Here’s a quirky post from one of my favorite commenters, Brian in Brooklyn, an out, married gay man who is a practicing Buddhist. He said in a comment on another thread that Christians who feel like they are being driven into the closet today have a lot to learn from how the gay community lived when they were ghettoized and closeted. I mentioned in response that it would be really interesting to learn what gays had to say to conservative Christians in terms of advice for how to live and thrive as an outcast minority, but I can’t imagine gay folks wanting Christians to know these things. Well, Brian proved me wrong. He posted this as a comment. I thought it was really interesting, and wanted to share it with you as a post:

The queer world I grew up in was a thick community. I can share what I experienced:

1. Have your own businesses: after 5:00 p.m. on Friday, I was almost always in gay-owned/operated/friendly establishments until Monday at 9:00 a.m.(and often on weekday evenings as well). For books: A Different Light and The Oscar Wilde Bookshop (people laughed when I said that Barnes & Noble and other bookstores creating gay/lesbian sections would mean the end of these stores, but that is what occurred). For refreshments: The Pink Teacup (which I was just barely able to experience with my husband). For socializing: any number of bars/dance clubs/the Center. Also, casual l get-togethers in friends’ homes. Not always the cocktail parties of gay legend (but sometimes), but book clubs, board game nights, and sports gatherings (yes, we do exist, and I so want Andy Reid finally to win a Super Bowl though, of course, he is facing the only NFC team I have ever loved–since when John Brodie was QB).

2. Enjoy invisibility: I used to love taking people around different neighborhoods and noticing how oblivious they were to the queer life bubbling just underneath the surface. Afterwards I would tell them about everything they had missed–that queer life flourished in places and ways they never imagined.

3. Accept limitations: this will be a hard one. I knew when I came out that I was putting a cap on career and social advancement–it was impossible not to know it. I just could not imagine any other way to live (well I could, but I found it unacceptable). I knew gays who were closeted and successful, and also miserable in their lives. In my world they were known as bitter queens. Maybe your equivalent will be bitter biblists?

I lost promotions and other career opportunities–and even a job once–because I was openly gay, but I learned to live frugally and very much within my means (same dumpy apartment for 30 years preceded by seven years in an even dumpier one). Of course, such a lifestyle is much harder with children and/or if a person lives in tenant-hostile communities. But not-havingness has to become a way of life. I knew I was forsaking many perks, but being open and not lying my way through life was deeply important to me.

4. Love living your truth: You will have the same advantage I had as a Buddhist–a commitment to living according to a particular religious ethic. With more success than not (I had great and patient teachers), I was able to live without regret. From my teenage years, I always loved Edith Piaf’s declaration “Je ne regrette rien,” [“I regret nothing”] and it became my mantra. In this way, not-havingness was not an issue, since the havingness of my Buddhist ethos was a much richer gift (I also unattached rather than repressed or struggled with, so that was a great help as well).

5. Be fierce and fabulous without being aggrieved: when I came out, I would tell friends that I had the advantage of being able to have sex without worrying about getting someone pregnant (this was pre-AIDS). Whatever gay life offered, I would make the argument that it was better than what was on offer in the more acclaimed/privileged/rewarding heteronormative world. And then I stopped giving any credence to desires not in line with who I was and my values.

6. Work toward geographic density: The Village. Castro Street. Boystown. Today, many of the most vulnerable queers are those who live in areas with a low queer population (excepting those who assimilate/closet themselves). I know/hear about many queers in the Midwest–especially older ones–who are farmers and other land-based folk who love their communities, but have little support as they age and/or when their is a crisis. Going coastal is not an option for them, and they are facing increasing problems as society is confronted with the first large cohort of senior queers.

7. Study and memorize show tunes so that whatever happens, you have a lyric at hand when necessary. There is never a wrong time for an eleven o’clock number.

What a lovely, humane list — and a practical one. Thanks, Brian, that was generous. I bet queer Buddhist you and right-wing Orthodox Christian me would be good neighbors. I don’t know any show tunes, but I’ll make you great bourbon drinks, and you can sing whatever you like.

I would like to keep the list going in the comments, both from gay folks and Christians alike. If you’re just going to trash Brian and other gay people, or trash Christians, keep your comments to yourself, because I won’t post them.

UPDATE: This is interesting:

My advice:

1. Cultivate an interior life-absolutely critical. My interior life centers on that detested “Western Culture” canon that the left is obsessed with destroying, aka decolonizing. Yours should too….especially the Bible.

2. Don’t feel obligated to speak out against comments that insult or question things that are deeply meaningful to you. Learn to hold your tongue.

3. Let your kids know that there is a duality at play between their home life/interior life and the outside world. Learn to pass as if you were one of those whose body and mind has been snatched.

4. Never forget that you are not the problem. And don’t seek validation from that larger world.

5. Develop your own “gaydar”, i.e. the ability to figure out others at work, etc in the same boat as you. Cultivate them!

6. You may have to temper expectations. Seek work where you are well-paid, coding, certain types of medical technicians, etc as opposed to high profile ones such as visible Vice-President of this or that or PR etc etc….

I think in the future it will be harder to carve these kinds of spaces because of social media and surveillance technology. But this is my road map…..Not only am I gay, but I have never felt comfortable in gay society at large as I am not in tune with its politics and tactics. BTW, gay men are nowhere as sophisticated and worldly as stereotypes have it.

It occurs to me that a certain number of readers will find this entire topic offensive, for this reason: why should Christians even think about going into a ghetto? We should be fighting for our right to participate in the public square. Hey, I agree, and do it every day here! But I also can see what is happening in this culture, and that we are losing that fight more and more. Learning how to live in a strong ghetto is a form of resistance, one we had better learn. Everything that this latest reader says aligns perfectly with things I have been learning from talking to Christians who lived under communism.

And, as this gay reader (and Brooklyn Brian) exemplify, not all gay people hate Christians and want to see us suffer, any more than all Christians hate gay people and want to see them suffer. We had better learn to take allies where we can. This is one of the big things I learned from talking to Christians from the underground church and dissident movement. It was true that you had to be extremely careful about who you trusted. But it was also true that there were people, even secular leftists (I’m thinking of the Czech Trotskyist Petr Uhl), who hated the system, and who took risks to defend the persecuted. Find those people and befriend them. It’s important.

UPDATE.2: Reader Siluan:

With all due respect to your commenter (and it was a very thoughtful post), we Orthodox need to turn deeply into our own heritage, because we have suffered things few other groups could imagine. Our forebears survived Diocletian, the Muslim Sultans, the Tatars and Stalin and Ceausescu. We need to turn to that past and learn from it. We’ve survived soft totalitarianism as well as brutal repression. We just have to remember it – to reconnect with our spiritual ancestors and learn from them.

A couple of things in particular I’ll mention, though. Your commenter mentions show tunes. That’s actually a better suggestion than many may think. Except for us it wouldn’t be show tunes, but liturgical hymns. Ask your choir director if you can spend a few Sundays in the cliros (choir area of an Orthodox church). Memorize hymns so they will be there in your head when you need them.

Also, read deeply into history from a Christian perspective. Bishop Fulton Sheen’s “The Only Person Ever Pre-Announced” is a great start. Then go and track down all his source material. When you find that basically the whole ancient world was awaiting a Messiah figure and the details all add up to the same Messiah figure, you’ll find it easier to question modern perspectives.

By the way, I notice reader Another Dave, in the comments, is really angry at this post, because to him, it signals Christian defeat. Well, he’s right: it does! Dave can’t figure out how five percent of the population has come to vanquish Christians in a nation that is predominantly Christian. The answer is that we Christians more or less committed suicide. If we really believed what our faith teaches, we wouldn’t have stood for this. As Christian Smith has discovered in his research (which began long before the gay marriage battle), American Christianity is a thin veneer of sentiment covering a core of individualism, hedonism, and consumerism. What LGBTs want fits in perfectly with what America has become since the 1960s.

I was reading a sociologist not long ago saying there is no modern precedent for a popular switching sides so dramatically on such a core issue as same-sex marriage as what has happened in the US over the past ten to fifteen years. Why did it happen so quickly? Because the collapse within American Christianity had already occurred. All it took was some sustained outside pressure (from LGBT activists), and the whole thing fell down.

Ask yourself: why is it that in long-secular France, where churchgoing is a tiny fraction of what it is in America, there have been for years now mass demonstrations in favor of keeping exclusive heterosexual marriage, and banning same-sex adoption? Meanwhile, we have nothing like it here. This holds up a mirror to ourselves, to the American church. I’m sorry, Dave, but the triumphalist model is so mid-20th century. It was like the Romanov Tercentenary celebration in 1913: an outward show of dominance and power veiling extraordinary inner weakness.

This is the world we live in now. I wish it weren’t so, but there we are. Comments from readers like Another Dave strike me as like French people in the provinces complaining in the autumn of 1940 that the French Army is not fighting hard enough, when the fact is, that badly outmatched and badly led army had already been defeated by the Germans. Go talk to Christian educators who are on the front lines of this culture war, interacting with students. We of the older generation — parents, pastors, and others — are like elderly French generals who sent soldiers out to meet the Germans with training and equipment that was current decades earlier. The culture war now is in an occupation-and-resistance phase. It’s not 1980 anymore.

Therefore, don’t be like those conservative Christians who gripe about how anti-Christian the world is, while their kids are in their rooms searching the Internet with the phones their parents gave them. I would rather try to learn from people like Brian from Brooklyn about how to keep our communities thick, so that the faith can be passed on under adverse conditions, than to live off the culture-war dreams of Christians who still believe in the effectiveness of the Maginot Line.

UPDATE.3: A reader sent me a copy of a comment he left on a different thread, that was marked as spam and deleted. I told him that that was bizarre, because I remember approving that comment earlier. Well, I looked for it in the spam folder, and there it was — along with about 20 other comments that I had approved earlier, including a number from under this post. There were a lot from Fran Macadam, in particular. I can’t explain why this is happening — there was nothing wrong with any of those comments, and again, I had approved them. Disqus is terrible.