Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
Coming Out: Ten Years Later
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
September 25, 2005
OPENING WORDS: A LITANY OF RESTORATION
If, recognizing the interdependence of all life, we strive to build community, the strength we gather will be our salvation. If you are black and I am white,
It will not matter.
If you are female and I am male,
It will not matter.
If you are older and I am younger,
It will not matter.
If you are progressive and I am conservative,
It will not matter.
If you are straight and I am gay,
It will not matter.
If you are Christian and I am Jewish,
It will not matter.
If we join spirits as brothers and sisters, the pain of our aloneness will be lessened, and that DOES matter.
In this spirit, we build community and move toward restoration.
Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley
MEDITATION: "Liberation is Costly"
Liberation is costly. Even after the Lord had delivered the Israelites from Egypt, they had to travel through the desert. They had to bear the responsibilities and difficulties of freedom. There was starvation and thirst and they kept complaining. Many of them preferred the days of bondage.We must remember that liberation is costly. It needs unity. We must hold hands and refuse to be divided. We must be ready. Some of us will not see the day of our liberation physically. But those people will have contributed to the struggle. Let us be united, let us be filled with hope, let us be those who respect one another.
Desmond Tutu
SERMON: "Coming Out: Ten Years Later"
Before I came out as a gay man ten years ago this past August, I was in prison and dying.
The prison was the closet in which I hid, one that prevented me from being authentic. I lived in the darkness, the place where secrets and deceptions lurked, where spiritual nourishment was lacking. I got used to it. I felt safe there.
I thought, too, that I was protecting others - my wife, my children, my friends, and my church.
As the years went by and I could no longer deny who I was - a process that was aided by my receiving more than just a little bit of help from my friends - I began to discover the truth: that fabrication could kill. It had been murdering me all along, systematically devouring my life force: my body, mind, and human spirit.
It had started when, as a five-year-old boy, I was called "sissy" and was beaten up by a classmate. Because of this and similar verbal and physical assaults, I did my best to become the macho boy, then the macho man that everyone else seemed to want me to be.
It seemed safer that way - to go into the closet, into my own prison cell.
I played that game for fifty years.
In the process so many things I wanted to be and do were denied.
Stress, caused by lying, was killing me in a cumulative fashion, year by year.
I felt trapped. I was - literally - at a dead-end.
Indeed, announcing to others a decade ago that I was a gay man was the most difficult thing I have ever done but had I not done so, I am convinced that I would be dead now.
The fact that I can stand before you today without great fear of what you might say or think about me because I am gay; the fact that I am publicly "out" as a gay man who happens to be a minister and that I feel mostly pride in this identity - tells me how far I have come in ten years.
Although I also have to say, that I am still "homophobic" to some degree - meaning, that I still fear aspects about myself and others who are gay, mostly in regard to how we are received or rejected or scorned by others.
The fact that I still do not feel comfortable holding my partner's hand when we are walking down the streets of Sarasota is an example of my homophobia.
The fact that I fear that some of you might never see me beyond my gay identity, and might even note that quality first in describing me to someone: "Oh, he's our gay minister," instead of simply saying, "He's our minister." Such poster-boy-ism from anyone frightens me and frustrates me beyond measure.
Well, blame homophobia on the time and the culture in which most of us were born and raised.
Certainly coming out as gay is about stating sexual orientation, but the act is symbolic for any of us who seek to be authentically our self in whatever way that might mean. It is about refusing to lie anymore to our self or to others. It is about leaving whatever "closet" has kept us from knowing who we can fully be as a human being. Revelation is salvation and should be of primary concern for all of us.
So my story is my story; you have yours. Each of us is unique, with our own angels and demons, some of which are visible, some of which should be revealed. What I have personally discovered is that in stating to others a basic truth about myself, I have freed a myriad of other selves festering in my closet.
Opening up your own closet door even a little bit, can lead to a massive housecleaning of your psyche!
Indeed, it might even keep you alive!
In this regard, let me share some of the things I have learned about the world and myself by coming out - which you might already know about yourself because of your own particularized coming out (whether or not it was announcing your sexual orientation).
The first thing I learned about was
FREEDOM
The words to the hymn state what I was wishing for at the time when I felt that by being closeted, I was dying:
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free,
I wish I could break all these chains holding me.
But when I was in the closet I didn't know how to gain my freedom.
Nor, at the time, did I realize that my imprisonment was shared by those I loved the most, as well as by the church community I was serving.
John Kavanaugh says it so well when he talks about the results of the coming out process:
If coming out is a question about freedom - and it is - it's a question about several kinds of freedom. Yes, it's about being free to be one's self, and being free enough to accept one's self. But there's another, even more demanding, kind of freedom at stake, too. It's the freedom that seeks out the furthest limits of love's bonds, the ties that usually hide from daylight. It's no small thing to ask another person - in the name of love, for the sake of love - this question: Will you grant me the freedom to choose my life whatever the consequences? Just to summon the courage for the asking can take a lifetime.
But it is harder, more difficult - isn't it? - to be the one who is asked. Hard to be the one to put aside all ideas, hopes, beliefs, and plans. Isn't it? More difficult to give up, well, everything. To stand alone, naked, bereft, with only empty hands. To say: Yes. I'll give you my hand. It's all that I've got, and together we'll go. where?
I cannot say now which takes the greater faith. ("The Question I Asked Him," by John Kavanaugh, from the book The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers, edited by Bruce Shenitz)
So, by coming out and gaining freedom, I learned a great deal about
BEING
Coming out for me was about being free to be myself. I don't think that most of us during most of the day or night think about being, we just are, we just exist. Not until something major occurs in our life - and certainly coming out gay is a major event - do we then pause in the midst of our everyday existence and start to wonder what it's all about; that is to say, what living, what being here in the first place is all about. And we begin to think of how we might be alive in other ways, beyond what we have known previously.
Coming out - in whatever way one chooses to apply this term of revelation - poses the existential question: "How then do we live?"
This new freedom we now possess can be frightening for some; it might produce second thoughts such as: "What was I thinking?" "If only I could go back to the way it was!" "Where will it lead me now?"
The reality is that once you come out - sharing with others the deeper part of yourself that has been imprisoned - you now exist in the world in a different way all the time, including in your sleep! I do know that I no longer suffer the nightmares I used to, ones that would readily classify me as a very destructive person. I seemed to be always driving bulldozers and gleefully destroying anything that got in my way! Of course, awake, I was a very nice guy.
Now, asleep or awake, I'm a nice guy.
The lesbian comic E. L. Gregory tells the story of her coming out to her mother who had a difficult time accepting this truth about her offspring. As Gregory says:
When I told my mother I'm gay, the first thing she said to me was, "Well, if that's what you want to do with your free time, I suppose I can't stop you. (A Funny Time to Be Gay, Ed Karvoski, Jr., p. 186)
Obviously, this mom does not realize that being gay is a full-time existence!
And, in gaining my freedom by coming out, I learned
ACCEPTANCE
This is about self-acceptance, realizing that as the song from the gaily conceived and gaily-executed theatrical and big screen production "La Cage Aux Folles" announces:
I am what I am.
This takes a very long time for some of us to realize. Gay people need to look at the scientific evidence that tells us that we do not have a choice in the matter of whether or not we are gay or straight. It is decided at conception!
So, those of us who are gay who are still trying to accept the reality of who we are - indeed, who we were meant to be - need to have fewer opinions and emotions on the subject, and more factual evidence.
Science certainly helped me in this regard - whereas the religion I was raised in did quite the opposite. I blame that kind of religion for making me and millions of others feel worthless.
One thing that I have learned from accepting myself for who I am is that it allows others to come to me and come out - some about their sexual orientation, others about a whole array of subjects.
In regard to this, I feel closer to women and they to me than I did when I played the role of the "straight man" preacher. At that time there seemed to be this protective shield between women and myself.
I also need to add that my relationships with straight men have improved as well. What I have noticed is that when I or anyone else is or at least attempts to be authentically our self - when we have accepted our self for what we are - others feel more comfortable around us. Comfortable enough, in most cases, to share deep things with us.
Finally, by coming out of the closet and being free, I learned a great deal about
LOVE
About loving and being loved; and conversely, about where love no longer exists, if it ever did.
It is hard for gay people to learn about love when we are growing up, since most of us are raised in a pretty heterosexual world. Most of us do not have gay models. Furthermore, we are told by society that we are different, odd, and sometimes undesirable. So what happens? We grow up cynical; and to come out and get from a place of cynicism to a place love, can take a very long time.
I know that when I first came out, I felt free for the first time in my life to not just be cynical, but to express my cynicism. It took a long time for me to like straight people again.
Consider these words by gay scholar David Nimmons:
No people know cynicism better than we (gay men) do, because we inherit cynicism as our queer birthright. It gets bred in our bones by the closet. Growing up, every gay boy feels in his soul that uneasy rupture between appearance and reality that is the very core of cynicism. Our very hearts remind us things are not always what they seem. To feel what you can't be, want what you can't name, say what you don't feel - each day we spend closeted provides a daily catechism in cynicism. We learn early on about subtexts and illusions, feints and postures. In our marrow, we feel a schism of hope and heart, a rift between what is felt and what is performed.
At the same time it keeps us ever on guard. We learn early to hide and keep secrets that protect ourselves and that distance others.We grow hyper-vigilant for any clue to suggest dissembling or disguise, each premonition of pretense, even a shadow of sham. We have to as a matter of survival.we find other beings like ourselves, who live in split-level souls. (The Soul Beneath the Skin, David Nimmons, p. 199)
Coming out gay - and by extension of that concept of coming out - coming out in whatever descriptive way you want or actually do - brings with it a new way of viewing the world, where those of us who have come out, at least, no longer inhabit "split-level souls": thinking and feeling one thing/saying and acting another thing.
So these are a few of the things that my freedom from prison has brought me. In attempting to be who I am rather than pretending to be someone else, I have not only survived, but also gained an immeasurably fuller existence. Most of the old hurts are dissipating and rather than dwelling on them, I choose to express joy at my relatively new-found freedom. And I sincerely believe that anyone else can do the same, but you must first come out of the closet, in whichever one you might be hiding.
Come out, come out, whoever you are! And know, along with the gay comic Mark Davis that:
.in the last analysis, you can get really angry and bitter about your life, or you can just get really interesting. (A Funny Time to Be Gay, Ed Karvoski, Jr., p.169)
Let's go for "interesting" shall we?
CLOSING WORDS: "This is the mission of our faith."
This is the mission of our faith:
To teach the fragile art of hospitality.
To prove that diversity need not mean divisiveness;
And to witness to all that we must hold the whole world in our hands.William F. Schulz