I just realized that June, which is Gay Pride month, is almost over, and I haven’t written any posts related to homosexuality for a while. So, here goes…
I applaud writers of all sexual orientations, who write about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals and strive to accurately and fairly depict them in their works. I think that what they do is often unrecognized and underappreciated, but they deserve to be thanked for it. I think this because if it weren’t for gay characters in fiction, I never would have come to see people of sexual orientations other than straight as human, and I would have missed out on a lot of good friendships.
You have to understand that I was raised in a Christian home, in Christian schools, where homosexuality was never discussed. If the topic came up at all, everyone agreed that homosexuals were all sinners and it was time to change the subject as quickly as possible. I barely even knew what homosexuality was, except for what a classmate had told me in third grade: “Boys who love boys are called gay. Girls who love girls are called lesbians.” As I grew a little older, I found out that this included men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women. Bisexuality and transsexuality were not discussed, and I didn’t find out what those were until I was in my mid-teens. I was a very sheltered child.
Though my community was sheltered, my reading was not. Almost all of what I learned about sex, I learned through young adult novels that I checked out of the public library. However, even when I read these books, I censored myself. I skipped passages that contained descriptions of heavy making out or sex. I skipped conversations that included swears. I even skipped portions of the books that included descriptions of religious rituals that were not Christian or Jewish. My reason for doing so was because I had been taught that these things displeased God, so I shouldn’t be reading them. In fact, I often felt guilty for not reading more Christian books, but they were so often dull. Most of them were tedious romances that I found in my Christian middle school’s library. The heroines of these novels worried constantly about whether or not their latest male infatuation was the man that God meant them to be with. When a crisis came, characters did not do anything proactive. Instead, they prayed, and a few chapters later, God would undoubtedly answer their prayers. The love between the hero and heroine was completely chaste. There was almost no hint of any sexual desire between them. Strict gender roles were enforced, and the heroines never thought for themselves. The heroes did all the difficult thinking. The novels were also heavily didactic, and I always felt just a little bit insulted that the author didn’t think I could figure out the main theme of the book (it was almost always, “Trust God and do what He wants you to do”) by myself.
With little interesting Christian fiction available, I read secular books, but, as I said, I skipped over any parts that I felt were in conflict with Christian values. (Well, okay, I didn’t always skip those parts. Sometimes I was weak and I read them anyway, but I always felt guilty afterwards.) Sometimes, I would even stop reading a book entirely, and one topic that was sure to make me stop reading was homosexuality. I barely even knew what it was, but I knew that it was bad and gross and God wouldn’t want me reading about it. (On a few rare occasions, I did read things that contained homosexuality, but because I knew so little about it, the references went completely over my head. This happened when I read the short story “Charm” in Francesca Lia Block’s collection, The Rose and the Beast. At the end of the story, I thought, “Wait? The two girls are kissing…? That’s odd. Oh well, I wonder what the next story is about.”)
Then, in ninth grade, I read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It started out innocently enough. The narrator, Charlie, was a pretty sweet guy, and I could relate to him. He was just starting high school, and so was I. He was often confused and sad. I was too. He didn’t always get along with his family. I didn’t always get along with mine either. He was taking an Honors English class, and I was too. He was a main character that I could relate to, so I cared about him. I could also relate to another main character, Patrick. I liked Patrick just as much as I liked Charlie. He was funny and added some much-needed humor to many serious sections of the book. He was outgoing, whereas Charlie was more reserved. They were good foils to each other, and their contrast made the book even better. I continued to read.
And then, I found out something shocking! Something mind-blowing! Something horrible! Patrick was gay! I was devastated. There was a gay character in a book that I was so thoroughly enjoying! But God didn’t want me to read about gay people, so I’d have to stop reading the book. But I really, really didn’t want to stop reading… I thought about it for a while and decided that I liked all the characters so much that I’d read the book anyway. And as I kept reading, I found that I still liked Patrick. He was still funny and goofy. He was still relatable. I felt really bad for him when he couldn’t see his boyfriend, Brad, anymore, even though I thought that what he and Brad had been doing was a sin. I was a little weirded out by the sections of the book where Patrick took Charlie to the golf course so that he could pick up guys, but I read them anyway. By the end of the book, aside from Charlie, Patrick was my favorite character.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower had changed me. Stephen Chbosky had created a gay character and made him human. His book had shown me that gays were human. They were people. They liked books and music and all of the same things that I did. They had feelings. They cared about other people. The book didn’t change my perceptions of homosexuality immediately, but it had made me empathize with a person who was gay. Albeit, this person was fictional, but I was beginning to see gays in a way that had never occurred to me before, which was a good start. I also stopped self-censoring books with homosexual characters or discussions of homosexuality in them. In fact, I gradually stopped censoring what I read all together and stopped skipping sections of books just because they contained things that went against strict Christian morals.
It still took me about a year, though, before I really began to question a lot of my assumptions about homosexuality. I really can’t remember what specifically made me begin to question what I believed. Even though I was now open to reading books about homosexual characters, I don’t recall reading that many books that touched on the topic of homosexuality and I can’t remember any gay characters making as much of an impact on me as Patrick did. I think that maybe I just became more aware of gays and lesbians and their presence in the larger culture than I had before. Now that I was beginning to learn what homosexuality actually was and what it involved, I was realizing that gays were not some sort of nebulous “other.” There were famous actors and singers who were gay or lesbian or bisexual. There were poets who were gay. Homosexuality was alluded to on shows that I watched, like Seinfeld. Maybe I was just becoming more aware of gays in general.
It was also around this time that I actually met, in person, someone who was gay. I didn’t know him very well. He was one of those people that I only knew because he happened to be a friend of a friend. Still, I’d hung out with him a little bit, and he was an okay guy. He was an excellent singer and had various solos in the high school choir. He had a good sense of humor and was friendly. He was also brave enough to come out, despite the conservative majority of the high school who made ugly comments about him behind his back (and probably to his face as well). I didn’t know him very well, but he was a nice guy and not a bad person, and that contradicted the “fact” that I had been taught that all gays were bad people.
I also think that I became more curious about homosexuality because, in an odd way, I could relate to it. Gays were told by the Christian culture that their sexual desires were bad and that they were sinning by having them. I might have been straight, but in a conservative Christian community that talked about heterosexual sex about as often as it discussed homosexuality, I felt like my own heterosexual desires were bad. Even thinking about someone in a way that even remotely related to sex was a sin. Having sex before marriage was a sin. Expressing one’s sexuality in any way before marriage was a sin.
But what was I supposed to do about my sexual desires until then? I was told to surrender my burdens, such as my sex drive, to God and that He would help me be strong and save myself for my husband. The trouble was that I’d always slip up. I’d fantasize about a good-looking actor or singer whom I’d have a crush on or I’d get turned on by looking at a hot guy who sat near me in a class. I wondered if, before I got married, I would have to confess to my future husband all the lustful things that I had thought and done and if he would be able to love me in spite of them. (It never occured to me that my future husband would have probably also experienced lust and the desire for sex. I thought that I was the only Christian in the world struggling with these problems.) I always felt incredibly guilty and would beg God’s forgiveness when this happened. I knew that God would forgive me because of Jesus’ death on the cross, but I didn’t understand how God could keep forgiving me again and again and again. I certainly never seemed to learn my lesson, and I was sure that eventually God, in His love, would punish me somehow. I also assumed that I would never be able to have a good relationship with a boyfriend or with my future husband, because I had always been taught that keeping one’s self chaste and pure was the only way to have a happy marriage. Even though I’d never had sex, I certainly didn’t feel pure or chaste.
So, perhaps, in my desire to justify my own frustrated sex drive, I decided to investigate homosexuality further. I had been taught by my dad that everything in the Bible had to be understood in context, so what if Christians were reading the Bible incorrectly by thinking that homosexuality is a sin? What if they were taking the Biblical passages about homosexuality out of context? And if homosexuality wasn’t a sin, then surely heterosexual desires couldn’t be evil either! Also, as I began to feel comfortable with the idea that gays were just regular people, I became more uncomfortable with the idea that God was going to send them all to hell. So I decided that I’d learn about homosexuality, and I did so in the manner that I investigated everything at the time, which was strictly through the Christian viewpoint.
There is actually more pro-gay Christian stuff out there than you might think, and Christians’ views about homosexuality run from the stereotypical fundamentalist view of “All gays are going to hell!” to very accepting views of, “Homosexuality is a gift from God that gays should celebrate!” I also picked up a lot of practical information, such as the distinction between homosexual behavior and homosexual orientation. I also got my first lesson in queer theory when I learned that human sexuality is not something definite, but seems to exist on a continuum, in which no one is totally straight and no one is totally gay. As I learned that homosexuality was not a choice but something that had a biological basis, I wanted to accept the idea that homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, was a gift from God that should be celebrated.
Unfortunately, all of the Biblical evidence that I investigated seemed to say otherwise. I did learn some interesting little facts about Biblical translation, though. For instance, anytime you read the word “homosexuality” in an English translation of the Bible, you’re not actually reading the world “homosexuality.” Translators have no idea what the original Greek word really means because, outside of the Bible, it’s present in only a few other texts. So, translators just guess that the word translates into “homosexuality.” To me, this seems like irresponsibility on the translators’ part, especially because most people don’t even think of the Bible as being a book that is translated or understand just how tricky the process of translation can be. There are words in one language that have no equivalent in another language or express concepts that are not present in another language. But lots of Christians don’t seem to realize this. They assume that the Bible in English is the same as the Bible in Greek. This is not the case.
I was confident that there was nothing in the New Testament that directly condemned homosexuality, but there were still some tricky passages in Leviticus that I couldn’t get around. I read Daniel Helminiak’s book What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality, and thought that I had finally found the solution. Helminiak argues that the homosexual act is not actually a sin but just part of the Jewish purity code, which included the Jewish dietary laws. Christians, however, believe that Jesus abolished these old laws. Well, I thought, if homosexuality is just part of the Jewish purity code, then there is no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity! Homosexuals are not actually sinning! …Or were they? I read some rebuttals to Helminiak’s arguments, and I hated to admit it, but it seemed like homosexuality fell into the category of sin and not an ancient culture’s purity code that contemporary Christians could disregard.
And yet I still couldn’t reconcile the idea of a loving, caring God with homosexuality being a sin. If homosexuality was not a choice, then why would God give someone the desire to have a loving, sexual relationship with someone of the same sex only to tell that person that their God-given desire was wrong? It seemed a little, um, sadistic on God’s part. It also seemed ridiculous to me that Christians just told gays to live lives of chastity. Sexuality, I had learned from my investigating, was much more than just being attracted to certain people. It was part of the core of who a person was. To me, that sounded like gays were being told to deny who they were. Why would God make someone a certain way only to have that person deny that part of him or herself? That didn’t make sense to me either.
I was also very uncomfortable with the “moderate” Christian view of homosexuality, which is, “Love the sinner and hate the sin.” I do believe that it is possible to love a person, even though I might not love everything that s/he does, but as I said before, a person’s sexuality is much more than just who a person sleeps with or wants to sleep with. It’s a part of who you are as a person. I also didn’t actually see any loving the sinner when it came to my Christian friends and homosexuals. Most of them wanted nothing to do with gays, and if they did interact with them, they only saw them as potential converts and not real people. I had a Christian friend tell me that homosexuality scared her because she didn’t know very much about it. Well, homosexuality had sort of scared me. That’s one of the reason that I’d decided to learn about it. But my friend wasn’t interested in my approach. The Bible said that it was a sin for a man to lie with a man, and that was all she needed to know. Maybe if she’s come to this conclusion after doing some sort of research I would have been able to accept her opinion, but she showed no interest in such research and saw no reason why she should do any outside of reading the Bible, let alone actually getting to know someone who was gay!
After a couple years of research, I decided that the only conclusion that I could accept was that the Bible’s writers had gotten the part about homosexuality wrong. The rest of the Bible, I thought, was still infallible, but I couldn’t accept that homosexuality was a sin. I decided that if the Bible’s writers had known what we now know about homosexuality, they never would have considered it to be a sin. I still held that the Bible was the divinely inspired word of God (and I don’t know how I reconciled that with my belief that what the Bible said about homosexuality being wrong) and I remained a Christian, but that was the first time in my life that I considered anything in the Bible to be incorrect. (Not surprisingly, a couple years later, I began to question how accurate the Bible was on a number of other issues until I rejected the Bible as nothing more than a book containing knowledge from a specific people of a specific culture at a specific point in history. In other words, I realized that the Bible was like any other ancient book and that it was not divinely inspired.)
However, in between the time that I decided to reject the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality and when I rejected the Bible altogether, I was more open to reading books by homosexuals and about homosexuals. I read Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and David Sedaris’s essays. I learned that my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, had probably been a bisexual or a lesbian. I was also more open to listening to music by homosexuals and bisexuals, and it was during this time that I discovered Ani DiFranco, Rufus Wainwright, Sinead O’Connor, and Melissa Ferrick. I learned that I’d been missing out on a lot of culture, not to mention good music and good reading, by dismissing people who weren’t heterosexuals.
Most importantly, I made a lot of new friends, and some of these friends were bisexual or homosexual. My friendships with these people only affirmed what I’d already decided was untrue: that homosexuality and bisexuality were not sins and that people who were not straight were not inherently bad. Some of my non-heterosexual friends were better people than I was! And many of them weren’t even Christian, but they were still keenly interested in the same questions that I was, like “What’s the meaning of life?” “What happens after we die?” and “If there is a god, what is this god like?” Sometimes we had different answers to these questions, but instead of arguing about them, we shared our opinions and got to know one another better. In fact, because most of my homosexual and bisexual friends were not Christian, they were the people who first showed me what interreligious dialogue looked like and how people with different ideas about religion could still get along.
Having friends who were homosexuals and bisexuals also made me realize that they really were just people. Homosexual rights might be important to them, and homosexuality or bisexuality influenced who they were, but they really weren’t that different from straight people. They have the same needs a wants, the same interests, the same strengths and weaknesses. They are certainly as capable of being in healthy, loving relationships as straight couples are! I won’t say that their sexualities didn’t matter to me, because they were important to them so they were also important to me. But I didn’t reject their friendship once they came out to me. For instance, a lesbian friend and I both shared a love of travel, reading, obscure music, and dogs. I actually got to know her pretty well before I found out that she was a lesbian, and when I found out, the news barely fazed me. I felt as though I’d discovered that she didn’t care for chocolate or read murder mysteries. It was more information about her and it gave me more insight into who she was, but I still considered her a good friend and a good person. Her being a lesbian didn’t change my friendship with her.
And I might have missed out on that friendship, and other friendships, if I hadn’t been exposed to homosexual characters in young adult novels. Some of these books caused me to question what I’d always been told about homosexuality. They’d also made me see that homosexuals and bisexuals and transsexuals were as human as I was. They weren’t dirty. They weren’t disgusting. They were people, and they deserved to have the same rights and dignity as anyone else. These books gave me the greatest gift that I think any author can give a reader—they made me see the world in a new way, in a way that I wouldn’t have even considered had I not read them. They held up virtues of compassion and empathy, and they gave these messages to me not through heavy-handed didactic morals but through realistic and well-developed characterization.
And to any writers out there who have tried to use their books to promote equality and understanding between diverse groups of people: your books have made a difference. Your books may be the only way that readers can interact with people who are different from themselves. Or your books may be the first of many interactions between readers and people who are unfamiliar to them. The world needs young adult writers who are willing to tackle big and often taboo topics, like sexuality. The world needs writers who convince us to question our assumptions and think in new ways. My life and my understanding have been deeply enriched by such writers, and, even though it might sound corny, I can’t thank them enough for opening my mind with their books.
Some young adult books that include topics related to GBLTA issues that I enjoyed:
Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block
Girl Goddess Number Nine by Francesca Lia Block
The Rose and the Beast by Francesca Lia Block
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Luna by Julie Anne Peters
Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger
Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger
Life as a Cup of Coffee 