Ky Dickens remembers watching Freaky Friday as a seven-year-old in Hinsdale and praying to God that one day she’d find herself in the body of a boy, just long enough to kiss a girl. At 13 she got obsessed with the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, watching Idgie and Ruth’s romance unfold almost daily. Dickens didn’t come from a very religious family–her father is agnostic; her mother took them to a local Lutheran church only on holidays–but she was still scared to tell them she was lesbian. And when she tried to come out, at 16, it didn’t go so well. “Mom, is there anything I could tell you that would make you disown me?” she asked. “And she said, ‘Well, yeah, you could tell me that you’re gay.’ She said it like, ‘Dinner’s ready.’”
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At 20 Dickens decided to start her adult life “honestly” and tell someone she was gay. She let the cat out of the bag during a class trip to Florida. “I told the person with the biggest mouth, her name was Hope, ‘I need to tell you something . . . ‘ And then a day or two later all these southern girls were like, ‘Wait a second now. Do you have a crush on me? . . . Why not? Am I fat? Am I ugly?’”
Dickens, who doesn’t practice any particular faith herself, spent two months talking with local religious leaders about homosexuality. Time and again she was told that if Jesus were alive today, the last thing he’d worry about is who was sleeping with whom. The handful of Bible passages commonly invoked to denounce gays, she was told, were often taken out of context for political purposes. This was a message she wanted to spread. “In order to survive, I felt like my only option was to change people’s minds. I thought that if they saw that their views were spoon-fed they could change.” But the timing wasn’t right. “It was still taboo. A lot of the priests said they’d talk to me when they were retired.” Seven years later homosexuality is a major wedge issue and, Dickens says, religious leaders are looking for a forum to discuss it.
Many members of the religious community, like John Shelby Spong, a liberal theologian, biblical scholar, and retired Episcopal bishop, insist the Bible will become less valid as a tool of faith and turn more people away from the church if it’s used to build an argument for hate. “Preachers everywhere, most of the ones I talked to, are horrified that if they hold on to this that they will just keep losing numbers. Because you can’t be discriminatory and hateful and think that people are gonna want to keep walking through your doors,” Dickens says. According to a 2006 Harris Poll of 2,010 U.S. adults, only 26 percent attended weekly church services.
Role Play
