Pride As Protest

by Brian Walkup

I turned twelve years old just days after Ronald Reagan was sworn into office for his first term as our nation’s President, and it turned out to be one of the most impactful years of my life. At the time, while living through everything that happened, my sorrow overtook my sense of self. My life got blown off course by two separate threads. First, I was unceremoniously outed by my pastor for being a “deviant and backslidden sinner” to my family, my church, and my community after I shared a personal struggle with him in private. Following the dictates of purity culture, I did what I was supposed to do and sought his counsel for an almost nonexistent indiscretion that carried a disproportionate amount of shame and guilt. My life, he claimed, had been irredeemably corrupted by Satan. I was a newly and self-professed homosexual whose body had been overtaken by literal demons. My soul was lost. And for the longest time, I believed him, save one point: I hoped against all hope that Jesus, for all my sins, would not turn his back on me.

Participants at the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Photo by James Steakley on Creative Commons.

All through the eighties, while I was coming of age, the AIDS epidemic swept through the gay community like a hurricane blowing over a house of cards.

These days, of course, we know AIDS is not a gay disease, but that knowledge took some time to manifest. In those first and dreadful years, there was no treatment, and gay men died in astounding numbers in unspeakable agony, while our President openly mocked our suffering. He refused to allow the Centers for Disease Control to take action. The protocols enacted in the face of any epidemic or public health crisis were deliberately disabled by his executive order, and it took nearly a decade to jumpstart those long-overdue interventions. All the while, pastors, from famous televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson all the way down to the humble men of God like my own pastor, claimed that this disease was God’s ultimate retribution. Gay men, corrupted by Satan, were being wiped from the face of the Earth by the vengeful God known to all by every sermon of hellfire and brimstone ever preached. Decent and hell-fearing Christians, they warned, could not allow themselves to be tricked into any show of compassion. Such weakness was a temptation laid out by the devil himself.

It is here in this dark corner of our shared history I found my first call to action, my first call to protest. Yes, gay men were dying in the big cities like New York and San Francisco, but they were dying everywhere, even in my rural community, and those deaths hit close to home. While I was just a boy, men I knew and cared about faced a brutal end to their shortened lives in the midst of a decent, beautiful, and working-class community that forgot its own values and offered those men nothing but contempt and hate. My first call to action was nothing grand or spectacular or in any way impressive or amazing. I nursed the sick and the fallen with all the other outcast gay men who were untouched by the epidemic. The work was never easy because I had to bear witness up close to just how disordered a human body can become. I wiped so many butts because no one else in my largely evangelical community would step forward and do the work Christ surely would have wanted.

Brutal hate, dressed up as God’s love, forced me into a very different born-again experience. My open and public ties to the sick and dying added fuel to the flames. My physical safety came under constant threat, and that threat of violence gave way to actual assault and physical harm on a regular basis by members of my own evangelical community. I was a twelve-year-old boy who lost, in a single day, the love and security I had always known, had always taken for granted, like breathing. I never again knew an adult anywhere in my life who did not blame me and hold me to account for the violence inflicted on me. It was my fault, you see. If I did not act like such a sissy, if I did not act like such a f——t, none of this would be happening to me. Those who turn away from God in such a vile fashion get exactly what they deserve.

My faith got stripped away by violent force. I grew up surrounded by the devout, and both of my parents came from generations of fundamentalist-turned-charismatic evangelicals. By the time I could read, I knew I had been touched, and God had claimed me and my life as his own by laying his hand on me. I was called. I was going to grow up and be one of God’s anointed here on Earth. I was called to the ministry just like my pastor.

Once my dream of becoming a pastor was dead, I had to find out who I was all over again, and it was not easy. It takes time to feel a loss like mine and build a whole new faith tradition. It all came as such a shock to my spiritual identity. Being stripped of my rightful place before God, where I was once held in the arms of his offbeat evangelical followers, inflicted a trauma I cannot fully describe. The words simply do not exist.

But there I was existing without the words, without the language, and I reacted, as I so often do, in very clear black-and-white thinking. That pattern of thought has always been one of the hallmarks of my life, and it has shaped my reality in both positive and negative ways. I dedicated my life to an angry and bitter version of atheism. I mocked Christians at every turn and reveled in every show of their hypocrisy. But in spite of the untamed anger, a transformation was taking place, not in the wilds of outer space, but in the realm of my inner space. I dedicated my life to the cause of social justice. At first, I only cared about my social justice and justice for my tribe of the beaten-down LGBTQ+ world. Those of us condemned to a barren half-life, those of us who were stripped of purpose and meaning in the broader community. But today, my call for justice leaves no one behind.

I take such pride in my life of radical protest, and I tell people all the time in our current political crisis to set fear aside and take action, any action that helps and heals. I tell them how taking such action will mark your life and how it will change the internal lens of yourself for all the days to come. And I say this with no lack of authority. Today, when I see the old reels of the AIDS quilt unfolding across the National Mall, when I see the footage of men and women laying their bodies down in the middle of busy streets to block traffic and raise awareness, when I see the documentaries showcasing the brutality police officers used against us, I remember. I remember it all. Because I was always there, up to my neck in all the chaos!

I helped move the needle, but I will not shield you from the truth. We were the unlikeliest band of heroes the world had ever seen. Our queer coalition was so strange and complicated. We came from every continent and nation on earth. We came from every faith tradition. We came from every race and ethnicity. We came from every economic class. And we came with more internalized homophobia than we could ever hope to surrender. We fought with each other like cats and dogs, and time and again our coalition fell apart from the constant infighting. The truth is we had no idea what we were doing as we cooked up one crazy scheme to grab national attention after another, and we had no idea if what we were doing would help heal our broken world. The only thing we did know was we could not stop fighting for real change. But change our broken world we did. We could not always see where we were going, and so much of the time it felt like we were not making any difference. But it was like applying the laws of thermodynamics. When you place force on an object, and keep applying that force, things happen and that object moves.

I swore I would never stop until the day came when no child anywhere was forced to relive my experiences in such a homophobic world. And when we look at our history, we know how much has changed, but we also know how much work still lies ahead. Far too many of our trans children are having their lives dragged through the mud for no good reason. Far too many LGBTQ+ youth end their own lives because of the hostile conditions forced on them by their religious communities. But the hate our children endure is happening in an ever-receding pocket. And one day it will be gone. So many of our children already have full access to the support they need—not all of them yet—but we will get there in our relentless effort to build a more just world and a more perfect union.

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The New Evangelicals is a digital-first 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to creating a better path forward at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. Through educational resources and inclusive community spaces, we empower people to reject Christian Nationalism and boldly advocate for their neighbors while holding onto a faith rooted in the way of Jesus: with love, justice, and compassion for all.