UNDER 21

UNDER 21

By Jim Auer

(A Leading Catholic Magazine, LIGUORIAN, September 1998, Vol. 86, No. 9)

When You Discover a Classmate Is GAY

Imagine you have rather bright red hair. (If you do you won’t have to imagine.) This makes you a fairly small minority among the population. It makes you different in just one way from most people. It’s also something beyond your control; you didn’t choose it. You didn’t look at a display of hair colors, consider all of them, decide on red, and say. “I want that one.” It just is. Your hair color came to you.

Now imagine that you have to hide it from everybody. Why? Because almost everybody seems to think that red hair is sick and disgusting, even a sign of being evil. So early on, you learn to cover it up. You dye your hair medium brown. You pretend and hope that it works. That color isn’t the real you, but you make certain that it always looks that way – because if people find out what color your hair really is, your life will be miserable. You’ll be called names. You’ll be tormented. You’ll be an outcast.

To most of your peers, it won’t make any difference if (besides having red hair) you’re also an excellent athlete, a good student, a loyal and supportive friend. It won’t make any difference if you’re kind, helpful, understanding, fair, honest, creative, strong-willed, determined, and ambitious.

All that will matter is your hair color.

You’ll hear crude remarks about it every day. You may even run the risk of getting beat up for having it. So at all cost you have to cover it up, keep it hidden. This makes everyday stressful; a slight slip-up could be socially fatal. Besides being stressed, you’re sometimes filled with self-doubt. (“What if they’re right? Maybe I am sick.”)

You’re also angry. You didn’t choose or create this condition, and you can’t change it. It just is. But because of that, you’re hiding and hurting simply because of being you. The unfairness of that situation makes you angry – either at yourself (for not being able to change) or the world (for rejecting you) or at God (for allowing you to be the way you are).

Growing up gay or lesbian is very much like this.

A choice?

This article is for straight young people who know (or feel kind of certain) that one of your classmates is gay or lesbian, or who may discover that fact sometime later on. How should you think? How should you act?

First, let us bury the “choice” idea. If you are straight, when was the day or the period in your life when you decided to be that way? Was there a time when you thought to yourself, opposite-sex bodies, same-sex bodies….wow, tough choice. They are both pretty interesting. Let’s see…I guess I’ll yeah….I’ll go with the opposite sex. That’s my decision – I’ll be attracted to the opposite sex.

No straight person makes a decision like that – a conscious, deliberate decision about whom to be attracted to. No gay person does either. By now, almost every ten year old in the country knows what gay and lesbian mean – and also knows how most people feel and talk about it. If you had a totally free choice, why would you deliberately choose something that you knew ahead of time would make most people consider you anywhere from strange to sick to evil?

The whole truth

Call to mind a close friend. Make sure it’s a particular person. Now make a mental list of all the things you admire and like about him or her. Make that list of qualities and characteristics very specific and concrete. Now imagine one more characteristic that you just discovered –he or she is gay. How do you feel about that person now? Is your picture different/ Have your feelings changed? If so, how? I’ve proposed this exercise to students in my classroom many times. Many quickly say, “It wouldn’t make any difference.” No one has ever said, “I’d stop being friendly to that person immediately.” But some have said, “I’d feel uncomfortable, at least at first. I’d feel like I hadn’t really known the person until then.”

Feeling confused or a little uncomfortable at first is understandable. But “not really knowing the person until then” just isn’t true at all. Being straight or gay is pretty basic, but it doesn’t mold, shape, or determine everything else about the person. It’s not like a glob of food coloring that you pour in a bowl of water, which eventually changes every molecule of water and turns it into that color.

If you find that a classmate is gay, everything else you previously knew about the person is still completely true, the good points and the faults. Everything else you always liked and admired about that person is still real, still true. Not a single one of those good points has been ruined, perverted, or canceled out and turned into trash.

The Church’s teaching

The Church position is very clear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. First, it affirms that same-sex orientation is neither rare nor chosen: “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexuality condition; for most of them it is a trial” (2358). Next, the Catechism provides clear guidelines for the way homosexual persons should be treated: “They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (2358). In other words, the Church teaches that it is not sinful to be gay or to feel strong homosexual attractions. That part just is. Like any feeling, by itself it’s neither right nor wrong. Feelings are not moral or immoral. They just are. When we act on our feelings, what we do as a result of them…that is right or wrong. The Church teaches that homosexual actions are wrong; “They are contrary to the natural law…Under no circumstances can they be approved” (Catechism 2357).

Most straight people have no problem with this teaching because it affects them about as much as a traffic law passed in some city on the other side of the world. Some find a reall cheap satisfaction in it: “We get to have sex because we’re normal and okay. You don’t—because you’re weird and sick. Each of us is getting what we deserve.” That attitude assumes straight people earn the right to sex and gay people deliberately throw it away…simply by being born. It’s about as close to the spirit of Jesus as the Earth is to Pluto.

Celibacy -- not always a choice

If you’re a straight young person who has decided that marriage is probably the way you’re intended to spend your adult life, you’re looking forward to a relationship which will certainly include sex. Hopefully you’re reserving that experience and gift for marriage. (Incidentally, according to a recent study, if you’re eighteen and still a virgin, half of your peers – no matter what you hear—are the same. Yes, things are improving! The reversal of the “sexual liberation” movement isn’t exactly a steamrollering trend yet, but it’s beginning.)

Your practice of chastity (saved sex) makes you look forward to the beauty and power and wonder of a loving, sexual relationship at some time to come. When it happens, this intense, loving, passionate, sexual relationship will have the approval of God, the blessing of the Church, and the support of society. When children come (which does not happen from holding hands) everyone from god on down through aunt Millie will say “Isn’t it wonderful!”

Great plan, great dream, isn’t it? To fall in love, to establish a permanent sacramental, religious covenant along with an official legal relationship. To be publicly recognized by Church and society as belonging to each other. To have the prospect of producing, from your passionate love, other human beings who will be able to grow up and follow the same dream. Are you looking forward to that? Thought so.

Your gay or lesbian classmates aren’t. Can’t. Won’t be able to. Try on that situation in your imagination, and see what it feels like. To be obedient to God’s teaching on sexuality as expressed through the Catholic Church, gay and lesbian persons are automatically charged with a lifetime of complete abstinence from sexual activity. Another word for this is celibacy. They can and will experience sexual attraction. They can and may easily fall in love. But they have to make certain that “ nothing happens.” Celibacy is a possible and a wonderful lifestyle. Priests, sisters, brothers, and many other people feel called to it, choose it, and make it work. Gay and lesbian people who do not feel called to it, and would not on their own deliberately choose it, might say thqat this is not fair when genuine love and lifelong commitment are involved. Obviously they’re right. It’s not fair at all. It very painfully emphasizes that this life on earth is not always fair. But it also leads us to realize that even when life hands you an unfair situation, you’re not automatically entitled to smash the rules. A person born into a poor family does not therefore have the right to break into someone else’s home and steal money or something else that would be nice to have. Someone with a terrible temper does not therefore have to right to become violent with anyone who upsets him or her.

Living without sex is certainly not the worst injustice that anyone has to cope with. Every noght millions of people go to bed without decent shelter, without enough food, without enough clothing, without good health, without freedom, without safety, and without hope of ever having any of those things. That’s a lot of worse going to bed without sex.

More myths and challenges

If you know of a friend or classmate who is gay or lesbian, you need to get rid of some myths, some really wrong ideas. We’ve already mentioned two: that he or she deliberately chose to be that way, and that his or her homosexuality cancelsor corrupts everything that is good about him or her.

Another myth is that all gays and lesbians have an uncontrollable sex drive, and it’s dangerous for people of the same sex to be around them because gays and lesbians would love to have a sexual experience with almost any same-sex person they see. Do you get an uncontrollable urge and start fantasizing about having sex with every opposite-sex person you meet? Let’s hope not. Gay and lesbian people don’t with every same-sex person they see either.

Besides, getting rid of those myths, you also have a challenge if you know of a gay or lesbian classmate: to accept that person. This does not mean accepting or approving of homosexual activity. (Remember, it’s not automatic that he or she is engaging in it.)

If that classmate is simply an acquaintance, someone you don’t know very well, the challenge is to avoid joining in any verbal persecution or general mean treatment that he or she may already be receiving.

If that classmate is a definite friend of yours, the challenge is to remain a friend to him or her, to let that friend know that he or she can still count on you. You liked that person before you found out; you still do.

“God does not love someone any less, simply because he or she is homosexual’” the United States Bishops said in their pastoral letter Always Our Children written for parents of homosexual children.

If God doesn’t, neither should we.