The fear I learned to live with
My dad has a saying. Technically, it’s a quote from “Dune,” but I heard it from my dad first.
Fear, the quote goes, is the mind-death. It means that when you start being afraid, you stop really thinking.
Fear rarely springs up fully formed. My childhood was the traditional ideal: a large family, homeschooled by a stay-at-home mom, with icons on the walls and theology books on the shelves. I didn’t even hear the word gay until I was 15, when I asked an older sibling why a relative was still living with her “roommate.” My sibling laughed and then whispered that the relative was gay. I was confused. She’s happy? Why is it a big deal if she’s happy? My sibling then explained what homosexuality was. She said it was a sin and that it was disgusting that two women or two men would want each other like that.
But in my heart, something sparked to life. There was a word for it? I wasn’t the only person in the whole world who got funny feelings in my chest when I saw my female friends, when we walked or sat together to read? Instantly, though, that discovery was mixed with shame. Those feelings existed, sure, but they were disgusting. Sinful. And maybe I was too.
My faith was important to me, and so when I began navigating the digital world, I gravitated to Catholic spaces. It was here I first heard about Father James Martin. My first impression was fairly neutral, but I was quickly told “the truth” about Father Martin: He was a dangerous radical who wanted homosexuals to be able to participate in our Catholic Church. He was telling people that they could sin and not be punished. He could not be trusted. Surely so many good Catholics couldn’t be wrong, I thought, and I decided that I would never follow such a dangerous man.
The idea of being publicly “gay” was utterly anathema.
I decided to attend a mid-size Catholic college in the Midwest, one of the gems of the Newman Guide that every “good Catholic family” wants to send their kids to. By then I thought I had those pesky feelings on lockdown. I was unprepared for how the broader culture of the campus would affect me. It started when I first opened up to a priest in confession about my attractions. “Quieter,” he said, “you must say it quieter!” I was confused. We were in a confessional. I was speaking as quietly as I normally did. I tried again. “Quieter!” The priest repeated. “Do you want anyone to hear you talk about that?” I left the sacrament of forgiveness with more shame than when I had gone in.
The prevailing campus culture was more of the same. There was a local chapter of Courage, a support group for LGBTQ Catholics who are attempting to live celibately, but it never met on campus. Besides, someone whispered to me, it wasn’t as anonymous as it claimed—everyone knew, or at least suspected, who was going to those meetings. The idea of being publicly “gay” was utterly anathema.
Once, a student came out publicly—she was shunned by everyone for it, including me, who had previously considered her a friend. Another friend, who was in a discernment program about a possible vocation to the priesthood, tried to open up to a mentor about his struggles with homosexual attractions. He was expelled from the program, lost his scholarship and had to drop out of school. In junior year, a friend and I independently got short haircuts. We were hauled into the Title IX office and asked repeatedly if we were sexually involved. We were told that we were giving the appearance of scandal.
For as long as I remained at school, I never cut my hair again.
A culture of fear and cruelty
That culture of fear, of always wondering if you were doing something that would get you in trouble, began to influence my online presence. I had joined a popular Catholic YouTube channel and suddenly I had a small presence in the Catholic online space. There was a team of us who thought of ourselves like the Catholic Internet Avengers, and we would rally to comboxes and Facebook posts whenever we thought we could “help” by offering Bible quotes, theological discussion and a heavy dose of snark.
That culture of fear, of always wondering if you were doing something that would get you in trouble, began to influence my online presence.
With that publicity, people began to ask for my opinions. They’d ask about this politician, that pronouncement from the Pope and what I thought about that horrible Jesuit Father Martin. My old prejudice mixed with my new fear. He was evil, I’d say. He was trying to bring down God’s church. And he and anyone who listened to him was as good as damned. I said this in online chatrooms, but I also went into Father Martin’s Facebook comments and regularly “debated” with his followers, telling them that they were following him straight to hell. In private, my friends and I said worse about him and about the LGBTQ people whom he served. We spoke insults and slurs, laughed at degrading memes, and thought it was okay because these were sinners. And aren’t we supposed to hate sin?
But deep down I feared that if I didn’t participate, someone was going to say those ugly words about me. And it felt so much safer to be in on the take, part of the group that punches down, instead of one of the ones getting punched. I couldn’t get in trouble for being queer if I was so vocally against it, I thought.
I couldn’t get in trouble for being queer if I was so vocally against it, I thought.
I would like to take a break from this and say that I am deeply ashamed now for what I did and what I gave others permission to do, whether by my example or by my silence in the face of bigotry. I was young, and I was scared, but I knew right from wrong. Speaking as we did about any child of God was wrong. But I had stopped seeing LGBTQ people as children of God. Something had to change.
A year or so after graduation, a friend called me one evening. “Did you hear about Lisa?”
“No,” I answered, “what’s going on?”
“She’s transgender!” The voice on the line crowed. “She’s changed her name and she’s becoming a man!”
I was in shock. Worse than shock. Lisa was perhaps my oldest friend. We had been toddlers together. I would have sworn that she told me everything. But I hadn’t known this. I immediately called a priest to ask what I should do.
“Have you talked to your friend about it?” He asked.
I admitted that I had not. I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to people who did stuff like that. He was quiet for a few minutes, and then he said, “Tatiana, go talk to your friend. Ask them what they have been going through and really listen. Don’t be like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son; be like the father who runs down the road to see his kid.”
Lisa and I got together a few days later. Over the course of a long walk I asked everything I could think of. How long had Lisa felt this way? Forever, but they had been scared to admit it to me. What had scared them? My vocal opposition to LGBTQ people, for one, had made me into someone who didn’t feel safe to tell. Would we have to stop being friends now?
My old friend looked at me with so much love in their eyes. And they said they would be my friend as long as I still wanted to be.
They left that day but not before giving me homework—books about being queer and transgender, articles about gender and sexuality. I finally had something stronger than my fear: my love for my friend and the accompanying shame that they couldn’t trust me to love this part of them. So I took a chance and started reading.
Since the first time I had heard about being homosexual, all I had seen was something monstrous, or at least something to be laughed at or shunned. But now I read story after story about how people knew that they didn’t fit into the gender binary, how they knew that they loved someone who wasn’t the expected choice. I learned about Alan Turing and Matthew Shepard and the horrible price that the culture of fear had extracted from their lives. I learned about the people (including my relative whose “roommate” situation had been my first exposure to homosexuality) who made hospice centers for their friends who were dying from AIDS when hospitals refused to care for them.
And I didn’t see anything disgusting or shameful.
I saw God.
Coming out of the tomb
I saw God’s love and creativity and passion. I saw the God who told us to love one another as he had loved us. The God who saw my friend and who saw me as being something not broken or depraved, but as a mirror image of himself. I felt like Lazarus, as if I had been dead in the tomb but suddenly the stone had been pulled away and I was being called by name to come out and live.
My life has changed since that moment. I now go to an affirming church and am part of a Christian LGBTQ club. I no longer haunt the Catholic online world trying to debate people, and I do not have a real social media presence anymore. After I started trying to talk about these changes in me, many of my friends and followers left. But my friend who transitioned is still my best friend, and I have found joy and peace beyond anything my teenage self would have thought possible.
My hope is that you have read it and that you’ll have the courage to realize that you don’t have to live in fear anymore. And that you’ll know that you too can come alive again.
A few weeks ago, my pastor gave a sermon on Mt 5:23, which says “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.”
A single thought seared my conscience: Father James Martin. Though it had been a decade since I had been so cruel, and though he had no idea I even existed, I realized that I needed to apologize. I poured out my heart in his Facebook messenger chat, explained that I had been a frightened, edgy teenager but that I had deliberately tried to hurt him and others, and that I was very sorry and hoped that God would bless his ministry. I didn’t expect him to read it. I thought surely such a busy man would have an assistant who would kindly say “that’s nice, God bless” and that would be the end of it.
Imagine my shock when the real Father Martin responded! He didn’t condemn me as I had once condemned him. He forgave me. And beyond offering forgiveness, he also asked me to write this story for his Outreach audience. It has been a humbling honor to look back on the road that led me to my tomb and back out of it again. My hope is that you have read it with the same open heart that I did when I read that stack of books from my friend. That you’ll have the courage to realize that you don’t have to live in fear anymore. And that you’ll know that you too can come alive again.
(Some names and details have been changed to protect the identities of people whose privacy and safety I value.)
