Being a young gay Christian. Find out among the school desks
Testimony of Andrea Del Young Christian young LGBT project, first part
I am a thirty-two-catholic homosexual young man, who lives in a small diocese of the rich and frenetic Lombardy. Finally, I took courage and "paper and pen" to write a long, and I hope useful, literary-thetestyness addressed in particular to young Christians LGBT and their families. I consider that words, like the word, have a strong intrinsic therapeutic power and therefore I have tried to choose them and select them with attention and care, with a clear language and a narrative style.
In fact, as the famous writer Orianna Fallaci wrote: "There are moments in life in which to keep silent becomes a fault, and speak becomes an obligation. A moral duty, a categorical imperative to which you cannot escape"(Cit. Taken from the book “Anger and pride", Rizzoli, 2001).
We start from my personal history, which I consider unique and unrepeatable, but I think filth of many young homosexuals, their families and the Italian ecclesial panorama. I was born in a small but lively town, in a family linked to traditions but not traditionalist.
Like all families, we have experienced serene and positive moments and more difficult and uncertain moments. My childhood is last without great jolts, between school (religious), babysitter, cartoons, penalties in the courtyard with my brother, Oratorian events, games and birthdays with the friends of snacks, grandparents, picnics and family. If I think back to those years, I perceive how the marked sensitivity, reflexivity and the tendency to great questions of meaning has emerged spontaneously and early.
When I think of the emergence of my affectivity and psycho-sexual orientation, it always comes to mind how, already in fifth grade, while the clearer boys wanted to be the last to enter the room to make the medical examination and vaccinated to see the girls who started preparing, I simply left to indifferent. I didn't understand why. Or again, in middle schools, my companions were divided between looking at the newspaper in the school and the proverbial complaints between those who had pulled the longest lemon on the trip to the most beautiful in the class. Once again, I felt like a fish out of water, without understanding the reason well. I said to myself, I am not the type from these things. But I could still confuse (and confuse) well, allowing me not to ask myself (and feel) questions, issues, epithets, allusions, easy judgments, labels.
Pre-adolescence and adolescence, as known, opens new and spiny scenarios and problems. Life for the "classic good boy home and church" in a professional school in a small provincial town is not exempt from evidence, for anyone. Furthermore, as I know, the girls often have more intuited and coquetry, and paradoxically, my homosexuality was fiercely slammed in my face even before I was fully aware of it among the classrooms and school corridors ... Unfortunately, of homophobic bullying and training of teachers in this regard there was not as today and I had to make my way and with the cultural and emotional tools I possessed.
I quote only a small episode, which makes the idea well: on an afternoon of spring, unaware, I went home with the school backpack with the written with the discolor with great capital characters "I am gay". I washed, alone and with the heart in the throat, that folder for interminable minutes. I still keep it in the cellar today. It was 2000. Don't forget it, quickly turning your gaze on anything else.
Or again, when in those years I read in the municipal library, dirty and with the pages of the book not too open, the CCC (articles 2357, 2358, 2359 - "Chastity and homosexuality") I felt bounce and amplifying words such as depravation, disorder, proof, sacrifice, chastity, prayer ... I opened and closed, I reopen and I quickly closed the book, if someone passed. Like my doubts.
For the rest, with an elusive, contrasting and full of questions, I observed my peers undressing in the hour of gymnastics at school or after athletics training, during sports. All the rest, he was relegated to mere do -it -yourself fantasies. The inhabited solitude and the silent and unnameable anguish of those years has been a constant, not always easy to support and elaborate in one's room. There was no social life, and the real friends were the few and of all time, striving in a group of always being on the piece and "normal". After all, I said to myself, I didn't miss anything and everything was apparently fine.
In those years, a psychological counseling service was essential to speak, deal with and deepen some issues related to homosexuality, my family and post-diploma university orientation.
Like most of the teenagers, after the sacrament of Confirmation, the general escape-fuggi from the local Church is a very common practice. Thanks to the simple testimony of some families of the parish, I returned to attend Sunday Mass, the summer grests, the parish fields, the Oratorian activities in general. Thus came the first official positions in the parish: catechist and animator of children and teenagers in the oratory.
If the first great catechesis and fresco of Christian initiation was in the domestic hearth (or, as I prefer, the beautiful image of "The Church of the apron" of Bishop Antonio Bello), the second has certainly been in the heart of my parish and his consecrated and consecrated, loving and precious mirror of the local and universal Church. I keep these beautiful experiences of first friendship with Jesus in my heart.
Thus my adolescence was flew, between home, study and oratory, up to the maturity with the flood of the votes. And many dormant and closed questions in my personal Pandora vase. He still burned too much, open it.
