GCN Radio - May 10, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

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

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JUSTIN: Hello, and welcome to another edition of GCN Radio. My name is Justin here in Raleigh, North Carolina …

BRIAN: …and I’m Brian in beautiful Muncie, Indiana. Here we are, program eleven. Thanks everyone for tuning in. I’m very excited about today’s show, we have a lot that’s going on. Justin, what is going on?

JUSTIN: Well, what is going on right now is I am finishing up eating a Hershey Kiss™ with caramel inside.

BRIAN: I don’t think I’ve had those before. Yum!

JUSTIN: They’re brand new!

BRIAN: I haven’t really had lunch today, so I’m hungry.

JUSTIN: Well, I was hungry too, and I just was snacking on one as we were opening and then it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t a good idea to be putting candy in my mouth right before starting the show.

BRIAN: That’s usually my case, I usually chew gum or something. One of my students brought me some pepper jack cheese because they know I love pepper jack cheese and crackers, so my lunch today was so nutritious of cheese, crackers, and Sprite®. Which is not a great dialysis diet, but it was a radio producer diet.

JUSTIN: Well, I had not gotten on a scale in a few days I normally…

BRIAN: You don’t need to get on the scale! You’re a feather!

JUSTIN: I do! I weigh myself religiously, and I got on the scale this morning and I was like, “Uhhhh!” because I had gained {ahem} several pounds since the last time I had gotten on the scale. So I’ve been very good today except for my Hershey Kiss™.

BRIAN: Well, you don’t look it!

JUSTIN: Well, I have old pictures of me up, that’s why. But when I mentioned the Hershey Kiss™, it occurred to me that maybe we ought to start soliciting sponsorships.

BRIAN: That’s a good idea!

JUSTIN: Then we could get on and I could say, “Ummm, this Three Musketeers Bar™ is so light and fluffy!”

BRIAN: GCN Radio with support from Justin’s kisses.

JUSTIN: I know!

BRIAN: Each sold separately, one per person, please.

JUSTIN: We do have a great guest with us today, and this is a guy who’s been with GCN since the beginning of time…

BRIAN: Since the Alpha.

JUSTIN: Well, now!...

BRIAN: Since the Beginning of Time! … and that’s a long time.

JUSTIN: Perhaps not quite that long. Mark, what’s your screen name now? Four Cents Mark or something like that?

MARK: Actually, it’s now $Mark.04.

JUSTIN: Okay. [laughter]

MARK: And it looks really good on the screen, but I realized that I have no clue how to pronounce my screen name now.

BRIAN: It’s like the unpronounceable screen name. I love it…

MARK: Like the Prince symbol.

BRIAN: Exactly, the Mark symbol.

MARK: So if you want to think of my as a glamorous rock star, go right ahead.

JUSTIN: Well, you’re Mark and four cents. Now folks who have joined the group in the last few months probably have no clue why you’re Mark and four cents. You want to explain to everybody?

MARK: Uh, sure. Back in December, Justin was having a fundraiser for the web site and I had planned to donate some money to GCN at the end of the year anyway, along with some other worthy causes I support. I was going to give a certain percentage of my income last year to each one of these charities, and the percentage just happened to come up to some amount of dollars and four cents. So when the time came, I just blithely typed in blah-blah.04 as my donation. And it never occurred to me that I would be the only person that wasn’t donating in an even dollar amount to the charities. So the totals came out and it was so-and-so amount and four cents. So there was a lot of speculation about who had donated the four cents. So now I’m $Mark.04.

JUSTIN: $Mark.04, that’s great.

MARK: Don’t vote for me!

JUSTIN: And you’ve been with the group for a long time.

MARK: Yeah, I think I’m member number nine on the boards.

JUSTIN: Something like that, um-hmm…

MARK: So it’s been a while. I remember that I stumbled across GCN back in the pre-historic days before the message boards, back when it was the icons that Justin despises so much. I totally embarrassed him by coming up with to the Internet Archives and finding the old icons, and I don’t think he’s forgiven me for it yet. [laughter] Yeah, I was here about a year before he even started the message boards. I’ve been around for a while.

JUSTIN: Well, I think I’m going to have to post a message on the News & Announcements forum and give people a little history and show them some of the old version of GCN. When you see them, the new version looks so much better than the old ones.

MARK: Yeah, I really do like the upgrade and the new logo looks really good. I’ve forgotten who did it, but…

JUSTIN: David, his name is David.

MARK: He did a really good job with that and I have to admit that it took me two or three times to look at it before I realized, “Oh, that’s a fish!”

BRIAN: Yeah it’s a fish! It’s a double-take but definitely is a fish.

JUSTIN: It’s a really cool logo, because it represents… there’s a network there, between these people, you know, this person sort of off in the distance and they have this sort of long distance connection and then there’s also this Christian fish that’s formed. You don’t see it right away, at least I didn’t, so I am so overwhelmed with that. I wish I had that kind of talent, but, I don’t.

MARK: Well, that’s okay, neither do I, so…

BRIAN: Mark, I was wondering, as you’ve seen the community grow over these years that you’ve been part of it, what kinds of changes have you noticed? What comes to mind as you reflect back on your history with GCN?

MARK: Back when the message board first started, literally there would be days between people posting. It would be like, someone would post and you’d check back a week later and there’d be two additional posts during that entire week, and now, of course, you log off for five minutes and you come back and you have entire new volumes to read. So the biggest change has just been the fact that the group has grown so huge…

BRIAN: Did you guys ever imagine two years ago, three years ago that we’d be looking at this magnitude of an organization?

MARK: I didn’t. Back then pretty much all the GCN regular were on my Buddy List, and now there’s just so many that the growth has just astounded me to be honest. I would never have in my wildest dreams imagined it would be this big.

BRIAN: Okay, so you were one of the early GCN people, Mark. How recent is that picture of you?

JUSTIN: We’ve been discussing this since you first joined!

MARK: I despise that picture!

BRIAN: But the floral view! I’ve become accustomed to seeing you with the yellow flowers behind you or foliage.

MARK: It’s actually fall foliage. The full picture is actually of me and my mom and I think that she’d be utterly horrified if she knew that that picture was up there. Luckily my mom is not in the picture that’s online but I really do need to get some new pictures. The problem is that I really hate getting my picture taken. There’s not that many pictures of me and the ones that are out there, I think are just awful, except for the ones when I was like four. I think they look good, but after four I don’t like them anymore. I need to grin and bear it and get some new pictures taken so that I can get that one replaced.

JUSTIN: So this is a notice to all GCN members who should ever meet Mark at any point in the future: bring your digital camera, take pictures mercilessly…

BRIAN: Lots and lots of pictures.

JUSTIN: …and then we will get one for him.

MARK: I’ll probably be screaming and writhing around on the floor and covering my face.

BRIAN & JUSTIN: That’ll make a good picture!

JUSTIN: Now here’s a topic that I wanted to bring up. Mark, you and I have had some conversations about this. We used to talk about this quite a bit, I think in the earlier days of GCN, about stereotypes of gay men and the fact that we don’t all fit these stereotypes. One of the big ones that—

MARK: What are you talking about, girlfriend?

[laughter]

JUSTIN: –one of the things that you pointed out, a number of times, is that you’re a big sports fan which is not stereotypically true, but actually we’ve got quite a few sports fans at GCN.

MARK: Yeah, well it’s still a definite conversation stopper in chat if I say, “So, how about the [fill in the blank of sports teams]?” and everyone is like crickets chirping. But I really do like college football and college basketball and major league baseball. For years, I was convinced that was the reason that I couldn’t possibly be gay because I like baseball. Of course, that’s stupid. I was actually having a side conversation last night with one of the new members and we were actually discussing how each of us had grown up liking rival NFL franchises. I’m a Cowboys fan and he’s a Redskins fan growing up and we were discussing how we’d both been programmed to hate the other team all of our lives.

JUSTIN: Well, maybe you need to start hosting a sports chat every other week or something like that.

MARK: That might not be a bad idea!

BRIAN: Yeah, that’s a great idea, hosting some sports chat and we could just have a little audio sounder and call it [music] SPORTS CHAT: WITH $MARK.04! [end music] There we go, that works. Anyway, back to our regularly schedule GCN Radio program.

JUSTIN: Well, I do think it’s true that so many of us grow up thinking for one reason or another, “I can be gay because…” this or that. You know, I can’t be gay because I like sports, I can’t be gay because I don’t have limp wrists or if you’re a woman, I can’t be gay because I’m not butch, I don’t have short hair. Whatever stereotypes you have. And all of us have things that might be considered stereotypical. And of course, I think the biggest one is “I can’t be gay because I’m a Christian.”

MARK: Yeah, big time.

JUSTIN: But it can be a kind of terrifying thing to figure that out. But one of the wonderful things about the whole community is because we have so much diversity, and because we have people coming from very different theological perspectives and people who have very varied interests, and so on, there’s always somebody, if you really get plugged into the community, there’s always somebody that you can relate to who understands. Usually a whole group of people that you can be friends with.

BRIAN: Along the lines of sports, wasn’t there an openly gay umpire at some point, Dave Pollone?

MARK: I’m not really sure…

BRIAN: Am I…? Because I read a book when I was in college, about Dave Pallone who was a gay umpire. And I don’t remember where he worked or really much who he was, I just remember that name.

MARK: That wouldn’t surprise me at all. I know that gay athletes are very slowly coming out of the woodwork, usually after they retire. I know that there was a football player that came out about a year and a half ago after he retired. And there’s been a few baseball players. One of the big gay mags Advocate or OUT, or whatever, wrote a column that his boyfriend was a current major league player, he didn’t mention who it was, but I remember that was a big deal for a while. I know the stigma toward gay athletes… I’m hardly an athlete myself so I can’t really say… it seems to fading ever so slightly. But then again, you also have got the moronic athletes who go on and say anti-gay stuff. So it seems like the walls are beginning to fade a little bit, but they are not fading very fast, unfortunately.

JUSTIN: I do think you’re right. Not just in sports, but everywhere, we’re seeing a gradual acceptance of gay people. But of course, one of the things that we’re going to have to fight to do as gay Christians is make sure that we don’t let that societal growing acceptance of homosexuality in society be tied in with this sort of secularization of society. That we continue to hang on to our faith and fight to be who we are as Christians and keep our focus on Christ, rather than just be content to be accepted as gay.

MARK: Right, and even if you’re straight, that’s an incredibly difficult thing to do in today’s society. And unfortunately, with churches being more than happy to reject you totally if you’re gay, it’s a really difficult thing to do if you are a gay Christian, I’ve discovered. I’m not out at all at my church for the simple reason that I teach Sunday school there to third graders and I’m still petrified if I was to come out at church, I’d have all of these knee-jerk reactions from parents who are assuming that because I’m gay obviously I’m doing evil, evil things with their kids. Which is of course not true, needless to say, but I’m just utterly terrified of that. Even with gay people being slowly and slowly more accepted more secularly, we’re also slowly getting accepted more in the church, but unfortunately it’s not moving fast enough that I can come out at church, unfortunately, so…

JUSTIN: Well Mark, thanks so much for being on the show today.

MARK: Well thank you so much for having me.

JUSTIN: We’re happy to have you. I feel I should say at this point, because Brian and I both have heard from a lot of folks who are like, “When am I going to be on GCN radio?” If we’ve taken this long to get to Mark, who is one of the first members… We’ve got a lot of folks. I can tell you there are a lot of people both within GCN membership and outside of GCN that we’d really like to be on the show, so there’s much to come.

BRIAN: And I appreciate people e-mailing me with suggestions, and in fact, Mark volunteered himself to be on, so we appreciate that, but it was because he sent me an e-mail. So if you have a suggestion of someone you’d like to see on the show—I’m talking with a few people right now who I’m e-mailing behind the scenes—send it to gcnradio@gaychristian.net. I may not be able to book someone right away, but I do pay serious attention to every e-mail I get.

JUSTIN: Well, thanks again, and thanks again, Brian, for all that you do with the show.

MARK: It’s a really good show, and I’m not just saying this because I just finished my segment on it.

JUSTIN: You heard it first here, folks: “It is a really good show.”

BRIAN: Well, thanks guys, I appreciate that. And we will look forward to seeing you next time. From Muncie, this is Brian…

JUSTIN: …and I’m Justin, from Raleigh.

BRIAN: See you later!

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