Author: Chris Damian

Homosexuality and the Resurrection of Disability

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The Catechism teaches that, while all people are equal in dignity, God also makes differences among people. “These differences belong to God’s plan, who wills that each receive what he needs from others, and that those endowed with particular ‘talents’ share the benefits with those who need them. These differences encourage and often oblige persons to practice generosity, kindness, and sharing of goods.”

I have not always appreciated the ways in which God has made me different. For a long time, I used to pray that God would make me stop being gay. It gave me particular struggles. It made discernment difficult. It was painful. All I could see was a disordered and broken part of myself that I’d rather do away with. I had failed to grasp the truth that, as C. S. Lewis once put it, “every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’”

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The “Coming Out” of Christian Doctrine

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I came out to one of my friends recently. We’ll call her Jane. As had often happened, I took forever to get it out, but after a certain point I just told her something like, “There’s a secret that I’ve had for a while that I want to tell you.”

She nodded her head up and down, smiling tenderly, and responded, “It’s ok. You can say it. You can just say it.”

So I told her I was gay.

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The Meaning of Vocation

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This is the sixth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second,  third, fourth , and fifth installments.

In many Catholic circles today, vocation is often considered to be a calling either to marriage or to the priesthood or religious life. Growing up, I considered my vocation to be a calling to one of these ways of life. I either had a celibate vocation as a priest or religious, or I had a vocation to marriage with a woman.

I dated for a while, both in high school and in college. I dated women whom I found interesting, exciting, and beautiful. I never seriously considered how my attractions to women differed from other men until somewhat late into my college years. For me, men dating women was a good societal, religious, and human norm that was based upon mutual respect and discernment of a possible life spent together.

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So how should you respond when someone tells you a story like mine?

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This is the fifth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second, third, and fourth installments.

Some of the best responses to my coming out have come from those who listened receptively. They take in what I have to say and seek to understand as best they can. In some ways, my coming out has changed very little in my relationships with others. I am the same man that I have always been. Most of my relationships have neither taken a radical redirection nor experienced a great rupture. So things have more or less remained the same.

Yet, everything has changed. It’s like a man who has always loved music and then learns musical theory. He loves the music, as he had loved it before, but his love is, in some ways, entirely different. He loves not only that music is beautiful, but he loves the particularities of that beauty that he had not seen before: its profound order, the development of a musical score, the genius of a composition.

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This is “gay”

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This is the fourth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second, and third installments.

The term “gay” can be both descriptive and constructive. It can be used as a term to describe particular emotions, sentiments, orientations, and actions. Or it can be used as a means by which one identifies oneself and one’s relation to the world. The word “Catholic” is always both constructive and descriptive. It describes one’s religious affiliation, but it is also a means of identification and construction; it becomes a center upon which one builds one’s life. It is not used merely to describe one’s beliefs. Rather, it dictates a way of life and has a command and affect on how we view ourselves. An identification with “Catholic” implies radical change and carries constructive force.

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My Early Education

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This is the third in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first and second installments.

I consider it a strength of my early upbringing that the particularities of sexual identity were not a primary topic of discussion. Although words like “gay,” “straight,” and “bisexual” were known to me, I felt no urgent need to make these categories a significant part of how I viewed myself.

From the age of about five, I attended St. Joseph Catholic School in Bryan, Texas. It was a small parish school; I don’t recall my class size ever exceeding thirty-five students. I grew up in a loving family, with a mother, a father, a brother eighteen months younger than me, and a sister about three years younger than him.

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Why am I saying this? Why now?

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This is the second in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Read the first post here.

In 2012, The Observer ran a series on the experiences of gay and lesbian students at Notre Dame. Senior Sam Costanzo came to Notre Dame with the same hope that I suspect many other gay students had brought to Catholic universities: that it “would be a school where he could come to terms with his sexual orientation as it related to being a practicing Catholic.” Like many others before him, Sam was no longer a practicing Catholic at the time the article was published. This is a common story, and it’s a story that I understand. When you’re gay, coming to terms with being a Catholic is an extremely difficult journey, a story that is rarely told, and when it is told, it almost always ends with a broken relationship with the Church.

Often, when gay and lesbian men and women can’t find a place in the Church, they feel that their only option is to leave, and they walk out of the Church, often accompanied by their friends and family members. This could have been my story. Given the frequency of this story, it is perhaps something of a miracle that my life is developing in a rather different direction.

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Chris: This Is Me

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This is the first in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality.

For a time now, I have been engaging in intense self-reflection, considering the direction that my life seems to be taking and the ways in which I can develop as a Catholic and as a human being. It seems to me that many Catholics today are confused about their relationship to the Church and its teachings about sexuality. Many are unsure of whether they can find a place in the Church. They feel alienated by misunderstandings, confusions, misrepresentations, unjust caricatures, and unfounded discriminations.

I count myself as among these Catholics. And I’ve realized that, if I am going to get past these obstacles, it is time for me to be open about myself and to reach out to others who are like me.

The main point of this post is the firm and frank admission: I’m gay.

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