Tea and Sympathy with Mrs. F
By Dominic Chua.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 at 5:13am
A teacher from my junior college days, Mrs. F, who's a passionate advocate of all things Catholic recently caught me by the scruff of the neck on Facebook, and wanted to know if I'd "changed" (she'd been reading my public information, and was rather scandalised by it all, I'm afraid!). Below is my reply to her, which I share as a note because it sums up a good part of my life - the point where religion and sexuality collide. It'll also help to explain to my Catholic friends on Facebook what I've been up to.

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Dear Mrs. F,

Thanks for the little comment you wrote to me and apologies for the delay in replying - I was thinking about how best to respond to your query about whether I had 'changed'.

I guess perhaps the 'post-Catholic' bit would be the easiest to address, so we'll start with that. It's a term I came up with because I acknowledge the ways in which I've been shaped by the Church, and because I still see a great deal of truth and beauty in her teachings. I don't go to church these days, though, because I really have no great love for Pope Benedict.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, he headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and was responsible for silencing many theologians, both priests and nuns, who were doing a great deal of good work with gay and lesbian Catholics, and who were also exploring (from a theological perspective) the place of gay and lesbian people within the Catholic church.

Silencing them basically meant that we end up with the old, default position, which regards homosexuality as 'intrinsically/objectively disordered'. The Church declares this by fiat, without any real listening to the experiences of gay and lesbian people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) as well as secular research. In a way, it's like Galileo all over again, just that this time it's in the area of human psychology, rather than the physical sciences - the Church declaring that 'this is how God created things' out of a preconceived notion of the 'correct' moral order.

When I first came to know you in junior college (1992-3), Mrs. F, I was in a phase of denial that had probably begun when I was 13 or 14, and which lasted all the way up till 22. Looking back, I feel like I lost my entire adolescence. While other people were happily dating, I was struggling with this unnamed, unnameable desire within myself. I refused to accept that I was gay, because I'd been told it was wrong, and I didn't want to be this sick, perverted, deviant, abnormal thing. Those are, after all, the default perceptions that a significant number of Catholics and Protestants entertain of gay people.

It was a struggle that consumed a great deal of my mental and emotional energy, and you won't believe the weird psychic contortions that I subjected my mind and my heart to, as part of that process of denial. For example, I told myself that I wasn't interested in girls, but that I wasn't interested in guys either - i.e. that I was asexual. That all I really wanted was this a really close guy friend. And that would be enough.

I experienced for myself at that point in my life the warping, distorting effects that denial has upon a person's psyche. Later on in my life, that experience helped me to understand other gay men and lesbian women that I would meet, who had gone further down that path of denial, some of them entrapping themselves in heterosexual marriage and living doubled lives of secrecy, deceit and guilt.
I read somewhere - I think it might have been a book by Fr. Gerard Hughes or Fr. John Powell - that good theology has to amount to good psychology, and vice-versa, because God created us to be fully human and fully alive. That became a guiding principle of sorts for me.

During the long, protracted process of praying and reflecting about the issue, I came to realise that most of the 'proof' cited by the Church (both Catholic and Protestant) for the abnormality and undesirability of 'the homosexual condition' is based on a very small, biased sampling of the gay community. These studies almost exclusively looked at gay Christians or persons who were deeply troubled by their sexuality (usually because of their religious upbringing), but not at those who were psychologically healthy and happy.

It's almost a foregone conclusion that these studies would then equate being gay with being psychologically unwell. We could liken the situation to that of a teacher who's put in some really hard-to-teach classes for the first 3 or 4 years of his or her teaching career, and who thereafter declares that today's youth are completely wild and have gone to the dogs.

When I realised this, and when I realised that the institution that I loved didn't really love me back and didn't really have my best interests at heart - I guess that was when I decided that it was best for me to step outside. There's a quote from Jeanette Wintersen, taken from her novel 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit', that captures well my feelings on this matter.

She writes: "I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible...and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky."

I guess what I've written above will give you some sense of why I feel there should be 'gay rights'. They're not - as some Christians would characterize them - 'special rights'. At the end of the day, gay people are asking to be treated as people - no more and no less. But just as we wouldn't ask a man or woman on the street to spend his or her life in hiding, paranoid about whether their going to lose their jobs or their friendships or the love of their family members because something about them is discovered - then by the same token, we shouldn't ask the gay men and lesbian women in our society to do precisely that - to stick to the shadows and fringes of society just because people would rather not have their their moral sensibilities affronted because of the prejudices they cling to.

I imagine it may not have been easy for you to read this letter, Mrs. F. I've tried to answer your questions to the best of my ability. As to that final question of whether I've changed - I would say that I've grown and matured, but that deep inside, there's still an idealism and optimism about the human condition that hasn't changed. That's still there. :)

I hope the years have been kind to you, Mrs. F. Please do write me again when you're able, and let me know what you've been up to of late.

Best wishes always,
Dominic