by Joel Derfner
“But how long is that going to last?”
“We’ll see.” I wasn’t sure I felt comfortable with where I thought this was heading.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “You’re smart, you’re personable, and I think you deserve more.” You left out cute, I thought petulantly. “My skin may want a man,” he said, “but inside I just want total intimacy.” The two propositions are not mutually exclusive! I wanted to scream at him. “I want everything for you, great relationships with men and women. When you say those words, my boyfriend—well, it just…it doesn’t fit.” Disappointment bloomed in me. I was going to rescue him, I thought, and instead he’s trying to rescue me. But neither one of us was interested in being rescued.
In the car on the way back to the conference center, Rob asked Louis, “How do you see yourself as a man?” Louis looked perplexed. “I mean,” Rob explained, “are there ways in which you see yourself as not measuring up to what you think of as a man?”
“My career,” Louis said. “I missed the boat by not going to college, and now it’s too late. I only became a hairdresser because my wife was one. And she was better than me. We got divorced a couple years ago and it was horrible. I’m selling my condo at a loss to meet the settlement terms. All those messages I was checking earlier were from my realtor.”
Somehow he had begun to seem less annoying.
After Rob parked, Louis and I walked back together to our rooms. “I wanted to jump into the river,” he said suddenly. “But I had an accident when I was a kid and almost drowned. Ever since then I’ve been scared of the water.”
“We would have saved you,” I said.
“I heard somebody drowned in that river three days ago. Not unless you’d all ranged yourselves across the river to catch me. I could have done it then.”
“Next time,” I promised him fiercely, wondering whether he would ever be in a position to take this chance again, and hating God for allowing life to lacerate a person so.
Later that night I saw hot Jon talking to very very handsome Matt. They were discussing gym regimens. “The conference has been hard for me,” said very very handsome Matt. “My head has been full of defiling thoughts, and I’ve had a hard heart.”
Realization hit me in the face like a mud patty: It was Matt to whom Jon was attracted, not me. It was Matt who triggered him. It was Matt he had told his wife about and sought out and talked to for a long time.
I instantly lost the remaining shred of interest I had in Jon and went to the ice-cream parlor, where I was propositioned by a sizzling ex-gay standing in front of me in line. (“What would you do if you had the chance to take somebody back to your room?” he asked me, staring me in the eyes as he licked his butter pecan ice cream. I did not take him up on his offer. My boyfriend fucking owes me.)
Everybody at the conference seemed to take as a given that homosexuality is spiritually and physically harmful both to those who practice it and to those around them. “If I go back just once, I could get AIDS,” Vito had said.
What about a CONDOM? I had wanted to shriek. What about SAFE SEX? What about THE FACT THAT STRAIGHT PEOPLE CAN GET HIV? When I got back from the conference I figured I might as well check my facts. International data on transmission mechanisms turned out to be appallingly sparse, but in every report I could find the majority of HIV infections were linked to something other than gay sex. If AIDS is a punishment, I wanted to ask—very few people came out and said this but it was implied in every discussion of HIV—then why are you here instead of starting a conference to help black women in southern Africa turn white and move to Newark?
Another assumption at the conference, voiced more frequently than the AIDS-as-punishment idea but never examined closely, was that gay couples are incapable of monogamy. I researched this too when I got back to New York, and though different studies gave numbers all over the place, the ones that seemed most methodologically sound suggested that about a third of gay couples choose to have open relationships, a third pledge monogamy but one partner or the other cheats, and a third pledge monogamy and stick to it. This means that, of gay couples claiming to be monogamous (two-thirds of all gay couples), half of them actually are.
Which, surprise surprise, is the same figure suggested by studies of straight married couples.
“But aren’t all gay couples non-monogamous?” Louis asked me at one point. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“No,” I said, exasperated. “A lot of couples I know aren’t monogamous, but a lot of them are.” It was obvious he didn’t believe me. “Look,” I said crossly, “I’ll make a list.” I pulled out my notebook to make a table of gay couples I knew and whether they were monogamous or not. Since I write musicals and everyone I know is gay, this should have been easy, but under pressure I was unable to think of more than five homosexuals personally known to me. In the end I just made up couples and monogamy statuses. My fake list looked like this:
John & Michael
Y
Stephen & Michael
N
Robert & Aaron
Y
Jay & Jeff
Y
Tim & Whatshisname
N
Keith & Jim
N
Daniel & Joey
Y
Christopher & Bill
N
James & Jon
N
Michael & Toby
Y
Kenny & Tom
Y
“See?” I said, showing Louis the list. “Out of eleven couples, seven say they’re monogamous, which means that statistically three or four of them are.” I do not know a Keith & Jim or a Michael & Toby or, in fact, most of the couples on this list. When in the quiet of my room I calmed down enough to remember gay couples I knew and with whom I had talked about monogamy, I found that my numbers had been pretty much on the mark.
“I’m sad to leave,” said Rob as I peppered my chicken fingers during lunch on the last day of the conference. I was relieved to be eating, as I had just attended a workshop at which a woman in her sixties had suggested to a roomful of men that when we felt the urge to masturbate we could keep ourselves from doing so by singing “There’s Power in the Blood,” which I happened to know was a particularly gruesome Baptist hymn. “It’s impossible to abuse yourself,” she had said, “when you’re singing about the power of Jesus.” My mind had filled instantly with a picture of gay men all over America jacking off while singing “There’s Power in the Blood,” and since then I had felt somewhat light-headed.
“This isn’t the real world,” Rob continued. “A lot of guys don’t have people at home who know they’re struggling, and this is the one place they can be honest about who they are. A lot of guys get rejected by their churches if they’re truthful. People who say they’re Christians can really be hypocrites. They go to church just like they’re supposed to and put on a mask, but then the rest of the week they go and do everything everybody else does who isn’t Christian.”
I was so horrified by the idea that this was as open as the ex-gays got that I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Then Louis came over and asked if he could join us; I wanted to throw my chocolate milk in his face—how could Rob fall in love with me if he never got to spend any time alone with me?—but instead I nodded and said sure.
The conference had been wonderful, said Louis sadly, and he didn’t want to go home the next day. “I feel like I’m just at the beginning of my pain. That means I’m also at the beginning of showing God my pain, but that doesn’t make it easy.” His ex-wife had turned his church against him, he said, and the next church he joined had expelled him for getting divorced. Now he went to yet another church, where a few people knew he was struggling.
“I just have so little confidence in myself,” said Louis.
Rob assured him that we all have problems with self-confidence. “I feel like less of a man,” he said, “around guys who talk about changing engines or hunting or the ball game. Whe
n I was little I was just like that guy in Monty Python who says, I just want to sing! I just wanted to dance. I took three years of lessons. Jazz, tap, ballet. But I stopped because my dad said dancing was for sissies. Now I wish I’d kept it up.”
“Show us some moves!” I said.
He smiled. “That was a long time ago.”
Louis was gazing at Rob, haunted, his eyes hollow, his cheeks sunken. He couldn’t be devoid of hope; otherwise he wouldn’t be here. But I had never seen anybody who seemed to believe less that his life would get any better. I wanted to cry. “Are you ever attracted to women?” he asked Rob suddenly.
“I wish I were,” Rob said, “but I’m not. And I’m thirty-eight. Getting from where I am now to married with children seems like a really long journey.”
“But God will do it in His own time,” said Louis, “if you trust Him. He can do it in a day.” He went on to talk about how sex with a woman was beautiful. “But I wish I had hotter chemistry with women,” he said. “To get aroused with a woman I need her to rub my back, massage my shoulders, stuff like that. Although when I initiate things it’s easier for me to get aroused.”
Rob turned to me. “How’s sex with your boyfriend?”
I almost choked on my chocolate milk. “It’s actually really good,” I said once I had recovered my composure. “We fit together really well. I’m not sure if I should say this while we’re eating, but—oh, I’ll just go ahead. When we have sex I’m generally the receptive one, and he’s the penetrative one, and—”
“Is that, um, a top?”
I laughed. “Yes, that’s a top. Top and bottom.”
“I just learned those words two days ago,” Rob said proudly.
“I learned them a couple months ago, off the Internet,” said Louis.
“I don’t understand you,” Rob said to me, and went on, mercifully releasing me from the obligation to wax lyrical about the joys of coitus with Mike in between bites of chicken fingers. “What I can’t wrap my little limited mind around is: I came here last year, and I had wrestled for months and months and had all kinds of conversations with all kinds of people. It was a big deal for me to come. You, you’re Jewish, you haven’t thought about any of this before, you’re in the lifestyle, you’re staying in the lifestyle. I don’t get it. Why did you come here?”
I was standing on treacherous ground. I stammered, “I, I, I think that, uh, that some of the things you’re, um, talking about actually make it…um…easier for me rather than harder. I knew this was a Christian organization and that there would be a lot of stuff that just didn’t make sense for me. So that took the pressure off. Also, um, I’ve had a good experience with the gay lifestyle, so, uh, so I didn’t have the sense that what I was coming to had to work, or else.”
Rob could see as clearly as I could that this made no sense. “Yeah, but it’s expensive to come here. You could have just read an article.”
“I did,” I choked out, “but I wanted to see it for real, come and understand what this is about.”
“What what is about?” asked Rob, frustrated.
This was getting worse and worse. I changed the subject slightly, hoping he wouldn’t notice, and offered something about being dissatisfied with my own behavior and finding the testimonies really inspiring and—
“I feel like I can’t give a testimony,” said Louis. I could have kissed him for rescuing me. “I’ve made so little progress on the journey out of homosexuality.” Rob said he felt the same way, and Louis looked at him strangely. “But your testimony would bless so many people.”
“Why?”
“Because of the way you look,” said Louis, coming as close as he could to “because you’re totally hot.”
“But you’re here at an Exodus conference,” said Rob. “You’ve gotten somewhere. I haven’t had any huge victories either. But it’s the direction that’s important.”
The nap into which I fell immediately upon returning to my room proved afterward to be a mistake, since I always wake up from naps depressed. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and started watching the first episode of season two of The West Wing (which I had also brought with me, in case the eighties clothing in The Twilight Zone got to be too much) and when I saw that it was Josh who had been shot in the first season finale I burst into uncontrollable sobs. Who the fuck did I think I was? What gave me the right to stop asking questions and pretend to find my own answers? I had come to care about these people more than I had imagined possible, and what ruinous things had I said to them? How dared I?
I called Mike, barely intelligible through my tears. “I came here as a jo-o-oke,” I wailed. “And I’m doing it. I’m playing a joke with these people’s souls.” My breath heaved. “What kind of da-a-a-amage am I doing to them?”
“People are resilient,” Mike said. “You can’t do that much damage in four days.”
“I, I, I can’t?” Snot dripped from my nose.
“No,” he said. “And you also can’t save them in four days.”
“But I can try!”
“No.”
I sniffled and wished that what he’d just said weren’t true.
We kept talking and I gradually calmed down. “I was worried this would happen,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. “Did you predict this?”
“No,” he said. “I thought it would go the other way—that they would be really negative and you would feel alienated. But this is worse, because the negative energy is self-directed, and you’re empathizing with them.”
After we hung up I realized that I could have come to the Exodus conference and been completely honest with the people I met. “I’m gay,” I could have said, “and I’m here because I don’t see why anybody would want to change, or even think it’s possible, and I just want to understand more.” And they would have welcomed me with open arms.
I felt as if I were in a teen movie, the photographic negative of the kind in which the guy pretends to be gay to get close to the girl, and does get close to the girl, but then has to confess to her that he’s actually straight. In the movies, this confession always goes over very well, and they end up together.
In real life things might be a bit more complicated.
As Rob, Louis, and I entered the auditorium for the final evening session, the man onstage was saying, “God, I believe there’s at least one person in this room whose heart is still hard. And I pray that You would soften it.” Already done, I thought ruefully.
“Here,” said Rob, handing me a plastic bag. “We got this for you.” Inside was a DVD of The Ballad of Little Joe, an animated Veggie Tales version of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, with vegetables, as a Western ( Joseph was a cucumber and the brothers were green peas); there was also a pack of Veggie Tales cards.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling deeply moved and hating myself and wanting Rob to bend me over the pew and take me, all at the same time.
The evening’s testimony and service were exactly like all the other testimonies and services. At the end, I went up toward the front to ask the prayer team for help. I felt foul, and I wanted to be pardoned before I left. This time I didn’t run away. When my turn came I was led to a short, stout older woman in a floral-print dress. “Thank you,” I said, and grabbed her hand and started crying. I told her my name and she said, “Thank you for you, Joel. God, I pray that You let Joel know there is an army of angels protecting him, and he doesn’t have to do this alone.” I wished more than anything that I could believe this.
On my way up the aisle I had expected to be filled with the urge to confess and to beg forgiveness for what I was doing, but instead as she continued to pray she just made me feel nice.
As I came back to my seat in between Rob and Louis, the man onstage said, “I pray that those who are frozen with fear would get the strength to come up to the front and pray.” I felt that Louis, who had not moved a muscle, might be among the frozen. He was leaving tomorrow, to go back to a life in which he had to deal with his ex-
wife and his career dissatisfaction and his bad hair, with selling his condo at a loss, with not knowing anybody like him. The bond these people felt with one another may have been dysfunctional, but they were part of a community all the same, and that community was about to be rent asunder. I put my hand on Louis’s neck and kept it there. He started crying, or maybe he’d already been crying and he was just more obvious about it now. After a while Rob put his head down in his arms. I couldn’t tell whether he was crying or not. I put my hand on his back and held it there. I asked whatever forces there might be in the universe to have mercy on the three of us, and on everybody in the room. If there’s any way for my goodwill to help these two men, I thought, then let it help them.
At the airport the next morning, after Rob helped me take my bags out of the trunk of his car, he reached to shake my hand; I wouldn’t have it, and I hugged him, an awkward gesture given that he was a foot taller than me. “You grabbed a piece of my heart this week,” he said. “I can’t promise I’ll keep in touch, but I can promise I’ll be thinking about you.” Anything I said in this moment would have been a Gordian tangle of truth and deceit, and I wanted to be able to remember one honest moment with him, so I kept silent as he got into his car and drove off.
I had always thought that the Christian right was motivated by selfishness, intolerance, and fear. But the story, as I mused on the plane ride home, isn’t that simple. The Christian right—or at least the thousand members of it at the conference—or at least the half dozen of them I got to know decently—they don’t hate gay people; in fact they can be more consistently thoughtful and generous than many of the crowds that might be found in a gay bar on a Saturday night. Oh, I won’t mount any defense of Pat Robertson or James Dobson or the venal politicians who find it expedient to stand with them, and I won’t deny that a lot of people in this country are afraid of people who seem different. But I think most of the Christian conservatives on the street don’t want us to go to hell. They want to save us from danger. Their reaction against gay-rights legislation is an altruistic one. If I ran a zoo, and somebody came to me and said, “Hey, I have a great idea! Let’s take down the walls around the shark pool so all the kids can swim with the sharks!” I would have him thrown out on his ass. To many of these people, laws that make it easier to be gay only give Satan freer access to our souls.