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
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?
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