Today was our last official day of campus visits for the 2007 Soulforce Equality Ride…

It is now midnight and all I can do is sigh…

At this point, if I think about it in too much depth, I will melt in my tears. As we wrap up this colossal road trip, I am finding the conclusion of this communal experience completely bittersweet. The bittter? I will miss my tribe, by people, my purpose, my cause. The sweet? I will return home to California and all that is familiar.

I am ready to go home. Or rather, ready to go back to my almost three year old son Jubal-Lee. I am not so much home sick as I am Jubal-Lee sick. “Home” has become a completely relative word over the last two months and will continue to be that way for the next 4 months of camping. “Home” has been a motel in Rexburg, Idaho. “Home” has been a hotel in Portland, Oregon. Row 15 on a coach bus with rainbow colored interior was a place I called “home” for 12 hours at a time. However, “home” was never complete because it did not include Jubal-Lee. So now I realize that home will be found with the people I love the most. Right now there is only one human that I love the most. My little one. When I find nothing else in the files of my mind that I can smile about, I conjure up an image of him…and there it is. A heart smile. A soul revival. True and pure love. A love that is so hopeful and so intentional. A love worth everything in the whole world. A love that I must return to. My job is complete. I return soon.

Today on campus we were in full force, all 52 passionate and collected Equality Riders. We stood vigil at Bethany Lutheran College for two hours. I spoke with two officers of the peace an hour into it. I explained once again that our intention was not to get arrested, but rather talk with and connect with students. They knew that was not going to happen on campus, and so they prepared accordingly, as did we, though we continued to hold out hope for an enriching on-campus dialogue with Bethany Lutheran students and faculty.

At noon, we broke vigil and flooded the campus green like a wave. Ten Riders met police with poster pictures of the Ride in their arms. I was able to make it over to a group of students, introduce myself and shake some hands. (One girl turned her head and said, “No thank you.”) I knew every moment counted at this point, as I saw the officers approach. There were now what seemed to be as many officers as there were students. The original two had multiplied, emerging from thin air. I smiled to each student and chose my words with care…

“I came here to promote love. I came all the way from California to introduce myself so you could see with your own eyes what a gay Christian looks like. I left my young son to do this. I wish to be recognized as a sister in Christ. I have been a Christian all my life.”

With that I was given my warning to leave campus lest I be charged with criminal tresspassing. As I backed away from the group of 20 or so students, I calmly remarked, “Your school has decided to silence us today.” They stared blankly as I walked away and shifted my attention to my friends who were now on their knees being placed under arrest. I stood on the sidelines and sang what has become somewhat of an anthem here on the Equality Ride…”go now in peace, go now in peace, may the love of God surround you, everywhere, everywhere you may go”. We sang to our friends as they drove away in custody. I returned to the vigil line until I saw what I had been praying would occur.

One Equality Rider (my fellow Californian) stood surrounded by 30 or more students conversing. I went and stood next to him, and we discretely held hands. The students were asking all kinds of heated questions regarding sexual identity. I chimed in, “Let’s talk about Christianity; we are really here to sow love.” Thus began hours of dialogue and connection as more Riders joined us and broke off into smaller groups with students. For a moment, I stepped away from it all to observe and soak in every detail. It was happening. Progress was being made. Disagreement or laughter, it did not matter to me at that point. The over arching epiphany was that THIS CONVERSATION WAS HAPPENING. That was the desire of our hearts. God bless each one of you who has courage to make change in this world. God bless each one who has a heart capable of loving ALL of God’s creation.

Jillian Nye

It is really a daunting task to look at this empty word file and know that I will need to try and find the words to describe this day such that those of you who were not here might have a glimpse of what occurred. I can only promise that I will try my best and use my heart and all the love that I feel right now to explain.

Today was truly the encapsulation of the entire Equality Ride. We laughed, cried, ate, drank, sang, were silent, conversed, dialogued, prayed, were arrested, met many new friends, said goodbye to many others, and basically did it all, and what was more and honestly the most special, today was the only day that we did it all TOGETHER. The East and West buses of the 2007 Equality Ride had only one stop at which both buses, 50+ people in total, collectively participated. This stop was Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota.

The feelings of joy, of completeness, in finally being reunited with the only other group out there who could truly understand what we the West bus had done and were doing, were palpable last night when the East bus joined us at the Ramada Inn in Minneapolis. There were few dry eyes in that room. Each bus had given up half our strength so that we might be able to reach more people, do more good, and spread our message of love more widely in the country, but now that we were together again, at full strength, at the peak of our game, there was NOTHING we could not do.

We all assembled early this morning for the 1 ½ hour bus ride out to Mankato. It was really special watching us load both buses, knowing that today we would be working, dialoguing, and praying with ALL our friends and compatriots. We arrived at Bethany Lutheran College, which unfortunately had made the decision to be closed, silencing, and fearful. We stood vigil, one east Rider, one west Rider, and so on, on two long stretches of sidewalk outside the school gates. We held poster-sized photos of scenes from our travels, both of welcome and of rejection. We stood in solidarity with a common message to the students and administration of Bethany Lutheran, that being: What is the Christian response – love, truth, and peace, or silence and rejection?

But even with the wonder and joy of all being together again, we were blessed by the fact that we did not stand alone as Riders at this vigil. We were joined by supportive community members and students from other local schools, in ones and two, in trickles that became a mighty stretch of humanity, until at 12:10 when we all stepped onto campus, to bring our message of inclusion, we were a sight to see. Our line was long and strong. We covered the large grassy field separating us from the school. There were close to 100 people who stepped in solidarity and love onto that grass at the same time, and this vision is something that I will carry in my heart forever.

We were met and turned away from campus loudly and harshly by police officers. Those few of us holding the 10 poster pictures kept going, walking forward when told to stop. They walked toward the school, toward the students waiting for this message, until they were placed under arrest, then knelt in prayer. The rest of us stood silent watching their bravery as they were taken away in police cruisers, honoring their gift to Bethany, until we collectively began to sing, Go now in peace, go now in peace; may the love of God surround you, everywhere, everywhere, you may go.

And then like a dam breaking, we watched as the Bethany students crossed that same field and came to talk and dialogue with us. There were many clumps of students, Equality Riders and supporters all along the sidewalk. Not every conversation was perfect, not every viewpoint understood and agreed upon, but the dialogue happened. And it was good.

Afterward, we had two amazing meetings, first at Minnesota State University Mankato, and then at a local UCC church. We shared our trip via a slideshow with students at the MSU Mankato Pride Center, and had a wonderful time answering questions, talking about our experiences, and enjoying the company of one another and of our new friends. Then we drove down the hill to the church where we were greeted warmly and served a delicious meal. We then meet together in the chapel for a unique and inspiring church service welcoming us home. Pastors from five different denominations attended to welcome and affirm us. We sang, prayed and loved together. It was a great way to end our Ride, together and among friends.

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.

At 8:45 am we circled together in the basement of the hotel to center ourselves for our last stop as the West Bus of the Equality Ride. Many thoughts were running through my head, and this moment seemed incredibly surreal. That evening, after two months of separation, we would reunite with our East Bus counterparts. A few of us had volunteered to stay behind from the school and prepare for a celebratory reunion.

Northwestern College comprised the shortest welcoming stop, with only four hours on campus. There was a lunch and three presentations from us, and after each presentation a brief response from the college followed by small table discussion in the room.

I made pleasant small talk with my student and faculty hosts during lunch. It didn’t take long before I launched into my own personal story of coming out and eventually getting involved with Soulforce.

The first presentation after lunch was our progressive theology’s “What Would Jesus Do: Beyond the Catch Phrase”. A man named Nate then stood as the university’s response. He didn’t look much older than a student, and he wore a painfully forced smile. He began by agreeing that the Church had made some gross mistakes in its treatment of “homosexuals”. Nate’s voice was slow and tempered, as if every word was spoken with forced effort. Thus when he finally spoke about “moving away from homosexuality” I wasn’t surprised. This man could not hide the pain and suffering embedded in his eyes. It was like they stared without really seeing anything – whatever reality was being processed was a fixed perception that needed no vision. His words sounded hollow and rehearsed. As a homosexual, he said, he had been broken in his ability to love, but Jesus fixed all of that for him. After all “the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality,” he said, “the opposite of homosexuality is holiness.” His words were a physical punch to my heart and lungs. The air in my body escaped with a soft “oof” at the impact. This man had just said homosexuality was pure evil with one simple statement. I wanted to cry for him knowing that he had mistakenly believed this to be true about himself.

Two more ex-gay speakers followed Nate’s performance. I got the feeling that these two were relatively new ex-gays. They told awful stories of the destructive nature of their lives: addiction to porn, sex, drugs, and alcohol. They felt utterly alone, unloved and abandoned. Sadly, somehow, they had confused this with their sexual identity.

Only three spoke, but after they were done, it was apparent that the whole room was filled with ex-gays. As the day progressed, I had to address a multitude of issues at my table in the allotted fifteen minutes between the presentations, with each ending in more and more soul-wrenching discrimination. Those table discussion moments were too short, with too many unaddressed issues. I was compared to fornicaters, drug-users, those addicted to porn, and even pedophiles. Worse, I realized that many of the ex-gays present believed these lies and had internalized them, leading to their own deep suffering. My head began to hurt as I recognized the depth of the confusion and pain that surrounded me.

Before long, I was numbly shaking hands and saying goodbye. Many people thanked me, but their lips said one thing and their eyes another. Once most of my table had said their thanks and left, a lingering girl approached me. She did not smile. Her eyes were filled with what I can only call fear and an indelible sadness. “Thank you,” she said taking my hand in hers. “Thank you for coming to this school.” I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she walked away from me. My heart had stopped beating. She turned her head back before walking out of the room and our eyes met again for a shared moment that left an eternal mark on my soul.

My heart broke in two as I thought of those LGBT Northwestern students who had emailed us or passed us notes asking us to pray for and remember them in confidentiality. If four hours at this school could have the effect it did on me, I couldn’t imagine what going to Northwestern College as a student must do to those who are closeted. I wanted to scream in fury, but I instead opened my heart and mind to prayer. Dear Creator, bless these students. Truly, they are the reason we do this work.

I’m thankful this school was last for our bus. It made the East Bus homecoming all the more sweet and wonderful. But, more importantly, it set my soul restless. I will never find rest now until there is justice for all. Even though this ride draws to a close, I know that my life as an activist has only begun.

Pulling into Ellendale presented a very ominous feeling. I had already begun to get butterflies while driving on the country highways surrounding the town. Although much further north, the area reminded me of where I grew up. The day before our stop at the school, we arrived in the town of 1500.

On arrival in Ellendale, we had scheduled a community outreach event at the only location we could find to host it–the steakhouse next to our motel. Being one of the vegans on the trip, this was a very comical situation for me. After meeting a few local community members and the director of the county emergency services, who was very worried for our safety while in town, we decided to walk to the university to get an idea of what the next day would look like.

My hometown of Drexel, MO is somewhere that I find it very hard to visit. Often people I knew in high school will avoid me if I see them there, and make it a point not to talk to me. I, being one of the few out gay people from Drexel, have a somewhat infamous reputation in the town. Often times I will hear through the grapevine negative things about myself from people I have never met. This is relevant because the city of Ellendale is nearly a mirror image of Drexel. Trinity Bible College is located in the exact same spot as the school in which I spent the majority of my young life.

We arrived on foot to see how the school would be set up. We were given a small fenced area on the edge of campus which was our “free speech zone.” All of the streets surrounding us were barricaded off from traffic.

The next day we readied ourselves for the campus visit. Several students from the University of South Dakota involved with the reconciling campus ministry Coffee Loft had knitted nine prayer shawls, one for each of the nine colors of the original pride flag, and to represent the nine gifts of the Spirit. We planned to present these to the University. I was entrusted with the gift of prophecy.

We vigiled in silence for most of the morning. We held hands. Some of us prayed. Some of us thought. Some of us hoped. We had been greeted by the Vice President in the morning, who had told us that the students had neither been told to talk to us, nor to ignore us–that it was of their own volition if they wished to enter into dialogue with us. We found out the next day through the local newspaper that this was not the case. The students had been told not to leave campus. The VP also stood in between the students and the Equality Riders throughout most of the vigil, making it very awkward for any student who did want to talk to us.

After we held a short ceremony blessing each one of the shawls, we handed them to two students from USD and one of our Equality Riders. These three women carried the shawls onto campus, intending to place them at the foot of the chapel cross and to continue to pray. Shortly after stepping onto campus, they were met with administration and law enforcement who took them away, but not before they could lay the shawls out, forming a rainbow on the lawn of the Trinity Bible College campus.

We stayed in vigil formation long after our friends were arrested. Watching this happen, I had a flood of emotions rush through me. I realized that I felt as if I were back in Drexel. I grew up in this same atmosphere, around similar people, in a town that was very much the same as Ellendale. On that vigil line, I was opening myself up, I was presenting myself honestly and fully, to tell them that I was human, deserving of respect and love. And I was met with a fence, a physical barrier between us. I took all of this into myself, and wept. I cried for the majority of the time that we remained in the vigil line.

We left campus and marched to the library, where we presented the librarian with a gift of books on various social justice and queer issues. I hope that the kids in that town who need those books find them, because I know I was one of them, and I have no doubt that had my brother and sister not supported me while coming out, one of those books could have saved my life.

I know this blog is getting exceptionally long, but I cannot end it without mentioning the Red Rooster coffeehouse in Aberdeen, SD. I only wish I had a haven like that while growing up. We held a community outreach event at the Red Rooster after our school visit. It has been one of the few stops on this trip in which I have felt like I could be myself completely. It is truly a gift that places like that are available in a climate so hostile to anyone who is different than the majority.