Rev. Kit Ketcham, April 6, 2003
I tore open the letter eagerly. Fern had been one of my closest friends in college and we had almost lost touch in the intervening years. Now here was an answer to my tentative reaching out to the new address printed in our alumni bulletin.
I scanned the page. Gee, not a cartoon, not a joke, not a trace of the characteristic Fernella humor.
Wait--she'd been in an accident. She'd almost died. Paramedics had patched her up and hours of surgery had saved her life. What? It was an attempted suicide? My friend Fern?
Trying to digest all this news, I arrived at the final lines of her letter.
"I've known something about myself for a long time, Kit, and I just can't be dishonest about it any more. I hope you'll understand, because we've been friends for a long time. But I've got to be honest or I can't live. And I don't really want to die. I just want to be who I really am and I'm starting with the people who know me well. I'm a lesbian. I'm attracted to women, not men. Trying to hide that fact led me into a disastrous marriage, and now this attempted suicide as I've tried to deny my own identity. I hope we can still be friends. Please let me know what you think. Love, Fern."
I was unprepared for the rush of thoughts and feelings I experienced at being entrusted with my friend's news. At that time, I had never known a gay person who was out of the closet. I had wondered about a few acquaintances in college, but at that time, the word homosexual was not really in my vocabulary.
I felt extremely ignorant--and a little scared. I had invited Fern to come visit me and I didn't want to renege on my invitation, but ..... I was scared.
Now you may have noticed, I'm an extrovert--almost off the scale--eager to meet people, quick to offer a friendly gesture, undaunted by strangers.
Yet till my friend talked with me about what it was like for her to be a lesbian, and until I was able to ask her questions and understand some of her struggle, I was scared. I joked around and I avoided people I thought might be "that way." When I realized that Fern was still the funny, laughing, loving person she had always been, that she was no threat, and that she needed our friendship more than ever, the world shifted on its axis and my view has never been the same.
During my years as a middle and junior high school counselor, I attended a training session intended to help counselors work with our gay and lesbian students. I sat down in the lecture hall, looked toward the podium, and did a doubletake. There was the mother of three of my students, sitting behind a small sign which identified her as the president of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. She too did a doubletake as she saw me sitting in the audience, and when we talked afterwards, she told me that two of her sons, young men I had known in their junior high years, were gay.
And I'll never forget a beautiful young woman named Brenda, whose compulsion to be honest forced her out of the closet as a 7th grader. In 9th grade, after she had endured two years of rumor and suspicion in silence, she came to me looking for a place where she could talk openly about her whole self, where she did not have to pretend.
And then there were Rob and Michelle and Brooke and Terry, whose despair erupted into multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations before they were able to understand their isolation and loneliness and take steps to come out into the sunshine of honesty. These were also my students, several years ago, and at that time, I did not know how to help them.
Since then, I've come to understand what a privilege it is to be entrusted with the knowledge of a person's sexual orientation or gender identity and to receive that knowledge with respect and compassion. No other response will do for me. No other response will do for our society.
What is homophobia? What does it mean that we are a heterosexist society?
Homophobia, as defined in the Unitarian Universalist Welcoming Congregation literature, is the irrational fear, hatred, or intolerance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people. It also includes uneasiness with any behavior that does not conform to gender-role stereotypes, such as males wearing makeup or females who look very masculine. Homophobia can show up as a fear of being gay, a fear of being thought gay, or fear of being associated with gay people.
Homophobic behavior can range from laughing at "queer" jokes to being violent toward gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons. We live in a heterosexist society. Our cultural, institutional, and individual beliefs and practices are based on the assumption that heterosexuality is the only normal, acceptable, healthy sexual orientation. This means that we routinely give advantages to male/female couples, that we assume that all persons want to be heterosexual, and we speak in exclusively heterosexual terms. It is not necessarily deliberate exclusion of homosexuals, but it results in a whole body of human beings who do not feel welcomed and included in society.
Some of this exclusion has, of course, been done by religious institutions. Many churches, particularly conservative Christian denominations, openly preach that homosexuality is a sin, that gay people must change their orientation in order to be acceptable, and that the Bible teaches these things.
Of course, they neglect to point out that these dicta were written down millenia ago when any behavior which led to a lower rate of human reproduction was condemned. They also neglect to note that these ancient laws also forbid eating rabbit, pork, and shellfish, touching rodents and lizards, working on the tenth day of the seventh month, wearing clothes made of half-wool and half-linen, trimming one's hair or clipping one's beard. They also do not seem to know that perhaps 10% of all animals--chimps, cattle, birds--you name the species--also is sexually attracted to its own sex. This is not just a human phenomenon.
These modern-day know-it-alls discount Jesus's admonition to "judge not" and "to take the log out of your own eye before you try to get the speck out of your brother's eye".
But I digress......
Why are we so afraid of people who are different? We are afraid of people of other races, of other cultures, of different appearance and ability, of different gender identification or affectional preference.
We may avoid them, we may commit violence toward them, we may laugh at them behind their backs or to their faces, we may refuse to allow them in our institutions, we may deny them their human and civil rights. The rules and regulations do not protect them as well as they protect us.
My half-baked, unscientific theory about this fear is that maybe in very ancient times, a person who was different signified a possible threat to the tribe and triggered an automatic protective response in members of the tribe who were wary of those who might be dangerous. A different colored skin, a different way of doing things, different religious practices, unusual appearance--perhaps these characteristics aroused a protective response in order to ensure the tribe's survival. Perhaps these persons were perceived to be weaker and therefore a drain on the tribe's resources. Learned or instinctive, this rejection may have seemed necessary for survival AT THAT TIME.
This behavior may have made sense for early human societies who were widely separated from each other, though even then it doesn't factor in the presence of natural human compassion and love. But today, when we have daily contact with a multitude of cultures, races, religions, gender identities, we have to overcome this nearly automatic response, because it is hurting us and our society to perpetuate it.
Evidence of the damage wreaked by homophobia is in our daily newspapers. Remember when Matthew Shepard, a young, openly-gay male college student in Laramie, Wyoming, was lured out of a bar and savagely beaten, then hung on a fence to die. His skull was crushed, his body battered, his face beaten to a pulp. Why? At least partly because he said he was gay. This young man was 5'2", a hundred pounds soaking wet. What kind of threat did he pose to the men who murdered him? to the women who protected the men? What kind of threat could he possibly have posed? And yet they felt threatened.
Some people's fear may be due to another kind of violence--that of child sexual abuse. Some people are afraid of same-sex persons because they were abused sexually by a person of their own sex. They mistake pedophilia for homosexuality.
A longtime male friend of mine, at age 8, was sexually abused by a man who was undoubtedly a pedophile, not a homosexual. But to this day, he is crippled by his fear. He cannot show affection to another man without real terror; his relationships are marked by fear of commitment and lack of attachment.
His fear of same-sex relationships is understandable but it is not accurate, yet he is too crippled to hear the truth. Perhaps some of our society's hatred is like my friend's--a leftover from some untreated and unacknowledged abuse.
We are horrified by this violent and unthinking behavior, yet it occurs across America daily. Gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and intersex people in many communities live in fear for their lives, their jobs, their relationships. Is it any wonder that many refuse to be open and honest about their gender or affectional identity?
Karen, my neighbor, became into a talented, brilliant medical doctor. Her patients love her and depend on her healing skills, but when she told her parents that she was a lesbian and a couple of years later invited them to the service of holy union with her life partner Kathy, her parents were outraged and rejecting. Karen's happiness is less important to them than their fear. They risk their relationship with their daughter because of that fear. And Karen wonders whether they will ever accept her.
Over the years, as I have grown in my understanding, my desire to be helpful, not hurful, has changed me. I do not tolerate derogatory jokes about sexual orientation or gender identity; I tell people that it's not okay to use hurtful words to describe others; and I make sure that my friends and family know that I think gay is okay.
I am at the point in my life where I have no patience with pretense. I'm too old not to say what I think. And I relish the opportunity to be exactly who I am, to express my thoughts and purposes, my beliefs and every aspect of my personality.
But millions of people in America do not have that freedom to be and say who they truly are. Students in most of our schools cannot express their true sexual or gender identity without fear. This is a tragic suppressing of human beings who have enormous gifts to offer the world.
To those who speak viciously about "the gay agenda" and "special rights", I want to shout, "Wait a minute! These are our sons and daughters you are negating; these are our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues. These are those to whom we owe countless works of art and music, medical and scientific breakthroughs, Pulitzers and Nobel prizes, to say nothing of the gift of their friendship.
A roll-call of famous men and women who were homosexual reads like "Who's Who"--movie stars, politicians, musicians, artists, scientists, ministers, writers, teachers. They are parents, children, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors. They are everything we are as humans.
When we as a society scorn and punish our brothers and sisters simply because they are different, we bring as much destruction on ourselves as we do on them. Hate begets a cancer of the spirit. Fear engenders more fear, cripples us so that we cannot move beyond its destructive influence. When we ridicule or abuse others, we destroy a piece of ourselves. We choose to create evil.
Human nature is capable of good AND evil. We can choose to extend compassion and love to those who are different or we can choose to exclude and exterminate.
As people of faith, we have a responsibility to extend love and compassion. As Unitarian Universalists, we have a responsibility to respect and affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, to promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations, with peace, liberty and justice for all, and to increase respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.
Our UU principles affirm and promote human worth and dignity; we stress justice, equity and compassion in our relationships, and we strive for peace, liberty and justice for all beings. We have learned that we are interdependent, that we cannot live without each other. We need every person on this planet. We need all the colors, all the religions, all the cultures, all the different viewpoints. We need straight people, gay people, bisexual people, intersex and transgendered people. We need each other.
For until my friend Fern, or my student Brenda, or my neighbor Karen, or my colleague Keith has the same freedom I do, to be his/her whole self, without fear, then I am not really free either. And if we are all a part of the interdependent web of existence, then I have a responsibility to my gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning brothers and sisters, to pursue justice, seek peace, and extend love.
Let's pause for a moment of silent reflection and prayer.
© 2003 Kit Ketcham. All rights reserved.