Collective Trauma: The Fallout 15

During this time of post-Pride, I am remembering an old friend, an ex-friend rather, who used to live here and some years ago returned with his family to Tennessee. He was actually a very pleasant, kind and generous friend. A devoted father and husband. A gentle and sensitive soul. A Christian pastor attending the same church as I 2003-2005. And this came out in our last ever conversation: he not only didn't accept gay marriage. He wanted to see homosexuality recriminalized, and all gay people rounded up and held indefinitely in concentration camps. I hardly batted an eye when he told me this, in a very low voice and with embarrassment flickering across his face, but I told him that there was no way I could endorse something like that. This was also both our final conversation, and the ultimate brick in the wall that to this day stands between me and the homophobic bigots that represent a kind of Christianity that has proven over and over again to be an absolute disgrace to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Shortly after, the pastor of the church, just following the ratifying of same-sex marriage in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 2005, spoke firmly against it during his sermon. I do not know how his sermon concluded. I walked out halfway, and I have never bothered to return. I came by this church innocently enough. I was so alienated by the Anglican Church after Bishop Michael Ingham's bumbling way of including same-sex blessings back in 2002 and the way it divided the church, that for a while I wanted nothing to do with the issue. Around that time I moved into my current apartment, a subsidized unit run by the Mennonite Central Committee. Unfortunately, their housing division in Vancouver was staffed by homophobic bigots, and I was lured into their church by a promise of exhibit space for my art and very kind and caring Christian people to befriend me. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, I suppose, because there was a concerted effort to convert or at least get into their church as many tenants in my building as they could fit in the car every Sunday morning. I did understand from the beginning that their position on homosexuality was going to be conservative. But I did not expect some of the Nazi-inspired bigotry that I was confronted with. The name of this denomination, by the way, is the Presbyterian Church in America, and I have since learned that they are notoriously rightwing and that many of them are firm believers in President Dump, the Great Deplorable squatting in the Oval Office. It is hard not to demonize these people. They are using the Gospel of Christ to cloak their own evil bigotry. But they don't come across as evil. They are like Adolph Eichmann, the architect of Hitler's Final Solution, and they treated Jews and homosexuals and anyone else who didn't fit their vision of humanity as fuel for the ovens in Auschwitz and other places. These people didn't come across as evil either: they were all family men, good citizens, loyal to their friends, and kind and decent people who also happened to hate Jews, gays and anyone else who wasn't like them. Or, in Hannah Arendt's famous definition: the Banality of Evil. I do not know what has become of the people I knew from that church. One of the pastor's son lives in my building and we see each other from time to time, but we are not on speaking terms, given that he seems to hold the same opinions as those other bigots, or he did at one time, but there is little indication that he has changed. I do not know how the current staff nd management of my building think about the issues and I will not discuss it with any of them as I am afraid of what I might find out. Moving out of here is not an option, by the way. This is Vancouver and there are no other affordable options for me for housing and I have no desire to end up on the street. I am thinking of my last ever email exchange with the pastor whose sermon I walked out on. When he again tried to convince me that homosexuals are inherently flawed beings and that same sex matrimony somehow denigrates his idea of marriage I asked him a simple and innocent question. I asked him to try to put himself in our shoes, to get an idea of what it is like to go through life discriminated against, bullied, persecuted, marginalized and even beaten up and killed simply for being attracted to someone of the same gender. I asked him to try to imagine what it must be like to have to hide and conceal and lie about every single gesture and evidence that could betray you as gay. I asked him to imagine what it might be like, for him, a heterosexual man, to be villainized and hated for all the innocent manifestations of his heterosexuality: his wife and his four daughters. I suppose that that was just a little too much for the poor little pastor, who cut me out of his life once and for all. Over the next four or five years or so we did encounter each other on the bus. He refused to acknowledge me outside of a grudging hello. Such Christian love. I am glad to say that I am completely done with this kind of people and happy to move on.