Learning to Love the Hard Way

“Before any negotiations begin, I will investigate my opponent’s position carefully, trying to understand exactly what my opponent is saying or doing and why my opponent is saying or doing it.” - Guidelines to Negotiation by Rev. Dr. Mel White

For the last three months, it’s felt a bit as if I’m an undergraduate again. Each week, my partner and I have had an assignment to read a few hundred pages of theology out loud to each other, alternately falling into interesting, revelatory conversation and falling asleep; we’ve studied the websites of ex-gay ministries; we’ve written papers, posted them online, and participated in discussion by conference calls with our other ‘classmates.’ That, I thought, was what it meant to study my adversary; that was how we were going to prepare for upcoming conversations with students, faculty, and community members at the schools on our ride.

And then today happened. In the morning, Peterson Toscano walked us through his seventeen-year experience in the ex-gay movement, most notably his two years in a residential Love in Action program as chronicled in his play “Doing Time in the Homo No Mo Halfway House.”

In the afternoon, Phil Lawson and our co-directors lead us in a practical examination of how to use non-violence, especially under duress.

Talk about knowing your adversaries. At two-thirty in the morning, my whole body is still reeling from what I’ve seen and heard. Here are some excerpts:

1. The ex-gay movement’s description of members of our beloved community as living a ‘false image’ of masculinity and femininity prior to their involvement with ‘ex-gay’ ministries (as if a preference for football or shopping were coded in our genitals, as if a single, binary system for understanding gender performance has ever worked even for the heterosexuals these programs try to mold their clients after).

2. The image of Katie, our dear and courageous co-director, berating Shawn for being transgender and screaming a racial slur at one of her closest friends as a way of preparing us for the possibility of encountering emotionally violent opponents in the coming months. How awful it was to see my precious fellow workers mistreated. How awful it was to see Katie have to channel such hate through her body. How it was even harder to take on the role of the furious opponent myself, though the reason for doing so was solid: to try to connect with the humanity of a person spewing hate and understand how painful that side of the confrontation can be.

3. Visions of Diane Nash and her co-organizers being dragged from their chairs at 1960s Tennessee lunch counters and beaten.

4. Veteran civil-rights worker Reverend Phil Lawson’s warning us that the traditional Christian theology in which God sacrifices God’s only son for our sins may well validate violence as a way of solving problems.

Those are the highlights of a week’s worth of study accomplished in a day. All that’s left is to go to bed, grateful and tired. Blessed be.

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