"A Journey Through Labels: Failed Horror Writer, Gay Theology Nerd, and Surprised Catholic"
In Catholic circles, there’s some hullabaloo over whether folks who fancy members of the same sex should identify as “gay” or “same sex attracted." This is a loaded question. On one hand, some people are uncomfortable with “same sex attracted” because it can sound scary and clinical. On the other, there's a fear that the word “gay” is too secular, implies a willingness to engage in illicit behavior and is too wrapped up in secular philosophies to have a place in a Catholic worldview.
I did not understand the gravity of the way people identify themselves until I compared it to my experience of identifying as a horror reader and writer.
From ages 10 to 23, if you asked me who I was fundamentally, I would have said a horror writer. That was my personality. In my Junior year yearbook, there’s a picture of me writing in a notebook in the lunch line with the caption “You can always find Alex writing, reading, or telling people wild stories from his wild imagination in the hallways!” I’m shy and spent many years not having friends, so being recognized as a beloved part of my school community via a clear identity felt great. This is how the identity label “gay” feels for many people.
My desire to read horror stories became a part of my identity when I was six. I was tantalized by the cover art for the Goosebumps books at the library. I was forbidden from reading them in elementary school, which only made me want to read them more. I lovingly admired the wonderful covers, imagining what kind of terrifying, mind-shredding scares lurked underneath. In Catholic elementary school, where I received the sacraments and religious education, I was starting to ask questions about who God was and why He created the world. Somehow, I felt that the emotional catharsis I would get from finally reading a Goosebumps novel would shed new light on those bigger intellectual questions. That connection might not immediately make sense, but according to philosopher Edmund Burke, gothic horror is founded on the nature of the sublime, of the engagement of emotions that compel an individual to move beyond themself in order to encounter the source of ultimate reality.
When I finally worked up the nerve to read Goosebumps behind my parents’ backs, I was heartbroken. The text did not live up to what the art promised. I was frightened by everything growing up. I thought the moon stalked me because it never got any farther away in the sky when we drove. And I wasn’t scared at all. I wrote an email to Scholastic with the subject line “Reader beware, you’re in for a SNORE!!!” (the Goosebumps tagline was "Reader beware, you're in for a scare"), airing my grievances.
I started writing horror stories to appease the hunger those Goosebumps covers had awakened. I was given a trailhead– something that marked a path to something greater than me– I had tried one trail, and was now finding another one connected to it.
In middle school, seeing myself as a horror reader and writer led me to books that changed my life. “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson gave me language for understanding negative emotions and navigating complex social situations. International ghost stories and urban legends introduced me to world cultures. Then I discovered HP Lovecraft, and the Earth shifted beneath my feet.
I was an atheist who’d rejected Christianity because I thought it was hateful, conformist, and anti-science. But I still had questions about where the universe came from and what people were. Questions that were not happily answered by wishy-washy agnosticism or spirituality sans religion. I thought atheism was the only plausible worldview. Lovecraft revealed the stark horror of existence if atheism is true. He doesn’t let you disbelieve and then move on; he forces you to confront the terror of being human in a totally meaningless, soulless cosmos. He’s honest about it. After sitting with this for a while, I found God again. The enormous, cosmic vision of Lovecraft shoved open my mental horizons enough to conceive of God in a way I would not have been ready for if I hadn’t been challenged by his rigorous atheism.
Following the trailhead of my longing for horror fiction, I wound up going to church again. All roads lead to Christ for me. Eventually.
Following my desire to write horror stories, I picked up a lot of great habits. I read that to be a writer, you have to be a voracious reader of all types of fiction and non-fiction. So, I went out of my way to be as well-rounded as possible and study history, biology, and sociology, while reading a healthy mix of classic literature and horror from all time periods. The skills I developed about observing human behavior and the way people speak, in order to write fiction, have served me enormously well in people-facing jobs.
As a writer, I’ve been published a few times, but more for poetry than prose. A few years after college, I realized I was more interested in poetry and non-fiction than horror, and that I had outgrown the horror identity. I also realized that I loved the creative process of writing and the writer’s way of thinking, but I didn’t love the rat race of getting published. I modified my “writer” identity to accommodate that. It was a scary process. My horror writer identity had gotten me through difficult times and had shaped how I move in the world. I had to learn to separate my fundamental ontological reality from the way I communicated my reality to others, and that was hard because I had nothing concise to replace it with.
My process of integrating faith and sexuality was similar. I accepted the fact that I was exclusively attracted to guys while re-accepting Christianity into my life. At the time, Christian materials about same-sex attraction with a traditional sexual ethic did not appeal to me. I read countless blog posts by people painting the single life as miserable and defined by coming home to a cold, dark apartment while married friends lived it up with their families.
So, I chose a theology that saw all sexual activity as fine because I didn’t know there were other rational options.
But the fact that I read my Bible every day and went to church multiple times a week always put me at odds in many gay spaces. In college, I was on all the apps, and I went to the bars and parties. Nobody talked about faith, nobody talked about books, or anything else I cared about. While hypothetically I thought all sex was fine, it was never a priority in my life, so I never strayed that far into hedonistic excess. Over time, through observing people around me with a novelist's eye, I came to believe that sex is designed by God for procreation and that, when taken outside of its proper context, it very easily becomes an idol that wants to govern everything. It makes people dehumanize others and themselves. It also makes people boring; there’s nothing worse than having a good conversation with someone and seeing the switch flip in their head when they put you in a dehumanizing lust box and start saying dull drivel. I didn’t really want to have sex with anyone because it got in the way of connection.
Eventually, I realized that the Church’s teaching on sex was the main thing keeping me from Catholicism, and so I consciously gave Catholicism the smallest, tiniest of considerations in my mind. Then one day, I blinked and I was Catholic again. I was convinced of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and felt like I was connecting with St. Joseph in prayer.
One afternoon, shortly after I reverted, I received an email declining a poetry submission. It was a piece about someone having a hysterical existential crisis in a drive-thru punctuated by the reframe “Sir, this is a Wendy’s.” I thought about Joseph’s silence and decided I wanted to give up writing to be published, for now at least, so I could follow Joseph into more silent contemplation.
I never beat myself up for not coming to Catholicism sooner or accepting the teachings before I did, because I recognize I wasn’t always working with the best information. I don’t want to obsess over past mishaps. I just want to move forward to wherever God leads me. There’s no rush to figure out what exactly comes next.
I’ve adopted several identities in my life-- gay, progressive Christian, Catholic, horror writer, poet, INFP-- that all fray and end in silence before my God. Donald Haggerty in his book Contemplative Hunger writes, “The truth of the encounter with God in silence lies outside a formulation of language.” For me, chastity and “following the rules” have been a delightful invitation to explore more of God in silence beyond limited language, and that is a gift I don’t deserve. When I was in that part of the secular gay world and going to all sorts of loud parties and meeting all sorts of people primarily interested in illicit activity, I didn’t have a lot of silence in my life. I didn’t feel secure in my body because I was always worried about how attractive I looked and stressed about what others thought of me. Chastity frees me from all of that to only worry about what God thinks of me.
Christ’s yoke is light and easy.