Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity by Coles Gregory

Author:Coles, Gregory [Coles, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2017-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

When I worked for the church in upstate New York, that first year after college, one of my many jobs was to curate our church library. For a job with the word curate in the title, it was a remarkably unglamorous role. As boxes of books arrived, I would categorize them, print labels for them, paste checkout cards on their inside back covers, and shelve them. Most of what I did could have been done equally well by a trained monkey (or perhaps the monkey would have had better luck getting the labels on the spine neatly). But categorizing meant I needed to know what the books were about, which gave me an excuse to become familiar with vast swaths of Christian nonfiction I might have otherwise ignored.

There were three categories in our library that I kept an eye on with particular interest. “Sexuality” (pronounced “homosexuality”) and “Singles” lived side by side, two anemic rows that couldn’t fill up an entire shelf even by their combined power. “Men” lived in a shelf and a half at shoulder height, just on your right as you came in the door. There were books I loved and books I despised within each of these categories. But in the end, all three categories taught me the same lesson:

I didn’t belong.

Predictably, the books on (homo)sexuality were a bit monochromatic. The books that made it onto our shelves were mostly either defending the traditional theological stance against gay sex or promoting the fluidity of sexuality and the possibility of orientation change. During my tenure, we did bring in a few books that pushed the boundaries of our church community’s conservatism on the topic, books calling for a love and empathy that transcended our theological stances. Yet even these books were addressed to straight Christians. They were about me, not for me. There was nothing in them that taught me how to thrive as a celibate gay person in the church.

“Singles” followed alphabetically after “Sexuality,” and it might have seemed like a logical place to look for tips on healthy, God-honoring celibacy. But as any church librarian can tell you, books on singleness are usually books about how to stop being single. Rarely do you find a book about choosing to pursue singleness, about regarding it as a blessing and a calling. In my curatorial quest to categorize everything, I had an awful time trying to distinguish between the “Singles” books and the “Dating” books. They were all about the same things, and they all started with the same assumption: that singleness is a transitory phase, something you endure for a season and then shed like a used-up skin.

Homosexuality and singleness. The two categories I seemed likely to live within for my entire life were the same two categories whose books could teach their members only how to escape.

The one category whose books wanted me to remain a member of its ranks was “Men.” Our library’s books on the art of Christian manliness invited me to become not less of a man but more of one.

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