I studied religion and philosophy at WVU, and that helped me frame certain questions and think about life and religion in a rational and critical way. One of the people I studied in depth was Paul Tillich. One of my professors happened to have studied with Tillich when he attended graduate school at Harvard.

Tillich wasn’t interested so much in what he would call the historicity of the Christian Bible or of Jesus. The books of the Bible and the events and people described took place in the distant past, and the question of their literal truth is beyond our capacity to answer in a way that is satisfactory. The study of the language and the cultures involved may have academic significance for some, but it’s not really helpful for the average person dealing with ultimate questions of life. For Tillich, Christianity wasn’t about dogma and a set of finite beliefs one had to attest to. For him, the Bible and the Christian story was mythology, a way of expressing and exploring our fundamental reality.

Tillich thought that religion should address the specific concerns of peoples’ lives, and he believed in the modern world we had to confront, broadly speaking, our anxiety. He didn’t mean mental illness that should be treated by a doctor, but the questions of life that concern us all simply because we exist. Death, knowing that we will one day come to an end. Guilt, knowing that we are moral agents in an ambiguous world. Meaninglessness, what’s it all for and why are we here? These things plague the mind of people who are no longer struggling to survive on a day to day basis, the problems of people who have time to think. Tillich believed that the problem of anxiety stemmed from a sense of separation and that faith was about finding the courage to accept that we are acceptable as we are despite our flaws and our imperfect knowledge.

Tillich believed very much that religion should address the modern situation, and he did not see any problem with science. I’m sure if he were alive today, he would claim that Christians should accept that modern science has expanded our view of sexuality and gender and that the Christian church should fully and completely embrace LGBT people and their reality.

Most fundamentalists don’t accept him as Christian. He didn’t even like to speak of God so much because he believed we should train ourselves to stop thinking of God as a being alongside other beings. He thought of God as what he called the Ground of Being. For Tillich, God was remote and abstract, and he insisted that God or this Ground of Being was beyond our intellectual capacity to the point that our faith must always carry with it a high level of uncertainty.

I found him to be intensely interesting. And his views seemed much more valid than the insipid fundamentalism that I grew up with. But in the end, I didn’t feel I could call myself a Christian or claim I had faith even using Tillich’s broader terms. But he, along with a number of others, provided a kind of ladder for me to climb up out of the simplistic beliefs I was brought up with and provided a vocabulary that helped me better understand my own point of view.

I've got the memo.

I’m likely to post pictures of young men without a lot of muscle or body hair, or artistic renderings of such young men. I know that all such males should be infantilized, labeled as “delicate” and anyone who shows the slightest interest in such males should be viewed with suspicion. We all know that no matter how mature, insightful, intelligent, kind or desirous of love, sex and affection, a thin young man should be thought of as a silly child or a sexless fairy, and that any normal person would be attracted to “real men” like jocks and bears, no matter how immature, irresponsible or dumb they are. I’ve got the memo.  

When I was growing up, I didn’t feel particularly wanted or appreciated. My family, the community and my peers seemed to be uninterested in me. I felt detached from them. My mother was also seriously mentally ill, and I felt I needed to withhold information from her because her reactions could be extreme and unpredictable. When I went through puberty and realized I was gay, I had this huge secret that I had to keep from all these people because I felt unsafe. I realized I liked boys when I was 11, but I never told another soul about that until I went away to college seven years later. Seven years is an eternity to a young person. But I guarded my secret, and I wasn’t particularly forthcoming about anything else. I held a lot in.

I was so withdrawn and shutdown that I even lost touch with my own feelings. I feared I wasn’t a real person or a whole person. The people around me talked freely about all kinds of things, but I had a hard time articulating, even to myself, what I liked and what I hoped for. I was simply surviving, trying to get through life day by day without being harmed. I was like a zombie.

When I went to college, I took advantage of the free counseling service and started seeing a therapist. It took her a long time before she broke through my shell. I would go in, and she would ask me questions about my life, and then she’d ask me what I felt or thought about what had happened. I would usually say, “I don’t know.” I was telling the truth. I really didn’t know. I was so unused to anyone asking or truly caring. And I was unused to situations where I could open up and feel safe. But I kept going back to the therapist, and she kept asking the questions.

At one point, I think she became frustrated with me and said that if she had experienced what I had experienced, she would be angry. She also told me that I had a right to be angry. That somehow touched a nerve. I felt I finally had permission to say what I was really feeling.

When zombie, autopilot Gary faded away and my true feelings rose to the surface, it was, for a very long time, a bloodbath. I was angry, depressed, suicidal, and I experienced mood swings and a lot of anxiety. I acknowledged my fear. I was deeply afraid. The world seemed like a very hostile place to me. I accepted that I was more than simply shy. I was terrified, and I mean I was on the brink of panic most of the time. Little, simple things were extremely stressful for me. Going to the mailbox meant I might run into a neighbor which seemed like facing a firing squad. Going to the Laundromat meant I would be stuck there while I washed and dried my clothes, and strangers could come in and harass me. I feared going to the grocery store because I didn’t know what the cashier might say to me. Going out into the world was like going into a war zone.

We began exploring why I was experiencing the world in such a way. Why did I think the world was so treacherous and dangerous? Who put those thoughts in my head. I had to acknowledge that my home life had been unstable and unpredictable. I had to acknowledge that my family tuned me out in a way. They didn’t know what to do with a boy like me, so they looked the other way. I began picking up on corrosive, extremely hostile homophobic messages everywhere I went. People were always talking about the queers, the cocksuckers and the faggots. I felt the overwhelming hate, but there was no one I could turn to for support. I had to endure it and live through it on my own. I lived in fear that all of that hate would one day be directed right at me and the people around me would tear me apart.

I was angry at my family, at my community, at the kids at school and my society. And after I understood my own feelings--acknowledged them, accepted them, traced them back to their roots--I was able to understand others. My mother couldn’t help being mentally ill. My father was an uneducated country boy who felt overwhelmed by his circumstances. The people in my life were raised to believe and expect boys to be a certain way. And there was this ingrained mythology about sexuality and gender that ran deep throughout society, and all of those who failed to live up to expectations were seen as a threat or a joke. It was okay to abuse such people because they were challenging the status quo in a way that was believed to be unreasonable and unnecessary.

I didn’t exactly forgive all of that, but I understood it better, and that has made it at least a little easier.