Happy National Coming Out Day (Oct. 11!)

Happy National Coming Out Day!

Every Oct. 11th is National Coming Out Day. And my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts are filled with stories, anecdotes, and incredible narratives of brave, courageous, graceful, grateful, happy, joyous, settled, people in the LGBTQIA+ community.

I can't come out with a single, linear narrative today, but pieces of coming out and being out that make up a collage or quilt of stories. 

* I was asked by a friend lately what I would've done differently as both my friend and I are in the twilight years of our careers as Ministers of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA). I immediately said, "Come out as a gay man earlier." But what I would've lost had I come out earlier are my now grown children, whom I love and adore. But, yes, I would've come out earlier, and spared me, and others around me, the pain they experienced as I lived into my truth.

* I came out when I was 40 years-old to the world around me, starting with my immediately family, e.g., my wife and children, and then my parents. However, I first had to come out to myself, and accept who God created me to be, and be at peace with that, and in love with the God who created me as a gay man. 

* It got messy after I came out. My former close-friend and mentor took the news personally, made it all about himself, feeling betrayed and offended that I didn't tell him personally, first. But then again, he told me everyone's sexual stories among the faculty that he knew of, and I didn't want him to gossip about mine. Nevertheless, the big gossip that he was and is, he told everyone (sigh).

* Coming out is weird. It is and yet it isn't a solo or individual experience. It is a community effort, yet you, yourself, have to finally admit and claim and embrace and come out to yourself, and be at peace with it, then others will be at peace with it, too. I credit friends like Richard Rodriguez, the writer, and Paul Ilecki, a Trappist brother and former student, both out and gay, who told me that I could call or contact them at any time as I went through the process of coming out, as did my former partner. 

* I came out and was outed when I was an up and rising Assistant Professor at Duke University's Divinity School--a United Methodist Church institution--and a Minister of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Both were openly hostile to LGBTQIA+ people in 1999-2003, the years I came out and sought tenure. Lousy timing in many ways. I knew that at the time. But I couldn't stay in my gay closet any more. It was literally and figuratively killing me. I had a choice: stay in the closet, stay in the marriage, get tenure, and die an early death, or come out, live honestly with myself and others, and live life more fully.

* Because I came out when I did in the midst of striving for tenure, I was denied tenure, though the institution would say, it was because my "fifth book was not up to Duke standards," one of the most subjective ways of judging a book, because there are no written Duke standards for writing a book. The previous year, before I entered the tenure process and was still in the closet, in 1999, I was the "Duke University Humanitarian of the Year," because of my pioneering work with people with disabilities. 

* In 2003, after denial of tenure at Duke because my "fifth book wasn't up to Duke standards," my then-Presbyter Executive of New Hope Presbytery told me that because I came out as a gay man when I did, she would protect my ordination personally, and added this caveat: "But you'll never work in a Presbyterian Church again." Since that time, I've worked in three other Presbyterian and one Lutheran Churches. 

* I'm still out. I wrote an article in The Advocate magazine (it was still being published) in 2006, in which I talked about my kids coming out and telling me that they were straight. The horrors! I threw myself down on the sofa and cried for hours, trying to figure out how I and my then-partner created two children who were non-LGBTQIA+. 

* I loved teaching Ethics and English at North Carolina Central University, an HBCU, in Durham, NC, after my time at Duke, especially when I told the students that I was a Presbyterian pastor and openly gay. There was always a hush in the room when I said that, and someone would always say in hushed tones, "Did he just say he was gay?"

* Having worked in the denomination that first dismissed me as a gay man (UMC), I was able to move the needle forward for out and closeted LGBTQIA people in the OR-ID United Methodist Church conference. I am thankful for your support in these efforts.

* As I prepare for a wedding with my fiancé, another gay man, I continue to pastor two churches that are open, welcoming, and accepting of out LGBTQIA+ clergy. I continue to write and work as an advocate for and with LGBTQIA+ people in religious communities. I moved to Oregon, which has provided me the space, the people, and the time to heal from my time in NC. And my adult children and I still love one another, and there is now a granddaughter in our fold. Love abounds. 

And love wins.

I am blessed beyond all measure.

And in the end, I thank God that I was created just as I am.

Happy National Coming Out Day.