Gay
I wasn’t sure whether to title this “gay” or “hate”… I decided to go with the more positive of the two.
I received the following message from Brian, an old friend from NYC. Kelsey is Brian’s wife’s God Daughter:
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Kelsey came out of the closet today. First to her family, then on Facebook. She lives in Louisiana surrounded by a conservative Christian community. She is having a really hard time, online and off, and could use all the friends and support she can get.
Please friend Kelsey and show her your support. Pass this message along to anyone you think might appreciate it.
Thank you.
-Brian
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Go here to friend Kelsey on FaceBook.
I dutifully FaceBook friended Kelsey; she accepted. I then went to her page. There I found numerous posts and comments from her “christian” friends (I suppose “friends” deserves quotes as well). These were people, horrified; people who couldn’t believe that their friend had so betrayed them, and therefore their version of Christ, by coming out of the closet.
They tossed the usual judgements at her, damning her soul while claiming to care about it.
How could she?!
I passed Brian’s message on to a number of, as I called them, my gay, spiritual, or spiritually gay, friends.
If you are on FaceBook, I urge you to friend this young woman via the link above.
Let’s face it. I, and most of the gay (my thumbs keep typing fay: a term stereotypical, as well as mis-spelled) people I know, live in a bubble. We have it relatively easy to very easy. Most of us live in cities, or larger towns, on “coasts”. One forgets.
Even here, having moved back to Reading, PA, it is easy to forget the days of my youth when it wasn’t as… Oh, but really, compared to what someone living in a true religiously conservative area goes through, even back then, in my fraught teens, I had it easy. (Thank you, Genesius; the theatre, not the Saint.)
How many young people out there never make it out alive simply because they can’t be free to be who they really are? Or just as tragically mind-bending, stand up to the world, showing their true selves, only to be beaten, spiritually, emotionally, physically, or often, all three? How many? How fucking many?
I could spend paragraph after paragraph of discourse on the hypocracy, the dishonesty, of the fundamentalist “christian” hate mongers. That, however, has been done before, by people far more learned than I. The problem is, one cannot have reasonable discourse when one party is blinded by a fundamental sense of “right”.
I no longer have the energy, or will, for this type of discourse.
What I do have energy for, is living my life as the out gay person that I am, and supporting those who choose, no matter the oppression, or odds, to do the same.
Have strength when you need it, lend your strength when it is needed from you.
How odd that the choice that Kelsey made, the choice to live as the Universe made her, the choice to live honestly to herself, and the world, how odd that that should have to be so hard.
Now that’s, as the kids today say, gay.
Nite,
k.
