Homosexuality

By Kjerish - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54180877

     I still remember the first time I met an openly gay person.

     I was 17 years old, riding a greyhound bus to Nashville to visit my best friend, who had just moved there. This was my first real venture into the world as a solo person, away from home and alone. It was an eventful journey, enough so that I remember more about the bus ride to Nashville than my time there. The bus left Salt Lake just ahead of a large snow storm that was moving eastward. In Rock Springs, Wyoming the bus driver broke their arm in attempting to put chains on the tires of the bus. Rock Springs isn't exactly a hub for greyhound and it was 8 hours until a replacement driver got us back on the road. This 8 hour delay extended a 1.5 day bus ride into a 2.5 day bus ride, as we were now in the thick of the storm as it rolled across the country. This gave large amounts of time to talk to fellow passengers. From Salt Lake to St Louis, I rode next to an older man who enjoyed conversation a bit more than I did. My memory is not particularly visual so I am unable to recall what he looked like, solely that I classified him as older. After more than a day of talking with this guy, I can still remember the moment when he revealed that he was gay. He was traveling from San Diego to Boston to visit someone, and I inquired as to how he was able to have that much free time. He replied that he was on disability (which given my privileged upbringing I had never really heard of) because he had AIDS, which he mentioned as being common among gay men like himself. I was mortified. I remember texting a friend, "He's Gay!!!" I did not even know how to process this information. In my mind I had just met someone who had casually admitted to being a step below a murderer. I was uncomfortable sitting near him moving forward, and looked for the first opportunity to put distance between us without seeming too incredibly rude.

     Flash forward to a time when I was a missionary in South Africa, which at the time probably had even less openly gay people than Utah. I remember the disgust I felt learning that someone I was teaching was gay. We burned all the records we had of teaching them in our desire to distance ourselves from the horror. Contrast this with the patience that I was able to put into working with a person who had admitted to repeatedly raping his daughter and then hiding the results with multiple abortions. At the time I was willing to give this person a chance to change their life, yet was insulted and disgusted that another had the audacity to sit and talk to me while being gay. Intellectually I know that I was a product of my culture in my horror, and in regularly using "gay" as the most insulting term I could think of, but it is hard to not feel ashamed of myself for not having the human decency to know better. Overcoming this visceral disgust and hate was a long and arduous journey. There are only a few things in my life that I have ever felt so strongly enough about.

     As much as I hate to admit it, this is one of the things I have changed my mind about that I don't feel like I can really take that much credit for. In things I have written about up to this point, my change of heart came after much effort to try to reevaluate my view. This is one that just pulled me along. I think I had felt too deeply about it that it had gone past all reason. In that way it was beyond my ability to critically examine, but took help from the outside to reach in and break down the hardness of my heart. There are  a few sources that I credit with softening my heart, so that when I did actually look at how I felt about this issue, I found that my mind had already changed on its own.

     First of all was the writing of Orson Scott Card. This may come as a surprise as age seems to have turned his views far more conservative than they once were, but the first gay character I ever read about was in his novel Songmaster. Ender's Game and the trilogy that follow it were the first real exploration of the importance of tolerance that I really understood. There could have been many others trying to reach me, but these novels really opened my mind to the importance of  recognizing when you are unable to understand an other's perspective and practicing patience and love in those instances, rather than lashing out. I learned about tolerance from the mistakes of Ender, and the way he spent the rest of his life trying to spread tolerance and understanding among humanity. I do not know of any other character from any other story who put as much effort into teaching people how little we may know about those around us, and how unable we are to judge them properly based on the little we do know. 

     Second is punk rock, and the music scene surrounding punk and ska in my area at the time. There are of course hateful elements of the punk genre, but Salt Lake at the time had a strong community built around unity. It wasn't necessarily that people at shows were talking about homosexuality specifically, but the emphasis on ending hate in all forms showed me what how to put tolerance into practice. I feel like I owe a great deal to examples of good people I met, and the art that they made. Music has been one of the few things that was been able to reach past the walls I put up against critical thinking and make me willing to consider points of view that were beyond my reach.

     Though changing my mind about the way LGBT people should be treated was something I fought anytime it came up consciously, the rising prominence in popular culture of the movement for equal rights brought plenty of time for my internal conflict between the ideals of equality and tolerance and my homophobia and belief that gay marriage should be illegal to be apparent. Not being the most self aware person at the time I lament that I am unable to point to the exact process of how I came to change my mind about these things I felt so strongly about. I do not think that it all hinged on one moment, but rather was a swelling up of conflict that had been suppressed for an extended period. However, if it was something that happened all at once, I certainly know what that moment was. It is one of the more clear memories of my life. May of 2013. At the time I was going to school at Utah State University and on the weekends I was delivering pizzas in Salt Lake 100 miles away. As such my wife, son Ezra, and I would stay with family on the weekends and one Sunday morning after a long night taking care of the nearly 1 year old Ezra, I put on some Stephen Colbert. The musical guest was Macklemore, and he performed his song "Same Love," and talked about the way that homophobia and misogyny were glorified in hip hop and the culture at large.

The moment from Macklemore that brought me to the realization of the need for change on my view

     I wish I knew why this was the moment that it finally clicked how much hate I held in my heart and how poorly it was justified. My son, Ezra, was so incredibly important to me that I built my whole life around him, and I remember the important thing in my mind being something along the lines of "Ezra can't grow up feeling this way, I can't be an example of discrimination and intolerance for something I do not understand." I knew I was in the wrong, and I realized I had to change my actions and opinions to match my actual values. I was not living up to my own ideals, and if I wasn't careful I would be leading my son down that same path of professing ones values as one thing, and then actively working against them. I needed to bring my word and my behavior together and live more authentically, even if it meant swimming against the current of culture.



     So in lieu of being able fully describe how I was able to change my mind on this topic, I will offer instead an apology. For all those who were unable to feel comfortable being themselves in a culture of repression that I contributed to, I am sorry. I know you were around me and unable to feel safe being out, and a part of that was due to the judgement I passed on you, and the hate that I propagated. Its far too little too late, but I am sorry for my part, for going with the flow and actively contributing to the flow. May we all work for a world for our children that doesn't make them feel ostracized for being who they are, gay or straight, black or white, religious or not. All I know how to do is move forward away from the pain I have caused, towards a place where all feel welcome and supported in their own skin. We can actually make a better world, and we can actually build our community to match our ideals and our values. I guess I just want to say, lets actually do it.