The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Malachi the Queer

by Damian Jay Clay

  "Mmm," I say.

  "We need to talk to you," he says, "about Sri Lanka."

  My mum is fingering the cross around her neck. This is something she does when she needs strength from The Lord. I know this because whenever she says, Lord, give me strength, she fingers her cross.

  Sri Lanka: once a year, at the beginning of the summer holiday we go away to another country to tell poor people about Jesus and help them fix their churches and schoolhouses and whatever. This year we were going to save some godless sinners from Sri Lanka. It would be no holiday but it would be the closest to a holiday I would ever get being in this family. I hate these visits and all missionary work because it means having to lie to people I have nothing against. But as far as my parents know, I'm looking forward to it.

  As soon as my dad speaks I figure by the tone of his voice that I'm not going. My hair becomes a shade brighter at the thought of it but I stop myself from smiling and keep on my serious face. I don't yet know where this is going.

  "I'm sorry to let you know this late but you're not going to be coming with us."

  Yes! My name is Malachi Russell and I am not going to Sri Lanka.

  "Oh no." I put on my saddest face, "Why?"

  "That's what we need to talk to you about," says my mum. "We should go into the lounge and have a discussion."

  We move into the lounge and I sit on the brown sofa. My mum sits next to me and holds my hand, which is something she's never done before, ever – because I don't like it when people touch me and other than for beatings my parents have never tried.

  Even when it comes to beatings my dad knows he has to touch me as little as possible. When we do it he pulls down my jeans and my boxers but I don't go over his knee. He tried doing that the first time I can remember and I went crazy kicking and punching him. So I turn around, facing the wall and lean right over with my hands against it. This way, I can't see him and it's only about the pain and not about anyone touching me and I can cope with it.

  My dad sits right in front of me on the pouffe. He's holding a colour brochure of some description in his hand, which I think might be the holiday guide I was wanking over last night but I can't be sure. I can't be sure what this is about. It's going to be one of two things. Either it's about me telling my sister to fuck off after church last Sunday and swearing at her again this morning, or, it's about my dad walking into my room without knocking (standard practice around here) to find me masturbating over a picture of a man. I want to pull my hand away from my mum. Her touching me makes me feel ill.

  "Now listen to us. We think you've got a problem in your life that you've been hiding from us and we want to talk to you about it." She gives my hand a reassuring squeeze - so fake.

  Yeah, this is totally about the gay wanking.

  "What do you mean?" I'm as innocent as Bill Posters.

  "Your hair for one thing," my dad says, "it's a radical change and there are other things I'd rather not get into… But I spoke to your head teacher last night."

  "Well why did you do that?" There's a note of disobedience in my voice and that's never a good idea with my dad. I could be taken to the village gates and stoned to death.

  "He spoke to me if you must know. About the name calling and what the boys at school are saying about you."

  "What the hell do they know?"

  My dad goes red. He grabs my wrist from across the table and brings his hand down on the back of mine at full force, then again and again. "Remember you're speaking to your father and show some respect."

  The coastal shelf deepens.

  I pull my hand back, it stings, tingles and throbs. Beyond my control I rip my other hand away from my mum and cover my wounded hand with it. This is not like my dad at all. Whenever I'm punished by him he always does it when he's calm and never when he's still fuming at the crime I committed.

  My mum gives him a stern look. "We're not angry at you."

  Yeah? Tell that to someone whose hand doesn't feel like it's been smashed with a rolling pin.

  "It's that what we've heard from the school is a little worrying." Now she puts her hand on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze.

  My dad seems calmer, sat back in the sofa again. "I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen what I saw last night."

  "We think you have S.S.A.D.," says my mum.

  "What? What's that?" Now I'm confused. I've never heard of that.

  "Same Sex Attraction Disorder," says my mum. "A lot of boys go through it. It's a phase where you feel curious about men."

  "We think you might be confused in your feelings," says my dad.

  My name is Malachi Russell and my parents are such idiots that I don't even have the words. What do I say? I mean, Same Sex Attraction Disorder? They can't even face the fact I'm gay.

  But then... Is this an out? I don't know. Logic and previous experience tell me I must take the path of least resistance.

  "I'm not gay." My voice is even and calm. "I'm struggling with feelings about boys." I feel tears begin to flow down my face. I start to sob. I'm red faced. I'm ashamed. I'm bloody ashamed in front of them! I'm hiding my face with my arm. Out of control! Out of control! This is so unexpected. I lower my arm and look up at my mum and she is smiling, so is my dad.

  My dad opens up the brochure. It looks like any other brochure for a summer camp and is titled: Leviticus Ministries Youth Camp. "Let me tell you where you'll be going. It's a place for teenagers with, well, problems like yours. This is their camp in America but they're running one this Summer in the UK for the first time. Now it was hard to do but I managed to pull some strings and get you on the first course at short notice."

  "I don't want to go, Dad."

  He puts down the brochure and looks me in the eyes. "Just imagine it. When you get back you won't be thinking about men any longer. They guarantee it."

  Chapter Four

  Christians have a very basic view of morality and almost no idea about ethics. If you ask my dad, he will tell you that morality is set in stone by God and we have to follow it or we’ll go to hell. He will go even further than this and tell you that God made our souls to be moral and that any sin we commit is a sin against our soul.

  To me, morality and ethics are two separate things and not different forms of the same thing. Ethics are codified ways of behaving that have a societal force of some kind behind them. A good example of these are legal ethics.

  Legal ethics exist to protect a profession whose members have to carry out activities that they may find personally objectionable. For example, a defence lawyer in a criminal case may know his client to be guilty of an horrendous crime that personally chills him to the core. The lawyer might, from a moral point of view, wish that their client is found guilty but they are bound by ethics to try the case to the best of their ability and can't say in court, The games up. My client admitted their guilt to me.

  The rod that holds this particular set of ethics in place is the prospect of being disbarred and thrown out of the legal profession for breaking the covenant of the rules by which they agreed to abide.

  Morals are our own personal beliefs about what is right and wrong. In the above example it’s the lawyer’s morals that are pulling against the ethics of their profession. It’s a cliché of legal dramas to see this being played out: do the lawyer’s morals or ethics win through? These two forces can be in opposition with one another. Someone could choose to follow ethics and forego the moral implications, or one can follow their morality and risk being seen acting outside of the ethical system by the fellow members who subscribe to that same system and having orangeade thrown at them and being humiliated in public.

  Our adherence to an ethical system is held in place by fear of authority, like my dad pulling my trousers and pants down and battering me. Our adherence to morality is held in place by our own conscience which, when we go against it, makes us want to drag our knuckles across walls.

  Morality is therefore relative to each individual based on their own exper
iences, psychological make up and brain chemistry. Ethics (though changeable) are absolute to the power that presides over them. The choice of which to follow is always the choice of the individual. Or another way to put it is that anyone who would commit an ethical action still has to make a moral decision before they take that action. My dad follows the ethics from the bible and therefore I have to stop being gay. He believes my soul doesn’t want to be gay. So what chance do I have?

  And here is where we can see the correlation between religious laws and political ideologies: both are ethical structures that present ways of thinking and ways of behaving which are enforced by authority. Dissent in Stalin’s world meant jail, torture and possibly death. Dissent from the ethical dictates of religion means exclusion from that religion and in the case of some faiths, the threat of torture, jail, execution, an eternity burning in hell or transit to stop being gay camp.

  In democratic countries the law is the ethical system that governs behaviour. The main difference between democratic law as opposed to religious law is that democratic law is a system evolved through a continual dialogue (be that through politics, journalism, public opinion, protest, art and academia) between its society’s members.

  This is why (at least where I live – in the UK) where slavery was once acceptable and fully legal; it’s now considered a relic of a barbarous age. This democratic system outlawed child labour, gave women the vote and rights equal to that of men, made state education of children mandatory, provided a national health service, pensions and welfare for those out of work or unable to work due to disability. It is what has taken us from the sodomy laws which made homosexuality illegal, to where we are at the current time with equal marriage for everyone, gay or straight. They even allow churches to marry gay people. Though, to me, that seems as desirable as letting an abattoir offer a pet sitting service.

  Even though Christians live in the same physical reality as us, they don’t live in the same mental reality. When it comes to my dad and every Baptist I know, even the most logical and well crafted argument in the world will be disavowed if it contradicts anything the bible says. Jesus Christ himself could stand in front of them and say, No, actually you got that wrong, and they would pull out the bible and say, No, let me show you why you’re so wrong about that.

  The idea of me not going to this camp is now against every fabric of the Bible. So, in the end, I accepted everything my parents said and agreed to go but I don’t want to spend two weeks in this sodding camp. And it’s tonight. They’re coming to get me tonight.

  I lie on my bed and let my mind do its own thing which is run through everything in search of an answer, a way to get me out of having to go to a place which will stop me thinking about boys. My hand is red and throbbing and I think it’s injured. My parents never touch me with affection. Isla, yes; me, no. So my mum holding my hand made me feel strange.

  But I lied to them. I’m not confused. This S.S.A.D. thing makes it seems like I have a problem. I don’t have a problem, my parents do. It’s not S.S.A.D. It’s being gay! I know what I am. Is it possible, when you’re sure of who you are, that a person, a place or a camp can change you? I can’t believe it is but that doesn’t stop me being scared. Why did I feel so ashamed?

  And a religious bible studying camp! I barely make it through church these days and religious studies at school and the brochure promised bible study and group worship. How is that going to help? Reading the bible was the thing which ultimately convinced me that Christianity was bullshit.

  What was it that first made me doubt? It was my dad.

  It was about six months after I’d got out of hospital. He’d been invited as a panel member on a discussion program on regional TV about the decline of religious belief in the UK. It’s something he’s done a lot now since his books have become so popular. I remember Mum, Isla and me were excited as the show started and we caught sight of my dad as the camera panned past the members of the panel. The studio was unlit, with each panel member spotlighted. It made it seem dark, edgy and serious.

  The moderator/presenter sat in the middle. To one side were a Hindu Priest, Muslim imam, a Jewish Rabbi and my dad, all wearing their religious outfits. On the other side, all by himself, in a sharp tailored suit, was a scientist and atheist named Dr Sam Hawnett. He was young, maybe in his mid thirties. He had piercing eyes that were very light blue and he looked so young and cool in comparison to his opposition.

  The conversation started off well enough and the moderator asked everyone why they thought religiosity was on the decline. All of the theists, my dad included, set about rejecting the premise of the question, saying that although church numbers might be in decline it was only because people were more comfortable these days holding their own belief in god(s) in a private manner.

  Dr Hawnett didn’t seem to be too impressed by these answers and said it was because people were waking up to rationalism and scientific thinking and realising that in the same way they lost their belief in Santa Clause when they realised that wasn’t true, they came to realise that every god out there was a fiction created by man.

  But it wasn’t this revelation that first planted the seeds of doubt in my mind, though it did linger there and made me aware for the first time that it probably wasn’t beyond the capacity of my parents to lie to me. What was puzzling me, more than anything that was actually being said, were the dynamics of the conversation in general.

  Each one of the theistic spiritual leaders were arguing for the case of god but not their god. I didn’t understand it at all. I expected them to be at one another's throats. Sam Hawnett was against the idea of god because he said there was no evidence but the theists were all defending one another. My dad even backed up the Hindu on a couple of points. It made me wonder what the hell was going on.

  Then came the last question. “How would you convince a non believer that your religion was the correct one?”

  All of them answered so convincingly but no one, not even my dad, criticised the other religions.

  “But Mum isn’t our religion the correct one?” I was a bit concerned.

  “Of course it is,” she snapped back.

  “Mum why are Hindus Hindu? Why aren’t they Christian?”

  My mum turned the television off. “Because…”

  “Because they’re born in India and their parents are Hindu.” Isla was wearing a strange kind of smile that I would later come to call the teacher’s pet smile or the snivelling toad smile. “Isn’t that right, Mum?”

  “Yes, that’s true, but it’s also because they haven’t yet heard the Good News about Jesus.” My mum turned to face me. “This is why we go on missions to tell them.”

  “And Jews are Jewish because they come from Jerusalem?” I asked.

  “Israel, silly.” Isla gave out a disappointed sigh.

  “But Mum, wouldn’t a Hindu say we were only Christian because we hadn’t heard the Good News about Ganesha or something?”

  Then I heard the edge of threat behind her voice. “Why don’t you just ask Dad when he gets in.”

  So I didn’t ask any more and I didn’t talk to my dad about it later or at any point after that.

  What I was left with was an understanding of how dependent most people’s religions were on parentage and/or geography. For the last few years (the only part of my life of which I have any memory) I’ve lived in the most multicultural borough in the UK and there are loads of Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Catholics. When I heard the other people on that panel talk about their religion it was plain to see they felt they were as strongly connected to their god(s) as I felt I was to mine. They had all the same stories of healings, miracles and spiritual experiences that I had heard from my dad. They all believed their religion was the correct one and that the truth of their religion was revealed in their holy books.

  In other words, from all reportage, there was nothing between the various religions in terms of validity – nothing to differentiate them at all in terms of truth. The onl
y real difference seemed to be that the religion held was the one of the family into which each of the panellists was born. The obvious problem was that the claims of these religions contradicted one another and so couldn’t all be true.

  So I did what most Christians do when they’re having a spiritual crisis. I read the bible. I read it from cover to cover and it was in doing that I found things written in the bible that made no sense to me and seemed to go against what I had been led to believe and what the Christians around me had always claimed: the genocide of the Midianites; Lot being saved from Sodom and Gomorrah because he offered up his daughters to be raped and then God turning Lot's wife to salt for the horrendous crime of looking over her shoulder; unhappy with the people he created, God killing all of them in a worldwide flood – it went on and on.

  Then I thought about the fact that God only saves people from going to hell if they believe in him at the moment of their death. A good man could be humble and believing all his life, then for some reason not believe at the last moment and he’s condemned to hell. Whereas, a mass murderer could find belief in God at the last moment, confess his sins and he’s on the escalator to heaven. How is that just?

  And that scared me. That made me think about what happened when I got meningitis. It happened when I was eleven and the only thing I can remember about the whole time I was ill was the lumbar puncture they did. I don’t even remember the beginning of the procedure, I remember being held down by a nurse, curled up with her pulling my shoulders and knees together as a doctor put a 22 gauge, three and a half inch needle through my back, between my two lower vertebrae, piercing through connective tissue and into the space around my spinal chord so they could tap my spinal fluid. I remember screaming at the electric pains which shot down my legs.