Virginia is for Lovers: Some Restrictions May Apply

©Sara Mackey
July 31, 2005

           As the kittens climbed up my leg to propel themselves off my lap and on to the table, over and over again, I laughed and thought to myself, “Chump!” My friend from seminary (the chump) had invited me over to see her new roommates. She, too, serves a congregation that’s not in Richmond, and one of her congregants had come by her office to take her to his house, to show her his new litter of kittens. He persuaded my friend that a woman living alone really needs a low maintenance companion. A cat, for example. He did a good job, evidently, of persuading; in fact, he persuaded her that once you decide to have a cat, there’s really no difference between one cat and two cats. (He’s right, by the way.) I spent the evening being captivated by Grace and Sophia, and took great delight in my friend’s story of taking them to the vet and being told that Grace and Sophia were some fancy names for a couple of tom cats. When she found out that the cats were males, my friend called her granddaughter, three years old and her partner in every major decision she makes.

“What are we going to do, Alise?” she asked her granddaughter. What are we going to name the kitties now? Think about it and call me back.” In a couple of days, Alise called with her solution. “Nanny, let’s just call them girls.”

           Let’s just call ourselves welcoming. We Unitarian Universalists do welcome and support the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community. We may be more affirming and supportive than any other denomination. We most certainly never tell people they are sinners, or they’re going to hell. We do not say to BGLT members that even though we love them, they can’t participate in leading worship. We take public stands in support of BGLT causes all over the country.

Let’s just call ourselves welcoming.

Let’s not go through that challenging and complicated process of self examination, looking at what we believe about gender identity and how we came to believe it.

Let’s not ask ourselves if we are more or less privileged than our friends and colleagues.

Let’s not set ourselves up for conflict and disappointment and frustration and opening up who knows what can of worms.

Let’s just call ourselves welcoming.

          And we ARE welcoming. In fact, I have wished many times as a member of the Welcoming Congregations committee in my own congregation that we could change the name of the program, because the number one response we get when we talk about Welcoming Congregations is just that: we already ARE welcoming. Becoming a Welcoming Congregation, though, certified by the UUA as having been through this demanding process, isn’t something we do just for ourselves, just for our own congregation.

           Another comment that comes up frequently is, why gay people? We don’t want to designate just one group and say we welcome them. We want to welcome everybody. We don’t have committees and programs to welcome African Americans, or immigrants, or people with special needs. That’s right. We don’t. And here’s why: even during the worst times of chattel slavery in the United States (the most devastating kind of slavery, because there’s nothing you can do as a slave to free yourself), the Africans still had church. It was usually forbidden to them, so of course they had it in secret.  They hid in groves of trees and hung wet quilts around to absorb the sounds of their whispered worship. They went to all kinds of lengths to hide their religious gatherings. But they had church. Indeed, the civil rights movement in the last century emerged out of the church. Through all the horrors that African Americans had to endure at the hands of their oppressors, from chattel slavery to dogs and fire hoses, they still knew they were God’s children. They still had church. Immigrants have church. People with special needs have church. It BGLT people who don’t have church…who get kicked out of church, or who’re told sure, you can come, but forget about being ordained as clergy, even if you feel a deep call, and you can’t read from the pulpit if you want to be a lay leader, and don’t talk about being gay while you’re at church because of course you’re a sinner, it says so in the Bible. (That’s not an accurate representation of what it says in the Bible, by the way, and to claim that it is does a disservice to the Bible.)  Additionally, you’re a sinner not because of anything you did, but because of the way you are, by no design or choice of your own. Is that what fills a person’s need when that person needs a religious community? What does one do, where does one go, as a BGLT person whose spirit longs for church?

           Every BGLT person who seeks a religious community and has been turned away, either by doctrine or by the behavior of members (or both) has a story to tell. Every person who tries to live a regular every-day life as a BGLT person has a story to tell. Some of those stories find their way to me now and then, and this morning I’d like to share pieces of them, to help make it clear why we need to be a Welcoming Congregation. Not all these stories are about church, but all of them are about loving community, or lack of it. All the people involved could have sought strength, sustenance, and comfort from a religious community, if they’d had one to go to. Some did, and it may have been a UU congregation that they found. Others did not.

           This first person was someone I knew during my time in seminary. My friend and I were eating lunch, and he was telling me about his younger days and his struggle with alcoholism. He’s sober now, but he went through some dark times to get to that point. “Not even God loved me,” he said. “That’s what I learned from the church, from the time I was a kid. There was nothing in me to love, and nothing I could do about it. I knew I was different, but I didn’t know how to be anything else. It was awful. After I got older, the drinking helped.”

There was nothing in him to love, he believed, and nothing he could do about it.

Can we live with that?

 Another man, about the same age, told a different story across a different table. “All the stuff I learned in church when I was younger,” he said, “I always knew it wasn’t true. I always knew there was something worthwhile and valuable in me. I knew I was gay at a young age, and I knew that church stuff was lies.” My own pain came out of the fact that he had been obliged to go to church and listen to those lies about himself when he was young. Questions overwhelmed me. How did you know? I wondered. What was in you that kept you safe from being devastated by what you heard? Where did it come from? To myself, I wondered, why did you have it and my other friend didn’t? This is not the first time I’d talked to a BGLT person who had experienced the same understanding of personal worth and value, but I’d never heard anybody be able to articulate the “why”. Still, even in the case of the friend who knew he was a child of God, finding Unitarian Universalism was a powerful healing experience for him. It put him into a community of caring and acceptance that let him know he wasn’t the only one who believed he was valuable and worthy. Suppose he had never found a UU congregation. Suppose he had never heard our good news?

Can we live with that?

           At a gathering one evening, people were asking about the experiences of BGLT people, and someone asked each of us to consider what we do every day, at work or in social contexts, to avoid being called gay, queer, fag, dyke. The question took me by surprise. “I don’t do anything to avoid that,” I answered. “It doesn’t cross my mind.” Another person who was there that night is a friend of mine. She has offered me many kinds of help under many circumstances, has provided considerate care at a time when her attention needed to be elsewhere, has read endless e-mails from me and responded with wisdom, compassion, and understanding. My answer, she said, had such an impact on her, because she thinks all the time, every day, about who knows she’s gay, who doesn’t know, what the implications are for who does know or who may not know but may find out. The possibility that she might be called a lesbian is never off her mind. She doesn’t resent me, I don’t pity her, but I don’t want a privilege that she doesn’t have, and carrying the burden of that privilege without earning it in any way oppresses me. If she were hungry and I had food, I could share with her. But there’s no way for me to share my privilege as heterosexual with her. All I can do is try to work toward a time that is surely coming, when being heterosexual doesn’t put me in a position of privilege.  What if becoming a Welcoming Congregation could bring that time closer, and we decided NOT to do it?

Can we live with that?

           The final story took place at yet another table, with yet another seminary friend, a young woman. She spoke of the frustration of being told, “It’s not that I disapprove of you, but I can’t agree with your lifestyle.”

“I don’t have a lifestyle!” she said. “It’s like they think when class is over I get in my gay car and drive down the gay road. Lesbian is not the only thing that I am!” Eventually she shared with me the story of a long-time friend of hers (and later she gave me permission to retell the story). I have told it before, from this pulpit, in fact, and some of you may remember it.  Her friend is also gay, and one night while she was visiting, his mother called. Mother and son had been fighting, and they fought some more on the phone.

           “Then,” my friend said, “his face just got blank. He said, ‘OK, Mom,” and then he hung up and ran out of the apartment. I chased after him and caught up with him in a couple of blocks. He was standing in front of this steel door. He had punched it, and his hand was bleeding, and he was kicking it, kicking it, with his boot. I said,’ What did she say to you?’, and he said, ’She called me a f***ing faggot.’ I just held my arms out to him, held on to him, and he cried.”

           My friend looked straight at me, and the anguish in her face blocked my own throat with tears. “Why?” She asked me. “Why would God let a thing like that happen?”

          “God didn’t let it happen,” I told her, and she said, “I know. I know.” But she wasn’t a UU, and she didn’t share the language of what that pure light within her really is. She wasn’t yet able to name that God chased her friend down the street. God stood as a witness to his suffering as he beat up that steel door with his fist and his boots. And God held him in God’s own arms while he cried. As Methodist children we learned to sing, “God is love, God is love.” God was there that night the whole time. The whole time.

 What I have not told you about the young man in that story is that when he was 14, he drank Drano in an effort to commit suicide. At such a vulnerable time in his life, he decided it was so difficult to be gay in this culture that he would rather die.

Can we live with that?

 That, my friends, is why we become a Welcoming Congregation. It’s an emergency.  It’s not just for us, for our congregation; it’s for whatever damaged spirit out in the world may be thinking it’s better to be dead than to be gay. It’s for those who’ve been taught that not even God loves them. It’s for those who’ve always known they were good, but have had to listen to others malign them in the name of religion. By becoming a Welcoming Congregation, we shine a bright light for BGLT people and their families who know nothing about Unitarian Universalism. We say here we are, we’ve been waiting for you, whatever you learned in church before now about being gay, you can leave that behind. By becoming a Welcoming Congregation, we who are heterosexual can start to free ourselves of the burden of privilege we did not earn, that puts us in a position of disequilibrium with our friends. By becoming a Welcoming Congregation, we can begin to alleviate, a little bit, the anguish of people whose families have cast them aside because they’re gay.

 What do we do first? My hope is that you will take home the brochure in your order of service, read it, and look at the UUA website  for the Office of BGLT Concerns, under specialized ministries, to read more. The first step to becoming a Welcoming Congregation is to form a committee, which you can do today by gathering up here in the corner after the service to talk to each other if you want to do that. Then the committee will eventually offer a series of workshops for the whole congregation, and I encourage you to participate in them. I lift up this morning the deep conviction that if Williamsburg UU becomes a Welcoming Congregation, we can make individual people’s lives in this community better, and that will make a difference in this town, and that will make a difference in Virginia. Which will make a difference in the world.

And so may it be.