“Once Upon a Dream”

By Emily Thompson

Ever since I can remember I have had a close relationship with God. When I was about ten or eleven years old, my mother read a few entries in my diary that suggested homosexual activity. She came to the doorway of my bedroom as I was falling asleep and in a nearly hysterical voice, demanded me to stop my behavior, stating it was an abomination to God, and threatened that I would go to hell if I didn’t change my ways. From that point on I prayed to God for new feelings, to change my attraction from Barbara Streisand to Robert Redford. I put up posters of David Cassidy, Bobby Sherman, and Donny Osmond, among others. I had trouble falling asleep at night and experienced vomit-inducing migraines until I was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church at twenty-two.

Although my mother had been raised Adventist, I was not. She left the Adventist Church when she met and married my father. I was first introduced to the Adventist faith when I began to spend time with my Adventist aunt and uncle and family. Because I had maintained a personal relationship to God and Jesus throughout my childhood, when I was near graduating from a public college, I started going to the small Adventist church that had at one time been the home church of my grandmother. Before traveling overseas to student teach in Wales, I was baptized and accepted into that Adventist Church. My traveling companion was my Bible, and I spent many hours reading and meditating about the God who created and loved me. I will never forget the feeling of newness that enveloped me as I rose from the baptismal waters. It wasn’t until I arrived at my host home in Wales that I began to realize what Jesus wanted to teach me now that I had turned over my life to Him.

When Dora, the woman who greeted me, took my hand to welcome me into their home in Wales, I felt a strange and warm sensation. Even though I had been active in sports and was surely in the company of lesbians during my college years, I never discussed the topic with anyone or even with myself. After a few weeks of living with my host family, and witnessing to them about my faith, Maggie, a 40-year-old mother, confided in me she thought she was in love with her best friend of over twenty years. I had to travel across the ocean to a small town in North Wales to meet my first lesbian. She unwittingly opened the floodgates of feelings that I had been almost successful in burying deep within me, seemingly out of reach. I read my Bible and prayed with new fervor.

My first teaching position after returning from Wales was midyear, in a tiny town in rural Nevada. When I was introduced to Jane, the teacher whose classroom I would take over, she shook my hand; and once again I felt that same strange and warm sensation. This time I thought, “She is a lesbian.” Several months later, Jane confided in me she was indeed a lesbian. And several more months later, I realized I was in love with her; and my “great conflict” began. As I struggled to reconcile my true sexual orientation with my faith, I entered the most traumatic year of my life.

My mother confronted me again, this time about the true nature of my relationship with Jane, this female teacher. When I reluctantly acknowledged her suspicions, she grew hysterical and launched into an abusive pattern of preaching, name-calling, and rejection. My Adventist aunt reassured me they still loved me but opened their Bible to share the verses that she thought condemned me.

Then Jane, my first love, left me for someone else. Our principal asked us to resign our teaching positions because some anonymous person accused us of being homosexual and therefore immoral. As one person summed up: I had lost my job, my love, my family, and my church—what else was there to lose? Fortunately for me, and for anyone else who will accept His gift, I had my personal relationship with God and Jesus.

In addition, I found SDA Kinship, a support group for current and former Adventist gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and their families and friends. Through my association with Kinship and the Kampmeeting experiences, I found the acceptance and reconciliation I had always longed for. I came to believe that God created me and loves me for who I am. I now know that when I turned my life over to Jesus, it was the beginning of my journey of self-acceptance, and that Jesus led the way.

Today, I am a lesbian mother with two boys, Ryan, age four, and David, eight months. My partner Grace and I had been together for almost four years before we inseminated. However, we had already experienced parenting together as a couple.

Only a year after getting together we assumed the parenting responsibility of my sister’s then five-year-old daughter because my sister had lost custody of her daughter Alexa to the state child welfare system. This child came to us with severe emotional problems (violent tantrums, biting, head banging, and other forms of self-mutilation), together with IQ scores that showed she was mildly mentally retarded. In the two years we parented my niece, she gained 16 IQ points, discontinued all of her self-destructive behaviors, and used complete sentences instead of two-word phrases. At age seven, Alexa was returned to my sister and her second husband. Today, she is living in a psychiatric residential facility for adolescents. This is her second placement since being returned to her heterosexual family.

The experience of raising my niece Alexa only magnified my long-standing desire and belief that I would be a good parent, but I thought my sexuality condemned me to being a really great aunt. Although lesbian couples were having babies long before me, I didn’t consider it an alternative until I met my Grace, my life partner, in 1990. We had a Holy Union ceremony in 1991.

After reviewing the sperm bank alternatives, we asked a very close gay male friend (from SDA Kinship) who had been in a monogamous relationship for seven years if he would consider being our sperm donor. We proceeded only after Conrad submitted to and passed the same testing sperm banks used to screen donors. We contractually agreed that he would have no legal rights or obligations; and when Ryan was two, we had a judge end his legal rights. The same procedure will be followed with David.

As Grace and I expected, notwithstanding our contract and the donor’s legal status, my four-year-old Ryan has discovered that he not only has two mommies, but he has two daddies as well. We have expanded our concept of family accordingly. In addition, our boys have three grandmothers, two grandfathers (one passed away), and plenty of aunts, uncles, and cousins to shower them with love. If only all children were so carefully planned, wanted, and loved.

Our family life has many more similarities than differences to a healthy heterosexual family life. We are preparing to move to a bigger home with either a guest house or room to build one because we know we will be the adult children who take care of our parents when they can no longer live independently. I truly believe that both Ryan and David will grow up to be good, decent people who will make the world a better place. They already have.

Emily Thompson is a pseudonym for a real-life Adventist lesbian mother who lives with her partner and their two children in mid-America.