one of the for-real trauma triggers for queer Christians in absorbing the new information coming out from Danny and Grace Lavery about the Ortberg family's choice to prioritize their pedophile son over their trans son is the reminder that our acceptance is always conditional.

I am super, super lucky. My Catholic family loves and supports me without reservation. They accept me for who I am. They love my girlfriend Alice. I have a parish that openly not just accepts, but celebrates its queer community.

I have a bubble, inside which I am safe.

But outside the bubble, I do not always feel safe, and many people don't have a bubble at all.

I think Danny thought he had a bubble, to at least some degree, and learned he did not in the absolute most shattering way possible, and that is devastating to see.

I spent most of my 20s as a youth minister, and I was . . . not exactly in a closet, but perhaps hovering near an armoire??

that is to say, people I worked with knew that I was gay, but it was politely understood that I would not discuss it openly. I also was not dating then.

but the only reason that any of the people I worked with knew that i was gay was that I was forcibly outed by a creepy stalkery right-wing blogger demanding that I be fired for being a danger to children because I was gay. she harassed my family for years. while my mom was dying.

one of her emails - until the day i die i'll never forget this - made the claim that "once again" the youth of our parish were in danger from a predatory adult.

meaning that i, and father loughlin the priest who abused boys at our parish in the 70s and 80s, were the same to her.

i think that was the first time in my fairly safe and privileged queer life that it truly sunk in that there were people out there in the world who GENUINELY BELIEVED that there was no functional difference between these two things: queerness, and sexual abuse of children.

my family did everything right. they reminded me that i was loved for who i was. my mom told me that i was brave. my dad wrote furious responses to the evil lady's blog posts and talked to our lawyer about whether we could sue her. my siblings had my back completely.

all the bullshit stayed on the outside of the bubble.

but still.

both i and my sister (who is bi, and worked for the archbishop at the time, and was being harassed by the same people) will have trauma around this forever. it comes right back to the surface at unexpected times.

and all I have to do is read the comments on one of @JamesMartinSJ's facebook or twitter posts, or get accidentally retweeted into a viper's nest of misogynist Trads, to be reminded of how many people in my faith still believe that i am functionally the same as a child abuser.

danny lavery spoke out against his own father and brother in an attempt to protect kids from a predator.

i would have walked into fire to keep my youth ministry kids safe.

but somehow we're the fucking bad guys to these people. we're the ones whose nature is an aberration.

i can't imagine what grace and danny are going through right now. i can't imagine having my family, my parents and siblings, being the SOURCE of that trauma instead of - as they were for me - my only safe place of refuge from it. what an unspeakable violation.

what a malicious and terrifying reminder that there are so many places in which we are only safe while we are quiet and well-behaved and keep our heads down and don't cause trouble and are queer only in circumscribed and contained and socially-acceptable ways that offend nobody.

anyway @daniel_m_lavery and @graceelavery are utter heroes in my eyes and i would like to hug them very much. they ran into a burning building to try and keep children safe from harm and they were and continue to be punished for it in ways that are staggeringly unjust.

this stuff causes scars that never disappear all the way, and rarely heal clean. my sister and i still have nightmares 13 years later. if you ever wonder why sometimes after a tweet or thread blows up on the internet, i have to like, disappear for a few days, that's usually why.

a piece of this story i always forget to mention because it fucked me up so badly i've genuinely blocked it out is that the right-wing priest who is now BFFs with my stalker and who we believe was complicit in her attacks on me was a friend of mine when i was a kid.

he was a seminarian intern at our church and was so nice and when he moved to Rome he used to send me postcards and then he came back and had been, like . . . . radicalized and was now terrifying

our pastor described it as, "there was someone else behind his eyes"

more than her own harassment, more than the words of a shitty stranger, i think the part that my sister will never get over is knowing that a person who knew me when i was a child could wilfully permit direct harassment and harm towards me

. . . . so yeah, this one hits home

for folks who are new here and haven't seen this before, if anyone wants to watch me talk about this at a Back Fence PDX live storytelling event, on a night which happened to be the best my hair has EVER LOOKED, here it is https://vimeo.com/103837089 

oh, it was deliberate

she knew my mom was dying

in one particularly gross post, she patted herself on the back for going easy on us right after the funeral and heavily implied that she hoped my mom had died before finding out she had a lesbian daughter https://twitter.com/st_heather/status/1277817464705990658?s=20