Stuff Gay People Like: Apostasy

A gay person can have some pretty interesting memories from church. One: his very first sexual experience in the gender-segregated cabins at church camp, right after study on a Bible verse mentioning that Jesus was kissing his disciples. Two: two weeks later, Father Michael said you can go to hell for masturbating. Ugh God, why are you sending these mixed messages?

A third of the people in any American church on a given Sunday are secretly agnostic; it spikes closer to two thirds on Christmas and Easter when religious people drag along their ambivalent spouses and kids. A Christian might believe intermittently, or maybe did in the past, and nowadays really only feels faithful when arguing against something liberals want. But why not just decide you’re a Christian anyway? There are free bagels after service, your extended family likes you being there, the church tells your kids not to do drugs or get pregnant in high school, and if you are a middle-class white married person who is not in debt or addicted to alcohol, the culture and the very message of your church is to affirm and celebrate exactly the person that you are. The Lord is so happy you bought that Honda Civic! Hooray!

Then there’s the “afterlife” and “forgiveness” mumbo-jumo and maybe that part’s true, you won’t know until you die, but you might as well be on the safe side and make it your official public stance, so if it’s real you get it.

It’s not the same for gay people, who hear in church that they somehow decided to be gay on purpose, and that in order to go to avoid damnation they have to do things that are a bajilion times harder than you would find in a straight person’s easy life. No real sex, no love or dating, no cuddling unless you’re discussing traumatic father-issues with an ex-gay counselor, and no kids unless you can fake it with a lesbian, which means masturbating until you’re really close then having intercourse for the final six seconds. Yet you can’t fill that void with booze, underwear parties or pornography because everything that’s fun is also sinful in the church. No, you have to “fill it with Jesus,” which – if you are one of the majority of Christians who participate mostly for social reasons – sounds like a role-playing fantasy from a book series.

Not very satisfying, is it? So a straight person’s episodic “period of doubt” before re-immersion in religion is a gay person’s ticket out of that fucking place, forever. Whether a gay man will become a hardcore atheist, an agnostic, “spiritual” or something weird like Unitarian, will depends on how traumatic those religious years were and whether he is more soothed by the bitchy rebuttals of Richard Dawkins or by the smarmy embrace of a Wiccan lesbian in a rainbow-colored cloak.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column featured in Out Front Colorado. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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