Perspective

Imagine growing up with plenty of well meaning adults around you. Sharing space with relatives, friends, teachers, and church goers who want nothing more than to help you successfully navigate this world. Imagine the warmth of that safety; the Knowing that everyone wants what is best for you. You grow and learn in a religious and social culture that teaches you right from wrong. You learn that certain groups of people are wicked, depraved and the opposite of all the things God wants us to be. You grow up absolutely sure that your religion is the right one, because your parents believe it. Your family believes it. All the people you know to be good believe it. 

Your preachers break down story after story from the Bible into words you can understand, aligning themselves and you with the oppressed and persecuted people in those texts and every Sunday you come out on top. You are the people engulfed in a neverending search for righteousness and saddled with a God ordained duty to share this message with everyone else on Earth. You are the people dutifully checking in with God several times a week to make sure you are doing things the right way. 

You are sitting in the pew listening to impassioned sermons in which murderers, thieves, homosexuals and rapists are discussed nearly interchangeably as groups of people who go against the very nature of God. You are taught that these people are inherently evil. You're taught that you will be loved, guided and protected if you simply confess your mortality to an omniscient God and ask to be saved by Him, promising to follow his teachings. Easy, because villains = bad and heroes = good. Of course you abide by this code to life. Who doesn't? 

You are immersed in this belief system your entire life before you begin to notice that there is something about you that is inherently different than most of the other people in your orbit. You don't know what it is. It doesn't have a name yet but you are a good human so even without a name, it's something you can live with. Imagine your entire identity is predicated on you belonging to a group of people; on you being the same as these people, and all your life you believe you're one of them. You believe every single thing this group believes and your life's purpose is to be "good" by this group's standards. 

It didn't happen out of the blue. Your crushes were never on boys. You drew hearts around the names of your babysitters. You had deep, meaningful relationships with other girls. The love songs on the radio reminded you of them. As you aged, when boys turned their attention to you, you rejected it. You felt terrible about it, because you genuinely like them as people and you didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but you couldn't reciprocate.

Nearly everyone in our culture assumes you are straight, until it turns out that you are not. By the time you realize you are gay, you have been taught to fear and denounce queer people for years and years. Your homophobia has no bounds. It doesn't matter if the person who is gay is you. You don't miraculously develop empathy and perspective beyond what you've been taught your whole life. All of that fear, judgment, and intolerance creates a marinade that your soul has soaked in for years. You do emotional and spiritual gymnastics, trying to rectify the chasm between the type of human you know yourself to be and the ONLY type of person a queer person could possibly be, as evidenced throughout your entire upbringing. You cannot be both. You are either good or you are gay. 

What happens the day you realize that YOU are what you've been warned about? You are the people you're supposed to avoid. You are the one who is evil; who is going to hell. Because you love girls? It seems too unbelievable. Forget sex. You love other girls. THAT'S what makes you an abomination? It doesn't add up. But it's what you believe. So before you even know who you are, you've already been drowned in shame and hatred so long that you naturally unleash that vitriol onto yourself. How can you live with yourself? How can you expect anyone from your family or social groups to not hate you? Where can you exist in this world? Your own world? You can't. You don't belong here. You are bad. You are evil. You are wrong. You are a sin.

Now, if you are 35-100 years old and a friend of mine on social media, apply that experience to the vast majority of queer people you have ever known. Then consider again, for one moment, their path in a life that includes them being honest about who they are. This is only one piece of the complex lived experience of most 35+ queer people raised in the South. But it's a hell of a big one.