‘The call toward authenticity is sacred’ - A reflection for Coming Out Day by Warren from Open Table Liverpool

Open Table Liverpool co-facilitator Warren Hartley walking in Pride with his husband Kieran (left)

October 11th is a special day in the LGBTQIA+ calendar - It’s National Coming Out Day!

National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is an annual awareness day, founded in the United States in 1988, grounded in the feminist and gay liberation spirit of the personal being political. It emphasises the most basic form of activism - coming out to family, friends and colleagues, and living life as openly LGBT.

The foundational belief is that homophobia thrives in an atmosphere of silence and ignorance, and that once people know that they have loved ones who are LGBT, they are far less likely to maintain homophobic or oppressive views.

Richard Eichberg, one of the founders of National Coming Out Day, said in 1993:

Most people think they don't know anyone gay or lesbian, and in fact, everybody does. It is imperative that we come out and let people know who we are and disabuse them of their fears and stereotypes.

The present-day expression ‘coming out’ is understood to have originated in the early 20th century from an analogy that likens a homosexual person’s introduction into gay subculture to a débutante's ‘coming-out’ party. This is a celebration for a young upper-class woman who is making her début - her formal presentation to society - because she has reached maturity or has become eligible for marriage. As historian George Chauncey points out:

Gay people in the pre-war years [pre-WWI]... did not speak of coming out of what we call the gay closet but rather of coming out into what they called homosexual society or the gay world, a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor... so hidden as closet implies.

The story of a parent’s transition and a son’s redemption - Paula Stone and Jonathan Williams

Coming out is a rite of passage in which we all share, particularly as LGBTQIA+ people, but it is also broader than that.  It is a process whereby we step outside of the expectations placed upon us by the culture in which we are embedded, by way of a call to a deeper authenticity.  As the Revd Paula Williams says:

‘The call toward authenticity has all the subtlety of a smoke alarm… The call toward authenticity is sacred.

If you’ve never heard her story, I can highly recommend her TED talk. 

This doesn’t mean that coming out is easy, nor that there may (or may not) be a huge cost involved. The most important person you can come out to is yourself - everything else needs to be discerned. The call to come out certainly doesn’t mean that we all must do it in the same way. 

In the Gospel of Luke (4: 14-30) we hear how, when Jesus is baptised by John the Baptist (3:21-22), the Spirit of God descends like a dove and a voice from heaven says:

‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’

I would like to suggest this is Jesus’ coming out story - the moment in which Jesus becomes aware of who he really is.

Think about that profound, spiritual moment.  Mark opens his Gospel with this story, at the start of Jesus’ ministry, the ‘aha’ moment which drives him into the wilderness to figure out what on earth he is to do with this realisation. Luke puts it only a little later in his narrative. Indeed Early Church theologians argued over whether this is the moment Jesus became God’s son, whether it was at his birth, or before the beginning of time - Mark, Luke and John each advocate for one of those theories in the opening chapters of their gospels.

This realisation, ‘I am God’s beloved child’, drives Jesus into the desert to be tested before he begins his ministry.

I would imagine most, if not all, of us LGBTQIA+ Christians in some way know what that’s like. That ‘aha’ moment which drives us into a wilderness time as we wrestle with what to do with that insight. What might this cost me? How can I possibly do this, or be this?

In Luke’s account (4:14-30), at the end of his time in the desert, Jesus goes into a synagogue and delivers what sounds like his ‘manifesto speech’.  In quoting Isaiah:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me’

Jesus was invoking a deep story and hope of his people, a vision to see the oppressed go free, good news for the poor, release for captives. It is a message of liberation, and that’s a message that excites me, draws me and inspires me, as someone who attempts and claims to follow Jesus.

The response was explosive - the people in the synagogue were ‘filled with rage’, Luke says, and ‘got up and drove him out of the town’ and were even going to try and throw him off a cliff.  For me, there are echoes in this of stories of LGBTQIA+ people who have come out and experienced violent reactions from society or even their loved ones. 

So where did Jesus get his courage to speak out, to ‘come out’ anyway? I’d also like to suggest it will be something like our own experience, where we recognise the call to authenticity as sacred, where we can no longer tolerate the klaxon of the smoke alarm calling us to authenticity. 

Maya Angelou

In October, which is Black History Month in the UK, my thoughts turn to the poet Maya Angelou who was involved in the US Black Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.  She wrote:

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.

I suggest that Jesus coming to know that he was a beloved child of God, ingesting it and internalising it, gave him the courage to step out, speak out and come out into the authenticity of who He was.  Similarly, as LGBTQIA+ followers of Christ,  I believe we are called to do exactly the same, to ingest and internalise that knowledge that we are beloved children of God.  With that knowledge, we become courageous, and come out into what we are called to be and to do in whatever capacity that may be, big or small.

So, thinking about your own experience, when have you:

• had your time being within a culture, or situation that oppressed you, or attempted to define you in ways that imprisoned?

• experienced a revelation, or an unfolding of who you are?

• spent time isolated in the metaphorical desert?

• returned to your community, been rejected, yet held onto this new truth?

On this Coming Out Day:

• what is the Spirit saying to you?

• can you hear her call you ‘beloved child of God?’

• knowing that you are a beloved child of God, what is your ‘Isaiah moment’, when you can claim that message of liberation for yourself, and others?