GCN Radio - January 15, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

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BRIAN: Welcome to our second edition of GCN Radio. I’m Brian, in Muncie, Indiana…

JUSTIN: …and I’m Justin in Raleigh, NC.

BRIAN: We had a great first response to our first show. I’m reading your messages and hearing that you enjoyed that and it’s exactly what we had hoped would happen; that we’d create something that you would enjoy and be proud of.

JUSTIN: Oh, absolutely. And it’s really exciting to me because this was just an idea of ours for a while, and it’s really exciting when you take an idea that you have and you get to see it come to life and see that “Hey!” it works and that people actually like it. It’s good stuff.

BRIAN: So a friend brought me in to the station, and for me it’s after work right now and my friend from church is bringing me in and he says, “Oh Brian, I guess it’s too bad you had to get called in to work,” and I said, “No, no, no… it’s really fun, I’m working on an Internet radio show.” And he goes, “Oh, you’ll have to send me the link!” And I said, “Well, it’s a gay thing.” And he’s as straight as the day is long, and he says, “Oh… do you have, like, descriptions or something?” I said, “No, no, no, no… it’s not like that at all. It’s GayChristian.Net, it’s very clean, very straightforward, it’s a really, really great show.” But we had a pretty good laugh with that, and it makes me very happy that GCN is a very upstanding website, and it’s a very good place, a wholesome place, for lots of people to come. I’m glad we don’t have any PG-13 kinds of things on here.

JUSTIN: Well, now that you’ve said that, I’m going to have to cancel the GCN porno section that I had ordered.

BRIAN: Oh darn, oh shoot! I’m disappointed. Well, no, actually.

JUSTIN: [laughs] Oh, goodness no.

BRIAN: We have a couple of things before we get started with our main portion of the show. We have a guest today, but just as a reminder about the music contest. We’ve had a couple of people ask and the deadline for submissions is February 8th, and we still have yet to get our first submission. So you guys get busy and create some music for our show, because we need a theme.

JUSTIN: Just to add on to that… just for technical reasons, sometimes large file attachments don’t always go through e-mail quite the way we would like for them to. So those who are planning on submitting, I suggest that you send e-mail to Brian at gcnradio@gaychristian.net and let him know that you’re planning to send a file and then get with him about how you want to send that. Is that right, Brian?

BRIAN: That’s absolutely right. In fact I was talking to someone online last night who asked me and I said, “If it’s easier, just mail me a CD,” and I’m happy to give out my mailing address if that’s the best option for people. So, Justin, I believe we have a guest today all the way from Oklahoma City. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about him?

JUSTIN: Well, I’m actually very, very excited because he gets to be our very first guest ever. Joining us by phone today is Nathan Gunter. And for those of you who are on GCN you’ll be aware that Nathan writes our column “Queer as Faith” on a regular basis on GCN. Nate and I have been friends for a long time, and I was really excited for him to come and start doing that column and I think a lot of people have really enjoyed that, so welcome to the show, Nate!

NATHAN: Hi! Thank you for having me on.

JUSTIN: Hello.

BRIAN: Hey Nathan, good to have you. So, I’m going to ask the first question since I’m outside of the loop here: how did you guys meet anyway?

NATHAN: That is a hilarious story… Justin and I went to college together. I pulled up to my freshman dorm at Wake Forest, and I remember I was wearing… I was not out at the time at all… but I was wearing this rainbow tie-dyed t-shirt and overalls.

BRIAN: Wow.

NATHAN: Justin was helping me unload all of my stuff, you know, out of my mom’s car and I had this pair of Wakko Warner slippers, and so he and I bonded over Animaniacs. And we’ve pretty much been friends ever since. It was crazy, and it’s fantastic.

JUSTIN: And the reason that we ended up meeting was that I was in the largest campus Christian group at Wake Forest, where Nate and I both went, which was InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. IV had a thing that every year they would have some students in the group come early and help the freshmen move in, and so that’s part of what I was doing. So we ended up meeting and talking about InterVarsity and other Christian-related stuff and Nate’s Christian music collection. And Nate was just a little bit, I remember him being just a little bit hyper.

NATHAN: Yeah, well…

BRIAN: I can’t imagine that…

NATHAN: People calm down in their old age.

JUSTIN: [laughs] Not too much.

NATHAN: I don’t even know if you know this, but it made it a lot easier for me to come out knowing that there were gay Christians that I knew that I could kind of have a role model coming out and still being a believer.

BRIAN: So he just dragged you out of the closet?

NATHAN: Dragged me kicking and screaming.

JUSTIN: Do you want to tell the story about me coming out to you?

NATHAN: Nope, no. [laughs] Yes I do. Justin didn’t come out to me for a while, and I remember…

BRIAN: Wait. Who came out to who first?

NATHAN: Oh, Justin came out to me way before; I was not out to anybody my first two years in college.

JUSTIN: In fact, because Nate and I were a couple of years apart, he had still not come out to me by the time I graduated, so I didn’t find out until afterwards.

BRIAN: Wow.

NATHAN: Even when you’re in the closet, I think you have a pretty good gaydar and mine was just beepin’ all over the place whenever I hung out with Justin. I would go to his room and he’d have all these books that I now have, you know, gay Christian books, and we would hang out in his apartment and he would drop those subtle hints like people like to do, and finally I said, “Justin, if you have something to tell me, please, stop skirting the issue and just freakin’ tell me!” [laughter] …and he didn’t! And the next day I got an e-mail, this is great, I wish I still had it. It said, “Well, Nathan, you were right, I do skirt around the issue a lot, I think you should know that I’m ga…” and the next paragraph, “…ining insight into what.” And the next paragraph ended with “You should know in fact that I’m a homo” next paragraph “sapien, and like all other people I…” And this whole thing dropping every gay word you could, and not actually saying it. It was just about the funniest thing I had ever read in my entire life. It was hilarious.

JUSTIN: Yeah, I think there was something in there about I was ready to come out … of my room.

NATHAN: [laughs] Yeah, I’d forgotten about that.

JUSTIN: Well then Nate ended up coming out to the entire campus because he’s been writing a long time before “Queer as Faith” he’s been writing. And he used to write a lot of columns for the school paper, many of which centered on God and Christianity and so on. At some point he came out in one of the columns, didn’t you?

NATHAN: Uh-huh. Yeah, the first one of my senior year.

JUSTIN: So I heard about that after the fact, and that’s when I was like “Well, I’ve been waiting for him to tell me!”

NATHAN: Yeah. That was an interesting time because the whole campus learned at once and it turned into kind of this mini-controversy on campus… fun.

BRIAN: Nathan, I want to ask you… well, first of all, I want to say that your column is breathtaking. It’s wonderful. I mean, you write on a level that almost is soul piercing. It’s just so organic and people can relate to it so well. But I want to ask you, what inspires you to create such flowing prose?

NATHAN: Drugs. I’m just kidding.

BRIAN: I’ll take some then.

NATHAN: I’ll have what she’s having. Really what inspires me is mostly just the fact that life is crazy. I have to struggle a lot to look for God in the everyday. I think that we, as Christians… I know that I did, when I was a young believer, I looked for mountaintop experiences to lead me to God, and those are just very few and far between. And even when you do have them, they don’t last long enough. No matter how long they last, it’s just not long enough. And so one of the biggest things that I’ve learned in my journey is that God really is in the everyday, and that the things that happen to us everyday, there’s something holy happening there, because we have the Holy Spirit living inside us. So it’s pretty much just my life, and God never ceased to give me a cornucopia of crazy things that are happening in my life that kind of give me material.

JUSTIN: Absolutely. My favorite thing about your column, Nate, is that you’re always very real. You’re not afraid to be honest about when you’re down, you’re angry, when you’re upset. A lot of things that we as Christians often fail to express, because we want to be seen as these really holy people instead of as these very broken people in need of God. So I really appreciate that… and so it’s probably good that you’re writing the column instead of me because you’re not afraid to say some things that I wouldn’t necessarily say. I think there have been a few times that Nate sent me a column and I was looking at it and would kind of say, “Do you really want to use this language? Do you really want to say…” Except for maybe a couple of exceptions, he normally wins but it’s part of what makes his column very real and very very raw, I think, which is good.

NATHAN: It’s an interesting part of my life. The first couple of years that I was a Christian, I didn’t become a Christian until I was seventeen, I was very afraid of feeling bad things and admitting when I was angry or upset or having a bad day. At some point, this switch got turned in my head (thank you, God for doing that) and I realized that it’s really okay and it’s necessary to feel those things, because if you don’t let yourself then you’re leaving the Holy Spirit out of something very important in your life. God, I learned, wants to be part of the bad times as much as the good. We grow a lot in the times that we’re feeling very angry, very resentful, very entitled and self-aggrandizing. We grow a lot in those times because God can really show us our weakness in that more than when we’re feeling good.

BRIAN: Nate, we have a lot of young people that have recently come to the site and a lot of people who are really struggling with their coming out process versus their Christianity and trying to reconcile the two. Especially when you have families involved and whatnot, what kind of advice do you have for them?

NATHAN: My biggest advice would be, “Trust the Spirit’s lead.” If people ask me, “How do you reconcile your faith and your sexual orientation,” I always say, “Well, it’s not a matter of Bible verses, and liberation theology et cetera, et cetera…” Which is part of it, granted, but I would say, what I always say to people is unless you have four hours for me to tell you the story of my coming out, you just have to trust that it was something that the Spirit asked me to do, which I didn’t want to do. I was very comfortable in the closet when I was in there, and I think Justin can attest to this because we knew each other back then, I had a very comfortable life as a believer, as a Christian on campus. It was something that was extremely difficult and extremely heartbreaking in a lot of ways, but again it was one of those things that the Spirit used to grow me so much, and I’m very grateful now that it happened.

JUSTIN: I just think it’s cool, Nate, that you’ve been through a lot of the stuff that you have because it gives you so much insight to be able to talk to people about things. One thing that’s interesting to me about your story is that you became a Christian when you were 17. Why did you become a Christian?

NATHAN: It’s a very long story, obviously. Basically, the less long version of it is that I grew up obsessed with success and at some point that just failed me. My drive to be the best student in school and to get into a great college, et cetera, et cetera. Up to the point at which I became a believer, I was pretty much defining myself by my success. It’s such an all-devouring thing, because no matter how successful you become, it’s never enough, and I needed to learn that God wants me the way I am now. He doesn’t want me in twenty years when I’ve got my life all together, and he doesn’t want me when I get ten points better on my SAT, he wants me now. None of that stuff really matters, in the end. And I needed to learn that. And at some point I was just broken by this drive for success that I had and God really came into that brokenness and showed me that it’s okay to be just me, and that he really wants me for who I am and not what I do.

JUSTIN: That’s awesome.

BRIAN: God does want us where we are. Takes us where we are, in whatever state we’re in and works with us where we are.

NATHAN: Absolutely.

JUSTIN: I have one last question for you, Nate. What is your favorite “Queer as Faith” column, so far?

NATHAN: Oh, Lord. I think one of them… I’ve got several that I loved. I loved "Bible Bar."

JUSTIN: I love "Bible Bar."

NATHAN: "Bible Bar" was just fun to write because it came from an experience when I was just completely appalled.

BRIAN: For those who don’t know, give us just a fifteen second recap on what it is, and we can of course go back to the archive and read it, but…

NATHAN: "Bible Bar" came out of an experience where I was in a Christian bookstore around Christmas and I saw an entire section that was devoted to nutritional supplements but they were quote-unquote “Christian”. Bible bar was basically a power bar except that it had a picture of Jesus on the front. It just freaked me out! I was like, okay, apparently being a believer means that not only do I have to follow the Spirit’s lead, I also have to lose ten pounds. It drove me crazy to be standing in a place that was supposed to be all about the Gospel and it was just about the exact same thing that the rest of my culture is about, which is being pretty and being successful and being exactly what you’re quote-unquote “supposed to be”. It just made me nuts! My way of dealing with that, obviously, is to laugh in its face. And so I wrote this sarcastic piece that was, you know, pretty scathing! It loosened everything up and gave me something to laugh at.

BRIAN: What do you want to be doing in ten years, Nate?

NATHAN: I want to be writing. Honestly, what I’m doing know with “Queer as Faith” is what I want to do. It’s really the only thing I can picture myself doing. It’s probably the only thing that I’m really good at, professionally. It’s the only thing I’m really qualified for. So I’d love to still be doing this. I’ve been trying to get “Queer as Faith” together into book form and see what it looks like, and so far it’s pretty bad. [laughter]

BRIAN: I can’t believe that.

NATHAN: I’m trying to clean it up a little bit, and when I get some more columns written and it’s the appropriate length, I’m going to try to submit it. I’m trying to find a literary agent, actually, right now and see what we can do with that.

BRIAN: Nathan Gunter, thanks so much for being on GCN radio today.

NATHAN: Well, thanks for having me!

BRIAN: We enjoyed having you.

NATHAN: It was great.

JUSTIN: Well, that about wraps it up for this edition of GCN radio. As usual, you can listen to us every day… or every week, rather at…

BRIAN: Or every day! I mean, if that’s what you want.

JUSTIN: Or every day. You can listen to us at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. And once again if you want to e-mail us with any questions or comments, or if you’d like to submit some theme music to Brian…

BRIAN: hint hint, hint hint.

JUSTIN: … you can e-mail him at gcnradio@gaychristian.net or you can reach me at justin@gaychristian.net. So that’s it for this week, I’m Justin…

BRIAN: … and I’m Brian

JUSTIN: and thanks for listening.

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