Garrard provides an
account of his experience of so-called ex-gay “therapy” and his
wider experience of growing up gay within a conservative Christian
family.
While the experience
of small-town Christian America is not replicated here in the UK the
social pressures that bear down on Garrard can be found here. The
world is changing fast - there are so many more role models for LGBT+
young people than there were ten years ago – but the impact is
uneven and so there are many communities, many families, in which
growing up gay remains an experience of deep pain. And of those
families as disproportionate number will be religious.
At one point Garrard
talks about Cosby, who is leading one of the sessions at the ex-gay
programme “He didn’t need this documentary to be straight. He
just was. His straightness
buzzed off him, inhabited the room … with none of the
self-consciousness the rest of us felt. … Though over the years I’d
done my best to pretend otherwise, I’d had a string of male
crushes that wouldn’t go away, a constant guilty ache that ran
through my body for so long that I came to believe the feeling was
just a part of what it meant to be alive.”
This
contrast between the easy
self-identity of someone
society defines as “normal” and someone society defines as
“other” is not unique to the LGBT+ experience, within “western”
society “normal” is white, male, heterosexual – if you don’t
tick all of the boxes you will have an uphill struggle, if you don’t
tick any of the boxes it can become a mountain climb.
At
the very end of the book, reflecting on the time since he went
to the ex-gay programme he writes “I will not call on God at any
point during this decade-long struggle. Not because I want to keep
God out of my life, but because His voice is no longer there. What
happen to me has made it impossible to speak with God, to believe in
a version of Him that isn’t charged with self-loathing. My ex-gay
therapists took Him away from me, and no matter how many different
churches I attend, I will feel that same dead weight on my chest. I
will feel that pang of a deep love absent from my life. … Perhaps
one day I will hear His voice again. Perhaps not. It’s a sadness I
deal with on a daily basis.”
This,
for me as a person of faith, is a great scandal, those who claim to
be Ministers of the Gospel are blocking the path to God. And it
doesn’t need a fully fledged ex-gay programme to happen – I know
of plenty of LGBT+ people who have been driven from the church,
driven from God, by the denial of their being by those that claim
authority within the church. Some have fled to protect their own
wellbeing. Some do find places of encounter with God elsewhere but
for too many the church has become an enduring barrier between them
and God.
I
find myself increasingly disappointed and despondent about inclusion
within the Church of England – ongoing engagement with its
institutional life and Synodical processes is leaving me embittered
but I feel called to remain because the alternative would be LGBT+
invisibility that plays into the hands of our oppressors. But
this means I have to divorce my self-worth and my faith any official
positioning of the Church.
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