stories

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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Going Public, Part 1

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If you had asked me four years ago whether or not I’d consider writing publicly about my experience as an evangelical Christian guy who is attracted to other guys, I’m not sure what I would have done—except maybe stare at you awkwardly for ten seconds then leap into the nearest hedge and try to escape.

I had just begun to acknowledge and wrestle with the fact that I really wasn’t anywhere close to being straight, that the feelings I experienced in the pit of my stomach whenever I saw him (which felt nothing like butterflies and everything like an explosion of spastic badgers) actually meant something that I should have understood long, long before, but didn’t. But couldn’t. I was afraid and deeply ashamed.

Now, however, if you would ask me the same question I’d be all “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m busy writing publicly about my experience as an evangelical Christian guy who is attracted to other guys.”

So things have changed.

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