Wretched piety (by Al)
The wretched piety of my youth: There isn’t much from the family. Mom and Dad started taking us to the Methodist Church when we were young. I never had any sense that they believed any of it, so it must have been done for our (Brent’s and my) benefit. I remember some Sunday school classes, but only in Talladega, where we moved in the middle of my fourth grade year. Did we even go in Eutaw? Can’t say.
My biggest moment of getting caught not being pious was when I broke my arm riding my bike on Easter Sunday. In fact, now I remember – it was during the 11AM service. We had gone to Sunday school, and then went home with my mother, but my father stayed behind for the service, perhaps to usher. I was riding my bike in front of the school just down from the house, same street, and hit a bump on the sidewalk, and over I went. I got up crying and ran home, and we had to get in the car and go get Dad out of church to go to the hospital.
My only memories of going to church were from Hamilton, where we moved between 6th and 7th grade. We went from a town of 20,000 to one of about 5,000, and church seemed to work for me. I remember not wanting to sit with my family, so I would sit down front, by myself, in the second pew. Sometimes my brother would want to come and sit with me, but I didn’t want him to. I was like that – I liked being alone. (When we shopping even, I would try to get lost in the store, away from the family. Brent also wanted to follow me there, to and I did try to lose him. I didn’t want him to slow me down, or to have to watch after him.)
The pastor there was Brother Railey, an older man with a speech impediment that made his sermons hard to listen to. He was transferred there almost the same time we were, and Mom and Dad really liked him. I remember that when he was about to be transferred, Mom and Dad made Brent and me join the church – they hoped that his getting a lot of new members might persuade them to not to transfer him. It failed. He was transferred, about the same time we were almost transferred to Auburn. In came Dan Kitchens, a younger guy who I liked a lot.
For my senior year, I finally joined MYF – Methodist Youth Fellowship – again, because of something I wanted. In the summer before my senior year, MYF went to see the Carpenters, my favorite group. The first album I ever bought was “Close to You,” and the MYF was going and I wasn’t a member so I didn’t get to go. (There is some debate about whether my mother would have let me go anyway, as over-protective as she was.) So I joined right after that, and the next year we went to see Elton John in Tuscaloosa. I had a good time.
Since the greatest joy of Methodists comes when they get out of church on time, we were always driving home at 12:05PM on Sunday afternoon, past full churches of Baptists and Church of Christ people, and yet the roast would always be cooked dry in the oven anyway. Bless her heart, my mother was always concerned about food poisoning, so my only experience with rare meat came in adulthood.
Perhaps the only true introjection of piety that happened in my life happened in 8th grade. I remember someone telling me the week before Easter that the world would end on Easter Sunday. I was 13, I’m guessing, and I spent the week in terror that it was true. I remember not sleeping well, and not focusing well in classes sometimes, but I never told anyone. I remember going to bed on Sunday evening, and I believe I didn’t fall asleep til after midnight, and when I woke up the next morning, I was relieved, and probably also relieved of my faith in United Methodism. Even though it wasn’t the Methodists who told me this – I’m SURE it was the Baptists – I pretty much resolved never to be scared of retribution for sins after that.
And so there I was, in the conservative heart of Northwest Alabama, where there was nothing but dry counties as far as the eye could see – people had to go to Tupelo for a liquor store, if they chose to ignore the bootleggers – a budding young gay adolescent with no faith to help out. It was a retrospective opinion, not one I consciously remember having at the time, that the loneliness that I felt growing up gay was in some way the neglectful church’s fault. There we were, attending the most liberal of Christian bastions in Hamilton, and I knew there would be no help for the feelings that I had no explanation for.
I believe it was in the 9th grade when I stopped sitting up front at the church and started sitting in the back, as an usher and passer of the collection plate. Hanging out with the older guys, one of whom was really cute, Eddie Bannister, a year older than me, straight black hair and beautiful eyes. Beautiful to look at, but no particular connection with him – I never really felt connected to Hamilton, in the way that people born there were connected, because I wasn’t born there. We fit into Hamilton pretty well, but it’s not like being born there. In fact, the high school clique I connected with were band people and people who had moved in from out of town – Susan, who lived in De-troit but came to Hamilton because the school was better and her mother taught here; Chip and Cindy, both of whom moved between junior and senior year, Chip from Decatur and Cindy from Michigan, and both of who ended up beating me out for valedictorian because of that damned B in trigonometry; Rita and Allen from the band; a few others; and the Moseses and the Greggs. I believe Allen was gay, but I still don’t have any confirmation of that. His brother Jimmy was also very cute. As were David Wigginton and Johnny Tyra, but those are other stories.
My group was smart, primarily not athletes, usually in the band and usually Methodists and Baptists and others who were less driven by the need to define themselves by their religion. I didn’t have to worry about any of them telling me the world was going to end on Easter Sunday, or any other day. I could be genuine with them, and there wasn’t a one I didn’t like a lot. They saw me at some of my adolescent worst, the times I avoided things while growing up.
So I enjoyed being alone, and yet hated being alone in understanding my sexual orientation. I didn’t want things to change, and to the extent they could, my family tried to keep that from happening. From all the moving, I didn’t like the way change felt. And one of the things I most wanted was that, when Alabama changed, it would go forward, become gradually a better place for “people like me,” people who wanted to live a life without thinking that the world was going to end on Easter Sunday. I wanted continual progress for my home state, a place I could stay in, or go back to, if I wanted. I wanted a hometown that wanted me.
My biggest moment of getting caught not being pious was when I broke my arm riding my bike on Easter Sunday. In fact, now I remember – it was during the 11AM service. We had gone to Sunday school, and then went home with my mother, but my father stayed behind for the service, perhaps to usher. I was riding my bike in front of the school just down from the house, same street, and hit a bump on the sidewalk, and over I went. I got up crying and ran home, and we had to get in the car and go get Dad out of church to go to the hospital.
My only memories of going to church were from Hamilton, where we moved between 6th and 7th grade. We went from a town of 20,000 to one of about 5,000, and church seemed to work for me. I remember not wanting to sit with my family, so I would sit down front, by myself, in the second pew. Sometimes my brother would want to come and sit with me, but I didn’t want him to. I was like that – I liked being alone. (When we shopping even, I would try to get lost in the store, away from the family. Brent also wanted to follow me there, to and I did try to lose him. I didn’t want him to slow me down, or to have to watch after him.)
The pastor there was Brother Railey, an older man with a speech impediment that made his sermons hard to listen to. He was transferred there almost the same time we were, and Mom and Dad really liked him. I remember that when he was about to be transferred, Mom and Dad made Brent and me join the church – they hoped that his getting a lot of new members might persuade them to not to transfer him. It failed. He was transferred, about the same time we were almost transferred to Auburn. In came Dan Kitchens, a younger guy who I liked a lot.
For my senior year, I finally joined MYF – Methodist Youth Fellowship – again, because of something I wanted. In the summer before my senior year, MYF went to see the Carpenters, my favorite group. The first album I ever bought was “Close to You,” and the MYF was going and I wasn’t a member so I didn’t get to go. (There is some debate about whether my mother would have let me go anyway, as over-protective as she was.) So I joined right after that, and the next year we went to see Elton John in Tuscaloosa. I had a good time.
Since the greatest joy of Methodists comes when they get out of church on time, we were always driving home at 12:05PM on Sunday afternoon, past full churches of Baptists and Church of Christ people, and yet the roast would always be cooked dry in the oven anyway. Bless her heart, my mother was always concerned about food poisoning, so my only experience with rare meat came in adulthood.
Perhaps the only true introjection of piety that happened in my life happened in 8th grade. I remember someone telling me the week before Easter that the world would end on Easter Sunday. I was 13, I’m guessing, and I spent the week in terror that it was true. I remember not sleeping well, and not focusing well in classes sometimes, but I never told anyone. I remember going to bed on Sunday evening, and I believe I didn’t fall asleep til after midnight, and when I woke up the next morning, I was relieved, and probably also relieved of my faith in United Methodism. Even though it wasn’t the Methodists who told me this – I’m SURE it was the Baptists – I pretty much resolved never to be scared of retribution for sins after that.
And so there I was, in the conservative heart of Northwest Alabama, where there was nothing but dry counties as far as the eye could see – people had to go to Tupelo for a liquor store, if they chose to ignore the bootleggers – a budding young gay adolescent with no faith to help out. It was a retrospective opinion, not one I consciously remember having at the time, that the loneliness that I felt growing up gay was in some way the neglectful church’s fault. There we were, attending the most liberal of Christian bastions in Hamilton, and I knew there would be no help for the feelings that I had no explanation for.
I believe it was in the 9th grade when I stopped sitting up front at the church and started sitting in the back, as an usher and passer of the collection plate. Hanging out with the older guys, one of whom was really cute, Eddie Bannister, a year older than me, straight black hair and beautiful eyes. Beautiful to look at, but no particular connection with him – I never really felt connected to Hamilton, in the way that people born there were connected, because I wasn’t born there. We fit into Hamilton pretty well, but it’s not like being born there. In fact, the high school clique I connected with were band people and people who had moved in from out of town – Susan, who lived in De-troit but came to Hamilton because the school was better and her mother taught here; Chip and Cindy, both of whom moved between junior and senior year, Chip from Decatur and Cindy from Michigan, and both of who ended up beating me out for valedictorian because of that damned B in trigonometry; Rita and Allen from the band; a few others; and the Moseses and the Greggs. I believe Allen was gay, but I still don’t have any confirmation of that. His brother Jimmy was also very cute. As were David Wigginton and Johnny Tyra, but those are other stories.
My group was smart, primarily not athletes, usually in the band and usually Methodists and Baptists and others who were less driven by the need to define themselves by their religion. I didn’t have to worry about any of them telling me the world was going to end on Easter Sunday, or any other day. I could be genuine with them, and there wasn’t a one I didn’t like a lot. They saw me at some of my adolescent worst, the times I avoided things while growing up.
So I enjoyed being alone, and yet hated being alone in understanding my sexual orientation. I didn’t want things to change, and to the extent they could, my family tried to keep that from happening. From all the moving, I didn’t like the way change felt. And one of the things I most wanted was that, when Alabama changed, it would go forward, become gradually a better place for “people like me,” people who wanted to live a life without thinking that the world was going to end on Easter Sunday. I wanted continual progress for my home state, a place I could stay in, or go back to, if I wanted. I wanted a hometown that wanted me.
posted by LifeWriter at 10:22 PM
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