Who is my family?

Julia Belian

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

June 9, 2024—Proper 6B

Who is my family?

I don’t know why I can’t recall the exact time of year that all of this happened. It

must have been mid- to late fall 1975. I was a junior in high school. I had just

turned 16, just gotten my driver’s license. My mother asked me to go pick up my

little sister, so I grabbed the keys and drove to the dance studio where she took

ballet and read a book while I waited for her to come out of the studio. After about

half an hour, I started wondering why she hadn’t come out yet, then suddenly

remembered she was not at dance lessons that day, she was at piano lessons. I tore

across town to the local college where we studied piano and found her – poor

thing, very frightened at being abandoned – and we hurried home. I expected my

parents to be angry, but I was blindsided by what happened next.

“Where have you been?” my father shouted at me, and before I could stammer out

even half an answer, he cut me off. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You lie so much of

the time, I can’t stand to even look at you.” I looked around the kitchen,

desperately seeking some clue to a rage that seemed disproportionate, even in the

days of no cell phones, when a child coming home half an hour late was so fraught

for parents. My mother refused to meet my eye. Even the dogs scuttled under the

table to hide.

My sister tried to defend me. “She didn’t mean to, Daddy, she thought I was at

dance –” He cut her off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” To me, he

said, “Get out of my sight.” My sister tried again, but I grabbed her shoulder and

dragged her out of the kitchen with me, down the hall to our bedroom. “Don’t,” I

said. She protested, “But he thinks –“ and I cut her off. “This isn’t about that,” I

said. “What is he so mad about?” she asked me. I didn’t know. The dread in my

stomach grew as I racked my brain to try to figure out what I had done to trigger

such rage. He drank a lot in those days, and he raged a lot when he drank, so I tried

to comfort myself that perhaps this would pass, but something in me knew this

wasn’t that.

My father stiff-armed my bedroom door open and pointed a finger at me. “You’re

going to see a psychiatrist, and you’re going to tell him whatever your problem is,

or I’ll beat the life out of you, I swear to God.”

Now I was scared. I grew up in a family where spanking was completely normal,

but no one had ever seriously threatened to beat me. I took several deep breaths,

trying to stay calm. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I finally found a

rational thought in which to take comfort: Fine, I thought. You want me to tell a

psychiatrist what my problems are? You bet I will. My problem is that my father

has lost his mind and is threatening me, that’s my problem.

The door burst open again. My father again. He was still enraged, absolutely

purple with it. “No daughter of mine is going to be a lesbian!” he shouted, and

slammed the door as he left again.

My heart was pounding in my ears so hard and so loud, I thought I might faint. I

sat on the edge of my bed, thinking furiously. How did he know?

Indeed, how could he know something about which even I was completely unsure?

It’s true, I had begun having feelings for my best friend … and to be honest, for my

second-best friend, and to some extent for every female I saw back then. I was,

after all, 16. But I had not told a soul on God’s earth, never said it out loud even to

myself, never even written the word in my –

I stopped dead. My journal. Perhaps you kept one, or perhaps you called it a diary.

The near-universal refuge, back then, for all adolescent females. Maybe guys, too,

I don’t really know. At that point in my life, I wanted to be a writer, so I spent at

least an hour a day writing in what I called my journal. It contained character

sketches, descriptions of landscapes, snippets of dialogue I found interesting, and

miles and miles of self-reflection, and that was the only place other than in my

prayers that I had even begun to confront my feelings for women. That meant my

journal was the only place my parents could possibly have learned any of this.

My journal. I checked where I kept it – not even under the mattress or anything

like that, just on my desk – and it was gone. To say the world fell apart around me

would be putting it mildly. My fear ballooned as I tried desperately to remember

everything I had written, but who remembers everything they have poured out on a

confidential page? I couldn’t believe they had read my journal. I’d never felt so

utterly betrayed. How long had they been doing that? What else of mine had they

snooped in?

I heard my parents discussing me loudly in the kitchen, but from this point

forward, I don’t have very clear memories of everything that happened that night.

Trauma is like that. Except one thing: When dinner was ready, we all sat down, and

my father said grace like he’d never said it before. He dropped his head and said,

“God forgive us.” We ate in silence.

I don’t know how I or they or we lived through the next week. I was grounded, of

course, from everything but church. Somehow, we managed a brittle détente while

they tracked down a therapist for me and while I confided in my church youth

group leaders how afraid I was of what my parents might do. That sentence puts it

so mildly. At one point, my father mentioned the possibility of sending me to the

Rebekah Home for Girls, a local facility run by the Rev. Lester Roloff. Lester

Roloff was an independent Baptist evangelist who, according to Wikipedia,

“preached stridently against homosexuality, communism, television, alcohol,

tobacco, drugs, gluttony, and psychology.” Roloff openly professed his devotion to

what he called scriptural discipline based on a verse from Proverbs, “Withhold not

correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”

Roloff was then the subject of a state investigation that eventually revealed the

girls there were “whipped with leather straps, beaten with paddles, handcuffed to

drainpipes, and locked in isolation cells—sometimes for such minor infractions as

failing to memorize a Bible passage or forgetting to make a bed.” (Texas Monthly,

“Remember the Christian Alamo,” 11 August 2016).

Terror can do a lot for your prayer life, though. I had, since I was little bitty, had an

easy friendly relationship with God and had not yet learned enough history to

trigger my anti-Christian phase. That came a few years later. In that week, I prayed

like I never had before, but I couldn’t tell you what I prayed for. I think it might

have amounted simply to, “Help me.” Over and over. Help me.

I was very, very lucky. The sponsors of my church youth group had a good friend

who was director of admissions at the college I wanted to go to, and they contacted

him and asked about early admission. I’d never heard of such a thing, but what a

shining star that idea was for me. I checked my credentials at school and learned

that I would be only one credit shy of graduation by the end of my junior year and

our local school system would allow me to transfer that one credit from a college

or university. Unlike almost every other LGBT youth, I had a way out.

The night I told my parents about this idea was only a week after the Great

Explosion. Things had been marginally calm, but that was because none of us had

not spoken more than a few words to each other, so I was, again, shaking in my

shoes to bring this idea up at dinner. I presented the idea calmly, although I’m

pretty sure my voice was shaking throughout. Maybe that was what my father

heard. Maybe at that point he really couldn’t stand the sight of me anymore. I’ll

never know. For whatever reason, by the grace of God, once I’d made my pitch, he

simply said, “I think that sounds like a good idea.” He never even looked at me.

Ruptures like this cannot be mended. There are things, once said, that cannot be

recalled, whose damage can never be repaired. For a couple of decades, my

relationship with my parents was strained at best. And although, eventually, my

parents and I built a new relationship, and although, eventually, they were able to

welcome both me and Holly into their home, for many, many years, they were not

– they could not be – a significant source of support for me. What they saw as my

sin, my abnormality, my problem, my defiance, my rejection of their values – it

was all too much freight for such a tender connection to bear.

This is the story of my early years, but it’s a story I’m sure many of you here know

as well. It’s one of the reasons many of us are here. Here we find connection. Here

we find support, help, and love. God commands us to love one another, and here

we strive to do that, in many different ways, but with the same spirit.

Who is my family? Here is my family. Whoever does the will of God is my brother

and sister and mother and father. And even my weird cousins and crazy uncles.

Thanks be to God. And again, Happy Pride!