Letter to a dear friend
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I wanted to say a couple of things.
1. I feel bad that you apologized for not knowing how I felt about religion. You had no reason to apologize, no reason to know, and what you said – that God is faithful – was an expression of your joy. I have no problem with people who believe in Christianity or anything else. When I was in California, one of my dear friends was a devout Catholic, and every time we ate together, she said grace first. She didn’t say it out loud, didn’t make a big deal of it, and asked no one to join her. But I was always silent out of respect for her and her beliefs. In the same way, when Mom wants to thank God for a meal, I hold her hand, close my eyes, and let her connect with her Lord.
I never want to give someone the feeling that they can’t express thanks to their God, and again, I sincerely apologize.
I was in a bad place when I responded that time. I moved 1200 miles to Wichita for a job, a thousand miles away from the nearest ocean, to a culture that is completely different from what I’m used to – not bad, just different. Less than two months later, I woke up at 2:37 in the morning on a Wednesday night to the sound of people pounding on my door and to the realization that my apartment was on fire. Before I’d spent a month in my new apartment, I went to writers.com, a web site I used to visit often to share stories and poems, and I contracted a virus that shut my computer down for three days. For two of those days, I couldn’t even get my computer to boot.
I was angry, yes, but worse, I didn’t feel safe, not in my apartment, not on my computer, not even in my neighborhood, which is located a block away from the strip in Wichita where prostitution and drugs rule. When I read Robbie’s comment about Mom being a godly woman, I resented that, chewing on it for a while before I finally wrote my hateful response to you.
I’m glad you accepted my apology, but I wanted to let you know not only that you did not deserve such treatment (you already knew that), but also that that’s not how I normally am. These last three months, and actually the last five years or so, have been a time of change and constant readjustments for me. I was in a bad place, and instead of keeping my mouth shut and waiting until I was able to make more sense out of things, I lashed out.
2. You never knew this, but I’ve always had a major problem with some of the tenets of the Christian faith. Although I eventually realized I didn’t believe any of it, even in the beginning I chose to focus on the loving words and actions of Jesus Christ and ignore the increasing negativity of everything else.
I don’t believe it will shock you to learn that it was being gay that made me finally realize that while I wanted to believe in everything, I actually believed none of it. I just never could understand why some mythical creator would make me attracted to men instead of women. And not just sexual attraction – if it was just that, I don’t think I’d ever have questioned my “faith” – but emotional attraction, physical attraction, soul attraction. I have yet to find my partner in life. He may not even exist. But I came close one time, and that’s when I really had to come face to face with the fact that everything religion said about homosexuality was a lie. Then I learned that most of them know it’s a lie, but they keep preaching anti-gay hatred because it brings in the most dedicated fringes, the ones that will send their life savings to support the ministries.
Once I started wondering why a divine entity would even care whether I was attracted to a man or a woman, or had sex with a man or a woman, it was pretty much a question of how much longer I would believe any of it. If you have sex with a child, you do irreparable damage to that child. If you marry someone related to you, your children will be at risk for many more diseases and disfigurements than if you married someone not related to you. If you marry two women, you are clearly saying that you view women as objects, not real entities. In my life, I have never met a single woman who wanted to share her soul mate with another.
But if you have sex with another adult, with both people wanting to have sex, and even better, with both people being in love with each other, then I can’t come up with a reasonable explanation why some divine being would care whether that other adult was a man or a woman. Two men can never have a child biologically, but then again, neither can infertile men or women, women over a certain age, couples that elect vasectomies and tied tubes, or the millions of men and women who have sex every day using protection of one sort or another to prevent accidental pregnancies.
Life isn’t about simply multiplying, no matter what Genesis says. A woman is more than a baby factory. A man is more than a sperm bank. And love is more than just a requirement to replenish the species. We’ve long since passed the point where the survival of our species is in any doubt. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve walked on the floors of oceans. If we cease to exist, it will be because of own petty battles and wars, not because women aren’t birthing enough babies.
But all of that is not what I wanted to tell you. Even as a child, I was always bothered by this notion of angels and demons. Why did angels only protect certain people, and even then, only from certain things? It seemed so random and so unfair. Why would an angel protect me but not protect that girl at Kent State weeping over the loss of her friend, the girl whose photograph was printed in Newsweek? If people only did good things because God inspired them, then what of all the millions of good things, miraculous things, that happened every day that weren’t done by Christians? And why did the church keep insisting that good acts alone would get no one into heaven, as if good acts were something to be despised unless they were done for their god?
As for evil, that’s the thing that really made me angry. I always hated when someone started preaching about demons. To preach about mythological gods is one thing, but to claim that evil is inspired by demons is, and I apologize for the word, but I can’t think of one more accurate, pure bullshit. Dad didn’t constantly belittle me, put me down, and make me feel worthless because he had a demon inside. He did it because he made a decision – a series of decisions, made on a daily basis – to let his anger win out over his humanity. He was so incredibly angry at the whole world, and yet, like one of those psychotic killers you read about, he was so good at hiding it from others. One of the reasons I’ve always been vocal about everything in my life, refusing to feel ashamed about anything that doesn’t hurt anyone else, is because I know the power of secrets, of two faces and hypocrisy.
Evil isn’t caused by demons. It’s a choice. It’s always been a choice. And blaming it on Satan, or bad weather, or circumstances, all of that just tries to mask the fact that we choose how we behave. When I mentioned the fire and the computer virus, I wanted you to understand that I was in a bad place. But by now I guess you’ve realized that I’m also saying I chose to be evil. Maybe not with a capital “E” and a lot of bloodshed, but I chose to be hurtful because I was hurting. And it wasn’t a demon. It was just little old me. I forgive myself for being so mean because you forgive me, and because I know it’s part of the growing process. As I’ve gotten older, more and more I’ve learned how to make the right decisions and avoid the anger inside of me. I think it may be a pipedream to believe I’ll ever fully cleanse myself of unreasonable anger, but I still hope to meet that goal one day anyway.
As for being good, that is also a choice. When a cashier gives me too much change back, I let her know. That’s not because I’m godly, because I’m inspired by angels, or because I’m naturally a good person. It’s because it’s the right thing to do, and I choose to do the right thing. I work very hard for the money I earn, and quite frankly, I don’t want anything to do with money I didn’t earn fairly. That’s not one of my values.
Everything Mom went through, everything everyone goes through, it teaches us, it shapes us, it makes us into who we are – beautiful people that shine, ugly people that destroy, and quite a few people that, like me, lie somewhere in between. It’s not because of angels or demons, Lucifer or Yahweh. It’s because we choose our paths, we choose our decisions, and like the god you believe in, we truly create the world in our own image.
To me, my brother calling my mother godly, while meant as the ultimate compliment, felt like an insult, a slap in the face. My mother has made a lot of decisions, some good, some bad, just like all of us. Yet through it all, she so fiercely loved every single one of us that it gave us the strength to survive Dad. Not all of us made it; Ricky died of pneumonia, Bill hung himself in the garage to escape, and the rest of us are learning day by day how to rebuild what should never have been broken. But Mom gave us the weapons we needed to fight his anger and hatred.
Just this last year, working on my Mom’s house, I heard my father’s voice in my head berating me, and for the first time, I could answer him back. “You lazy asshole, if you had ever finished one thing in your life, I wouldn’t be here painting cabinets that have been unpainted for fifteen years, laying tile on a concrete floor, painting the walls and ceilings, installing shelves in her closet, and all the other dozens of little things to make her house livable that you were too lazy and disrespectful to do yourself.” It’s the first time I realized that Dad might have been a horrible father (and husband, unfortunately), but he no longer had the power to make me doubt myself anymore.
And through it all, my Mother has survived the absolute worst and loved her children with a devotion that is astounding. When I think of her, I think of a lioness, willing to do whatever it takes to kill her enemy. She never was strong enough to triumph over my Dad, but she did the one thing she could do – give us the love and support we’d need to do that ourselves.
And to hear her called godly, it diminishes her and her achievements. It makes her sound like a tool of some deity, instead of a woman who tried every way she knew possible to take care of her children. That has nothing to do with gods or angels or unicorns or elves. My mom didn’t do what she did because she was godly. She did what she did because it was right, because it was all she could do to help her children, and because it was good.
Although I’ve probably only made things more confusing, I hope the opposite is true, that you understand why I believe in people, not in gods. I mean no disrespect, and again, I want you to feel free to express all the joy you feel in the Lord to me anytime you want. But no god allowed Dad to abuse us or gave Mom the strength of character to gift her children with unfailing love. They made their choices, just as we make ours, and in my mind, to suggest otherwise is blasphemy.
We are miracles, every one of us. That I was born, that I had Mom as my mother and Dad as my father, that I was blessed with Robbie as my brother, that I met Roberta and Sandra and Richie, always Richie, Susan and Kandra, Dale and you and Linda and Marie, Eric whose real name was Matt, Julie, Janie, Janna, Ron Corrado (my first major crush), Kim and Donna and Linda and Sandra, man, if anyone honestly sat down and counted their blessings, not just people but everything, it would take days to list. All of this, all of everything, it’s all a miracle.
And it’s not because some supreme being made it so. It’s because every one of us is born a miracle, and everything we do from that moment on is a result of what we choose. Call it God if you want, but even that’s a choice, to pretend that our actions are guided by a higher power and not ourselves. We choose to do good, we choose to do bad, we choose to do both. That’s what makes us so incredibly powerful.
And I’m not comfortable, and never will be, with saying that God inspired Mom or you or anyone else to greatness when I know the truth, that it was a decision made, a chosen road, a personal conviction to do not what is easy, but what is right. I believe that with all my heart, and I always will.
Peter Vidala freely admits on a video he taped for YouTube that during his orientation anti-gay discrimination was discussed. He was very aware that it wasn’t tolerated in the workplace. Vidala was hired to be a manager, but one shudders to think how he treated employees or customers of Brookstone that landed on the wrong side of his various prejudices.
On April 19, 2009, the five finalists for the Miss USA beauty pageant were asked questions ranging from how to stop domestic violence to whether or not taxpayers’ money should be used to bail out failing corporations. Carrie Prejean, the reigning Miss California, had the misfortune of being asked a question about marriage equality by Perez Hilton, an online gossip columnist.
It seems counterintuitive. Republicans are almost as friendly to gays and lesbians as those lions who cheerfully welcomed Christians into the arena back in the day. Democrats are the ones promising change, hope, equality for all minorities, so if we’re going to donate money and invest in America’s future, we should contribute to the DNC, right?
