Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Derivations on a Theme -- Water Balloons

Trey Smith

For many years I was a right wing, God loving, God fearing, racist and homophobe. I hated homosexuals. I thought they were vile people whom God had given over to a reprobate mind. (Romans 1) As a pastor, I regularly preached against the sin of homosexuality. My words were caustic and inflammatory, not unlike most of my pastor friends.

The funny thing is I never personally knew any homosexuals. Oh, I have no doubt there were people in the congregations I pastored that were homosexual but they kept their head down lest they find themselves under the wrath of God and the pastor.

I maintained this approach towards homosexuality until the late 1990’s. Eventually, my political and religious views began to moderate, and over time I came to realize that my bigoted views were dishonoring to God and hurtful.

I came to see that homosexuals are normal, every day people that deserve the same civil rights as anyone else. I also came to see that what people do behind closed doors is no one’s business.
~ from Why Evangelicals Fear Kurt Hummel by Bruce Gerencser of The Way Forward ~
In looking back over our lives, most of us can single out a few episodes here and there which we feel ashamed of. Sometimes it has to do with being lazy or not sticking to our principles. At other times, the incident happens at a time when our thoughts or beliefs had yet to evolve to the place we are now. What I will share below is in terms of the latter.

Growing up, I was not exposed to homosexuality. There was no one I knew or suspected of being gay. It wasn't a subject I ever thought about. As far as I was concerned, everyone was heterosexual.

It wasn't until high school that I even became aware that some people had sexual interests in members of their own gender. Since these sorts of interests made no sense to me whatsoever, I thought such people must be deviants. I guess we could say that I bought into the evangelical Christian depiction of homosexuality as a sin against God.

With this background in mind, I attended a Key Club district convention with many of my classmates in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was held in a ritzy downtown hotel. Unfortunately, our club's adviser had tarried a bit in sending in our required paperwork and, because of his tardiness, our group didn't get to stay in the ritzy hotel; we stayed at the Grady Manning Motor Motel, a few blocks away.

There were about 20 of us from our high school and we were spread out two-to-a-room on the 5th and 6th floors of what, I think, was a 9 floor motel. The building was far older than the one where the convention was being held and it was serviced by two noisy elevators.

Two of our members -- big wrestling jocks -- became all freaked out over an encounter they had in the lobby of our motel. These boys saw two "girls" and, being the egotistical jocks that they were, decided to hit on them. Somewhere along in the process of flirting, both of my comrades realized they were wooing drag queens!

They raced up the stairs -- they were so freaked out that they forgot that they could use the elevator -- to the floor my room was on and, within minutes, their sordid tale was disseminated to every member of our group. It was soon discovered by another member of our group that the bar in the basement of our motel was a gay bar!

Well, the majority of our crew headed over to the ritzy hotel for some evening activities. Not surprisingly, anti-social me chose not to go. My plan was to stay in my room and read. As luck would have it, my roommate (Roger) wasn't a very social bloke either and, after going with the group over to the festivities, changed his mind and returned to our room.

So, Roger and I spent the evening hanging out together. At some point, we realized that the Greyhound Bus Depot was right across the street and this gave us a crazy idea. I don't recall WHY we had two or three sacks of balloons with us, but we decided it would be fun to throw and/or drop water balloons on the departing buses from the window of our room.

We engaged in this juvenile activity for more than one hour. We hooted and hollered each time we nailed a bus with a water balloon. At a later point, we noticed that a large number of drag queens was gathering below us on the sidewalk near our motel. While throwing water balloons at large buses was fun, we decided it would be far funner to drop them on drag queens!

And that's what we did.

The drag queens did not see the "fun" in our activity. They screamed at us from the sidewalk below and, at some juncture, told us that one of them had called the police. This sent us into hysterics because we figured that IF the police arrived, they might pin medals on us!

Looking back on this episode, I still see quite a bit of humor in it. What strikes me as funny -- in a very pathetic sort of way -- is that we were so scared of the drag queens. Almost every member of our high school group acted as if we thought that, if a drag queen so much as touched one of us, we would instantly become a homosexual!

Fortunately, my thinking has evolved much like Bruce's. It is for this reason that I am ashamed of the fact that I ridiculed people I didn't know. I dropped water balloons on them without ever considering how this made them feel. I am now painfully aware that it was a terrible and petty thing to do.

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