What does it mean to be a young lesbian woman in a close and loving evangelical family? How do you come out to your father? How does he respond when you do? How does your mother react to the news? How about your brother, your best friend, your pastor? Who helps you swim through those terribly tricky waters — and how? How do you reconcile everything you’ve ever learned and believed about homosexuality with the fact that you are gay? What do you do with your faith? What do the people who deeply love you do with theirs?
So often the dialogue now everywhere around us about the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity remains at a stratum of concern just above where people actually live and breathe. I wanted to bring the whole issue right down into people’s lives, which is the only place it really matters anyway. Moreover, as a writer I yearned to create and explore a fictional narrative; I wanted to tell a story. (And I will be — and not just about LGBT-Christian relations. I look forward, for instance, to introducing onto the show the character of Hussein, a Muslim-American.)
Here’s the second episode of The Smith Family Chronicles, a story I’m now telling via the free tools available at extranormal.com. The first episode in this series is Jane Smith Comes Out to Her Evangelical Father.
Tune in right here every Friday morning for a new episode of The Smith Family Chronicles.
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