“Don’t ask, don’t tell!” That was the slogan promoted by his dad’s employer. Brandon’s dad was career Navy. So, when Brandon finally came out at age twenty, he was completely surprised by his dad’s reaction. His dad was the one who never went to church. He considered himself a Christian but didn’t fit the bill of what Brandon was told it looked like to be “born again;” church attendance, fellowship with Christians, and being a part of the life of the church. And yet, in that moment when Brandon really needed love, support, acceptance, grace, and mercy, his dad was the one who provided it.
Brandon’s Story
I grew up in an independent, ultra-conservative, fundamentalist church. My mother was responsible for making sure my brother, who was five years younger, and I had a proper religious upbringing. My father rarely went to church. His family was not very religious, from what I understand. My paternal grandmother was a clairvoyant medium, which I think is a no-no in most conservative churches. Through the years, my mother and I “progressed” together from the ultra-conservative forms of fundamentalism to a slightly more liberal approach but still stayed on the conservative side of the fence.
Our family was very close. Because my father’s career required that we move every three to four years, our family and faith were the few constant aspects of life. We depended on each other. Through the course of his career we lived in a few different states, spending much of the time in Virginia. He retired the same year I graduated from high school, 2000.
My mom was the most important person in my life. I was a momma’s boy. We shared a deep friendship. She used to tell me that I was “born more mature” than she was when she had me. She was only nineteen when I was born. We talked about everything. She shared things with me that some would probably say a mother shouldn’t share with a child. We had a tight bond throughout my entire life. Even during the rocky times when I was coming out, we remained close…and I loved that.
Dad and I were never very close, partly because his job took him out to sea for several months at a time. We were also very different. Dad had more in common with my brother and they understood each other and were very close. But when I came out later in life, something happened to my relationship with my dad and we grew much closer.
My brother and I spent a great deal of time together growing up. I was the safe one and did not take many risks. I spent much of my time protecting him from injury. While I have never had a broken bone or so much as a cavity, he broke several bones and needed to be stitched up multiple times in his childhood. We did have fun despite all the injuries.
In elementary school, I always felt different from the other children. I was a loner and could feel isolated even when in a group. I was more of an observer than a participant and was often not actively involved with the other children. I spent most of my time with the adults because I found them much more interesting and I felt more comfortable with them. I have been called an “old soul” on many occasions.
I started to experience attraction to the same sex as early as five years old. I have a vivid memory of standing in line with the other kindergarteners about to go into our school and seeing a boy that I had a huge crush on. I remember looking at him and knowing I was feeling something for him. That’s all I remember…me looking at him as we stood in line, feeling those feelings.
I have memories of playing pretend and dress-up, acting, singing, and dancing. One of my most vivid memories, where I felt the happiest and most like “me”, was when I was playing with some neighborhood kids on the playground one day. I think I was between six and eight years old at the time. It was just a few of us. I don’t even remember who they were or what they looked like. I just remember they were girls, and one of them had a small purse with a long strap. I put the purse over my shoulder and pretended to be Dorothy Zbornak from The Golden Girls. I have no idea how I even knew who that was, my grandma must have let me watch it with her. I was tall, and mature, and proud—and an old woman.But at some point, I pushed all those interests aside. My love for music remained but instead of singing, I went into the band.
In middle school, I tried playing soccer but really did not like it, too much running, so I started playing the clarinet. I picked up the clarinet because my dad told me that his father used to play the clarinet. His father had died unexpectedly of heart failure before I was born. So, when I auditioned for band in sixth grade, the band teacher let me try out a clarinet. I was a natural. I had all the embouchure and breath support needed to play it. I remember clearly the band director turning the mouthpiece of the clarinet around so I could blow into it while he moved his fingers on the keys. I produced a beautiful sound. He was impressed, and that made me feel great about myself. For one, because I knew my dad would be proud. Two, because I did love music and finally found something I was good at and enjoyed. And three, my mom was excited to connect with the band director because when she met him they realized they had gone to high school together. It was a cool experience all around.
Other than band, seventh and eighth grades were not great. I was always picked on and had a difficult time understanding the other kids. They did not understand me either.
I remember when I was in eighth grade, the seniors from the area high school came to help with our band. I found myself strongly attracted to the drum major, who happened to be a guy. I tried to ignore those feelings and never told anyone about what I was experiencing.
When I got to high school, I finally hit my stride. I was in an environment with other peers who were older than me. Being in band allowed me the opportunity to be in classes with the seniors, so my freshman year, I became very popular with them. I even started semi-dating a girl. It didn’t go very far, because she was also dating someone else…and some other not-so-obvious reasons at the time. But just as my popularity started to rise, the military moved us again. This time we moved to the area near my mom’s family.
Church continued to be a major aspect of our lives. God was always part of my story from a young age. My mom says the earliest things I used to talk about involved becoming a preacher. That makes sense, not only from a calling standpoint, but in church the pastor was akin to a celebrity of sorts. You listen to him and never question. What kid wouldn’t want that? I didn’t seem to mind the fact that I was sheltered from almost everything—pop culture, secular music, TV, movies, etc.
I was so engrossed in my church that it made it easier to ignore what was going on in my body. I do remember hearing the hellfire and brimstone sermons about homosexuals from televangelists and my own pastors. Growing up, one of my pastors used to tell us the way we could identify a homosexual was by the earrings. “Left ear: not queer. Right ear: wrong ear. Both ears: woman.”
I started working at a theme park when I was sixteen and continued for several years. It was my favorite job ever. I worked my way up and got promoted quickly, three times over the course of two years. There were a lot of gay folks who worked as performers there, and in other areas of the park. Even while still attending my fundamentalist church and “being straight,” I developed a crush on my supervisor who was gay. He was older than me by about five years and again, while I was still “straight,” was my first gay kiss. It never grew into anything more, but it naturally created a lot more internal conflict for me.
I became good friends with many of my co-workers. I was closest to Sharon. She was a Christian and very open-minded, and we spent a great deal of time together. After going to the gym one day, we stopped at a Christian bookstore. Sharon told me that she recognized one of the guys working there from a gay bar that she had gone to. I went back to the bookstore later to meet the guy again. We struck up a conversation and started seeing each other. We fell in love very quickly, and our relationship was tumultuous to say the least. We were both from very strict churches and carried a burden of guilt about our relationship that made it very difficult to stay together. We were stuck in a cycle of dating, repenting of our relationship, breaking up, and then getting back together. It was very difficult.
In November of 2000, after my experience at the theme park and during a “repent” cycle with the guy I fell in love with, I joined the Army National Guard. I got back together with the guy before deploying and he told me he would wait for me. Just before I left we went into another “repent” cycle and didn’t see each other again for many years. I went to basic training— “boot camp” and military police school and was mobilized shortly after on 9/11. A year later we deployed to Kuwait and then Iraq in 2003-2004.
Prior to boot camp in 2001, I tried telling my parents about my struggle with same-sex attraction. They were driving me to the Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS), where I would do all the preliminary paperwork and medical checks, and head to basic training directly from there. I was in the back seat of our minivan and I kept leaning forward to start to tell them but I just could not do it. I wanted them to know that it was something I had been struggling with but was working on and trusted God had healed me. I never got it out that day.
While deployed the first time in 2003, I was working in lay-ministry with the soldiers in my unit as I always had. I had a core group of other fundamentalist Christian friends there with similar worldviews. At one point, I became so overwhelmed by my secret, feeling guilt and shame, that I decided I needed to tell my family.
Fortunately, the phone in our barracks had a long enough cord for me to pull it up on a nearby top bunk. I called home and started to cry when my mom picked up the phone. I don’t remember my exact words, but it was something to the effect of, “I just wanted to tell you that I’ve been struggling with homosexuality, and I’m trying to be straight.” My mom’s only response was, “Talk to your father,” and she handed him the phone. Then, I told my dad what I had been carrying around for so long. I remember hearing and feeling his voice change. It was one of pure love and acceptance, and he said, “That’s okay, son, God still loves you!” After a moment, he added, “Now… don’t tell anybody else.” From a man who spent more than two decades in the military, that advice made sense. That’s all I remember from that call. I later found out that they were on their way to a family picnic. It was the Fourth of July. Probably not the best timing.
I heard some years later, that my mom basically shut down at that point and did not talk to anyone for a week. It is understandable, I suppose. My revelation had a lot of implications for me, her, and her relationship with my dad after all the lying I’d done to cover my tracks.
Back in the barracks in Kuwait, I hung up the phone and felt immediate relief. It was good to get it off my chest even though I knew things would be rocky at home with mom. And despite my dad’s warning, I soon shared my “struggles” with a few close Christian friends in my unit. I wanted them to help keep me accountable and on the “straight and narrow.” I ordered a correspondence course to help me become and stay straight. It was from a ministry run by a man who said God healed him of his homosexuality, and he was now happily married to his wife, with no remnants of his former “lifestyle.”
My relationship with my mom was pretty damaged for a while. For better or worse, I was seven thousand miles away, and being that it was the early 2000s, we didn’t have much access to the internet. We communicated mainly through snail mail, and she shared her concerns to me through pen and paper. She expressed that she didn’t want me to go to hell, and shared Bible passages with me typically used against homosexuality, saying she was praying for me, encouraging me in my work with the ex-gay correspondence course program.
I remained in the Middle East for eight more months. My unit moved north from Kuwait to Baghdad. Most of my unit there did not really connect with our chaplain. Somehow, I was among a lot of other fundamentalists of different flavors… and our chaplain was a woman. We tried not to talk about the whole “woman pastor” thing, even though some of the guys took issue with it. I got along well with her, though, and she trusted me and allowed me to lead chapel services for our midnight shift guys. So, every week for eight months I preached a midnight service on Sunday and a Wednesday night service as well. It was energizing and empowering and incredible.
After returning to the United States in August 2004, I enrolled at Liberty University, the late Jerry Falwell’s conservative Christian institution. I started going to a church that had a ministry with recovery groups for people dealing with different issues—divorce, porn addiction, alcohol abuse, and same-sex attraction.I went to the same sex-attraction group for many months and participated with the others in the group. We kept each other accountable to having thoughts that were pure and “straight,” and openly discussed our struggles. While I disagree with the premise of the group now, this was a big catalyst for me in just being able to speak openly about that part of my life with a group of people who shared similar struggles and could be empathetically supportive.
The summer after my first full year at Liberty, I was home visiting my parents and the phrase “gay theology” popped into my head as I sat at their computer. I searched it online and found a plethora of Christian websites showing their gay-affirming understanding of Scripture. I was blown away. I had no idea this existed before. I mean, I’d heard of “gay churches” but of course they were “ridiculous and satanic.” But, these churches were engaging with Scripture. That started my year and a half of devouring everything I could to try to sort it all out.
I went to Liberty for one more semester before deciding to discontinue my studies. School was expensive and I didn’t want to take out any more loans. I moved back to my hometown and eventually got my own place with a roommate.
In the next few months, I started leading praise and worship music for Wednesday night Bible study groups at the big southern Baptist church I was attending. I did that for several months until one day I got a text from my friend Alicia, saying that pastor James didn’t want us to have music that night before we split into our separate men’s and women’s Bible studies, which was our norm.
Instantly, I sensed that he knew about me. “What was the big deal?”I thought to myself. After all, I had not made any decision about my sexuality yet. At that point, I had just been reading and praying and researching and looking at Greek and Hebrew and trying to prayerfully, diligently sort things out. I wasn’t dating. I wasn’t having sex. I was just trying to understand things.
That night, I went to Bible study late, hoping to sneak in and avoid any conversations. But of course, pastor James wasn’t in Bible study; he was in his office waiting for me to walk by as I entered the church, so I walked into his office.
It was the typical, non-question question from PJ: “So, how’s everything going?”
“Great,” I said.
“Anything going on you want to talk about?” He asked.
“No, not really—I’m good. How are you?” I replied.
He was going to have to say whatever he wanted to say. I was not hiding anything, and I was not doing anything. I didn’t have anything I wanted to talk with him about because I knew how he would respond and I’d already read everything on that side of the argument. He basically let me know that it had come to his attention that I seemed to have a lot of gay friends on social media.
I explained to him, openly, where I was, what I was feeling, and how I was prayerfully researching and reading and analyzing Scripture. I expressed that I had not come to any conclusions yet. I’ll never forget his response.
“I think you know what the truth is here, and you’re just fighting it. The problem with sitting on the fence for so long, is that one day you’re going to fall down and you’re going to hurt yourself.”
I don’t remember what awkward conversation ended that dialogue, but I left the church, got into my car, and just drove around for a while. There was much mental back-and-forth, and many of tears that night.
Everything I’d been reading and all the beautiful LGBT Christians I’d been fellowshipping with in online chat rooms and prayer groups deeply resonated with me. In the physical world, I knew I loved this church community. They were my family. I felt at home there, and how could that be wrong?
I made the decision that night. I would walk away from all this searching, and just accept the fact that my church was right, and that “gay Christianity” was a delusion. I couldn’t give up the church family and community I had. I was straight, and that was that.
Later that evening when I got home, I logged into the computer to the website for a gay Christian ministry. I had become so active in participating in their online discussion groups, email prayer chains, and had been writing daily devotions for their email list for some time now.
Their founder and still current leader, Mary, was such a beautiful model of Christ’s love to me.
“No,” I said to myself. “This is not wrong. These people all love God and live like Jesus more than some of the other ‘Christians’ I know. I am gay.” And that was that. As quickly as I “decided” to go against my soul and be straight, I decided I was wrong and followed my heart and intuition.
I later found out that I immediately became a hot topic in the Bible study and prayer circles at the church. I was apparently a “big scandal.” A couple of the guys from Bible study reached out to me, especially after I announced not too long thereafter that I was moving to Los Angeles. One wanted to have breakfast with me before I left. We did. He just wanted to say goodbye and make sure that I had seen a few of these Bible passages I may have missed. I moved to Los Angeles in July 2007 where I joined the army reserves.
After I came out as a self-affirming gay Christian, a few years passed and mom had come to terms with things. We still loved each other very much and spoke regularly throughout all of this. At that point, she still didn’t agree with the “lifestyle” but was loving and kind. Dad never cared either way. The fact that he had three gay siblings probably helped some. I had met and spent time with my aunts and uncles, but we never spoke about their relationships. Even my aunt’s long-time partner was included as part of the family, yet the relationship was never identified. It’s incredible what we can avoid. Of course, when I came out, my aunt and her partner were just like, “Oh, thank God. We’ve been waiting for years.”
About six years after I came out as being gay to my parents for the second time, not as just struggling with my sexuality, mom got to the point where she was open to meeting more people from my world and learning more about same sex attraction. I’d become heavily involved with the Gay Christian Network, which hosts a conference in a different spot around the U.S. every January. In January of 2013, she flew to meet me in Los Angeles, and we took a mother-son road trip to Phoenix, where the conference was held that year. That conference opened her eyes and heart in many ways. It does for pretty much everyone who steps into that conference center and takes part in the corporate worship led at the start of each conference.
Time and time again, you would find parents who were formerly non-affirming, or “sitting on the fence” about what to think, standing up along with the hundreds of other souls in that room, singing, praising God, praying, crying, submitting their lives to Christ and to leading lives of love. Mom was no different. She started connecting with more people there and became fast friends with a lot of my friends, leading to her texting them more than I even did after the conference.
When mom attended the next conference with me in Chicago in 2014, she opened up even more. She made it a point to pull me aside, tell me she loved me, and let me know that she affirmed me for who I was.
I moved to New York to complete a degree in American studies in January 2014. Mom developed a highly aggressive form of breast cancer while I was away, so I returned home often to spend time with her. I missed many classes and was given many extensions for finals and papers but mom and I had some beautiful moments together. She died in January 2016. I returned to my studies and completed my B.A. in May 2016. She would have been very proud.
Much has happened since then. My mom and I were very close, and her death was a significant emotional event for me. It caused me to question everything. I had never lost anyone so close. I became more open and began to question my own spirituality. What did I really believe, concerning life after death, and my own spirituality in general?
I often wonder what life would have been like if I had grown up in a more mainline, liberal denomination. My faith background made a huge difference in delaying my coming out. How far could I have gone, tapping into my truest self sooner in life? Where would I be now?
Throughout my military career, I had a desire to study and become a chaplain. I was involved in some sort of lay ministry wherever I went, and it made sense to me to stay in the military and have that be my career. But after I came out, I knew I needed to find an LGBT-affirming seminary. Last year, I finally finished the undergraduate degree I’d started so long ago and was accepted at Yale’s Divinity School. I was preparing to attend to start earning my master’s in divinity, the graduate degree required for military chaplains, when I realized that the career that I had recently started building as a life and leadership development coach was fulfilling more of my yearnings and callings than I thought it would. I was working with people to identify happier, more passionately creative ways of living, and along with my new position as an equal opportunity advisor in the Army Reserve. I was fulfilling my own desires to encourage others to live their God-given, truest selves in this world.
I have learned that everyone has their own journey to walk. Coming out must be done according to your own timing. When you do come out, have a back-up plan. Make sure you are physically safe and stable. You could be potentially compromising your living, working, food, and shelter situation. Start by coming out to people or a community you know will be supportive. You will need that support. Even if you live in the “boonies,” find online support. As much as possible, do not attach yourself to any outcome. You can only control your own thoughts and actions. You have no control over how others will respond. Their response is not about you; it’s about them. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. You just need to be yourself. You are here for a purpose. The best way to find and live your purpose is to listen to yourself, to your biggest, truest, highest desires and callings. Respond openly and gratefully to them, wherever they might take you. You may feel guilty if you leave certain people or communities for your own mental health and livelihood. You may feel the need to somehow go back and save them from their ignorance and prove to them that you are still the same person, to prove your worthiness of their love, to show them that you are right, that you can be “gay and ____” (Christian, for example). In the quest to prove your point, you may be tempted to contort yourself to fit into some other boxes where you do not belong, in boxes that will become just as constrictive as the closet you just fought so hard to come out of. Be patient, be loving, be gentle with yourself.
When I look back on my situation, I wonder how I could have done things differently. Part of me wishes I had given my family a chance to walk with me on my eighteen-month journey of prayer, research,and discovery of my identity. I went from “God wants me to be straight” to “No, I am actually designed this way.” But, I did not trust anyone or give anyone a chance. On the other hand, when I didfinally come out, many of their responses were telling. If I had not been as far along in my research and heard them give such dismissive responses, it may have taken me even longer to come out. They would have been examining everything I did. It was hard enough to “hide” when people were not actively watching me. Ultimately, I believe that if I hadknown how supportive my loved ones could have been, I would have come out sooner.
My deepest desire is to live a life of love, openness, and non-judgment. My focus is on becoming all that I was created to be by exploring creativity and gender and helping others to do the same.
An excerpt from Who Do You Say I Am? Personal Life Stories Told by the LGBTQ Community, by Carol Marchant Gibbs