Untamed

A fundamentalist Christian organization recently announced that I was excommunicated from “the evangelical church.” I learned of this with great amusement. I felt like Kramer from Seinfeld when his boss tries to fire him from a job he never really had. “You can’t fire me,” Kramer says, baffled and defiant. “I don’t even really work here.”

I was talking to a friend about this and she said, “It’s so awful. Why can’t they understand that you were born this way? You can’t help it! How cruel to punish you for something you can’t even change.”

Hmmmmm, I thought. That’s not exactly it.

Sometimes we say things that we believe are loving but actually reveal our conditioning.

Things you can’t help are things you would help if you could.

If I could change my sexuality, I sure as hell wouldn’t. Sweet Jesus: I love sharing my life with a woman. I love how relentlessly we yearn to understand each other and how neither of us quits until we do. I love how we already do understand each other so well, because we are two women trying to free ourselves from the same cages. I love how our life together is one eternal conversation that we put on pause only to sleep.

I love having sex with my wife. I love the touches that are suggestions, and I love the moment we lock eyes and decide. I love how well we understand each other’s bodies, and I love the liquid velvet of her skin. I love the softness, intensity, patience, and generosity of the during, and I love the after—the time outside of time—when we lie in each other’s arms in silence and smile at the ceiling in relief and gratitude. I love how one of us inevitably giggles and says: Is this really our life?

I have been in a mixed-gender marriage and in a same-gender marriage. The same-gender marriage feels so much more natural to me, because there is no constant effort to bridge the gap between two genders that have been trained by our culture to love and live so differently. My wife and I are on the same side of the bridge already. Being married to Abby is arriving home after a long, cold, exhausting journey. She is the crackling fireplace, the shag rug, the couch I sink into, the blanket wrapped around me, and the jazz playing in the background that makes me shiver inside my blanket.

What I want to say is: What if I wasn’t born this way at all? What if I married Abby not just because I’m gay but because I’m smart? What if I did choose my sexuality and my marriage and they are simply the truest, wisest, most beautiful, most faithful, most divine decisions I’ve ever made in my entire life? What if I have come to see same-gender love as a really solid choice—just a brilliant idea? Something I would highly recommend?

And what if I demand freedom not because I was “born this way” and “can’t help it” but because I can do whatever I choose to do with my love and my body from year to year, moment to moment—because I’m a grown woman who does not need any excuse to live however I want to live and love whomever I want to love?

What if I don’t need your permission slip because I’m already free?