GCN Radio - January 31, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

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

BRIAN: Hi, this is Brian at GCN Radio. One of the great things about doing this show is we’ve been able to use technology to bring you the highest possible audio quality of an internet radio program. And if you’ve listened to GCN Radio before you know that. But sometimes [rising in pitch and speed] even the best-laid plans get foiled by circumstances and strange phenomena way beyond our control. The truth is these [dropping in pitch and speed] things happen and there’s really nothing we can do about it. [clears throat] Like this week. My regular studio wasn’t available, so I had to record the program you’re about to hear in a different location. So, if you notice some fuzziness or my voice doesn’t sound as clear, that’s why. But we still have a terrific show this week and Justin and I really wanted to share it with you. Enjoy.

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JUSTIN: Well, hello and welcome to another edition of GCN Radio, I’m Justin from Raleigh, North Carolina…

BRIAN: and this is Brian in beautiful Muncie, Indiana. It’s good to have everybody listening and we appreciate you tuning in. Before we get to our guest today, we want to just mention that the Music Contest continues and we’ve had a lot of neat discussion about a few interesting things on the boards including “Do Lord” and other sorts of things going on behind the scenes. So, pretty soon guys, a music show is coming up, so stand by for that and get your entries in, it’s not too late to e-mail me at gcnradio@gaychristian.net.

JUSTIN: Have people been in touch with you yet about this, Brian?

BRIAN: Actually, yes, I’m so excited. A couple different people have talked to me online and over the phone about ideas and I know that we have, I believe, one official entry that I’m aware of. We have one person working on one at the moment, and maybe one or two more. So I think that we’ll probably have at least three or four different entries, but I’d certainly like more. So please put your thinking caps on, those of you who are musical. And if you need help with getting audio to me or working with your computer, please just catch me online and I can do what I can to give you some tips and stuff.

JUSTIN: Good deal, good deal. So, how’s your day been going so far today, Brian?

BRIAN: It’s been great, in fact, I went and looked at a condo. I have been a renter for about ten years or so and I’m now to the stage where I’m actually looking at buying a house.

JUSTIN: Really?

BRIAN: And I can’t believe what all is involved. If I’m going to make this kind of investment I want to move into something I love, and so far the places that I have looked at, I haven’t just loved. I loved maybe the neighborhood but maybe the living room is too small.

JUSTIN: Oh no!

BRIAN: So I really want to get something larger to live in. I have a nice apartment now and I’m in no hurry to move, but… So I believe that ‘moving’ right along… haha, how about that segue? We have a great guest today all the way from Bellingham, Washington.

JUSTIN: Yeah, Stuart is with us today from Bellingham. How’re you doing today Stuart?

STUART: I’m doing pretty good, Justin. I’m happy to be here.

JUSTIN: Awesome!

BRIAN: How long have you been at GCN, Stuart? It seems like you’ve been around at least as long as I have, but when did you first get involved in GCN and how did you find it?

STUART: I know it was last spring… I think early April or so? So it’s only been eight or nine months, I guess. I don’t remember exactly how I found it. Everybody else seems to know Justin from Bridges Across or somewhere else on the Internet, but I think I just found it looking for the keyword search ‘gay Christian’ on the Internet and just kind of stumbled across it as far as I’m aware.

BRIAN: Just a non sequitur… the term ‘stumbled across’ always comes up when we talk about Internet searches. And I just have this image of someone falling all over their computer and tripping and stumbling…

JUSTIN: Well, Stuart’s certainly not the first one to stumble across GCN, we’ve had a bunch of folks that just happen across us. It seems like generally, if you find us on the Internet, you were searching for something. Was that the case for you, Stuart?

STUART: Yeah, I really was. It was right around the time that I was getting ready to come out to a Bible study that I was a part of, and I was thinking about coming out to my family over the summer as well, so I was dealing in the immediate sense with a lot of questions about what it meant to be gay and Christian and kind of looking for resources. Like I had been looking on Amazon for books and found a couple of books that are actually listed in GCN’s Resource section and read those before I even came to the site. Beyond that, I had already been part of another community online that catered to gay Christians, but that particular one had a specific focus that I wasn’t comfortable with anymore… or I guess I just wanted to explore some other options and hear other viewpoints. So, when I found GCN I was really excited, because it seemed like there was a lot represented at the site and I would be able to get a more well rounded perspective which was a really exciting possibility for me.

JUSTIN: That’s awesome.

BRIAN: What about your coming out experience? You said that you were looking for resources. What was your coming out experience like, and I know that can be a long, long story, but can you give us the nutshell version?

STUART: [laughs] the nutshell version. I know that some people leap out of the closet wearing rainbows and flags and ‘Here I am!’, but that wasn’t my experience at all. It took me—aside from the fact that it’s an ongoing process for everybody, for everybody you meet—for me it took about a year and a half. First with my close friends, then with most of my other friends, and then my family, and then my Bible study… so it was kind of a step-by-step process for me. My walk with God: again, that was also a pretty long story, step-by-step. You know, I did a lot of kind of avoiding the issue in high school and then when I came to college it’s like your whole world opens up and you want to explore things but you’re still kind of scared? I was at a church conference and there was this speaker—and I’m not usually very affected by speakers—he said something about ‘claim the covenant of God’s love for you because he chooses to love you’, and that made all the difference in my life in terms of being able to accept what I was and that I was if not perfect, I was still desirable to Him. So from there I was able to really start asking questions about what it meant for me to be gay and what that meant to God and it meant for the relationships that I’d be having. What I kind of ended up deciding was that what it meant, what being gay and Christian means for me, is that I just have to work harder at being honest with myself and honest with God and honest with the world around me. Because where there’s this assumed heterosexuality or just an assumed non-homosexuality, it’s just easy to let that pass. And so for me, coming out was a long slow process of learning how to stop hiding behind a façade, I guess.

JUSTIN: What would you say would be the most difficult part of this for you, of the whole process?

STUART: I think it was having to accept again and again the fact that I am loved by God. You know when spend your life in an environment that tells you that because you feel a certain way you are sinful or you are twisted its easy to, even subconsciously, even when it’s not beaten into your head all the time every day, it’s still kind of there in the background, in the subtext of your life, so it’s really easy to get this general perspective of “Okay, I’m just not worth anything to anybody”, much less the Creator of the universe who shaped the stars and created all of humanity. And here I am, this one person who feels something that I’m not supposed to be feeling, why would God want me? So for me, it still is to this day, my biggest struggle is trying to remember how much God realy does love me and then acting from there.

JUSTIN: Yeah, you said something there that really struck a chord with me, because you said, “Feeling something that I’m not supposed to be feeling”. And there’s a certain amount of helplessness that goes along with that when you say, “Oh I feel this,” but how do you not feel something that you feel, you know what I’m saying?

STUART: Exactly, that’s definitely at the core of the struggle… at the core of the conflict.

JUSTIN: Now Stuart, you’re also an RA [Resident Advisor], is that right?

STUART: Yes, I am.

JUSTIN: So now, has this made things more difficult for you as an RA?

STUART: Not more difficult. It has definitely colored my experience. Because I became an RA near the end of my coming out process I was still in that mode of needing to come out and be proactive about it and tell people, so I came out to my staff very proactively; one-on-one, I told each of them and then brought it up at a staff meeting, just kind of mentioned, “If you have any questions, I’m pretty open”, that kind of thing. So, it’s colored the experience with my staff, and that’s been very positive, which I’m very, very grateful for. It’s colored my experience with my residents a little bit, in that it’s a little odd being the ‘gay RA’ on an all guys floor. You feel kind of in the spotlight and you know that there’s going to be a little bit of talk if you say something, or if you act a certain way, or if you ‘throw your wrist’ or something silly like that. And I know that there has been some talk, and I know that there has been some positive stuff that’s come of it too. Like, I feel more confident just being who I am in all circumstances, especially in the public eye. That I don’t feel that I have to hide when I wear my rainbow wristband anymore or I don’t worry about bringing it up in casual conversation. Just because I am in the public eye doesn’t mean that I have be any less myself.

BRIAN: Stuart, I want to ask what kind of reactions have you had from family, church, and your residents. That’s kind of part one of my question, and part two is: If you’ve had any negative reaction, how have you dealt with it?

STUART: Most—like the overwhelming majority—of responses I’ve got have been supportive of me as a person. I was involved in a campus ministry here for two years and it was a very conservative one, so they aren’t all supportive of the choices that I’ve made regarding what I believe or what I’ll do with my homosexuality, but they’ve all been very affirming in that they love me and that they respect me as a person who believes in and loves and wants to follow God. That’s been wonderful just to receive that and to see that people, even when you disagree with them, can really just respect you and allow you to make your own decisions and that they’re not going to shove something down your throat just because they’re scared of it. There have been a few negative reactions. I had one person who I was very close friends with cut off all ties from me after a while. He had known for a while and then he just decided that it was just too much for him, that he couldn’t deal with it. I’ve had anti-gay vandalism on my floor and that colored the interaction I had with the residents that were responsible for it. The worship community that I was part of here on campus, that I’m not anymore, I know that there was some confusion after I left the group and it’s colored some interactions there, like made some things awkward every now and then. And with my family it hasn’t changed so much how we interact on a day-to-day basis, but sometimes it feels like even if we’re not talking about it directly, it’s sort of lurking in the background, like this uncomfortable issue. So, the majority, I guess I would say coming out has been overwhelmingly positive in that I’ve gotten a lot of love and support in a lot of places that I wouldn’t have even thought I would’ve gotten it. It has been challenging in many of the ways I did expect in that people aren’t always comfortable with it, people don’t always know what to say. When they feel like they do know what to say it’s not always what I want to hear… that kind of thing I guess.

JUSTIN: You’re in Washington, which tends to be more of a gay-positive part of the country, in general, I mean, it varies from place to place I know. But for you, as a college student where you are, have you found that it’s easier to be gay and out or to be a Christian? Is one more difficult than the other? Or does it matter who you around?

STUART: I guess I would say I don’t think it’s harder to be Christian than it is to be gay here, I think ‘gay’ is still something that’s very stigmatized even in very liberal places, but the hardest thing is that most people think that you can only be one or the other. Since I was very involved in this campus ministry for two years, many people who would’ve otherwise assumed that I was gay just kind of gave me the quote-unquote “benefit of the doubt”. And a lot of people that have met me this year, now that I’m not involved with that particular ministry anymore that do know I’m gay assume that I couldn’t possibly be a Christian. So when they see me pray at a meal, they get confused, they’re like, “Oh, wait a minute, is he really gay?” And it can be very confusing, often, with the two sides that people often see as diametrically opposite.

BRIAN: Stuart, what advice do you have for college students or people in their early twenties or late teens who are coming out in the context of being Christian?

STUART: I guess I would just say to go to God first with your questions, because no matter what people you talk to with those questions, you’re not necessarily going to find what you’re looking for. Don’t ask questions with hopes of getting a particular answer, just try to be open to what God has to say to you, and the fact that he’s trying to take care of you and he wants you to be happy.

JUSTIN: Stuart, we’ve asked you all sorts of serious questions and stayed on serious topics, but you’re really not a particularly serious guy all the time…

BRIAN: Meaning that we shouldn’t take you seriously?

JUSTIN: In a good way! He’s a really light-hearted, fun guy. I think that comes through a lot on his posts on the boards, and that’s been my experience from my limited chance to talk to him in the past.

BRIAN: What do you do outside of school and all that sort of thing?

STUART: Outside of school… there’s life outside of school? I don’t know, I do a lot. I’m a total geek: I love comic books, and video games, and movies, and so I spend a lot of time watching or playing or reading. I’m spending a lot of time with friends recently, because that was one of my new year’s resolutions, to keep in better contact with them. I play the cello. I’ve been doing that since about fifth grade and we have a lot of musicians on GCN so that’s always cool to talk about.

JUSTIN: Cool. Why the cello?

STUART: At the time it was because all the children in our family were required to learn an instrument, it was just something our parents made us do. And my brother and sister, who are both older than me had decided to play the violin and I wanted to do something different, but something that I was still interested in. I was interested in strings, and the cello was kind of that opportunity, it was something a little bit different and kind of had this appeal for me. The reason I’ve kept playing it is because as an instrument it expresses a lot that I can’t really do vocally. It’s just so sweet and has a kind of purity to it. There’s something about playing it that completes me, I guess. I really don’t know how else to describe it.

JUSTIN: That’s cool. I wish I had musical talent; sadly, I do not. Oh! I did want to mention one other thing that I think is funny that you had mentioned to me, Stuart. What is up with the fact that you said every picture of you looks different?

STUART: [laughs] That’s true.

BRIAN: You know, I’ve only really seen your one GCN picture.

JUSTIN: I’ve seen several because I’m trying to get the enhanced profiles working so that people can have a bunch of pictures in their posts so I have some archives of pictures that people have sent that they want in their profile once it goes online. And I will say it’s true: every single picture of Stuart looks like a totally different person.

STUART: That’s really funny because when I met Paddy and Ron at the Northwest GCN get together last summer they were both, like, “I didn’t even recognize you from your picture!” and it was really funny. But, I kind of get bored with picture taking sometimes so when I know a picture is being taken, I’ll make a different face every time because there’s that picture smile that everybody has, you know “Eeeee”… and I just get sick of making that after a while. So I scowl or I grimace or I yell at the camera or something like that. Just kind of spice things up, I guess.

BRIAN: Stuart, thank you so much for being our guest today on GCN Radio. You’ve been great. As usual you can log onto GCN Radio each week by going to www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio. And we appreciate you listening and we’ll be back again very soon. So, I’m Brian in Muncie, Indiana…

JUSTIN: And I’m Justin in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thanks very much for listening today.

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