Beyond Apologetics: Sexual Identity, Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Practice symposium, presentation by Darnell Moore
"Coming Out" or "Inviting In": Interrogating our Rhetoric and Rethinking our Pastoral Counseling Approaches with LGBTQ Brothers and Sisters
Lecture given by Darnell Moore at Phillips Theological Seminary Beyond Apologetics Symposium, February 15, 2010
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.