#gc2019

When I was a babby teenager, I was pretty dang religious and honestly kinda conservative too. And that tapered off as I got into college, even though I always knew that I wanted to be a religious leader. Which I worked on. I went to theology school, which was amazing. That was where I learned a lot about myself. That was where I tried weed for the first time. That was one of the first times I ever had a drunk make-out with a friend that turned awkward.

It’s also when I realized I was queer.

And the thing is, the UMC has always had a REALLY awkward stance with queer people. Ever since the... 1970s-ish, they’ve had some very explicit rules in their social rules about both members and pastors being “openly practicing homosexuals” and zero rules about trans people, but you could FUCKING GUESS. And everything really just came down to individual people. It was up to each and every pastor how closely they would follow those social rules.

I’ve always been really lucky when it came to that. Going to BU, I could depend on everyone being very accepting, though I still didn’t come out as trans until after graduation. But I was also in a UMC policy class with one of the most notorious right-wing people in the entire blogosphere. Dude’s kind of a major prick and I can’t believe I didn’t know it at the time.

Everything was on track. Every four years, the church would fail to change their social rules and they would just keep right on trucking along. And I was nervous, because I was a boy who wanted to be a girl and really liked girls, and that fucked me up. Never mind the way that my mental health was on a steady decline. I was not in a great state.

So as I was trying to get ordained, I had to take a mental health survey, meet with a shitty professional, and then sit down with the District Committee to decide if I would continue on my ordination process or not. There was a lot of worrying answers, and I ended up crying during that ordination meeting. They were worried about my mental health, that I would implode after too much stress as a pastor, and I was dropped from the process. Years after a lot of work, and years away from my next goal. 

It really, really, really screwed me up. It destroyed my faith, it crushed my mental health, all that. But I still kept watching the UMC, just to see if some day they might become more accepting of LGBTQ people. 

This weekend, they held a long-awaited conference to do just that. Instead, they passed legislation that would likely make the denomination MORE conservative. And I’m just so tired. That’s the thing. A lot of my friends, both queer and allies, are completely lost. Many are down to just crying and going to ice cream and alcohol and hugs and whatever they can get. But I’m so numb.