Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen

Author:Mark Sundeen [Sundeen, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Adventurers & Explorers
ISBN: 9781101560853
Google: TKgNRLb84agC
Amazon: B005GSZIN0
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

9

. . .

My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him.

I arose to open for my lover, and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the lock.

I opened for my lover, but my lover had left; he was gone.

—Song of Songs

SUELO ARRIVED IN Moab still a member of the Celibate Club. His romantic life till then had crashed in waves of self-pity. Looking back at what he called the midlife crisis of his thirtieth birthday, he wrote: “I had never been in any kind of relationship and was feeling withered and without hope and chronically lonely.”

On that first night watching movies in the back of the co-op, Daniel was introduced to a gentle lion named Rocky who was into hiking and literary theory and had recently been excommunicated from the Mormon Church. He was strong and fit and freckled, with a mane of strawberry hair. Damian had met Rocky at a Quaker meeting and thought the two would be a good match. Like Daniel’s, Rocky’s coming-out had been a cataclysmic rejection of his upbringing. His LDS childhood rivaled Daniel’s fundamentalist roots in intensity. The two hit it off—just as Damian had planned—and Daniel’s first romance blossomed. “Rocky and I could walk around holding hands, and people don’t seem to care,” Suelo says now.

The acceptance he found in Moab, however, was not equaled within his family. In the four years since coming out, Daniel had insisted to his parents that being gay was natural. The Shellabargers had done their best to put his sexuality into biblical perspective. Their conclusion: like Daniel the prophet, their son was a eunuch, an idea that Daniel himself had floated before coming out. They clung to a belief that Daniel’s lack of appetite for women was brought on by the loss of one testicle during college, after a case of testicular torsion—a belief for which there is no scientific basis. His family believed that his longing for other men was a sin, but as long as he didn’t act upon it, it was not a mortal sin.

“I was trying to maintain a relationship with my family and have no religion,” says Suelo. “I labeled myself an atheist. I felt like I needed to build some bridge with my family. And it’s impossible to do that as an atheist.”

Daniel’s coming-out was just one in a series of trials that befell the family. Around the time Daniel went to college, Dick Shellabarger had left his job at the dealership and was hired as a minister in a newly formed evangelical church. With all five children grown and out of the house, the couple settled into the parsonage, seeing a stable and pleasant future for themselves. But hard times were just around the corner. In 1987, while Daniel was in the Peace Corps, his sister, Pennie, left her husband and brought her eight children to live at the rectory. Within the year, Dick’s father died, Daniel wrote his coming-out letter from Ecuador, the minister job fell apart, and the family was forced to move.

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