National Coming Out Day has passed. I didn't miss it, really; I received a number of e-mails asking me to identify myself as a "straight ally" of LGBT folk (let's call them "those people").
I want to be counted as one of "those people."
I should have come out twelve years ago, when I was involved in the "discernment process" for the Episcopal priesthood. This was before Gene Robinson's consecration as the first openly gay bishop ignited a cultural firestorm; back when dioceses like mine practiced an ecclesiastical equivalent of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Kind and sympathetic people on my parish discernment committee, the diocesan Commission on Ministry, and the bishop himself asked me all sorts of questions, but no one asked me whether I was--how shall we put this--"actively" involved with the woman with whom I slept every night. (We were married halfway through that discernment year.)
That's really quite appropriate. If any of them had asked (they all had better sense), I would have replied, "none of your damn business." But my gay, lesbian, and transgender peers in seminary didn't have the luxury of coasting through that part of the gauntlet. They visibly shook as they anticipated their encounters with Commissions on Ministry in less enlightened dioceses.
During that same period, I was involved in a debate on the Roman Catholic university campus where I was a faculty member. The pope's latest declaration on "human life" reiterated the line that human sexuality was inextricably tied to procreation. Hard-liners on campus said yes, that meant that any sexual act that couldn't result in a baby was inherently sinful. I cheerfully volunteered myself as Exhibit A: I had married a woman with whom I would not have children (I'd had a vasectomy years earlier) and we both were rather enthusiastic about the prospect of being--what is the word--active, though not reproductive.
It was a small gesture. Nevertheless, I was surprised by what I will call the vehement silence from Roman Catholic colleagues---indeed, no one followed what I grandly considered my "lead" and volunteered their own ecclesiastical transgression---and by the gratitude bestowed, though covertly, by members of the campus LGBT community.
I want my point to be clear. Heterosexuals travel with a passport of privilege. We aren't asked questions that would damn our non-het neighbors to hours of delay, ostracism, and possible physical harm. Why not? By what moral right do we fly above the moral radar while our friends, siblings, children, and neighbors are whisked aside for questioning (and worse)?
A Rutgers student has committed suicide after fellow students covertly videotaped his sexual encounter with another man. The liberal world is mobilized! But listen to the privilege that oozes from the declaration of a Rutgers coed, carried by AP: "If he'd been with a woman, this wouldn't have happened."
Think about that. If the sexual encounter being secretly videotaped in a Rutgers dorm room had been a heterosexual encounter, then yes, the average straight male student would have been far safer--not only than the gay student down the hall but, more importantly, than his female partner. She, after all, might awaken the next morning to find her image proliferating, virally, on the Internet under the keywords "girls gone wild" or "campus slut." That Rutgers coed's comment is just wrong. Shame, ostracism, humiliation---those aren't just risks of homosexuals. Statistically, women in heterosexual encounters are just as vulnerable.
Let's hear that right. A woman in my parish who's been a lifelong activist for---well, for any cause you can name, so long as it's connected to empowerment and justice---gave me an earful about my city being the national leader in child prostitution. It also happens to rank near the top for two immigrant populations. The two facts are uncomfortably related. Girls in vulnerable immigrant populations, especially those who don't speak the Queen's English, are easier prey for gang-related prostitution rings that condemn them to lives of misery.
The larger point I wish to make happens to have a comfortable home in the Episcopal Church, whose social teaching is clear, and has been clear for more than a decade. The issue is justice in sexual relationships, not orientation.
But the great majority of us can think of that as someone else's problem, their problem. Surely it's past time for all of us to come out: to refuse all the insipid little privileges, the smiling silences, the nodding indulgences, that come with being "straight." Come out, come out, wherever you are--you beneficiaries of straight privilege--or show yourselves cowards.
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