Todo Sobre Mi Madre, Part 1; or, Going Home

Originally posted on July 3, 2003:

When I went home to visit my mom and grandmother 2 weeks ago, it was my mom's 50th birthday. My mom is a dedicated Southern Baptist who raised me in our small, conservative local church. She also, however, chose to raise me in the theatre, in a very gay-friendly environment, and she herself always taught me tolerance and acceptance towards all our gay friends.

At Christmas, as I shared on livejournal then, my mom and I had a conversation in which she told me I'd always been "obsessed" about "that sort of thing." The implication was that I was unhealthily interested in gay politics and gay culture.

On her birthday I had prepared this whole step-by-step process in which I would come out to her as a slash writer. I had a whole folder containing not only my fanfic, Love Under Will, but letters from people who had read my stories and written me very moving, really precious letters about how reading something I'd written, on my journal or in a fic, had changed their perceptions about homosexuality and gay people. I had printed out a few livejournal posts where I explained my position and my background and, of course, how I felt after reading the Wild Swans. I had planned to give her the folder, along with a copy of the Wild Swans, along with a note that I was trying to give her the gift of understanding who I am and what is important to me.

Naturally things didn't go that way. A couple of weeks before I went home one of my friends came out to their mother, and their mother's initial response was essentially, "whatever." As I was hearing about this I sent an email to my mom saying, "If I ever had some dark secret like this to tell you, how would you respond?" My mom's response was very affirmative, so I felt confident, even though I assured her that I *wasn't* planning on coming out of the closet anytime soon.

The day I got home to Tennessee--beautiful, redneck, home of my childhood, Tennessee--coincided with a busy busy week for homosexual rights.

First there was Canada. Then there was the sodomy laws being overturned. And there was also the annual Southern Baptist Convention, held in Arizona that same week, just a few days after the Canada courts changed their ruling on marriages. Back 10 years ago when I was just a sophomore in high school, the Southern Baptists tried to boycott Disney because of its gay-friendly policies. They/we were notoriously ridiculed for it--and that was the moment that I officially stopped being a Southern Baptist at heart.

So, ten years later they have started their bullshit aggressive campaigning (Aka Resolutions No. 1 and No. 4) to "convert" homosexuals and win them over to Christ, the idea being that Christ would therefore liberate them from their sin. Their (or i guess i should say "our," since i grew up in the church and am still a member of it and therefore still indirectly culpable for what those shits were saying in Arizona this past month) argument is that because homosexuals are prone to so much promiscuity, they should be brought to Christ and redeemed of their sins, which will then allow them, naturally, to enter into happy, successful marriages.

I got home and immediately started furrowing through the paper hoping to see if Resolution 4 had passed. My mom naturally asks me what I'm devouring so eagerly in the local news.

So I, unwisely, less than half an hour into the trip,