Our theme for the month of June is “older and wiser.” Writers were asked to write a response to one of their previous pieces. Today, Annaka responds to her June 2022 post, “Sacrificing My Soul on the Altar of Gay Porn.”
I kept buying the gay manga.
And I bought a bookshelf for it, when my collection outgrew the shelf beneath my nightstand. And a second, when it again outgrew the first. I own comics so sweet they will rot your teeth and some so foul they’re good for nothing but a laugh; comics about trans kids and androgynous ones and ones caught up in crossdressing shenanigans; G-rated comics about parents supporting their gay sons and teenage artists connecting with senior citizens through BL manga; X-rated comics about longtime friends turning lovers and workplace romances and, yes, vampires; omegaverse ones (if you don’t know, don’t ask) and Korean ones and ones that are both.
While I nursed my BL manga habit, the CRC’s governing body continued to double down on its commitment to anti-gay homogeneity. Neither of us seemed inclined to pivot based on the objections of the other. Nothing changed in the two years since I first wrote about the HSR, except the lengths we were both willing to go.
I would like to be very blasé about the whole thing. We knew this was coming, after all, and my association with the CRC is almost entirely past tense. My name is probably still on the membership rolls at my home church, if only in the “inactive” section. Until last month, I was on the board of a CRC-affiliated nonprofit—the final real string trying me personally to the denomination. When asked if I would be taking a second term, I gave the others a sad smile and received understanding sighs in return. They would continue their good and important work without me. The state of the CRC is a staple at the dinner table, but it doesn’t affect me in the tangible ways it does my family members who are still active in the denomination. I’m above it. I’m over it.
Which is why I didn’t think it would be difficult for me to return to my home church to attend a service honoring my mother’s retirement from her position as worship coordinator there.
And it wasn’t, at first.
It’s a building that I know very well, having traipsed through its halls thousands of times in my childhood for morning services, vespers, Sunday school, Christmas programs, potlucks, girls club, youth group. It’s where I changed into my Dutch costume during Tulip Time and had my graduation open house. And there are people there that I know if not well then for a long time, though fewer of them than there were two years ago. (Several of the people who taught my Sunday school classes and sang in the choirs I grew up listening to have left to find a church in a denomination that better reflects who they believe God to be.)
We got through two songs and were halfway down the Apostle’s Creed before I noticed anything was wrong. I’d like to think that I held it together pretty well. I didn’t.
As anyone who has had one will know, the best place to have a panic attack is in the front row of a crowded church sanctuary, sandwiched between your sister and grandmother while a man you’ve known since you were a toddler is doing the prayer for illumination about ten feet away. And if you are able to extract yourself from that, the second best place to have a panic attack is in the back of a church where there is at least one person in every single plausibly private room, even during the sermon.
Surrounded and claustrophobic, I fought my way back into the narthex, knowing that I couldn’t go back into that sanctuary but twisted up with the need to be there. One of the church members, a woman whose children I played on the church softball team with, got me a glass of ice water when I worked up the courage to ask for one. She put her hand on my shoulder with the most painful gentleness and asked, “Can you go up?” when it came time for my mother’s family to join her up front and place their hands on her in prayerful thanks for her service. She kept it there as I shook my head and cried into my hands.
When I got past feeling guilty about it, and selfish, and ashamed, I realized that what I might have been doing was grieving. It’s a deep, deep grief, one that goes well and far beyond the loss of a denomination. My home church is not LGBT-affirming, so they’re not going to be thrown out of the denomination or get forcibly taken over by the congregation two streets over. They aren’t being told to leave.
But I am.
Yes, I could stay. It’s not like I’m trying to get on another church board or join a council. It’s not like my membership is anything but technical. A thing to fall back on. A first place to go if I ever decide to try organized religion again.
The CRC hasn’t thrown me out, not really. But you have made it impossible for me to stay. And more, you have made it far less likely that I ever will try organized religion again. You have made it so that I will never do so at one of your churches. You didn’t do it so much when you denounced gay sex (we’ve known your position there for years) as when you took away the right of your office bearers to say, “wait, I don’t agree,” and your churches to say, “we trust you anyway.” When you took the right to ask questions of my God and the right to be in harmonious discord with my neighbors—the very things that your schools and your churches brought me up to believe was acting out my faith.
We make sacrifices. We all sell our souls to something, in the end. When I titled my first piece about this “Sacrificing My Soul on the Altar of Gay Porn,” it was clickbait. I know that my soul isn’t in danger because of the comics I read. That’s not a part of my religion. It is a part of yours, though, and you’ll sacrifice more than just me on the altar of orthodoxical purity.
I hope it’s worth it. What hurts most is how convinced you are that it will be.
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Thank you for helping me express my emotions.
This is really beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
It’s so painful. I am truly sorry. Even from my self-imposed exile more than two generations old, I hurt for the collective us all over again.
The undeniable thing is the extreme shortsightedness of it all. Your fierce commitment to integrity, honesty, and faith is to be treasured. Treasured.
I foresee a time when there will recognition of what this stance has cost them. It won’t be worth it.
My heart breaks over and over for so many young people sent packing in one way or another.
It’s been awhile since I cried reading on of your posts. And I agree wholeheartedly with Pamela.
Thank you for courageously sharing your thoughts on a most painful decision. You are a jewel..