Asian American X: An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices

20. Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World

20 Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World Michael Kim Author’s note: I have changed the names of places and people—including my own—in this narrative, in a sense to protect the innocent, or those critical people in my life to whom the sensitive details contained within it are not yet known. I struggled somewhat endlessly with this decision, as it alternatively seemed to me a renunciation of that which I had worked so hard to achieve. I now understand and embrace the reasons I still feel that anonymity is necessary at this stage in my life, but I have also come to understand the elegant way in which changing names universalizes identities and not only helps me objectify my own experience more productively, but, I hope, helps to better depict the resonances that my story can have with that of Everyman. If I found a genie in a bottle, after my Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse and BMW 760, I would wish upon everyone in the world a coming-out experience . Forget sexuality, I am talking about the kind of critical existential moment that provokes unsettling questions about faith, religion, truth, society , and norms. I am talking about the kind of terrifying moment in which one perceives the limits of provincial sensibilities and questions the intellectual and moral constructions of one’s upbringing. This moment might come in meditation on the logic of Christian belief and on the reasons for being a Christian apart from parental admonition. It might arrive in the exploration of the personal and social complexities of being a second-generation Asian American. Often, it comes in dealing with being gay. In this essay, I will ask—you and myself—what it means to come out at the intersection of all three, to consider the complex but underexplored world of a gay Korean American Christian man. I spent every Sunday morning from the time I can remember until the time I graduated high school at Grace Baptist Church, a 3,000-member Southern Baptist congregation that practiced compassionate conservatism well before George W. Bush gave it a label. The congregation enjoyed Sunday-morning fellowships, Bible study, a 150-member choir, a thirty-piece orchestra, and a transcendently charming preacher. My family thrived within this warm and inviting community, without any feelings of exclusion despite the fact that we were one of three Asian families in the entire congregation. As a child, I demonstrated a special aptitude for playing piano and as a result came to be celebrated and embraced widely within the church community . I became the church pianist and organist and made myself blissfully indispensable to the music ministry of the church. I played so happily for choir rehearsals and with the orchestra that this welcoming bunch of white Christian adults took me in collectively as their adopted son. It was of no consequence to them that I was Korean American; perhaps more important, it was of no consequence to me that I was Korean American. In addition to my musical success within the church, I managed somehow to be a theological success as well. Given my particular propensity for memorization , I was a star student in knowing Bible verses by heart, committing to memory all the Bible stories and even their accompanying moral lessons. These were lessons designed for small children like me who were not yet involved in abstract and complex thought. God is good, Satan is bad; marriage is good, divorce is bad; pro-life is good, pro-choice is bad; straight is good, gay is bad. I swallowed these doctrines whole and washed them down with a swath of Bible verses to back up all the dogma, because, as Jerry Falwell has amply demonstrated, you can ‹nd a Bible verse to prove just about anything. The danger here, in the church of my childhood, was not that these doctrines were oppressive but, on the contrary, that they were comfortable. If one does happen to be heterosexual, married with children, and lacking a personal relationship with anyone who has aborted a fetus or who is gay or who has been in an unhappy marriage resulting in a divorce, the sparse environs of dogma are a very comfortable place to be. Before I was perceptive of even the Asian American X 140 most rudimentary inklings of my sexuality, Christian fundamentalism was an easy place to...