When you grow up in South and your family is Baptist and you realize you're gay, you have problems. But they are not always the problems you’d expect - something this beautiful passage from gay author Mark Doty’s memoir, Heaven’s Coast, captures as well as anything I’ve read:
I grew up in two religions.
The first one – comforting, strange, rigorous, in its way – was comprised of an astonishing and lovely set of images. It was a religion given to me primarily by my grandmother, whose East Tennessee faith had the kind of solidity and rock-depth upon which Jesus must have intended to found His church. She was Peter’s rock, unshakable, holding us all up – or at least holding me up…. I loved her with all my heart, and everything that was hers: the green rocking chair, a fruitcake tin filled with swirled peppermint candies, the Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red, like holidays on a calendar. She would set me up on her lap and, rocking all the while, read Bible verses to me. I’m not sure if I remember especially her readings from Revelation or if it simply feels to me now, whenever I hear someone mention a phrase like “last days” or “apocalypse,” that the scent of her – lavender, peppermint, and clean old dresses – and the texture of her clothes, the Bible’s leatherette cover and onionskin pages, are forever commingled with those words; some essence of her imbues them.
It was she who presented me with my first religion, which was the religion of images, and they were given to me in Bible verses and in the songs we sang on the porch swing, summer nights: the sweet chariot coming to carry us home, the moon turning to blood, the angels sounding the trump so that all the dead would clap hands and arise, the thin veil of this world – thin as her sprig-scattered skirt! – parting at last and opening into a world we need not fear, though it would be awesome, a world made true and just and bright and eternally resonant as the songs we sang….
I don’t think I had any awareness of the second religion, the codes of explanation and prohibition, until after her death….
