What religion is this that loves but does not love?

Another turn of another decade in the years of my life,
and still, my mother cannot openly love me, her gay son.

By Rev, Stephen Parelli
January 24 and 25, 2013
Bronx, New York

As a gay activist and son, I finally, openly reflect on my mother's inability, after 15 years, to escape her homophobic religious surroundings in which my father, her husband who is a lay-pastor, dominates her life, manipulating her landscape
through the grid of his own dreaded, hidden, secret homoerotic feelings.

 

Yesterday my mother refused to speak with me on the phone when I

called her on my birthday. All she could say, in a soft-spoken voice,

was "OK" to each of my several awkward small-talk comments. Then

she said "I love you, I always have," and hung up. In 15 years times -

since I came out and entered into a same-sex union with my lover in

1997 - my mother and I have spoken perhaps 5 or 6 times.

I wish she could see this present-day, 2013, video of a Parsippany, NJ, high school student coming out to his classmates and suddenly realize,

like an epiphany, that we gays – by virtue of our omnipresence, if

nothing else – are not sinners from whom to separate. Ostracism is

one of the worst forms of abuse a person can suffer, so psychologists

tell us. We gays are people to love just as we are, not off-spring to

disown and disassociate from, to discharge as if suddenly we become

still-born when publicly coming out as gay.

I don't know why God made me this way . . . but I am . . . and I wish

they could all love me unconditionally (just as they once did): That my

parents and my children and my college friends from Bible college and

seminary days, and my former clergy peers and church friends since

my childhood, and my ex-wife (who knew before we married), -- that

they could all love me now, love me still.

God is my witness: I did not choose this! So, I will live it with gusto and

thanksgiving, honoring the God who blesses me with it.

Yes, I am gay and I am blessed with a husband of 15 years who holds

me in his arms at the end of each day and is lovingly, passionately

dedicated to our union. I hurt. He loves me, oh so tenderly, when I

hurt. With sympathetic eyes, he looks deep into mine while holding me.

They - my (former) family, (former) friends and (former pastor)

associates - are missing out on some of the greatest ventures and

accomplishments of my life. I miss them, but I cannot go back. I pray

they will, with love and affirmation, at long last step into the light with

me, and embrace me, and rejoice in God's creative diversity - so

obviously, universally attested to.

"I love you, I always have," my mother said as she silently hung up the

phone, shutting me out of her life again. How sad that she cannot live

the love she testifies of: the love for her first-born, a love she keeps

swallowed up in her breast. What religion is this that loves but does

not love?

I live the love I know, the love I have, the gay-love God has given me

that I, too, should live to the fullest. The moment is mine, it belongs to

those who love. I'm gay. I love. I’m present. I’m alive.

It is my mother who is still-born, tethered to a by-gone, man-made

church-based heterosexist moralistic era from which she cannot now

escape, forever closed-off to her son, knowing only the heart-beat of

her own lonely heart, making the choice to never see, or hear from,

her son.

She hurts.

And who is he who loves her, my mother, oh so tenderly, when she

hurts; who with sympathetic eyes looks deep into her own? It is my

father who late in life became a popular lay Baptist pastor in Central

New York, who became enamored with a new found prestige and

power, who when I said, as a married adult with four children, that ‘I

must tell my mother I’m gay because someone who loves me must

know,’ said to me, grabbing my throat with both his hands and raising

me bodily two inches completely off the floor by the strength of his

rage, “I will kill you if you tell your mother.” It is he, my father, who

comforts her, my mother, with goodly words like “Follow me as I follow

God.”

A year or two will pass before I call again and say, as I did yesterday, “I

just wanted to hear your voice, mom.” “OK” she will manage to say.

And just before hanging up, without the slightest hint that my one-way

conversation with her is over, will whisper “I love you, I always have.”

The phone will go dead and she will go on dying one day at a time,

believing she is honoring God and honoring her husband by aborting,

again, her mother-son relationship, believing she has made this holy

choice of abortion on her own accord when in reality she is tethered.

Tethered to an out-dated God who is majestically ascribed by some

worshipers as “the same yesterday, today and forever,”

misappropriating the sacred text to shield themselves from whatever

changes in society or in life they cannot face.

It is my father who cannot face life as he knows it. He is a homophobe

for reasons, he only knows, found deep in his dark heart. Reasons he

attempts to hide from others. What is it that makes him especially

hateful towards gays that he would say to his own son “I will take a bat

to your head if you attend your grandmother’s funeral?” or “All gays

should be taken out and hung” or “Your ten-year old son should never

see you, or your partner, again – what all gays ever do is molest

minors” or “If you ever tell your mother you are gay I will kill you” or

“I've told your children [ages 10 – 16] what kind of deviant, pervert you

are, and I am not sorry for having told them.”

Such hateful statements are as telling as they are hurtful.

Many argue that such hatred for gays is really a hatred of self because

of one’s own homoerotic feelings. It is not unthinkable that my father

falls into this category: a self-hating closeted bisexual or gay man. His

refusal to attend his granddaughter’s wedding (on the basis that it

would amount to adultery, being her second marriage); his refusal to

be his brother’s best man (same reason, a second marriage and

therefore legalized adultery); his refusal to acknowledge a shower for

his new-born grandchild (because the live-together parents had not

yet decided to be wedded and so they are, therefore, living in

fornication); and his insistence that his grandchildren should separate

from the man their sibling sister was to marry because he was outside

of the faith, all point to a hyper vigilance, and in most cases to a hyper

vigilance for moral or sexual purity.

It is not hard to see how my father’s hyper vigilance for sexual purity

and his open hatred for gay men may indicate a preoccupation with

unwanted homoerotic feelings.

One of the most telling accounts of my father’s fear of his homoerotic

feelings is this: When I was in seminary studying to become a pastor,

my father – much to my surprise – became a lay pastor (as I stated

above). This was in the early 1980s. He was in his late 40s. He had no

education beyond high school, no formal training in Bible or

counseling. I was about to be married. He wanted to give me some

father-to-son, pastor-to-pastor, advice about the marriage bed. He

told me this: “Let me tell you what I tell all the couples I counsel before

marrying them. I tell them not to practice oral sex on the male partner

for this reason. It will only increase the husband’s desire to look for

more of the same outside of the marriage and he will find himself

seeking out men who will provide the service.”

I was shocked to hear my father tell me he was giving this advice to

couples he marries, that, in fact, according to him, the heterosexual

marriage bed would, in deed, in this one case, foster desires on the

part of the husband for same-sex sex.

How un-insightful, on the part of my father, to fail to know that, at this

juncture of the counseling session, he was telling on himself! For all

his hiding and hyper vigilance to keep his homoerotic feelings unseen

and in tow, it was here in the counseling chambers of the pastor’s

office that he completely, unwittingly, let his secret escape him, telling it

to couple after couple.

So, yes, it is in this homophobic context that my mother squanders out

the last days of her life, living in mindless religious isolation with her

moralizing, parading, husband, separated forever from her gay son,

tethered to a homophobic God who is made over in the image of the

man who impregnates her with decades of his self-loathing, self-hating, because of his homoerotic feelings.

If time allows, and if I can muster it, I will phone her again months down

the road, and she will quietly say as she prematurely hangs up the

phone, “I love you, I always have,” while beseeching her asexual God

to forgive her once more for having bestowed a mother’s love upon a

despicable, God-forsaken son.

I will hear her words of love; I will be thankful for it; yet I will always

carry an amount of sadness that life, in her case – in our case, could

not be lived to the fullest as parent-child, as God had intended when

he created family.

Although my father's homophobia overshadows and beclouds my

mother's ability to clear her head and think, there are her own long-

standing, debilitating fears that play into my father's homophobic

disdain for his son.
 

From what I know of her puritanical lecturing over the years, this must

be added: it would appear that my mother's mother-son miscarriage is

due, in part, to an irrational fear she has of sexual misconduct

occurring in others, especially in others close to her. She spoke of this repeatedly, in one form or another, over the years.

So now, when you tie religion into all of this, you have both father and

mother, man and woman, paralyzed before a wrathful Edenic God who

created humankind as sexual beings and who, subsequently, sent

them out of the garden because of their disobedience. Sex, God and

their complex, internalized fears, all tied to gather, complicating their

relationships with others.

My parents always were their own, unscripted, abiding moral guides. The father, homophobic, forming his world and life view during the McCarthy era, was very much guarded - obviously so - as to what is and what is not masculine in himself and in his two sons. The mother, truly doomsday shocked, since the 50s and Elizabeth Taylor and Alfred Kinsey, at the new norms society was forging and re-forging, became the house spoksperson in the sex-revolution 60s for moral

awareness, for what is sexually right and wrong.

Now enter their seminary graduate, preacher-boy son, father of four,

divorcing his wife, openly gay, openly celebrating his new-found same-

sex lover.

My parents immediately resolved, without discussion or further

thought, and as a matter of course, due to their good Christian

character (rooted in their irrational respective sex-laden fears), to

never accept their son again, to never see him, to never talk with him,

to never acknowledge him. He is, after all, what they each fear most:

sexual misconduct in others (my mother) and dreaded homoerotic

feelings (my father).

A pervasive, long standing fear, or any negative emotion that rules us,

is a hard taskmaster, crippling our ability to freely love ourselves and

others. That was and is my parents. Throw in religion, and now you

have my parents unknowingly disguising themselves from themselves,

preventing themselves from seeing themselves.

It brings me some comfort, however, to know that, while they are not

able to love me, neither are they able to love other people like me,

including other immediate family members, who openly cast off

traditional moral values. Such people with "immoral life styles" bring

my parents too close to their own gripping fear that their own marriage,

or their own standing in religious society, could be compromised, some

day, some way, at some unguarded moment.

My mother's words, as important and as significant as they are to me,

that "I love you, and I always have" fail to empower her to actually live

in a loving relationship with her son, her fear of sexual misconduct in

others overpowering whatever feelings she may have for her son.

She must address her gripping fears, along with her husband's fear of

the homoerotic, and only then, I feel, will she free herself to openly

love me unconditionally and others like me who do not adopt her moral

values as their own.

My husband and I, we would, of course, welcome unconditional love

from my mother and father, but with every passing year it seems less

likely, especially knowing that religion, in their case, is their enabler,

that is to say, their brand of religion permits them, encourages them,

reinforces them, celebrates them in their resolve to disown their son

and his partner and others like us, gay or straight, who compromise my

parents' standard of moral integrity.

Essentially, It is their kind of religion that leaves them little to no room

for self-reflection or self-analysis as to what are the real factors,

rather than their religious code, that may be pushing them towards

cutting off all dealings with significant others.

It is their sort of religion that leaves them with no ability to adapt to society's changes around them, so that to say "I love you, I always have" is, sadly, a window to the past, a lamentation of what once was, a polite way to say "This is the parting of our ways."

 

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By clicking here, this article can be viewed at Other Sheep Exec Site, the site where Steve Parelli and Jose Ortiz share their stories, especially the stories of their travels for Other Sheep.