It’s Pride month, and we’re coming out!
It’s Pride Month! And since we’re perhaps the only (or one of very few at best) congregations in the East Bay led and pastored by queer women, I thought it time to talk about that very thing. We’re also six months into the launch of this Sunday Night Service and so I thought I’d take this opportunity to introduce myself, my coming out story, and my family.
My name is Emily Hansen Curran (she/her) and I am married to a remarkable woman named Megan. We have a newly 3 year old daughter named Simone and a German Shorthaired Pointer named Scout.
Megan and I are both from Modesto, CA (a place I have deep affection for) and both attended Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo (a place I don’t have deep affection for), but didn’t meet until we had both graduated from college and moved back to Modesto. How we met and fell in love is a long and funny story, which I won’t detail here, but I will say that neither of us were “out” when we met in the fall of 2010 and that Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream was definitely playing in the background.
The soundtrack I came out to, however, was Sufjan Steven’s Age of Adz in the winter of 2011. I was a student at Fuller Seminary at the northern California branch over in Menlo Park, taking classes on nights and weekends. By day, I was working with a construction crew gutting foreclosed homes following the recession of 2008, and posting antique electrical trinkets to Ebay for my next door neighbor who was an online antique dealer.
At this point in my life I had already had a couple of relationships with women (only one of which was acknowledged for what it was), but I carried guilt and shame around those relationships because of my particular upbringing in the Church and a general belief in biblical literalism. So much guilt and shame that I started therapy to try to deal with this overwhelming pull I had towards female friends of mine. This therapist worked hard with me to get rid of my sense that I might be gay, but ultimately suggested I attend the Christian 12-step program called Celebrate Recovery, and labeled my attraction an addiction to codependent relationships (never once did I question that my “codependency” was limited to women only). I faithfully attended.
At this same time I was taking the second class of a three part course in Church History at Fuller Seminary as well as a class on Theology and Literature. And so it was in the middle of a 12 step program, a course on Church History, and Tom Robbins Another Roadside Attraction that I decided to risk coming out to myself. It was literally in the middle of Church History class when I realized that God was bigger than the rules of the Church, that God had always been bigger than the rules, and that people, for ages, had tried to confine and control the force that is God in the world to their own ends, which to be honest were not always bad and rarely malicious. In short, I realized that the Church and God were two separate entities. And I remember a flash in my mind––what if I wasn’t codependent, but just gay? And what if I was okay? What if I wasn’t a problem, I wasn’t disobeying God, I wasn’t full of sin, but I was just gay. I got up for a bathroom break, and didn’t come back to class that day.
And what I remember knowing on that fateful drive home from Menlo Park back to Modesto was that whatever was coming next was in my control to release, but that everything was going to fall apart and I wasn’t sure that it would ever be put back together (I didn’t yet know about “affirming” churches at that point in time!). But I was alive: I was scared and excited and thrilled and I don’t think I ate or slept for a week.
Things did not go well next. I won’t get into it all here (I recount some of it in this podcast on the Abbey Normal Podcast), but some things did work out. I ended up dating Megan and eventually marrying her four and a half years later on a hilltop on Sonoma (at an older, wiser, queer friend’s house, which he gave us as a gift) catered (also as a gift) by Tacolicious, my employer at the time. Two days after my wedding, I started my new job at All Souls Episcopal Parish in Berkeley.
It’s taken me a long time to feel pride around my story and about being gay, but I feel it and I know it acutely when it comes to this Sunday Night Service because I know that who we are matters to what we believe. That this congregation is led and pastored by women and women who are queer matters. Part of the experience of being female and gay right now, at least for me, is to live into the power of what that means––to own the story and live into the specific power that comes from being overlooked, patronized, infantilized, objectified, and made secondary by the White male story of what it means to live this life (don’t get me started on the New York Times Sports page and how they only tell stories of greatness as it relates to male athletes). In the gospels, this list describes the people who understand and know Jesus first and firsthand. Who we are matters to how we see God, how we know God, how we live in community with each other, how we lead, how we worship, and how we gather.
I just learned about the idea of “Affirming Sunday,” a day in the month of June (Pride month) when you try out a service that is affirming. I say, go one step further: try out a service that is not just affirming (and usually led by White men) but a service led by queer women. Come see and experience the difference it makes.
