Deconstructing from fundamentalism finally allowed me to authentically love my brother who is gay: Part 1

Content note: child abuse, homophobia, forced outing, suicidal ideation, religious and spiritual abuse

By Whiltierna Wolfe

It’s June again. This past Pride Month in 2022, I wrote this about my brother. Now more than ever, I feel it’s imperative to humanize the LGBTQIA community after so much hate.

It breaks my heart into pieces to see such carnage unfold before our very eyes. It reminds me of how important Pride Month was and how every month should be Pride Month, especially when love needs to win over hate so badly right now. 

Pride Month is a time to recognize our LGTBQIA friends and loved ones and celebrate their lives and loves. Pride Month is the celebration of diversity, freedom from overshadowing stigmas, and from having to hide who you really are and who you really love. We do this in the hopes of expelling myth, absolving manipulative guilt, casting a light upon prejudice and hate, and to fight for equity and equality for all people, but especially for our LGTBQIA communities who have lived too long in the shadow of political, social, and religious suspicion, and shame. (A shit-ton of shame, to be quite honest here.) 

In the month of June and in the months since, I find myself reflective and contemplative, but, also, I am very cautious — and, yes, a little sad, sometimes. My thoughts linger on someone specific whenever the issue of sexual orientation and gender identity are in the spotlight. When I intentionally give these thoughts space to land for more than a moment (before I would usually brush them off for my own peace of mind), my head and heart are flooded with all the same pain and regret that I’ve tried to escape.

If I am brave enough, sometimes I am able to allow these thoughts to reveal themselves without a buffer, and, if I let them, my meditations draw out my own tendency toward avoidance and cowardice. All the ways I have participated in the lie and enabled the naysayers in their prejudice by staying out of the fight and being silent bring me no peace — and it shouldn’t, because I must not let myself become complacent. At times like this, I must force myself to face the truth and endure the memories for someone else’s sake.

Someone I love dearly is gay, but he’s not free to show it or talk about it freely, especially not in his own family of origin. For most of the important people in his life, this dear man has to pretend he is not gay.

He has to compartmentalize his life to keep others comfortable in their religious ignorance. I am left to wonder: why must it be so? The family of origin I mentioned are all predominantly Independent Fundamental Baptists — a group of legalistic, religiously enslaved Christians known for their cruelty, self-centeredness, abusive patriarchy, and deeply rooted political views and prejudices.

If there is one religion in which you do not want to “come out” as anything even remotely related to anything LGBTQIA, it would be the IFB. God forbade it and woe unto you! Frankly, an antelope would be safer in a pond full of starving crocodiles. 

And the gay man I spoke of? He is my brother.

My baby brother, to be exact, the youngest of five kids and the only boy.

I will call him “Shane” to protect his privacy. He says he just knew he was different from an early age. Probably by age three or four, he said. This is when he began to wear dresses, confessing that he wanted to be a girl, like his sisters.

For this, Shane, though still only an innocent child, was ungraciously judged and abused. I remember how he was spanked repeatedly, impatiently, angrily, as my parents tried to purge this “evil” from their child and rid their son of this “strange,” unfamiliar (and supposedly “sinful”) behavior. They failed.

By age fifteen, Shane knew for certain he was gay, despite 16 years in church and Sunday School, youth group, and music ministries. By 20, Shane was pretty much living on his own, working full time, making his own life… and dating men. 

He told his friends and two of his four sisters about being gay, but he still hadn’t found the courage or a good enough reason to make the announcement to the rest of our IFB family.

In fact, my brother never got the chance to tell our parents and others on his own terms, when he was ready.

Someone who thought himself the savior and defender of the family cruelly and intentionally took that choice away from him. Shane was outed by our uncle. 

Somehow, this awful, arrogant man — our IFB father’s younger brother, who took great delight in needling and challenging his older brother — cornered my three younger sisters during a family visit and demanded to know “the truth” about our brother.

By then, I was a newly married woman and had moved away from home. I wasn’t with them, or I would have told my uncle to go to hell and stay there. My three younger sisters were trapped, badgered, and bullied into confessing that, yes, Shane was, in fact, gay — they told me so themselves.

No one blamed them for what happened. You didn’t say no to your elders, especially not to the men in your own family.

Oh, but it didn’t end there. Our newly informed Southern Baptist uncle, armed with this shocking truth, took this information, and called our father just a day or so later. My parents later told me that he broke the news to dear-old-dad insensitively.

“You need to get a hold of your family and get your children back in line, older brother,” he said. “Your wife, your daughters, and your son have all been lying to you. Are you aware that Shane is gay?!”

No holds barred. He took it upon himself to interfere in our family’s private business and decided he would “stop the nonsense” himself by telling our father the truth.

It didn’t work out as planned. My father, while simultaneously incensed and stunned, couldn’t do a damn thing about it, even if he wanted to — my brother was a grown man who could make his own choices. Unsatisfied with just wreaking havoc on my brother and the rest of us, my uncle proceeded to inform our entire family — our grandparents, aunts, and uncles — of my brother’s dreaded and ungodly “homosexuality.”

In some weird twist of fate, a year or so later, my brother ended up working construction with this uncle and a cousin from another branch of the IFB family tree while trying to save money for college.

They made his life a living hell trying to “work the gay out of him.”

My brother, a classically trained pianist, almost wrecked his hands doing crazy hard labor and ridiculous chores with tools not meant for the jobs he was doing, and without the training to use them properly. They deliberately set him up to fail, repeatedly.

Our uncle and cousin went out of their way to make his life difficult, tormenting and taunting him and exhausting him in every way they could —mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. They put him in tough situations he couldn’t just get out of just to shame and humiliate him at every turn.

They disturbed his sleep. They shorted his pay constantly. Then, my uncle made him pay for things that were supposed to be included on the job. Never letting up, this continued for months, until my brother was beaten down, miserable, and almost defeated.

All in the name of “Christian love” and “faithfulness” to God and His Word. 

Shane told me a few years later, after he escaped their abuse and had time to process, he wanted to die at one point.

These two “Christian” men actually made my brother wish he was dead, and sometimes, I wonder if that really was their underhanded goal, whether they were aware of it or not themselves — to force Shane to submit to the IFB way of life or commit suicide. Either way, their scheme to rehabilitate a backslidden youth didn’t work.

Shane wouldn’t give in. Not that he didn’t want to, but he literally couldn’t.

No one LGTBQIA can just change their sexual orientation or identity on a whim to please others.

My brother couldn’t comply with my uncle’s demands no matter how awful the man was being or how hard he pushed. It just doesn’t work like that, though Christians in the IFB and other church denominations still deny it, even with all the scientific, medical, psychological, and biological evidence to support that LGBTQIA people are born this way.

And Shane was still gay. 

Read more: Part 2