This is not the greatest essay in the world, no, this is just a tribute

Last week, I penned one of the most important, moving, and healing essays I have ever written. It took me a long time to complete it through the tears and trauma I was fighting as I typed every word. I had to battle deeply with my inner demons of purity culture and church hurt in a way I never had before. It seems that, during every stage of my personal journey of unlearning, just when I think, “Am I healed, is this wholeness?” I get slapped in the back of the head with the stones of guilt and shame. When I finally completed my work, I sent it over to my editor, David G. McAfee. They wrote me with no real notes on the content; I was nervous that maybe it wasn’t as powerful of a piece as I thought. I cracked a joke and then they said, “Don’t make me laugh while I am still crying over your essay.”

David was one of the first, and last, people who will likely ever read what I wrote.

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Over the summer, I fell in love. I didn’t mean to. I was at work and doing work things and using work brain. I met a beautiful person and they stole my heart in an instant. When I walked into the house after our first interaction, my nineteen-year-old daughter looked at me and said, “Dad, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said with a smile beaming across my face.

“You just… look… different.”

“Oh no!” I exclaimed, “I’m in like!”

From that moment, it was curtains for me. I fell fast and hard. Next thing I knew, we were planning adventures and little getaways. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt like this and it was like walking on clouds. In the course of my life, I have only genuinely fallen in love a hand full of times. Only thrice before this had that moment been instant. Mostly, love has grown in my life. Friendships that one day shifted and then you realize that everything has changed. Thankfully, those relationships were built on the foundation of friendship and so, when they reached their natural conclusion of heartbreak, there was a friendship still there under the surface of all the love-making and fighting and dissolution.

The first time I fell like that was shortly after high school when I met the first girl I asked to be my wife. We were young, fool hearty, and in love. The moment I saw Katie walking down the stairs at the theatre in between my rehearsals and her ballet classes, I just instantly knew that I needed more than a passing glance. It turns out she was auditioning for Romeo and Juliet, too. We read lines together and I was smitten. Neither of us were cast in the roles we hoped for, she not at all. That next week, I waited at the bottom of those stairs for hours for the moment when she would arrive. This time, as she descended, I stood there with my heart beating out of my chest and palms sweaty (mom’s spaghetti or whatever it is that Jesus said). I gave her my number and later that week we went on our first date out at the beach. We walked on the sand sharing stories and a kiss under the moonlight. After a beautiful summer together, her parents decided that I wasn’t the right element. Rude, but not incorrect, but still rude. She was given an ultimatum and soon I was single.

The lesson learned there, pay attention to foreshadowing, my guy.

Years later, still heartbroken and distraught by the loss of my love, I walked into a Waffle House and saw a girl sitting with my friend. I walked over and cracked a joke about my friend’s crucifix and it made this girl with him laugh. I was certain that I would never fall in love again, but this alluring young woman with the brown eyes was staring back at me and I could feel that same pounding in my chest. A few years later, I bought another ring. It has now been nearly two decades of love and loss and learning together. In so many ways, we have grown up together and had to figure out what this whole being an adult thing really is in the context of this love we share. She got the best and the worst of me, mostly the worst. Nearly eight years ago, we reached what felt like the end of our love story and divorced. Then, because love never ends, we found our way back to each other. When we got married the second time, we promised that it would not be like the first go around. We had truly enjoyed many elements of being divorced but there was much we missed about our marriage. We made the mutual decision to try and blend the two theories to create a new type of relationship dynamic for ourselves. We promised that this time we would not live together, that we would not smother each other, that we would still maintain our autonomy. She would still go out, date, and I would do the same. We got married again on Leap Day the year of our lord twenty-twenty… seventeen days later we were in lockdown and all of those promises we made didn’t make sense anymore during a global pandemic. Her name is Tashina.

The third, was Jessica. I was tossing darts at the bar that inspired my book All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge. I turned around and saw her and just like that, I knew. Because of life and its cruelty, our love was never allowed to blossom into something other than friendship but the love was there, all the same. Of all the stories of love in my life, this is maybe one of the more tragic because it was stunted. Yet, we found something in the midst of our journey that never fully began: friendship. To this day, whenever the world doesn’t make sense, she will reach out to me and I to her. Maybe it is one of those moments of thanking God for unanswered prayers or possibly the story isn’t fully written. No matter which it is, I’ll forever be grateful to have her in my life.

The fourth, well, that is an essay you’ll never read.

As I was processing all of these emotions, I almost broke down and prayed. In my panic of not wanting to give God the satisfaction of winning by getting me on my knees again, I called David instead. As a devout atheist, they felt like a really good alternative to prayer. During the course of our conversation, David, who is also polyamorous, told me that my essay had so deeply impacted them that they chose to ask the person that they were dating to be their girlfriend.

“Watching what has happened, I just, I had to,” they said.

David shared with me about how cruel some folks were being in the comment section when they announced their relationship. People were leaving horrific comments about how this would be the end of David’s relationship with their wife, Rae. Folks began predicting their divorce. Someone called them an STI factory. As we were discussing these things, I commented, “You know, we really only have ourselves to blame.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at us. We are successful authors and polyamorous. Yes, we discuss this in our writing but neither one of us have lived our polyamory in the same way we do anything else we care about. We hold it sacred, we don’t share it with the world. You and I have both seen societal changes because of things we have written but we don’t talk about this like we do religion. So, we live in a society that doesn’t get us, doesn’t understand polyamory, and that is on people like us who don’t tell our stories. Instead, we have lived comfortable in our little bubble of security while there are polyam folks working as bartenders and lawyers and at Walmart, and they are out there struggling alone as we are gleefully silent with our own struggles.”

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Growing up in purity culture, there was this cautionary tale told in I Kissed Dating Goodbye, where the author talks about a nightmare they had. I haven’t read the book since I was a child but I’ll never forget the story. Josh Harris, the author, talks about this dream where they are at their wedding day and just before they say their vows, dozens of women stand up to say that they all own a piece of his heart. The moral of the story is that hearts can be fragmented and you won’t have a complete heart to give to your wife, or husband, someday whenever God brings the perfect person into your life. This will, according to the book, become a point of contention and it is why all dating is evil. The further premise of this anti-dating book is that each dating experience is like a little micro marriage and each breakup a miniature divorce where your body, mind, and genitals hold the score.

Josh is now a divorced atheist who left the church and is happier than ever. He spent some time going on a mea culpa tour where he apologized for all of the damage the book he wrote did to an entire generation of evangelical kids and had the book removed from publication.

One of the only other people who read my essay, other than David and Tashina, was my mother.

I came out to my mother.

I told her that I am queer and polyamorous.

I prefaced my sending it to her with a statement, “I’m currently going through something. I also know that it’s something that you are probably not going to be able to fully understand. But I need you to know about what’s happening in my life. I am going to send you what I wrote.”

That was a long wait. I read the essay again just so I would know how long it would take to read so that I could gauge when I should expect a reply. It felt like hours or maybe days but I think it was only minutes before she responded.

She said, “I don’t have to understand it all to understand how painful love is.”

The woman who purchased me I Kissed Dating Goodbye and gave me my promise ring so I would wait until marriage told me that. I could have never expected this would be her reply. For years, I had known that my parents knew. Of course they knew. I haven’t been silent about my polyamory on the internet or in my books. But I had never invited her into my world. I had never explained to her the loves and the losses. My mother never had to see how real all of this is in my life or that it’s not just that Tashina is some harlot and I some sunken, sullen, cuck sitting in the corner. I held all of my heartbreak in and never shared it with anyone, and whenever I did give a glimpse, it would be behind the guise of fiction and never part of my reality. I told just enough stories to become a polyam icon but never enough to take the bruises with everyone else. I hadn’t trusted my mom enough to be honest with her, I was too afraid of the pain of the rejection. Instead, I chose to keep it all inside and to shield this hugely important part of my life from her view.

I have done the same with each of you.

The essay I wrote was supposed to be how this partner found out that I was in love with them. I had a plan and, then as things go, by the time I was ready to finally share it with them, and with each of you, this culture we live in of not understanding people like me naturally brought about the end of something beautiful. I hold no resentment at them, and my love remains fully intact. If I have learned anything about myself, and one of the revelations that helped me realize I was polyamorous, is that I have never stopped loving anyone. Yet, I also had to learn from this experience that my fear to bring the world into this part of my life is part of what got me here. That is on me. This silence doesn’t affect only me, but also this remarkable community that I am a part of. Choosing to be silent, under the ruse of privacy, has only further allowed the general public not to see examples of this working. It took me crashing into the wall that I helped uphold to realize that, and I am sorry.

I felt pretty sorry for myself, as a I lay there in my depression fort eating Taco Bell and watching The Notebook, like a goddamn adult. I listened to Tom Jones “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” on repeat. I ceremoniously burned a copy of the essay and then placed yet another ring in a box where those things go. It wasn’t meant to be an engagement ring but a promise just the same that they would always have a piece of my heart, forever. The thing Josh had warned me as a nightmare had become my dream. Then, during my ten thousandth round of Sir Tom Jones serenading my broken heart, the app randomly played another song: Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan. I wept hardest during this than any of the heartbreak songs I had been pumping into my veins like some self-righteous heroin to numb the pain.

Everything that Chappell talks about in that song, that world where boys and girls can be queens every day, that is because of brave humans like Marsha P. Johnson who risked it all so that people like me can live authentically. Yes, there are plenty of fights yet to be won when we talk about personal agency and freedom. One only has to open the metaphorical newspaper to see that the world is burning at every corner. Yet, there are young kids today who are living in a time with the ability to be their authentic selves because of all of those who tossed bricks and were willing to put everything on the line for what they believe in.

I am a coward, I thought.

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This past week I have been entirely stifled in my ability to write. Having this pending thing that I wrote, this essay… no, this love letter, just hanging out there as an incomplete story has ripped me to shreds and incapacitated me. It has felt like being shoved back into the closet all over again and I was stuck in there with the rotting corpse of my priesthood and the stench was thick. As I looked at the flies devouring the face of the man I used to be, I had to smell all of the bile of that life. That was the man who subjugated his wife while they were in the church. That was the man who told other men, just like he had told himself, that they should remain celibate rather than seek meaningful experiences of love and pleasure with other queer people. I hated being in that closet with him and was frustrated with how little decay there actually was. Shouldn’t it all be bones and dust by now, over a decade later? Was that part of me one of the incorruptibles?

I’ll never fall in love again.

I’ll never fall in love again.

I’ll never fall in love again.

Yes, I will.

Again.

And again.

And again, again.

Amen.

Katie taught me that love never ends, no matter how many decades pass. Tashina showed me that love can be lost and found again. Jessica helped me see that love can evolve into something entirely different than what we had wanted and that there is beauty in that.

This has taught me, finally, that I must shed the last of my guilt and shame. That corpse rotting in the closet, along with the closet itself, only exists because I have allowed it to by not fully, completely, and proudly sharing myself with the world. I have made a choice to keep that closet because, as much as I hated standing in it, it was always there as a safety blanket in case I ever needed its damp embrace again.

I took the burning embers of that essay and tossed them into that closet and watched it burn. I took the cremains of the man I used to be, with all his guilt and shame, and scattered them to hell where he belongs.

I will sing.

I will fall in love.

I will go on dates.

I am going to dance.

I will have heartbreaks.

I might one day buy another ring.

I will be a better husband to my wife.

I will be a better partner to whomever comes along.

I am a queer man capable of loving outside of gender.

I am polyamorous and I am finally, truly, ready to accept that.

This will be the last time I have a story I can’t tell or a love that I can’t scream about from the rooftops. I am not a polyamory guru, I don’t know what I am doing half the time and I am reading all the same books you are, not writing them. But what I can tell you is that I will no longer be silent but instead defiant in my resolve here.

This week could have crushed me. I could have chosen to believe that I truly would never find love again and accepted that. I could have run back into the safety of that closet or in the security of monogamous love. That would have been very easy to do. Yet, this week, as I struggled deeply with all of this, my friend Jess took me in and let me stay in her spare room. Jess is polyamorous. David and Rae talked me through everything, they took my calls late at night and listened to me through tears. They are also polyamorous. My dear friends Evey and Ki checked in on me every single day. They too are polyamorous. When I had a million questions this week about matters of the heart, my friend Brent took my calls. You guessed it, also polyamorous. Tashina was there for me, her boyfriend checking in on me, too. All of these amazing and loving people who are my friends but are also part of this beautiful web of human beings who are deconstructing the scariest of all the sacraments to blaspheme; marriage.

Maybe, if more of us are willing to share our stories, a few decades from now some young kid will write a song like Chappell has done for the queer community but instead, it will be about the complexity of the dynamics of their polycule. There could someday be a world where leaving comments like, “you’ll end up divorced, you STI farm” will be considered hate speech.

But only if we do the bold and scary work of having these conversations. There is this great speech given by Alan Rickman as Metatron in Dogma where he says, “Knowing what you know now know doesn’t mean you’re not who you were. No one can take that away from you, not even God. All this means is a redefinition of that identity, the incorporation of this new data into who you are. Be who you are! Who you’ve always been. Just be this as well, from time to time.” I don’t anticipate that this will replace anything I talk about or become the central focus of what I write on. It will simply be that I will be inviting y’all along on this journey too. I will no longer be hiding my light under a bushel.

This is not one of the greatest essays in the world.

No, this is just a tribute.

You’ve just gotta believe me.

And I wish you were there.