"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is a weekly column by Nathan Gunter.  Unconventional and thought-provoking, Nathan writes as a gay Christian struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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Week 24:
Liner Notes

It was the first time I’ve ever seen my name in the liner notes of a CD, and it was enough to make me smile for the better part of an afternoon. Some friends and I had been to a concert of a local songwriter named K.C. Clifford, and we pre-ordered the record before it was even finished. That was four months ago. Now, in July, I get the disc and all of our names are in the thank yous.

My friend Laurie and I met that same night to watch movies at my apartment and talk about the new disc. Laurie said, “When I heard the first song, the first person I thought about was you.” So of course, because I really am this self-obsessed, I’ve been listening to that track backward and forward, thinking about me.

The line Laurie was talking about, mostly, is the one where K.C. sings, “I would give all I’ve got to live just one day where I didn’t feel alone.”

Well duh.

I think that no matter who I’m around, there’s always some part of me that feels very alone. I wonder if we’re all like this. Maybe not – it certainly seems to me that there are people who seem to fit in no matter where they are. I know people who could walk into a biker bar in West Virginia and immediately be everyone’s best friend, then turn around and make all the buddies in the world at a Franciscan convent. And I think that these people must automatically be happier than me. But that shows you my worst habit at work – comparing my insides to other people’s outsides.

I look inside myself, and when I’m honest, I see some very unpretty stuff. I see a boy who’s clingy and selfish and sad, and who if it wasn’t for grace would probably go insane with self-doubt and guilt. Luckily, Jesus gives me the courage to look inside and not want to drink a Drano cocktail.

But then I look at other people, and in lieu of being able to see inside them, I look at how they act and how they are with other people. And the fact is, most people are much less shy and much more intelligent than me, and it seems they can quit smoking at the drop of a hat and that they don’t have any money problems, so they must be Okay. It’s just like when I was a kid and I was convinced that other families didn’t fight or live through awkward silences at the dinner table, and that was why all the other kids learned to swim first and had better lunches to bring to school.

I got to thinking about this when I saw my name on those liner notes. For a moment I swelled with pride: “Now people will think I am cool.” People would buy this CD, by a little-known yet extremely cool and insightful songwriter, and by association think that I must be extremely cool and insightful. They’d be asking when my album or my book would be out, and of course I’d smile in this humble, coy way and brush my hair out of my eyes, and say something brilliant, like, “As soon as I get off my butt and get the thing done!” And I’d laugh, in a very non-self-aggrandizing way. And I’d never be alone again.

Fake me can seem so much better than real me, because fake me fits like a shell over the me that’s actually here. It’s like a plastic snap-on exterior – two seconds to put on and bam, you’re good to go. Except it requires a lot of battery power to fuel all those bells and whistles and shiny, flashy lights, and I haven’t had a recharge in quite some time.

I think the blessing in going through some difficult times in life is that you don’t get a recharge. My fake-self exterior is cracked and brittle, and when I try to put it on I feel as though I’m showing right through it. And for someone like me, that can be the most frustrating thing in the world, because I think that if my outsides match everyone else’s, then everything will be Okay.

But I think that all of our insides look a lot more alike than our outsides ever will, because I think we all hurt and I think we’d all give all we’ve got to live just one day where we didn’t feel alone.

Remember the story of the pearl merchant? He’s out one day looking for pearls, like always, and he finds one of immeasurable value, and so he goes and sells everything he has so that he can buy it.

So I pray, and I realize that we don’t have much in this life. And what we do have, we don’t get to keep, because we’re all so terminally ill. So the things we get to call ours for a little while, we are told to let them go and become free of the gravitational effect they have on us – they pull us back down to an Earth where we are alone, rather than let us find a home in heaven where we never are. My value on this planet will never be in the fact that my name is on the liner notes of a CD. (Although I’ll probably tell the next person who rides in the car with me about it – old habits, you know.)

Okay, so I’ll probably never really like the way I look, and my thoughts will probably always tend to be my biggest problem. And there are days when I wish that I could snap on the plastic coating of Fake Nathan just so that I could fit in a little better. But the fact remains that inside of Fake Nathan is still just Nathan, and Jesus said that you don’t light a lamp to go and shove it underneath a bushel basket. God’s grace smashes the plastic outer shell to a billion pieces when I least expect it.

Okay, and, yeah, I’ll probably always feel kind of like a stranger in this world. And I’ll always think that makes me special, when really it just makes me normal. But as likely as that is, it’s equally likely that I’ll always have family and quirky little friends to reach out to, that I’ll always have the rusty little tool that is prayer, and a wealth of grace, and, mostly, that will be enough.

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