My Foundation

I grew up in a loving home with a wonderful mother and father. Easy to take for granted, yes — but, I know how fortunate I am to have grown up in such an environment.  

My mother has always been one of my dearest friends and my biggest role model. When I mention her in conversations with friends, I frequently hear “I love your mom.” She lights up a room and makes anyone she encounters feel special. One friend remarked after meeting her that her smile was dangerous, that it was so big, she feared falling in. My mother is a big Jesus-lover. And is a HUGE memorizer of Scripture.  

I’m more like my dad. We are more reserved. We internalize. My dad is a voracious reader, a hard and disciplined worker, and a super generous human with a soft heart. And, well, his smile…it’s boyish, warm and inviting. He loves a buttery chardonnay (not sure what this means), the Kansas Jayhawks, his family and Jesus. With coffee in hand, each morning he goes downstairs to his office and reads his Bible and prays.  

I am their only child, my dad’s peanut, and my mother’s honey bunny. I was a good kid and always close to them. I played sports and made good grades. I drank alcohol several times in high school but that was the extent of my “wild” ways.

My upbringing was pretty much Leave it to Beaver.

I was loved. And this gave me a pretty healthy self-esteem and confidence.  

As you may have gathered, I come from an evangelical Christian home. I accepted Jesus into my heart at the age of five. I grew up in a Baptist church, attending Sunday morning and evening services. When I was 10 years old, I spent the summer in Mexico. Our former pastor and his family had moved to Pueblo to start a church and my parents shipped me down to live with them. One of many adventures that summer was going with them on a medical missions trip to the jungle. A couple years later, my parents switched churches and started attending an Evangelical Free Church so I could be a part of its thriving youth group.

Each summer, I attended a conference for Christian teens where I bought and wore a t-shirt that declared, “I’M NOT DOING IT”.

It was the highlight of my summer and I came back from these weeks on an emotional high. After high school, I left my hometown of Wichita for Chicago to attend Wheaton College, that bastion of Christian evangelical education. And I spent yet another summer on a missions trip, this time living in the slums of Manila, Philippines, technically helping run a vacation Bible type school for the kids (but, truthfully, not doing much of anything). 

You’re getting the picture…I am a dyed-in-the wool evangelical Christian. Yes, my faith is inherited. Yes, I did all the things that good evangelical kids do, checked off all the boxes: youth group, missions trips, Christian conferences, even Christian college. Yes, I followed the rules. But I do love Jesus. I love the idea of the Trinity: God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. I love the mystery of it, the idea that God’s Spirit lives in me, guides me, knows me, loves me.  

This love has been the bedrock of my faith but sin has been the talking point.

It was the sermons on sin and rules that embedded into me. While I have felt Jesus’ love for me, it was the sin I focused on. I was brought up believing homosexuality was a sin. A big-time sin. A you-are-for-sure-going-to-hell sin. A destroying-Jesus’-love-for-me sin. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was raised in Kansas, a conservative Republican state in the heartland of the country. I did not know many people who were not like me. Christian, middle-class, conservative, white. In the 80s when I was growing up, gay people, at least in my neck of the woods, were still seen as weird and unnatural. Something was off about them. And their being gay defined them. It was impossible to see past their “gayness.” 

My family lived near a park and we would drive by it on our way to and from our house. Oftentimes multiple cars were parked outside the men’s bathroom. And I don’t know how, but my dad just knew that men were hooking up with other men in that bathroom for sex. He was utterly disgusted by it. It seemed like every time we drove by, he would make some derogatory comment about it. I quickly adopted his revulsion.  

Of course, this revulsion stemmed from the idea that gay men were only about hook-ups. They were not interested in being in love or being in a committed relationship; they were only interested in having sex with as many men as possible. This was the decade of AIDS, a disease caused by gay men having sex with each other, right? What further evidence did I need that God condemned their actions? When Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV positive, I was shocked. How could an NBA basketball player be gay? A professional athlete? The epitome of a masculine man. He’s gay? But if AIDS was a gay disease, he had to be gay.  

My view of lesbians was a little less judgy but still wildly inaccurate and harmful. My high school volleyball coach was a lesbian and she fit the “butch” stereotype: mannish, short hair, dressed in 80s jogging suits. My classmate, Molly, was masculine and gravitated to the girls. We all figured she was gay. She came out years later. No surprise there.

But, turns out, the Homecoming Queen of our high school and my best friend was a lesbian.

(I wouldn’t find this out until many years later.) And she was feminine and fun and kind. And gay.  

Thus, my formative years, those years where learning and experience and memory etch so deeply in our psyche, were spent thinking gay people were unnatural and unattractive and a whole host of other inaccurate and harmful stereotypes. Those youthful impressions and beliefs impacted me so much that it has taken me half my life to come to terms with my own sexuality.