This is a sermon in five parts. I’m going to leave it up to the artist in each of you to meld them together.

People-watching is a sport for most of us. We subconsciously classify and sort our data, correlating traits and extrapolating brief observations into complete personalities. Of course, faulty correlation and extrapolation is the root mechanism of stereotyping and bigotry.

We use our lifetime collection of people-watching data for forming first impressions of other people, particularly people who are unusual. Normal people, those whose collection of personality and behavioral traits fall comfortably within 80% of the bell curve of humanity, often don’t want to be bothered with the unusual people. What they would really like is for those unusual people to get with the program and act right!

Or so they think.

The irony that normals miss is that without the unusual people, their lives would be even duller than they already are. My observations tell me that giftedness and creativity are often accompanied by unusual behavior. All the while the normals are disparaging the differences in unusual people, they are allowing these same people to provide them with the things that make the world a better place. How many painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, poets, actors, and other artists fit into that 80% we call normal? Likewise, how many scientists, engineers, computer programmers, or mathematicians, who are at the top of their form, fit into the normal catagory? In my experience, even the ones who appear to be normal are often simply pretending, all the while hiding their particular differences from all but intimate friends. Would the same normals who rail about abnormal lifestyles or behaviors want to live in a world without Mozart, Monet, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Thoreau, Jesus, or Buddha? If they were still alive, would normal people want to associate with these oddballs? History suggests not, since in their day, most normals shun and persecute unusual people.

I rarely watch hospital dramas on television, but I happened upon a Chicago Hope episode a while back, where the theme immediately caught my attention. A gifted pediatric cardiac surgeon is called in from another state to do a leading-edge procedure on a little girl. As it happens, he is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, which causes frequent obsessive twitches, movements, and utterances. The unnerving behaviors affect the other characters in various ways. Even though his symptoms are reported to disappear during the intense concentration in the operating room, the parents are uneasy about entrusting their daughter’s life to him. The chief surgeon fears him and wants him to leave, and a long-time woman friend, who really likes him, is turned off sexually by him. Of course the Hollywood ending has people generally accepting him with both his gifts and his afflictions. As the plot is winding down, one of the characters says something like this:

"The most gifted among us are often beset by personal demons that they must endure for a lifetime."

As I've observed people over my half a lifetime, I've noticed that normal people are very reality based. They understand how their world works, they accept it, and they structure their lives to fit into it. Really exceptional people, on the other hand, have a tendency to blur reality with fantasy, gaining in the process an ability to see what isn't yet there, but could be. They invariably enjoy stretching their minds by dreaming of new realities, and they often turn these flights of fancy into art or ideas.

Popular culture has adopted the habit of referring to left brained and right brained people, based on the apparent major functions of the two halves of the cerebral cortex. We may speak of left brained, rational, linear thinkers, and right brained, emotional, passionate artists. OF course, barring unusual disease, we all have complete brains. But we assume that some of us use more of one side than another.

So what about people who exhibit both left and right brain tendencies? Are there rational artists? Are there people who can be both? Perhaps so. What might such persons be like? Might these people be some of the most unique and gifted of all? Would the ability to see the logic of music coupled with the passion that fuels creativity lead to a Bach? Or would such completeness lead to a Da Vinci, who could create a masterpiece painting one day and invent flying machines the next? Would it be surprising that their mental activity would be so intense, their passion so overwhelming, that they would find it impossible to live a simple, normal life?

That ability to see what isn't there yet, that cauldron of creativity, has a dark side. The ability cannot be turned on and off. It is always on. And so, such people cannot think about life as normals do, cut and dried, monotonous and unchanging, preoccupied with the present, nostalgic about the past. They think about endless possibilities, and their observations of life lead them to insights, which lead to more questions, which cause more flights of fancy, which lead to .....

The inevitable path as reality and fantasy intersect, and fantasy, coupled with desire, acquires purpose, is a growing passion to alter personal reality. If a different world can be conceived, can it be created and inhabited? The creative impulse reaches a crescendo as acceptance of the "normal" world falls off into diminuendo, and the artist sets about creating the new world. Thus, the most gifted often enter their own special reality. Sometimes, the normals, who cannot conceive of such things, believe these people to be insane. Do you suppose these creators of new worlds see it that way?

As I've grown older, I find myself seeking out the oddballs, since the normals aren't as interesting. The oddballs have fascinating stories to tell, and if they come to trust you, they have amazing gifts to share.

Maybe there is some truth to the old saw, "It takes one to know one."

There are some really good web designers out there on the internet. I enjoy the fresh medium of web design, which combines programming skill with the artistic elements of design, but I am merely a curious student, not a master. Brilliant web designers, like most artists, are stimulated by the pleasure of creation, and by seeing extraordinary work by other people as well, so they often provide links to one another. I was following a link from one designer to another when I found this remarkable essay, as I was studying the author's site, hoping to learn some techniques to improve my own work. This essay is called:

The Very Last Life Serial

by Lance Arthur

(with apologies to the author, a few edits were done to preserve the ears of the more sensitive)

Admitting It

I've decided to give up my final secrets to you now, most of which are no longer secrets anyway.

I'm gay, which isn't a secret to anyone who knows me. I don't usually discuss my sexuality because I'm so bad at it. I'm a horrible gay man. I'm horrible at being a gay man, to be more precise. Even I am not sure what that means, but I feel like it's true.

Being gay, you know, is nothing like you think it is when you're not gay. I pretended not to be gay for a long time, which came after denying I was gay, which came after wishing hoping and praying and trying not, not, not to be gay, so I guess I can say that I know what it's like not to be gay which is exactly the same thing as making other people believe you're straight which you can do quite easily, actually, because "gay" is seen, most often, as a put down and an epithet and, in extreme cases ([like] Arkansas, Wyoming, [and] certain parts of Northern California) a threat to life itself.

So people want to assume you're straight, and it's easiest to simply go along with that assessment and make everyone more comfortable. One of the hardest moments for me and, perhaps, other gay men and women is the first time you actually say out loud to another person "I am gay." You hear it inside your head a lot and you think it will be easy. And you've constantly been saying, "I'm not gay," so one might imagine that excising an apostrophe and a single three-letter word and inserting an 'a' would be easy.

It's not.

Saying It

I was sitting in my car outside a club next to my best friend at the time. She was sitting in the passenger seat and we had come outside because she wanted to ask me why I treated her the way I did.

The way I treated her was like this: We would go out and dance and drink and laugh and have a great time. We would dance close, we would shake parts of our bodies at each other, we would sweat and sing loudly and feel each other. The next day she would want to tell me how much fun she had and when could we do it again? I would turn a cold shoulder toward her and not talk to her and avoid her eyes.

The reason I treated her like that was this: I was a gay man hiding that fact from myself, my family, everyone I knew, everyone I worked with, everyone everywhere. I was afraid of... what, I'm not sure. That they'd think I was [sodomizing] someone? That I kissed men on the lips and liked it? That I sometimes looked not at the women's [butts] but the men's and the looks were lingering and not intended to see how big their wallets were?

Admittedly so. I had to be asexual. I had to not look at anyone. It had been this way, my life, forever. It was a life of denial, a life of shame and self-hatred. It was a life I contemplated ending more than once, but I was too cowardly even for that. I wasn't afraid of what people would think, but of what they might think. I wasn't afraid of what people would say, but of what they might say.

I wasn't afraid that my best friend would hate me, but I was ashamed that I made her feel that way, so I was staring through the windshield, not at her, and my hands were gripping the steering wheel so tight that I thought my knuckles would spring through my skin, and I was sweating so much that I was drenched and the entire driver side of the car was fogging up, and I opened my mouth and said inside the tightly sealed vehicle, "I'm gay."

The world, such as it was, did not end.

Living It

I thought that maybe by saying it out loud, I was finally admitting to myself that I was the thing I hated. The thing I had been taught to hate, and maybe I wouldn't hate that thing anymore.

But it doesn't work like that. Saying it to one person and then making them swear not to tell anyone extends and magnifies the lie. The shame grows exponentially, because now someone else shares it and validates it for you, even unintentionally. "You're right," they say, "we should keep this a secret, this thing you are, this shameful horrible thing. Deny it! Hide it! Together we'll..."

We'll what?

She gave me a piece of advice sitting in that car that night, one which I didn't follow. "Get out of here," she told me, my best friend. "Move away. Go somewhere and be gay. If you can't do it here, leave. You have to. You'll never be happy here if you can't be yourself. You should leave."

She was absolutely right, but what I couldn't figure out was how to be half-gay. How to move somewhere and make new friends as Gay Lance, and still have friends of Non-Gay Lance. I saw this division clearly, as if it were true, as if I were two people. How could I do that? And what would happen if they found out, anyway? Why go away anywhere?

But I had said it. Out loud. One other person in the world knew I was gay. It was no longer a suspicion or a bet, it was for sure. I had said it, so I knew it. I had said it to her, so she knew it. But still I did nothing about it, and the darkness and fear grew heavier. I was gay. I really, truly was. There was nothing I could do to change it, nothing to deny. And I felt no better at all.

One night, one ([please] excuse the expression) dark and stormy night, as the lightning and thunder raged around me, I found myself in a deep, dark depression. I couldn't go on like this! I couldn't! I hated myself, I hated that I couldn't change, I hated that my life would be forever like this and that I was too [damn] weak to just... change it. To accept it. To be it, whatever that meant. Just admit it and move on with life. It was life! This was my life! Why wasn't I living it? Did I truly hate myself so much?

I went outside into the storm, because I wanted to feel something. I needed to feel something, anything, except what I was feeling. It was a horrific and beautiful tempest, the lightning flashed around me and the thunder was like rifle shots. I was drenched as I walked down the bike path near my apartment and I came upon a felled tree. The wind was so strong it had knocked it over, and I couldn't go any further.

I couldn't go any further.

I went back to my apartment and sat down at my computer and wrote four letters. They were letters to people I felt I had lied to the most about myself, so I wanted to apologize and admit things and go further. I needed to get around this thing, and this was my first step. I printed out the letters, I signed them, I put them in envelopes and addressed them and immediately mailed them.

The storm had stopped.

Leaving It

What I wish most of all for everyone faced with this situation was that it didn't exist at all. Of course I wish that, but wishing won't make it so. And no matter how you try to explain who you are -- more than that, it's what you are. Explain what you are, that you cannot change that, that trying to change it leads to lying and to hurting and to broken lives because you invite other people into the lie. And all the explanation in the world won't change people's feelings about it.

That was a very hard lesson to learn, and it took years. Wasted, pointless, frustrating years of my life to learn it. People will think what they want to think. This is not only true of opinions on homosexuality, but on everything. You simply cannot change their opinion, and the harder you try the more they'll defend themselves to the point of attacking you verbally, then physically, to the point where some will want to kill you.

And then you actually start thinking about that. People I may meet on the street who I don't know and have never met, spoken to or seen before, will want to kick the shit out of me. People will want to string me up to barbed wire fences or set my body on fire or shoot me in the head because... because I'm gay. Not because I said something they didn't like, or hit them or even looked at them funny. They'll do it because I'm gay. Who wants to live a life like that?

And then you decide -- I decided, well, [screw] it. Which is worse, leading a life alone lying to everyone and denying your desires and feeling ashamed and hateful, or taking the one-in-a-million chance that some doofus who's afraid of their own stirring homoerotic tendencies will want to beat me senseless because they can't beat that out of themselves? Am I really going to go through the only life I get being afraid of something that is unlikely ever to happen?

So, I offer two pieces of advice for two classes of people...

If you're gay and you know it (how do you know it? this is the Mike Test, which my friend Mike used on me: "When you're alone and [you're jerking off and] your eyes are closed and you're fantasizing about being with someone or looking at someone, what sex is that person?" there's your answer. you may be able to lie to yourself, but your body knows what it likes.) and you're afraid to admit it to anyone, including yourself, it will never get any easier and it won't go away.

You will waste your days in wishful thinking and in your nights you will be alone. You have to come out. You have to. Not for anyone else. For you.

It may destroy friendships (it probably won't), it may destroy your relationship with your parents (it may, but is that worse than denying what you are? only you can answer that question. and your parents may surprise you (they may already know)) you may be scared to death by the prospect of what might happen, but you have to do this.

It shouldn't be something you have to "face." I agree. Lots of other people agree, too. To most people, it won't matter at all. You may, in fact, want it to matter after the build up you've given it. But take comfort that for most people, and I mean most people, it won't matter. To a certain few, it will matter very much and they'll hate you and call you names. So what? A fag is what you are. Say it. "I'm a fag." Claim it. Be it. "Yes, I am a faggot. How are you?" Nothing else matters as much as you liking what you are, which becomes who you are. Do you really want to hate yourself forever?

Finally, to those who wish gay people would just go away, or that we can be "healed," or that God hates us, or any one of a thousand other reasons you hold onto to validate your hatred of millions of people -- I don't care. I don't care about who you are or what you stand for or how strongly you believe what you believe. I know you're wrong. I know it, now, finally. You were always wrong. I'm not supposed to hate myself for being who I am, and wanting what I want, and saying it out loud. I'm not supposed to sit in the corner quietly and pretend I'm not what I know I am.

There's nothing wrong with me. Well, besides the weight thing and I'd like to get that laser surgery for my eyes if it weren't so expensive and I look horrible in red even though I love the color. But there's nothing wrong with me. I'm trying hard not to hate you the way you hate me, because it would also be for no reason. You are what you are - an ignorant, small-minded, backwards-thinking nobody with nothing better to do with your life than rail against something that no one can control. Go yell at the trains when they pass, maybe they'll stop for you.

Me? I'm a faggot. How are you?

Sometime during my childhood, I saw a movie with a scene that made an impression on me that has lasted through today. My memories of childhood are like that - just a few snippets of events and experiences like movies that I can recall very clearly. Unfortunately, most things in my personal memory bank are long gone. Those powerful memories I've kept were created by powerful emotions at the time they were experienced. This tendency in all of us is the psychological basis for our use of rituals for important social events. But… back to the movie.

The scene that moved me so powerfully was of a leper colony. That one scene is the only part of the movie I can recall, so I don't know the name or even much of the context of the movie other than a vague sense that it was in Biblical times. The image is of a sunken area; perhaps it was an abandoned quarry. There was only one path in or out, making it a natural prison of sorts. The Hollywood-created image had the people living there with sores on their bodies, disfigured faces, clothed in rags, and moving about aimlessly if at all, their eyes dull and lifeless. The emotion I felt so strongly back then, which is why the scene was etched permanently into my memory, was compassion.

One other important thing from that memory (I did connect it to Biblical times, remember) is the image of a person (Jesus perhaps?), walking among the lepers. There were other people, who dumped scraps of food into the pit like they were slopping hogs, but kept their distance for fear of catching the disease. Juxtaposed against these other people was this serene man who walked gracefully among the inhabitants, with no fear. He treated them with respect, and he personified that same emotion I had felt so strongly in my young self, compassion. All those other non-afflicted people showed fear and scorn instead.

This scene must have been my first impression of a class of people who were condemned by their difference to isolation and derision. They were outcasts, and they kept to themselves. Being a curious child, I probably asked my mother, that font of wisdom, about the lepers when the movie was over. She probably reassured me that leprosy was a relic of the past. Maybe that scene kept me from feeling any fear a few years later, when my cousin and I occasionally caught armadillos in the woods to keep as pets, in spite of the country lore that armadillos carry leprosy. I don't know.

In truth, leprosy, which is caused by a bacterium, is not very contagious. Only 5 percent of the spouses of those infected ever contract the disease themselves. Yet, because the untreated effects are very disfiguring, the fear of catching the disease colors our perception of the true risk. Leprosariums for quarantine of patients existed in this country well into the 20th century.

Though leprosy has declined in modern times, it has been replaced by other social afflictions. Whether race, disease, religious belief, mental state, unusual sexuality, physical abnormality, or political ideology, countless groups continue to be isolated and quarantined. Perhaps most revealing of the power of social ostracism is how common it is for such people to choose some measure of quarantine for themselves as preferable to living among those who revile them. Our cities are full of these collections of unusual people who band together to form a society within a society, hoping the everyone else will leave them alone. They build their own leper colonies, referring to them as "communities." For many, as long as the basic human needs are available in the community, it provides a safer, less stressful place to live. Separate but almost equal.

When I started thinking seriously about religion as a teenager, and specifically about my assigned religion of Christianity, I think the leper scene from my childhood was working powerfully in my subconscious. Somehow, I had assumed that all those awful people in the movie who treated the lepers so poorly were a scourge of the past, just like the disease. Modern people were more like the Jesus-ideal, tending the sick and showing kindness and compassion to those with afflictions. But gradually, my shell of naivety was ground away by the abrasive reality of life. For reasons I didn't understand at the time, I was wounded, and I didn't heal well. Whereas many people scab over with self-interest and recover rather quickly, my wound became an open sore, and I dealt with it as best I could, pretending it didn't exist. It never went away.

As the years passed, I learned to recognize the rare people who would walk among the modern-day lepers and treat them with dignity and respect. These people, just like that Jesus-ideal from the movie, were so secure in themselves that they had no fear of our social lepers, and spoke no ill of them. They had little concern that they might themselves become afflicted, simply by being in the midst of the afflicted. They rejected the myths and teachings that portrayed all atypical people as evil, sinful, contagious, or simply distasteful. These people, rare though they were, became my role models. They kept my wound from becoming gangrenous.

A few years ago, a day finally came when I realized why that wound from my youth wouldn't heal. It was the day I admitted that I was one of the unclean. I finally understood that I could no longer pretend to be like everyone else. That wound had begun to consume me. I would just have to learn to accept myself. I had to get past my fear of being different. No, I'm not gay. I'm transgendered. What does that mean? The last time I tried explaining the full meaning of this to a friend, it took five hours and a six pack of beer, and she was still confused, so I'll say no more about it today.

Everyone who experiences such an emotional re-evaluation of self goes through a serious grieving process. When we lose our claim to "normal," for any reason, we are wounded emotionally just as surely and suddenly as a soldier shot in battle is wounded physically. It may be superficial, or it may be terminal. We may bounce right back, we may be long in recovery, or we may not make it. Unfortunately, for most of us, at the very least some of the gloss fades from our eyes. We feel cheated and resentful. We see that we are destined to go through the rest of our lives with a burden, and we ask, "Why me?"

The wound of being different cannot heal until we quit asking that question. No matter what affliction it was we discovered in ourselves, healing of the emotional wound always leaves a scar, and maybe some loss of sensation. But we can learn to accept our affliction, wear our scar without shame, and make the best of the only life we have. In time, we may even come to think of our difference as not an affliction at all, but merely a marker of our uniqueness and a route to a more completely fulfilling existence.

I've come to see that in some way, most of us are modern-day lepers of some sort. Rather than hiding and fearing one another from within our enclaves of people like ourselves, can we not be more like that Jesus-ideal in the movie? What might happen if we ventured into the other colonies of lepers, without fear, with respect and compassion? Might our travels lead us to understand that whatever strain of leprosy sets our group apart; we gain nothing by despising the others? Perhaps we can only begin to heal our own emotional wounds as we learn to stop avoiding the oddness of our neighbor.

Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson repeat a story told by one of their clients in their book Dancing In The Flames.

Ian had been married to the same woman for thirty years. They were extremely comfortable together . . . . One day he went into a shopping mall to pick up a pen that he had left at a repair shop some weeks earlier. It was during the lunch hour, and, passing a restaurant in the mall he decided to go in. To his great surprise, upon entering the restaurant he saw his wife at the back of the dining area sitting alone, reading and eating her lunch. His immediate reaction was to walk up to her table and surprise her, just as she had inadvertently surprised him. It would be fun to have lunch together in this thoroughly unplanned way. Then he suddenly realized that he could not do this. Totally unprepared for this second surprise, he felt completely disoriented. Looking at her sitting alone, Ian knew that he would be intruding upon her privacy. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the woman sitting alone reading a book and having her lunch was a complete stranger. It seemed as if he had never seen her before. Shyness amounting to embarrassment, embarrassment amounting to shame, overcame him. Though he knew nothing about her circumstances, what she was reading, he felt such a powerful surge of love that he began to shake. Reeling, he turned and walked out. The surge of love lay solely in this: his wife of thirty years had suddenly been unveiled to him as a complete stranger.

In becoming empty, we learn to live on the edge of our understanding. When you live at the edge of your understanding, you are always alert and ready for anything, because you don't know what is going to happen or how (or even if) you are going to need to react. You find yourself open and empty, and simply alert to any messages in any form. There is a different level of awareness to the world. Unfortunately, as we grow up we are taught to stay away from the edges of things, because edges are thought to be dangerous places. But in staying away from the edges, staying where everything is safe and predictable, where we can keep everything in control, we lose the ability to become open and aware. We forget what it feels like, and even that it is possible. Emptiness becomes unknown, another edge. And we have to stay away from edges, because everyone knows they are dangerous.

When we stay away from the edges and everything is predictable, we come to have expectations about everything in our lives. When we buy into a culture where difference is abhorred, we expect everything, and everyone, to be "normal". And then, when something or someone comes along and tries to live out on an edge, refuses to fit our definition of normal, we are left uncomfortable, shocked or at least annoyed. If we stay away from edges, we are by definition not letting go of desires, not being open to whatever comes to us. When we stay away from edges, it is hard to even remember that when we were four or five years old (when there were nothing but edges) we could not understand why adults just didn't see all of the amazing and wonderful and fascinating things all around. They are still amazing and wonderful and fascinating. We just can't see them anymore, because we "already know all about all that stuff."

dm 6/24/01