Coming Out Day

Coming Out Day is a chance to celebrate the courage and freedom of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people (who have been able to choose) to be open about who they love. It’s also a chance for straight allies to express their support.

Of course, for lgbt people, pretty much every day is coming out day: we come out over and over and over, to different people in different ways, and we are always calculating the cost, even if we have been able to choose to live out of the closet all the time. Some people love our reality; some tolerate us; some hate us; some kill us.

Coming out stories are fascinating to me (and to enough other people that collections of coming-out stories have been published); they bear all the earmarks of conversion experiences, of metanoia. I like to hear the stories of people who seem to have always known their same-sex preference, and the stories of people for whom the realization came slowly, and the stories of “late bloomers” like me, who lived straight lives until some catalytic event catapulted them into their own reality.

My own reality tried to peek through the blinds of my enculturation as a straight girl, but there were enough barriers in the way for me as a young person that I could not let myself fully acknowledge what I felt and what it meant. That truth hid in a gray space in my soul I kept so carefully locked away it seemed even God could not find me in it. I thought the gray space was constructed to contain the childhood sexual abuse I had experienced; but the truth was buried even deeper than that.

A different light came, slowly. First, through language. There was the feminist theology class where I heard the term “compulsory heterosexuality.” Then through visibility: there were the lesbian friends I met in my M.Div. program who I could see living into full Christian identities. Finally, through experience: the friendship that teetered on the edge of becoming something more.

What surfaced through that friendship had the power to reach what I thought was the deepest wounded place in my life, and turn it into my deepest question: am I a lesbian?

The question was too risky; I ran from it, into deep and heartfelt prayer, including fasting prayers. A day here, a day there … my life as spouse, parent, pastor and student continued, with regular activities and exercise. Every day I prayed Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit with me.”

This came not from a sense of homosexuality as sin; I had a longstanding affirmation of lgbt folk as beloved children of God, deserving of justice and acceptance. However, I was struggling with the notion of accepting this affirmation myself, when it seemed everything hung in the balance: my marriage, my children, my ministry, my ordination, my church.

I asked God to take away the desire for this woman, for any woman, even as the awareness began to surface of how there had always been an important woman in my life. The truth was streaming in; I was stubbornly running. The cost of embracing this truth would be too high. “Take it away, God. Take it away.”

Weeks went by … five, six … I was oblivious to what was happening in my body as I prayed back against the frightening freedom beginning to dawn in my soul.

Finally, one day, I stood lost in prayer before my closet, wondering what was happening in my life even as I wondered what clothes I could put on my body that I would not feel lost in. A small voice came, in response to my by-now monotonous prayer for clarity: “Have you noticed that your lifelong addiction to food is gone? If I can take away that unhealthy desire, don’t you think I could take away this one? If I thought it was unhealthy? You don’t need clarity. You need courage.”

Stunned, I moved through my day, accepting the implication. Later, at the local Y, I stood on the scale. Forty pounds had melted away … and God was right. I felt completely different about food, and I was beginning to feel differently in myself, and about myself.

I was changing, from the inside out: changing shape, changing identity, changing allegiance. Having come out to God, I began the process of coming out to myself.

And a funny thing happened. My spiritual director, a pastoral counselor friend, and my womanist theology professor all gave me the same good advice in a space of weeks: “Tammerie, before you can figure out who you are meant to love, you have to learn to love yourself.”

And so, I set about the task of learning to love this new self God had given me. I went about it the way I would love another: I would want to know the beloved’s favorite activities, joys, passions; I would want to know where the hurts where, what needed tenderness, what brought pleasure. I gave myself the space and permission to experience healing – to feel healed. I chose when to say no; I chose when to say yes.

There was a high cost; the women of color I was co-pastoring with could not abide the questions or the changes coming about in my life, and it took several years for those relationships to regain their footing (and I am thankful they did). The anti-racist, multicultural church we were pastoring together – a vessel for so many dreams and hopes – had already been struggling to survive, and this was one difference too many. We came apart.

To make space for my own and our family’s discernment, I found the courage to resign my credentials in and respectfully disengage from a denomination and a church that could not affirm even the question of my orientation. I moved to a local church community in the United Church of Christ, which offered room for the asking and answering of this question. And over time, God and community helped me and my family to move as nonviolently as possible through the painful process of ending a 21-year marriage, and beginning family life anew in a way that spans two households. I am grateful that my ex-husband has happily remarried; and I am unspeakably happy in the rightness of the love I now share with my beloved M.

I have made choices and taken stances to live into who I feel made and called to be. I meet white people who are uncomfortable with my stances on racism, anti-racism, white privilege, feminism, or my queer identity. Some individuals and communities of color struggle too with homophobia, and sometimes in those settings I experience tension between my queer identity and anti-racist stance. Sometimes, when my feminist commitment runs up against a person of color behaving in a sexist way, I need to find the way between my anti-racist and feminist stances.

I feel the constraints of respecting positions I know in my embodied self to be wrong. In wrestling with those tensions, I come back to the primacy, for me, of my anti-racist stance. I name the truth as I can, and live into my commitments.

Given the interconnections among forms of oppressions, and the similarities of their processes and effects, I gain some insight from the experience of sexism and heterosexism that helps me in my attempts to be an effective white ally, in dealing with racism and white privilege. And, conversely, I have learned some things from people of color about how to deal with and resist oppression when it comes. I have not learned everything that is on offer, but I have learned some things, about courage, honesty, grace, and being human.

I will never regret coming out, because it has been a coming into my own, a coming into the self that God uniquely created me to be. I will always thank God for bringing me to my senses. Literally.