I began journaling some years ago–actually in the 80s. Daily, I took a small spiral-bound notebook with me to lunch and I wrote, much of it about what it means to be gay and Christian—and to hold those together in a world that wants them to be ripped apart.  When it got full, I started numbering the notebooks.  I still have them.  It was a neat and tidy way to accumulate my thoughts and at least have them down. But as PCs got better and better, it became so much better to jot down things at the keyboard. I found that my rate of speed on a keyboard was about equal to my rate of speed in the brain. Handwriting is too slow.

But as each successive hard drive filled up (and when I changed jobs), keeping track of what I had written became more problematic. I lost things, or at least misplaced them electronically for long periods of time. I couldn’t keep them organized. Worse, through the mischief of electronic demons, pieces of files became scattered on the hard drive, creating fragments of thought ripped out of their context, or enthusiastic ideas now cut off from their conclusions. The naughty hard drive became the land fill of thought, like dementia for the organized mind.

The blog is today’s journal. I am experimenting with it as my own form of organization, under key topics which are important to me. Plus, it allows me to link to other people, ideas, computers, and to my own mind in a way which creates new insight through the effort to find and make links.

Searching my hard drive for material I have treated, I see that five years ago I did a lot of idea-collecting and writing about coming out from a Christian perspective. Entire books could be written on this. (Have been written?)

What set me thinking was a bit of research David Plummer mentions in One of the Boys [p207].  Stay with me here. He says,  

“Coming out” is often described as part of gay identity formation. The “coming-out” process . . . appears to be constituted because of homophobia and, as such, testifies to the power and pervasiveness of homophobia. As Garnets and colleagues wrote, “coming out becomes a process of reclaiming disowned or devalued parts of the self, and developing an identity into which one’s sexuality is well-integrated” (Garnets, Herek, and Levy, 1993: 583). [boldface added] . . . Once again, the relevance of the “closet” for this research is that it is a place to hide and is constructed by homophobia.

“Reclaiming disowned or devalued parts of the self.” There is a link here to the spiritual work of recovery, whether from substance abuse, shame, a dysfunctional family history, or internalized homophobia.

It is like my old hard drive, with fragments and pieces of files, and the new enthusiasm of developments in one’s life, cut off from its conclusions. Thoughts are lost. Sanity is lost. The links to other human beings are cut off. The closet is a place of solitary confinement as much as supposed safety.

Coming out is the reclaiming of lost or devalued parts of myself.  This is actually why I started keeping a journal in the 80s and now a blog in the 00s.  To reclaim pieces of myself which were disowned or devalued.  And distorted by fear and shame.  To come out is to re-order my dignity as a human being, and to reconnect what had been scattered or chopped up and discarded by homophobia.

Presbyterian author Chris Glaser, in Coming Out to God: Prayers for Lesbians, Gay Men, Their Families and Friends (Westminster, John Knox Press, 1991) has a wonderful prayer about the closet. It’s on the “[1] Prayers of Others” page.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles