In my previous post, I had a quote from Glennon Doyle from her book Untamed. I think the entire passage is worth reading, so I include it here. This is from p. 266 in her book. Glennon was on a speaking tour when an older lady stood up and asked the following question:
“I feel confused. My nephew is now my niece...my granddaughter took a girl to homecoming this year...And now you’re gay too? Why is everybody so gay all of a sudden?"
Glennon's response is below:
"There are wild mysterious forces inside and between human beings that we have never been able to understand. Forces like faith, like love, like sexuality. We are uncomfortable with our inability to comprehend or control these mysteries.
So we took wild faith, the mysterious undefinable ever-shifting flow between humans and the divine and we packaged it into religions. We took wild sexuality, the mysterious undefinable ever-shifting flow between human beings and we packaged it into sexual identities.
It’s like water in a glass. Faith is water, religion is the glass. Sexuality is water. Sexual identity is a glass. We created these glasses to try to contain uncontainable forces. Then we said to people: ‘Pick a glass: straight or gay.’...
So folks poured their wide juicy selves into those narrow, arbitrary glasses because that was what was expected. Many lived lives of quiet desperation slowly suffocating as they held their breath to fit inside.
Somewhere, sometime, someone for whatever courageous miraculous reason finally acknowledged her dragon...
She dared to imagine an unseen order where she might be free. She refused to contain herself any longer. She decided to speak her insides on the outside and just let it burn. She raised her hand and said, ‘Those labels don’t feel true to me. I don’t want to squeeze myself into either of those glasses. For me, that’s not exactly it. I’m not sure what it is yet, but it’s not that.’
Someone else heard the first brave one speak and felt electric hope flowing through his veins. He thought, ‘Wait, what if I’m not alone? What if I’m not broken at all? What if the glasses system is broken?’ He felt his hand rise and his voice rise with a ‘Me too!’ Then another person’s hand slowly rose, then another and another until there was a sea of hands, some shaking, some in fists, a chain reaction of truth, hope and freedom.
I don’t think that gayness is contagious. But I am certain that freedom is.
In the name of freedom, we added more glasses...
'Here’s a bisexual glass for you, for you how about a pansexual glass?' We kept adding glasses...until it felt like we’d eventually use of the whole alphabet. This was better. But not exactly right.
Because some glasses still came with fewer rights and greater burdens, and some people, like me, still couldn’t find a glass that fit.
My hunch is that folks have always been 50 shades of gay. I wonder if instead of adding more glasses we should stop trying to contain people within them. Perhaps eventually we’ll rid ourselves of the glass system altogether. Faith, sexuality, and gender are fluid. No glasses. All sea...
Progress is perpetually undoing our no longer true enough systems in order to create new ones that more closely fit people as they really are. People aren’t changing, after all. It’s just that for the first time there’s enough freedom for people to stop changing who they are.
Progress is the acknowledgement of what is and has always been. Progress is always a returning.”
—Glennon Doyle
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