Under the Lights and In the Dark by Gwendolyn Oxenham

Author:Gwendolyn Oxenham [Gwendolyn Oxenham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785781544
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

AMANDA MARTIN SPENT, in total, ten years trying not to be gay. She listened to everybody she possibly could, from both sides of the aisle – from the homosexuality-is-a-sin crowd to her friends who said things like, “That is all bat-shit crazy.”

In 2013, she met a beautiful, tall blonde who had never kicked a soccer ball in her life. She had nothing to do with that world. She’s also not religious. And, after an entire life of soccer and God bleeding into one another, it is profoundly comforting to be around someone who isn’t centered on either.

Before her wedding, she knew she had to tell Paige. She hadn’t given Paige – her once best friend – a life update in six to seven years. Paige didn’t know she was dating a woman, didn’t know anything. It wasn’t an easy phone call for her to make. “We went through this together. I helped her leave Abby. Our lives took drastically different turns: she became a missionary, I married a woman,” Amanda says. And even though she no longer believes that who she loves is a sin, she knows that Paige does. “And I felt like I was letting her down,” she says. She sent her an email and Paige’s response was kind, as she knew it would be: “I just want to say I wish you the best. I love you and I’m praying for you two. Tell Jenna hi, I look forward to meeting her in the future.”

In a candlelit room with open beam ceilings and brick walls, Amanda’s wedding officiate read from the 2015 Supreme Court decision holding that the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the fundamental right to marry: “It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

As for God, Amanda has not broken the promise she made to herself when she was thirteen years old. She still believes in God, but her faith looks a lot different now than it did then. She’s not ready to step back into a church. She lives in a suburb of Nashville, in the conservative South. “I don’t want to expose my family, my new wife and the kids we one day want to have, to a community that doesn’t validate us.”

Nowadays she is proud of who she is and active in fighting for equality. When Tennessee legislators passed a bill that would allow mental health professionals to deny patients treatment on the basis of their sexuality, Amanda reached out to her senator. They met for two hours, and she tried to express how incredibly hurtful and harmful it would be to seek help and be turned away on the basis of your sexual orientation. He tried to

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