Thoughts on “The Wise Kids”
I recently caught up with Stephen Cone’s 2011 film The Wise Kids, and it immediately became my favorite film about faith and sexuality. The film follows three teenagers as they graduate high school and age out of the youth group at the Baptist church that comprises their community: Brea, whose curiosity causes her to start asking questions that undermine her faith; Tim, who is gentle and sweet and gradually comes out (or is outed) as gay; and Laura, who clings desperately to a relatively narrow-minded but wholehearted faith, especially as Brea and Tim’s journeys threaten her beliefs. Cone has said he wanted the film to be a “portrait of a community,” and the film accordingly highlights other members of the church, including the strained marriage of Elizabeth and Austin, the church’s thirty-something worship minister who is coming to terms with his own sexuality. What’s remarkable about the film, and why I resonated with it so much more than I tend to connect with stories about faith and sexuality (maybe more than any other movie ever), is its sincerity and nuance. The characters are believable and three-dimensional, and Cone refreshingly resists merely reinforcing stereotypes. (Roger Ebert praised the film: “There are no bad people in this movie.”)
What this film captured particularly well, among other things, was the emotional complexity of being gay among a community of people who love you deeply but also feel conflicted about your sexuality. There are many, many gay and lesbian individuals who grew up in religious communities that were hostile and harmful, and for these individuals, leaving those communities is often a vital step toward healing and sustaining any potential for relationship with God. There are also, nonetheless, many gay and lesbian folks—and I’d count myself here—who grew up in religious communities that were undeniably imperfect (especially on matters related to gender and sexuality) but that were largely healthy and provided environments of support and trust in which we could begin coming out. As those of us in this second category grow more confident in our self-understanding related to sexuality and gender, our relationships with those communities often become tricky and bittersweet: We may consider them “home” while recognizing certain spaces (maybe even specific relationships) where we’re implicitly or explicitly unwelcome. We struggle to keep track of where everyone stands in relation to one another as our attitudes and theirs shift, often at different paces, sometimes in different directions. We can’t quite remember if their anxious concern about our sexuality was merely an empathetic reflection of the anxiety we expressed, or an unhelpful reinforcement of it, or maybe some of both. They loved us when we may not have loved ourselves; they may have inadvertently contributed to our self-hate. They’ve seen us at our best and our worst, which offers the gift of rootedness as well as the threat of stagnation. They were there for some of the most tender, vulnerable moments of our lives, which means they’re irrevocably part of our stories. Our memories are tinged with joy and sadness.
The film’s exploration of this emotional complexity largely centers on Tim. (Fair warning that I’m going to discuss specific plot points of the film below. If you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend watching it first; it’s on DVD and available to stream on Netflix as I post this.) Whereas narratives about gay kids often establish high school graduation as a sort of escape hatch leading to self-actualization (and again, it is for some kids, but not for all), Tim’s transition from high school to college is more of an inevitability. He’s excited to move from Charleston to New York for college, but he’s not in a hurry, and he seems content to return home on Christmas break.
There are three moment’s in Tim’s story that capture the emotional complexity I’m describing particularly well. Near the beginning of the story, the three friends walk down their suburban street at night, and Laura asks Tim whether, as was hinted earlier, he really is gay. (In her discomfort, she noticeably can’t get the word out.) Tim diffidently confirms before asking, “How do you feel about that?” Laura, who is visibly shaken, stammers a response: “Well, I double-checked, and it’s definitely wrong.” Tim looks mildly surprised and only replies, “Okay.” Laura continues: “I can send you the verses, if you want,” and Tim quickly answers, “Sure,” before assuring her he’s still a Christian and expects his orientation will change. It’s unclear how confidently he believes this, and Brea (who already knew Tim was gay, and who doesn’t seem troubled by it) watches the entire conversation with mild horror on Tim’s behalf.
The scene captures all the delicate dynamics of the vulnerability and anxiety-managing that characterized so many of my coming out conversations in Christian spaces: Tim is young and uncertain, and seeing his devout Christian friend react with such consternation likely validates his own self-doubt; his promise that “I’m gonna work this out…it’s, like, a thing you work out,” is as much a reassurance for himself as it is for her. (In the early days of my coming out, when I made similar predictions for myself, I expected to “work this out” with much greater certainty than Tim expresses; the promise relieved everyone’s anxiety, including my own.) For Laura, on the other hand, Tim’s coming out is merely the first crack in the tenuous belief system she fearfully curates. When she tells Tim, “You can’t be both [gay and Christian]; that’s…like…that’s like a paradox,” what she means is, “I can’t conceive of a world in which someone can be both gay and Christian.” On the other hand, she does genuinely love Tim, and while her concern may be misguided, it’s concern motivated by her genuine love. I know these dynamics well: When Christians come out as gay, people (including the ones coming out) often start to treat each other as manifestations of certain cultural forces: the Christian, the Gay Person, the Conservative, etc. As Tim and Laura talk, Brea watches on in silence, unsure of whether she should interrupt and defend Tim or whether he would even want her to do so, and I think many of my loved ones often felt a similar struggle in their concern for my well-being.
The second moment occurs halfway through the story on a family trip to the beach. Tim’s younger brother approaches him, saying their father told him Tim is gay. “I…kind of hate it,” he says, “…like, I mean, I really hate it. I mean, I think it’s sick,” before walking away, leaving Tim blindsided. When they arrive home, Tim confronts his father, a character who is clearly troubled by Tim’s sexuality but who doesn’t come across as overtly antagonistic or abusive. Tim says he would have preferred to be the one to tell his brother, and Tim’s dad defends the younger brother’s reaction: “You’re gonna need to give him some time. He’s gonna need some time.” Tim, clearly still reeling from his brother’s words, quietly asks, “How long?”
Tim’s question approaches a tension many of us encounter coming out in conservative communities: To what extent do we owe it to others to accommodate, or forgive, or be sensitive to—choose your verb—the discomfort our honesty causes them? As Tim asks: How long ought we to wait for people to process or understand our self-disclosure? In my case, my coming out was, for many people, the first time they had knowingly interacted in any meaningful way with a gay person. (It was my first time, too!) They had never felt any pressure or obligation to consider their beliefs about same-sex relationships, and my coming out made what had felt like an unnecessary rhetorical question suddenly feel like an urgent crisis. I had been reflecting—maybe “agonizing over” is more accurate—my sexuality for many years, but it was a complete and sudden surprise to many of my loved ones. On the one hand, it’s not necessarily the gay person’s job to help others process their thoughts and emotions about sexuality; on the other hand, processing thoughts and emotions often constitutes the content of relationships, and when it comes to my friends and family, it felt natural for self-disclosure to occur in both directions. Although theoretical discussions about sexuality occasionally crossed a line into territory that felt too personal for me, it usually made sense for us to act as sounding boards for each other as we puzzled through the myriad questions we faced. (It’s important for me to note here, though, that I didn’t encounter any reactions nearly so negative as that of Tim’s brother; and if I had, I imagine I might be much less willing to wait for others to understand.)
Although I’ve been out for a long time and feel much less insecure about my sexuality than I did when I first started coming out, I find that I’m often still cautious when I enter Christian spaces unfamiliar to me in light of the potential discomfort (or even contention) my orientation might elicit. My orientation usually feels like the elephant in the room that tags along up whenever I try to interact with a new Christian institution or community, whether I’m applying as a potential employee, visiting as a potential church member, or even joining a friend’s parents for dinner. There’s undoubtedly a certain freedom in coming out in an unfamiliar space: If I encounter negative reactions, I can simply shake the dust off my feet and decline future (albeit unlikely) invitations to dinner, or visit a different church next week, or apply for a different position tomorrow. Nevertheless, the situations I’m describing involve some measure of indebtedness on my part—I’m the guest, or I’m the recipient of hospitality, etc.—and I don’t necessarily want to instigate a theological crisis.
Finally, the third moment occurs near the end of the film—and again, watch the film before you read me spoiling the plot! Throughout the story, it becomes evident that Austin (the thirty-something worship minister) is attracted to Tim. At Tim’s eighteenth birthday party, the two share an unexpected kiss that leaves them each deeply confused and unsettled. When Tim returns home for Christmas after his first semester in college, Austin stops by the house to talk with him. The awkwardness is palpable. Austin confesses he thinks he might be gay—probably verbalizing it for the first time to anyone—and Tim reacts with a suitably standoffish reaction: "Okay. Me too." Both men understand that the married worship minister shouldn't have kissed the teenager a few months ago, and both understand it’s probably inappropriate for him to be coming out to him now. But Austin continues, breaking into tears: "Yeah, but...I don't know…I don’t know what to do. I don't know what to do, Tim." Suddenly the dynamics of the situation shift. Tim seems to recognize that while he’s young and likely on a trajectory toward stability and self-acceptance, Austin is carrying many more years of shame and baggage and is only beginning to acknowledge truths that have the potential to alter his life dramatically. Austin probably should have chosen someone else to receive this self-disclosure, but then again, Tim probably felt to him like the only safe outlet in his community. So Tim then demonstrates profound grace and compassion, leaning in to to envelope Austin in a hug as Austin continues: “I don’t know what to do.”
It’s difficult to describe to someone who didn’t grow up in conservative Christian circles just how utterly terrifying it is to confess, to yourself and to anyone else, a reality that feels poised to unravel everything. (Cone, who plays Austin, masterfully portrays this angst in his unbearably nervous coming out speech.) As gay and lesbian people become more visible in our culture, that shame seems to diminish more and more with each new generation, so it can be difficult for people my age or younger to empathize with older gay and lesbian people whose formative years occurred in an entirely different, much more hostile world. (It’s somewhat surprising that a film released in 2011 could take seriously the dread someone might feel about coming out—as if we’ve already moved past that as a culture—but my sense is that there are still many, many people like Austin out there stuttering their way through self-disclosures, if they ever come out at all.) Along those lines, as I started coming out to friends and family, mostly in conservative Christian settings, I was surprised how often my self-disclosure elicited similar self-disclosures from others. In many cases, me coming out as gay prompted others to share, maybe for the first time, about someone they loved who was gay. A few times, people responded to me coming out by coming out themselves. In many cases, though, my vulnerability invited others to be vulnerable about matters entirely unrelated to sexuality: about shame they carried or doubts that haunted them. (I helped lead an unofficial LGBTQ student group at the Christian university I attended, and I was surprised how many of the people who showed up in the early days didn’t identify as LGBTQ but merely saw us as a safe place to be atheist, or feminist, or something else that didn’t fit our school’s norms.) Tim models a sort of hospitality and kindness we would do well to emulate.
By the end of the film, it seems likely that Tim may be the only one of the three teens whose faith will endure: Brea’s doubts have only expanded since she left for college, and if Laura manages to keep her fragile belief system intact, it will require increasingly defensive measures on her part. Tim and Brea, home on break, walk down the street together. Brea timidly asks Tim, “Hey, what would you think if…I stopped believing in God?” Tim considers and asks, “Have you?” Brea’s silence confirms her skepticism, even if she’s not ready to admit it. Tim continues: “Well, as long as you’re okay with always being part of my bedtime prayers.” Brea is charmed: “I’m very, very okay with that.” Try as we might to confine each other into stereotypes, in my experience, people are too complex for that, so my journey as a gay Christian has been complex, too. I have given and received love, I have perpetrated and suffered harm, and the conservative Christian communities that raised me are indelibly part of my identity. To steal Brea’s words: I’m very, very okay with that.