What Sunday School Can Do For You
On the Sunday of Atlanta’s Gay Pride March, Clyde and I attend church against our will.
My employer, a fundamentalist minister training college always seeking potential donors, requires traveling employees to visit local congregations of the faithful. I know, upon returning home, that the first question I’ll be asked will be, “Where did you go to church?” This in mind, Sunday at 9:45, my lover and I scale the steps of the Smyrna, GA, Church of Christ.
Just inside the front door, two older men — the week’s appointed greeters — pounce. One asks where I work; I tell him.
“I’ve been there!” he exclaims. “I was there during The War,” he says, as though World War II was the only war, ever.
The put arms around us and steer us to the information booth, where information is taken, not given. We fill out cards, and a bird-lilke old woman jabs me with a rose-shaped fabric sticker. She bobs from side to side, waiting for Clyde’s posture to admit her attack, and then darts forward, affixing an identical sticker to his collar. Clyde, taken by surprise, looks up.
She smiles. “Hope you don’t mind. It’s your Visitor’s Rose.”
The roses’ special magic lures well-wishers from all over the congregation. We shake dozens of hands. Most members ask the same three questions, always in the same order:
1) Name?
2) Local or Just Passing Through?
3) Plans for Lunch?
No one questions why to apparently single men in their early thirties have chosen to vacation together in Atlanta the weekend of the Gay Pride March.
When we sing hymns, my bass voice has woman all around us looking for its source. Somber men serve us a sterile and impersonal communion. The minister takes to the pulpit, welcomes visitors, and expresses his hopes that the Smyrna congregation will appear to be a friendly one. He then announces the topic of his lesson: “What Sunday School Can Do For You.”
“Sunday school keeps you in balance,” he says. “Israel often got out of balance. Today, America is out of balance. Know why?” He leans forward. “Homosexuals. Abortionists, too … but mainly those homosexuals.”
Beside me, Clyde, who normally dozes through any sermon, stiffens.
“Homosexuals!” the man repeats. “They’re everywhere, just like they say. All around us. They’re wrong. They want to be on telvision and in the movis and make everyone accept them as just another lifestyle. It’s not a sin, they say … they call it a lifestyle choice. But they’re really just homosexuals, and that’s all there is to it.”
I feel my ears redden.
The minister paces the platform. “It’s not genetic. It’s not natural. It’s not normal. It’s homosexual! It’s out of balance. Want to know why America is deteriorating? Remember how wonderful life here used to be? Back in the fifties? I’ll tell you why: no homosexuals. You didn’t see ’em. If there were here, they kept quiet. No one talked about homosexuals in the sixties, and those were far better times.”
Given the minister’s longing for the pre-civil rights days, I scan the faces of the few black church members. They sit, arms crossed, their expressions unreadable.
The preacher moves on, now slamming “the kind of women who would even want abortions.” After ten minutes, Clyde and I walk out.
In the car, we ride in silence for several minutes. “He didn’t cite a single Scripture,” Clyde finally says. “He fanned into flame the prejudices he knew most of the audience would already hold. Even if you hated us and believed we needed to be saved from who we are, would a concerned Christian, motivated by God’s love, use the pulpit to slam people? And what did any of that have to do with what Sunday School can do for you?“
We burst out laughing, point the car toward downtown, and prepare to attend our first Pride Parade.
Pride on Parade
We park the car at Richard and Jim’s house. They gleefully inform us the march has been timed to pass by a number of churches just as their services conclude.
We wince at the word “church” and tell them about our morning.
Richard shakes his head and asks, “How can you work for them?”
I have no good answer.
We walk to the site of the march. Noonday sun sears the thick, stagnant air. The sidewalk and pavement shimmer with reflected heat. In minutes, sweat soaks our hair and tee shirts. We stand at the intersection of 5th and Peachtree, propped against the street sign, watching hundreds of gay and lesbian persons pass us by.
The variety of marchers stuns me. Charlie Brown glides past, looking impossibly cool, casting each on-looker a knowing glance. The required drag queens and men in leather make their way down the street. A pale, topless woman joins them, her skin glistening with perspiration. College boys, dressed for the beach, stroll down the street, walking dogs and calling to friends. A carload of children carrhying homemade signs (“We love our lesbian mothers!”) cruises by. A float features Black and White Men Together.
A group of Persons With AIDS marches down the street; many of the infected men are pushed along in wheelchairs. Few of them smile. One, his clothing flapping loosely on his emaciated frame, glances at Clyde, then fastens his large, moist eyes on me. We watch each other, connected by his haunted gaze, until he vanishes from view.
The parade route does, indeed, pass between two churches. On one side, a Baptist church has battened down the hatches. Mounted security guards stand ready to remove any stray parade-goers from the immaculately tended lawn. A white-haired man — the pastor — leads a group of men onto the steps of the church and gestures at the passing throng. He folds his arms and shakes his head in disblief: the Guardian of Holy Ground, his church and city under seige.
On our side of the street, St. Mark United Methodist Church has also mobilized. A dozen or so volunteers line the street, filling hundreds of paper cups with cool water. As an overheated marcher passes the church, a member of St. Mark’s rushes out and gives her a cup.
Like many before and after her, she smiles, gulps the water, and thanks the volunteer. We see the scene acted out again and again. Teams of women rush whole trays of paper cups to the passing floats. Marchers crane their necks to see the name of the church; I see several of them mouthing the words and committing the place to memory: “Saint Mark’s.”
Winning even more hearts are the large, low bowls of water church members have placed along the curb. Every dog in the parade strains toward those bowls. Paraders accept their cup of water, then spot the dogs noisily lapping up their own refreshment. Everyone smiles. We hear the words again and again: “They even thought about our dogs!”
I look from one side of the street to the other. One pastor, red-faced, stands above the crowd and shakes his head. The other, in shirt sleeves, moves through the thick parade, passing out water.
My mind goes back to the sermon we just walked out of, and the preacher there who, without ever knowing it, preached about me. I think of the dozens of ministers-in-training being schooled in that brand of hatred at the college where I work. I think about my own comfortable, closeted silence.
I turn to Clyde, who stands beside me. I’m dazzled by how handsome he is, by how proud I feel to be here, among other gay people. I smile at him, at the parade, at us all — flaunting who we are so that, one day, we can simply be who we are.
I take Clyde’s hand. He raises his eyebrows, leaning forward. He says, “You look like you’ve got something to say.”
We stand together in the bright sunlight: just another couple, holding hands.
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