Why This Pastor Removed Her Cloak of Bisexual Invisibility

I’ve known that I was attracted to people of both genders for a long time ― since long before I knew the word bisexual. I remember how excited I was as a teenager to discover that there was actually a word for people like me. As an adult, some of my crushes, dates, and relationships have been with women, and some have been with men. As it happens, the person I fell in love with and have committed to spending the rest of my life with is a wonderful and amazing man.

Being out can be tricky for bisexuals because our sexuality is often invisible. Bisexuals who are with same-sex partners are often assumed to be gay, and bisexuals who are with opposite-sex partners are often assumed to be straight. Plus bisexuals are sometimes viewed with suspicion or confusion by both ends of the Kinsey scale, gay and straight alike. All of this, coupled with the fact that I hate few things more than awkwardness and making other people feel uncomfortable, has meant that until relatively recently, I’ve been out only in patches: the search committee who hired me at First Congregational Church in Natick, Mass., where I am an associate pastor; a lot of my friends, but not all; and some family members, but not most.

Because bisexuality is so misunderstood, I told myself that rather than coming out completely, I would be doing more for LGBT rights if I kept my sexuality to myself, rather than risk muddying the waters for those who aren’t so well-versed in the whole LGBT alphabet soup. But I had a change of heart two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the Perry case over whether or not California’s Proposition 8, prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying. was constitutional. In response to news about the case, my Facebook feed was flooded with status updates, posts, and online conversations about the case ― both pro and con. Sadly, most of the posts against marriage equality were generated by family and longtime friends of mine.

It quickly became clear to me that my decision not to be out as a bisexual person was a lie I told myself out of fear of alienating some members of my family. But those posts showed me that the waters could not possibly get any muddier. After all, how could the dialogue with those in my life deteriorate further, given that it began with comparing the right to civil marriage to pedophilia, incest, and bestiality?

As I contemplated coming out as bisexual to those family members, I realized just how important it was to me for them to understand that when they talked about how “the gays” were destroying the institution of marriage or brainwashing our children or eroding our moral values, they were talking about me. They were talking about Summer Finnell Shaud, their sister/aunt/cousin/classmate/friend/pastor/whatever. They were talking about me and millions of other regular people who want only the same legal rights and protections that they enjoyed. So I came out as bisexual. On Facebook.

As we prepare to mark Celebrate Bisexuality Day on Wednesday, I think it’s worth coming out again. Just to remind folks that I’m still here ― and still bisexual. What I learned by coming out two years ago, particularly with my congregation, is that coming out is just the beginning. Not a single person in my church has reacted negatively to my coming out (at least not that I’m aware of), but for many, it prompted curiosity and a desire to know more. I have had a number of conversations with parishioners and fellow staff members since then who have wanted a kind of “bisexuality 101.” While many of those conversations with congregants were sometimes awkward for me, they were clearly and invariably coming from a place of love and a sincere desire to understand. They were also a reminder to me that faith communities must minister to the spiritual and social needs of bisexual people ― pastors and congregants alike. Perhaps the best way to do this is by creating “bisexually healthy congregations,” a termed coined by the Religious Institute to refer to congregations led by clergy who are educated about bisexuality and where bisexuality is explicitly addressed in the church’s youth and adult sexuality education.

My Facebook-inspired coming-out two years ago took place during Holy Week, when I was deep in preparation for our Maundy Thursday worship service, the church’s commemoration of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet as an act of love and acceptance. That reflection, coupled with my experiences coming out, has taught me that we know love by what love does. In the end, when we are supported in our journey toward authentic and abundant life, love wins.

SUMMER SHAUD is associate pastor of First Congregational Church in Natick, Mass., and a contributor to the congregational guidebook Bisexuality: Making the Invisible Visible in Faith Communities. 

Summer Shaud

www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/9/22/why-pastor-removed-her-cloak-bisexual-invisibility

Friend: Bill Clinton warned about Hillary’s ‘discomfort’ with gay rights in 1999

Bill Clinton confided to a close friend in 1999 Hillary Clinton was ‘put off’ by LGBTI rights, according to an audio recording obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Taylor Branch, who shared an apartment with Bill in the 70s, wrote a history of Bill’s White House years based on an audio diary of their conversations.

According to a 10 June 1999 recording, Branch had been interviewing Bill at the White House when the then president stepped out to take a phone call from Hillary.

When he returned, he seemed worried that his wife’s ‘discomfort’ with LGBTI rights would hurt her 2000 Senate campaign, and expressed regret over signing the Defense Against Marriage Act.

‘[Bill] came in and he said, “You know I’ve had much more contact in my life with gay people than Hillary has,”‘ Branch says in the recording.

‘He said, “I think she’s really a little put off by some of this stuff.”‘

Branch said Bill generally supported ‘the gay agenda right down the line.’ But he told Branch that ‘Hillary, emotionally speaking, still finds the issue harder to swallow than I do. And that it could be difficult for her in New York politics, how far she’ll be asked to go.’

Branch added that Bill was ‘essentially I think saying that Hillary had kind of a conservative religious temperament, and was not likely to be comfortable around gay people who were kind of acting out, or pushing her to the limit. She did have general discomfort.’

Hillary endorsed civil unions during her 2000 Senate campaign, but not gay marriage. She only publicly come out in favor of gay marriage in 2013.

Listen to the recording below:

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Darren Wee

www.gaystarnews.com/article/friend-bill-clinton-warned-about-hillarys-discomfort-with-gay-rights-in-1999/

Nine trans women arrested in Indonesia for cross-dressing

Nine transgender women have been arrested for cross-dressing in Indonesia’s Islamic Aceh province, according to the state-owned Antara news agency.

Some of the women were detained in the beauty salons where they work in the city of Meulaboh, after they were reported by local residents who suspected them of prostitution. Others were picked up at a contraceptive store.

‘They, these transgenders, were caught for violating Islamic Sharia law, but they are not violating Qanun Aceh (local bylaw),’ head of West Aceh Sharia police Ika Suhannas said on Monday (21 September).

‘After we caught them and checked their identity, we allowed them to return to their hometowns.’

No evidence of sex work was found.

Cross-dressing is not illegal in Indonesia and some public tolerance is given to transgender people working in beauty salons. However, there are no laws protecting transgender people from discrimination or harassment.

Aceh is the only province in the Muslim-majority country that has Sharia law and gay sex is punishable there by up to 100 lashes and up to 100 months in prison.

Police warned the women to start dressing in men’s clothing and stop working in beauty salons.

‘Their activities caused public unrest because they hung out until midnight wearing female outfits even when they’re male. These activities caused public unrest and residents told us to take action,’ Suhannas said.

h/t: Rappler

The post Nine trans women arrested in Indonesia for cross-dressing appeared first on Gay Star News.

Darren Wee

www.gaystarnews.com/article/nine-trans-women-arrested-in-indonesia-for-cross-dressing/

Prince William Speaks Out Against Anti-LGBT Bullying

In what is apparently a first for the royal family of the United Kingdom, Prince William has spoken out strongly against homophobia.

Attending an antibullying workshop at a British school Monday, the prince (pictured above) said that if he witnessed anti-LGBT bullying, he would comfort the victim and confront the attacker, U.K. website Pink News reports.

“Referring to a chart of how to tackle homophobia, he said: ‘I would start on that side [comfort the victim] and end up here [confront the bully],’” the site reports.

Members of the royal family have historically avoided discussing LGBT issues, Pink News notes, partly because 90 percent of the population of the British Commonwealth lives under some form of anti-LGBT law. The commonwealth is a voluntary association of 53 independent nations, many of which were once British colonies. No royal has even spoken in support of same-sex marriage, which is legal in most of the U.K.

Accompanying Prince William to the Hammersmith Academy were Education Secretary and Equalities Minister Nicky Morgan and staff of the Diana Award, named for the prince’s late mother. Staff members run antibullying workshops around the nation.

“Though the comments may seem minor, they are a strong statement of intent from the future Monarch — who may one day be charged with deciding to ‘confront’ anti-gay leaders from across the Commonwealth,” Pink News reports. William, who holds the title Duke of Cambridge, is second in line for the British throne. His father, Prince Charles, Duke of Windsor, is first.

The site also notes that while in the Royal Air Force, William served with a transgender pilot.

Trudy Ring

www.advocate.com/world/2015/9/21/prince-william-speaks-out-against-anti-lgbt-bullying

Man tries to marry Jesus at Kim Davis’ office, gets rejected

No have couples have been denied a marriage license in Rowan County, Kentucky since Clerk Kim Davis was jailed for turning away gay couples two weeks ago.

Well, except for one man who tried to marry Jesus.

‘The only denial of a marriage license application that has occurred within the last two weeks was to a gentleman who stated that he wanted a license that would permit him to marry “Jesus,”‘ according to a status report one of Davis’ deputy clerks submitted to a federal judge on Monday (21 September).

‘When it was explained to the individual that both parties had to be present, he stated, “Jesus is always present.”

‘After being denied, the gentleman returned later and presented a type of power of attorney document issued by his church granting him authority to sign “Jesus’” name. Since both parties were not present these requests were denied.’

No information about the man was given in the report.

The post Man tries to marry Jesus at Kim Davis’ office, gets rejected appeared first on Gay Star News.

Darren Wee

www.gaystarnews.com/article/man-tries-to-marry-jesus-at-kim-davis-office-gets-rejected/

Disenfranchised Catholics Discuss Pope Francis With Thomas Roberts

MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts recently invited a group of diverse Roman Catholics to New York City’s Rockefeller Center — just steps from St. Patrick’s Cathedral — to discuss Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States.

Roberts, the out anchorman who hosts a daily live two-hour news program on MSNBC as well as an online show about LGBT issues on its Web-based Shift service, hosted the panel discussion, which was recorded last week.  

He asked a twice-divorced Catholic, a woman who leads a pro-choice group, two gay men, a lesbian, and a transgender woman to talk with him about what they would say to the pope if they could meet him, their views on his papacy thus far, and what they think of his predecessor, retired Pope Benedict XVI. 

Dawn Ennis, The Advocate’s news editor and a lifelong Catholic, was the trans woman who took part in the panel.

Perhaps most surprising to Roberts was that each member of the group felt a strong connection to their faith despite the church’s disdain for gay, lesbian, pro-choice, divorced, and trans parishioners. He revealed to the group that as a survivor of abuse, he himself is conflicted about his Catholic faith. 

Watch parts 1 and 2 of the panel discussion below, from MSNBC.

Advocate.com Editors

www.advocate.com/religion/2015/9/21/disenfranchised-catholics-discuss-pope-francis-thomas-roberts

Kim Davis accused of interfering with marriage licenses – ACLU asks judge to intervene

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion in Kentucky District Court on Monday (21 September) accusing Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis of violating a federal judge’s order.

Davis was released from jail on 8 September on the condition that the same-sex marriage opponent not interfere with the marriage license process in the clerk’s office.

The ACLU states in the motion that Davis has directed the significant alteration of licenses and had a deputy sign them as a notary public rather than as a deputy clerk. Any reference to the Rowan County clerk’s office has been removed from the licenses.

In their motion, the group is asking the court to order the clerk’s office to issue the same licenses that were issued on or before Davis’ release from jail. It asks the court to order the deputy clerks to disregard any contrary instructions from Davis and requests that she be ordered to immediately stop interfering.

If the situation persists, the ACLU asks that Davis face civil contempt fines and that the clerk’s office be placed into a receivership for the purpose of issuing marriage licenses.

‘The clerk’s office needs to issue valid licenses that comply with the court’s orders,’ said James Esseks, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project. ‘It’s sad that Ms. Davis has continued to interfere with the basic constitutional right of all loving couples to marry and that the plaintiff couples have to ask the court to intervene once again.’

Davis has cited religious beliefs in her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. She was locked up in a Kentucky jail for five days earlier this month for defying a federal court’s order that she allow the licenses to be issued by her deputies.

The post Kim Davis accused of interfering with marriage licenses – ACLU asks judge to intervene appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/kim-davis-accused-of-interfering-with-marriage-licenses-aclu-asks-judge-to-intervene/

Video Of Man Smashing Gay Advertisement Goes Viral

What’s more harmful to the public good, an advertisement for a gay website or a sidewalk covered in broken glass?

If you answered the former, you’ll appreciate the handiwork of this disheveled man as he rants about the gays and chucks a large brick through the bus stop ad behind him.

Below, watch this reported father of nine (dental insurance must be out of the question with nine mouths to feed) make his case for destroying public property (spoiler alert: his argument is “I don’t have to put up with this!” because of the first amendment, duh):

Dan Tracer

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/4sNgUbzn1oI/video-of-man-smashing-gay-advertisement-goes-viral-20150921

Christopher Bollen’s ‘Orient’: Book Review

Christopher Bollen begins his gorgeous new novel with an epigraph from the philosopher Paul Virilio: “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” It’s a fitting motto for this story of island murder, an inventive whodunit that’s also a profound meditation on how the vehicles we construct to enable our lives and keep us safe—families, towns, identities—conjure the very disasters we fear.

On one late summer afternoon, two bodies appear in Orient, Long Island, a beach community that—long the Hamptons’ less sought after sister—has begun to be invaded by the stylish rich of Manhattan. One of these bodies is a strange, unidentifiable creature that washes ashore, a mutant carcass that locals fear drifted over from a nearby government facility. The other is a man.

Even before these first casualties—and there will be many more—Bollen makes Orient a menacing place, crawling with hunters and “lethal with ticks.” Beneath their friendly veneer, the locals boil with envies and resentments, the usual conflicts of a small community exacerbated by the changing dynamics of the town, as prices rise and ancestral properties are purchased and altered by outsiders seeking beachfront views. It’s a town at war with itself for its own future.

Into it comes Mills Chevern, a homeless, gay, nineteen-year-old runaway from the California foster care system. He’s taken in by Paul Benchley, who finds him shivering and high in the hallway of his Manhattan building and brings him to his family home in Orient to get sober. Their relationship is ambiguous at first—like so many LGBT homeless youth, Mills has experience with survival sex work, and he wonders about Paul’s expectations. But it quickly becomes clear that Paul’s intentions are benevolent, and Mills finds in him the father figure he’s never had.

When a neighbor’s house burns down, killing all four members of the family inside, Mills quickly comes under suspicion. As he tries to find evidence that will exonerate him, we learn just how deeply divided and perilous Orient is, how many of its residents—among the “year-rounders” and weekenders alike—harbor motives for murder. Bollen constructs his murder mystery well, drawing the reader forward to the steady pulse of suspense and surprise.

But the real achievement of the book lies elsewhere. Bollen is an indecently gifted writer, able to capture a character in a quick gesture and with a startling gift for the perfect simile or metaphor. A hunter’s taut bow is “wired like a mosquito hungry for blood”; the disorder of a house is “the kind of headache that might induce the aspirin of divorce”; “grown men crying were like deep-water fish against aquarium glass.”

More impressively, he has a masterful sense of the micromaneuvers of human interaction, the tiny gestures and shifts in temperature that make up our relationships. Mills finds his best ally in Beth Shepherd, an Orient native who has returned to her childhood home after a failed career as a painter. Bollen’s portrayal of their friendship provides some of the book’s most moving moments. Beth is, in her way, as lost as Mills, bewildered by her faltering marriage and lost career, and unsure whether she wants to keep the child she has just learned she’s carrying. Even as she grows increasingly frightened and disoriented by their discovered, Beth’s relationship with Mills allows her to imagine a livable future.

“A family wasn’t forged out of steel,” Mills thinks late in the book. “You dig a hole in a person and then you fill it with yourself.” The real mystery Bollen explores in this beautiful book isn’t murder. As he examines not just scenes but entire lives from different characters’ perspectives, his profounder subject is our irreducible opacity to each other, how even when we intend to strip ourselves bare we hide behind battlements of delusion and fear. “The truth of what a person needed in order to feel human wasn’t always something you could discover by asking the people who knew him best,” Bollen writes. “The answer was in the moments he went missing from his life.”

Previous reviews… 

Michael Klein’s ‘When I Was a Twin’

Ryan Berg’s ‘No House to Call My Home’

Vivian Gornick’s ‘The Odd Woman and the City’

David Crabb’s ‘Bad Kid: A Memoir’

Connect with Garth Greenwell on Twitter.

The post Christopher Bollen’s ‘Orient’: Book Review appeared first on Towleroad.

Garth Greenwell

Christopher Bollen’s ‘Orient’: Book Review

Alabama High Court Hands Down Homophobic Adoption Ruling

Proving itself once again to be one of the most homophobic high courts in the nation, the Alabama Supreme Court Friday refused to recognize a Georgia adoption by a lesbian mother.

The woman, known only as V.L. in the case, adopted her partner’s three children while they lived in Georgia in 2007. After the women broke up, the biological mother, known as E.L., moved the children to Alabama and denied her ex visitation rights. E.L. argued that the Georgia adoption was invalid in Alabama, according to AL.com, a website for several Alabama newspapers..

V.L. sued for visitation, winning and losing several times before the case went to Alabama’s highest court. Working with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, V.L. argued that she was an adopted mother in Georgia and, in effect, should be one in Alabama. But the notoriously antigay Supreme Court didn’t agree.

All but one of the Alabama justices “ruled that Alabama did not have to respect the Georgia court’s adoption because the Court believed that Georgia law did not allow same-sex parents to adopt,” the NCLR wrote in a statement last week.

One of the Alabama justices, Tom Parker, went even further, writing in a special ruling that adoption is a privilege, not a right, and children should be raised “with both a father and a mother.”

“The biological mother in this case chose my client as a second parent to these children, before their births, during their conceptions, and in formal adoption proceedings intended to ensure my client’s rights — wherein she stated that having my client as a parent was in the children’s best interests,” Heather Fann, one of V.L.’s attorneys, said in a statement. “Because, many years later, she chose to contradict her own decision-making regarding the establishment of a family for those children, a court ruled today that my client is not a parent. Not only is that not true, its harm extends far beyond my client, to children who have called her mother their entire lives, and now to adoptive families throughout Alabama.”

V.L. released her own statement: “It is extremely difficult to see the distress in my children as they realize that the courts who are tasked with putting their best interests first won’t recognize our family. I am just a Mom who wanted and prayed for these children and raised them from birth, and I hope every day that we can be together again.”

Neal Broverman

www.advocate.com/families/2015/9/21/alabama-high-court-hands-down-homophobic-adoption-ruling