Seeking a Common Language

January 31, 2005 - An unsettling cab ride in Argentina left Jeff Sapp wondering about the current public discourse on moral values, religion and gay and lesbian rights.

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

    My partner and I recently traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The city is breathtaking, and I can see why people call it the Paris of South America.  Neither of us speaks Spanish very well and so we fumbled through our trip rather poorly.

    We did have one scary moment.  We were in a taxi going to see Casa Rosada (the Pink House) when the taxi driver said in broken English, “Are you the gays?”

    I was a bit shocked and simply repeated what I thought I’d heard:  “Are we the gays?”

    He stopped the taxi and dumped us out and we had no idea where we were.  Fortunately, it was in a busy area and we simply caught another taxi, sitting as far away from each other in the back seat as we could.

    It frightened me and tainted the rest  of my trip.  And it got me thinking about how scary it can be when we can’t communicate and speak the same language.

    I have made the claim for many years now that I am bilingual because I was raised (then) in religious fundamentalism and am (now) a queer activist.

    I think about my bilingualism a lot these days when gay marriage, hate crime laws, the Defense of Marriage Act, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and a dozen other topics fill the news and channels of television.

    I still get scared.  But I can get around town pretty well.

Speaking Safely

    I graduated in 1981 from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and have studied the Bible all of my life.  I have especially studied those portions of Scripture that mention homosexuality, what some in the LGBTQ community refer to as the “clobber” passages because we have been beaten up with them.  I studied them because I wanted to reconcile my sexuality and my spirituality.  

    I was immersed in the Bible.  I swam in it.  My Ph.D. dissertation was on the topic of spirituality in education, a topic that still interests me.

    And now I have added to my lexicon.  I am a queer theorist.  As a professional educator of many years, I have spent the last decades working to end homophobia in schools.  I have written numerous professional journal articles on the interconnection between personal liberation and social change, about how coming out in the classroom is a transformative act.

    So I find myself comfortable in this country because I understand both sides of the current public discourse.

    What I am not sure about, though, is how we can speak and feel safe when we don’t know each other’s language.  Will someone simply look at my partner and me, ask us if we “are the gays,” and then throw us out of the cab and that will be that?  Will I do the same?  I grow incredibly weary of queer people yelling at Christians in the same way that I am more than weary of some Christians yelling at us.

    This is not going to get us where we want to go.

Out Of The Silence

    There are many of us on both sides who just want to throw the other group out of the taxi.

    I have a lifelong friend of mine who is a preacher and he and I worked together for years in the youth ministry.  But when I came out in 1993, I remember him having a difficult time with the new reality of a brother he’d worked with in ministry for so long now saying that he was gay the whole time.

    I’m not sure if he threw me out or I threw him out (there is still some dispute about this), but I know I was left standing in the street wondering what had just happened.

    Standing alone doesn’t offer much opportunity to talk.  Sometimes, though, even riding together can be quiet.

    My mom and dad are what some would call “pillars of the church.”  They are all that is good and true about being a Christian.  I have never seen anyone live it better.  It was difficult when I came out to them in ’93.  Mom said, “Ok, but let’s not talk about it.”

    So we didn’t.

    That silence lasted a year, then we began to talk.  Just a little bit.  Mom told me she loved me and asked how my weekend was.  I told her I loved her too and that I’d had a nice date with a guy named Erwin.

    Then we just kind of sat in the taxi for a while and drove around not saying anything.  But we were together.

Dialogue and Liberation

    Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote about the importance of dialogue in the practice of liberation.

    For dialogue to truly occur, there must be an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and trust.  Without mutual acceptance and trust there is only a one-way communication.  This one-way monologue perpetuates domination and oppression.

    Without dialogue, there is no communication and without communication, there can be no liberation.

    My partner Sino and I are going back to Argentina this year.  I begin Spanish lessons this spring.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam tincidunt lorem enim, eget