[Webmaster's note: This article appeared in edited form in the May 21, 2001 issue of America, a Jesuit magazine. It appears on the PFLAG-Talk website by permission of the author. -- JL]

by William Glenn

Several years ago, while sitting at my desk early one morning at Continuum, an AIDS agency in San Francisco I served as executive director, the phone rang. The caller identified herself as a secretary to the First Lady; she asked if I would come to the White House for a community leaders' forum later that month. As simple as if she were a friend asking me to go for coffee that afternoon. After my initial startle, I said, Why, of course! As you might imagine, I was honored, felt privileged, understood this as an obligation, and was very excited.

Fast forward to several weeks ago. My friend Robert Hotz, the president at Creighton Prep, the Jesuit high school that I attended in Omaha, NE, where my younger brother Greg teaches, called me one morning and asked if I would return to Prep and speak to the faculty about my experience of being a gay student. He asked, too, if I would suggest what I thought Prep might do to assist its gay students. Well, again I felt privileged, I was honored, I understood this as an obligation. But I was not excited. The heart pounding this invitation generated was intense. The hand that held the phone was trembling!

I hadn't been back in that school in 35 years. I had been to Prep's gym for Christmas Midnight Mass, and I have been at the track watching my brother John and my nephew Brian practice football, but I had never stepped foot in that building since the day I graduated in 1966. The belly of the beast for me! And several weeks later, there I was.

In thinking about what to say to these women and men, teachers at this privileged school, I knew I wanted to say one perfect thing that would forever change the way all gay students are treated. But there is no one perfect thing to say, and I am one imperfect human being. I decided I would tell them who I am, a bit of my experience, some of what I have come to know, and what I believe is possible for them to better serve all of their students, particularly the gay students, at Prep.

After graduating from Prep in 1966, I spent four years at its mother institution, Creighton University. In 1970, I joined the Society of Jesus where I spent the next ten years in a variety of ministries, most satisfyingly as a scholastic at another prep school run by the Society of Jesus.

It was also as a Jesuit that I befriended alcohol. I got sober in 1978, and for a multitude of reasons but none because I did not greatly value Ignatius' vision, I decided the following year to leave the Society. I subsequently was principal at a black elementary school and vice principal of a large multicultural Catholic girls' high school in San Francisco. For the past seventeen years I have been a psychotherapist, working in private practice, in hospital-based substance abuse treatment centers, and particularly, in the AIDS epidemic. From 1993-1999, I led an agency that cares for dual-diagnosed individuals with disabling HIV disease in San Francisco's rough Tenderloin.

Two years ago, in response to an ancient call, one that stirred within me before I matriculated from Prep in 1962, I left my formal work in the epidemic and focused on my interior journey. Last year I made a pilgrimage to Ireland, where, in a small cottage on an island off County Mayo, I spent 30 days in silence, working the Spiritual Exercises, saying again yes to the One whose call is irresistible. Nowadays I spend my time in a ministry of prayer and of presence with those discarded by culture.

But back to Prep.

As I was preparing my remarks for that afternoon's talk, I was aware that I was not the 52 year-old man that I appear to be. I was again the sixteen-year old boy, the sophomore of 1963, a gay boy, thrown back in time. I re-experienced my old life, with feelings and memories that echo within and haunt me still.

Though I have butched up pretty good, I was a sissy boy, and Prep was no place for sissies. After a difficult freshman year, I begged my parents to transfer me to the local public high school. That request was, for my father, tantamount to heresy. Little did he know how ashamed and deeply isolated I felt inside, while a student in this revered high school. I lived in constant fear that I would be exposed, found out. I lived in constant dread that I would be discovered as this despised thing whose name I did not know, but whose negative effects I could see and feel all around me, mostly deep inside me.

All was not bad, of course. I had some wonderful teachers: Jesuits and laymen alike (in my four years, there were no women on the faculty). My senior English teacher, a coach, particularly impressed me: he taught us to write from our feelings and he showed us each respect and dignity.

At Prep, my faith deepened, I encountered Jesus in a profound way, I was introduced to rudimentary Ignatian wisdom, that incomparable combination of spiritually and psychologically congruent and grounded, graced understanding and intuition. I had lovely friendships. And I developed my first forays into critical thinking.

But Prep was a difficult place for a gay boy. Prep then strongly supported the dominant culture's values, values anathema to the development of persons, values then so pervasive. Values particularly suited to molding boys into narrow and constricted men.

Let two incidents suffice: At the Prep homecoming football game at City Stadium my freshman year, I was sitting with a friend when two thugs from my homeroom approached. One said to the other: This is the one, and proceeded to cuff my collar and stand me up in the bleachers. The other sucker-punched me in the gut, threw me back into my seat, and walked away, scornfully laughing. They imparted the knowledge I dreaded: We're onto you. I lived with that fear everyday for my four years, always believing that somehow I deserved what I got for being the one, the one they were all onto.

They were thugs, but they were also the kind of minor celebrities that high schools produce: they were both touted athletes (the sucker-puncher became All-State Football senior year). But thugs nonetheless, thugs the dominant culture, in its unconsciousness, encouraged. And still does.

In sophomore year, I fell in love. I fell in love like nigh all high school boys do, though unlike all of my friends, I was not falling in love with a girl from one of my hometown's Catholic girls' schools. I was falling in love with a boy who sat one row away from me. It felt overwhelming. I was alarmed, ashamed, guilty. There was no container for me, no one with whom to speak, no one with whom to share these feelings, to even acknowledge that the feelings existed. I felt then the beginnings of what I would feel profoundly for the next fifteen years: I was alone. In the most riveting sense, I was alone. And alone I believed I would have to always be: no language, no community, no symbol nor myth, no conversation, no dialogue, no hope.

What I did acquire at Prep, and in the world in which I lived, were the messages the dominant culture proffers. I came to believe during puberty's final onslaught that I was evil. And more: that I was sick, that I was sinful, that I was perverted. That I was unacceptable in the eyes of the world. All our culture's words and notions and judgments came home to roost, in me, a 16-year old boy, a little gay boy that the world, let alone his parents, could not know.

But, finally, and primarily, I came to believe that I was unacceptable as a human being in the eyes of God.

The more I prayed to be changed, which was the heart and concentrated content of my prayer, (so deeply aware that I had not chosen this but came to know it was visited upon me because of my sinfulness), I regarded my not changing as God's judgment on me that my prayer, and my life, were insincere, were somehow beyond the pale. I was not available to the strands of grace everyone else seemed to somehow merit.

The One I called God, and my lovely companion Jesus, previously the source of such great succor in my life, were taken away, or they left. They somehow necessarily abandoned me to the despair of myself, because this person I had become, through no wish of my own, could manage no change, could not desist either my feelings nor my desires, no matter how hard I fought them, or prayed to be delivered from them. In the end, I was utterly alone.

This is the terror for gay boys and girls: that they are alone. We suffer without the comfort and love of a mother or a dad, of friends or even the odd solace of the cosmos. No one with whom to share this terrible fate: we believe all the cultures heinous images, holding our young selves responsible for this sick and perverted condition. There is no symbol to transform the experience, no story to context it, no person to explain it who could take the onus of bearing it away.

I think sometimes: Really, who would wish this on their enemy? Let alone their child, or their friend. But this is what happens to gay boys and girls in this culture. This is happening today.

On the inside, I experienced a circular existence of guilt, shame, expiation. Inescapable, and from which there is no relief. On the outside, I straightened up as best I could, and hyper-developed a good boy image to appear, as much as possible, in everyone's eyes, as one of you, knowing all the while I was not nor never would be.

I discovered the aforementioned immense relief alcohol brings, with which I was finally able to mask myself and relieve the constant pain. I drank for twelve years, culminating in a near-fatal auto accident in June of 1978. Even then, I continued to drink.

But that same summer, on Labor Day, while riding my bike early that morning on the shores of Lake Michigan, nursing a particularly brutal hangover, I heard the words: You never have to drink again.

I knew it was over.

A few weeks later, back in Berkeley studying theology, I went to a rally to defeat Proposition 6 on the California ballot, not so unlike the recent initiatives against gay people disguised as being about something else (like the sacredness of marriage) that have been popping up everywhere. This initiative would have required any teacher in California discovered to be gay be fired. I went to San Francisco that afternoon in my Roman collar, not wanting anyone to think I was a gay man, though I had in truth never been anything else. Harvey Milk, the soon-to-be assassinated gay supervisor, gave what was his standard speech. He proclaimed that we didn't have to be afraid anymore, for we were together, alive and free. He asserted we were there for the little boy in Fresno and the little girl in Sacramento who tonight believed they were all alone.

I was so deeply moved, really undone, for Milk, in those few words, was telling my story. The tears streamed down my cheeks, I pulled the tab out of my collar, and wept.

I went home on the subway that evening, entered my room in the small Jesuit community in which I lived, put a piece of paper in the Selectric and typed out the words: I am a gay man.

I was thirty years old.

That day I vowed with the conviction only a reformed drunk can muster never to live in fear again, and, at all costs, to be myself, no matter what or who would say no. No matter who. For I knew the dominant culture says no every day. And everyday, still, I pray for the grace to say yes.

My little story is a version of every gay boy or girls coming out story, and these stories will continue until the dominant culture, which suffers exquisitely from its own homophobia, withdraws its enormous and blinding sexual shadow.

Homophobia, the stepchild of misogyny, exists for a simple reason. Culture projects the enormity of its unconscious sexual shadow -- its desires and fears and taboos -- onto gay persons. It stigmatizes, scapegoats, labels as degenerate, makes laws against, violates both the dignity and humanity of, and demands, as culture does of its scapegoats, that gay people bears its burdens and become the oppressed that scapegoating intends to create. If you wonder how this collective model works, look at the history of the Jews in the West since the time of Paul, or gander at the way patriarchy regards the humanity of women.

These potent human issues: sex, gender, power, relationship, body, intimacy, transparency. All shunned into the shadow and then cast out onto gay persons, among others, who are asked to bear their negative brunt.

From seventh grade to the age of thirty, nothing was worse than being gay. But, as Providence would have it, I now understand this biological, psychological and spiritual dimension of myself, my gayness, as the source of enormous grace, and wisdom, for me. I am deeply grateful, most likely in inverse proportionality to my previous despise, for being gay, for the grace of my particular path, for the deep freedom coming to terms with this gift has given me, for the work my interior journey provides. And I have had returned to me, my compelling and demanding companion, Jesus, who of course never left at all.

The overwhelming thrust of the Gospels, Jesus' ministering in the margins to the unrecognized, is no longer just a model for me but, in my life it becomes an outward sign of grace, a sacrament. So my story comes in ways, though skewed, full circle. I am yet that 14-year old boy who came to Prep in 1962 to become a man.

I concluded my remarks at Prep by offering some suggestions to the faculty, premised on the following truths. One, I invited them to remember that all gay kids, and most gay adults, believe they are damaged goods and, as a correlation, all gay kids, and many gay adults, feel, and are, isolated and alone.

I was asked by the school's head to offer what I had needed to hear at Prep in 1963, and what gay Prepsters need to hear today. I believe they need to hear three things. One: You are created exactly as God intended you to be. Two: You are not damaged goods, nor sick, nor evil. Three: You and the love you provide are essential, mysterious grace in God's plan for the world.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I asked them to accept my gratitude and deep admiration for the manner in which they had received me so graciously that day, for inviting me to tell my story, and for having the grace and courage to host and attend this gathering. Prep will, in no small measure, ever be the same, nor will I. They have unwittingly healed an old wound in me, and I am in their debt. I asked that God bless the work they are doing in making this school a graced place for every student who enters those doors each day, boys they have been given the charge of assisting becoming men for others.

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