COURAGE TO BE

I once played the Cowardly Lion in a community theatre version of The Wizard of Oz. It got awfully hot in that costume, but I was determined to put on a good show. Because of such a quick scene change at the end of the play, I had to wear the farmhand costume under the lion costume for most of the play. During that scene change, I would run backstage, where several attendants would get me out of the Lion makeup, put me back in the farmhand makeup, and strip me of the lion costume (including changing my shoes) all in no more than five minutes. When I came out of that lion suit, the costume beneath it was drenched with sweat, but out I went to do the last scene of the play. I learned something during that play that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, even though I had been watching The Wizard of Oz movie since I was a child. When the Wizard of Oz spoke to the Cowardly Lion, he told him that he was getting courage confused with wisdom. There may be times when the wisest thing we can do is run away from danger. It doesn’t mean we don’t have courage if we are making wise decisions about what is and isn’t safe. Ultimately, courage is the choice we make when we stop listening to fear, and that is often a choice of doing something that we have been afraid of, perhaps for quite a while. Fear is a fantasy that something bad is going to happen. It is not anxiety. Anxiety is generated by fear, and because anxiety is so uncomfortable, we can become stagnated by fear and fail to realize that courage sets us free.

What many people fail to understand is that playing a role is a significant amount of hard work, especially when we’re afraid of what might happen if we don’t play that role. I’ve done several plays in my lifetime, but when it comes to community theater versus Broadway, I only have to rehearse for a couple of months, and then the show runs over a weekend or two, and that’s that. Life goes back to normal.  What if someone had to play a role all the time and pretend to be something they’re not? How hard do you think that would be? It was Shakespeare who said, “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” What he failed to mention is that every damn one of us wants to be the director, some far more than others. He also failed to mention that there are roles that society expects us to play, and some religions also expect us to play them. However, what if we don’t fit the role? When directors are casting their plays, the actor has to fit the role. If the role requires a German accent but the actor can’t do one, then, even if they look the part, they are not right for the role and won’t be cast as that character. If the director has to pick someone who isn’t right for the role, then the actor will have a more difficult time playing it. What if, in our so-called “real life,” we don’t want to play the role, or keep ourselves pretending all the time, day in and day out?  Such roles don’t just apply to jobs like teachers, doctors, and lawyers, but also to how women are expected to act and how men are expected to act, and that one seems to be a huge issue, at least in America right now. We have all these rules about how men are supposed to dress and behave, and how women are supposed to dress and behave, and there are people out there who are actively and deliberately breaking the rules. They aren’t playing the role that society expects them to play, and it is pissing off many factions of society.

According to research by Jim Mahalik, Ph.D. of Boston College, women are expected to be nice, stay thin, be modest, and allocate resources to their appearance. Men are expected to be in control, work hard, pursue status, and settle things with violence. If a woman ends up in a position of management, even when she is doing no more than her job as a manager, she is often referred to as a bitch. A man applying the same techniques would be considered competent at his job. On the other hand, if a man is modest and nice, he is considered to be weak. Because LGBTQIA+ people seldom fit into these categories either as men or women, they are (or at least have been in the past) expected to put on a mask and pretend to be something they are not. I don’t know how often it happens today, because there remains a tremendous amount of pressure from fundamentalist churches that are anti-gay. However, it used to be that gay people would marry, have kids, and play the role of being straight when that was never how they actually felt. Many straight people were later hurt to find out that they had been married to someone who was pretending to be something they were not. I’m sure some gay people play the straight role for their entire lives and never come out to their partners or family, but when they do, it is often devastating to the whole family. If it were not considered to be a shame to be who you are, this kind of heartbreak would not be happening.

As a gay man, one of the things I’m very grateful for is that I never married a woman and set her and potential children up for that kind of later heartbreak. Still, I played a role for much of my life, trying to force myself to be straight, and there were times when I considered getting married to a woman, but I could never bring myself to do it. It took me years before I could openly admit that I was gay. Of course, I had known that I was attracted to men since I was little. I never fit in with my bull-riding, deer-hunting cousins. I had more interest in cooking, gardening, art, and writing, and my heart was far too compassionate to kill animals deliberately. I was, however, complicit in their demise by eating meat. Growing up, I was not only attracted to men, but I was terrified by them. I was terrified of being shunned, bullied, or beaten. The first time I ever admitted my attractions toward men to any straight men was in a therapy group that my male, heterosexual psychologist talked me into. It was an all-men’s group and I was the only one in it who wasn’t straight. I went in there week after week, giving feedback to other members of the group, playing my role, and never being honest about myself. One day, the biggest, burliest guy in there confronted me about what I was doing and why I never talked about myself. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “I want to know what’s going on with you.” … I had a panic attack. The tears came, I trembled and shook, and almost couldn’t say anything. Had it not been for my trust in the psychologist who conducted the group, I might have gotten up and walked out, but I finally admitted to straight men that I had attractions to men. To my complete surprise, I was met by these men I feared, with compassion and understanding. That was actually the first real step I ever took toward stepping out of the role of pretending to be straight, listening to my fear that men would hurt me and that society would shun me.

Of course, some people still hate me just because I’m gay. Some will hate us, no matter what, and for no good reason. They may not even take the time to get to know us. They just judge. Some churches still believe that being who you are is a choice and that if you are gay, you are choosing to sin. They try to talk you into playing the role that they want you to play instead of loving and accepting you for who you are. Those who have the most difficulty loving and accepting themselves for who they are are most likely to fall into the “straight” roles and deny their true selves. What these churches and some people outside of churches don’t understand is that who we are is not a sin. A sin is a behavior, not a state of being, and any act of being unloving is, in fact, a sin because every religion calls us to love instead of judging. In the minds of fundamentalist religions, if you are true to yourself as a queer person, you are choosing to play the bad guy.  I think they fear seeing LGBTQIA+ people take off the mask and be themselves as much as I feared taking my mask off in the men’s group back in the early 1980s. They have convinced themselves that LGBTQIA+ people are evil. So when they see LGBTQIA+ people being openly themselves, they are frightened by their imagination that queer people are terrible without taking the time to learn the truth.

When I did all those community theatre productions, I tried out for roles I wanted to play. If I didn’t get that role and were assigned a different one by the director, I would choose whether to be a part of that production or drop out. I was never required to play a role. No one forced me into it or demanded that it was what I should do. Yet, in society, in “real life,” everyone wants to be the director and tell others how to act. Some, when they become wiser, back away from this, relax, and let others be who they are. You see, being the director is hard work, too. Those who think they have to dictate the roles that others should play cast themselves in the role of guards at the prison gates. What they don’t realize is that they imprison themselves as much as those who are willing to play the roles of being their prisoners. It takes courage to back up, examine ourselves, be true to ourselves, and claim our authenticity. It takes courage to stay out of other people’s business, and as long as they are not personally intruding into your life, let them be who they are. It takes courage to look at ourselves honestly and discern the difference between our behavior and our true nature. It takes honesty to examine our fears and see them for the fantasies that they are. It takes strength to refuse to act out of fear and allow ourselves and others to simply be.