Why I Am Gay-Friendly - by Andrew Tatusko

July 1, 2008

I hated gay people.

This was a sentiment often covered up by statements like, “I am being compassionate for their eternal status with God”, or “Hate the sin, love the sinner”, or “God did not create us to have sex with people of the same gender”. I was a harbinger of repentance, of purity, and of chastity for those who had succumbed to the whims of desire, a fallen culture, and the poor misguided choice of the psychologically needy to seek out someone of the same gender to fulfill their dark sexual desire. I had a very clear and indubitable assumption that a “practicing” homosexual could not receive Christ and those who believed they had, were deceiving themselves. After all did not John say, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”?

But these were statements to absolve me of my own guilt. The truth is that I hated gay people because they were a disease to the world and the the Church. Gay people were pedophiles, sexual addicts, and the source of the AIDS epidemic - something God must have brought upon us to make us aware…of them.

Then my sister came out and everything began to change.

As with many in my position, there was a clear period of mourning. At first it was because my unconditional love for her was in clear conflict with what I believed to be the Truth of the Bible and what God had clearly revealed to humanity regarding our behavior, and how we ought to respond to the act of salvation that Christ performed. Her lifestyle did not fit within my picture, and I had to find a way to resolve the conflict.

It took me a while to reach the point where I could even say that I still loved her, but I did not love her lifestyle and could never affirm it. Homosexuality to me was no better than an addiction. Sure addiction is a disease and no one chooses to be addicted to anything. But a choice has to be made at some point to engage in behaviors that lead to addiction. And addiction comes as a result of a lot of environmental variables that make it more likely. However, it is this very connection between addiction and homosexuality that caused me to doubt my idea of what homosexuality was for me at the time.

You see, my sister was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. My family is loaded with people who have self-medicated in order to compensate for chemical imbalances and too much stress probably as a result of mild OCD issues and clinical anxiety. I literally watched her walk the path of self-destruction and pain as an addict. What I did not know is that her own struggles with her sexuality were participating in her sense of pain and not helping her situation at all.

Her recovery from addiction was accompanied by her coming out. Learning that these two events were irreducibly related was not easy and was very hard for me to visualize. Her own psychological well-being depended in large part on her reconciliation of her sexuality with her identity. Rather than her coming out being a sign of self-destruction, it was a sign of healing - evidence that she was OK with the world. I could either reject that evidence even though it was obvious and clear, or accept that evidence as valid and change my picture of Truth. The latter would allow me to love my sister unconditionally, the former would constrict my love for her with self-imposed conditions.

I had to reconcile my understanding of unconditional love with the conditions that lead to my sister’s own healing process from years of pain and addiction. So the question slowly moved from How can I love her and hate her sin?, to How can I love her for who she is? And it was this question that forced me to accept and radically change my world-view to see that homosexuality is not a sin, but a gift.

If God truly is love, and if my sister could find love, is not God an active participant in that love too? If my sister could receive Christ, truly and only after coming out, does that not suggest that homosexuality is not an aberration of nature, but as integral to the fabric of our world as heterosexuality? See, the evidence that the love of God can be released in the context of homosexual love, or what I now prefer to call gender-neutral love, forced me to change my ideals just as the clear evidence that evolution is real and the universe is 13.5 billion years in the making forced me to change my ideas of what Genesis really must mean.

After 10 years of struggling with the question, my sister is now entering her candidacy to be a minister of Word and Sacrament in the Episcopal Church. She asked my wife and I to participate in her exchange of vows with her partner as witnesses. My wife and I are the only ones in either family to have been there for that ceremony in Toronto. Her sexuality has been a witness to the redemptive power of God’s love, not the myth of a God who will punish persons who have sexual orientations other than heterosexual.

Not to affirm the presence of God in her relationship, is to deny the very existence of God for if God is love, God is with them and creating them to be better servants of the Kingdom now, that it may become fulfilled in our midst.

Drew Tatusko is an academic administrator and instructor at Mount Aloysius College in Cresson, PA. He has an M.Div. (1999) and a Th.M (2000) from Princeton Theological Seminary. He lives with his wife, two sons, two dogs, two cats, and the occasional foster dog in Duncansville, PA. He graduated from Westminster College (PA) with a B.A. in religion (1996). He is completing his Ph.D. in Higher Education from Seton Hall University and posts frequently to his blog Notes From Off-Center. He is currently an elder at his church, an affiliate with the PC(USA).

Posted by Tony Posted in Guest Writers Re: 'Coming Out', Posts by Guest Writers