To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  The deepest hurt was the surprise insult, when some kid I didn’t know would ask me if I was gay. What? Why did he ask me that? Shoot, what did I do to give it away? “No, I just talk like this. I’m over here trying to get attention. I’m weird. I don’t want to be like everyone else.” I’d felt found out. That was what I had to avoid. So I acted weirder in every way possible. I obsessed over Star Wars and anime and comic books and science. I said weird things that didn’t make sense just to throw people off. I raised my hand in Mrs. Shackleford’s English class and asked, with the intrigue of a journalist, “Mrs. Shackleford, do you wear a thong?” This, of course, had no relation to anything. It just came to my mind. The class gasped and held in their chuckles and shot their eyes in unison to her. She fought her smile, because she liked me. “Jed, uhm, you aren’t allowed to ask me that,” she said. “I’m going to have to give you detention.”

  Leading with my weirdness, I took the ammunition right out of their lips. Or gave them words that didn’t sting as much. “You’re such a nerd.” “You’re such a freak.” “You’re such a weirdo.” Mmm, those felt nice. Insulation from the other words.

  And I was friendly. Very friendly. I made friends easily, even if they were simply kids who knew my name and liked to see what I would say next. I made it through middle school and kept my sexuality mostly hidden, from my friends and from myself, all the while collecting new friends and a reputation.

  My weirdness got me weird friends. Not quite outcasts, but a solid group of five guys who didn’t care to fit in. They didn’t take church seriously. They made fun of their stupid parents. They were into Stanley Kubrick films and ranking the best movies of all time. But our wit was sharpened on one another, and primarily on me. My few friends made fun of me constantly. They mocked my sunny disposition. They mocked my voice and my body. Sarcasm was God. There was no time to be kind to one another. We were constantly ranking the best movies of all time, and agreed that The Shawshank Redemption was number one. But after that, it was all arguing. Arguing over how terrible the new Spielberg movie was, or how genius it was, or whether or not the score was up to par with older John Williams work.

  As high school came, my weirdness faded. I discovered that I could turn the dial on my comedy just a little and make the cool kids laugh. If I was clever instead of weird, if I was smart instead of crazy, I was interesting to them. And slowly but surely, they invited me to things. “Hey, Jed, wanna go to the Metallica concert?” “Me? Uhm. Yes. I love Metallica.” I’d never listened to one song by Metallica.

  They liked the way I made them laugh. But more than that, they didn’t mock me. I was used to people laughing at me. These kids were laughing with me. And they were Christians.

  I gave the Bible a chance in my senior year of high school. I’d been dragged to church my whole life and never given that huge stupid book an actual chance. I had disregarded Christianity as mythology in a reactionary attempt to find my own identity in the shadow of my mother. But my new best friends were Christians in high school and I wanted to speak their language. I would like whatever they liked.

  Everything changed, though, when I read the book of Ecclesiastes. My youth group was dedicating the summer to reading and studying it. Normally I sat through the teaching with my mind turned off and my pen out, doodling on whatever paper I could find. But the youth leader was reading passages.

  “There is no remembrance of people of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.”

  “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.”

  “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

  Damn! That is some dark shit. It was dismal, an almost nihilistic sequence of wise sayings and rules to live by. It was from the perspective of an ancient king who received all the luxuries of opulent living, and found them empty.

  Later that week, some of the coolest guys in my grade asked if I wanted to join a Bible study group with them. I said yes. Not because I wanted to study the Bible, but because I no longer hated the Bible and I wanted to belong to something. These Christians were nice to me. And these guys were baseball players, football players. Those types of guys hardly ever noticed me, and now they were inviting me to spend time with them. To talk about life and God and this newly interesting book. I relished every meeting, every hang.

  My weirdness faded into the background. I stopped talking with my hands so much. My voice got deeper. Maybe it was puberty. Maybe it was performance.

  The Bible study worked on my mind, kneading it in new ways. I believed in these guys, and through them, started to believe in the Bible. For one, as a teenager, knowing I was gay but not sure what that meant, the feeling of normalcy and acceptance into the dominant cultural clique was an incredible relief. Humans want few things more than to belong. And nothing unites people like a common enemy. Faith gave me that. A community of people united against evil, the devil, sin, the secular world, Democrats, sex, drugs, gays. The sense of purpose was incredible. We were on a journey together.

  That was the crack in my armor. A slight change in perspective, an angle by which belief could sneak in and change my life. There is a reason why organized religion has billions of human beings—the majority of us—under its spell. It is because it benefits us. And if it benefits us, it must have truth in it, some clues to the workings of the universe. If it didn’t, it would be unspreadable. And its best trick is to hook you with its beauty, and demand you drag with it all the rest. You come for the sound of the choir, and go home with the weight of the bricks and the golden cross.

  It was tiring, though, to know that my very existence was a problem. When you carry a secret for as long as you can remember, years of offhand comments pile up like a CIA case file. One friend would say, “Gay people are so gross,” while watching a pride parade on television. Another would say, “Fags, like real fags, are so annoying. Why do they have to talk like that?” I’d file these comments away. And the fear. I’d double-check my voice for difference.

  Television was my only window into a world where people spoke differently about my secret. In school, in church, in every avenue of my real-world life, I felt alone and burdened by my shameful desires. But the characters on TV were not like anyone I knew. They showed me options that didn’t seem to exist in my surroundings. The main show for me was Will & Grace. I saw the character of Will as a gay man who wasn’t hypersexual, wasn’t the caricature of femininity I had been trained to hate, didn’t seem to be overcompensating. This was huge. The model of another way to be what I was. My own curiosity helped, too. I have always been motivated by understanding the workings of things, and the vast majority of “sins” as talked about by Christianity made sense. Gossip is hurtful and untrue. Greed is unjust and destructive. Promiscuous sex poisons intimacy and emotional strength. But a committed relationship with someone I love? That didn’t compute.

  * * *

  —

  WESTON AND I were cycling all day, talking very little. I was excavating my past, thinking over the years and my pain and my fragile masculinity. I came across so confident, so sure-footed. We set up camp each night and ate our salami and cheese and Weston made lentils over a fire and we drank boxed wine and Coca-Cola. I didn’t talk to him about my cycling thoughts. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because I didn’t know what to do with it all. I was homesick, but also leaning into the lessons I knew I wanted from this bicycle. I was unpacking the bags of my life, spreading the contents on the floor to have a look.

  Until the summer before I went to college, I kept my sexuality a secret. I never kissed a boy. I never had a secret behind-the-barn make-out. In the privacy of Internet searches and library sneak sessions, I would read all I could about being gay. The causes. Was it a disease?

  I told m
y friend Carla first. Early senior year, I overheard her watching a reality show on Bravo and mutter, “I wish I had a gay best friend. It seems like the best thing.” I made a mental note: If I can tell anyone, it will be her. She was best friends with all my best friends, too, so I thought she could help me figure out how to minimize the damage.

  I told Carla on her couch. I cried.

  “Carla, you know how I’ve never had a girlfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I, I don’t exactly like girls. Like in that way.”

  “Oh, really? Do you mean you like boys?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t say the word gay. It stung too much. It felt too covered in blood and fire.

  “Really!?” she said. “I suspected when we were freshmen. But I stopped thinking about it.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. You weren’t gay or straight. You were just Jed.”

  I felt relieved that Carla was surprised at all. I carried shame at being perceivably gay. Anytime someone asked me, a stranger or a friend, I recoiled in failure that I had not hidden it better.

  Carla and I planned which friends to tell next. Whit would be next. Then Rob. Then Kyle.

  I told them one by one. Sobbing. Hands over my face. But none of them got up and walked out. None of them called me disgusting or a moral failure. They all said, as if they’d had a secret meeting to get their stories straight, “Jed, I love you, man. This doesn’t change anything. Who cares?” It took me hearing that from all of them to believe any one of them.

  I felt emboldened to move to California for college at USC. The love of my friends, the acceptance, hadn’t pushed me away from the faith I knew. It pulled me closer. I wasn’t rejected by the church for being the way I was. I was loved. My community loved me. I wasn’t the stereotype my church had been taught to fear and reject. I was their friend first. And they couldn’t kick out their friend.

  I loved Jesus for not taking my friends from me. The least I could do for Him was keep my lips and hands and penis to myself.

  * * *

  —

  THE DEEPER I GOT lost in my past, the farther I rode behind Weston. I wasn’t watching the road, I was looking through glazed eyes. When I would stand to pump the pedals up a hill, the bike wobbled hard back and forth. I went through my twenties in California. My love of God. Tall hundred-year-old cacti rolled by. I sat up straight and leaned back and felt the wind on my face with a good downhill coast. Sweat poured from my helmet. I was cooking in the sun, but my thoughts remained in Los Angeles. My mind was ticking through the last decade, what had come of it, what it meant.

  The wager I had made with God as I drove out to California from Nashville in 2001: I will stay celibate, I won’t throw my body around without Your blessing. I feel like it is okay to be gay, but I know that’s not what Your Word says. So I’ll let You make the call. If You bring a boy into my life that loves God, loves the Bible, and loves me, I’ll know it’s from You. If You don’t, I won’t risk being wrong just to feel good. This I promise You.

  I became a leader in my college youth group. I went to Christian retreats and camping trips. I had a great time. And God never sent me a godly man. Or a woman. Or anyone. Just lots of friends.

  By the time I turned twenty-seven, the same telescoping of time and the future that sent me on this trip shone its light on my romantic retardation. I am almost thirty, and I’ve never touched anyone. Is this my life?

  Back in California, I knew of a guy at my church who was happily married to a woman. He had a daughter. I had been open with some of the leaders about my sexuality, about “my struggle,” and they told me about Derek and his triumph over the deception of homosexuality. He had “overcome his struggle and been freed.” I asked if he knew of any meetings. He told me about an organization called Exodus International and said he’d be glad to take me to their weekly meeting.

  Two weeks later, I met him at his house to go. I was so tired of the theological acrobatics, so ready to be done with it. I wanted a wife. I wanted a kid like he had. I wanted his nice house in Long Beach with an Audi in the driveway and no good Christians breathing down his neck to change. I didn’t know him well, but I had made up his healed life as a dream. His wife and daughter were home. His house was beautifully decorated. He was sweet and spoke to me about freedom and loving his wife. He said he had been with boys before his wife, and never figured out how to shake the shame. He said being with his wife made him feel whole and accepted in the sight of God. He spoke quietly and with great calm. He showed me some photos of him in his twenties, when he was “active in the gay lifestyle.” His eyes were alive. His smile was ear to ear. Maybe it’s because he was younger then.

  He drove me to the meeting and hardly said a word. He put on worship music. The image of an uncle driving his niece to get an abortion came into my mind. A heaviness. A necessity.

  The meeting was held in a church on Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista. I sat with my friend near the back. This was a free meeting. There were weekend seminars you could pay for that were more in depth. Tonight was just an intro. When we showed up there was a guy on stage singing and playing a guitar. He was in his fifties, thick and muscular, with a buzzed head, and had the look of a motorcycle gang member. He had a high voice and his “s”s held. He wore the guitar on his hip softly, and sang “How Great Is Our God!” over and over. I surveyed the crowd. Probably sixty people, mostly older than me, in their late thirties, forties, and fifties. Mostly men but some women. Most were singing. A few stayed seated, looking at their hands or the back of the pew before them.

  When the singing ended, a small bald white man came to the stage. He had electric eyes, as if animated only by caffeine or speed, but aggressively so. Around his eyes were tired wrinkles. His face was red and flushed.

  “Welcome, everyone. For those of you here for the first time, you are especially welcome. For those returning, welcome back to a place where you can feel safe, loved, and accepted in the arms of Jesus.” He spoke with conviction, but an odd one. An urgency, almost a controlled anger reciting kind words.

  He spoke about the freedom of Christ. The lies our desire tells us. How “the heart is deceitful above all things, Jeremiah 17:9.” He said our culture is lying to us. That the shame we feel is God calling us home.

  I surveyed the room and felt such a heaviness. I noticed the man next to me. Mid-forties, handsome. A little too tan and clothes well-chosen and fitted. He listened to the sermon squinting, almost wincing. He worked his lips, thinking. It looked like he was arguing with someone unseen.

  “Now I want everyone struggling with homosexuality to stand up. You’re safe here. Stand up. We’re going to have Kyle come back up and play some music. And here’s what I want you to do. Forgive whoever touched you, whoever abused you, whoever molested you. Was your mother overbearing? Did your father abandon you? Who did this to you? Were you molested, raped? Don’t let them have power over you. Give it to God. He wants to take it from you. Put it on Jesus. He is the man you’re meant to love. Men, He will free you to love women, and women, He will free you to love men. So now, say the name of whoever did this to you, shout it out, set them free and set yourself free.”

  The music began playing and names flew. People were shouting. The first one came awkwardly, like an out-of-tune trumpet. “Michael Green. I forgive you! Michael! Michael! Jesus forgives you!” Then the others came all at once. One man said, “Ryan, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan…” Another said, “Mother, mother, mother.” Another said, “Uncle Daryl, Uncle Daryl…”

  I stood in silence and looked around the room. People held their hands high and shouted. The music was loud. I have never been molested. I have great parents. Sure, they got divorced. Maybe that made me gay? Did my dad abandon me? No. Did he neglect me? Not to my knowledge. Maybe I’ve blocked something. Maybe I was molested? Was I? Am I traumatized and I’ve blocked it out?

&nbs
p; No. I had no one to forgive. No one made me this way. Nothing I can trace made me this way. I just like boys. As the man on stage continued the forgiveness session, a Bible verse came into my head, John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” I looked around the room. Where was the life and life abundant? These people were zombies. Another verse came to me, Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.”

  This was good fruit? This was life abundant?

  I looked at my friend sitting next to me. His face was tired. He seemed like a broken horse, saddled and roped to a fence. He drove me back to my car, I told him thank you, and I felt worse, like the healing was a scam.

  I met a guy a few days later and kissed him. I was twenty-eight and let him lead. And in the two years leading up to my trip, I kissed a few other boys and dated my first boyfriend. We had sex. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” He said he would show me. He was tender and kind.

  I went on this bike trip to chase adventure and avoid the assembly-line life of routine and expectations…right? That is why I ran off from my twenties to South America? But unpacking my childhood, my faith, my sexuality, walking through the building blocks of my mind, I could see I had a lot of things pulling strings in the shadows, making decisions for me just outside my view.