I was socialized by fundamentalist Baptist theater Majors. It’s not like being raised by wolves, but in that context….
People usually either laugh or look confused or bemused when I tell them. But it’s true.
After being largely rejected by my peers through elementary, the beginning of seventh grade was no improvement. I attended a private Christian school, an elementary and high school that was owned by our church and shared a campus with the large Baptist university it also owned. Seventh grade was the first year of junior high, and we shared a building on campus with the high school.
Seventh grade began for me with the same survival strategy that had gotten me through elementary: reading through lunch and pretty much everything else. But after a few months, I found myself sharing a table with another lunch-reader, a junior named Lisa. She was new to the school, and it wasn’t long before we were sharing book recommendations and her dad’s amazing oatmeal cookies.
Lisa’s older sister was a theater minor at the university, and their family lived only a couple of blocks from campus. By eighth grade I was part of the family, and Lisa and I were hanging out with her sister’s music and theater friends. When Lisa graduated and enrolled in the university, my entire social life moved with her.
I spent four years of high school (and then most of college) in the world of those theater kids (young adults, really), and to an awkward teenager, they were talented, glamorous, confident – everything I wasn’t. But more importantly, they were kind.
It was a season of years when the university’s theater program was thriving with an excellent faculty and some amazingly talented students. I saw musicals, Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Chekhov, among others. I learned every note of the soundtracks to Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. I loved it all, absorbing other lives in other worlds.
But even more important than the escape of the plays and the songs, those theater students welcomed me as one of their own and gave me a space to begin to figure out who I was.
I’ve thought about them a lot over the past few years. As I’ve sung the songs I learned with them at Show Tunes night at Sidetrack in Boystown, and as I’ve walked alongside Christian gay friends and their wives as they unpacked their faith and undone their marriages to recreate their lives and families.
I’ve thought of all the stories they were trying to pour into those plays. All the things they had to keep in. How much we learned to hide. So many of them were gay. Not that they told me then, and I chose not to speculate – I saw the damage that could do. But as we’ve reconnected on Facebook, and I’ve seen many of them out, finally living out loud, I haven’t been surprised. I’ve been glad, and grateful.
And in retrospect, the journey my own life has taken over the past several years shouldn’t have been so surprising. Thirty years ago, I was socialized by fundamentalist Baptist theater majors – gay and straight, creating a family that welcomed outcasts and gave them (me) a place to grow up, a place to be ourselves that was probably as safe as we could make it in our context.
They lived in inherent tension – all of the contradictions are there in the description: fundamentalist Baptist theater majors. And I learned to be at home in that space – however ironically, to feel safe there in a way I imagine many of them never could. But they gave that gift to a “kid sister” who showed up one day in need of a family.
I grew up with preacher boys and theater kids, sometimes one and the same, and when I look around at Gilead on Sunday evenings, I see the same kinds of folks. Only now no one needs to hide a thing.
Leaning Out 