This post was submitted by Chris

“Fags! Repent!”

Oh great – those words. Turning to meet them, I rolled my eyes as those funny, short words echoed and bounced toward me over hot summer-baked pavement. The words were intended to hurt but the insult fell flat. “I’ve heard much worse, and much more creative, fuckers,” I thought with a self-satisfied smile of superiority.

Still, I couldn’t ignore them. My friends and I were in someone’s crosshairs, singled out as needing salvation. What had started as a normal night migrating from bar to bar in search of new friends and hot beats had quickly become something of consequence. With just two words, a divide was drawn between these strangers and my cohort as cloudy and seemingly impassable as the Guinness I had just gulped.

Did this really have to happen now? I was newly 21, looking to have fun, a few drinks in and feeling a bit defensive. I wasn’t sure I was really in the mood to navigate this assault gracefully.

The battle cry had seemed to manifest out of the ether. My friends and I were between bars, enjoying our evening and ready for some spirit-ed dancing. We are not exactly a motley crew – sure, a good number of us are marked by tattoos, lightly adorned with piercings, regularly extinguishing cigarettes, and dressed in clothing that might raise a few Sunday morning eyebrows, but we are an amicable bunch and my feeling is that we do not alienate others in spite of our appearances. Yet as we approached a queer bar one humid August night and prepared to pop, lock and drop it we were confronted by several men with Bibles in hand, accusing us of maintaining an “alternative lifestyle” – a phrase that always makes me smirk, as if there were such a thing as a uniform lifestyle when you cut to the bone of things – and offered our “offensive” appearance as evidence of this. (Or maybe we just had some serious gay face going on.)

My friends were clearly caught off guard – after all, we were just there to party – and responded in self-defense, though in all fairness I thought that some of what they had to say was not in the best taste. Slightly embarrassed, I thought to myself: “Well, politeness is not readily facilitated by beer and not easy when one feels ambushed.”

Sensing escalation, I suggested my friends move inside, recognizing that the conversation was quickly becoming aggressively didactic, not thoughtfully dialogical. They were happy to oblige – they had come to dance, not debate. A friend whispered in my ear as he passed by, “are you going to be okay?”

Though I’d had a lot of experience speaking with folks who disagreed with me, I suddenly wasn’t sure. I felt compelled to pursue a conversation with these individuals; perhaps because of a recent attempt that had gone terribly awry, or maybe just as a part of who I am. Either way, I sensed that they desired dialogue, so I went for it.

Our conversation began with a reading from the Bible, not intended to open dialogue with a graceful spirit but as a blatant attempt to proselytize. I thanked them for sharing their holy book with me, and asked if they would like to explain to me why they had chosen to spend their Friday evening on this particular street corner. They informed me that they had recently given their lives over to Jesus Christ and had been commissioned by their minister to recruit other believers. They had heard that this part of Chicago was “heavily populated by homosexuals” – you know, flooded with queers – and decided to come spread their message of reformation and repentance to a community that they believed was in need of it.

After hearing them out, I asked if I might be allowed to share my story with them. To my surprise, they nodded affirmatively. I told them of my years as a Christian and how immensely powerful they were for me – the love that I experienced, the joy I found in communion with other believers, and the inspiration Jesus Christ provided me. But there was a darker side to those years: my struggles with recognizing my sexual orientation and wrestling to reconcile it with the teachings of the tradition, the shame I felt over who I was, and the weight of what felt like living a double life. This was a very difficult time for me, and I shared with them every embarrassing, difficult detail.

When I was finished, I noticed that a quiet had overtaken the group. Finally, one member spoke up. With a gruff tone and eyes fixed down, he thanked me for sharing my story with him, saying that he had never actually known a “homosexual.” He hadn’t thought what it might be like to experience intolerance for being queer, comparing it to the xenophobia and racism he had known as a Mexican-American immigrant.

We engaged in open discourse for the next few hours with candor and respect, discussing discrimination and dancing and difference, beer and bigotry and basketball, religion and rap music and respect, fags and forgiveness and frijoles. Though we all remained fixed in our convictions, we came to understand one another as fuller human beings, not caricatures of our sexualities or religious identities.

Not all conversations go as well as this one – as I alluded to earlier, another summer night just one month prior to this incident, a friend and I found ourselves suddenly surrounded in a subway tunnel. We had been talking at length and not paying close attention to our surroundings, something my mother always warned me about, when we lifted our heads to see that we were encircled by a group of men who accused us of sin and sickness. Though I attempted peace-making and dialogue, the incident ended in violence.

I’ll never forget the night I was attacked on the Chicago Red Line; though I’d like to believe open dialogue can always overcome problematic conversations, I know that this is not true. As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, I have learned that there are times where personal safety is a higher priority than respectful engagement.

Yet I will also always remember my night outside a gay bar, sharing stories as bass-heavy music floated right on by me, carried away on a cool summer night’s breeze, my friends dancing just inside to a song I’d never know – I enraptured by music much sweeter in the form of dialogue despite difference with new friends who were supposed to be enemies.

Hey missionaries of the world – get at me. I’ve been burned a time or two, but I’m still your fag.

Chris’ column, The Non Prophet, runs Wednesdays at 2 PM. His column will be on sabbatical for a few weeks while Chris travels the country for three conferences this month. For more, visit his website.

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