Beyond Apologetics: Sexual Identity, Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Practice

Phillips Theological Seminary

February 15, 2010

“Coming Out” or “Inviting In”: Interrogating our Rhetoric and Rethinking our Pastoral
Counseling Approaches with LGBTQ Brothers and Sisters

I want to begin by encouraging you to participate, with me, in an exercise of imagination.

Imagine that you are at home attending to your children in your living room, responding to emails in
your office, cooking a meal in your kitchen, lounging, reading or even sleeping. Your doorbell rings.
You stop what you are doing to answer the door. You look through the peep hole and realize that a
family member or close friend has, without notice, paid you a visit. You open the door. You offer
greetings and then you open the door signaling the person to come inside, or rather, you decide to
“invite the person into” your house. Now imagine that you are back at home and just happen to be
busy attending to a personal or family matter. The door bell rings again, but this time the person on
the other side of the door happens to be a stranger. You inquire as to who the visitor is while
speaking through a closed door. When you feel a remote sense of security, you open the door, you
converse for a bit, and you decide–after developing a sense of connection, a sense of safety, a
holding environment–to “invite” this person into your house so that you can talk more.
In the first exercise, it may seem natural to extend hospitality from the outset, to share your
personal space with someone with whom you trust or have an established relationship. In the
second example, however, you may feel awkward allowing “strangers” into your personal space,
right away, if you feel the potential for confrontation or harm. In both examples, however, the
power of invitation remains in your hands and not those of the person who knocks on the door. In
both examples, you were never faced with an injunction to “come out”: to leave your house/your
space/your domain of personhood/your life-world, instead, you functioned as the minister/servant
of hospitality/invitation. I’m using this rudimentary example as a means to think through the ways
in which the reframing of our language, rhetorics and metaphors–particularly, imagining the process
of disclosure of one’s sexual identity (vis a vis the notion of “coming out”) in different ways like that
of “inviting in.” New metaphors may, indeed, serve as useful interventions in pastoral care
approaches with LGBTQ persons and those that love them.
The process of “coming out of the closet”–when imagined as an act of political resistance–
can, indeed, be seen as an emancipatory intervention. It is often considered the only means
of survival for LGBTQ people. But when I read and meditate on the revolutionary words of the
radical black gay writer activist Joseph Beam, who wrote the following in his well-known
essay Brother to Brother, “I dare myself to dream of us moving from survival to potential, from merely
getting by to a positive getting over,”[1] I am challenged to reconsider the limitations of the “coming
out” and “closet” paradigms as modes for self and community liberation. Though, Beam’s primary
audience was black and brown gay/bi men, I think that his statement, or, rather his dream, is
instructive for all LGBTQ people and those that love him and could be reworked to read: We should
dare ourselves to dream of us moving from survival to potential, from merely getting by to a positive getting over. With
Beam’s proposal in mind, I ask: What would it mean for us–for LGBTQ people–to move from a
mode of survival when our survival has always been connected to our ability to “come out” from a
“closet” that some of us may, or may not, have ever inhabited? What does it mean for us to move
from a state of “merely getting by” to “getting over” when our sense of self and communal agency is
ostensibly acknowledged and thought to be actuated only after we “come out”, only after we name
and define ourselves over against heterosexuals, only after we speak out (even if we really want to
keep some things “in”), only after we march in pride parades (even if some pride parades seem to
absent other essences of our identities), or only after we live openly and always marked as a lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning person (even if the labels themselves seem to delimit the
fluidity of and/or experiences of our sexed and having-sex selves)? I wonder, then, if it is really
efficacious to speak of our processes of self-disclosure, our moments of self-identification as
LGBTQ people, and the practices through which we become self-aware by way of the “coming out”
metaphor. Does “coming out of the closet” properly function as the most useful way to name one’s
quest towards self and communal liberation and expression? Does the usage of the idiom “coming
out”–and the “closet metaphor”–facilitate or impede the liberatory potential of affirming theologies
and pastoral counseling approaches? Should we consider nuanced and innovative rhetorical and/or
paradigmatic interventions that speak, more succinctly, to a queer politic and theology? My research,
as part of this larger conversation/project, considers these questions and argues for the dismantling
of the “coming out” and “closet” paradigms. In sum, my research seeks to problematize the
functionality of such rhetoric within the framework of pastoral theologies and pastoral
care/counseling approaches and argue for a turn to a new intervention, or what I am naming, the
process of “inviting in.”
In short, “inviting in” connotes: the existence of the subject’s agential potential, the ability of
the person to choose when and to whom s/he will disclose their sexual (or other essences of)
identities to, the notion that self-disclosure is a political/personal act that is grounded in what
pastoral counselor Natalie Hill, refers to as a person-in-environment or person-in-community based
approach and not a political act that does not entirely take account the contextual factors in a
person’s life that may/or may not complicate one’s moments of disclosure And where, “coming
out” ostensibly functions as a survival mechanism that must be enacted by LGBTQ people only and
demands that the onus is on us as the sexual minority to disclose to others, a demand to out our
“alternative” sexual identities over and against heterosexual identification and when, or, if we don’t,
it is assumed that we complicitly live into a compulsory heterosexuality that refuses to challenge
heterosexist and heteronormative structures…“inviting in” functions as a means of hospitable
sharing, a choice to disclose to those with whom we may feel safe disclosing to, a choice to disclose
when we feel ready to do so, and an opportunity to subvert heteronormativity by refusing
to other ourselves, that is, to self-disclose as a means of compliance with the unspoken demand
placed on all non-straight identified individuals to name ourselves as sexual minorities out of fear of
being named “straight”. Lastly, “inviting in” functions as an intervention for straight-identified
individuals as well. It opens up the space for that straight mother, who decides after her 29 year old
son discloses that he is gay, responds by saying, “Uh, I’ve known that for some time.” In that
example, the mother may have never felt compelled to speak with her son because she may have
always believed that it was his duty/the duty of the “other” to “come out”/to disclose his sexual
identity to her. By turning to the paradigm of “inviting in”, that same mother could come to
understand that she too maintains the potential to practice hospitality: to share without fear, to share
with love, to invite her son into a conversation, a safe space, a holding environment wherein she can
invite him to discuss his sexual identity and to share with him what she may have always known or
assumed.
Further, “coming out” and “the closet” are mutually inclusive phrases that cohere to form a
paradigm imbued with some problematic connotations like having to always see our process of self-
acceptance and self-love as developed through a symbiotic process wherein we define ourselves over
and against heteronormative representations. I argue that “inviting in” allows for a new imaginary
and a new paradigm that is disconnected from the dangerous and heteronormative notion of “the
closet.” Where “coming out” is a process that is dependent upon one exiting “the closet” as a
radical performance of resistance and is, therefore, centered on heterosexism, “inviting in” is a
process that centers on the person-in-community and her agential potential (namely, her existence
outside of a need to define herself in response to an injunction to do so as per a need to dismantle
heterosupremacy) to engage the domain of her own personhood. Where “coming out” is a process
that is only achieved when one decides to formally and publically disclose his sexual identity (i.e.
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning identifier), “inviting in” is a process that
encourages one to explore categorizations that discourage or frustrate heteronormative hierarchies,
binaries and oppositions as a means to reorganize one’s politics of representation. Where “coming
out” seemingly encourages one to exist on one side of the secrecy/revelation, invisible/perceptible,
reticence/articulation, and shame/pride binaries, the process of “inviting in” understands that
context is a valuable factor that influences the ways we negotiate these potentialities daily. Lastly,
where “coming out” calls/demands one to name her sexual identity–as if one presenting oneself to
the public, the process of “inviting in” encourages an individual to make a choice to educate/share
with another–to literally invite another in to her life world and that of her communities.
I close with a quote from theologian Ivone Gebara:

It often happens that we have knowledge of what oppresses us but we do not have the means to
change the rules of the game of oppression. Knowledge is certainly important in the process of
transformation, but it is not enough to bring about actual change. To change the very conditions that
produce relationships of domination, there must be a collective process of education. There must be
agreement, a minimal consensus, a common analysis to intercept what has become habitual. As
{Pierre] Bourdieu says, there must be a change in the symbolic order and then a change in actual
practice, in the daily life of the culture. The domain of theology is particularly the domain of the
symbolic production of meaning…a privileged place of action in view of a revolution in
symbolism.[17]

Gebara’s thoughts are instructive for LGBTQ people in this present moment. It is clear that
we have knowledge of that which oppresses us, namely, heteronormative practices, heterosexist
ideologies, hetero-streamed theologies, but we often do not possess the means to “change the rules”
of these forms of oppression. This project, Beyond Apologetics, is a critical intervention in what Gebara
calls “the game of oppression.” I offer this presentation as a means to seriously consider the
symbols, the rhetoric, the paradigms and the language through which we negotiate our identities and
experiences in the world. By refusing to pronounce symbols and paradigms , namely the metaphors
“coming out’ and “the closet”, that order and constrict the ways in which we self-represent, we
begin the revolutionary process of moving from a mode of opposition, survival and “getting by” to
a process of communal harmony, advancement and “getting over.” By changing the words we use
and creating new paradigms, we will actually engage in a strategy of resistance that may hopefully
transform all of us.