Facing the Music

by Jennifer Knapp

  There are ghosts from my past who’ve owned more of my soul

  Than I thought I had given away

  They linger in closets and under my bed and in pictures less proudly displayed

  A great fool in my life I have been, have squandered ’til pallid and thin

  Hung my head in shame and refused to take blame for the darkness I know I’ve let win

  My voice cracked as the tears rolled down my face. Really, I was only able to sing intermittently. A few kind souls in the audience sang along to fill in what I was unable to sing. I don’t remember if I managed to actually finish it. I just played and let myself remember the days when I wrote it. Alone, in my bedroom, back in Pittsburg, praying for a new lease on life. It was my prayer then and it was again. I couldn’t hide it. Everyone in the room knew why I was crying. I had been shunned.

  After the show, a few of the people that came wrapped their arms around me and gave me the warmest, most genuine hugs. For the first time, we talked openly about the cost of being gay in a Christian setting. No one whispered. That night they shared the sorrow of the loss with me. Derek stood up straight next to me that night, the same as every night before. Together, their compassion got me through the pain of getting punched on an old wound. I let my heart dare me to lead me with the music. I volunteered to be exposed. Why? Was it worth it? I wondered if the pain of it was a sign that I’d truly shared something meaningful, or if coming back had just been a mistake.

  It was hard to push back thoughts of giving in and giving up. It wasn’t that people stopped liking my music; it was personal now. They didn’t like me anymore. I was being rejected for things about myself I could not change.

  The most devastating rejection that I would experience would come in the form of a package sent to my fan-mail box. I was getting a steady stream of encouraging letters to accompany the ones that expressed disappointment in my character. Most of the sad stuff came in the form of letters, while the larger packages I received usually turned out to be interesting welcome-back gifts like books, art, or music. One day, a puffy package had arrived, labeled with what seemed the girly-scrawl of a young teenager, whom for the sake of anonymity, I’ll call “Julie.”

  I tore it open in anticipation of something wonderful.

  Inside were several of my CDs. The jewel cases were well-worn, the shiny-silver playing surface of the discs scratched from a decade of listening. I had assumed that Julie sent them so that I would sign and return them but, as I read through the accompanying letter, it became clear that she wanted nothing of the kind.

  Julie went on to explain how I had completely destroyed her enjoyment of the music that she once held so dear, and that she wanted nothing to do with my music any more. She only listened to Christian music made by Christian people. Since I was gay, she explained, it was obvious that I was not a Christian. According to Julie, and the many others who were now letting me have it, no one can be gay and Christian.

  She sent the records back because she no longer wanted them and she didn’t want anyone else to hear them either. She could have just thrown the music away or quietly moved on. Instead she needed to make a point. She wanted me to know how disappointed she was that I failed to be the Christian she imagined I had promised to be.

  It worked.

  I was crushed, heartbroken, and angry all at the same time. I wanted to give into the physics of anger and scream over the hurt of rejection. I wanted to hide my face and quit. I wanted to drive to Julie’s house (after all, I had her return address) and ask her where the hell she thought she got off judging me? When anger would give way to tears, I found peace in absorbing her blows. I wanted to wrap my arms around her, hoping to be a friend when she needed one most. I shuddered when it hit me that she might be having an experience in her own life when she didn’t feel accepted and loved for who she truly was. I didn’t have any answers, but I knew what it was like to be unwanted.

  Through both the anger and the pain, all I could think of was divorcing myself from Christian culture. I didn’t want to live with people who insisted that I was a failure. Rather than being the community that reflected the compassion that I had experienced in Christ’s Christianity, it had transformed into the one place where I felt most unsafe and unwanted. Christianity had turned into the place where my faith, my loves, and my personal experiences were constantly being assessed and judged instead of being nurtured.

  Julie’s act touched on the one secret that I still carried in my heart. In public, I could still claim to be a person of faith, because it was true. I was. Yet I still feared that Julie was right in that I no longer had the right to describe my spiritual experience as Christian.

  Like so many other Christians of my time, I couldn’t see how to describe my faith as Christian without attaching so many of the beliefs that were demanded by the church and my peers in Evangelical culture. A Christian had always been described to me as a person of belief, and that the measure of one’s faith was evidenced by the ability to believe in the unbelievable.

  For every fact I failed to swallow whole, for every doubt and question I had about the story and theologies that had been handed down to me, I could not, for the life of me, go without exploring for myself. I followed because, at times, my struggle was with unbelief.

  I don’t know that what I believed about Jesus had actually changed as much as my willingness to confess that I had no idea how to believe any more. I could no longer tick the box that said Christian without feeling as though I had failed the test of my religious experience. I wasn’t willing to relinquish my spiritual experience with Christ. My life had been transformed by faith, and Christianity was my native tongue. The Julies could try, but there was no sending it back or erasing it, even if I found myself in a new struggle of explaining my experience to others in a way that they might understand.

  INSIDE OF TEN days of my national coming out, a very public, fever-pitch debate about the legitimacy of gay Christians had brewed into a big enough storm that CNN’s Larry King Live decided to use my life as the lightning rod.

  When I agreed to the taping, I did so naively thinking that I was simply to be extending the narrative of my own journey. I anticipated that my faith would be a portion of the conversation, but hardly the headline. I was still underestimating how offensive homosexuality can be to the core beliefs held by many conservative Christians.

  As counterpoint to my story, CNN invited a Southern Californian Evangelical pastor, Bob Botsford, to represent the conservative Christian voice. Pastor Bob held the predictable line that deemed homosexuality a poor “lifestyle choice.” He cited scripture after scripture as evidence, finite and complete for his side of the argument, but I had nothing more than my own lived experience. I had no smart retort or Biblical reference to justify my being gay; I just was. When called to answer Pastor Bob’s assertion that I couldn’t be gay and Christian, all I had to offer was the simple request to be respected as a human being.

  “I am comfortable with the parts of me that you don’t understand,” was all I could manage. The simplicity of it seemed too mundane to be sufficient a defense against Pastor Bob’s arguments to the Godly order of things. What more could I do but ask to be acknowledged for being present and accepted for who I was and not judged to be less than a credible human being, regardless of my sexual preference?

  The question of so-called homosexual choice made its expected appearance, and I found myself floundering to answer the age-old quandary. I’m attracted to a woman—what else is there to say? I just knew I was gay.

  Pastor Bob insisted that being gay was a choice, but Larry posed the obvious question I had never thought to ask.

  “How did you know you liked women?” Larry asked, catching him off guard. “How did you know you didn’t like boys . . . romantically?” Of course the query was meant to unsettle him but, at the same time, Pastor Bob might have done well to understand this was just the
same kind of implied insult that I and gay people everywhere experience almost daily.

  Bob stammered and fidgeted, unable to find the words that helped him describe his own sexual awareness without a Biblical quote, the same as I had. It’s not easy, but sometimes the answer is as simple as considering your own experience.

  The conversation deteriorated for Bob from there. All he could say was that was the way God made everyone and then he said it . . . the worst and most tired cliché of them all: “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” His hands started to shake and his face went pale. He had been rigid and proud before, but now he seemed to have lost his zeal.

  It wasn’t surprising that Bob couldn’t describe his assurance of his sexual orientation. He’d never truly been asked to explain his attractions before that moment. One could argue that he was safe, because he never had to defend his straight sexual orientation to a greater majority.

  Under the hot lights and on national television was hardly the place to expect him to reach any epiphany. I had had seven years to formulate my own convincing defense of sexual orientation, and still needed Ted Haggard and Larry King to come rescue me.

  We ended in an impasse, as these so-called public debates often do. Pastor Bob had done little more than make it clear that his church was for straight people, and that I was only welcome if I repented. Behind the scenes, Bob kept insisting that he and the two beefy strong men he brought with him were only there because they loved me. He let me know that he was praying for my life to have peace.

  To my surprise, I was finding that I was actually feeling more peaceful, but probably not in the way that he had imagined. I ­actually found that the anger I had toward his theology was easing and, instead, was just feeling sorry for him. He really was a nice guy and I truly think he meant well, but his choice to be ­religious had usurped his heart. It was like he’d never actually met a gay person who wasn’t broken to pieces by being gay. It didn’t make sense in his world because all he had ever experienced were gay people who disappeared from his church. After what I had seen, it was no surprise that he had probably never seen any come back. I was the same—unable to walk back into his world because I wasn’t able to be who he wanted me to be. Yet, here I was, somewhere out in the margins, still holding on.

  “Bob, I didn’t lose my faith when I realized I was gay, but it took a lot of faith to tell the truth. All I ask is that you be the kind of guy who gives me the space to sort it all out safely,” I said. Maybe no one had ever asked him that before, to step back and agree to disagree. Maybe he’d never been in a place in which he was outnumbered and left feeling alienated.

  Only he has the right to tell his story, as I have the right to tell mine. Who knows what his takeaway was, but mine was one of feeling uninvited to his party. I didn’t want him to feel the same. I invited him to come to my show later that night. I told him I would put him on the guest list so that he could come see and hear for himself the kids who were showing up at my concerts battered by the so-called love he was offering.

  “Please know that you are welcome to come. Stand beside me and listen. There are a lot of gay people who still share the same faith that you have. Maybe you would like to meet and hear from some of them?”

  He never came.

  twenty-four

  It was disappointing that Pastor Bob couldn’t show his intended love for me in a way that would have really made a personal impact. He could have met me in a place where I lived and prospered. He could have listened and opened himself up to an invitation to see the world where music was cultivating hope in my life and in the lives of others. I could have talked until I was blue in the face about how I was the same person as I ever was, even though he now knew I was gay, but nothing replaces showing up and seeing for oneself what is actually happening. Instead, we parted ways, and haven’t spoken since.

  I can’t sit here and judge only him, though. I had been just as complicit in the segregation between my old life and the new. Despite the fact that there were many churches asking me to play, I couldn’t see a way to feel safe there anymore. Christian fundamentalism had left me so fragile and defensive that the last place I wanted to be was in a position to have to explain, justify, or exonerate my faith to a crowd of witnesses.

  I couldn’t play every Christian song I had ever written, but I had reclaimed a few. If people wanted to hear them, I insisted, it would have to be in bars, theaters, and coffeehouses, but there was no way I could walk into a church. It didn’t matter that there were many faith communities that called me, wanting to show their support by gladly offering me a place to play. I continued to deny their invitations, embarrassed that I couldn’t share my faith the way I once had.

  I answered every Christian’s request for a concert with as gracious and honest a reply as I had: “I’m sorry, but I’m not playing churches anymore.” I needed a break from the public pressure to explain my faith and orientation. Really, I just wanted to focus on my music career. “Thank you for the appreciation and support. Truly. I hope you’ll come out and join me on the road!”

  The thing that I didn’t yet comprehend was the fact that there were some churches that simply wanted to be a part of helping me get back on my feet. They were aware of how hard it was for an LGBT person to come out in this world, never mind the devastating experience that so many have had when religion was in play.

  Despite many requests from faith communities that hoped for a full evolution of my return, I continued to resist. Beyond the solidarity of coming out, I felt I had nothing left to offer the church.

  It was easy to take part in the kinds of conversations that I had at my shows outside the church walls. Outside the earshot of those who saw fit to correct every misstep and doubt, I found many people who were just as bewildered, yet eager, to process their own spiritual journeys. So, why was I so adamant that it wasn’t possible for me to do the same in churches that were inviting me to bring that conversation to their neighborhoods? I began to wonder if I was rejecting genuine gifts of hospitality when churches asked me to come and play. Perhaps I was limiting the potential of LGBT faith by failing to offer some portion of my own experience to those who asked me to share it?

  Part of what changed my willingness to engage was an encounter I had with Pastor Mark Tidd of Highlands Church in Denver.

  Highlands was preparing to host a small local conference bluntly called “The Church and Homosexuality,” and they were calling in speakers capable of adding to the conversation. Initially, I turned up my nose at the idea that I had anything to contribute. I was well on my way to severing what few remaining ties I had with organized religion, and was looking forward to the peace and quiet of less religious rhetoric in my life.

  As, usual, I fobbed off their requests on my management team, reiterating my lack of interest in playing any music inside the church. The last thing I wanted to be was the subject of another unresolvable public debate over Scripture, outdated church traditions, and theology. Enough eloquent, biblically examined cases have been made by scholars and clergy alike that suggest homosexuality is neither sickness nor sin. I’d read so many books on both sides of the aisle only to be left feeling as though my lesbian arms had spread between the two and my life was being used as a tug-of-war rope.

  I couldn’t see how yet another debate was going to break the impasse enough to heal the wounds that I or any of my LGBT friends carried. The assumption that Tidd and his church wanted to wade through the quagmire was less than appealing.

  Pastor Tidd was insistent though, and kept calling. After several emails and phone calls to my camp, it was clear that Highlands wasn’t going to go away. I decided to speak with Mark directly, hoping to appeal to his pastoral side. Perhaps after a personal conversation, he could hear my voice and understand I wasn’t the person that he was looking for any more than he or his church was what I was interested in.

  We ended up chatting for over an
hour. I listened as Mark shared with me the background of how Highlands came to be. How along the way he had personally experienced revocation of his ordination by openly supporting his LGBT members. How he and his church were rebuilding after they theologically came out, having lost the support of their parent denomination and funding. He spoke of how his own journey and the lives of the people in his community had been hurt through adverse judgments and theologies that sought to separate LGBT people and their allies from spiritual community. It wasn’t that Highlands was a gay church, though there are many members who happen to be.

  “These guys are serious about their faith,” Mark explained. “We just want to be a place where everyone knows they are welcome to be who they are.” The fact that sexual orientation was a recurring theme among the damaged Christians walking into Highlands encouraged Mark to want to listen more and speak less.

  Pastor Tidd seemed to express a desire to be a part of a community that helped people discover the joys of a spiritual life and all that comes with it, rather than be the enforcer of by-the-Book Christianity, if there is such a thing.

  Mark asked me if I was willing to share a picture of the journey I had experienced in my life. He released me from any obligation to have a neat and tidy explanation of where I stood. He didn’t ask me to define my faith, instead he asked me to tell the real story of the adventure. In fact, what he hoped I would be brave enough to share was the doubt and the insecurities—the unpolished truth of my Christian experience.

  “What has that been like for you? Tell me in your words. If you come, I’ll take responsibility for making a safe place for you to tell it. You don’t have to be a Christian if you’re not there anymore. You can be angry, cuss, cry—it doesn’t matter. Just tell it like it is,” Mark offered, “I hope it can be a gift for you to share what you’ve been through.” He hoped that maybe, in doing so, we’d all find the ways in which we relate and could share our faith rather than argue about how we are different or who was right.