According to my calendar, June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Pride Month. A more condensed title is LGBTQ+ Pride. The plus sign signifies to me that, nowadays, we have as many kinds of sexual identities as we have styles of running shoes.
When I was a boy in the 1950s, it was simple (or that’s the way it seemed). If you had a vagina you were a girl, and if you had a penis, you were a boy. Boys peed standing up, had short hair, paid for the movie and were elected student council president.
Girls peed sitting down, wore their hair long, thanked the boy for paying and were elected student council secretary.
In the very first chapter of the entire Bible I read, “God created humankind in the image of God, male and female.” Simple. It seemed to work for me. It seemed to work for the 30,000 or so residents of Manitowoc, Wisconsin where I grew up.
After graduating from college, I got married, had two kids, moved to Forest Park and had my picture of reality significantly photo-shopped. The first gay person I got to know well was named Ron. He would share with me how hard it was to be a gay man trying to navigate life in a straight world.
“People sometimes argue that it’s a choice to be gay,” he told me, adding, “Who would choose to be gay in a homophobic world like this? The only real choice I had was to acknowledge who I was created to be.”
The second gay person I got to know well was a pastor named Andy who lived in a nearby suburb. He was a good, decent man. He served his people well. Then I became good friends with David, another gay pastor with the same spirituality and integrity as Andy had.
And then, my first wife gradually figured out her true identity, and after 17 years together left the marriage, explaining that she could no longer live a lie now that she finally knew who she truly was.
Inside my soul, my concrete experiences were having a serious, even tortured discussion with the five or so Bible verses that condemn homosexual behavior. The verses were pointed out to me when I was a teenager in an attempt, I suppose, to inoculate me against making “bad choices.”
Here’s one of the insights that help me change that debate from tortured to synergistic: Methodists use what is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral — Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience — when they are trying to understand who God is and how God wants us to live.
Think of it as four different windows in your home, each with a different view. To get the most accurate view of what exists outside of the space you live in, you’d have to look out of all four windows, which makes spiritual discernment a complicated undertaking. Attempting to simplify the task, progressives are tempted to discard scripture and tradition while evangelicals tend to err on the side of throwing out reason and experience.
When I heard Ron tell me his story, when I witnessed daily the labor pains my wife felt in the process of giving birth to herself, I was given more windows to view reality through, and I found myself adding more nuance to the stories I was telling.
The stories I was hearing, the lives of gay people I was observing, were adding color and detail to the simplistic black-and-white pictures of reality I had brought with me from childhood.
During this Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Pride Month, invite a couple of the many gay people who live in town to hang out with you for an hour or two at Kribi Coffee. Tell them you want to hear some of their stories. Tell them you want to add color to some of your old black-and-white pictures.
