A QUEER TIMELINE:  Life After Jerry Falwell

May 16, 2005 - Teaching Tolerance’s Curriculum Specialist/Writer Jeff Sapp reflects on his Christian fundamentalist past, his present queerness and all that happened in between.

By Jeff Sapp | Curriculum Specialist/Writer, Tolerance.org

    When the spring 2005 issue of the Intelligence Report - The Southern Poverty Law Center’s publication on domestic extremism in America - identified some in the religious right as extremist hate groups, I had a warm fuzzy feeling.

    I agree with the Intelligence Report, but that’s not why I got all fuzzy.  I got fuzzy because I’m one of those queers whose early life was shaped by religious fundamentalism.  This issue of the Intelligence Report was a perfect documentation of my young adult life.

    I went to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in the fall of 1997.  I was 19.  The Intelligence Report’s Timeline of the Anti-Gay Movement, also is the timeline of my movement - a movement from inauthentic pretender to authentic individual.

I Was There

    I was there when Anita Bryant sang her public song of anti-gay rhetoric.  I boycotted orange juice when they terminated her contract.  I reacted in horror when they told us that Bryant was <gasp!> getting a divorce.  I was required to read James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline as a textbook for a Liberty University course.  I allowed Tim LaHaye’s The Unhappy Gays to shape my view of what it meant to be gay.

    It didn’t look good.

    I was there when Falwell began his political career and the Moral Majority was founded.  Dr. Francis Schaeffer spoke in our chapel services.  I remember being one of six students to meet with Phyllis Schlafly.  I was on campus the day presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan came courting the Right.

    I was there.  Surrounded by constant anti-gay rhetoric, judgment, self-loathing and shame.

Looking Back

    Look back now, I wonder about many of us who went to fundamentalist schools as sort of penance hoping that God would take away our being gay.

    I sang in one of those high-profile choirs that Liberty sends out to churches to spread the gospel (and, well, if we raise some money then hooray for that extra blessing).  I look back at all of the guys on our singing team and now realize that many of us were gay.

    I spent my life in fundamentalism.  It’s not easy to get out of dogma’s clutches.  It’s not easy to break with all that you have ever known.

    But it’s not easy living a lie either.  Church is one of the greatest places for a gay man to hide because church never demands you be a virgin until you marry.  Thank God!  That way I never had to be faced with any kind of sexuality.  I was the good, moral guy that all the church mothers wanted their daughter to marry.

    I could not have planned a better closet.

Who Names Me?

    I’m a bit of a nerd, and those who know me won’t be surprised to hear the thing that really liberated me was the methodology for my dissertation research.  I chose a qualitative design that believed that no one knows a topic better than one who has lived immersed in it.

    Suddenly I got it.

    Everything I’d ever known about being gay had been told to me by heterosexual, conservative, Republican, evangelical Christians.  Everything.

    I remember saying out loud, “How can someone who is not me name me?”  Suddenly, this  nerd took to gay literature like a drag queen to stilettos.  I read everything I could get my hands on as long as it was written by gay people for gay people.

    It wasn’t until 1993 that I saw the first glimpse of wholeness.  That was when I began to journal.  Here is the very first thing I wrote on the very first page:

            This is my story about truth-telling.  and what happens when you tell the truth.  To

            yourself.  To others.  To the delicate relationships we all have.

            I am queer.

            I am not a sodomite.  I am not a homosexual.  I am queer.  And I choose the term

            because I am tired of being named by the Other.  How can the Other name me?

            How can the Other be the true chronicler of my world, of my experiences?  Only

            I can name myself and define and understand what that means.  I am queer.

What I Discovered

    I’ve discovered there are a lot of people who don’t want truth.  People jumped out of my life like rats on a sinking gay cruise ship.  I was left alone, but I finally felt like I had integrity.  And the thing about integrity is that some people like it a lot more than lies.  I soon had wonderful friends who loved me because I was a truth-teller, not because I pretended to be one.

    I discovered that you don’t have to give up being a spiritual being because you’re gay.  Spirituality can coincide with beautiful queerness.  That is my truth.

    I discovered that what you read matters.  And whoever wrote what you read will impact you greatly.

    Mostly I discovered telling the truth is difficult but important.  Truth-telling is the foundation of spirituality.

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