THE CHURCH, THE STEEPLE, THE LGBTQ PEOPLE
At Hillhurst United, Pam Rocker draws on her own experience as a gay woman growing up in an evangelical community to ensure that congregants fififind acceptance at the end of the rainbow.
At Hillhurst United, Pam Rocker draws on her own experience as a gay woman growing up in an evangelical community to ensure that congregants find acceptance at the end of the rainbow.
Pam Rocker was about seven years old when she first felt as though something didn’t quite fit. It was in the late 1980s, and her family was living in Port Leyden, New York, population 700. The nearest neighbour was a mile down the road. I feel like I’m chewing on charcoal. Like I’m addicted to something that absorbs me without mercy. But I keep going back.
She was sitting alone in her room one day with two girl dolls made by her mother. She made the two dolls kiss, and remembers feeling some sort of illicit thrill, something she couldn’t express in words. “How do you explain it if you can’t understand it in the first place?” Rocker asks. I grab another hunk, take a big bite. It chips my teeth then scrapes down my throat, burning me, shredding my insides until I bleed. My tongue turns black and my cracked teeth stain to a dark grey. But I can’t stop.
Her Evangelical family moved to the suburbs of Dallas shortly afterward. She was home-schooled and studied the Bible alongside math and other subjects. Her older brother was pulled out of school after being exposed to Dungeons and Dragons, which her parents considered “witchcraft.” Rocker didn’t cope well with the move. Sometimes my stomach heaves and I vomit. Sometimes I keep it down. But everything in me rejects it. I chew and grind and wear down my teeth until that chunk has disappeared and then I reach out and grab another.
Rocker learned at a young age that the one unforgivable sin was homosexuality. In a way, she almost felt relieved. Armed with the knowledge that being gay would lead to hell, she promised herself she wouldn’t ever “do that.” She didn’t even consider the possibility, she recalls. Black drool swims down my cheeks and stains my shirt. A stain that doesn’t come out.
The problem, she says, was that she was beginning to realize that the way she felt about other girls sometimes went beyond simple friendship. But her feelings didn’t fit the definition of homosexuality she’d been taught, either. Trust me. It’s absorbing me. A little bit of me disappearing with every swallow. But if I don’t eat it, I’ll starve.
“When you’re told it’s evil but it’s not actually who you are, you’re stuck in this weird purgatory,” Rocker says. She spent 27 years in that purgatory, struggling to acknowledge and accept that she was gay. In 2005, she expressed it in a poem about eating charcoal, a metaphor for her experience of trying to deny a large part of her identity.
Those days are over, but they still inform Rocker’s work as the affirming and creative co-ordinator at Hillhurst United Church, a role in which she works to welcome other queer people of faith. In late March, Rocker shared her message with the congregation at McKillop United Church in Lethbridge, Alta. Dressed in dark pants and a blazer, her hair styled in a faux hawk, Rocker was a striking figure. She recalled first seeing a rainbow-coloured sticker on the Hillhurst United Church sign. “Something in me that had always believed that I would have to live my faith on my own cracked open, and I thought maybe this place would actually live up to its name of being a sanctuary and not just a building,” Rocker tells the crowd. “I took a risk to go.”
Rocker spoke easily and confidently. At 35, she is active in Calgary’s queer community and plays in a band called The Wrong Kind of Girls. All this suggests she has embraced the part of her identity that caused her so much turmoil. It’s an impression confirmed by a visit to her website, where she bills herself as: “Writer & Speaker. Atypical Activist. Super Gay.”
At Hillhurst United, Rocker works to shorten the path to self-acceptance for others. “I want people to know they’re not alone,” she says. “I was
saved by people who did write, speak up,” she says. “It’s super lonely when people make you feel like they don’t want you to exist.”
When she was 16, Rocker finished high school and began attending a missionary school in Tyler, Tex. As part of her education, she travelled the world for two years, spreading the gospel. Rocker and the other missionaries all lived together in army-style barracks. She grew close to a bunkmate, a girl with blond hair and eyes of different colours. The pair held hands, wrote love letters, and spent all their time together. Rocker was certain she was going to marry her.
But one night, Rocker heard whispers. The word “gay” floated up to the bunk where she and the girl were lying. It wasn’t the first time Rocker had heard that word, but it was the first time she’d heard it in regards to herself.
During a time when the two teenagers were apart, the girl withdrew. “I was completely devastated,” Rocker recalls. It wasn’t until 10 years later that she told Rocker she felt they were getting too close.
Rocker eventually met another missionary, a man. They collaborated on plays and skits, and he was kind, caring and funny. After they had been together for a few years, Rocker felt it made sense to get married. (She was in her early 20s, and most of her friends were already engaged or married.)
In the early 2000s, Rocker and her husband were living in Calgary. There, things started to unravel. During a playwriting course in 2006, Rocker began exploring her emotional turmoil. “If I ever thought I was going to live in a reality where I wasn’t straight, I wouldn’t have gotten married,” Rocker says now.
That course gave rise to heterophobia, a one-act play that Rocker premiered at Sage Theatre’s Ignite Festival in 2009. The following year
heterophobia enjoyed 13 sold-out shows during Pride Week, and has since been performed at numerous staged readings around Alberta.
The play follows Grant, a young woman who lives in a world where being gay is the norm. Grant, however, develops feelings for her male friend, and struggles to accept them. The opening lines of the play are Rocker’s poem about eating charcoal, about being torn between her faith and her awakening sexual identity.
“If this is the life I’m supposed to have, do I choose the long game of slowly deteriorating or do I just end it now?” Rocker remembers thinking as she wrote the poem. “I think that that’s a really common feeling that people have, and sometimes they do choose to end it now. And I can’t blame them.”
Towards the end of the play, Grant and her friend Peter kiss. Grant decides she can’t mask her feelings and her identity any longer. “How much longer can I hide? Can I live like this for one more day, one more minute, one more second?” she writes in her journal. “The truth will not set me free.”
The situation mirrored what Rocker was facing around the same time. She’d fallen in love with another woman and, much like Grant, was left broken-hearted when the woman did not share those feelings.
The play doesn’t have what one would call a happy ending. Grant’s parents discover her journal and are devastated. Despite Peter’s rejection and her parents’ heartbreak, Grant chooses to be true to her identity. “That’s the only thing she can control,” says Rocker. “She can’t control people’s reactions to it, or people having enough courage or capability to have her back…. And she definitely can’t control the family and how they are going to react.”
Rocker chose to do the same. She and her husband divorced in 2007, and in 2009 she came out to her family via e-mail. In their response, her parents confined themselves to a single line: “Deep, deep sadness.”
A few days later, her parents wrote again. “It was like, ‘Oh, you should come home,’” Rocker says. “And, ‘Everything is possible for people who believe in God.’ They were quoting scripture, like nothing is beyond God’s power to fix. I was crushed.”
Today, Rocker maintains a relationship with her parents and three older siblings. But she says she still can’t be truly authentic around them.
“My parents love me, they want me to visit all the time, we talk every week,” she says. “They just think I’m an amazing person, but this is the one thing where they’re like, ‘Yeah, if just that would change.’”
In 2009, Rocker found Hillhurst United, the church with the rainbow sticker on its sign. The following year, Rocker began working at the church, and, in 2012, was named the church’s affirming and creative co-ordinator.
Hillhurst is one of 130 affirming United ministries in Canada. In order to become an affirming ministry, the church enters into an “intentional time of reflection, education, theological study” to determine its position on inclusive issues, including LGBTQ issues. Hillhurst voted to become affirming not long before Rocker came to the church for the first time.
“I look at it like a gateway, in a good way,” Rocker says, adding that her central focus is to identify and remove barriers that might stand in the way of the church being an inclusive community. “Pam eats, sleeps and breathes affirmingness,” says Rev. Sheena Trotter-Dennis, one of three ministers at the church. “It’s the essence of who she is.”
Hillhurst United hosts regular support meetings for LQBTQ individuals of faith as well as for their parents. It also partners with other organizations within the Calgary community, including the Calgary Sexual Health Centre, FairyTales Film Festival and the Coming Out Monologues YYC.
Rocker herself meets regularly with church members—and sometimes their families—who are struggling with their faith and its connection to their sexuality or gender identity. For her the central question is, “How do we continue to love each other?” And she adds, “To me, it’s completely unfaithful as a congregation, and as a person, to not believe people.”
“I’ve never seen someone who lives her values like Pam does,” says Adrea Wirl, who handles communications for the church. “She’s uncompromising.” That may be the case now, but it was only at Hillhurst that Rocker was first able to reconcile her identity with her faith.
“Without faith, for me my life wouldn’t be fulfilling,” she says. “Without being open about who I am, my life would be devoid of integrity. And my faith calls on me to have integrity.”
Still, she struggles sometimes with how much grace she should have for those who aren’t as accepting and welcoming. “I want to have grace for people who were in the same position as me, because if you don’t know—if you’re not really allowed to have an open thought process or exploration of who you are—it’s really easy to just believe (what you’re taught),” she says. “But at the same time, if you always deny invitations to really see other people as whole… then you’re accountable for that.”
And after 25 years of her own struggling and learning, Rocker has managed an elegant reconciliation of her faith and her sexuality. “I feel like it’s faithful to believe when people tell us who they are,” she says.