Dr. Mary Lamb Shelden

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time . . .
But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
~ Aboriginal Activists Group, Queensland, 1970s

My first marriage came apart for many reasons that I won’t go into here. When it did, though, I went from a 11-year relationship with a man to a brand new relationship with a woman. While I had identified as bi* since my teens, and had always been forthright about this with partners, family, and close friends – and actually, anyone who asked, and whenever the subject came up — my bisexuality had been obscured to many in my social circle because I had been in a committed relationship with a man. Folks saw a man and a woman, and simply assumed that both of us were heterosexual. Honestly, I think much of the reason that bisexuals are stereotyped as players, or heartbreakers, is that we’re only seen as bi at the break-ups, when our next partner is a different gender from our last. We’re not seen and therefore not understood during our long stretches of monogamous fidelity. Not that all bi people are monogamous, or faithful – but if we’re only seen at the break-ups, those of us who are monogamous and faithful will likely never have an opportunity to influence the narrative about bi people, to the extent that one exists at all.

As it happened, at that time, the UU congregation I was with had started down the path toward recognition as a Welcoming Congregation. Ten years prior, the minister and I had co-led the adult RE curriculum, and now, as I was leaving my marriage to another member, and beginning this new relationship with a non-member who became a semi-regular visitor (and who, not incidentally, became my life partner and spouse – i.e., Margie, my beloved now for 21 years), I was co-leading a second offering of the curriculum, and then co-chairing the committee leading the congregation through the process. To say the least, then, this period in my life was awkward – for me, for Margie, for my former, for our daughter Marjorie, and for the congregation. The good thing was that I had had a long relationship with this congregation, and with my denomination, and I was clear about what was needed. I knew that LGBT people (by then we were using these four letters) needed safe havens. It was still a crime in many places for us just to live as who we were, and while my former was a person of admirable good will, I was acutely aware that people like me going through a divorce, or seeking to adopt, very often had no standing in the courts in their plea to be custodial parents, and that this was only one of myriad challenges faced by LGBT people. I also knew that UUs were called to offer safe haven for us – that our first principle, and our long prophetic practice in many quarters, should be the ground from which safe haven could spring.

All of the above is prelude to the moment I’m about to describe. For all the years I’d attended this particular church, we’d had precisely one member of color: an African-American man named Chuck. Despite the fact that the surrounding community had a fairly large black community, the church had not succeeded in drawing black members – a common issue for UU congregations, then and now – except for Chuck. Chuck was in real estate, if I recall correctly, and had a man-of-the-world quality about him. I had had many pleasant conversations at coffee hour, but we’d never gotten to a level of conversation where I felt comfortable asking a question often on my mind, about why he’d stuck it out with us, solo, all these years. For this fact I was grateful, but perplexed – but I didn’t know how to shape the language to ask him about his experience in choosing Unitarian Universalism. Indeed, looking back now, there are a great many questions I wish I’d thought to ask Chuck.

But when the time came to put together a conversation series leading up to our congregational vote on the resolution to become a Welcoming Congregation, Chuck came to me and asked to be given floor time. I said yes, of course, and then asked what he’d want to say. He said, “I want to help folks to understand that LGBT people have always been with us, in the struggle.” I thought this a really beautiful idea and, of course, put Chuck’s name on the roster of speakers. But I wasn’t really prepared for the power of what Chuck had to contribute to the conversation. I remember with clarity the day he stood before the congregation and said that, as a young man, he’d been in the struggle for civil rights, and had been a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC. And he said that gay people – vulnerable as they were – had put themselves in harm’s way in order to advocate for civil rights for African Americans. He said, “I stand with them today because they have always been with us.” And I remember and cherish the dawning sense of pride I felt that my people had been there with him, the way he was now here with us. Chuck for many reasons, but certainly in large part simply because of who he was in the context of our congregation, had an ethos unique among our membership. When Chuck spoke, people listened. I don’t know precisely what difference he made in the vote for resolution later that year – as I recall, it was unanimous. But I do know the difference he made in the room that day, and in my own heart.

I share this story about Chuck here now out of my profound sense of gratitude for his clear example. Chuck came to the work – our congregation’s work toward a Welcoming Congregation resolution – out of a sense of shared struggle. He understood, and helped teach me, what it means to have my liberation bound up with that of another person or people. He was a beautiful illustration that day of what it means to be an ally – to understand that as allies we, too, have skin in the game.

King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As a person of immense race and class and educational privilege, I have often struggled to understand how this is true. Privilege often blinds us to what we give up to our unconscious assumptions. But Chuck that day offered me a clarity that will always be with me, as others before had offered him. We are in this world together; what harms you must inevitably harm me. Though the harm to me may only be my gradual desensitization to the harm you experience, still that is a monstrous harm to me, even when, or especially when, I am not conscious of it. As I become aware of my privilege, I may seek to be a hero – and indeed, Chuck was a hero to me that day, in using his privilege to help me and people like me. But the more so because he understood at a profound level that each of us, without the freedom of the other, could not be free.

*While I’ve had long years of ambivalence about my bi label, I have settled into it. One thing that continues to bug me about it, though, is that it tends to reinforce the idea of two opposite, mutually exclusive genders – so let me be clear here that I see this two-ness in bisexuality as two ends on a spectrum, or two poles on a sphere, of gender. I know many prefer pansexual as their chosen label for this reason, but I dislike the way that label tends to reinforce other stereotypes – as in people like me are attracted to everyone, or to all of creation – “everything that moves,” as the saying goes. Indeed, one of the things that chafes me most about the bi label is that other people get to have labels about what does matter to them in their attractions, whereas I am stuck with a label about what doesn’t matter to me. I am attracted to particular people, not to particular genders. Still, bi is my chosen label – the best  for me of the limited options I see so far, and an example of how language fails, and of how labels are never adequate substitutes for stories.

© January 18, 2018