As many of you probably already have heard, Seattle’s evangelical Mars Hill church has just set up shop in SE Portland. The story broke via the Portland Mercury last week and ignited a controversy which has been covered in the media (both local and national) ever since.

When anything notable that’s LGBT-related happens in this town I generally expect to get calls from newsrooms wanting official statements from Q Center about said goings-on. That’s part of our role as an organization, actually; to speak out and offer up a voice from the queer community. As Q Center‘s Public Relations Manager, this time-sensitive-race-to-press stuff lands on my desk – generally all at once and without warning. This was certainly the case this past week. At 4pm Thursday Fox News descended upon my office with TV cameras. The Oregonian and Just Out had both interviewed me about the church just before they arrived as well.

Here’s where this whole thing gets tricky:

I’m a gay man who was raised in an anti-gay fundamentalist Christian church/cult. My father was a preacher. I came out when I was 14 in Nebraska (Pre-“Will & Grace”, mind you) and, well…it wasn’t pretty. My time in the church was incredibly painful, second only to the pain of leaving the church & rejecting my family, my friends…everything I had ever known. Suddenly Fox News has a TV camera in my face asking me how I feel when I hear that the co-founder of the Mars Hill church has described gayness as a cancer. You can imagine what first comes to mind, but this line of work that I’m in is complicated.

I know that ultimately what comes out of my mouth in these initial unplanned moments matters much more than any of the well thought out words I will think to say in the days following…so I try my best to speak from the heart and stay focused on the issue at hand instead of my past experience or perceptions. I’m not gonna lie, though- This particular issue is hard to stay objective about…impossible, maybe…so I decided not to.

Instead of fighting to stay removed I dove headfirst into my personal experience. I thought about how different my relationship with my family, the church and the world is these days compared to when I was coming out as a teenager and I thought about how it was that we got from there to here. In the years since coming out I have been able to change the hearts and minds of the people in my life. The once conservative views alive in my family are no longer anywhere to be found. We live in a profoundly free, new world together; a world full of love and celebration of our differences. It’s really quite beautiful. Had you told me this would be the case with my loved ones when I was 14 and miserable I would have laughed in your face at the impossibility of it all.

When I think about how this change in our lives came to be there are many variables. The common factor is me, however. In getting to know me, in seeing what it means to be a gay person through my life, my parents and these anti-gay people around them have changed their minds. It has taken years…but eventually is so much better than never. There are educational opportunities in front of my face all the time. Sometimes I am the teacher, but I am ALWAYS the student. When I heard Mars Hill Pastor Tim Smith speak in this video (click HERE to watch) I knew this was one of those times. I invited them to come take a tour of Q Center and chat and they took me up on the offer.

This afternoon MH Pastor Tim Smith arrived at Q Center with his colleague and we (along with Barb and Paul) spent nearly 2 hours together, chatting first about our similarities to find common ground and then about our differences and what that means for the local LGBT community here in Portland now that they have arrived. It was a very respectful, civil afternoon. We spoke about what all we do at Q Center, about youth suicide, bullying, queer families, the local political landscape and the state of the LGBT community here in Portland and worldwide. They spoke, we listened. We spoke, they listened. We had “ah-ha!” moments, they had “ah-ha!” moments. It was really that simple. No screaming. No fighting. Just talking. I believe we all left today’s meeting with a better understanding of one another’s perspective and with a resolve to take this dialogue to the next level.

In discussing what that would look like initially, we have decided to gather a dozen people – 6 from the LGBT community and 6 from the Mars Hill/Evangelical Christian community – to meet and dive deeper into these discussions over the course of a period of time yet to be determined. This will be an opportunity for the hard questions to be asked, answered, cried about, talked over, etc in a safe space, with the end goal being that both sides walk away with a better understanding of the other. There is so much fear on both sides of this particular coin…and we often are most afraid of the unknown. My hope is that we can replace the fear with knowledge, swap out the misinformation with education. I have seen this happen in my immediate family and believe wholeheartedly that it can happen in the larger human family as well. We are all just people, after all.

Today was a victory for courage, compassion and kindness; for being heard and for listening to. I’ll keep you all posted as this develops. I have high hopes that something really good comes out of this bridge we started building today.

In the end, love wins. Always. You’ll see.

xo,

Logan

I can barely make out the words on the screen through my tears as I am typing this. I’ve hit a wall with being able to push down my anger about the cruelty and hatred that’s directed at me and my friends just for being ourselves. Last night a group of my friends got jumped by a bunch of gay bashing Rose Festival hill people. Everyone is alive today with much to be thankful for, but I’m fed up. This is not a political post. It’s not about fucking politics at all, actually. These are the words that are going to turn to cancer in my body if I don’t let them out, so I have decided to do it now. FUCK IT.

As you can see from the photo above, I’ve always been different. There has never been a time in my life where I walked into a room and instantly felt like I belonged there. I’m just not wired that way or something. I grew up in a very conservative home in a very conservative part of the Midwest. Other kids started calling me “girly” at an early age. This morphed into “sissy” which morphed into “gay” and sort-of spiraled out into violence from there. At the time, I didn’t really know what any of those words actually meant. I just knew that the other kids (and sometimes adults) didn’t like ME. I got beaten up for the 1st time for being a sissy when I was 8. I ran all the way from downtown York, Nebraska to my Mom’s friend’s house, crying, scared out of my mind. This would be the 1st of many encounters with mean boys to come.

(This is a photo of me getting my very first Barbie & Ken dolls. My parents did the best they could with me at the time. Looking back, I think it is very sweet that they loved me enough to let me play with dolls in the privacy of our home. Most boys like me without sisters back then weren’t that lucky. Have you EVER seen a face so happy?)

Things went terribly wrong in my life around that same time and I went inward. It became clear to me what I was soon after…that what they had all been talking about that whole time was true. I was a sissy. I knew this by the time I was 10 years old and had already begun to seek out ways of taking the edge off chemically, making myself feel better through lies, and protecting myself by being totally fucking fake. By the time I got to high school the torment had moved to torture. I was constantly ridiculed by the guys in my class and had to be removed from gym during Sophomore year at York High because they were harassing me. Eventually, I was removed from the school all together when we moved to Kansas. I decided to come out of the closet in 1994. It was a very unpopular decision. I could probably go on and on forever about how horrible it was to be an out teenager Pre-Will & Grace and how I couldn’t get from class to my locker without having my books knocked out of my hands for a full year my last year of high school, but tiny violins are not really the point of this post.

My message to all of you homophobic gay bashing pricks is this: WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??? Why has it always been such a huge problem for me to be myself? Why do you care whether my male friends are wearing wigs and dresses to a gay bar? What’s it to YOU? I feel like I have been fighting you my whole life because I HAVE BEEN. You have never once let me be myself without the fear of being attacked or made fun of and I’m just fucking sick of it.

LEAVE US ALONE. IT’S ONE THING TO NOT ALLOW US THE SAME BASIC RIGHTS AS YOU, BUT IT’S ANOTHER WHEN YOU WANT TO SEE US BLEED. IF IT’S BLOOD YOU WANT, IT’S BLOOD YOU SHALL GET…BUT IT WON’T BE OURS. FUCK OFF, NAZI PIGS. BITE YOUR TONGUE OR WE’LL BITE IT OFF FOR YOU.

…and to my brothers and sisters who’ve been fighting back their whole lives, too:

KEEP FIGHTING. WE ARE GOING TO WIN THIS EVENTUALLY. THINGS ARE GETTING BETTER. STAY STRONG, KEEP YOURSELVES SAFE, BE WHO YOU ARE, AND KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU. I’M HERE WITH YOU. WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.

-Logan