In His Presence — Or How I Could Have Ended Up at the Stop the Steal Rally

I cleaned out the closet in my home office over the holidays for the first time since we moved into this house in 2016. Junk was just piled up to eye level, and I had no clue what vestiges of my former self I would find as I set out on this exercise. Going deeper and deeper into the mess was akin to doing a geological excavation of my 23 years in Nashville. At the very bottom of the closet was a blue plastic bin left unopened for at least 15 years — a true time capsule. At one point, the Christian CDs and books and papers stuffed in the bin held value for me, but now they’re truly relics from a previous life. One item really helped me make it all make sense, though. My personal calendar from my freshman year of college was included in that pile, and looking through the pages I began to remember my point of view as an 18-year-old closeted evangelical Christian.

Everything I did in 1999 and 2000 revolved around getting a Christian-based education at Belmont University or attending Christian concerts and Bible studies and gospel choir practice. I wouldn’t get into formal “Pray Away the Gay” conversion therapy for another few years, but the struggle between the conservative Christian culture I was raised in and the raging liberal queer I was working so hard to suppress is laid out in that calendar — in my own handwriting no less.

Next to the non-stop Christian activity, I see the story of my intense crush on a close male friend playing out in the reminders I made myself to call him over the summer 2000 break and try my best to stay up to date with his whereabouts throughout the year as he traveled. We’d confided to each other that we were both attracted to men during our intense one-on-one prayer sessions, but we were trying not to act on those evil urges. The times when I fantasized about acting on those evil urges with my friend were the fuel that led my trips to the altar to ask for forgiveness and deliverance from this “thorn in my side.”

Visiting with 18-year-old me now from the perspective of 41-year-old married to a man me, I see so much shame and secret-keeping over what is truly just my natural desire for love. This was a crush on a guy I liked, and the fact that he was, you know, “that way,” made it even more intense. I’ve never allowed myself to get consciously sad or angry over the experiences and desires I had to deny back then, but I know it fuels the anger I express now towards far-right evangelical zealots. You may have seen some of this on my social media accounts? HA HA HA HA

So, I find myself in Washington, D.C. on the second anniversary of the January 6th insurrection. I came up here to get some perspective and plan the year ahead, but I’m playing tourist, too. So, I wandered over to The Ellipse, and the spirit of my former closeted self just sprang back to life as I looked at the site of Trump’s Stop the Steal rally. This video is the result of that regressive therapy. My God. I now realize there’s a world in which I could have been at the Stop the Steal rally if I had never had that break with evangelical Christianity and gotten honest with myself. The effort of deconstructing is holy, messy work indeed.

So much of this experience is stirred up from my friendship with Adeem the Artist, who joins me on Proud Radio this Sunday. Adeem’s new album, White Trash Revelry, asks us queer southerners to imagine practicing radical empathy for the folks on the right railing against LGBTQ+ people again because they don’t understand the people in power telling them to hate us out in the open again are mostly just using our queer community as a convenient bogeyman to literally scare up votes from the evangelical base now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. How’s that for a run on sentence? I should edit it for clarity, but you can get it if you read it back again.

Honestly, it sucks to have to think this much sometimes, but I’m grateful to Adeem for challenging me to not just put EVERYONE I disagree with into a basket of deplorables.

Proud Radio airs this Sunday at 5pm ET on Apple Music Country. On demand for subscribers. Listen here.