Coming out ahead

Here is an extract from an excellent address given by Dr. Ralph Blair

at the Eastern and Western connECtions 2003 The States. It is an annual conference hosted by Evangelicals concerned. It is an attitude not often expressed and is worth thinking about and commenting on......What do you think?



Malcolm Muggeridge...... was the consummate insider who was ever the outsider. In his memoir, Chronicles of Wasted Time, he tells of a recurring scene in his mind, "both sleeping and waking." He describes "standing in the wings of a theatre waiting for my cue to go on stage. As I stand there I can hear the play proceeding, and suddenly it dawns on me that the lines I have learnt are not in this play at all, but belong to a quite different one. Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what I should do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way on to the stage, and there look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor-boards. Alas, he only signals helplessly to me, and I realize that of course his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience, who begin to hiss and shout: ‘Get off the stage!’ ‘Let the play go on!’ ‘You’re interrupting!’ I am paralyzed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don’t fit. The only lines I know."

Ever feel like that? Miscast – gay in play that’s straight, Christian in a play that’s pagan. A fruit out of season. A fish out of water. With St. Mugg we might counter: "Only dead fish swim with the stream."

Still, might there not be a "coming out" onto the stage of the everyday world to a better outcome? Can we come out ahead instead? Yes, most definitely. And no, certainly not.

A popular endorsement of "coming out" claims that "Coming out reduces isolation and alienation and allows for increased support from other GLBT people and allows you to live a full life." Well, not necessarily. And in the deepest sense, of course: Absolutely not.

For serious Christians who happen to be differently oriented sexually, coming out can increase isolation and alienation. Coming out can disallow for support. And besides, as any serious Christian should know, merely "coming out" as lesbigayt is not what "allows you to live a full life." What allows you to live a full life is your coming out into Christ.

Evangelical Christians whose sexual orientation is not what the Evangelical establishment approves and whose Christian orientation is not what the lesbigayt establishment approves are in for a shock if they buy into such promises uncritically. People of dual identity must be, in Jesus’s words, "wise as snakes and harmless as doves" to cope in homophobic Evangelicaland and the Christophobic Emerald City. "Coming out" as gay to evangelical family and friends and "coming out" as evangelical to gay friends is fraught with isolating and alienating misunderstanding and hostility. To "come out" as "the other" in either venue is very likely to evoke: "Get out!"

I’d like us to get out of the tired lesbigayt rhetoric on "coming out" and get into coming out ahead. Coming out ahead is our daily Christian calling – no matter what may be our sexual identity.