[Note: I have serious reservations about some of this, and present it here in the interests of informed thinking/discussion. Rowland].

Julian Rush is a Methodist minister serving today as the Director of the Colorado AIDS Project in Denver. Recently, he shared with me this unforgettable story. A young gay man came to seek his counsel. He was living with an AIDS diagnosis, which had progressed to the place where death had become his inescapable destiny. He was alienated from his parents over many issues and had never told them he was gay because of their expressed attitudes toward homosexuals. He had moved to live in an urban area and over the years communication on any level had become less and less frequent. Then came the AIDS diagnosis. He now wanted to seek reconciliation and tell his parents who he was while he was still alive. He thought the best way to do this was by letter, since he felt he could not manage a personal or even a voice meeting. He was apprehensive, but nonetheless hopeful about how they would respond. That was what brought him to seek the advice of this Methodist minister.

Julian Rush agreed to help and together they composed a letter that made three devastating revelations. “I, your son, am a homosexual. I am living with AIDS. I am dying.” When the text was complete they walked together to mail their joint effort. When a response arrived from his parents, the young man returned to Julian Rush’s office, meeting his need to be with a supportive friend when this letter were opened. Inside there was only a blank piece of paper folded around the torn up fragments of his birth certificate. His parents’ final act toward their son was to tell him in this symbolic way that they wished that he had never been born.

The audience, hearing this story with me, gasped audibly at the hurt it revealed. It was painful to embrace these emotions, but the greater pain came in the realization that homophobic prejudice can still be more powerful than even a mother or a father’s love for their own child. I found myself grieving for both parties.

I was first amazed at the depth of alienation that rises out of human fear, but then felt a tremendous need to understand the forces that created it. What was it that justified this parental message to a dying son proclaiming that, “as far as we are concerned you were never born, you never existed, you have never been part of our life.” Only something as irrational as homophobia can create this level of cruelty. Those parents and their son have been victimized by a deep seated cultural ignorance. I have known people who reflected these attitudes. It is that knowledge that drives me to seek to understand how homophobia works its insidious poison in our society.

There was a time, not too many years ago, when most people assumed that homosexuality was a result of either a mental illness that needed to be cured or a deliberate choice of moral depravity, that needed to be judged and punished. Either way there was a need to blame someone. Parents were a popular target.

Theories abounded concerning dominating mothers or weak fathers creating gay males, and weak mothers and dominating fathers creating lesbians. Presumably these incompetent or inadequate parents warped their children so badly that they turned them into being homosexuals. That explanation was both seriously advanced and seriously believed.

Other explanations suggested that children were turned into being homosexuals by having been molested by homosexual adults. Once more parents were suspected. In both of these theories the homosexual was seen as a victim to be pitied. In many ways that was the kindest explanation that an ill-informed prejudice could offer. Yet, by assigning blame, this bit of ignorance opened the door for parents, needing to save themselves from shame and ridicule, to reject their children. A culture of secrecy developed in which parents not only did not want to know themselves, they also did not want others to know this dark family secret.

Homosexual people, frequently encouraged by their parents, moved to urban areas where they formed safe ghettos. Now former neighbors in the Peorias and the Fayettevilles of the world would never guess their secret. Their parents could say that their now young adults simply preferred an urban center with its fast life, to “our values here in small town America.” Above all parents hoped that their children would not return home to die of AIDS. They did not want that death confirmed by the local coroner and written about in the local paper. To disown such children was the safest course to guarantee this outcome.

The only other explanation offered was equally ill informed, but many parents found it more comfortable since it appeared to blame them less. This theory suggested that people chose to be homosexuals because they were attracted to an evil lifestyle. In this way parents, like their children, were victims in this tragedy. “Our child has gone wrong,” these anxious parents might say. “Some people obsess on drugs, some on alcohol, some with sex.” Then parents could become sympathy seekers joining in the blame game. They could talk about the “bad crowd” that lured their son or daughter into the world of wickedness. These were the elements that helped to create the tragedy that unfolded in the room of this counselor when the pieces of the birth certificate fell out of the letter before the young gay male dying with AIDS. It was a tragedy born in ignorance and exacerbated by fear.

Added to this equation is the cultural condemnation of homosexuality by organized religion, which enabled this relentless prejudice to be buttressed by quotations from the Bible, making it seen to be supported by “the word of God.”

The real tragedy is that not one of these understandings of homosexuality, used to devastate human beings in the name of God, is accurate. Indeed each of them is nothing but cultural ignorance upheld and undergirded by insensitive religious organizations. Ignorance, no matter how covered over with piety, is still ignorance. That is a fact that must be confronted.

There is no evidence anywhere that suggests that one person can cause another person to become a homosexual. Sexual orientation appears not to be amenable to change in either direction. It is as deeply a part of human nature as left-handedness, skin pigment, gender or hair color. These are givens in our humanity, they are not things we can choose or reject. Yet, “straight” people, who cannot recall the day they chose to be heterosexual, continue to suggest that there comes a day in the lives of homosexual people when they decide to be gay. Can you imagine a pubescent child saying, “I think I will be homosexual. I like being abused, rejected, beaten up, fired, banished, exiled, and even murdered. I like being different and being persecuted for it.” Since those things have all been the destiny of homosexual people, what would motivate them to choose such a life? The fact is they do not choose, but the heterosexual world out of the fear of differences, has nonetheless ! responded with inappropriate hostility.

Homosexuality is not what a person does, it is who a person is. It is not abnormal, it is simply a minority. That is the first fact that must be embraced before this ancient prejudice against homosexual people can be broken.

The second fact is that homosexuality constitutes a statistically stable percentage of the human population at all times and in all places. In those cultures where it is a crime to be homosexual, gay and lesbian people are present but they remain hidden. Hiding places are plentiful in such cultures and they have been used since the dawn of time. In cultures where acceptance of homosexuality is practiced the hiding places dry up and the gay community thrives. But the fact remains that the percentage of homosexual persons at all times, in all countries and among all people appears to be constant.

The final fact that we need to embrace is that homosexual persons are not born on some foreign planet. They are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our pharmacists and doctors, our priests and our lawyers, our firefighters and our policemen. Indeed they are in all walks of life and in all levels of society.

Scientists are all but universally convinced that homosexuality is a natural part of life. It is not a sickness, a mistake or a distortion. It cannot be taught or caught. It is not hereditary. It does not appear to be genetic. It is not environmentally produced. It is simply one more variable in a diverse humanity. Homosexuality probably played a role in our evolutionary history that we will someday understand, acknowledge and celebrate. When that day comes, the victimization of homosexual people by the society and most particularly by the Church will cease.

We will then recognize homosexual people for who they are and we will bless their unions. We will hold homosexual people to a standard no different from that to which we hold heterosexual people. We will stop quoting the Bible to define homosexual people as evil. We will remove any sense of blame from parents. For the only “sin” of which homosexual people appear to be guilty is that they were born with a sexual orientation different from the majority.

That will be a great day. We should not rest until it comes.

John Shelby Spong

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