The Cross in the Closet
Timothy Kurek grew up hating homosexuality. As a conservative Christian deep in America’s Bible belt, he had been taught that being gay was an abomination before God. He went to his right-wing church, saw himself as a soldier for Christ and attended Liberty University, the “evangelical West Point”.
But when a Christian friend in a karaoke bar told him how her family had kicked her out when she revealed she was a lesbian, Kurek began to question profoundly his beliefs and religious teaching. Amazingly, the 26-year-old decided to “walk in the shoes” of a gay man in America by pretending to be homosexual.
For an entire year Kurek lived “under cover” as a homosexual in his home town of Nashville. He told his family he was gay, as well as his friends and his church. Only two pals and an aunt – used to keep an eye on how his mother coped with the news – knew his secret. One friend, a gay man called Shawn – whom Kurek describes as a “big black burly teddy bear” – pretended to be his boyfriend. Kurek got a job in a gay cafe, hung out in a gay bar and joined a gay softball league, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian.
The result was a remarkable book called The Cross in the Closet, which follows on the tradition of other works such as Black Like Me, by a white man in the 1960s deep south passing as a black American, and 2006’sSelf-Made Man, by Norah Vincent, who details her time spent in disguise living as a man. “In order to walk in their shoes, I had to have the experience of being gay. I had to come out to my friends and family and the world as a gay man,” he told the Observer.
Kurek’s account of his year being gay is an emotional, honest and at times hilarious account of a journey that begins with him as a strait-laced yet questioning conservative, and ends up with him reaffirming his faith while also embracing the cause of gay equality.
Along the way he sheds many friends, especially from Liberty, who wrote emails to him after he came out asking that he repent of his sins and warning that he faced damnation. He does not regret their loss. “I now have lots of new gay friends,” Kurek said.
But it was not a straightforward journey. Early on Kurek decided to try to acclimatise to Nashville’s gay scene by visiting a gay nightclub. Entering alone, he soon found himself dragged on to the dance floor by a shirtless muscular man covered in baby oil and glitter. As the pair danced to Beyoncé, the man pretended to ride Kurek like a horse to the disco music and called him a “bucking bronco”. It was all a bit too much, too soon. “I want to vomit. I need a cigarette. I feel like beating the hell out of him,” Kurek writes.
But soon things started going better. In order to avoid unwanted sexual passes from men, Kurek recruited Shawn to act as a faithful boyfriend and he rapidly became part of the Nashville gay scene. He explored gay culture and found it to be as diverse and interesting as any other slice of American life. In one gay bar, Kurek was stunned to discover gay Christians earnestly discussing their belief in creationism. “I found gay Christians more devout than me!” Kurek says. He became active in a gay rights group and wound up joining a protest outside the Vatican’s embassy to the United Nations in New York.
Want a copy of his book? You can buy it here after watching the video trailer for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R6qIIvYEqs
Not exactly honouring his parents – not letting them in on the secret.
True, but it made the point well.
That’s what many gay people have to do in America, Kate64. Haven’t read it yet, just downloaded it in Kindle, but my guess is that he was trying to live the life(style :-) short of having sex) to the full to make his research experience as deep as possible. However I don’t won’t to judge before I’ve read him :-)
I’m a mother of four sons. If one of my sons did that without letting me in on it, I would be devistated. I would feel that he didn’t trust me. Not to mention the year of believing that he had fallen away from his faith.
Let me be very clear though – under no circumstances would I ever cut a child out of my life because he experienced same sex attraction. (Actually, I can’t imagine any situation in which I would cut one of my children out of my life.)
The trouble is that many young people have not experienced the kindness and love you obviously have for your sons, Kate64. Many young gay people, when they realise their sexuality, don’t know whom to trust – especially if they have heard antigay messages in the home itself. (That’s why Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Campaign is vital, by the way.)
No doubt very true, but not relevant to my point. (My sons have heard what you might consider ‘anti gay’ messages. I have taught them that sex is for one man and one woman in marriage, and that outside of that God calls people to be celibate. I’ve also taught them that experienceing same sex attraction is no more a sin than being tempted to steal – the sin is acting on the attraction or the temptation. )
The author of the book isn’t gay. He conducted a year long social experiment, and I think it was shameful that he didn’t tell his parents what he was doing. Surely letting them in on it and seeking their blessing on it wouldn’t have made all that much difference to his experience.
Have you read it? I think you should withhold judgment till you have Kate because even though I’ve just started reading it it is both surprising and it rings true. I think you mean well by saying to your sons that to experience same sex attraction is no more a sin than being tempted to steal but if you really think about it that is actually a very poor example. Stealing is clearly wrong and no-one could disagree (there may be circumstances where it would be justified if you were starving and no one would give you a crust) but experiencing same-sex attraction is certainly not in the same category because being attracted to one sex or the other is very closely part of ones’ sense of identity and well-being you cannot distance yourself from in the way that you can dismiss the thought of taking something that belongs to somebody else. Secondly, it is only sinful if you believe it to be so to act upon it. It is not a self-evident truth whatever you may think the Bible says and not everyone agrees that the Bible got it right. I am not saying for one moment that you did this but just think for a moment if one of your sons were gay the terror he might feel if he heard you talking about same-sex attraction in the context of sin, or Sodom and Gomorrah or worse, say that gay people were going to hell. The last thing he would feel like doing would be to be honest with you. He would rather be loved for what he was not that risk being hated for what he was. YOU say you would still love him unconditionally but HOW would he know that if he has heard those antigay messages? I don’t wish to hurt you or offend you but I speak from my position as having lived through this and it took me years to be honest with my own father. When I did tell my mother she counselled me “Don’t tell your father, he’s narrow-minded”. Actually that advice was wrong when I eventually got the courage, but my point is that the terror started at home with the kind of casual unthinking remarks (e.g. the “love the sinner” variety) that signify gay people as flawed.
What worries you so much about the fact that he didn’t fess up to his parents? They thought they had a gay son, had to get over it, then later learned it was not so? Surely they would understand his noblest of motives in trying to walk in the shoes of a despised minority and be proud that their son was trying to do what he thought Jesus was calling him to do – love everyone without prejudice?
Nobody likes to be lied to.
Very difficult to be a parent these days. Did you see this from Boris Johnson’s sister “”Grown-ups are too involved in their children’s lives now, and should back off, says the Mayor of London’s sister”?
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/families/article3567000.ece
It is behind a paywall so I will take the liberty of pasting just a couple of paras. Hope that is legal/within copyright percentage allowable.
“In many ways, nothing changes. We love our children. We want our children to grow up to be competent, decent human beings fit for adult purpose. These are the main things, and in these we have, I think we are all agreed, not done too badly. Our children, and I’ll generalise here, are not serial axe murderers or kitten drowners.
Our children do make an effort — at least on special occasions anyway — to repay the enormous investment of time, energy, money and emotion we have poured into them. Children are programmed to please, to be loved, and to love us back. Thank Christ.
So we are not here to examine our children. Where we should peer in this chapter is under the stone — at the damp place where pale worms wriggle in the dark, for this is the condition of the modern parent — to try to find out where we have gone so terribly wrong.
Before we come to the wretchedly indulgent state of modern parenting, though, I suppose I’d better set out my stall. Inevitably, when one becomes a parent, one can’t help revisiting one’s own childhood to make comparisons……”
Indeed Tom. And it’s always worth reiterating (hopefully this won’t earn me another screed from FIddle Sticks) that homophobia is one of the few areas where ‘sin” is interpreted to mean ”should be illegal, or at least ‘discouraged”’. One can’t recall many campaigns to criminalise heterosexual fornication.
Are you a fan of Dan’s “Savage Love” pod, Tom? He had a good call from an evangelical Christian facing conflicts over LGBT issues a few weeks’ back.
Yes Ryan, I am an avid listener to Dan. I heard that call – it was so moving.
Very interesting, Peter. I think I may get the book. How did you come across him?
A Facebook link. There’s also a Kindle version of the book here
I think I’ll check this out too…perhaps it could be the first title for a virtual reading group involving this blog’s regulars! :-)
Set up a Book Club :-)
A fantastic volume. The most moving part for me was the scene in a gay karaoke when one of the performers put on a recording of old hymns and Kurek went in to find them all singing with lighters held aloft.
Gay people are no more “drawn” or “tempted” to sin than heterosexuals are drawn to or tempted to engage in non-procreational sex. The genitals are designed (by God/nature) for procreation just as the eyes are for sight and the ears for hearing. Everything else is mere secularist heresy.
That is the view of the church founders. As heterosexuals have taken it upon themselves to bend nature/God to suit their own carnality, they have no excuse for not extending mercy and compassion to others. Either that or to stop pretending that what they classify as “sin” is somehow greater and more worthy of hellfire and damnation than their own sins against nature.