When I
was an undergraduate there was a guy, 'John', on my corridor in college who made
an extraordinary claim. He said that, as a schoolboy, he’d been obsessed with the
Nazis and not only their attempted genocide against Jewish people, but their
persecution of gay people. He’d had maps which showed their extermination
centres and his biggest regret at the time had been that the Nazis had failed in
their vile plans. This confession was all the more startling because, by the
time I’d met him, he was an out gay man clearly confident in his identity and
sexuality. Unsurprisingly he was repelled by his former views. As a teenager he
acknowledged he’d really struggled to accept himself for who he was and had
been drawn to precisely the kind of regime which gave focus for his personal
fear and loathing.
I’ve been
thinking about John today because of a couple of striking stories that have
been in the news. Firstly, the news that Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus
International, has both made an apology to gay people for hurt and damage
caused by Exodus' ‘ex-gay’ ministry and also has immediately closed the
organization down (though we should be *very* cautious about how deep this apology reaches). He has acknowledged that he has never resolved his own
attraction to and feelings for men. Secondly, I’ve also been chewing over the
story in The Church Times which suggests that, even if clergy in civil
partnerships publicly state they’re celibate, they still might not be accepted
as eligible for the role of bishop.
When I
met John at university he was, unless my memory is faulty, the first confident,
out, gay man I’d ever met. I’d grown up in a village and gone to school in a
small town so perhaps that’s unsurprising. However, it was still an age (the late ‘80s)
when ‘being out’ was – even in university contexts – relatively rare. As
anyone who knows me or has read Dazzling Darkness will know, I was – at 18 –
utterly unable to acknowledge how messed up I was and far from ready to come
out as trans.
The
reason John’s story has stayed so powerfully with me was that, though it
remains difficult for me to acknowledge, I too saw the appeal of the Nazi
totalitarian mind. I was, unlike John, not exactly obsessed with them, but as an utterly screwed up teen I'd been secretly attracted to the idea that ‘unacceptables’
were wiped out by Hitler and his gangsters. One doesn’t need to be a hugely
nuanced psychologist to appreciate that my fascination with the Nazis’ gigantic
crimes was a ‘public’ way of dealing with my internal desire to wipe out what I perceived to be 'the unacceptable’
within.
The ‘queer
but so filled with self-loathing they want to persecute themselves’ trope is so pervasive
it’s a cliché. From Cardinal Keith O’Brien through to Alan Chambers, queer folk
have often so internalized cultural fear of difference that they become the
most vocal agents of their own exclusion. Indeed, protesting too loudly about gay folk, or wanting them excluded from church or
society and so on, has often been taken as definitive evidence of being in the closet. Fair
or unfair, I’ve never quite been able to get beyond the feeling that anyone who
gets overexcited about the acceptability of LGBTQ people in society or before
God or in church may have some unresolved personal issues. That may be a little
crude but it’s difficult to resist.
In some
respects society has moved significantly since I went to university twenty five
years ago. I may live in a metropolitan south Manchester bubble, but UK attitudes
to LGBTQ folk have moved far in recent years. Nonetheless, let’s not pretend
that queer folk, especially gay men, don’t get beaten up; let’s not pretend
that trans* people get a fair deal in our media; let’s not pretend that
prejudice isn’t real.
I’d like
to think that young people are far more confident about their sexuality and
gender than I or John or many LGBTQ people were twenty five years ago, but in my bleaker moments I fear not. Outside of the big cities, two women or two men holding hands and kissing in public is probably not especially common. I suspect that in many schools it is still really tough to dare be
out about being gay or trans*. I guess many wait till university or later to
begin to be and express themselves.
And here’s the rub: my fear is that one of
the environments which acts most strongly against sexual self-acceptance is a religious
one. Even when the message ‘gay is bad’ is not explicit, the implication is ‘gay
is not quite as good’. Indeed, that it’s a kind of impaired way of being a human being. I’m privileged to know a number of happy,
confident Christian LGBTQ people who’ve had
parents, families and congregations who’ve worked very hard to deflect and challenge the
dominant religious narrative about being gay. Yet, ironically, an environment
which focuses powerfully on the call to love and grow into the likeness of
Christ so often invites people to be furtive and fearful. It rewards subterfuge
and secrecy and invites self-loathing. It’s not always easy to come out the
other side.