“My Daughter – a Lesbian?” by Kathleen Bremner as told to Candace Walters. Update, December 1999.
Witness: Gay and Lesbian Clergy Report from the Front by Dann Hazel (Westminster John Knox, 2000), 147pp.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
This sad account of a lesbian daughter has been circulating in the “ex-gay” movement for years. That it now is rerun as the featured testimony in the newsletter of the “ex-gay” umbrella, Exodus International, is evidence of the bankruptcy of the “ex-gay” movement, for it doesn’t even claim that she’s no longer a lesbian! The masthead promises “Freedom from Homosexuality through the Power of Jesus Christ” and “ex-gay” Web sites have been posting this story under “Testimonies of Freedom from Homosexuality,” but the “testimony” is that the daughter is still a lesbian. In fact, Bremner says her daughter is “quite active in the gay community … travel[ing] the country lobbying for homosexual rights on behalf of an influential gay political caucus. She and her companion own a home on the East Coast.” On the Internet, at least the title is true: “My Daughter Is a Lesbian.” Update changes that to the evasive: “My Daughter – a Lesbian?”
Bremner was “president of a Christian women’s auxiliary [and] well-known for [her] involvement in evangelistic crusades” when, in 1985, her daughter, Susan, announced: “I’m a lesbian.” Bremner’s immediate response: “You must be wrong. … You can’t be a lesbian, you’ve been married, besides, you’re a Christian, and the Bible says it’s a sin.” That was a mother’s understandable response on the spot. But fourteen years later it’s inexcusable as published propaganda. Susan had said: “Mom, you don’t understand.” Bremner admits: “I didn’t understand much about homosexuality 14 years ago.” She still doesn’t. Evangelical leaders who should know better, and in many cases do know better, continue to exploit practiced naivete, assuring that other families will remain as unprepared as this mother was – and is.
At first, Bremner says, she “didn’t think [she] could continue to live, knowing my daughter was gay. … I couldn’t eat or sleep. I cried constantly. Hearing Susan had died would have been easier to bear. It seemed all the dreams I had for my only child had been shattered.” She recalls that “most [church friends] were accusatory, asking why I hadn’t known my daughter was gay, or how she could call herself a Christian, or what had we done to cause her homosexuality. Other close friends were uncharacteristically silent. I couldn’t talk to anybody. I was confused, embarrassed, and devastated … condemning myself. Where had I gone wrong?”
Bremner could find no local support group with which she agreed, so she started her own group, thus pooling the ignorance. She calls it Spatula – after Barbara Johnson’s Spatula Ministries for parents of gay children. (Johnson, who has a gay son, now makes it clear that she’s never seen a case of change in homosexual orientation.) Bremner’s group has met weekly for fourteen years and she’s organized “ex-gay” conferences throughout those years. What she says she’s learned is that she is not at fault for Susan’s homosexuality: “Susan has chosen this path.” She’s right, she’s not at fault for Susan’s homosexuality. But she’s wrong about Susan’s having “chosen” it. Her continuing refusal to understand is her fault and the fault of her cohorts. She says she “still lovingly [?] confront[s]” her daughter and prays for her, “trusting God for the outcome.” She says she now knows that “God is bigger than homosexuality.” Would that she did!
The sad stories in Witness illustrate some of the unintended consequences of evangelicals’ failure to understand homosexuality. These are accounts of gay men and lesbians – many from evangelical, Pentecostal and “ex-gay” backgrounds – who’ve suffered grievously from the arrogant ignorance there. But rather than taking the radical Law-free Evangel more seriously than the homophobes do, they’ve left it for syncretistic “interfaith” postmodernism, Unitarianism and other non-Christian moralisms, and now center spirituality in gayness, mimicking the obsessions of the anitgay. The head of the Unitarian Universalist office of gay/lesbian concerns was reared a Southern Baptist. He says: “The Southern Baptist Convention’s stance on homosexuality had everything to do with my joining the UUA.” Others have turned to the extremely liberal United Church of Christ. But even in the UUA and UCC, they find that many congregations are still unwelcoming.
Hazel quotes Mel White, who is doing a very good job in trying to improve gay awareness among his former colleagues on the religious right: “we’re ready to throw the baby out with the bath. And who can blame gays and lesbians for that?” White celebrates lesbians and gay men as “a spiritual community; we’re homospiritual and always have been.” But is a gay-centric “gospel” any more the Good News of Jesus Christ than is a gay-bashing “gospel? Aren’t they both preoccupied with homosexuality? White accurately detects the “cultic force” in the antigay Right but doesn’t detect it in the gay-centric Left. Instead of reacting to homophobia with homohagiography, why not go deeper and proclaim nothing short of the explosively subverting and converting truth of the (sex-neutral) Gospel of Jesus Christ? As even Bremner knows better than she knows: “God is bigger than homosexuality!”