The State of Side B

Gay Christians, part 1: How the community has changed

Creatures, you can still find it on the internet: an almost thirty-year-old website called Bridges Across that sought to build “respectful relationships among those who disagree about… homosexuality, bisexuality and gender variance.” You can still enjoy its GeoCities–era web design, its “Hagar the Horrible” cartoon scanned from a creased newsprint original. But the real legacy of Bridges Across is in the terms, “Side A” and “Side B,” which were adopted by the Gay Christian Network in 2001 and continue to shape American gay Christian discourse today.

This here is a two-parter, creatures. Part One introduces SIDE B to those who are not yet surfeited with its discourse, and also suggest ways that the community named and created by this categorization has changed since 1997 (!). Part Two will attempt to describe what’s wrong with “Side B,” explain why it nevertheless persists and likely will be with us for some time, and offer a reframing that I hope highlights the spiritual insights of this subculture while making new conversations possible.

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Oh, Do Not Ask, “What Is It?”/Let Us Go and Make Our Visit

The alphabet language began as a way to avoid emotionally-charged alternatives. “Side A” names Christians who believe that same-sex marriage and/or sexual relationships are in harmony with God’s will, while “Side B” names those who believe God calls people to sexual activity only within monogamous, opposite-sex marriage. “Side A” people might call their view “affirming,” to which B-types might reply that we affirm all kinds of things—most notably, our own churches’ teaching! Meanwhile B-lievers (sorry) might call our side “orthodox,” but that begs the question of what right belief is. “Conservative” and “progressive” have too many political implications. “A vs. B” seemed almost neutral.

Over time, these terms accumulated additional nuances. “Side B” is now used primarily to name people who accept ourselves as gay (or lesbian, bi, or same-sex attracted) and are not seeking to change our orientation through psychology or prayer. In 2014, I spoke at the University of Notre Dame’s “Gay in Christ” conference, which brought together many speakers and attendees who had met through Side B networks. Four years later, the Revoice conference was founded by and for “sexual minorities who uphold the historic Christian sexual ethic”—or, as Revoice’s FAQ page notes, Side B.

Side B began in Protestant circles. Most American Catholics who identify as gay or same-sex attracted, and seek to live in harmony with Church teaching, would not call themselves “Side B.” But elements of Side B culture have spread widely, including among Catholics, through the leadership of people like Ron Belgau, who spoke at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in 2015; the influence of events like Gay in Christ and Revoice; and the accessibility of B-identified Facebook communities and podcasts. And in the decades since I entered this conversation as a feisty young convert, Side B culture has shifted in ways that hold lessons for the broader Church.

Here’s my sense of three changes since the early 2000s.

First, Side B life is more community-focused and less cerebral. One of the first Side B watering holes was the Spiritual Friendship blog, co-founded by Belgau, a Catholic, and Wesley Hill, an Episcopalian (now the Rev. Hill). Spiritual Friendship took its name from dialogues by St. Aelred of Rievaulx, and it could get heady, with frequent quotations from Scholastics and liberal use of the original Greek. The blog might place the covenant of David and Jonathan in both historical and eschatological context; explore the possible theological meanings of Jesus’ threefold “Do you love me?” to Peter; consider variant translations of the Catechism’s recommendation of “disinterested friendship” for same-sex attracted people; or share St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s tribute to his beloved friend St. Basil the Great, whose friendship made them “two bodies with a single spirit.”

One of the more common criticisms in the comments-box at Spiritual Friendship was that the community was hyper-intellectual—bookish, disembodied. That’s all changed now! Between Facebook communities, Revoice, and general in-person mingling, Side B feels very down-to-earth nowadays. Real people have real friendships and real fights; they share home truths and dumb memes. This strikes me as an inevitable and mostly-healthy change… although I wish some of these whippersnappers would get their theology from Tertullian, not TikTok or Tumblr.

It’s much more aware of trauma and abusive religious leadership. I know—who isn’t? But when I was first discovering Side B communities, there was little discussion of the ways that silence, misconceptions, and active homophobia in our churches might have harmed us or warped our relationship with God. That’s changed. It’s changed partly because of massive changes in the surrounding culture: Headlines and hashtags and Oscar-winning films all make it obvious that religious leaders can be wolves in shepherds’ clothing.

But it’s also changed because so many of us shared stories. I remember eating at the Taco Bell in the Notre Dame food court during Gay in Christ and discovering that almost every person at that long countertop had been fired from or denied a church-related job because of being gay—even though every single one of them accepted and lived by their church’s sexual ethic. Books like Bridget Eileen Rivera’s Heavy Burdens, and my own later Tenderness, come out of Side B communities and articulate the harms experienced by believing LGBT/SSA+ Christians in our churches. Maybe the one book that’s as universally-praised as St. Aelred in Side B circles is Alan Downs’s work of pop psychology, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World. Aelred depicts the dream of ordered, selfless love; Downs has given many of my Side B friends essential tools to make that dream a reality.

More speculatively, I’ll suggest that this shift has accompanied obvious changes in the American political landscape to create a new web of alliances for Side B Catholics. At the time of Gay in Christ, my guess is that most participants would have described themselves as “conservatives,” and seeking support among social conservatives seemed natural. Now, there are many Side B people who would consider themselves on the political left—and if I were looking for natural allies, I would turn first to Catholics who have advocated for survivors of clergy sexual abuse. People who continue to place faith in Jesus and the Church, even when we know how often and how devastatingly Catholics have failed to live out the Gospel, are people who understand the core of the Side B experience. Many of these Catholics would also consider themselves social conservatives, or share various “conservative” beliefs about abortion and sexual immorality—but this is no longer the part of their self-understanding that brings them closest to the Side B community.

Paired same-sex love has moved from the past to the present. From early on, Side B communities highlighted historical and Scriptural depictions of two men or two women following God together: Sts. Basil and Gregory, Ruth and Naomi, St. John Henry Newman and Fr. Ambrose St. John. This interest was especially clear where Catholic influence was strongest—unsurprising, given Catholics’ attention to the lives of the saints and emphasis on continuity with the Christian past.

However, in the early days few people knew anyone who had actually tried to live out these ideals in their own lives. Slowly, voices emerged, in places like the blog A Queer Calling, whose authors drew on monastic models to shape their “community of two.” Terminology varied, from “covenant friendship” (modeled on the covenant of David and Jonathan) and “adelphopoeisis” (literally “brother-making,” from Eastern Christian traditions) to newfangled terms like “celibate partnership,” “Side B relationship,” and “queerplatonic love.” The podcast New Kinship explores some of the distinctions and models here, from an Anglican perspective; host TJ Espinoza gave a fascinating presentation at this year’s Revoice delineating a few different models, including the traditional covenant brotherhood he himself celebrated in an African community where these models have been preserved for millennia.

Paired same-sex love is relatively uncontroversial in the Side B world when it happens because a sexually-active gay couple experiences a religious conversion and embraces chastity. It’s more controversial when someone declares an intention to seek a life partner of the same sex. Many Side B people emphasize the dangers of this kind of relationship: Aren’t you placing yourself in constant temptation? Aren’t you giving up on the ideal of community, and retreating into a quasi-marriage? Are you going to wind up adjusting your convictions to fit your lifestyle? Are you going to end up having sex you can’t be honest about, or even pressuring one partner into sex?

Those fears are based on the real experiences of some community members with this kind of relationship. Other Side B people report that entering into ancient traditions of paired same-sex love has freed them to be more honest, more self-giving, and more chaste. (This has extremely been my own experience.) My purpose here is not to hand down a verdict, but to name the current position of these traditions in our community.

In spite of these changes within Side B, and the even greater changes in the surrounding culture, there is still an ecumenical Side B movement. I am ambivalent about this fact, and I’ll start with this ambivalence in Part Two. But first… if you know what I’m talking about here, do you agree with this list of changes? Do you have other changes you’d add, or a different assessment of the reasons for/value of these shifts?

Rainbow sheep photographed by “nac!” on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.