Walking into the room where Northwestern College representatives were planning to share with the Equality Ride about the Freedom Tour, a bus trip students and faculty had taken to several important sites in the Civil Rights movement in the South, I was nervous. There were a lot of white people in that room, myself included, and I was thinking about how so often white folks praise the work of civil rights leaders like Dr. King, The Greensboro Four, and the Freedom Riders without taking responsibility for our part in the racist system that caused so many to sacrifice so much then and continues to cripple our country now. I was thinking of unexamined white privilege and how it still runs rampant in so many social justice movements: the mainstream feminist movement, as evidenced recently by the entire week it took NOW to denounce Imus’s statements about B/black basketball players, the anti-war movement, which has often ignored the racist overtones of war, and the mainstream LGBT movement, which has tended to present itself as being wholly or mostly concerned with the rights of white LGBT people while sometimes drawing simplistic comparisons between the struggle to end segregation and the struggle, say, for marriage equality. It’s true, of course, that the various oppressions often work together, that they do, at times, borrow from each other in ethos and tactic, and that they come down in their multiplicity on folks who fit into more than one community that the establishment wants kept out of power. But in my experience, these complexities often get lost when white folks talk about race, and people who are present often find their suspicions confirmed that white folks, even white activists, are not doing their work around racism.

Within a few minutes of listening to the Freedom Tour’s presentation, I knew my fears were unfounded. The faculty member who spoke first began with a definition of race as a constructed entity that had been used to parcel out social power. Another faculty member and students who spoke after the sideshow emphasized how their experiences highlighted the ways church and society have failed at addressing racism. A Hmong student challenged the US for its ongoing complicity in her people’s suffering. A white student explained how racism was a wound that, because it had never healed properly, was continuing to fester in our society, and stressed the responsibility that came with her color to work against racism in all that she did. Those students spoke powerfully and well. I was honored to be in their presence, and it was clear to me that Northwestern’s Freedom Tour had ‘done its work’ in thinking about racism in our time. I was looking forward to a complex and challenging discussion about this country’s history regarding race and what its implications might be for those who identified as Christians, as activists, as both.

And then, the final speaker came up to the podium. He began by revealing to us that he had been ‘homosexually raped’ as a child and that, in his words, God “had a sense of humor” because God had then called him to minister to “homosexuals” in the inner city in his adult life. Now, I do not in any way want to minimize this man’s experience of sexual violence. For such a thing to happen to a child is beyond deplorable, and my heart aches for any child who must spend hier life working to heal from that. But rape is rape, not an act made any more or less egregious by the gender of the perpetrator or victim. To equate that act of violence with the (presumably) gay men he worked among later in life was as outrageous as it was hurtful, both to me and to them. It was an awful statement, but the rhetoric got worse from there.

Later, he seemed to assume that members of the Equality Ride had come to the session in order to prove how his school’s Freedom Tour and our own bus tour were similar. (We hadn’t actually been given an opportunity to speak at that point, so he had not only not heard such a thing from any of us present, but as he spoke for over fifteen minutes he took up most of the time that would have been allotted for us and for group discussion). Without any acknowledgement that the two bus trips had been organized for very different reasons and under very different circumstances, he went on to say that, if the two were to be called similar, the spirit of repentance and taking responsibility on the Freedom Tour (I assume he was mostly speaking from his experience as a white rider on the bus, though he didn’t make that distinction) should be present on our ride, too. He suggested that the Equality Ride should be characterized by a spirit of repentance for our community’s sins, especially against children. Now, over the course of the last two months, I have been listening to all sorts of difficult and misguided rhetoric aimed at dehumanizing the LGBT community, but still, this one nearly knocked me out of my chair. That anyone could say such a thing when, as Amy pointed out during the precious few minutes left for discussion after this speaker walked out of the room to teach a class, most pedophiles are in fact straight men, and when the LGBT community has never aimed to equate straightness with the victimization of children, was astounding. That a college aiming to provide its students with a liberal arts education would choose a faculty member with such vastly ignorant and spiritually violent views about LGBT people to speak is, in my mind, nothing short of tragic.

After the speaker left, both students and faculty in the room spoke up to challenge his equation of sexual orientation with pedophilia. Amy and Wick spoke brilliantly in response to the speakers’ many and varied assumptions about the Equality Ride and the LGBT community in general. But we never did get to that complex and interesting conversation I was anticipating. We were caught up in the basic act of defending our humanity, something which a simple look at science and statistics could have avoided. And it wasn’t an hour later that a different faculty member asked me if I didn’t think a school had the right to exclude pedophiles from their campus, as a defense for Northwestern’s exclusion of students on the basis of ‘homosexual acts.’ Maybe it was the sheer repetition of the insult. Maybe it was the fact that the school had also invited a whole crew of ex-gay folks to campus that day, many of whom spoke about their life stories as if their addictions to pornography, drugs, and alcohol, as well as their uncertainties about ‘who they were’ in relationship to God had anything to do with being gay. In any case, I left Northwestern feeling as if we wasted a lot of time talking about things that were as ludicrous as they were unnecessary, that many of us never did get down to that level of interaction that Allison and I wrote in our vows to each other, and which we hope to extend to all humanity: to learn from each other in all the ways that we are wise.

Before getting on a cross-country bus tour with 26 other people whose homes are hotel rooms in the vast urban sprawl that surrounds cities as varied as Minneapolis and Malibu, my partner and I lived with about 80 other people in a little mountain village called Holden in the North Cascades. Though the two experiences both offer deep learning about what it means to be in community, there are some major differences. Holden, for example, being situated literally in the middle of a wilderness area, is a whole lot quieter. There are no phones there, no television networks or ring tones. At night, after a full day of work at the hydroelectric plant or the compost piles or the kitchen, people return to their rooms in huge old chalets and the valley hushes. Occasionally, as part of our daily communal worship, we would walk to the creek that wound through ‘town’ and listen for the word of the Divine in the sound of the water going over rocks. Even our songs and shouts of greeting were muffled by the endless silence of mountains standing all around us.

Noise has been one of the hardest things for Allison and me as we’ve moved from Holden to the ‘outside world.’ Semis passing on the highway, twelve different phone conversations when we step into a restaurant, sirens of all kinds that always make us feel as if we need to jump up and report for fire brigade duty, which is the only explanation for sounds as piercing and horrible at Holden.

Maybe that’s why this morning at Yellowstone Baptist College was so powerful for me. Our vigil the day before had been difficult––the school’s refusal to engage in dialogue, weather, the occasional hostile passerby. Yesterday had been raw and challenging, a clear picture of what we’re up against as activists when so much of the Christian community isn’t ready to accept the reality that LGBT people have been created good. Today, we wanted to come to campus with the intention of honoring what was beautiful about our time there. We decided on a shorter vigil and we decided on silence. We wanted to reaffirm our loving intentions for YBC and its students in a way that would open a space for the Spirit to continue her work. In silence, in single file, we walked from the bus to the gates of the school. In silence, we faced the school and opened our hearts to our hopes for change.

As I prayed for guidance about what could move YBC and the Equality Ride out of our present impasse, I thought of Jesus and the clarity he brought in situtations where church doctrine was crowding out God’s good intentions for humankind. I thought of Earth, how she teaches that it is our interrelatedness that makes us whole. In silence, the two teachers brought me to a place of peace and as I imagined the hearts of my fellow riders filling the way mine was, I was grateful. Grateful for truthspeaking in bad weather. Grateful for quiet. Grateful for schools where LGBT students will someday see their hopes for change fulfilled.

“There might be a few more people than usual,” said Tristan, the BYU student who was walking Brian, Brandon, Jonathan and I to an apartment where other students had gathered for a weekly off-campus discussion group noted for its lively, late-night exchanges about everything from ecological building to the ethics of war. It was already after nine o’clock. The streets of Provo were dark and the sidewalk glinted under our feet, still damp from an early evening rain. Fifteen people, I was thinking, maybe twenty. These were college students after all. How many people had enough leftover energy after a full day of attending classes, writing papers, and taking care of the various social and institutional minutiae that go along with campus life to show up and listen to a handful of activists from out of town? After about six blocks, we arrived at a sweet little two story with red filigreed doors. Tristan brought us down the walk and motioned us inside. Brian stepped ahead of me into the entryway and, as I tried to decide whether or not this was a household where I needed to take off my shoes, he opened the door to the living room. Just as quickly, he closed it and bulged his eyes at the rest of us. “Oh wow,” he said.

I decided to keep the shoes on and followed him into a room absolutely crammed with students. I knew immediately what he’d meant. The six or seven chairs were occupied, often with someone perched on each arm. The walls were lined, and rows of people snaked across the floor, their legs drawn up tight so as not to bump the people in front. I stepped carefully on the few spaces of carpet between bodies, hoping I wouldn’t bang somebody in the head with my bag. At the front of the room there was flurry of motion while a couch was cleared off for us to sit on. Later, a student would tell me that there had been about seventy people in that space, and, as our conversation continued, more and more people kept showing up, inching their way in the door. When we asked if these were all BYU students, the whole room shook its head, yes.

We gave a very abbreviated version of our presentation about progressive theology, and as people began asking questions about family and the nature of the Celestial Kingdom, I felt both grateful and awed. Here we were in Provo, having been told again and again by BYU that the university was so certain that its Honor Code, which prohibits not only ‘homosexual practice’ (undefined) but also any implied or explicit advocacy or association, was solid LDS policy, that it need not be questioned, that dialogue about sexual orientation and gender identity weren’t appropriate on campus. And still the five of us Equality Riders were sitting amidst seventy students or more students who’d decided to give up a night of preparation for their classes, to give up the desire to simply be comfortable with school policy, to give up any semblance of personal space, just to talk with us.

We were all tired. We’d had a day of giving presentations at Utah Valley University, of talking with students, of attending a panel presentation of current and former BYU students at the Provo City Library. Aaron was in his second day of a debilitating cold, I was getting over an upper respiratory infection, but I am sure there is nowhere any of us would have rather been for those nearly two hours. The students asked difficult questions, and we answered from our hearts. No matter who was speaking, the feeling in the room was one of great respect and deep listening. This is a testament to the women who started this group and the way they have been facilitating it for several years, to be sure. But I think it is also a testament to the fact that when we accept each other’s right to ask questions based on personal experience with the Divine, conversations of incredible richness are possible.

That night, I learned a great deal not only about LDS Doctrine, but also about the possibilities of dissent within the church. I learned that there was already a group of students working on creating a safe space for LGBT people at their university. I learned that, regardless of BYU’s policies to the contrary, there is a great hunger among students to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity in their communities, and that these conversations can be had with deep respect for all the people involved.

On Monday morning, our first day at Wisconsin Lutheran, I woke up with a pain in my eye. It was intermittent, and when I rinsed off my contact it was gone, mostly, so I left the hotel room, got on the bus with my fellow activists, and prepared for a long day standing vigil. Wisconsin Lutheran is a school whose policy book states that “homosexual practice” is a sin and that the school will teach and discipline accordingly. They certainly did hold fast to their claim about teaching; the day before we came to campus (we were told the sidewalk out front was as close as we could get) the school held a Bible study attended by 150 of the 300 students in which they were told that the main thrust of the Bible is that we are all sinners, and that Christ himself had clearly and unequivocally ordained marriage only between a man and a woman. Those themes came up again and again in the conversations I had with students during the day. It was clear they had been prepped–every time the conversation would get difficult, the student I was talking to would circle back to one of those two statements.

At one point, my presentation group and I were “invited” to drive to the outskirts of town to a conference room in the Sheraton Inn to give some of our thoughts on Progressive Theology to a small, hand-picked group of students, faculty, and administrators. The school’s pastor who, since he was ‘hosting’ the event, took the liberty of prefacing and concluding our presentation, read the story of Jesus rebuking Peter––”get behind me, Satan”––as a an example of how he saw his role in relation to our visit. Needless to say, it was a difficult day, though our little group stood and spoke well and developed some important relationships with students in the meantime.

When the pain in my eye began to come back, I thought the weird scratchiness and weepiness was just a little dust from standing outside all those hours. Or maybe a result of stress. But by five o’clock, when we left campus to share a much needed meal and time of conversation with the amazing folks at the Milwaukee LGBT center, I was having a hard time keeping my eye open at all. Blinking didn’t help and shifting my contact in my eye didn’t help and, when we finally got back to the hotel at seven or so, taking the contact out altogether only seemed to make it worse. Within an hour I was on the way to the emergency room with some hotel ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth pressed over my right eye and my left eye closed to keep it from accidentally pulling the other one open, which felt for all the world like sandpaper and lake water being shot from one side of my eye to another. My partner and two friends led me into the emergency room with one eye painfully propped open so I could at least see the blurry outlines of the doors I was entering and the chair I was ushered into. One nurse took my basic information, another gave me bracelets to indicate the seriousness of my condition and an allergy to sulfa, and I was sent out in the waiting room to wait for my name to be called. The nurse who registered me was optimistic: an hour to an hour and a half, she said. Three hours later, the ice in my washcloth had melted completely, our friends had left to check out the food situation for the next day and had come back with hummus, pita, and soy drink that tasted like heaven, and had left again. In all that time we had heard only one person’s name called over the loudspeaker. Allison, who could see, was grieving for the people who were waiting alone on the little, screwed down chairs around us. She described them to me: one man with a badly sprained ankle, a woman with a pink mask over her mouth who was dry heaving into a matching pink tub. I didn’t need her to tell me about the choruses of coughs and groans all around us. I could hear those for myself. Obviously, this was a room full of people who were, in many cases, worse off than me. And so we waited. There was nothing else to do.

We talked a little about the speech we were planning to give on campus the next day, but without any ice left the pain in my eye was especially distracting. Time stretched and bent and flowed around us until I had no idea how long we’d been in that loud place where sight was a memory and nobody knew when their deliverance would come. If you felt well enough, or if you were lucky enough to have someone to send, you could shuffle over to the front desk and ask how many people were in front of you from time to time. Six, Allison was told when we finally got desperate enough to ask, and then later, three. I was afraid to send her after that because your number could go back up if more serious folks came in the meantime. I wasn’t sure I could handle that..

Finally, at around eleven p.m., my name was called. I held my left eye open in order to follow a nurse in teal green scrubs through one set of swinging doors and to a bed set up in a hallway. “It’s not a room,” she said. “But at least we got you back here.” She was getting a pillow and some new ice, she said. Then she disappeared. We waited for her and then we waited for the doctor. Another forty minutes or so, at least.

After that, there isn’t much to tell. Eventually, a doctor came. One drop of numbing eye solution, two Vicodin, an eye exam, and a flurry of receipts later, I was in a taxi cab back to the hotel with the diagnosis of a scratched cornea, a prescription for antibacterial drops and the assurance that my healing would be quick. In the morning, my eye was still red, but I could blink without wincing and look Allison full in the face when she asked how I was doing. I could even smile.

Three hours later the two of us were in police custody, along with four other Soulforce folks and two members of the Milwaukee community who, when we were told to leave the tables we had set up to try to talk to students on campus, decided to stay. Allison, Kourt, Emil, Justin, Jonathan, Ray, Wendy and I were driven by police car to a holding station nearby, which we were told was the newest and nicest of its kind. The floors and walls were painted hospital beige. The waiting benches were long and cold with bars running along the front of them so that one of your hands could be cuffed to them while you waited. The chairs, where there were chairs, were bolted to the floor. One officer took my information and then another. I was led to a holding cell with one long cement bench along the side, and a stainless steel toilet/sink combination against the far wall. The door in front of me had a thin, high window through which officers would peek occasionally, sometimes saying my name or sliding a paper for me to sign through the slot in the middle of the door, sometimes just looking and going away. None of them explained why they were there or how much longer I’d be waiting. They just came and went and I sat.

Without my watch––it had been taken along with shoelaces, jewelry, scarf and belt, everything in my pockets––I had no idea how much time was passing. Officers came and went through a hallway that must have connected to my cell block off to the right, making incredible clanging noises as the doors opened and closed. Once, I was summoned to have my photo and fingerprints taken. Then I was returned. The officer said, simply, “it’s going to be a while,” and then left. I meditated and dozed, I did the back stretches my naturopath instructed me to do everyday which I never remember––overall, I tried to be calm, be patient, and welcome the chance to be alone. But every time the door slammed and the banter of officers in the rooms nearby rose to a pitch, every time a blue, zippered torso walked by my door, I caught myself hoping that maybe now was the time they’d let me out, that maybe my waiting was over.

With my eye feeling better, I studied everything. Just as, the night before, I’d listened until I could distinguish between a particular person’s coughs and another person’s wheezes, now I began to distinguish the smudges in the beige wall of my cell that maybe, almost, if you squinted right, began to spell a word. “Mast” maybe? Or “Mark”? I worked my way up to the ceiling, where a single fluorescent tube was covered with diamond-patterened plastic and framed by wood on all sides so the whole contraption could be bolted at an angle where the ceiling met the wall. No corners or recessed edges to hang things from. No switch to turn off the light.

It was then that it came to me how similar my two instances of waiting had been. That fluorescent glow that made it hard even with my eyes closed to pull into the dark of myself and meditate had the same tone and consistency of the lights in the waiting room the night before that had made me squint, even with my eyes closed, even though it made them hurt more. In the waiting room I’d felt the same sense of helplessness as I felt in the cell, especially when I considered what it might feel like to be arrested without the preparation or support I’d had as a member of Soulforce choosing to take that risk arrest for something I believed and knowing I’d be out before evening. How last night, as today, all I’d really known was that I had to get through the waiting, no matter how cold or bored or in pain I felt, no matter how long it would be. How the chatter of the nurses and receptionists around the night before had been like the back and forth of the officers, trying to figure out which forms needed to be filled out, which pictures needed to be taken. How all that chatter was a reminder that there was a system much more important than my pain or my choice to stand up for justice at Wisconsin Lutheran, that my sickness and my arrest were just a blips in the process, no real events in themselves.

I know that the process of arrest and detainment is not nearly so impersonal for a lot of people: that people of color often find themselves singled out for abuse and hazing after being arrested for even the most routine offenses, or for no offenses at all; that having an organization with the money to post bail for me and seven of my closest friends gave me a peace of mind few people have when they’re taken in. But still, I can’t help but think of how striking the similarity was for me between my time in an institution that had been established to heal me and one that had been established to reprimand me for breaking the law. It seems to me that both work within frameworks of waiting that render clients’ will and emotional well-being irrelevant.

Recently, Alexey, one of our co-leaders, told me that many folks who finish their time volunteering with Soulforce end up working for prisoner’s rights in the jail systems. I can see why. And after the last twenty-four hours, I am more ready than ever to add patients’ rights to the list as well.

“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.