The cab driver had a gentle manner, big hands and an easy smile. Leaning back, he asked me about the streetcar tracks that ran down the centre of Queen Street. He was from Ghana, it was his first winter in Toronto, and he was concerned that when the weather got cold the streetcar tracks would be transformed into deadly ice slides that regularly propelled cabs into oncoming streetcars.
“It is not the manner in which I want to meet my maker,” he confessed to me with a smile.
While talking I found out that he was studying to become a preacher at the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College.
“I believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” he told me without the slightest trace of proselytism.
Conversations in cabs are always framed by economy. Two strangers from unpredictable corners of the world are thrown together for a very brief period of time, and in this transit, stories, often surprisingly intimate and urgent, are exchanged. In this case, we spoke of Christianity.
The driver knew an awful lot more on the subject than I did, of course, but we seemed to be in agreement on many things, except perhaps homosexuality.
I live downtown, in a large, urban centre, and in the culture I inhabit the sexuality of a person is sincerely irrelevant. It’s clear to me that homosexuality is not a choice that a person makes or a psychological deformity caused by trauma, but merely the way the way a person is built—like some have blue eyes and others powerful hands. It’s my opinion that it’s utterly inevitable that the church– both mainstream and orthodox–is going to have no choice but to accept gay culture as an inalienable part of human culture, and not as something aberrant, and to love it as it loves it’s own.
The driver, listening to me politely, was receptive to what I was saying, but also, in his manner seemed slightly skeptical. Although I know nothing much of Ghana or this man’s background, I imagine it quite different than mine.
I went to high school in Ottawa in the 80’s, and it’s very easy for me to forget just how homophobic that culture (one in which I was fully participatory) was. If you were thought to be gay—which was considered the worst possible thing—you were ostracized and relentlessly taunted. People I know– men in their 40’s– are still in the closet, denying an utterly essential component of who they are, because of the shame they were made to feel when they were younger.
Naturally, this sort of abuse has led to all sorts of tragedy, and in the last month or two a couple of well-publicized suicides. Inspired by this, writer and gay activist Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better campaign, in which gay people– both famous and less celebrated– tell despairing youth not to take their own lives, assuring them that life does, in fact, get better. The YouTube videos are unmistakably sincere and heartbreaking, and watching them it’s impossible to deny their beauty and humanity.
The bigotry and exclusion that’s defined the mainstream attitude toward gay people is something to be utterly ashamed of, and hopefully– in terms of acceptance, full legal equality and apology– the church will find the strength to lead, rather than follow.