There's More than One Way to be Something

This post represents a departure from my typical schtick on the blog, but I do hope that my regular readers can see connections as I attempt to make them.

Today, 24 June, is New Directions' Synchroblog where authors from widely variant perspectives attempt to weigh in on the cultural divide between the gay community and the Christian community. Over the course of my entire blog here at Academic Crossroads, I have attempted to describe an academic's life course even through places of uncomfortable dissonance, whether that dissonance exists within a person, within a person's community, or within a person's wider social context (hence the large number of posts here tagged as "cultural insanity"). The gay-Christian debate represents another flashpoint in society that can be just as charged as the creation-evolution debate, the Republican-Democrat debate, or even the women-in-science debate. Culturally, we exist in a sea of flash points characterized by either/ors; and logically, the insistence of these absolute zones of no-overlap do not and cannot exist through looking at the lives of people who try to live in the non-existent middle ground.

You cannot be a scientist if you are a woman is just as repugnant as you cannot be a Christian if you are gay.

I always laugh when people ask me about my "gay lifestyle" because I wonder what everyone thinks I am doing. I'm quite happily single (intending on remaining that way too), and I cannot stand going to bars. I'm a graduate-level academic trying to understand what it means to write in such a fashion where I can publish, and I spend my time thinking big thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. I prioritize my Christian spirituality as it helps ground me in the midst of an incredibly crazy world and invites me to come and rest. When I look at the so-called "gay agenda" I am supposed to be propagating and recruiting, I see very limited overlap. With regard to GLBT issues, I tend not to be political with the exception of asking people to consider that GLBT persons exist.

To be sure, I am in no way, shape, or form perfect at what I do. But I am comfortable in my own skin...most of the time. I try to let my "Yes" be "Yes" and my "No" be "No" even when the hectic tenor of the academic world incites me to burn out because I tend to say "Yes" to too many projects. I struggle to live within my moral compass, but I think moral compasses tend to be a bit like the gimbal in the famous Apollo 13 burn: dancing around between idealism and pragmatism.

For me, being gay is more about the pragmatic consideration about how to get my family to back off about me finding "the perfect guy" and about realizing that I have to live in my own skin today. I do not consider this to be the "ideal" life configuration, but the perfect ideal situation does not exist in the world marked by tensions of all sort.

I have been involved in all sides of the gay-Christian conversation. For a while, I thought people could change because I knew some people who would describe themselves that way; for a while, I thought being gay meant pursuing gay relationships apart from any sort of Christian community; and for a while I thought one could pursue gay relationships in a Christian community. But now I rest in the tension between my pragmatism and my idealism, wishing that people did not force the issue through mouthpieces that suggest that people like me are out to destroy the fabric of society as we know it.

Yes, there is more than one way to be gay just as there is more than one way to be straight. You can be single, you can be married. You can live by yourself, you can live with a roommate. You can have a rich community, you can isolate yourself from everyone around save a few choice people you let close. You can investigate your own life and see what fits within the identity matrix you choose to accept. As people we have so many choices that extend into every reach of our personhood. And the only thing we have to do is live within the consequences of our choices.