The Conversation We Really Need About Homosexuality

22 May 2014 | LOREN SEIBOLD| 

I didn’t choose to be heterosexual. I was born this way. From the time I was old enough to notice (and taking into account that at the time I was far more interested in Lego blocks and model cars) I remember thinking little girls were incredibly charming creatures. My first real exposure to homosexuality came in college, when I had friends who I learned (probably as they were learning it themselves) had attachments to people of their own gender. This was a time when homosexuality was at last being spoken of aloud among ordinary people. It even got a friendlier, non-clinical name: gay. For many Christians, this openness was a symptom of an oversexed, undermoraled world. It was as though naming it, identifying it, made it real. It’s a diagnosis from the same people who still say, “Why are there so many homosexuals now? They didn’t exist back when I was young.”

That not true, of course. When I think back on my childhood (and this from the safety of a protected, conservative, rural Seventh-day Adventist home) I remember a dapper, swishy high-tenor church member whose mannerisms occasioned rolled eyes; a church school teacher who always moved to new jobs with a female friend; the bachelor farmer who, someone said, got strange magazines in his mailbox; not to mention puzzling appointments written on the walls of public toilet stalls. Yes, it existed. But back then, among polite people, most things sexual got talked about only when unavoidable. There was vast ignorance about sex, and we all wanted to believe that anything outside of wholesome marriage relations was rarer than it really was. Which is why homosexuality often ended up in public restrooms. Read more...