Comming out story Published to Gospel For Gays

Hey, this blog is now about spiritual stories and their sexual underpinnings. Here you can read "My Comming out story" it is well edited, unlike the version in this blog


http://gospelforgays.com/?p=910

Here is some background

Dear Pancho,

Thank you very much for both this comment and your wonderful coming out story. I published the latter today; I trust you'll be happy with the very minor edits I did - basically adding a couple of pronouns you had omitted, along with a couple of periods. I resisted my own temptation to create paragraph breaks, where for example you had dialogue: I felt that you had set it up the way you wanted it to appear, and that it was a very successful piece of writing as it stood.

More importantly, far more importantlly: it's a beautiful and courageous story. I'm privileged to have it on my site.

Re. Paul. I've been thinking a lot more about him since returning from a three week trip/course that followed his itinerary in Greece and Turkey. I learned a lot. But my fundamental sense of him has not changed, and here it is:

1. I think he was basically homosexual, before the word 'gay' existed. I think that orientation gave him huge anguish, that he tried every way he could to repress his sexuality, but I think in the end he accepted it, always in a chaste way. I don't think he had sex with Timothy or others: that would make him a hypocrite. Masturbation: well of course. I think that was his 'thorn in the flesh'. He has the high energy and high intensity of a man with a good sex drive.

2. The more I learn the less I understand why the church puts Paul on the same level as Jesus, in terms of the authority of his very few utterances re. our sexuality. It makes no sense. I've started to address that in a couple of postings, and I intend to continue that line of inquiry.

So frankly, however we interpret his scant references to men having sex with men - I don't think they deserve the kind of absolute authority that people give them.

I hope you're doing well. You are in my prayer.

In Jesus,

Jeremiah

Dear Jeremiah,

Thank you so very much for your personal reply. You must be quite busy and I feel honored to have you reply directly. I am about check the posting of the story, in the event my name is not there, please post it! I would also like if you could post my location, Windhoek, Namibia. I want to refer this site to members of our LGBT network here and I want to see that someone from here has already posted. Thanks for doing the grunt work of the editing! The periods and pronouns always get me.

Your idea about Paul is intriguing. I wonder if I read his work whether I would come to the same conclusion. Could he not just have been ascetic?

Queer readings and traditional readings, which ones are inspired by the Spirit. When Christians speak of letting the Spirit guide our readings of scripture, what do they actually mean? I still wonder, because just as I found out when I danced at mass when no one else was dancing – it was a youth mass here in Windhoek and really joyous - people disagree as to when the Spirit acts. My fellow youth member, Paulcheria, felt that I was just dancing cause I wanted to and that I was using the Holy Spirit as an excuse.

I have published the letter you sent me on my blog : pmulonge.blogspot.com

If you would like me to remove it, please tell me so and I will. I assumed you would not mind.

Thanks again,

And you are in my prayers too!

Pancho

Home Stories 2: Mothers lipstick

The First Time I put on my mothers lipstick – age 24 . First I put on her overcoat, it was black blue and exactly what the French would call a vest. It trailed down to just above my knees and had no buttons, making it distinctly for women. Inside it I felt warm, for it was winter and because it was my mother’s. Her hairs were on, many of them and I brushed them off. In one of the pockets I found tissues – she always has them for blowing her nose, a roll of zambuck herbal lip balm, a splinter of chewing gum with three or four gums remaining and a un-capped lipstick. I could not resist and so I put some one as I admired myself in the mirror. I puckered my lips afterwards as I had seen her and other women do so many times. The lips in the mirror resembled Tutankhamen’s but a violet pink. I wondered whether it would be noticeable, whether I would be beaten in the street – as I always walk on foot – or whether my brother or anyone would notice. I then took a tissue and wiped the pink away and it quickly came off to smudge the white tissue in my hand. It would not be complete if I had not done that – had I not removed then and there while I was looking in the mirror. That is part of growing up gay – the excitement of being intrepid, but then covering your tracks afterwards.

After writing this, the lipstick putting event has already happened. It is part of my past and so that feeling of it being novel, it being new is gone. I now question whether this was the first time, or is it just what I think.

Home stories series 1

Is it necessary that I make my mother upset? I woke up at 7:30am, after having gone back to sleep at 06:30 am when we spoke to my grandparents in Bulgaria over the phone.

I went to the kitchen to find my mother ready after just staying a bit in my room and thinking about what I dreamt, about graduation and giving away the food that was not eaten by us at the reception here in Klein Windhoek, instead of at Princeton – merging of times and realities in my dream.

After I began making the sandwich, she really wanted me to hurry and so shouted at me
“ po burzai, phlegma takava!” (hurry up you phlegmatic one!)

Then shouts and outburst that followed included “ oh your are a soiled seed, soiled seed, you get this from your father.” And “ please God, return to him, let everything he did to humiliate me come back to him, God will Punish him, God will Punish him, God will Punish him!” came the words from her stern face.

Before this, I could have just hurried up and kept quiet, but I opened my mouth and out came provocations “Well don’t worry, relax, chill, I will make it now, you are still making coffee are you not?” She was, as she moved from the kettle to the sink from the sink to where I was at the table. I added “why do you wish bad for someone, that is not good.”

“I am not wishing bad!” she exclaimed, “that everything he did to me to come back to him, and that he will be humiliated how by his kurvas (hores) the way he humiliated me.”

So why did I have open my mouth. Before all of this, I could have remained silent and obedient, then perhaps when I was busy smearing that peanut butter on her bread she would not have said “you don’t honor your mother”.

When she left, she was upset and in tears, I was rushing behind her to give her the plastic back with her bread. Peggy our family friend, was taking her to work. And they drove off. Me in the kitchen, with the scene of the dirtly plate, the breadnife and the butter and peanut butter on the table. The dishes dirty from lasts night’s birthday dinner party for my brother.

My comming out story

This is my coming out story. It is about me telling my mother what was already hanging in the air, in all those moments when I just remained reticent to those questions “Don’t you like girls?” or statements “One day, I want you to give me grandchildren”. I told her one night, when I did not keep silent, but I talked back until the air was dripping with truth and all came down, the truth. I will now proceed to tell you this story, but it will not be chronologically. Instead, I will move back and forth, in and out of different parts of the process, just like how Jesus makes loves to me. Indeed, late at night on my mattress, I imagine him – I contemplate him and his body against my own. The love making takes Him through me, I see his vibrant glowing eyes and I take off that crown of thorns to dry up the red rivers that streamed down the contours of his face. “I know because I am in love with Jesus, I have prayed about it, I wanted first God to change me, but then I realized there was nothing wrong with this,” said I in response to my mother’s question “How do you know you are gay.”

I was already under the covers on my way to sleep when my mother knocked: “Pancho there is one more thing I want to tell you,” said my mother as barged in “No I am going to sleep, now, not now,” I protested from where I was lying on the mattress down below “Well you are not yet asleep so listen. I have green eyes and people with green eyes can tell the future – you are not gay. I see somewhere a woman who will find you and she will have sex with you!” she prophesied.

“O.K so, she will rape me?” I replied sarcastically

”Not exactly, but she will be more assertive than you and you will see it will happen.”

“Alright, goodnight” I said as I resigned myself to respecting her rather than reacting to this comment. I wanted to honor her, I longed to honor God. “Honor they mother and father, so that you may long in the Lord your God is giving you” was my solace. I had just come out to her as a gay man and yet I wished to honor her aspirations rather than tarnish them by aggressively asserting my identity.

Earlier in the evening her green eyes peered into me when I stood before her at the outside table beside the hanging branches of peach tree and she questioned me: “Tell me the truth” she asked calmly. Now this day had come! Was I ready for it? I trembled inside at having to answer truthfully, but then I knew what Christ had told the Pharisees “When he lies he speaks his native language, for he is and the father of lies.” Jesus was speaking about the devil in rebuking the Pharisees for not believing Him. I too told lies to my mother, always in Bulgarian, my mother tongue. Now it was time to end this, but I could not bring myself to say it plainly so instead I relied on a piece of the Gospel: “Mother when you are ready to hear the truth, I will tell it to you, ‘for the truth shall set you free’, as Jesus said, when you are ready to accept it, but now I feel you do not want to hear it.”

“Now I am ready, more ready than I will ever be” came the reply and my inner trembling subsided. She knows the truth already, I thought and so that’s what I told her “You already know the truth, you just have to accept it.” She was my mother! How could she not know? “So the truth is that you are gay?” she said calmly before she denied the fact “I don’t believe you are, Pancho, someone confused you, you will find a nice girl and then…”

“I am a homosexual, I am gay.” I jutted in, breaking her talk about how I would change. I was grinding my teeth – I was so fed up of this – why is still denying it? So I had to say, I had to assert it – for the sake of the truth.

And that was it. Since then all has been the same, as if nothing was said regarding this thing. The power of denial is immeasurable and only time will tell whether she will overcome it. I will continue to pray for both of us, and by the way, I did pray after she left my room that night. I asked in the darkness of my shut eyes and streaming thoughts whether I was wrong and whether I was not meant to be this way. The silence was only broken by own thoughts “What the Bible discusses is men who lust for each other as a result of God’s displeasure with them and not what you are.” I do not believe that Paul is referring to “homosexuals” when wrote that letter to Corinthians about those who will not inherit the Kingdom of God. If he was, then I guess I will be grinding my teeth for all eternity, as I am cast away to the outer darkness. But the primacy of us being Christians who are gay men was probably alien to Paul and his contemporaries – the idea of sexual orientation had not come into being. Leaving aside the tension between notions of identity predicated on our experience and Biblical interpretation, I am confident of the validity of my gay Christian identity, “because I am in love with Jesus”. I invite your minds to wonder what it means “I am in love with Jesus” in the context of my homosexuality. The wandering thoughts of your mind are probably not far from the truth. There is Agape and there is Eros - he is my friend and my lover.

The kisses I have imagined with Christ are not sordid like the kiss of betrayal that Judas gave to Jesus. They underlie my passion for Jesus and my choice to put him in the center of sexual desire instead of relying on imperfect men – whether real (hookups) or fake (pornography). Making love with Jesus is a transcendental state through I experience Jesus touching me, my soul and all my members. I imagine some of you Christians may recoil in disgust at such thoughts, but then you probably are not a gay man. In any case, I ask that you pray for me that my “heart may burn within me and that the Lord will open the scripture” to me, as he did with two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Right now my reading of the Gospel is unequivocally queer. I ponder why the author of John is referred to as “the disciple Jesus loved.” Does not Jesus love all of the disciples? Is there any difference in the way he loves that disciple from all the others? I believe Jesus still loves that disciple right now, just as he loves all of us. But are they differences in the relationship we share with him to the extent that for certain gay men He becomes our lover?