The Making of a Homophobe
My early indoctrination and recovery from homophobia as told in free verse
Growing up in small town East Texas, I was
around plenty of church people who could work
themselves into a lather about plenty of things
including drinking
and dancing
and fornicating —
especially gay fornicating.
And they were REALLY concerned
about this lifestyle choice, as they called it,
like they actually believed
you would just wake up one day
and choose to be gay
like you might decide
to wear your gray sweater
instead of your brown one
or you might choose to buy the Buick
over the Oldsmobile.
In retrospect, gay sex seems
like a strange preoccupation in
a tiny, insular community, in the 70s,
where there was no internet, no public library
and only 4 TV channels, usually managed
by a father in a La-Z-Boy,
who possessed a strong opinion
about what constituted acceptable programming.
And, in this church community, there was a
preponderance of old people
who were married to other old people
all heterosexuals — presumably,
along with a smattering of families
with young children and teens
and, apparently, we needed
the bejesus scared out of us
lest we somehow stumble
upon the idea of being
gay and we might decide
to adopt this lifestyle
as they called it
and the fear of hell, a raging hellfire, would be
enough to deter any of us from the abominable choice
of loving someone who just so happened to have
matching chromosomes and sex organs.
A town called Sodom
of Old Testament infamy
was regularly trotted out to illustrate
the evils of being gay
while they were railing against
dancing
drinking
and fornication
especially GAY fornication,
and Sodom — as the story goes — was destroyed
by sulfurous hellfire because of
its pervasive sin and wickedness.
Sodom was, reportedly, full to the brim
with raging and rampant “homosexuality” and a
sex-crazed pack of wild teen boys and men essentially
beat down the door of a man named Lot and demanded
to pervert themselves with the angels Lot had
happened upon in the town square
and invited into his home.
As the story goes, Lot — in his finite wisdom — did
what any god-fearing man of the times
would do and offered his virgin daughters
to these predators
to do with what they wished
and Lot’s grotesque offering
was used to illustrate
the abomination of gay sex
and these preachers back in East Texas compared
anyone in committed, same sex relationships to
these molesting mauraders and the intimation
in my bewildered young mind, at least,
was that it’s better to sacrifice
your young, virginal daughters
than to engage in gay sex — consensual or not.
In this Bible tale, the aforementioned angels
pulled rank and smote
the pack of men and boys
with blindness.
And God was so appalled
with the people of Sodom that he ordered
Lot and his family to get the hell out of there,
so he could torch the city
and, during their exodus, Lot’s wife indulged
her curiosity by glancing back to gaze
upon the destruction that was her former existence and
was, summarily, turned into a pillar of salt.
And, you know the really weird part?
Those East Texas Baptist preacher types couldn’t get
enough of Sodom and Gomorrah
and my elementary school self
possessed neither the audacity
nor the intellectual means
to question this teaching
especially in the absence of a decent, uncensored library
and the internet which, at that point,
was hardly a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye,
so it took more than a few years to begin
the difficult work of extricating
myself from the clutches of small town East Texas
fundamentalism and its viral homophobia.
At one point, in my deconstruction, I stumbled
upon another passage about Sodom
from the book Ezekiel:
“Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom:
She and her daughters were arrogant,
overfed, and unconcerned;
they did not help the poor and needy.”
They did not help the poor and needy.
When I read this passage,
I wanted to smite someone.
My early homophobia
AND a bunch of other people’s
was firmly rooted
in stories and sermons about the evils
of Sodom and Gomorrah.
AND
HOW
DARE
THEY
because not once in my purgatorial stay
with East Texas Baptists
did anyone get up in arms about Sodom’s
reputed greed and selfishness
and their refusal to help the poor and needy.
Not once.
Instead, they were hyper-focused on the
tale of sex-crazed pervs who they likened to
anyone in a same sex relationship.
Interestingly, the Talmud
and other ancient Hebrew texts
go into far greater detail about the transgressions of
the “Sodomites” who enjoyed a high
standard of living relative to others in the region
and lived in an area replete with resources
and, guess what?
They didn’t like to share.
They especially despised poor strangers and exacted a
heavy penalty — even death — on anyone
who tried to help them.
And there are many other details,
but the reported transgressions of Sodom are
but one of the ways in which I realized that
the Baptist clergy I knew were selectively choosing
what to emphasize and what to de-emphasize
to confirm their biases
and reinforce their prejudices.
And I shudder to think how many
people have been shunned and abused and even slain
due to cherry-picking in the name of God and how
many times the horrific scourge of slavery was justified
and how many children have not been spared the rod
in cruel and hideous ways
and how deeply the subjugation of women
permeated society due to such selectivity.
And then I wondered
I wondered why —
why loving your neighbor and
ministering to the poor and oppressed
were not as important as worrying about
who people love.
Why?
References
Genesis 19
Ezekiel 16:46–50
Talmud, Sanhedrin 109b
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