As some of you know, today is National Coming Out Day . . . an opportunity to acknowledge what a monumental, frightening, but ultimately healthy and necessary step it is to step out of the closet and reveal to the world who you are. Once upon a time it was a supreme act of courage to come out because one would almost certainly expect abuse of one kind or another as a result. And even from one’s own loving family there was no guarantee whatsoever that such news would be received with grace and acceptance. Thankfully, we live in a world now where it is more likely for such a revelation to be greeted with understanding instead of hostility. But by no means is that always the case, and one still hears of heartbreaking cases of children essentially disowned by parents and siblings because of something the person did not ask to be- but simply is. So this is an important day to remember those who have come out and been received with loving, accepting arms- as well as those for whom this represents something more painful and wrenching.
My brother Steve is gay – and when he put together a montage of photos of various people in his life, both family and friends, who have been important allies for him and his husband Scott, I was touched to see a photo of Kathy and me top row center. But as I saw my photo there, it made me think of Steve’s experience of coming out to me and the rest of my family . . . and of how in that moment I was a less than sterling ally (let alone brother) to him.
Steve and I were both in college at the time, and Steve had come to understand his own sexual orientation after an encounter with a fellow staff member at the Bible camp where they both worked. In the wake of that self-discovery, if you will, Steve came out to a few of his closest friends …. but not to any of us in his family. A few months later, I found out about this aspect of my brother when I stumbled upon a letter that someone had written to him – a love letter from a guy at Luther. I wasn’t intending to snoop- It was a matter of picking up the letter to see who it was from and taking in the gist of its final paragraph in one disbelieving glance. I think it was later that evening, when Steve and I were driving somewhere by ourselves that I quietly (or maybe a better word is ‘gravely’) confronted my brother about what I had learned about him. It wasn’t that I suddenly hated my brother- suddenly found him repulsive – or believed he was going to hell. More than anything, I was shocked and dismayed and maybe a bit perturbed that he had kept something so important from me and that I had to find out about it in this way. (I remember my sister saying much the same thing, sort of feeling like dozens of Steve’s friends knew about him before his own family did.)
I think only lately has it really dawned on me that he would have told me about this if he would have felt completely confident that I would respond with love and acceptance. And the truth is that he had every reason to doubt that. I feel so badly about that. But what I feel even worse about is that at the end of that brief, tense exchange in the car (if I remember correctly, I was driving and Steve was in the back seat) it never dawned on me to tell my brother that I still loved him. To be perfectly honest, I don’t have any recollection of having ever said the words “I love you” to my brother before that. It would have been the simplest thing and the best thing for me to say to him in that difficult moment, and I just didn’t. I let that silence hang in the air. I let him wonder. And it’s very hard for me to forgive myself for making that challenging moment for my brother even harder.
So here’s the thing: If we love someone- really love them- they we must make sure that they know we love them even in those moments when they might say or do something that leaves us shaken or dismayed or disappointed or shocked. Those are the very moments when love is more important than anything else – and needs to be the first word we say. Maybe that’s what Saint Paul meant in his letter to the Corinthians when he wrote “love endures all things.”
It’s been more than 35 years since that night but I still regret how I left my brother hanging and wondering rather than wrapping him in a bear hug and letting him know that I still loved him, that he was still my brother. 35 years later, Steve is one of the people I admire most in this world. I love him, his husband Scott, their son Henry – and Kathy and I are so grateful that they are part of our lives. And I thank him for helping me come to better understand what real love really is and how foolish it is to try and confine it behind barriers or restrictions of our own design. Love Means Love.
Like a lot of professors at Carthage, I have a poster on my office door that let’s students know that I am someone who will accept them for who they are and that they can count on me for whatever support or encouragement they might need. It is thanks to Steve that I think I understand what the words on that poster mean . . . what it really means to be an ally, and how desperately someone needs an ally in a moment when they are taking a courageous step into the open air. I think of the first trans person I ever knew- a woman who came to me for private voice lessons shortly after transitioning from man to woman. She was wanting to rejoin her church’s senior choir, but the director told her that she would only be welcome if she would sing soprano or alto with the other women; she did not want her singing with the baritones, where vocally she really belonged. So we worked for nearly a year to see if her falsetto could be nurtured to the point where she could sing as a treble, but it proved to be impossible. (She was in her fifties and that was probably part of the problem.) But once she had relinquished her original goal, she continued studying with me as a baritone and eventually prepared a lovely recital that she sang at that same church- billing herself as The Lady Baritone. It was a wonderful, heartwarming triumph. She passed away a couple of years later, and at her memorial service one of her daughters movingly recalled the day when Deb returned to work at Snap On Inc. – as a woman. Her daughter was in tears as she imagined how scary it had to be for her mom to walk up to the front door of her workplace, having no way of knowing just how she would be received by coworkers who until then had only known her as a he. And Deb’s daughter said she wished so much that she could have somehow realized at the time how hard that moment would be for her mom, and figured out some way to be her ally on that challenging day.
Imagine a world in which all of us are there for the people we care about when they are feeling most vulnerable. Better yet, imagine a world in which there is no place for ridicule or rejection.
Coming Out Day invites us to imagine such a world – and work to bring such a world into being.