by Libby Phelps
THAT NIGHT, I THOUGHT ABOUT MY VISCERAL REACTION TO being in church. How exclusionary it had felt to me; that some churchgoers were more worthy than others. How, if you didn’t take Communion, you weren’t as close to God as if you had. How, historically, their priests had been shielded from punishment and prosecution when they’d preyed on children and young men.
All my experiences after leaving Westboro had left me feeling that organized religion embodied a holier-than-thou, nose-in-the-air mentality. It wasn’t so noticeable outside of a church setting, but once inside the church doors, or if religion was brought up, whomever you talked to, they thought their religion was head and shoulders above the rest. And I couldn’t stand it. No one, and no religion, is better than others, I thought; I just wanted to tell them to get over themselves and be nice to one another. It seemed mean and uncomfortable and unnecessary to create an aura of superiority. It seemed to me that Westboro had, in a weird way, at least been more egalitarian in their condemnation of everyone to whom they preached.
ONE AUGUST DAY IN 2010, LOGAN ASKED ME IF I WANTED TO go on a walk on a trail near my house with him, one of my favorite pastimes. I had a funny feeling he was going to ask me to marry him. I knew it was coming, because we’d gone ring shopping weeks earlier. But I still wanted the surprise of having him ask me. We went on our walk and nothing happened, and I found myself a little disappointed. I told myself to be patient and that he probably needed a little more time. As we walked in the door of my house, I saw a chair sitting in the middle of the entryway with a ring box on it—he’d secretly arranged it all on the pretense of having forgotten his sunglasses when we first started out on our walk. I was genuinely surprised—he’d pulled it off. He opened the box, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him. With tears in my eyes, I said yes—then asked if he was sure. Who would want to marry me, with all the baggage I brought? He assured me he had made up his mind completely, then took my right hand in both of his and started to put the ring on it. Laughing, I told him he was holding the wrong hand. We were both shaky and smiling and crying a little. It was perfect.
We decided to get married on the beach in Mexico. I’ve always loved to travel to exotic beaches, and Logan is half Mexican, so it seemed like the ideal plan. Cozumel caught my eye as I searched for resorts that held weddings, and that quickly became our destination.
As soon as we began to make up the guest list, I had to fight back feelings of guilt and anguish at not being able to tell my family I was getting married—let alone invite them to be there on the day. I did invite some of my cousins who’d left, though: my cousins Josh, Tim, and Hez, and their significant others. Josh’s wife Stephanie agreed to be one of my bridesmaids. The rest of the guests would be Logan’s family and our friends.
We got to the Iberostar resort a few days early, to take care of legal paperwork and make sure all the arrangements were made. We also took a couple of excursions with friends who came down early—taking an ATV through muddy trails, nature walks that let us see and even touch wildlife and strange jungle plants. Our hike leader showed us one small, green flower that would recoil when you touched it, then slowly open back up again. I could have stayed for hours watching that plant jump back and slowly come forward again. We swam in open water with dolphins, which lifted Logan and me out of the water on their noses while they swam. I felt like I was flying. Logan didn’t fare quite so well—he wobbled and face-planted into the water while the dolphins seemed like they were giggling at him.
During the rehearsal dinner, Logan’s uncle Mike walked up to me. “This is it. This is forever,” he said. “Are you ready for this?” I laughed and assured him I was, but internally I was flustered. What a time to ask that! Especially of someone so prone to second-guessing, which I thought might come from living a life where all my thoughts and actions had been so heavily controlled. Making up your own mind is a lot harder, I thought. But I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that I wanted to marry Logan Alvarez.
The day of the wedding, I woke up ready to stick to the plan I’d made. I had brought makeup and some flower hairpieces I wanted to use, but I realized I didn’t really know how to use any of it. Panic momentarily set in before Logan’s mom recognized my cluelessness and kindly stepped in to help. As I got dressed, I put on some rings that my mother and grandmother had given me. I wanted so much for them to be there, but I knew it was impossible. I knew, also, that they’d have wanted to be there if they had been allowed to do it—or even speak of it. Overwhelming sadness mixed with the joy and excitement of the day, and I let myself give in to tears for a minute.
We took some photos in the morning under a beachside gazebo, the perfect location for our first look. Within seconds of him seeing me in my long, white beach dress, I blurted out to Logan, “Do my boobs look all right?” He burst out laughing and assured me that I looked fine. My bridesmaids had made a big deal of positioning my cleavage perfectly, so I was glad he approved. Much of the day was spent making a wedding video with the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and guests, set to “Yeah” by Usher.
Mosquitoes descended on our beach ceremony in spite of the thick cloud of repellent the resort had sprayed beforehand. But Logan and I seemed to have lucked out; we were the only ones not getting bitten. As we stood watching the afternoon sun sink over the waves, I marveled that this was happening at all. I looked around at all the people we loved who’d made the trip down here and felt so happy. We stood near a tree that had been adorned with seashells. It was so simple and beautiful. Logan and I read our own vows; we had a sand ceremony, with pink and blue sand poured together to represent our two lives meshing. My cousins read Bible verses and explained what the sand stood for.
It had started raining right before the ceremony, but stopped as Logan and I were walking down the makeshift aisle together. Everyone told us that was good luck.
Later that night, as we were lying on the bed reflecting on the day that had flown past, I told Logan how much I missed my family and wished they were there; we had agreed not to talk about it too much because of how sad it made me, but he understood, saying nothing and embracing me in one of his bear hugs. We fell asleep quickly, and I realized how right everyone was about the wedding night not actually being all that romantic. Besides, this wasn’t the first time Logan and I had slept together—another way I knew I’d really burned my bridges with the church.
The day after the wedding, we took underwater ocean photos. I had heard of the tradition of brides “trashing the dress” after the wedding, which had given me the idea of jumping into the water in mine. The photographer wanted us to kiss underwater, but I found myself completely unable to do anything but blow bubbles. Finally, we figured out that if we jumped in while kissing we could get the shot.
We went across the ocean to Playa del Carmen for our honeymoon. It brought up a lot of the fears that had been drilled into me as a church member, compounded with the collective fear of the authorities cracking down on us for our views was the terror of impressionable youngsters (like me) being exposed to so many people with different views and lifestyles. The long-instilled paranoia about government crept into me every time we went through customs, where I would envision them seeing my name and then calling me into a private room to interrogate me. But nothing happened, other than one officer being short with me. We spent a glorious week, sightseeing and tasting delicious food and constantly being surprised by how welcoming everyone was. Not once did I have to stop and tell people they were going to hell.
RIGHT BEFORE LOGAN AND I LEFT FOR OUR WEDDING, I decided to tackle another first: getting my ears pierced. He thought that was funny, because it seemed so minor. But I had always thought it looked pretty, and I’d bought some dangly earrings on a whim while on vacation to Italy with Logan a year after leaving. Now, I was going to take the next step in—as the church would have said—defiling my body. My friend Bridget went with me to Claire’s in Lawrence, a chain known for piercing. I went through my usual extreme nervousness and mo
tormouthed talking, and then the woman put studs into my ears with an earring gun, and it took all of two minutes. I felt a familiar twinge of worrying that there would be spiritual repercussions to what I’d just done. But I liked the way I looked so much that I quickly put those worries aside. If I was going to hell, so was every woman I knew.
IN TOPEKA, NEAR WBC, CHANGES WERE AFOOT. IN 2012, someone bought a small ranch house across the street from Gramps’s place and painted it in rainbow stripes. The rainbow, I knew from my many years of picketing, was a symbol of gay pride; we’d used it on countless signs ourselves, to mock what it stood for. I first read about the house in news stories people had posted to Facebook; I could only imagine how mad Shirl would be. I couldn’t help smiling to myself about that. Gramps would probably just welcome it as more publicity for the church; my family would have said it was a good thing because it brought attention to them, and it would make a clear, visible distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous. I decided I had to go see for myself. It would be the first time I’d been in my old neighborhood since leaving.
Logan and I, plus Dana, a cousin of mine on my mom’s side of the family, and her daughter, Alyssa, made the half-hour drive over to Topeka together. My stomach began twisting up as we approached the highway exit. When we turned the corner onto the street, my anxiety changed to disbelief—I forgot to think about the church for a minute while I gaped at that little house. It was one big gay pride flag of a building. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually choose to paint their house like that—surely it was a promotional stunt. There was a sign on the lawn that said PLANTING PEACE and that visitors were welcome. We got out of the car and walked up the walkway. Outside, sitting in a lawn chair, was a heavyset man. I introduced myself and told him I’d grown up there, in the church across the street, and that I was nervous about being there. He took off his baseball cap and offered it to me to hide my face. It smelled awful, but I didn’t want to offend him, so I thanked him and put it on. Logan and I wandered around looking at the outside of the house until two young men walked out onto the porch and introduced themselves. They didn’t look like gay radicals—more like preppy college boys. One of them was Aaron Jackson, president of Planting Peace, which owned the house. The other was Davis Hammet, who worked for Aaron as the tiny charity’s director of operations.
I introduced myself and told them who I was. They seemed pretty excited that I was there, especially Davis. They were busy painting the exterior, and we all offered to stick around and help.
Aaron told me they’d named this building Equality House, and that they’d bought it to deliberately make a statement to Westboro about equal rights for gay people. They wanted that little house to be a symbol for treating everyone well and decently. I loved the idea. Why wouldn’t God want everyone to be treated well and decently? And who were we to say who got to go to heaven and who didn’t? If Westboro was right, well, all these people would go to hell. There was nothing anyone could do to change that. And maybe, just maybe, Westboro was wrong. In that case, we would have spent our lives antagonizing people for no reason. I liked the Equality House mission better.
A week later, I went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Aaron and Davis, who told me about a new project they were working on to combat bullying in schools. They wanted me to come with them to do presentations and talk about my experience of having bullied people as a picketer. That stung. I said I didn’t think I had been a bully—that I had never tried to make anyone change their ways. That was God’s prerogative. They pressed me on it, but nothing really came of the plan. In the process, though, we ended up having an ongoing discussion about tolerance and civil rights and religion—things I had never really talked about outside of my family. Ultimately, they both had a big influence on me being able to say, with conviction, that I don’t care if someone is gay or not. Davis and I became and stayed close friends. Months later, he went with me and Blake to a drag show at KU. Afterward, Davis brought me backstage to introduce me to some of his friends who had performed and their fans. “Oh yeah, we know who you are,” one of the guys said, makeup still visible around his eyes. But he said it in a friendly way, and the truth was, I’d had fun at the drag show. I didn’t see what was so horrible about it, and I didn’t feel the knee-jerk certainty, once second nature, that everyone involved was evil. It was definitely a new, eye-opening experience.
I found myself spending more and more time hanging out with Aaron and Davis at the Equality House. I knew my parents would have been horrified, but what did it matter now? There was a more subconscious agenda for me too, though. Standing at the front window of the house, I could look out to the front door of Gramps and Gran’s house, and see any of my family members that might be passing by on their walks around the neighborhood, or to picket. Standing inside that gay pride flag–painted house was the best way for me to catch a glimpse of my family—even if it could only be a one-sided view.
One afternoon, my parents walked right by on their afternoon walk. It was the first time I had actually seen them since I’d left the church. They looked exactly the same—my dad wearing his sweatpants, my mom’s long gray hair gathered into a low ponytail. I cried quietly as they walked past, completely unaware that their daughter was so close. They were right there in front of me, and yet the chasm between us was too wide for any of us to cross. “Those two walk by all the time,” Aaron said. “Who are they?” “My mom and dad,” I whispered through my tears. The other people in the room with me fell silent as they realized what was happening, and I just stayed at the window, staring at them until they rounded the corner and were gone.
Another afternoon while I was standing at my post near the window, Shirl came out, and then Tim, and some of Megan’s teenaged brothers: Gabe, Luke, Jonah. Shirl got onto her tandem bike with Brent for a ride, and I remembered how we all used to make fun of her for buying that ridiculous thing. She started to sing. I couldn’t hear it from inside the house, and I thought, if I never have to hear Shirl sing again, I’ll be the happiest person alive. I wished my parents would come out again. Then I wished my parents would leave the church, so I could see them and talk to them again. I thought about how Megan and Grace had left—I had never thought Megan would leave. I thought of Anna, who’d be about eight years old by this time. I wanted her to leave. And my other nieces and nephews. I hoped they would decide to leave, too.
A DAY OR TWO BEFORE I WAS SET TO TAKE A TRIP TO NEW York in January 2013, I got a call from one of Logan’s cousins. She was a little older than me and had young kids she wouldn’t let me babysit, despite the fact that I offered all the time. I would have loved to have been around children again; in the church, there was no such thing as a day that you didn’t spend some time with young kids. When I first met her and her family, they reminded me a little of mine, in that way. But his cousin didn’t want me around—not because of my past, but because of how I had changed since leaving the church.
I was set to appear on Anderson Cooper’s show during my visit, and Logan’s cousin had called to give me her opinions about what I should and shouldn’t say. “God has given you this platform,” she said, “and you better use it to glorify Him. You know homosexuality is wrong. And you better tell people that.”
“I’m not going to say that,” I said, “because I don’t believe that. It doesn’t matter to me whether somebody is homosexual or not.”
She and her family attended a very small fundamentalist church in Lawrence that shared a lot of views with Westboro. She thought I had become a questionable person because I was so accepting of people now. I had learned there were a lot of people like her out in the world, though—who basically agree with the things my former church says, but aren’t brazen enough to say the things they really think in public.
When the cousin would try to talk to me about religion, she’d get really worked up; she’d cry about how much she loved God and Jesus, though she didn’t seem very eager to extend a helping hand to me as I was str
uggling to fit into a whole new world, one where I’d given up every person I’d ever known. She would tell me that gay people “need to turn from their way and turn to Christ,” and meanwhile she’d be turning her back on me.
It was the kind of behavior that reinforced my decision that I was done with religion, at least for now. I knew I would always believe in God, but that didn’t have anything to do with religion for me. I could worship God however I wanted; you can do it however you want, or not, as the case may be. As long as you don’t try to push yours on me, we’re good. That’s what we were doing in my church, I knew now: pushing our religion on others. My family would tell you differently; they’ll say they are simply telling the truth. But I know better now.
HOW FAR I’D COME FROM THE DAYS WHEN I WATCHED Anderson Cooper on The Mole and nursed a crush on him, despite suspecting that he was gay. He’d invited me to be on an episode of his show, Anderson Live, in which he focused on hate groups. I was used to talking to the press, so I didn’t hesitate. I wanted to talk about leaving the church. Most people who knew me didn’t bring it up all that often anymore, assuming I wouldn’t want to reopen old wounds. It was just the opposite: I needed to open them, I needed to keep airing them out so they could heal. I was still figuring out how to think for myself, which is something you’ll see if you look up the YouTube clip of that interview.
He came and talked to me a little bit before the show started; I told him that I’d had a crush on him back in the Mole days. He thought that was funny—and he told the audience about it during a commercial break! I half died of embarrassment, but had to admit it was a pretty funny story.