by Ethan Seavey
Exile is on my mind and there’s a large full moon above my head I cannot see through the clouds.
I am part of a family of three exiles who are doing it again, recovering after exile, and working hard to stay together. Our shared communities have dropped us for the third time and it feels like I finally recognize the pattern we’ve always fallen into :
1) Find a community that embraces us because it excludes others; and 2) get rejected when we grow to learn that we have become the others.
When I came out as gay in 2015 my family stopped going to Church, specifically the one where we had been attending weekly (with few exceptions) for somewhere around a decade.
It was a personal decision for each one of us. It was an effort to support me. It was also a social decision. While this Church was more progressive than others, it was still a Catholic Church. It seemed to me that priests were required to spend a Sunday sermon every year talking about how being gay is a sin; sometimes hiding it behind the idea that being gay was not a sin so long as you never acted on it.
Many people within that Church remained close friends. They’d ask why we’d stopped attending and I was the reason. It didn’t distance most of our friends, but I remember my younger sibling was forbidden from spending time with one of their friends outside of the friend’s home, because the friend’s mom saw me as a bad influence.
Most of the Good Catholic Kids from my grade school moved onto a well-known Catholic College Preparatory high school. I followed suit there, and the same was true with all of my siblings. My older sister waited until a bit after her youngest sibling graduated from high school to publish her truth about the school, how it protected and covered for a teacher who had been harassing her.
And that was exile number two. My family still living in our hometown became very aware that we were the topic of conversation. At a restaurant they heard people talking poorly of us at the next table over. Some friends had nothing to say and others said terrible things behind our backs.
Exile number two was a low blow to our thin connections to the suburb. It was around that time that my parents decided to move from the suburb to two different locations, a house in the Rocky Mountains and a skyscraper in downtown Chicago. They held ties with true friends and spent time together when possible and when convenient.
The third exile came after the beginning of this summer, when my dad came out as gay, and their friends scrambled to take sides. My parents wanted none of that. My dad was the victim of hate speech from people he considered close friends; my mom was the victim of pity and people inserting themselves where she did not want them.
It’s the third exile and the social rule says we are booted, never to return. If you return you run the risk of running into a past of people still walking in circles, unwilling to respect us.
Exile is enjoying life in the flock in an open field with many friends; then it is being put into a smaller fenced off area because the shepherd has noticed your wool quality is not up to his standards; then a second exile is being put into a cage in a small fenced off area in an open field; a third is total rejection. And if you’re lucky you have the chance to leave. Exile is not enforced freedom but a prison you must escape from.
When you’re free you have the ability to go wherever you want, but you’ve become so close to the other sheep living with you in that tiny cage that you always want the others to be secure, to find new flocks and new pastures with hot, gay, reasonable shepherds. I’m grateful to say we’re doing it together.