HOME AND DRY: Hello and welcome, if you got here via Andrew Sullivan. You want this post. And now the promised follow-up, in which I talk about what I think the most beautiful argument is in favor of gay marriage: It gives gay people a home.

Sullivan’s written about this quite a lot, of course. Both he (in Love Undetectable, I’m pretty sure) and Jonathan Rauch (in Gay Marriage) have described, briefly and without self-pity, really intense childhood exchanges with their mothers. I don’t recall the exact wording of Rauch’s story off the top of my head, but I do remember Sullivan’s. From memory, thus possibly a bit off: He asked his mother if God really sees everything, and she said yes, at which point he replied, “Well then there’s no hope for me.”

I mean… a little kid.

And I’ve written before about how I experienced some fairly intense childhood alienation of basically exactly that kind. I felt like I had no place in the world and couldn’t have one–shouldn’t have one, hadn’t earned love or self-respect. Becoming Catholic, I should say, was in part about accepting that I could be loved by Someone who genuinely knew everything about me. In order to be really Catholic you have to accept healing and love, and there are times when that’s very hard for me, still; it’s still somewhat baffling to think that I might be made in the image of God. (I mean, what does that make God?)

I have no real sense of why I associated that sense of alienation with my sexual orientation. One obvious possibility is homophobia; I certainly don’t remember ever hearing anything antigay until I was in junior high, and my parents had gay friends etc etc, but it’s impossible to prove that I wasn’t somehow affected by subtler and pervasive cultural bigotry. Anyway, point being, I’ve said many times that it was such a relief to come out to myself because it seemed like I could finally explain that alienation in toto; and because being gay wasn’t something I thought anyone should be ashamed of, I could finally put all of that unhappiness and sense of homelessness behind me! I don’t know that this relief is especially common for gay teens, but I do think a lot of gay people did have that childhood sense of intense separation, of being cast out.

And since virtually all gay people are raised by heterosexuals, the home in which we grew up doesn’t provide obvious models for the kind of relationships we want to form. It’s hard for us to know how our own love stories can fit in to our family story, the family model we grew up with. (Yes, I realize that a lot of straight people can say the same thing, but walk with me here for a moment.)

Gay marriage promises that, for those of us lucky enough to grow up with parents in a loving/good-enough marriage, we truly can fit our own futures and dreams into the family story we grew up with. We can step into our parents’ shoes. You all know that I think this promise is based on some really false beliefs about sex difference and family structure, but believe me, I feel the power and attraction of the promise.

And this longing for home is one reason the Church’s silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you’ve known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Anyway, I continue to believe all the stuff I’ve said in prior posts about gay marriage, but I thought it was important to throw this out there as well. The longing for home is even more powerful to me, and even more beautiful, than the longing for honor which also animates the gay-marriage movement.