Lance Bass came out of the closet and you won’t believe what I thought about his mother!
I cringed a little when I read the first lines of Lance Bass’ piece on his mother speaking about homosexuality. The title read The First Thing My Mom Did When She Learned I Was Gay. I thought about what happened before clicking. Did she cry? Kick him out of the house?
I knew he had grown up in a southern home, with Baptist parents. I didn’t know what I was going to do if this story turned out to not be uplifting. Why do I care? Because any story about coming out reminds me of the fear I felt while harboring a bisexual secret for most of my teenage years. As for Bass, I already knew a lot about him because I grew up having a huge crush on him. I devoured details about his life in a way that only a teenage girl can. Bass begins his piece with “growing up as a gay kid in the south was not easy”.
I didn’t grown up in the south, but nevertheless I concur. Fear looms large when you are a queer kid. In a small town there’s a particular kind of fear, the fear of violence. Of course it isn’t only in small towns that LGBTQ face harassment and discrimination, but small towns were where both of us come from, and they aren’t the types of places that typically have resources for young queer kids. The fear of what can happen to queer kids was solidified for me in adolescence. I was twelve years old when they found Matthew Shepard tied to the fence after he’d been tortured and left to die. This for the “crime” of being gay. This isn’t the quintessential experience for all gay children, but I think it’s a memorable point in history for many.
Here’s what I knew about Matthew Shepard when I was 12—he was different. I heard that he had liked boys—and I grew up in a place where that wasn’t normal. I was afraid this could happen to me too. For a queer girl there’s a particular kind of violence to fear, and though as a child I could not articulate it, I did see it happen in movies like Boys Don’t Cry. A movie I had to pause in order to finish crying—not only for the character but also for myself.
I was lucky, I did not face an extreme level of violence for being queer, most of what I dealt with it was a result of ignorance. I’ve heard from my own family toe-curlingly hateful statements, people denying that bisexuals exist, or thoughtlessly saying bigoted things about lesbians because they assumed I was straight. A few coworkers found out I lived with a woman and they whispered. I denied all rumors vehemently because I didn’t know how to out of the closet, and I was still marked with the fear of what can happen to you when you are different. I didn’t know how to make it safe. So while I certainly don’t know what it is to be a gay man, I do know what it is to feel the marginalization, and ridicule leveled towards those of us who aren’t straight.
Happily, my fears about Bass’ mother turned out to be ill-founded. Instead of turning her son out of her, life Diane Bass she turned to Jesus, who she feels would want her first and foremost to love her son. Says Bass of his mother, “to me, she represents a true Christian and what the majority of Christians believe today in the country”. His mother spoke to her congregation and one in a neighboring town with a speech about what it is to be the mother of a gay son, and how she knows that those who have hatred for gay people must be misguided.
When I hear fellow Sunday School members, co-workers, politicians, and Christian people on TV and radio say negative, judgmental things about gays, I just cringe and it breaks my heart. Not only are the Christian community pushing away gays who are Christians, we are alienating those who are lost. I believe with all my heart that Jesus would say to all Christians who are gay that they belong to him and that he loves them unconditionally. Jesus says in John 10:27-28, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand.”
Myself and all of my queer identified friends have varying degrees of trauma about what it is to realize that you can’t be straight, that you can’t make yourself normal. That’s where the letter irks me. From the sounds of it she was not always accepting (which I think we can understand in a society where people still insist on calling homosexuality a lifestyle). She prayed for many years for a miracle to happen and Lance to be made straight.
This brings up complicated feelings for me. Bass’ introduction to his mother’s speech is one of pride for her ability to speak out—but in the beginning she still wanted him to change. Gay was still not the normal she hoped for. Bass’ mother seems to have accepted that homosexuality isn’t curable—which is not precisely the same thing as thinking that her son is normal.
Dan Savage has a similar story. He once shared his story in an episode of This American Life. His mother, Judy Savage, was a deeply devout catholic women and when she found out her son was gay the first thing she did was go to a priest. When she told Father Tom, he then placed a hand on his mother’s knee and came out to her himself. After a few years she came to the conclusion that the church must be mistaken on this. After all, as Savage points out, the bible got slavery wrong too. His mother came to a different level of acceptance however. She didn’t love her son in spite of being gay, she just loved him for who he was.
The move towards acceptance in a culture happens slowly. It begins by questioning social ideologies. It begins with knowing LGBTQ folk in your community and coming to terms with our stunning normal-ness. It begins by thinking this, the teachings of the bible can’t be right, they must be wrong. That’s what these supportive Christian mothers are out there teaching their communities. We aren’t quite at complete acceptance of gay people, and we are nowhere near acceptance of transgender people. There’s much work to be done.
But, I suppose it is a start.
Photo: Wikimedia