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By Bruce Lowe 

The Homosexual's Suffering

1.      Homosexual Suffering in a Homophobic Society

The burden imposed on the homosexual by society is a great evil.  We should stand in revulsion against and do all we can to oppose the prejudice, the hatreds, and the ostracism that make homosexual life so difficult. 

The lynching of Blacks may have passed but not the lynching of homosexual people; some one hundred such hate-crime murders are recorded in the U.S. each year.  Most receive little press.  An exception was Matt Shepard—beaten and tied to a fence to die in Wyoming because he was gay.  Shortly afterwards, gay men and lesbian women all over America received faxes, emails and phone calls saying, “Matt Shepard is dead; you may be next.”  I know of books written about two such murders.  A man walking in a wilderness area in Pennsylvania observed from a distance two women camped there, and they were holding hands.  He walked back to his truck for his rifle.  One of the women survived his double-murder attempt and wrote the book, Eight Bullets.[i]   (For the other book, see Six below.)  Gay men in a major city complained to the police that it was not safe for them to walk in their neighborhood.  The police didn’t believe them but finally had plain-clothes officers walk there as decoys.  The officers, mistaken for gays, were attacked by men with baseball bats.  Twelve men were finally arrested for homophobic attacks in that one neighborhood.  A recent article in our paper told of a man asking where the nearest gay bar was; he said he wanted to shoot some queers.  A few minutes later he did.  Such things are happening everywhere in America, and gays and lesbians live in constant anxiety about these kinds of hate crimes.

Homosexual people do not have the natural protection of the law that others have.  There are federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and national origin; there is no federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.  Only one-fifth of our states have laws prohibiting discrimination against homosexual people.  A Dallas judge gave a light sentence to a murderer explaining that the two victims were only queers.  Long Road to Freedom chronicles almost countless hate crimes against gays over the past few decades.  There were 127 (known) incidents in the month of August 1991 alone, including three murders.[ii]

The hatred gay and lesbian people encounter, added to the psychological problems most face in accepting their homosexuality, make many of them live in an ever-present milieu that borders on trauma. 

McNeill outlines some of the psychological problems:

Many problems … make a positive adjustment to a [homosexual] life extremely difficult.  Among these difficulties can be enumerated

•  The agonies of remorse and self-torture over what typical homosexuals feel to be their immoral desires, whether these arise from conscious identity with the condemnations of Church and society or from neurotic conflicts within themselves;

• Their openness to blackmail and other forms of intimidation;

• Their status of being outside the normal protection of the law;

• Their necessity continually to conceal what they frequently believe to be their true identity from public view, with the added threat that accidental revelation could result in loss of their job, expulsion from school, dishonorable discharge from military service, loss of future security and job opportunities, loss of friends and the respect of family and dependents.

• Still other problems involve their propensity to sexual promiscuity [because they are] divorced from a complete and healthy interpersonal relationship; and the resulting tendency for sexual desires indulged in, but never fully satisfied, to occupy a disproportionate place in their life. 

• Above all else, there is the very real threat of ultimate loneliness to one to whom all the normal structures of society—marriage, children, dependents, etc.—are closed.

It should be noted, however, that all these negative aspects of homosexuality are not due to homosexuality as such, but are the results of both society’s and the Church’s attitude to the homosexual.  All these rather common aspects of homosexual life can effectively paralyze all initiative, result in a feeling of inferiority, and lead to an emotional breakdown which could make social adjustment impossible.[iii]

A mother in our church told me that her lesbian daughter, because of ostracism by society and condemnation by the church, has no sense of self-worth.  How many others (millions - ?), likewise , have had their feelings of self-worth, self-respect crushed for their lifetime?  And what McNeill said is true: All this has nothing to do with a person’s being homosexual.  It has everything to do with the milieu of ostracism and condemnation in which he or she must live.

2.      Homosexual Suffering from a Condemning Church: Homosexual men and women are being sinned against by our churches.  Like our society, our churches need to change. 

“Kill a Queer for Christ”

I added the italics, foolishly; what italics are needed for such a statement.  In your small town you probably have not seen that cleverly alliterative bumper sticker.  For you and me it is unbelievable, unreal.  Sadly, it is very real.

The thinking shown in the bumper sticker and the position of so many churches and their pastors abets the crimes against gay men and lesbian women.  Peter Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, says, “The combination of ignorance and prejudice under the guise of morality makes the religious community, and its abuse of scripture in this regard, itself morally culpable.”[iv]   He relates this:

In preparing for her novel The Drowning of Stephen Jones, based upon the true story of a young gay man tossed from a bridge to his death by a group of young gay-bashers, author Bette Greene interviewed more than four hundred young men in jail for various forms of gay-bashing.  Few of the men, she noted, showed any remorse for their crimes.  Few saw anything morally wrong with their crimes, and more than a few of them told her that they were justified in their opinions and in their actions by the religious traditions from which they came.  Homosexuality was wrong and against the Bible.  One of those interviewed told her that the pastor of his church had said that homosexuals represented Satan and the Devil.  The implication of his logic was clear: Who could possibly do wrong in destroying Satan and all of his works?  The legitimization of violence against homosexuals and Jews and women and blacks, as we have seen, comes from the view that the Bible stigmatizes these people, thereby making them fair game.  If the Bible expresses such a prejudice, then it certainly cannot be wrong to act on that prejudice.  This is the argument every anti-Semite and racist has used with demonstrably devastating consequences, as our social history all too vividly shows.[v]

When the funeral of Matt Shepard (above) was held, a Baptist preacher from Kansas and his followers from several states were there marching in front of the funeral site with placards reading, “God Hates Fags” and “Fag Matt in Hell.”  It is some consolation to know that the people of the town put themselves between the marchers and the family, and when the marchers began to cry out their messages, the people sang loudly “Amazing Grace.” (“Fag,” short for “faggot,” originated several centuries ago in Europe when people suspected of engaging in same-gender sex were burned at the stake.)

In the summer of 1998 fundamentalist Christian organizations, fearful of the consideration by some states of recognizing same-gender marriage, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads in major newspapers telling the nation that gay and lesbian people are “sick” and “sinful,” that they can and should be “cured,” and that their rights and protections should be denied.[vi]

Louise, one of the first things I realized when I started to think about this subject was that the millions of gay men and lesbian women in this nation will never, with few exceptions, darken the doors of our churches because they know our attitude toward them is one of hatred and condemnation.  Is “hatred” too strong a word?  A few years ago a Baptist church in Austin ordained a gay man, and the leaders of the Baptist General Convention of Texas asked the church to disassociate itself from the Convention.  The next day The Dallas Morning News ran this two-column headline: “Baptist Convention Reasserts Its Hatred of Gays, Lesbians.”[vii]   We may piously say that we don’t hate the sinner, only the sin, but the newspaper believed it just the way it was printed, and gays and lesbians do, too. 

A writer says, “Those of us who have published opinion pieces in favor of gay equality can testify that most of the hate mail we get cites religious justifications for the hate.”[viii]

A gay and a straight man worked together and became close friends.  Then the straight man became a Christian.  When his friend learned about it, he was concerned and asked, “Now that you are a Christian, will you still love me?”  This woeful question is one the church has earned.  Jesus’ love included; our lack of love excludes.  I have read that Carl Sandburg was once asked what he thought was the ugliest word in the English language.  He thought for a minute and replied, “Exclusion.”

Ignacio Castuera, Latin American Liberation Theology leader, said to theologian John Cobb “that if he [Castuera] were to be true to liberation theology, he must be especially concerned for those who are most oppressed in our society.  He had come to the conclusion that these are gay people.”  Then Cobb comments: “Some may question whether gays and lesbians are the most oppressed in our society.  There is serious competition for that spot.  But it is clear that whereas in most other oppressions the church has given at least some support to the oppressed, in this case the church has been the leader in the oppression.”[ix]

What the church is doing to its own lesbian and gay young people is almost unforgivable.  They grow up loving God and their church while hearing that homosexuality is a sin, that God hates fags, and that gays and lesbians are going to hell.  Then they discover their gay orientation.  Then they wear calluses on their knees begging God to change them and when he doesn't . . .  One young man spoke for thousands: "It terrified me to think that God made me just to hate me and send me to hell."  [Dear God!  How long?  How long?]

Our churches need to change, for the churches ought to be havens for gays and lesbians from the insufferable burdens they bear constantly.  But when the world believes that churches despise and condemn homosexuals, those who hate them find encouragement.

Fundamentalists promote the problems seemingly with a vengeance, declaring homosexuality itself a sin.[x]   This subject so needs to be examined and discussed at length in our churches, without passion and with open minds.  I believe what I am stating in this letter will be the truth the churches will someday discover.  Sagacious Will Campbell observed that we Baptists have apologized to Blacks for our treatment of them in history.  Then he said, “some day we’ll apologize for what we are doing to gay and lesbian Christians and non-Christians.  But not yet, for we ride the waves of culture.”²⁸  Christians and Christian churches ride the waves of culture!  Surely angels weep!

John Pearce, in an editorial in Baptists Today, laments, “ … the church often lags far behind secular institutions.  … I want to keep praying for a day when the church will be the engine rather than the caboose when it comes to changing society ….”[xi]   Bishop Gray Temple grieves the fact that "The evidence points to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit currently finds the world of more service than the church in nudging society toward the kingdom."[xii]

When the story of the Holocaust became more fully known, there was recognition that the sin of the Nazis was not the only sin involved—there was the silence on the part of the churches and of other nations as they learned about it during the war.  When we know of the hate and the hate-crimes against lesbian and gay people, we should not be silent; we have a responsibility to do anything we can to overcome such.  Our silence encourages it and makes us guilty. 

Pastor Paul Duke is preaching about the oppression of lesbians and gays:

Whose fault is this?  It's the fault of us all.  It's the fault of any of us who make jokes about gay people, who insult them with the use of demeaning names.  It's the fault of us who are silent when others do these things or when they publish lies about what homosexuality is.  And it's the fault of us who don't provide a safe place and a caring response to those of homosexual orientation.  Who knows how many hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost—to violence, to suicide, to drugs, to promiscuity, to AIDS, to shattered self-esteem, to life forever outside the doors of the church—because we have participated in or by silence colluded with the demeaning and the ostracizing of homosexual people.  In this respect there is blood on the hands of the church.  And that's what has driven me more than anything else to talk with you as I am doing.  I have had a vision of Christ at the judgment asking, “Why were you silent?”  Why has the church abandoned these children of God to despair and to death?  When people are lost and dying by the millions you don't pontificate about sexual morality, you reach out to them, you give them a safe place, you listen, you talk, you love with the love of Christ.[xiii]

All this that our churches are guilty of is especially sad to you and me for we both have our hearts in the church.  Our churches are so terribly wrong about homosexuality, just as they were in the sixties about segregation and 150 years ago about slavery and before that . . .  All the wonderful things our churches are doing and the immeasurable importance they are to our society can’t cover up our woeful failures in this matter.  I think of the homespun philosopher Josh Billings’ saying, “The longer I live the more I find it necessary to reexamine those things about which I was once most certain.”  The church can’t begin its reexamination too soon.

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