new single - conversion
there’s a shine in my soul
My friend was 8 when he moved from Egypt to Orange County. The Dana Point beaches awakened in him a primal love for the ocean, always with him, but dormant until that moment his eyes landed on the object of its affection. He was 22 when he gave the beaches up again. After showing up to his brother's wedding at a small charismatic church in the Nashville suburbs, something happened that he hadn’t at all expected: a conversion. The couple made their vows. The wedding band played—except this wasn’t like wedding bands he’d heard or seen before. As if queued by some invisible hand, the attendees rose to their feet and lifted their voices in melodies he’d never heard before. This performance stunned him. A swelling feeling rose in his chest and face, flushing tear-stained cheeks. He couldn’t pinpoint what exactly had happened inside of him, but after the newlyweds were seen off and the wedding goers had said their cheerful “it-was-so-good-getting-to-meet-you’s,” he knew that he wanted more. Later that summer, he would move to Nashville, return to that church, and become introduced to the community of people within it that had made the wedding possible in the first place: a group of “same-sex attracted” men trusting in the divine to transform their sinful desires. It was within this community that my friend and I got to know each other.
lyrics
writing so the room don’t spin
notebook paper, a ballpoint pen
i can’t keep lying to you
remember when i took that stage?
saw you clapping when i said i’d changed
both of us stockholmed in someone else’s truth
i wrote you a letter
cuz i couldn’t say out loud
i love you but
i won’t let you take me down
can’t keep me in
can’t take me down
don’t know how to handle this
don’t know who it is i been tryna convince
god or myself or you
and i can tell you what they’ll say
lack of trying or a lack of faith
but what they call freedom feels more like abuse
i wrote you a letter
cuz i couldn’t say out loud
i love you but
i won’t let you take me down
can’t keep me in
can’t take me down
there’s a shine in my soul
can’t change what you can’t see
and you can’t change what you can’t see
there’s a shine in my soul
can’t change who god made me
and you can’t change who god made me
He and I were given curriculum—books, and workbooks, CDs and cassette tapes to listen to in the car. If we were to meet up or hang out, we were told to make sure a supervisor was present, and if we couldn’t, to report back to a leader about what was shared. We were taught how to develop our masculinity and avoid temptation, to wear appropriate clothing. Avoid men for fear of lust. Avoid women for fear of picking up “feminine” mannerisms. We were appointed “spiritual fathers” to take the place of our biological fathers who, because of their assumed neglect of us, must have contributed to the malformation of our sexualities. The man who approached me with the expectation to take up this role was the community’s leader: a former radio host who had left behind years of homosexual rebellion in California to attend Love in Action, become a pastor, get hired by a church, marry the secretary down the hall, and answer the call to start his own conversion therapy community.
My friend was 23 when that pastor called him to the stage. To a packed room, he shared a testimony of deliverance from a former life of sin, decrying the land of golden sands and blue water. He ended by affirming the goodness of god, and I rose to my feet, applauding. In a smaller men’s group, he and I would pray together weekly, and would check in with each other about our “journeys” fairly often. In the weeks and months after my friend delivered his testimony, however, it became less often, and then hardly at all. He began losing touch with the pastor, with our mutual friends, with his roommates, and with his brother. They would ask me if I’d heard from him. They would ask me to talk to him—to try and “get the truth” from him. But I was singularly focused and resolute, unwavering my convictions, and as such, unapproachable for him when he began to have doubts. When I asked him how what his relationship was to his sexuality, he assured me that he was as steadfast as ever.
My friend was 25 when he wrote me a letter. He left it underneath my Jeep’s windshield wiper. The moment I saw my name scrawled on the envelope in his handwriting, I knew what it would say, so I pulled over in the AMC Thoroughbred movie theater parking lot and read it in the front seat.
“This is me finally coming into acceptance with me being gay.
You know my struggle with this over the past few years. However, the real struggle has constantly been me trying to convince myself that I am not gay. My years at [the church], however healing they were in many aspects of my life, were truly damaging both emotionally and psychologically. I felt as though every time I shared my testimony, I was trying to convince myself of its truth more than I was trying to convince the people listening. I was always in doubt, fear, insecurity, and shame, and couldn’t handle that anymore.
This has been a part of me, down to the core, for as long as I can remember.”
He concluded his letter by saying he knew that writing it would confuse and disappoint me.
“I know things will change between us, but I hope you see me as the friend/brother you’ve always had.”
I texted him after my third read and assured him that nothing would change between us, and privately prayed that that was true. I suspected everyone else would react severely, and I didn’t want to, but I also didn’t know how to affirm my friend when I couldn’t affirm myself.
After coming out for the second time in his life (a process that’s difficult enough to do once), my friend returned to the shores he knew would nurture him as they had before—without condition, discrimination, or manipulation.
◊◊◊
Years later, after beginning work on Human Becoming, I pulled my friend’s letter out again and began pouring over it. I was no longer in conversion therapy—or at least, I wouldn’t have said that I was. I had distanced myself from the community that had, in my friend’s words, damaged him emotionally and psychologically. But such damaging ideas remain more ubiquitous within Christian circles than I had yet developed an awareness of. I invested deeply in a church community that communicated the same ideas about sexuality I’d encountered in conversion therapy, while its leaders claimed to disavow the practice. Though I still doubt they were aware how often they parroted ex-gay advice, they had essentially crafted an environment that, for me, was conversion therapy in disguise—a term that I would use to describe the LGBTQIA+ experience in American white evangelicalism at large. I willingly participated in and subjected myself to that abuse for nearly a decade.
I knew when I began writing Conversion that my friend and I still believed different things about human sexuality. When I dusted off his letter again, I sensed that I didn’t fully believe him when he shared about emotional and psychological damage. The truth didn’t damage people, right? Paul said we all have our thorns, and they find us at our sides, not on our corotids.
Still, this song was about my friend, and my friend’s beliefs—not mine. I knew that if I was going to write this song, I needed to pay attention to his vulnerability. I needed to lower the intellectual barricades that prohibited real empathy, to actually believe him when he said he was hurt. I needed to afford him the same respect, compassion, attention to detail, and benefit of the doubt I gave to each of my straight, white, cisgendered Christian friends I’d written The Present Tense about. And for that, I needed to see things through my friend’s eyes. I needed to feel my friend’s pain.
I remember sitting at my piano and feeling the texture of the paper my friend had scribbled his note upon. I tried to imagine what pen he’d used to write it, and upon what surface. I could sense the sweat that had wetted his palms, the heartbeats thrumming in his ears. I watched the thoughts that had once flown through his head fly through mine: What if they hate me? What if I’m wrong? And right when I began to settle down into the pain I imagined my friend had been feeling, I found something terrifying: it was a kind of pain I was already intimately familiar with—one that had long been waiting, in the dark, for my acknowledgement. When I came back to myself, staring at the letter which suddenly felt as though it was not just written to me but by me, I began to truly consider whether I was wrong. I could see myself clapping at his ex-gay testimony. I remembered a wicker table at Starbucks, where I asked him how his “struggle” was going, never deigning to soften my cold theological convictions for the sake of his safety or trust. The harm he’d experienced had come from my hands, too.
Our friendship is an ongoing story that, thankfully, is now marked by mutual affirmation, love, and freedom. Most of us know what that feels like—freedom—and most of us know what abuse feels like. But it’s much harder to discern between the two when you’re told that your emotions are “deceitful above all things, and beyond cure.” Engaging his letter again was one of several catalysts that moved me from a place of repression to affirmation, from abuse to freedom. Imagining taking a loving response to my friend necessitated imagining taking a loving response to myself. When I saw how my friend suffered a great risk in order to take his power back from those he’d ceded it to, I realized not only that I could do the same, but that I must do the same—for me, for him, and for anyone else like us.
Track Details:
Recorded at Pentaverit Studios
Production/Mixing/Mastering: Bobby Holland
Writers Splits:
51% Nader Ghattas
49% Blake Mundell
Written Feb - Dec 2017
Artwork & Design: Elliot Green