened my mood. “
Are
you…?”

“Of course not! You know me better than that,” I answered. “You know my story, about how I was raised and everything.”

A look of recognition blossomed, and his demeanor changed. “That’s perfect!” he said without my having to elaborate. “If you walk in their shoes, you might not be such an asshole to them.”

“Hey, now! I am not…Well, yes, basically. But I don’t want to be an asshole anymore,” I said as Josh smiled at me. “It’s just that, well, I’m not sure that I should…” I voiced my hesitation, wondering if he would tell me to drop it or encourage me to go through with the idea.

Josh saw my hesitancy. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to find someone who will. This is the best idea you’ve ever had, and it needs to be done. Tim, this is your chance to question everything you’ve ever been taught! It’s your chance to grow a heart. This is going to change your life!” He knew me too well.

I knew I didn’t have a choice.

Josh leaned against the wall of his balcony, twisting the hair of his black goatee between his thumb and index finger. His expression was pensive, and I knew he was working out what exactly he wanted to say next. I looked off the balcony at the lights of downtown Nashville and lit a clove cigarette. The sweltering June heat, and the humidity even so late at night, had me consistently wiping my forehead with my t-shirt while I waited for him to speak. The cigarette was nothing more than a tar-soaked filter and my shirt was damp before he finally spoke.

“Tim, you know if you do this, you’re going to have to establish some pretty strict rules for yourself.” Josh’s exultant expression had turned serious.

“Like what?” I said.

“Well, for one, you won’t be able to date women. You won’t even be able to flirt with them! That’s what will make or break this project,” he said, taking another hit of the clove nestled between the fingers of his left hand.

“Why not?”

“For several reasons. First, the duality of this experiment is hinged on the fact that while you’re out as gay, you’ll be in the closet as straight. You’ll be completely imprisoned to this new life—repressed like gays and lesbians are, before they come out. It will bring you closer. Also, it minimizes the risk of being found out by everyone. People talk, and if you’re dating someone, they won’t be able to keep things a secret. Plus, you’d be cheating yourself out of the most important part of the story if you did. Relationships just complicate things. You wouldn’t be able to handle it.”