Open, self-aware conversation

Part 2: Outing myself again

This morning I realized that the best entrée into Part 3 would be to retell this personal story first for those who do not already know it.

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I was born in Ohio in 1950, a Lutheran preacher’s kid just like my mother. My parents were genuinely compassionate, progressive Christians—yet with all the buried generational wounds that every person carries into adulthood in some form or other. I tried to be the perfect preacher’s kid, especially during my adolescence when those wounds began to resurface for them in ultimately irresolvable ways.

Despite my efforts, though, I was crippled by my own hidden wounds. Wounds I had no names for except the slurs used by the other boys. To them I was a sissy. White middle-class grade school boys in the 1950s tended not to know about sex yet. “Sissy” didn’t automatically mean “homosexual,” a concept no adult of that era would mention in front of children, especially in a preacher’s family.

For me, sissy simply meant I wasn’t a “real boy.” Due to non-paralytic polio in 1954, I had no strength or coordination for boy’s sports, and I feared physical competition. Worse, I was a bright student who loved to read and do art. Girls’ stuff, in other words.

1958, third grade

Somehow I made it all the way through junior and senior high without hearing explicitly about homosexuality. My affectionate and erotic longings for other boys were simply there. Something I experienced and knew by osmosis to hide. Something no one else experienced, as far as I knew.

College was a bittersweet joy. I devoured every humanities and social sciences course I could get myself into. I lived my second and third year in a little, oddball men’s dorm with mostly electrical engineering and architecture majors. For them my weirdness fit in with theirs. We all listened to Tull and Steeleye Span and read Tolkien.

But….

I ground to a halt emotionally several months into my junior year. The closet can do that. As a professional counselor in my mid-thirties, I recognized this crisis as my first full-blown episode of clinical depression. I took three incompletes and floundered through my final three undergraduate semesters, still somehow manufacturing As but feeling directionless. Then I made a bizarre and desperate decision to go to Lutheran seminary.

Huh? Simple. The also-closeted boy I was in love with said he was going to go. By the time I was committed to the program he had backed out. But I went ahead for my final school term of being a closeted preacher’s kid. Then I came out and left the institutional church behind.

1974, Cornell Univ. Libraries

Coda: I took Jesus along with me into the pagan wilderness where I still live.

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Image sources:

• 1958, school photo, personal collection.

• 1974, shelving reserve books at Uris Library, Cornell University, personal collection.