To Be a Friend

 

Summer 1985

 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Lynne said and wrapped her arms around me in a hug.

We were sat together in my parents’ kitchen, while my parents were in the living room, watching television.

Lynne and I were members of the Young People’s Fellowship (YPF), which was the young people’s group at our Evangelical Anglian church. We were also friends. I really admired her singing voice, which was one of those voice’s that could claim the attention of a whole room with its purity and clarity. She admired my writing, which was strange and humbling. She was one of the handful of people then who encouraged me to write, which was so eye-opening to me.

Lynne was and is beautiful but her beauty is more than skin deep and stays in the memory long after meeting her. She radiates a confident sexuality which is so attractive to others, and yet she is so oblivious to it herself. In the YPF, there were so many young men who were attracted to her, some even claimed to be in love with her, and yet Lynne barely saw this. I, though, was fascinated. These young men projected so much onto her, one even claiming that God had sent her to be his wife, but none of them seemed interested in Lynne as a person, none of them looked further than Lynne’s attractiveness. To me, she was a wonderful friend with an amazing intellect and a warm personality.

That summer Lynne was eighteen, preparing to go to university that autumn, I was nineteen and struggling to deal with my sexuality, and failing, believing that the only choice I had was celibacy because I was an Evangelical Christian. I had also started my first job and had fallen into a hopeless, unrequited and very secret love for a male colleague.

I can’t remember why she called on me but that’s the least important part of the evening. For some reason Lynne asked to see one of the poems I’d written, one about loneliness. So I showed it to her, in the notepad I used to write my poems in. My poems were very teenage poems. They were high on emotional content and low on style and format. I simply copied the styles of poets I liked, not understanding the form or style and struggling with rhyming couplets. My poems were much more of a way to explore and vent my emotional life, to try and make sense of my emotions and the things I was living through.

Lynne read that poem, nodding to herself, and, to my horror, turned over the page and started reading the next poem. After she finished that one, she read the next and the next one. She must have read a dozen of those poems. To my horror, she read poems were I expressed my struggles with my sexuality and my unrequited love (crush?), poems that talked about my love for him. I didn’t use the gender neutral “you” because I never intended anyone to read them. But Lynne was reading them (!!). I couldn’t just snatch the note pad out of her hand, so I just sat there and watched her read them. Though the expression that graced her face wasn’t disgust, it was realisation.

After she’d finished reading, she put the notepad down on the kitchen table, said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” and gave me a big hug. Then we talked.

I tried to explain to her my therapy that it was the “act” of homosexuality, not the desire, that was the sin, and if I could remain “pure” then God would be “happy” with me. I was still in the thrall of the True Freedom Trust. I must have sounded crazy but Lynne didn’t act negatively, but she did ask me an important question. She asked me what I really wanted. Quietly I answered, I wanted a boyfriend. I didn’t know what form that relationship could take, especially with my believes then, but I wanted a relationship, someone to love. She was the first person I admitted to that I wanted to love someone, to love another man, and she didn’t condemn me for it, she simply accepted it.

Her acceptance meant so much to me and was so eye opening. There were people who didn’t hate and condemn me just for being gay, and maybe wanting to love another man wasn’t so wrong. Her acceptance wasn’t a light bulb moment, I didn’t suddenly realise it was okay to be gay, but it stayed in the back of my mind, it held out the hope that I could be accepted.

All these years later, I am still in contact with Lynne, though we live at almost opposite ends of the country. She is one of the few people I remained in contact from that time. So many people, back then, who called me their friend, quickly dropped me when they found out that I’m gay, not Lynne. Many, many years later, Lynne sang at my wedding. She sang a marvellous version of O Tell Me the Truth About Love by WH Auden. Her beautiful and clear voice filled the registry office, being the perfect ending to our marriage ceremony. She was one of the four people I dedicated my first book to, she was one of the people who encouragement kept me writing.

There are some people, through their simple acts of kindness and love, that leave a deep impact upon our lives, Lynne was one of those people for me.

Drew

 

 

Postscript: In the previous essays in this series I’ve used pseudonyms for the people mentioned. This essay is different because I’ve used Lynne’s real name, with her permission. I want this essay to stand as a tribute to this wonderful person.

When Denial Was My Only Option

 

(This is part of a continuing series about how I tried to come out as gay in an Evangelical Christian environment. If you haven’t read my other essays in this series, please find them here, they will put this essay into context)

Spring 1985

“I don’t believe you’re homosexual,” he said. “I believe you’re bisexual, mostly heterosexual, and this is a phase you are going through.”

I just nodded my agreement, what else could I do?

We were sat together in the tiny study of his house. He was the curate of the church I attended, in suburban Liverpool. It was an extremely Evangelical church, everything was right or wrong, no grey areas, from a very simplistic reading of the bible, but it was also the place I was desperately trying to belong to. I wanted to be accepted by this congregation, these people, because I believed they were my only chance at finding friendship. But there was a secret stain on my soul, I am gay, and back then Evangelical Christians saw it as a sin so bad it was only punishable by hell (I know many still believe that).

I was eighteen then and so deeply closeted. I had locked that closet door and wasn’t letting in a spark of light. No one could know I was gay, if they did I could risk losing all of my friends, and I was lonely enough. The thought of being friendless was terrifying. But my secret was eating away inside of me. There was the fear of being found out but there was also the isolation. There was no one I could talk to and be my real self with, I had to constantly monitor what I said, again and again I had to pretend to be straight, again and again I had to hide so much of myself.

I longed to be open with someone about my sexuality. (Deep down I longed for a boyfriend but that was too much to express. But I still believed that if I had gay sex, it would be a sin that would condemn me to hell forever). I was so deeply depressed, but back then I didn’t even recognise that, I found it was just my normal, melancholic personality.

Several months before that day I hit a watershed moment. I saw an advert for an organisation called the True Freedom Trust (TFT), in the back of my Christian youth magazine, they claimed to have an alternative to the “homosexual lifestyle” through Christianity. I had been seeing its founder, HM, since then for counselling. He said his belief was just being gay wasn’t a sin but any kind of gay sex was, the only “acceptable” lifestyle was that of celibacy. I jumped at that, when I first heard it, it was my fire escape from hell (Though as time passed, it proved nothing of the sort).

HM said that I needed to confide in someone, at my church, about my sexuality. He suggested my church’s curate. I was unsure but was convinced by HM. HM said he had met the curate and he was the right man to support me. I wasn’t sure but HM said this was the right thing to do.

The curate was a middle-aged man who had trained for the Anglican ministry after a life of low paid jobs and then a long time in adult education. He had deeply Evangelical beliefs, which he would talk about at any opportunity, especially his views on sex, which were just as Evangelical. He talked about masculine Christianity and for Christian leaders to be strong and real men.

I screwed up what little courage I had, this would only be the second person I told about my sexuality, and asked the curate if I could see him. There was something I needed to talk to him about.

On a weekday afternoon, I visited him, at his home, sat in his tiny study with him, and I told him I thought I was gay. I actually said I thought I was homosexual and that I’d been having homosexual feelings. That was when he told me he believed I wasn’t, that I was just a confused heterosexual.

I was stunned, this wasn’t the reaction I had been expecting, or even fearing, and I had no answer for him but to agree with him. How could I have argued? What could I have said? I didn’t have the strength, back then, to tell him that I don’t have a heterosexual bone in my body, which is what I would do now. I just agreed with him, because that was what I was sure he wanted me to say, and in that I wasn’t wrong.

Then he told me he’d had of vision of me, a vision given to him by God. He saw me dressed in a suit and tie, not wearing my glasses, with my hair short, neat and tidy, taking a girl out on a date to the cinema. If I followed this vision then I would truly find happiness and be the man God wanted me to be, he said.

I felt a terrible kick of fear. How could this be a vision from God, it was so wrong. Without my glasses I am very short-sighted, which makes most activities difficult, at best. My hair is thick and curly and in any style that is short, it rebels against it, sticking out at odd angles, it is never neat when short. I hate wearing a suit and tie, even then I did. Suit jackets show off my round shoulders, I’m never comfortable with a tie pushed up to my neck, and shirts never stay tucked into my trousers. My mother always complained about how badly suits hung off me, but I am just genetically unsuited to them. But taking a girl on a date, that was the most confusing part of his vision. Was he telling me to stay and follow the TFT’s ex-gay counselling? I was begging God, each night, to turn me straight, but that prayer went unanswered, every time. Did the curate’s vision mean I was failing? His words felt like a command, telling me the way I should be living, but a goal I was falling so far short of.

I didn’t argue with the curate, I didn’t tell him what he said was certainly a lie, when he called me heterosexual, but I couldn’t. I had such a negative view of myself, I hated so much of myself, that denying myself and agreeing with him was all I could think of to do.

As I left his study, and his home, I again agreed with him, he said I wasn’t gay, only a confused heterosexual. He was so wrong.

I felt so betrayed, after seeing him. I had gone to him for help and support but he’d denied me that by denying what I said to him. How could he have turned it into such a lie, something that was so untrue? (Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I realise that man was deeply homophobic. It was his homophobia that drove him to deny my sexuality and to come up with that ridiculous vision of me. But I didn’t know that, back then)

After that afternoon, the curate behaved as if I had never told him I was gay, he just ignored it as if I had never said a word to him. He carried on talking to me about me finding a girlfriend and his preaching, at church, got increasingly homophobic. I got the message though, he didn’t want to hear any more about me being gay.

The impression was made, did anyone at church want to know I’m gay? No they didn’t. I had to stay firmly closeted because being gay was something to be ashamed of. Not what I needed to hear at that moment.

 

Drew 

 

Find the next story in this series here