Way too many thoughts to put into one post….

I’ve also posted earlier on my blog as it’s been a very thought provoking experience to read:

Gay Christians; “A Life of Unlearning”

G’day Anthony,

It wasn’t until I read your book that I had any idea there were so many people out there who were gay but also wanting to embrace Christianity. I’d come across a few sites online in searches on occasion, but although I thought that was OK I just thought it a bit weird that people would want to embrace something that has caused so much harm and damage to us over many decades. It is of course far more complex than that, I now realise.

Although it’s a bit hard to get my head around presently, I find myself in full support of your stance and what you are doing. You are in effect taking the fight for equality far beyond the shouting and disgust by many secular gays at the churches attitudes, to the very core of the argument within the church itself. It seems to me a very effective and logical way to proceed in your situation, and your efforts in that area are utterly commendable.

I think you are right btw that things are ever so slowly starting to change. Believe it or not there are a couple of people I knew from Bible College in America way back in the early 1980’s, who now read my blog. They are still in the church, still believe it’s doctrines about homosexuality, yet simply want to be my friend. No agendas. This was confusing for me, so a while back I emailed them this question:

I assume your still part of the UPC experience, or some kind of Apostolic thing? Was looking up again the UPC doctrine on gays:

Let us therefore resolve that the United Pentecostal Church International go on public record as absolutely opposed to homosexuality and condemn it as a moral decadence and sin, and do hereby encourage prayer for the deliverance of those enslaved by that satanic snare.

UPCI

http://www.upci.org/doctrine/homosexuality.asp

So how do you reconcile being part of a church or organisation that agrees/supports that statement, and a friendship with me?

The replies were sincere and honest. Basically feeling it OK to be friends with someone such as me, and leaving whatever judgment up to God. A far cry from the ten foot barge poll pointed in my direction in years past by others.

I too was rejected by those in the church by those who I thought were my friends. Soon after leaving it I got a letter all the way from Saint Paul in America from a dear old couple in the church associated with the Bible College I attended, who’d been extremely friendly to me for the 3 years I was there and helped me get through school with money and even food sometimes. The letter I got in New Zealand from them was very blunt, telling me to “get back to the church where you belong”. When I didn’t they had virtually nothing more to do with me. Over the years I tried contact with one person from my class, sharing the new way I had been thinking about the church and spirituality, but got fuck all back. The very occasional few short lines of meaningless small talk; almost like they felt guilty about no contact but would send a token gesture. No real communication. Later with the internet the same thing. I even emailed one of the ex teachers there who’d moved on with his ministry and created a more liberal thinking church outside the UPC, but no, nothing. It was like I was too dirty.

Believe it or not, like you Anthony, a few years after leaving in one of the first communications with an ex class mate, he wrote back (although a very short letter) that he thought I’d died, insofar he was very happy to hear from me. WTF? I was astonished at the time to find out that I was dead. I sent a letter back (again before the internet) asking exactly how I died. It was evidently in a car accident! FFS back then I had a perfect driving record! People I knew in America had for some time thought I was dead! And in New Zealand after I left the ministry, all I got was a visit at home by a couple of fellow ministers trying to keep me in the church, then after that absolutely nothing.

And like you, I found far more help and support outside the church than from in it. Secularism certainly worked for me.

The Jason story, I found so very very sad. I know he was violent (to put it mildly) and all, but had he been more honest about disclosing his HIV status to you from the beginning things may have been so different for the both of you. Disclosure is a huge subject even today, but back then it must have been a nightmare. Perhaps he really did love you deeply, but was just too afraid of losing you by telling you he had a death sentence. Perhaps he was hurting so much that he was simply being selfish, trying to have some sort of company during his last years alive. He may have been in a huge moral dilemma; to tell you and lose you, or not tell you and have your companionship. His distance to you during your living together may have been a reflection of that; that he was trying to keep you but at a distance so as not to hurt you. Likely he felt like a leper.

HIV treatment has come a long way since then, the breakthroughs coming in the mid ’90’s. I’ve heard terrible stories about back then of what it was like, and how deeply it affected the gay community. How people would go to hospital and you wouldn’t know if they’d come back. How you could see the AIDS victims on Oxford St obvious to all. It seems almost impossible now that that was only a few short years ago. Today I take only 3 pills in the morning for it, and it made the viral load undetectable within weeks after starting them. I haven’t known anyone personally who’s died of AIDS. It’s almost that “surviver guilt” thing.

Today though the disclosure issue is still a huge one. There is so very much ignorance about HIV within the community. I still have people ask me “When did you get AIDS?” Or they think I’m going to cark it in a few years. Or it can invoke discrimination in the work[place, etc etc. I am very very careful who I tell. I can only imagine how Jason must have felt.