By Ryan Self
I grew up in one of the most conservative areas of the country, West Texas. My sophomore year of high school, my hometown of Lubbock was ranked the second most conservative city in the nation. Coming in third was Abilene, Texas, where I went to a Christian college.
In the 19 years I lived in Lubbock, I only knew one out gay person — we’ll call him Derek. He was a classmate in the year below me in junior high school.
Derek didn’t hide that he was gay; and people didn’t hide their distaste for him. He was bullied. Kids taunted him, said all kinds of degrading things behind his back without being overly concerned if he could hear them. One day, I remember seeing him crying on the bus. It was the first period of his first day at a new school and he was already in tears.
To say that those around me, including myself, were callous toward Derek is an understatement. I wish I could say that I was sympathetic to him — I was not. I joined in on the jokes and never thought twice about the harm we were doing to another human being. After all, he was a gay person.
One Wednesday evening, he showed up to our church youth group. I was shocked. How could anyone let a gay person into a church?
Even two decades later, I am still ashamed of what I did next. We were asked to name a person we admired and list a few things we liked about that person. For my hero, I said what I admired most about him was that he was straight.
Immediately, the youth minister told me to sit down and tried to defuse the situation. I got a call from him and another friend that night to talk about what happened. I honestly was not thinking too much about how what I said would be offensive; I was trying to be funny. Only later did I realize how hurtful what I said had been. But a part of me was deeply confused. Were we not supposed to treat gay people with contempt?
The way I and others treated Derek back in junior high was wrong. I was young, I was dumb, and I was repeating messages my community had given to me during my formative years. But my lack of understanding didn’t mean I didn’t have a responsibility to apologize, to own up to what I said. The following day, I apologized to Derek at school.
Thankfully, Derek did come back to our church. I would never have forgiven myself as an adult if something I said led another person to feel so alienated that they chose to never come to our church again.
Deep down, a part of me knew I had more in common with Derek than I ever wanted to admit. I was in junior high. I was going through puberty. My male friends were beginning to talk about girls, how they noticed girls, how they were interested in them. And deep down, I knew: The way my male friends were talking about how they felt about girls was the way I felt about guys.
