Category Archives: Gender and Sexuality

Gender and Sexuality, Society

Why are anti-gay people so confused about consent?

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[Content Note:  Rape culture, Sexual Abuse, Anti-Gay Bigotry]

Yesterday afternoon, Zack Ford of ThinkProgress reported on a new statement by NARTH that’s intended to encourage the Boy Scouts of America to continue to exclude gay, bisexual, and (presumably) transgender boys from joining their ranks.  It’s the usual mash-up of misinformation about promiscuous gay men, heightened health risks, and gay people as sexual predators.  Zack does a good job of providing links that deconstruct the information.

However, I want to take a closer look at one of the excerpts from the statement that Zack quoted:

How will child protection be assured? If openly homosexual boys are allowed to participate, how does a Scoutmaster monitor the influence or actions that these boys may have upon others in the troop especially during overnight events?

As someone who has spent some time in feminist circles, I think that the answer is quite obvious:  You teach all the boys involved about consent.  You teach them that they have a right to say no to the advances — be it an offer of a hug or something more physically intimate — of any of their peers.  You also teach them that it is absolutely essential that they respect the boundaries of their peers and do not cross those boundaries without freely given (as in not coerced) and informed consent.  You teach them that if a peer does not respect their boundaries, they should immediately talk to the leaders about it and reassure them that the leaders will be sympathetic and take the matter and their safety seriously.  In short, I don’t think “protecting” boys in this situation is exactly rocket science.

But then again, I have no problem with the idea of consent.  I expect others to respect boundaries and I support those who speak up when their boundaries are violated.  I’m not convinced the same can be said for all — or even many — who raise the specter of sexual abuse when the topic of LGBT people comes up.

I’ve noticed for some time that there seems to be a lot of overlap between those who believe that LGBT people — especially gay and bisexual men and trans* women — are sexual predators and those who think that men in general are incapable of controlling their sexual impulses.  The difference is that when such people think about cis, heterosexual men — they assume that this is just natural and that others — most notably women — should adjust their lives and choices to protect those men from their hard-to-control urges.1  After all, they argue that those men ultimately can’t help themselves.  Insisting they respect consent just doesn’t work.

So it’s no wonder they automatically assume that teaching and enforcing consent won’t work with gay, bisexual, and trans boys.  Many of them are likely invested in ignoring the whole concept of consent anyway.  Which tends to make their pleas to “think of the potential victims of sexual abuse” sound rather hollow to me.

Of course, the other thing is that ultimately, I think that what NARTH and people like them are really afraid of isn’t that boys will get molested by their fellow scouts.  Instead, I suspect that they are worried that closeted and frightened scouts might actually meet and discover other boys like them and learn that being gay, bisexual, or trans* isn’t so bad.2  Because in greater scheme of things, that is one way in which NARTH and other folks like them are especially hostile to consent:  They don’t want LGBT people to feel like they have the choice to truly be themselves.

1I mean, stop and think about those two statements.  First:  “Heterosexual men are just sexual and aggressive by nature, so women should stay where they are safe and avoid tempting those men.”  Second:  “Gay men are just sexual and aggressive by nature, so gay men should be kept away from heterosexual men in order to protect the heterosexual men.”  Notice the one thing that is consistent between those two arguments?

2Yeah, the anti-gay animus and stigma can be pretty rotten at times.  But being gay itself?  It’s actually pretty okay.  (I’ll leave it to those who are bi and/or trans* to comment on whether they feel the same way about their own sexuality and/or gender identity.  I don’t want to speak for others.)

Gender and Sexuality, Religion

Some final musings on the GSCR

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Before too much time passes, I wanted to offer a few more comments and thoughts on the Generous Spaciousness Conference Retreat I attended 10 May through 13 May.  In particular, I want to reflect more on one of my reasons for going and what I found out:

Generous Spaciousness offers a possible alternative [for living peaceably with Christian friends and family members] to those choices [hiding parts of who I am or limiting how much time I spend with certain people], and it’s an alternative that I want to place hope in.  Going to the retreat was, in many ways, an attempt to gauge how much hope I should allow myself to put in Generous Spaciousness.

At the retreat, I found a great deal of welcome and a willingness to walk with me no matter where I was in my own journey.  I found that people were seeking to make Generous Spaciousness as open as they possibly could.  In fact, I remember another member of my community group turning to me at the breakfast table and asking me if I had found the even very generous or spacious, given the fact that I followed a completely different faith tradition.  It suggested to me that he was considering how his spaces could be more welcoming, even beyond the bounds and dimensions of human sexuality.

I’ll also note that while many people commented on my bravery for attending the event, I found my fellow community group member’s choice to ask that question pretty brave in itself.  It takes a certain amount of vulnerability to ask another person if they perceive you and your comrades as welcoming and hospitable as you perceive yourself to be.

For the record, by and large, the answer to that question was a resounding yes on my part.  Oh there were a few things here and there, mainly what seemed to be a couple assumptions about people who land outside the Christian faith.  But I saw these as mostly minor things, the sort of thing that would be resolved by further dialogue.  What was far more important to me was the desire to have that dialogue and how many seemed open to allowing that dialogue to challenge them.  I think this was most likely due to the fact that I was dealing with people who have experienced what it’s like to be misunderstood and seen inaccurately (a la validity prisms and straw men) by others and have combined that experience with their capacity for empathy, creating a desire to better understand those they themselves and lose their own preconceived notions along the way.

Of course, this raises the question of how well other people — including the people who are in my life on a more regular basis — would do.  After all, the retreat was full of a self-selected sample of people who wanted — and in many cases — likely needed Generous Spaciousness.  It may still be a long time before Generous Spaciousness gains traction with a less intentional gathering of people.  I have high hopes that it will gain that traction in time, however.

Gender and Sexuality

About that Tim Keller quote (Part 2)

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Yesterday, I blogged about the following statement by Tim Keller:

If you say to everybody, ‘Anyone who thinks homosexuality is a sin is a bigot,’ . . . you’re going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You’re basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door.

In that post, I talked about the quote from the perspective of seeing the fear that seemed to motivate and permeate it.  Today, I want to talk about it from the perspective of seeing the privilege that seems to motivate and permeate it.  Because if I may be honest — and I’ll try to do so as graciously as I know how — I find something deeply ironic about an evangelical minister objecting to the fact that other people might be asking him to change the way he thinks or even “kick his faith out the door.”

Dear readers, that’s exactly what every single evangelical Christian is asking of every single person who follows a different religion or no religion at all:  “Give up your faith and what you believe and believe what I think is right instead.”  So effectively, Tim Keller is objecting to other people (allegedly) asking him to do exactly what he calls upon every Jew, Wiccan, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Santerian[1] to do without giving it a second thought.  That’s boilerplate unexamined privilege right there.

It also underlines to me the biggest problem with unexamined privilege:  It’s often the enemy of empathy.[2]  Here’s an opportunity for Tim Keller to consider how (feeling like he’s) being asked to give up something so important to him feels to him and try to imagine how those he evangelizes to might often feel the same way.  And yet, because I suspect he doesn’t even make that connection (or avoids it by insisting it’s somehow different), he’s missing out on an opportunity to (1) empathize with those he’s trying to evangelize to and (2) think about how that empathy might influence how he handles his attempts to do so.

I don’t necessarily want Tim Keller or others like him to quit sharing his beliefs or inviting others to join his faith.  However, now that he and those like him have experienced being on “the other side” of the conversation, I’d like them to let that experience and their capacity for empathy to inform their mission.

Also, it would also be nice if their empathy would help them to understand that yes, if they really want others to be open to their message, they’re almost certainly going to have to be likewise open to others’ messages.  Otherwise, they’re expecting something from others that they are unwilling to offer up to others.  And one thing I that think is near-universal if not truly universal among humans is that we tend not to like double standards.

Note:
[1] Not an exhaustive list, I assure you.  But hopefully I’ve named enough religions and non-religious people to make the point that it’s a lot of people he’s asking this of.

[2] Or maybe the lack of empathy contributes to one’s failure to examine privilege.  Personally, I suspect it may be a bit of both, not to mention a self-reinforcing cycle.

Gender and Sexuality

About that Tim Keller quote (Part 1)

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During her Saturday morning address, Wendy drew attention to the following statement made recently by evangelical minister Tim Keller:

If you say to everybody, ‘Anyone who thinks homosexuality is a sin is a bigot,’ . . . you’re going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You’re basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door.

One of the thing I noticed about this quote was the fear involved.  Some evangelical Christians fear that if they allow themselves to question their views on same sex sexual relationships — any one of a host of other issues — they might end up losing their faith altogether.  In a lot of ways, I get that fear.  I experienced it once upon myself at times, too.

And I get it because, in some ways, I represent the realization of those fears.  I started out as a devout Christian.  When I allowed myself to rethink my views on homosexuality, it also gave me the freedom to grapple with a number of other questions.  The end result of that process, which only started with my struggle with my sexual orientation, was that I eventually chose to follow an entirely different path altogether and serve other gods.

It’s easy for someone like Tim Keller to point to me and others like me and say, “See, this is what happens when you start down that path!”  And I can understand their tendency to do that, at least to some degree.

The problem is, people like Tim Keller think that what happened to me is inevitable for anyone who starts asking those questions.  I don’t think it is.  I sat in a room with roughly fifty other people this weekend, most of whom serve as living evidence that a journey that begins by asking the tough questions and reconsidering what they’ve been taught doesn’t have to lead one down the path I took.  It’s just as likely that one could change their mind about same sex sexual relationships — or any other single topic — and go no further.  It’s just as likely that after one does all the thinking and reconsidering, one ends up back at the same conclusions they held before then.  So people like Tim Keller are fearing something that’s not inevitable.

I would like to suggest that the fear people like Tim Keller are feeling is the exact reason I think they need to rethink something about the way they do faith.  Because right now, the way they’re doing it causes them fear, and I don’t think that’s healthy for them.  So I’d personally like to see them to start asking some hard questions — and maybe not even questions about human sexuality — in an attempt to restructure and firm up their faith so they don’t have to worry about it unraveling on them so much.  In short, I’d like to see them develop a faith — and a way of doing and having faith — in which they can actually have more faith.

Gender and Sexuality

So why did I go?

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While at the retreat, I was fairly open about the fact that I follow another religious tradition rather than Christianity.  When people asked me if I attended a church[1], I answered that I did not and continued by saying that I follow a different spiritual tradition.  When one or two asked what my faith background, I said something like “Well, I grew up in a small American Baptist Church and attended a Full Gospel or charismatic church while going to college.  Since then, however, my spiritual journey has led me to follow another religious tradition outside of Christianity altogether.”

Not surprisingly, more than a few people asked me what led me to attend the conference, given it’s Christian focus.  Just to be clear, they were all glad I was there (and not just because it meant a chance to convert me).  Instead, it was pretty clear to me that they seemed to operating under a sense of wonder at my choice.  I think the leader of my community group, Jason, gave voice to that sense of wonder when he commented that he wasn’t sure he’d be brave enough to attend the conference if had been in my shoes.

To be honest, I asked myself the same question several times before the conference and even a few times during it.  “Why am I doing this?”

First and foremost, I went because I wanted to meet Wendy.  I had been talking to her for quite some time online[2] and had come to admire her and appreciate her friendship.  As a result I’ve often wanted to meet her for a long time.  In fact, I kept telling myself that if I ever found myself going up to Toronto and had the time in my schedule to support it, I’d contact her and ask her if she had the time to meet someplace for a cup of coffee.  So when the conference came up and she asked me if I’d like to attend, I took that as my opportunity.[3]

Another reason I went is because I wanted to see firsthand how (and how well) Generous Spaciousness worked in person and in a community.  I knew Wendy did a great job (at least online, and I had plenty of reason to believe she was no different in person) at embodying Generous Spaciousness herself, but I also feel it’s easier for one person to do that, especially when they’re dealing with people on a more one-on-one basis.  I was curious to see how Generous Spaciousness fared in an environment that involved multiple people, each with their own views, needs, and understandings.  (Short answer:  It works quite well.)

You see Generous Spaciousness represents hope to me, a hope that I most desperately want.  As I told a number of people at the retreat, I’ve made my peace with the faith of my past and the fact that my journey has taken me down other roads, roads my old faith communities would find strange and possibly more than a little terrifying.  Where I struggle, however, is dealing with the members of my old faith communities, especially those who I am still in relationship with and wish to remain in relationship with.  My parents, sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews are all Christian.[4]  I have friends with whom I have a long history who are Christian, and there are times when I struggle with how to live peacefully with them in a way that still allows me to be authentic when I’m with them.

Sadly, right now, that sometimes means limiting the time I spend with some of those people.  That’s not a solution I particularly like.  Sometimes, it means hiding parts of myself when around some of those people — thereby sacrificing my own sense of authenticity to some degree. That is not even a solution and I loathe that choice even more.

Generous Spaciousness offers a possible alternative to those choices, and it’s an alternative that I want to place hope in.  Going to the retreat was, in many ways, an attempt to gauge how much hope I should allow myself to put in Generous Spaciousness.

Notes:
[1]  Come to think of it, I don’t think anyone asked me what church I attended, but rather if I attended one.  I find that interesting now that I’m thinking about it.  I suspect (thought can’t be sure) that even among LGBT people who maintain their Christian faith, it’s common to walk away from faith communities for a period.

[2] I participated in the Bridging the Gap Synchroblog back in June of 2009.  I think I started reading the BTG blog a month or two before that, though a quick scan of the post titles from back then didn’t help me narrow it down any better.  But I can say for certain that I’ve known her via online interactions for nearly four years, perhaps slightly longer than that.

[3] I’ll admit that before I signed up, I asked her if she was sure it was a good idea.

[4] For many of these people, my sexual orientation and my choice of how to respond to it is a bit of a sticking point.  My religious choices are a sticking point for all of them.

Gender and Sexuality

Musing from an Unbeliever[1] at the Lord’s Table

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Saturday night as Joe, Wendy, Jason, and I sat playing Stone Age, Wendy and Jason began talking about a few details for the next morning’s worship session.  In the course of the conversation, Jason asked, “Aren’t we having communion during worship tomorrow?”  Wendy confirmed and I tried to focus on the game to help distract me from the thoughts that had suddenly burst into my head — or least keep them from becoming obvious to any of my companions.  Because communion is quite possibly the one Christian ritual[2] that I struggle with participating in, though I’m not sure many people understand why that is.

In many ways, I feel blessed to be devoted to gods that are rather lenient when it comes to participating in the rites of other faiths.  Their attitude tends to be, “you have your obligations to us.  As long as what you choose to do does not interfere with or contradict those obligations, feel free to follow your conscience.

No, the discomfort I have with communion stems from the fact that I deeply respect the rites and practices of other faiths.  In the case of communion, different Christians see communion quite differently, and it’s hard to tell if the most respectful thing to do is to participate or not.

In the church where I grew up, communion was Very Serious Business.  On those Sundays in which my church served communion — it was conducted roughly once a month — the minister would read 1 Corinthians 11:23-29 without offering any commentary or explanation, then go on to tell the congregation that they should only take communion if (1) they were “saved” and (2) had made their hearts right with God.

Like I said, for some Christians, communion is Very Serious Business.  My first church was one such church.  And I know many other churches who hold the view that only Christians should participate in communion.

Rites mean something to their faith communities, and sometimes, it’s not always easy to determine what those rites mean, especially in a situation like this past weekend where people are coming from diverse Christians backgrounds, each of which may have subtle (and not so subtle) differences in how they interpret this particular rite.

So when it comes to communion, I often find myself uncomfortable with participating in the right communion of communion because I’m not sure what I’m “signing up for” or “saying” by my participation, which makes it difficult for me to really decide if I can do so honestly.  And to me, participating in a rite dishonestly is one of the biggest forms of disrespect.

In the end, I did end up participating in the rite.  Wendy had each community group — the small groups we had been divided into for the purpose of sharing and growing together — in turn and partake together.  Under those circumstances, I felt a bit better about participating.  My community group (and Wendy) for that matter knew where I stood theologically, so I didn’t feel I had to worry so much about being dishonest.

Plus, this was a group of people I had grown fond of and close to over the previous day and a half.  Sharing in that rite with them seemed like the correct — and highly desirable — thing to do.

Note:
[1] Someday, I will write a blog post in which I unpack everything I don’t like about that word and others like it.

[2] I suppose I might feel the same way about baptism if the assumption was that everyone present was going to get baptized.  In my experience, that’s not normally the case.

Gender and Sexuality

Home again

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I made it safely home from the Generous Spaciousness Conference Retreat.  I hope to blog on my experiences there and share my thoughts on the event.  It has to wait, however, as I’m still trying to process through my thoughts on the retreat.

I will say, however, that it was a wonderful experience and I’m glad I went and that I’ll go again in a heartbeat (finances and schedule permitting) if they have it again next year.  I met a number of wonderful people who both shared parts of their story with me and invited to similarly share with them.  The stories shared were utterly amazing.

Gender and Sexuality

Soon, I’ll be Canada-bound

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Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be headed to a Christian retreat center in Canada.  There, I will spend the weekend hanging out with other people at the Generous Spaciousness Conference Retreat.  Here’s a brief description of the retreat:

A safe place to be
authentic, to share, to worship, to learn and to grow! All are welcome
to enter this experience of Christian community with generous hearts, a
listening and humble posture, to experience God’s outrageous love and
grace!

The retreat is being organized by New Direction Ministries of Canada.  I’m looking forward to it for a number of reasons, including the fact that attending means I finally get to meet Wendy Gritter, with whom I have conversed online for two (three? four?  I’ve lost track!) years now.  Wendy is one of the driving forces behind the concept of Generous Spaciousness and has done a great deal of blogging about it.  Her thoughts on the topic are great.  I’m not sure if this particular description was written by her, but I think it accurately reflects her vision of Generous Spaciousness:

What is Generous Spaciousness? GS is a relational posture
that acknowledges the reality of diverse perspectives on the question
of faithful discipleship for same-sex oriented people. These differences
have polarized the church, hindered our public witness as the Body of
Christ, and alienated LGBT people from the church.

This posture prioritizes nurturing a safe and encouraging environment for gender and sexual minorities to explore and grow in faith in Jesus Christ,
entrusting each individual to the leading of the Holy Spirit while
encouraging them to be a part of a Christ-centered community.

Generous Spaciousness seeks to build bridges, to find unity in our diversity, and to pursue peace.

I’ll admit that earlier this week, I was very skeptical about the concept of Generous Spaciousness, or at least whether it could ever be successfully applied.  To be honest, between reading material that called me and other LGBT people to tell our stories and educate Christians in spite of the fact that many Christians are poor listeners at best and actually hostile to the listening process at best and being faced with some Christians who are unwilling to let go of their overpowering need to “answer the morality question,” I found myself disillusioned.

But then I remembered that people like Wendy have demonstrated both an eagerness to listen and engage with LGBT people and have even been willing to set aside the “morality question” or at least accept it as a disputable matter which Christians can disagree on in good faith, allowing them to focus on hospitality and fellowship.  As I considered these things the past couple days, my hopes for finding Generous Spaciousness and the retreat to be something worthwhile have returned.

I’ll blog about how it went and my thoughts sometime after I get back.

Gender and Sexuality

I am not a theological problem to be solved

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[Content Note:  Disappearing LGBT Humanity, Religious Supremacy.]

Earlier this week, I posted a few thoughts about a paper by Nigel Chapman about same-sex sexual relationships and evangelical Christianity.  Since then, Mr. Chapman and I have had a chance to discuss things.  (Our conversation starts at comment #5.)  I eventually summarized my central point thus:

The
insistence by heterosexual Christians that they must first answer
whether LGBT lives and relationships are moral before they engage in
acts of love toward and relationship with LGBT people is an aggressive
act of power against and privileging heterosexual Christians over LGBT
Christians. As long as heterosexual Christians insist on reserving that
power and privilege for themselves, they are actively causing harm
toward LGBT people. I call this sin and would ask that all evangelical
Christians who believe that harming LGBT people and exercising power
over them to be sinful to call all who engage in this particular act of
aggression and pride to repentance.

To me, Mr. Chapman’s paper feeds into the evangelical desire to privilege their sense of entitlement to be the moral arbiters of LGBT people’s lives over their duty to be good and loving neighbors to LGBT people.  After all, rather than saying — as I have called him to do — “Hey, the morality of what LGBT people do is not your primary concern.  The morality of how you treat them is,” he’s saying, “Okay, we can worry about how you treat LGBT people after we figure out whether what they do is moral.”

I also want to draw attention to is Mr. Chapman’s own description of his paper:

So my paper isn’t advocacy, and is only indirectly concerned with listening, rather, it’s theological problem-solving…

This is the other problem with playing into the idea that Christians need to answer the “morality question” about LGBT relationships first:  It’s a line of thinking that dehumanizes LGBT people and our lives into a theological problem to be solved.  Not humans first and foremost to be loved and related to.  An “issue” to talk about and work out.

The sad thing is, I get a clear sense that Mr. Chapman ultimately wants to help LGBT people, make things better for us, and make evangelical Christianity more welcoming of us.  But he’s so deeply entrenched in the systems of privilege and power that are still part and parcel of his religious subculture that he’s unable or unwilling to see that his methods of trying to help actually play into those systems and allow them to continue to other and marginalize the people he wants to help.  You cannot help LGBT people and still treat us as a theological problem to solve or even allow others to continue treating us as such.

I hope that Mr. Chapman comes to realize this some day.

Gender and Sexuality

Welcome to the Conversation…Forty Years Late

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Dear heterosexual evangelical Christian (or any other heterosexual person) who is looking to join in the LGBT conversation,

I’d like to welcome you to the conversation.  It’s a conversation that’s quite important to me as a gay man who has Christian friends, gay friends, trans* friends, and friends who belong to more than one of those camps.  It’s a conversation that is absolutely necessary for all of us to live peacefully and share this world we live in together, so the more people who join in with that aim, the better.

Having said that, I would like to take this time to remind you that this is not a new conversation, even though you may be joining it for the first time.  This conversation is older than me, having been started more than forty years ago.  This conversation was long established when I joined it over seventeen years ago.  In all that time, much has been said, re-said, examined, discussed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and rehashed.  In short, this conversation has a lot of history behind it.

As a newcomer to this conversation, you would do well to familiarize yourself with some of that history, as it will help you get up to speed when it comes to participating.  After all, this isn’t some small discussion about unimportant matters.  This is a discussion about real people, real relationships, and real struggles they face.  And as one of the people this conversation is directly about, I would appreciate it if you’d treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

As a newcomer to this conversation, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of new ideas.  You’re bound to have a lot of questions that are new to you.  The thing I’d like you to remember, however, is that these are not new ideas to those of us who have been involved in this conversation for a while.  We asked those same questions ourselves years — even decades — ago.  Since then we’ve answered them, explored those answers, criticized those answers, responded to those criticisms, modified our answers, and in some cases even come up with new answers.  Similarly, a lot of those ideas that you may run across or come up with have been  presented, hashed out, rehashed, debated, debunked, shored up, and in some turned into a deceased equestrian that should not be beaten ever again.

So please understand that when you bring up certain ideas or ask certain questions, no matter how novel they may seem to you, they are tiresome old topics — and often dead ends — that some of us don’t really care to spend any more time on.  In case of questions, many of us will try to direct you to recorded instances — via books, blogs, and other sources — where those questions have already been addressed.  In the case of ideas, we might do likewise (some ideas have been proven so thoroughly invalid and even fraudulent so many times that some of us are exasperated that some people out there can still be unaware of just how off-base those particular ideas are).  When we do so, please look up the information we tell you about (or find it yourself via Google) and answer your own questions and engage in at least a first-round critique of your own ideas that way.

The one thing I would absolutely ask that you not do is pretend like you’re the first person who came up with the question or idea — and certainly don’t bask in your self-perceived genius for coming up with it.  New ideas and new questions do come up from time to time, and you may be someone who does come up with something new at some point.  But remember, you’re joining a four decade conversation that has involved many different minds — some of which spent huge swaths of their lives thinking about these things.  The odds really aren’t in your favor at this point, so I’d ask that you show a bit more humility.

Another good reason why I’d recommend humility is that you and evangelical Christians and institutions are joining this conversation very late in its development.  While you may be a young adult and therefore have valid reasons for coming so late to the conversation, your religions and the institutions that represent it do not.  Many of those people and institutions have patently refused to join in the conversation — and certainly would not listen to LGBT voices at all — in the past.  That’s a big point of irritation for me and some other LGBT people.  Especially when you ask us to deal with questions and ideas that we’ve already discussed to the point of exhaustion.  And while you may be young enough that this represents your first opportunity to engage in this conversation, please bear in mind that your forebears’ choice has contributed to your current level of ignorance.  Had they joined the conversation when they were first invited, they’d be able to fill you in on much of that backstory and background information you’re missing.  The fact that they didn’t and you’re now left in ignorance isn’t necessarily your fault.  It’s just not mine either.  However, I would appreciate it if you’d take the lion’s share of the responsibility for fixing it.

Also, bear in mind that part of the reason that your forebears chose not to engage in this conversation before is because it did not affect them.  Like you, many of them were heterosexual so LGBT issues, LGBT lives, and the choices we LGBT people were faced with were things they didn’t have to think about.  Unlike me and those like me, they had the luxury to just ignore it all and go on merrily with their own lives.  In reality, you still have that choice.  This conversation does not affect you the way it does me, and you could fairly easily make ignore it all and move on.  I don’t get that choice.  The things being discussed in this conversation impact my life every single day.

Now, understand, I’m glad you’re choosing to get involved, rather than ignore the whole conversation.  It suggests to me that you and others like you are realizing that completely ignoring the real struggles and lives of your fellow humans is not cool and that you want to be more compassionate and concerned.  That’s a good thing.  But I’d encourage you to follow that thinking further and understand why compassion might call you to acknowledge how you handle yourself in this conversation, especially considering how much catching up you have to do and how it ultimately affects you and I in different, unequal ways.

Thank you.  And thank you again for joining in the conversation, even at this point.

Jarred.