Gay At Wheaton
Steve Slagg
I like dudes. There, I said it. I am a male student at Wheaton and I’m exclusively attracted to other guys. This essay is about having to be both of those things at the same time.
This is not my first time being publicly open about my sexuality at Wheaton. I started coming out as a freshman, telling close friends and family after years of silence. Soon I felt the need to talk to my floor, Fischer Five East, and several campus groups I was involved in. As word spread about my willingness to talk, I was approached by The Record to do an interview, and in the spring semester of my freshman year it was printed, with my name and face appearing under the headline “Gay at Wheaton.” It was a terrible picture. I looked like a missing child on the back of a milk carton.
That’s how I became Wheaton’s gay poster boy as a freshman. Since then, campus turnover has taken its toll and only a handful of people know anymore. And that’s been fine with me.
Yet I’ve found myself wishing I had had more to say when I gave that interview as a freshman. I was eager to share my experience with the world then, but I hardly had any experience to share. Since then, I’ve lived in the Wheaton community, attempting to reconcile my sexuality with my faith, for three years. I’ve gotten to know dozens of others here in the same situation. And I’ve gotten to know Wheaton—the ways it’s both the worst and the best place in the world for someone like me. Now I look at the awkward kid staring out at me from a three-year-old Record and wish he knew any of what I know now.
So even though it’s nobody’s business, I now find myself writing to whoever wants to read, once again “Gay at Wheaton” for all to see. My intentions are three-fold. I want to tell my story to the campus at large, most of which has no idea what it’s like for its same-sex attracted fellows, or even that it has them. I also realize that there are more students than even I’m aware of who are at some point on the spectrum of gay experience and could benefit from hearing my story as well. Finally, I hope to open the conversation on the subject of homosexual students at Wheaton, a subject I’ve found to be conspicuously absent, despite much talk of homosexuality.
Rather than attempt to tell my story chronologically, I will arrange it topically. I’ve found that the most difficult part of reconciling homosexuality with Christian faith is that there is no shared language to describe the experience. No one has gone before and named the specific trials, questions, and problems we face. The language we do have to choose from is weighed down with political and theological baggage we don’t completely understand.[1]
Because of this lack of shared language, as often as not the homosexual Christian has to come up with his or her own language to speak about his or her experiences. After wrestling with a problem for months, all I may have to show for it is one sentence where there used to be confusion. What follows are the results of three of my battles at Wheaton, one sentence at a time.
The first sentence is this:
We exist.
The most harmful and pervasive lie I’ve encountered at Wheaton has been that homosexual students either don’t exist at Wheaton or aren’t worth considering. Outrageously enough, I believed this lie for most of my freshman year.
I came to Wheaton desperate for answers, knowing my faith and sexuality seemed to be at odds, hoping I would find Wheaton to be a place that was ready to help me answer some of those questions. I didn’t even know what such a place would look like at the time. I think I hoped I would find an environment where people felt safe to be open about their sexuality and where someone more experienced than me could take me aside and tell me what it was I was supposed to do with myself. I didn’t quite find that.
What I did find was a wonderful community of mostly straight friends who admitted their ignorance of my struggle, but promised they would be alongside me no matter what. I also met several other same-sex attracted students. What I didn’t find was answers or even any well-worn route toward them. The only thing we all had in common was confusion—we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, and nobody else was telling us. There seemed to be no protocol for us.
Eventually, one of my gay friends told me about a support group at the Counseling Center for same-sex attracted students. I went, hoping this would be a step toward answers. Every Friday, five of us sat in a circle and talked about our experiences with two mostly silent grad student practicum counselors.
It’s hard to describe the way I felt about those meetings. I looked forward to them every week—I’d never been able to talk candidly with others in my situation before. At the same time, though, I felt worse after every session. The more we talked, the more we all felt irrevocably isolated from the rest of the Wheaton community—holed up in the counseling center on Friday mornings, crying because we liked guys. I was even more confused than I’d been before.
Meanwhile, outside our little room in the Counseling Center, everybody at Wheaton was talking about homosexuality. In April, a gay activist group called Soulforce visited our campus as part of its Equality Ride, which visited dozens of institutions across the country with moral policies it viewed as “oppressive” to homosexuals. In preparation, the college hosted speakers, forums and events to prepare the student body for their visit. Ex-gay speakers testified in chapel about their miraculous changes in orientation, giving anecdotes about their current spouses and kids. The provost and other administrators took a closer look at Scripture passages that prohibit homosexual behavior.
On one level, this was exactly what I’d been waiting for. Wheaton was suddenly a flurry of information about my struggle, and some of it was extremely helpful. But at the same time, the attention on the issue was extremely alienating for those of us at those Friday morning meetings. Despite the floodlights being thrown on the issue of homosexuality, we the homosexual students were still in the dark. Not one of the sessions reached out to same-sex attracted students or illuminated our struggle to straight students. We were occasionally mentioned as a liability—the concern seemed to be that one of us would hear Soulforce’s rhetoric and be won over to the wrong side of a moral debate.
This is one example of a pattern I’ve seen at Wheaton. Every once in awhile, like during the Soulforce visit, the issue of homosexuality flares up on campus, and this usually serves as a valuable time for the campus community to revisit its stance on homosexual behavior and address Wheaton’s place in a wider moral debate. I won’t argue that this is unimportant. Of course homosexuality is a moral issue the entire campus—gay and straight—needs to be addressing.
But I want to argue that this type of discussion is always harmful to homosexual students unless coupled with an acknowledgment of our struggle and an active attempt to reach out to our needs. The reason for this is that for us, the issue is one of self-identification. The moral issue for us is not just an issue—it’s an identity crisis. And we can’t be expected to deal with those questions until more urgent needs of community and self-identification have been met. I’ll describe more what this looks like in my third section.
As for Soulforce, they came and went, and I felt unsatisfied by the whole experience. They claimed that Wheaton’s policy prohibiting homosexual behavior was oppressive, but I was unconvinced. Regardless of what I may or may not have believed, given my soup of ethical confusion at the time, I knew that the last thing I needed to be doing was having sex with anybody, and I was glad for the paper restriction to hold me to this conviction. Further, the main purpose of the Wheaton prep sessions for Soulforce’s visit was to convince us that Wheaton’s stance is Scriptural, and thus not oppressive, and I was mostly convinced.
Still, what about the six of us wasting away in the Counseling Center? If the Soulforce visit hadn’t prompted someone to help us figure out our situation, what would? As the group disbanded at the end of my freshman year, I concluded that nothing would. I felt I had reached the glass ceiling, and from there on out I was on my own. We may exist, but barely.
It took another year and a tragedy to gain a second sentence:
Wheaton is oppressive.
In June 2007, the summer before my junior year, my friend Stephen stepped in front of a train in Germany and killed himself.
Stephen had been the first gay student at Wheaton to approach me after I came out. He was a year older than me, and had been coming out to people for a couple months when we met. He was one of the five from the counseling center group, and was the closest thing to a mentor I had during my first year at Wheaton. He was as confused as I was, but he was older and smarter and he cared about me. When he died, it felt like I had lost a comrade in battle.
Stephen and I had talked numerous times about a previous gay Wheaton student, also named Steven, who had committed suicide at a train crossing in the 80s or 90s. We wondered if he was an urban legend, but after Stephen died, a friend sent me a scan of an article about Steven in The Record. It had a picture of him and friends’ remembrances. He was a poet and was in Workout. He killed himself near campus, at the President Street train crossing, in March 1988.
The danger of stories like this is that after awhile they become legendary. The 1988 Steven has achieved campus lore status, and after just two years, Stephen is approaching that status too. But for those of us who knew one of these men or shared their struggles, these stories are far too close to home. In my time at Wheaton, I have known probably two dozen gay students, and almost all of them shared with me that they were (or had recently been) suicidal.
I have written and re-written that sentence, and I can’t seem to make it painful enough. As it is, it sounds like a statistic, because I can’t share every story. But these people are my friends; they are dozens of my friends. And Stephen was my friend. Of course, Stephen was everyone’s friend. His death was a wake up call to many who had no idea they were so close to someone in so much pain. Chances are, my friends are also your friends.
I remember talking to one of my friends who was at the end of his rope one particular evening, then walking home, waiting for a train at the President crossing, where Steven died twenty years ago. I didn’t know him, but I have seen his face in The Record I have saved as a PDF on my computer. And I did know Stephen. When I remember his face, I see it exhausted, across from me at a Saga table, or grinning, cracking me up with poetry about Kant. I have to train myself to remember him that way, as my friend, and not as a legend.
Waiting for the train that night, exhausted, I asked God why so many of my friends wished they didn’t exist. Sometimes it seems like we’ve been told the lie that we don’t exist for so long, it was bound to start coming true. In many ways, these two deaths, separated by twenty years, are nothing more than isolated tragedies, each with its own set of circumstances. But for me, they are a reminder that “We exist” is a sentence we have to fight for. Dozens of people on campus—your friends and my friends—are losing themselves to the lie that this isn’t true. The only thing that sets these two men apart is that they did the act.
That’s really all I can say about oppression at Wheaton. Homosexual students aren’t actively oppressed. We are welcomed, as long as we don’t have sex, just like all Wheaton students. When we share our struggles, we are usually well received. And yet so many of us are wasting away under the burden of an oppressive, deadly silence.
The argument will be made that depression and suicide rates are higher among homosexuals across the board, not just at Wheaton. And it’s true, a radical paradigm shift like coming to grips with one’s sexuality, especially in the Christian faith, is extremely stressful for anyone, and a lowered emotional state is par for the course, at least for awhile. It’s not right, it’s often tragic, and it’s nobody’s fault.
But I’d like to argue that it could be made so much easier for gay Wheaton students. As impossible as it may be to believe here, thousands of gay Christians outside Wheaton (and some inside Wheaton) live relatively well-adjusted lives, doing the hard work of reconciling their sexuality with their faith. They do this in community with other Christians, both gay and straight. They deal with the issue the way normal people deal with normal issues, alongside other normal, fallen Christians with normal, fallen, Christian issues.
That’s the truth that kills the lie, the truth I wanted to hear my first day at Wheaton, the truth that needs to be shouted from the rooftops so every closeted gay Christian can hear it. The reason the silence is so oppressive is that it has hidden this truth under a bushel, hidden it from generations of Wheaton students, gay and straight, except those who were willing to search for it like some stupid gay holy grail. Put more simply, it’s my third sentence:
You are not alone.
I learned this truth by mistake. As I said earlier, when I came out I found myself in a wonderful community of mostly straight friends who promised to stick with me. And they did. That community, over and against the support group, has been what has made my Wheaton experience positive. Though it may be obvious, it’s important to say that that community was not centered on my sexuality. What bound us together, ironically, was grief—for Stephen, for other loved ones and losses—out of which grew celebration with and for one another in our different, normal struggles.
The other community I discovered accidentally was Church of the Resurrection. At Rez (so called by its members) I found the healthy, intentional community Wheaton is not. While Rez has at times been engaged in what it considers a moral battle over the issue of homosexuality, this focus is coupled with an active and ongoing reach within the church to its same-sex attracted members. Rez actively ushers its homosexual members into communities of discipleship where they are free to be transparent about their struggles just like everybody else.
These communities have two main elements: community among those who are same-sex attracted, and community between those who are same-sex attracted and those who are not. In my experience, both of these elements are necessary for healthy existence as a same-sex attracted Christian.
To define what this type of community would look like at Wheaton, I first have to describe what it isn’t. First, it’s not a support group. As I stated earlier, the Counseling Center support group I was in placed me in an isolated community with other same-sex attracted students, and we mostly reinforced each others’ feelings of alienation.
Second, it’s not a dating service. Wherever two or more same-sex attracted students are gathered, people worry they will have sex with each other. This simple fact is the biggest hindrance to community between homosexual students. Same-sex attracted students are afraid to seek each other out because of this fear. Administrators and faculty are afraid to encourage this type of community because of this fear. The clandestine, underground attitude Wheaton has toward homosexuality perpetuates this problem. The solution is openness and accountability both among gay students, and between gay students and their straight peers. This is how straight students maintain chastity, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for us.
Finally, the community I’m describing isn’t a gay-straight alliance. Community between homosexual Christians and heterosexual Christians is community between Christians. We meet not to celebrate our differences but to remember that we are the same. When I share about my sexuality with straight men, we find that our experiences are more similar than different.
Since Wheaton isn’t a church, this community can’t be enacted here the way it is at Church of the Resurrection and other churches. Still, I would argue that some type of intentional, organized community that strives to be what I’ve described above is possible and necessary here. It would likely be a student led, informal but regular meeting of straight and gay students, focused on swapping experiences, answering questions about sexuality, and seeking out more experienced individuals who can point them to answers.
It is most important, however, to seek out this type of community as an attitude of openness and awareness among the student body. Straight students, remember that you are surrounded by gay Christians whether you know it or not, and be open to hear their stories. Gay students, be open and genuine, wherever you are in your experience.
I said before that Wheaton was both the best and the worst place for me to be a same-sex attracted Christian. And I meant it. It hasn’t been easy, but I wouldn’t trade my Wheaton experience for anything. The resources here for someone like me are unparalleled—people here take their faith very seriously, and I’ve finally (though it took until my senior year) started to find answers to questions I’ve been asking since I first realized I liked guys. I’ve caught a glimpse of a Wheaton that is the best place for someone like me, and I dream of a Wheaton community that makes its resources known rather than hiding them in an oppressive silence.
Steve Slagg is a senior IDS major from Montgomery City, MO. He is in a rock band that needs a name—e-mail him with ideas.
Resources
To any students at Wheaton who experience same-sex attraction: I may not have met you, though I pray for you often. I don’t know for sure where you are in your search for answers, but I want you to know you’re not alone. Hundreds of us have gone before you, navigating faith and sexuality in the waters of Wheaton, and made it out unscathed, or better—improved and thankful for the experience.
Don’t be fooled—reconciling homosexuality with Christian faith is a lifelong, difficult task. But it isn’t impossible. Though I hardly addressed the work itself in this essay, (I’m only just starting that work myself) I included a list of resources I’ve found helpful, including some people with much more experience than me. Still, I would welcome an email.
Chad Thompson – www.lovinghomosexuals.com
Loving Homosexuals as Jesus Would – the first place to start for any same-sex attracted Christian
Disputed Mutability – www.disputedmutability.wordpress.com
Ex-gay woman’s blog – the best online resource I’ve found
John Heard – www.johnheard.blogspot.com
Celibate gay Catholic speaker and blogger from Australia
Eve Tushnet – www.eve-tushnet.blogspot.com
Celibate lesbian Catholic blogger
College Jay – www.collegejay.blogspot.com
Celibate, same-sex attracted college student
Gay Christian Network – gaychristian.net
Online community for discussion between ex-gay, celibate gay and practicing gay Christians.
[1] In this essay, I use the phrases “gay,” “homosexual,” and “same-sex attracted” interchangeably. Each of these phrases has a set of political or cultural connotations I’d rather not use, but they’re the words we have. My definition for each is this: one who is sexually attracted, exclusively or not, to the same gender.
Spring 2008
Thoughts from the Editor
[Narrative]
Cachúpin - Christine Kindberg
Prologues and Prayers - Alyssa Keysor
Grape Juice Grace - Briana Bryant
[Essay]
Gay At Wheaton - Steve Slagg
Made In Cambodia - Sarah Baggé
Racial Reconciliation Reconsidered - Ian Yue
The Magician and His Apprentices - Josh Carr
Vodka and Evangelism - Johnny Snyder
[Review]
Rorschach in Reverse - Daniel Leonard
Sly and the Family Stone - Michael Hahalyak
Tomorrow's Contemporary - David Warren
[Poem]
eating in the reflection of a television
Lectio Divina- Jordan Konkol
Flood
NO SALE NO POEM - Dayna Christensen
Summer with Two Deaths and a Peach - Peter Strand
A Prayer and Christmas Dinner - Benjamin J. Chase
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