Where There's Hope

by Elizabeth A. Smart

  “We were targeted and raped, my friend and I, just for being lesbians,” says Angeline. “It was at gunpoint, and that was a moment of seeing my life flash before my eyes.”

  This wasn’t an isolated incident. Angeline tells me she’s heard similar stories from four other LGBT women who were lured into the same trap by someone pretending to need help. Sitting in my kitchen with my phone to my ear, I try to process one woman’s inconceivable betrayal of another.

  “How did you move forward from such a horrible experience?” I ask. “You were so young. Could you even process what had happened?”

  “That resulted in a period of just trying to identify what it is that I needed to do. At nineteen, I asked myself a question: What have I done to contribute to society? If I were to die now, could I say that I have done anything for someone else? I processed that question in the months after the attack, realizing there wasn’t really anything I could say. I recognized—as a lesbian and somebody who had experience sexual violence—there wasn’t anywhere to go if something like this happened. Who did we turn to? Who did we go to?”

  It took time for Angeline to work through the physical and emotional impact of the attack. More than anything, she was heartsick that she’d asked her friend to come with her. But in the seven years since that terrible night, Angeline has found her way back to herself and continued her efforts to reach out and help others. She went back to volunteering with the HIV/AIDS community and had the opportunity to go to the 2012 World AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., which is where she heard the term “quality of citizenship for all people” in a meeting with the World Bank.

  “I was very excited about that term,” says Angeline, “because for me, that covered everything. It wasn’t specifically sexual, it wasn’t specifically LGBT.”

  Still in her early twenties, she cofounded a nonprofit organization called Quality of Citizenship Jamaica, which works with and supports lesbian, bisexual, and trans persons in her community.

  I’ll be totally honest here and say that of all the interviews I pursued as I gathered the stories I wanted to share in this book, this conversation with Angeline is the one I’ve been most nervous about. Because I was raised to view homosexuality from a conservative Christian point of view, I’m worried that I’ll say something politically incorrect or ask a question in a way that comes off as disrespectful or unkind. And this is piled on top of the sensitivity required when discussing any experience of sexual assault. I have personally been on the receiving end of questions that are less than thought out, questions that may not come from a cruel intention but are nonetheless blunt, unfeeling, and insensitive. I often find myself inwardly bristling at these questions. Usually, the first things that come to mind are some stinging comebacks, but thank goodness, my brain usually intercedes before my tongue lashes back. Most people don’t mean to be insensitive; they’re just genuinely curious and don’t know how to ask, so they say the first thing that comes to mind.

  As the pause on the telephone lengthens, I struggle not to treat Angeline in the manner I so often find distasteful. How do I ask a question without being tactless? How do I not sound like a racist, homophobic jerk? The harder I try, the more I feel myself stumbling all over the place, trying to find the right wording, and while my mind races, the silence on the line is passing from that acceptable pause phase to the awkward pause phase where almost anything out of my mouth next is going to sound lame. I take a breath and return to that common ground we share. The homebody. The church kid.

  “What was your childhood like?”

  “I grew up in a very service-oriented family,” she says. “I didn’t even process that until I just said it. I just grew up doing service. I was baptized in the church at a very early age, and with that came the responsibility of ministry and doing outreach. That was where my foundation was built. I would go out and do tract distribution with different groups in different neighborhoods around the city.”

  “In high school, when you volunteered with the parish AIDS Association, did your parents know?”

  “They knew about it,” says Angeline. “I think the reason they didn’t react negatively was that my mom also taught at that school, so she knew the teacher who headed the association. My parents didn’t know that, for me, that was a space in which I could find LGBT people. It was about a space in which I could help others, and that was how I told them about it. Volunteering opened my eyes to so much I hadn’t known because of growing up in the country. Having a strict Christian family, things like sexuality and sexual health were not discussed. While volunteering, I was able to learn and then impart my knowledge to other young people. I was happy just being around gay people. The volunteer work was a combination of different things, but all helped me figure out who I was.”

  “I imagine it was very difficult when you told your parents—” I stop myself, not sure if I’m overstepping. “If you don’t want to answer this question—I mean, I want to be completely respectful of you. I don’t want you to feel like I’m—If I ever go too far, please just say you don’t feel comfortable telling me. It’s just … I’m curious about the conflict between how you were raised and who you are now. How did your family react when you came out?”

  “There is a complicated answer to a very simple question,” says Angeline, “because the first time I told my parents anything was when I was thirteen. I was still at St. Hilda’s High, which was the all-girls school, and there were rumors going around church that I liked girls. I wanted to make sure that I was the person who told my mother. I did not want it to come from anybody else. While I was not ready to come out, I already knew how I felt, but I told Mommy just in the matter of saying it to her before she heard through the grapevine at church. Mommy’s reaction was to pray for me. She prayed, and that was the end of that discussion.”

  When Angeline was sixteen, people were threatening to beat her up at school, so her parents moved her to a different high school and sent her to “ex-gay therapy.”

  “The purpose of that,” she says, “was to identify the root cause for why I liked girls and to help me develop a liking for boys, but I stopped very early with that. I told my parents, ‘We’re wasting your money, and we’re wasting my time, and I’m not going back.’”

  “Good for you.”

  “Sometimes in hindsight when I think about all the things I did between thirteen and sixteen, I was really stupid, because it could have gone really wrong. Really badly. But it didn’t. Later on, in my twenties, at one point, I was very low emotionally. I was self-harming, and my doctor had given me Valium, and since I was pumped up on medication, completely devoid of emotion, I decided to go home and speak with them. I thought, I’ve never told my parents the whole story. I can’t judge them, because I haven’t given them the chance. I’m very happy I did it at that point. I was very open with them. At the end of the conversation, my parents said, ‘We love you as our daughter, but the Bible says that homosexuality is a sin.’”

  “Do you still have a relationship with your parents?”

  “I still do. Outside of my being gay, we have a very good relationship. We just don’t talk about it.”

  “Is that hard for you?”

  “It is. It’s very hard, because within the context of Jamaica, and a population of three million, I’m not just a regular everyday gay person. I’m very well known in the LGBT community in Jamaica. I’m very well known among people who are really anti-gay in Jamaica. When President Obama was in Jamaica and mentioned me as a young leader, I know my parents were happy, but it was this conflicted happiness of ‘We’re happy for you, but we can’t be fully happy, because the reason you were mentioned is because you’re gay, and because you’re very public about being gay.’ It’s complicated.”

  “Having gone through everything that you have gone through, there must be times when you feel alone or hurt or lost. Where do you turn to for peace?”

  “In 2009 I wasn’t going to church, and I found this online community, the Ga
y Christian Network. I very much relied on that community in the days and months after the rape. I got a lot more in touch with my faith during that period. That was probably the most Christian or spiritual I’ve ever been. I relied heavily on faith, and I listened to a lot of gospel songs. About a year or two afterwards, I had done a course on reconciling the Bible and homosexuality. It was not something I needed to do for myself personally, but it was something I wanted to do so that I would have the knowledge to be able to respond to my dad or some other religious person who tried to pick an argument with me. After that, I went through a period of agnosticism. I really didn’t rely on much of anything at that time. I’ve never been a person to cope very well with downtime, and especially at that moment, I made sure to be very, very active, very involved with school, involved in volunteer work, just very invested in anything else that made sure that I did not have downtime. I was on a panel at Founders Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, and let’s put it this way: I don’t think God uses relationships to get people back to God, but in this case, I think there was an exception to that rule, because that’s where I met my partner. That was my first time dating somebody who was exactly my age. Somebody who wanted to be a pastor. I had never heard that from anybody before. A lesbian who wanted to be a pastor! It was there, with her, that communication. I really started to get back in that space of spirituality.”

  That space, I realize, is the true common ground Angeline and I share. I know how it feels to be torn apart, lost, and confused—at some point or another most of us do. Difficult times befall us all, and unfortunately, they don’t disappear immediately. While we’re going through difficulties and challenges, it’s not uncommon to lose ourselves. And it may sound too simple to be true, but I think love for others is how we find ourselves again. When we start giving back to society, serving others, and doing good deeds and acts of kindness, we are changed during the process. We find our better selves through love for those around us, a love of reaching out and working for a cause throughout humanity.

  It’s easier said than done. The pitfalls along this path include overwhelming grief and anger we are unable to accept, feel, and then let go. Shutting ourselves off from the world and those who love us seems like a sturdy self-defense mechanism, because sometimes the people close to us have the leverage to hurt us the most.

  Shortly after I was rescued, because of the massive amount of publicity surrounding my story, there were many people scrambling to write books and make movies about what had happened to me—and these things were happening without my approval. As a fifteen-year-old who just desperately wanted to get back to a normal life, I became very angry. How dare anyone try to write about something they didn’t have the slightest clue about? What right did they have to say anything about this horrible, humiliating thing that had been done to me—much less cash in on it? And worst of all, one of the many people threatening to come out with a publication was my uncle. I was very hurt and felt betrayed. This wasn’t an uncle who was far away and unknown to me. He was someone I’d gone horseback riding with many times, someone I admired and wanted to be like. He seemed to know everyone and had done so much, always going on adventures for work or with his family, an absolute cowboy up in the saddle, and more important, I had always considered him a friend. How could this be fair? I had just lost nine months of my life, and then I came back only to feel betrayed by my own family.

  Despite my objections and my parent’s objections, he went ahead with the project. He published a book about what had happened, even though I had begged him not to. I did receive a copy of his book, and as I started reading it, I became angrier and angrier. I finally ripped up parts of the book, because I couldn’t stand what had been written. I’m not a violent person, and I had never ripped apart a book before and haven’t since, but I couldn’t stand it. Unfortunately, the real damage that this book caused was within the family. My family became divided. Some of my aunts and uncles sided with us; some did not. We went about a year avoiding family get-togethers and speaking to each other as little as possible. That was tragic, because I always thought that what made my family so special and unique was how much we all cared about each other and how close we stayed, supporting each other no matter what. It seemed as if all of that had been destroyed almost instantly.

  My dad was the one who, for my side of the family, bridged the gap. He took me aside and told me that no matter what had happened, he still loved everyone; he was hurt by what they had done, but they were still his brothers and sisters.

  “If something were to happen tomorrow or next year,” he said, “I don’t want to be the one wishing I had made amends.”

  I realized he was right. I missed my family. My love for them was bigger than my anger and disappointment. We started coming back to family parties and reunions. I was surprised at how easy it was to forget about everything with everyone—well, almost everyone. Everyone except my one uncle. I was still harboring some harsh feelings toward him. But at the end of the next summer, I finally found myself alone with my uncle at my grandparents’ ranch. I decided I should take the opportunity to express my feelings and unburden myself of the negative baggage I’d been carrying around because of him. I took my chance, and it was not easy. I’m not a very confrontational person, even if I feel I’m in the right. But I found the strength to speak up for myself. I told him how he had hurt me and asked him how he could have done that. He has three daughters of his own and would not hesitate to rip into anyone who hurt them, yet he could do what he did to me? Tears began running down his face. He apologized and offered to give me the money, but I wanted nothing to do with that. It was too late to undo what had been done. There was nothing else he could do but ask for my forgiveness.

  I knew I was at a crossroads. I had to make a decision: continue on and let all of this go, or hold on to my anger at his betrayal, the repulsive words I had read, and the cover of the book, which still conjures images of shredded paper in my mind. I knew which choice was the right one to make, but it was hard. I told him I was speaking to him because I was forgiving him, but I wanted him to know how much he had hurt me, and I made it clear that our relationship wasn’t just going to go back to what it once was.

  That was over a decade ago. My uncle and I have moved on since that point. We still go horseback riding together and chat at family get-togethers. The past is not spoken of anymore, and I don’t dwell on it. I am so grateful for a dad who isn’t afraid to show his daughter what it means to forgive someone you love and still love them. I value and love my uncle. And it has been through love that our relationship was healed.

  It crosses my mind to share this story with Angeline. It feels a bit like another acre of common ground. But this is about her, so I ask, “When you look back on it all—on the people who’ve hurt you—do you ever struggle with grief or anger?”

  “Grief, not anger. I’ve definitely felt anger. Different instances have caused different measures of anger, but I’ve definitely felt grief in the sense of sexual violence. I felt grief for myself, but I felt more grief and guilt regarding my friend, who has never spoken out, who has never sought medical resources for what she experienced—somebody who came to give me support. I feel very guilty about what she experienced. I’ve had to just be present and be a friend, continuously checking in, finding out how she’s doing, calling. That’s what I’ve been able to do while learning to not have guilt about what had happened.”

  “And what about your family?”

  “I definitely have had grief as it related to my family and my family’s difficulty in accepting me. It’s an anticipatory grief right now. How are they going to respond when I introduce them to the person who is in my life? What are they going to do when I get married? What are they going to do when I have kids? At the same time, I think there is hope, so where the grief is very present, I’m still young enough that I will say, ‘Hold on to that hope.’ I think especially with gay people, hope is what we all do. We hope that, at some p
oint, the people who mean the most to us will be able to accept, to understand, and to love us.”

  “Have you forgiven the people who’ve hurt you in your life? And if so, how?”

  “Wow,” Angeline says. “I never even considered that question. Being able to see other stories and learn why people do some of the things they do—as silly or as stupid as they might seem from my end—I’m able to sometimes look from the perspective of the other person. That has made it more likely to be able to forgive. I’ve forgiven the stepbrother. I’ve forgiven the man who had the gun. I’ve forgiven the woman. How, I don’t know.”

  I don’t know either. In fact, I find it shocking when Angeline says she has forgiven the woman who set up the rape. That part of the story is almost worse for me than the actual rape, knowing that a fellow woman targeted Angeline and her friend—two people who were willing to go down a dark street in order to help her, only to be raped just because this woman didn’t agree with their sexual orientation. There is never any excuse that could possibly make rape the right thing to do. It doesn’t matter what you believe, your political views, your personal standards, or your religion—nothing could ever give one person the right to sexually violate another person. I’m still upset by Angeline’s story.

  “I can’t believe it was a woman who set it up,” I tell her. “That makes me so angry.”

  Angeline calmly responds, “I have in some ways moved past the situation, but I don’t 100 percent forgive her. She messaged me just the other day, asking for my phone number to speak with me, and I said, ‘You know what? Let’s just keep our conversation here on Facebook, because in all honesty, I don’t want to give you my number.’ I really do not know how I have managed that forgiveness, because of all the different hurts, that is the biggest. At the same time, it’s also been the catalyst for my change and who I have become. If I could repeat history—I don’t know—people usually say, ‘If you could go back, would you change this?’ I don’t know, because then I wouldn’t be who I am. I wouldn’t have had the experiences I’ve had. I wouldn’t have my partner. But for the sake of my friend who was raped, I would give anything to change that.”