Facing the Music

by Jennifer Knapp

  I had hidden away for too long, fought too hard to find peace with my own person to give up by going back to a place that was less than honest. All I have ever wanted is to create a safe space for people to find a pathway to hope. Murrow had at least one point that I began to appreciate. Right or wrong, the Christians that had supported my music career, those who still called themselves fans, wanted to know if I was still the same kind of soul-searching person that they had once known. Now, they were about to find out.

  By the spring of 2010, the loose plan started to take shape. In March, I’d start touring nationally. In April, I’d do some ­interviews during which I specifically discussed my sexuality. Then, in May, we’d release Letting Go. My first record in nearly a decade.

  My first tour back was going to be a three-month stretch with a rabble-rousing, fringe Christian artist named Derek Webb. I wasn’t all that keen on the idea in the beginning. I really wanted to get away from the CCM scene, but Derek insisted that we get together and chat about it over coffee. He emailed me a copy of his latest record, Stockholm Syndrome, and said I should give the idea a chance before I blew him off.

  I didn’t know it, but Derek was getting in some hot water for openly encouraging Christians to rethink their religious bias toward LGBT people. In particular, he wrote a song to none other than Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist infamy to get his point across:

  How could you do this to me

  How could you tell me you love me when you hate me

  Freddie, please

  —Derek Webb, “Freddie, Please,” Stockholm Syndrome

  I found it interesting that Derek didn’t seem to be angling for me to make any confessions. It was unusual for most of my conversations at the time. He didn’t ask me if I were gay. He didn’t ask me to explain how I could call myself a Christian. We just sat down and started talking. We talked about what our experiences had been like in CCM. We talked about music and our faith. But, mostly, he wanted to welcome me back to the life of an artist.

  He encouraged me to remember that many of our fans were cut from the same cloth and that I didn’t need to be afraid to be myself. He wanted me to know that he was a friend who wanted to help me reconnect.

  Derek’s gesture was a genuine invitation unlike any I had received in my career. He was offering his hard-earned platform for me to get back on my feet. We really didn’t know each other that well. He didn’t owe me anything, yet there he was, standing up as a Christian man in Nashville, a known CCM artist, willing to put his reputation on the line to do his part in helping a fellow artist and friend succeed.

  I could hardly believe that a person could do such a thing without ulterior motives. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something bad to happen, or for Derek to pull out. Instead, in the lead-up to the tour, we found ourselves jostling over who was going to open the show. Normally, artists fight to be the closing act, but Derek and I argued that the other should take it.

  I said that I hadn’t done a tour in years and there was no reason for me to close the night. Not only did I fear I lacked the stamina to play a closing set, I worried that audiences would be disappointed if Derek wasn’t treated as the main attraction. I didn’t think I was a strong enough artist to warrant the arrangement. Derek disagreed all the way to sound check of our first show.

  “Yeah,” he said with an easy grin, “I think it’s better that I open.” With that, he finished his sound check and the order was settled. He played his set and I sat in the dressing room chewing at my fingernails, imagining the whole time that the audience was going to walk out after Derek had finished.

  I don’t remember the city of our first show. I just remember the picture of walking out onto the stage, my knees a little wobbly, the stage bright, the room dark. My name was announced and, as usual, the applause started as I walked to the center and put on my guitar.

  When I looked up, I realized that this was no ordinary welcome. The crowd was on their feet, clapping and cheering with electric enthusiasm. I stepped up to the mic to say “Thank you,” to quiet the crowd so that I could start, but the crowd wouldn’t stop. They kept cheering and cheering. Before I could sing a single note, the room had risen to a standing ovation to welcome me back. I tried to quiet them, but they wouldn’t be denied. It went on longer than any applause I can ever remember receiving. I tried several times to get on with things, but still they made me stand there and accept their appreciation.

  Part of me didn’t want such a big deal to be made because, when I finally allowed myself to take in the extraordinary scene, my eyes welled up with tears and my throat tightened to the point that I feared I wouldn’t be able to sing at all. The raucous reception continued until the crowd knew I had fully received it. I had to put my hands over my face to try to keep all the emotions from spilling out.

  After so many years of self-imposed silence, after years of thinking I had no more music to offer nor any good thing to give back to the world, I found myself in a room full of people who seemed to acknowledge that I had returned from a very dark place and survived.

  It was humbling. To receive their support was a privilege and an honor. I was so overwhelmed that they invited me back to do such a seemingly simple, yet life-giving, thing. They asked me to sing. It was the one thing that I feared I might never be given the chance to do again and it was theirs, for the moment, to make possible.

  Though the news of my sexual orientation had yet to be confirmed, it was clear to many that I was not the same artist that had left those years ago. I had done several interviews in which I spoke about why I was moving on from Christian music, and even tried to talk a bit about how my faith was evolving. I could talk about my CCM burnout and my experience with Christian culture with relative ease, but when asked about what my spiritual evolution was exactly, I found myself tongue-tied as to how to respond. It was true, I had stopped going to church entirely (a news item I was careful to omit), but I had never stopped contemplating my spiritual life. The truth was, I had shifted away from the Evangelical Christian theology and practice, but I was terrified to talk about my specific personal views in public. Simply leaving the Evangelical tradition was grounds enough for the Christians who raised me to say I wasn’t Christian anymore. But gay? Everything that I had ever been taught said that was a deal-breaker.

  One might argue that I had lost my religion, but no one could take away my faith. I struggled (and still do) with the language of how to express the inner, holy, transformative experience I had when I decided to follow Jesus. This kind of following is an act of faith that is different from belief. Beliefs are the certainties you’re encouraged to hold about Jesus so that you can stay a voting member in your church (orthodoxy, according to Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith), but faith is the thing that changes the human heart.

  When I saw that Jesus, I wanted to be like Him. Loving. Created. Good. Mindful. Open to the miraculous. Forgiving. Giving. Gracious. Loved. Compassionate. The day that I opened my heart to the invitation to accept, receive, give, and honor those sacred, holy things was the day that my life changed forever.

  How could I ever have imagined how that one spiritual experience could have led me on such an odyssey? I had always tried to follow. I had always tried to listen. Now I was back in America, back on the road, and back on the firing line.

  On stage, I didn’t say much about Christianity. I was happy to play a few of the old songs, but mostly, I needed to get onto the new stuff. By the end of my set, you could feel people leaning in, urging me on to tell my secrets, if I had any, or explain more, but I kept mostly to the music and expressions of gratitude.

  After the show, the pressure of our weighty reunion continued to build. I barely played for an hour on stage, but the conversations with folks after would go on for even longer.

  I listened to story after story of how others had made journeys similar to my own. Many people talked about how they fought
to keep hold of their personal spiritual experiences while others in their church insisted on judging their validity. Some were kicked out because of supposed sin, others for differing theologies, and more than enough just left because they felt like they couldn’t trust their faith community to love them when the going got tough. In all, they were the collective stories of the times when we need hope, faith, and our communities most.

  Some shared stories about how they had moved on from the church after nightmare divorces, others disgruntled by the way those who shared the label Christian simply made them embarrassed to use the term. But the most personally heartbreaking of them all were the countless number of LGBT people who told how revealing their sexual orientation had cost them so dearly.

  Even those who had never had sex, and had only admitted to being same-sex attracted, were getting pushed out of their churches. Singers were getting kicked out of choirs. Teenagers were being ostracized from their youth social groups and Bible studies. In extreme cases, adults and teens alike who sought a so-called God’s correction were subjected to reparative therapies and exorcisms.

  On more than one occasion, I had a young adult share with me how their religious parents told them that it would be better for them to douse themselves in gasoline and light a match than to be gay.

  How can that possibly be okay? What can you say to soothe that kind of suffering except to hold a person in your arms and help them grieve? The only thing I could think to do was wrap my arms around those damaged souls and whisper my own confession, “I know; I get it. I’m gay too.”

  It was a good start, but I wasn’t saying it loudly enough.

  twenty-three

  As crazy and premeditated as it sounds, I had to plan and schedule my coming out. When I returned to the States and to Nashville, there was no question to those around me that I was in a same-sex relationship. It wasn’t a secret so much as it was a question of just how fast the details of my private life were going to spread. There was clearly an expectation that I would come clean, but the question was, how, when, where, and to whom I could tell that story in order to tell it well and accurately.

  So many reporters had expressed their interest in breaking the story to the point that it became unmanageable; so, my manager, publicist, and I decided to pick one gay, one Christian, and one mainstream media outlet for the inevitable exposure.

  In March 2010, I did three interviews, one each with The Advocate, Christianity Today, and Reuters. They all agreed to post at the same time, so that we could attempt to control the chaos that seemed likely to ensue, but my story kept getting pushed back. Meanwhile, the tour with Derek kept moving on, the standing ovations kept coming, and the after-show talks were still heavy with the weight of what I knew I wanted but was not allowed to say. I was on lock-down, unable to openly speak anything of my own truth until the media reported it.

  A whole month went by, and we were now into April. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep my nonsecret from seeming like avoidance. Fortunately, the news was planned to drop that first week, but then pop icon and lust-magnet Ricky Martin came out. Unable to compete with that kind of star power, I got bumped!

  As my young nephew Jarrod once said, “You’re not Lady Gaga famous,” speaking carefully so as not to burst my bubble, “but you are ‘mostly’ known.” (This was his summation after he Googled me and found I had a better-than-average presence in the Internet universe, but was still lacking in true star power.)

  I suppose the good news was that the journalists really wanted to make sure people heard the story enough to wait Ricky out. The bad news was that their hopes of national coverage hinted of the storm that was to come. Apparently, nobody wanted to miss the opportunity to watch the Christians freak out over a so-called sex scandal.

  For several weeks, my story was delayed, and life went on as usual. The tour was going well, but I wondered for how long. Our audiences were strong and enthusiastic about my return, but I knew the majority were Christians. But what kind ? Despite the clandestine conversations and even those who seemed as though they might still accept me, there was no way to know until I spoke my truth plainly.

  I had taken a break from the tour to go camping for my birthday. For two weeks, my publicist kept insisting that the story would land any day now, but I had to stop waiting for the phone to ring and get on with my life. To ease my growing anxiety, I took a weekend to retreat to the quiet outdoors.

  April twelfth, my birthday, was particularly beautiful. Apart from a phone text I got from my mother, the day was quiet enough to imagine that Karen and I were the only two people in the world. Nestled in a narrow valley somewhere in middle Tennessee, I was no one of any importance or consequence. I was just another flower on the hill poised to soak up the sun. The spring nights were still crisp and cool enough to forget that I had this strange alternate life somewhere back in the hustle and bustle. My phone had gone silent and I did nothing but quietly count the minutes as they slipped by.

  The next day was more of the same. I was standing waist deep in the lazy waters of the Caney Fork River, trout fishing when suddenly, my phone began techno-chirping from deep in my pocket.

  I hauled my fly line back to a submissive length and tucked my rod underneath my arm. Bothered by the interruption, I grumbled while I fossicked through the copious supply of vest pockets, certain that when I pulled it out I’d probably learn nothing and drop my iPhone in the river just for the trouble.

  It wasn’t nothing. It was a text from my management: It’s official. You’re out.

  Weird. I swallowed the lump in my throat. Nothing about me had changed, and yet everything felt as though it was about to. I was officially a woman of controversy.

  The river coursed around me. Downstream, a fish mocked me by flopping out of the water. It was Saturday, and all that business was a world away. Whatever lay ahead, it would be Monday before I could see it.

  I put my phone back into my waterproof waders and cast another line. That was that, I thought. Career 2.0 might be over before it even started.

  So, there it was. The door was now open for complete strangers to talk about my sexual preferences. Conservative Christians sounded the alarm. Internet social networks were buzzing, article comments were crashing Web pages, and sermons were being posted on YouTube directed toward me personally about the evils of homosexuality. I ignored most of the Internet junk and asked my friends and family to do the same. It was harder, however, to ignore the lines of communication that were necessary for my work. My Facebook pages, phone lines, email, and even snail mail received hundreds, if not thousands, of responses.

  I got everything from “Burn in hell lesbo!” comments to gay wedding announcements.

  All in all, it wasn’t too bad. Most of the correspondence I received was split neatly down the national average of fifty-fifty in terms of support and disappointment. Unfortunately, almost every negative, ugly letter came from a person who made a point of identifying themselves as Christian. There were a few letters of support from people of faith, but the challenge of affirmation is that it rarely has the volume to compete with the outrage of anger and disappointment.

  The inevitable crush of those concerned with supposed Christian rightness had to be made known. Christian radio stations made it a point to remove my songs from their playlists. Christian bookstore chains deleted me from their search engines. Religious leaders wrote editorial blogs, gave sermons, and encouraged faithful Christians to keep tight to the teaching that homosexuality is a sin.

  The unfortunate thing is that none of it was surprising. I expected it. I had seen others judged, labeled, and discarded by those who claimed to speak for God. I did my best to brace for the impact, but nothing prepares you for the way it actually feels when it happens to you.

  April fifteenth, two days after G Day, Derek and I were back on the road and performing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was excited to be back in the Midwes
t. These were my people, the same kind of folk that I grew up with, not two hours to the north. I had been looking forward to a homecoming of sorts, but I had heard that ticket sales were poor. Even worse, people were calling to cancel their tickets after they confirmed that I was gay. Our show got demoted from a ballroom venue to the smaller spillover bar area, and there was some talk of canceling the show altogether.

  When it came time to do the gig, fewer than fifty people showed up. Derek on his own could draw more people than that, so I was embarrassed that he had to suffer the blow with me. It was clear that it was my fault that nobody dared to come. There were so few people there that it almost seemed silly to turn on the PA. Still, we went ahead as planned and tried to give the best show possible to those who braved the controversy.

  I was grateful to those who came, but it was hard not to feel humiliated. I had traveled a long way, fueled by the encouragement that the gifts I had to offer were of value, and now it looked like being gay was a complete disqualification. I tried to keep my head up, but it was so hard to push back all the negativity that flooded in.

  You’ll be punished for living a life of sin. The inner voices started in.

  God cannot live in a person like you.

  You will lose your voice if you give into homosexuality.

  I tried to fight them but, in that moment, I wept over the fear that maybe it was all true.

  After a few nervous and less than spirited performances, someone from the room asked if I would sing “Martyrs & Thieves.” It was one of the few songs off Kansas that I still felt I had enough Christian integrity to play, but that day I was afraid it was slipping away from me. I didn’t feel worthy enough to sing it. I didn’t want to, but there were only a few people there and it felt rude not to try.