Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 1: The Rainbow-Colored Sheep (1999)

As of this month, June 2019, I have been publishing fiction for twenty years! What a fantastic truth!

To mark the occasion, I thought it would be fun to look back over my writing-career-thus-far. I spend so much time looking forward in this business, moving on to the next project, that I seldom sit down and really contemplate everything that I have already done. It always feels like I haven't done much, honestly. I think that's because I compare my present day oeuvre to all of the works floating around my head that have yet to be brought down from the ether and put to the physical page. But now's a great opportunity to take it all in. Twenty years! And it all began with a sheep.

I actually wrote "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" in 1997, two years before it was originally published. 1997 was a difficult year for me. A year of big changes in my life. As the year opened, I had just been through my first brutal break-up, and I was a better man for it. As a result, I had spent the better part of the end of 1996 making amends like a recovered drug addict. The relationship had been toxic and co-dependent. I had slowly but surely allowed myself to be isolated from all of my closest friends, and I hadn't bothered to tell them why.

1996 and 1997 were the years of transition into a better life. I got out of that relationship, I reconnected with old friends and discovered new ones. And as I was making the rounds, reconnecting with the people I had lost, I was also coming out; admitting aloud what most of them had already known. I think the most common reaction that I got from old friends when I told them I was gay was, "Duh." I thought I would shock them, but I was the one who got the surprise. And the best part of the surprise was the discovery that it didn't make a difference to my oldest, most tried-and-true friends. They were just glad to have me back in their lives.

Of course, there were exceptions. Painful exceptions. There was a girl, who had fallen in love with me. I considered her a friend at the time, and, yes, I knew how she felt about me, and I allowed it. I didn't pursue her. I didn't pretend to feel the same. But I also didn't tell her that she never stood a chance. Not until my break-up and my decision to come out to everyone. She hated me for it. She told me, rather specifically, that she hoped I would die and burn forever in "a Southern Baptist hell."

And yes, there was that. There was the Church. I'd been a Methodist all my life. Active in the leadership of the church since my teens. It was an important part of my identity, to say the least. But I'd done it all in the closet. To put it mildly, some of the people in the church were not having it when I came out. In particular, the father of one of my best friends had a lot to say. He would take me aside, whenever he found an opportunity, to let me know exactly what he thought. "You're not gay. You're a wannabe," was one of the weirdest things he would  say to me, and he said it often.

I suppose, like so many people at that time, he had a preconceived, stereotypical idea of what gay people acted like, and I didn't fit that mold. He wasn't the only one who thought this way, but he was certainly the most outspoken. I asked him why I would ever "wannabe" gay. Why would I want to be oppressed and discriminated against? He never had an answer, but that didn't change his mind.

Eventually, I was arrested, one fine Sunday morning, on the way to teach the college-age Sunday school class. Nothing scandalous; just an unpaid traffic citation. I hadn't even known there was a warrant. As noted before, this man's son was one of my best friends, so I had their number memorized. This was way back in the twentieth century, before everyone got cell phones and lost the need for retaining phone numbers in their heads. I called everyone else first, but as it happens, everyone else was in church or otherwise unavailable. I called my friend's house, and his father answered. His father called my father, and they got me out of the slammer together.

This gave him a new argument. "If you was really gay, then you wouldn't have called me to get you outa jail."

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

" 'Cause if you was gay you'da been in hog heaven."

"Gay people don't enjoy getting raped." I pointed out, not sure then or now how I managed it without absolutely flying into a rage. "That's like saying women enjoy being raped by men, because they are attracted to men."

"No," he insisted hotly. "Women's got different plumbing!"

I had no words. There were clearly some people in my life who could not grasp my truth. And I didn't need them to.

Years later, this man actually did change his mind and became an outspoken ally. I think I showed him who I was by simply being who I was and never proving him right on any of his erroneous suppositions about gay men. He finally realized that I was just like any other man. My virtues were not dependent on my sexual orientation. In fact, my going through hell with him was great for his nephew, when he came out. Instead of the homophobia his uncle had met me with, he was greeted with acceptance and understanding. I think that's one of the most important lessons of coming out for me. The fact that I came out when I did saved someone who came out later from facing the same battles with the same people. Coming out is important. It's not easy, but if you can navigate the struggle, you might just save a life by doing so.

I know, I'm supposed to be writing about "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." The thing is, I am. All of this was a part of that story.

I had no idea at the time that I was going to be a writer. I never would have guessed it, in fact. I hated writing, for the most part; "serious" writing anyway. I didn't have the patience for it. When I was a boy of twelve, and even into my early twenties, I liked to draw weird little comic books and write bizarre short stories without any dialogue. I was always a storyteller. And, yes, I was even at this time working on my first novel and thinking it an insane endeavor. I had been working on it for about two years and had no real reason to believe I'd ever finish it. But that's a story for another blog post. The fact is, if you had visited me from the future and told me I was going to write serious fiction and even become a seasoned novelist, I would have laughed in your face. I wanted to be a cartoonist. I had written a comic strip soap opera about ducks, and I had several other ideas for cartoons all mapped out. I wanted to go to film school. I wanted to be Spielberg. Writing serious prose fiction for a living wasn't even on my radar.

Then I got a letter in the mail.

I've told this part of the story before, I know; in interviews, on YouTube, in person when people have asked me about how I came up with the idea for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." I will tell it as often as the opportunity presents itself:

There was (and is) a faction of the Untied Methodist Church, running a magazine called Good News, which, let's be clear, was a hate rag. Good News was all about fighting the gays at the turn of the century. Not that this was their only focus. They'd been spewing their misogynistic, homophobic poison since the late 1960s, but by the 1990s, the gay rights movement within the world of Christianity was viewed by them as the most terrible threat to Jesus.

I don't know why I received their newsletters, but I did, regularly. I used to find them humorous, because they were so ignorant and absurd. I read them for a laugh. But they had recently started not to read as much like a joke. They were starting to transition from feeling irrationally threatened by the LGBTQ community to being a threat to the LGBTQ community.

This letter, in particular, asserted that "the gays" were tearing the church in two, with their desire for acceptance. Gay people were, to them, a threat to good Christian families everywhere. And now they were asking me for money, to fight the gays. To keep them in their place. And let's be clear, that place was not the Church.

I was outraged! I was wounded! How dare they ask me for money to fight me! To keep me out of the Church that I had put so much time and and energy into being a leader in for so many years? For the first time since I had been getting these uninvited newsletters in my mailbox, I sat down to write them a reply.

And as I opened a new file on the computer, as I sat there, ready to write, it occurred to me that whatever I wrote would be utterly disregarded by the editor. It would be laughed at and tossed in the garbage.

But my hands went to the keyboard, and I wrote anyway.

It wasn't a letter to the editor. It was "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." I wrote my truth in this fiction. I wrote my pain and my struggle. I wrote my determination not to be dismissed by ignorant bigots. I wrote my struggle with the dogmatic, bigoted, hypocritical ignorance of these men.

When I had finished it, I sat back, read what I had put to the page, and I said, "Where did that come from?"

I didn't know. I hadn't planned it. It had just flowed through me, straight out of the ether. I find that a lot of authors feel this way about their work. Still today, I marvel at my best work, not feeling that I really deserve the credit for it. Feeling more like I had channeled something than that I had created it. But there it was, my reply to the hateful bigots. And I had no idea what to do with it. I showed it to friends and family. I got positive feedback. I put it in a folder and let it collect dust.

Two years later, my first novel was about to be released, and I wanted to create a presence on the Internet. This was before social media. This was the time of Websites and e-mail. I built a Website through my America Online account. I put the synopsis for my forthcoming novel, Cry, Wolf, up on the page. But I wanted to keep it fresh. I had the idea of putting up a short story each month until the book came out, to keep people coming back to the site. "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" had opened the floodgates for me. I had written more serious short fiction since, but never done anything with it other than show these stories to friends and put them away in a folder. But now I had a Website; a venue to share these stories with the world.

I posted "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" in June of 1999. There were e-books, of a sort, in those days, but they were a little-known concept and basically failed to find a place in the market at that time. I posted the story directly on the Web page and left it there for a couple of months, until I replaced it with "The Ghost in the Olive Grove." I had posted the cover art for Cry, Wolf with the synopsis in May. When I replaced that with "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" in June, I wanted an image to go along with it. My sister created an iconic piece of artwork to go with the story, and I placed it just beneath the title.

Later, I changed Web hosts for the site and re-posted all of the fiction I had taken down from the AOL site. Again, e-books were not really a thing. I put "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" on the site, as a downloadable file, and the rest is history.

Through downloads on my Website, the story's inclusion in my anthology book The Great Debate in 2003, and the Kindle e-book single release of the story in 2011, "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" has remained my most widely-read work over the past twenty years.

It's a personal victory that I can only describe as bittersweet.

The sad thing for me, about the story's enduring success, is that I can so clearly see the reason for it. Despite the passing of nearly a quarter of a century, the message of the story remains relevant to our times. The "United" Methodist Church stands on the brink of schism, over the matter of treating LGBTQ people as people of equal worth; the right wing "Christian" hatemongers have taken political ownership of the teachings of a man whose spiritual philosophies are the very antithesis of what they stand for; and hate crimes against the LGBTQ community, and so many others, are on the rise, under an administration that values bigotry and authoritarianism over human rights, equality, and the very tenets of democracy. Now, more than ever, I find strength in the message of the little lamb who refuses to hide his true colors; who refuses to apologize to anyone for who and what he is.

To say that I am proud of this story doesn't really make sense to me. As I said before, I don't really feel like I came up with it. It just sort of happened. But I can say, without any feelings of pretension, that I am grateful for this story. This is the story that forever changed my life.

And to think, it was only the beginning.