Via Ex-Gay Watch, I read this story about Levi Kreis, a gay musician whose only desire was, as he writes “to sing Christian music and be the purest vessel for God that I could be.” At 15 he secretly checked himself into one of Exodus ex-gay programs in order to, again as he puts it, “heal the homosexual in me”.

Well, you know where that’s going. He eventually came out, was dropped by his record label and expelled from the Christian college he was attending. Love the sinner.

There’s a passage in that interview that moved me deeply. It comes where Kreis discusses the impact seeing a performance of Del Shore’s Southern Baptist Sissies. What artists do for the world that they find themselves in, they do even more urgently for one another…

Southern Baptist Sissies’ was the sole catalyst in putting years of pain behind me. Embracing the thought of being an abomination to God and an embarrassment to my family instilled within me the heaviest, darkest self-hatred I could imagine. Walking in that theater one day, having no idea what I was about to see, I found myself in a fetal position in my chair crying uncontrollably. I had no idea there were other young men out there that had experienced the same journey as I had.

There is this hoary old bromide I would love to get my hands on and strangle, about how before an artist can produce great works that move people, they have to suffer. Paying your dues, as they say. It’s a lie. More often then not, the creative gift is strangled by great personal pain and suffering. It dies without ever being noticed. The one blessed with great creative gifts who manages to create something, anything, while in a state of great internal pain, does so in spite of it, not because of it.

“Del happened to be sitting behind me during my break down in the first act,” Levi continued. “He came to me during intermission to see if I was okay. After the show, he invited me to come in anytime and see the show as many times as it took for me to come to terms with my past. It was SBS that introduced to me the idea of a loving God; that helped me realize that I could actually love myself. The impact it had on me could never be accurately conveyed in words.

Creative gift or not, this is why our stories are so important. In telling them to the world we both heal ourselves, and one another. Don’t imagine you need a lot of talent to just tell your own story in your own voice, in your own way. Just put it out there. It will find someone to heal.

It might have to bounce off a few brick heads first though. In googling Southern Baptist Sissies…I came across this…

Shores, in an interview, said Southern Baptist Sissies, which won an award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), is about “love and acceptance” for homosexuals who “have felt excluded from the church, from the love of God because of the teachings and doctrines that were taught to us as children and beyond.” Shores, a homosexual activist, has said he was raised in a Southern Baptist church in Texas and attended Baylor University in Waco.

Shores described his play as ending “with the message of hope — that God loves us all, just as He created us.”

…

While the theme that God creates people to be homosexuals likely will be promoted in the film, it is unfounded, said Michael Dean, pastor of Travis Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, the site of a recent seminar on what the Bible says about homosexuality.

“The viewpoint that homosexual behavior is ‘natural’ for some persons cannot be supported by Scripture,” Dean said, noting that the behavior is regarded as sinful in both the Old and New Testaments. “But even if it were discovered that there is a genetic predisposition to homosexuality, that would not remove the sinfulness of the expressed behavior. Heterosexual desires are ‘natural,’ but are also sinful when expressed outside of a biblically defined marriage between a man and a woman.”

Dig it. Even if the reality is that homosexuals are born, not made, it’s still unnatural because scripture says it is. Reading that pure submission to dogma over reason put me immediately in mind of this passage from Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man:

It happens that there is a philosopher called Friedrich Hegel, whom I must confess I specifically detest. And I am happy to share that profound feeling with a far greater man, Gauss. In 1800 Hegel presented a thesis, if you please, proving that although the definition of planets had changed since the Ancients, there still could only be, philosophically, seven planets. Well, not only Gauss knew how to answer that: Shakespeare had answered that long before. There is a marvelous passage in King Lear, in which who else but the Fool says to the King: "The reason why the seven Starres are no mo then seven, is a pretty reason". And the King wags sagely and says: "Because they are not eight". And the Fool says: "Yes indeed, thou woulds’t make a good Foole". And so did Hegel. On 1 January 1801, punctually, before the ink was dry on Hegel’s dissertation, an eighth planet was discovered – the minor planet Ceres.

Never mind what nature reveals…what does scripture say? But in the end it isn’t even scripture that matters, but the word of the person who claims to be an authority on it. Or as Groucho Marx once said, “Who are you going to believe…me or your lying eyes?”

Shores told Baptist Press he does not anticipate that Southern Baptists will “stand up and applaud” the message of his forthcoming film, that of “love and acceptance that would include gays.”

But Stith said he believes Southern Baptists will respond biblically. “The most loving thing we can do for them is say that this is not what God wants for them, and that they need to live in obedience to His Word,” he said.

No, no Mr. Stith…not God’s word after all…but yours.  The reason why the seven Starres are no mo then seven, is a pretty reason…