Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 7: The Great Debate (2003)

The Great Debate was my second multi-format book release. It was a short book of short fiction; four stories, one of which had already been published on its own previously; and it was the hardest writing project I had ever taken on at the time.

I was still in that bleeding demons phase of my early writing career. I was struggling with things, as I wrote in "Part 1" of this blog series. I was struggling with coming out, with the hypocrisy of the church I had been raised to believe in, with the fear of them being right and my being wrong; the fear of Hell. The fear, and the reality, of being rejected by people who mattered to me.

I had launched my writing career with the publication of my short story, "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," in 1999, and it had been cathartic. It had been healing, in the way that having a good cry is healing. But it hadn't sorted the issues in my soul. It had merely opened the floodgates. I needed to say more. Much more.

I set out to write an anthology of stories that would illustrate the process of coming out as gay while struggling with the self-hatred  happily encouraged by a deeply religious upbringing. I was always angry about these things, and rightly so.

I didn't start writing the book as a cohesive thing at all. I wrote "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," and called it a day. I'm not sure, exactly, of the order, but I think the next story I started in on was actually the last in the book, "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." The third story I got sucked into was the novella, "Six Nights to Damnation," which was placed second in the anthology, and the fourth was "Christian's Dilemma," which wound up sitting between "Six Nights" and "Reverend Philips."

It took me years to write this book.

It was still the late 1990s when I started "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." I had fully embraced the Theatre culture on the campus of Richland College at this point. I had made friends of all the girls, and the other guys were often overheard saying things like, "What does Glenn have that I don't have?"

The answer? Safety! I wasn't trying to get anything out of the women in our group, other than the  friendship they freely offered. It was a game to us, not letting the straight guys know what was up. The girls would drag me into the ladies' room for chats, never explaining to the straight men what was happening. And it was still dangerous to be completely out. Even in a college Theatre group. There were men who were known to be a threat, and everyone knew it. So the women kept my secret from these men, after sussing it out for themselves.

Those were good times; the promise of creative freedom was all around me. I started growing out my hair, expressing myself boldly in everything I did. I had written all of the stories I would publish in 1999, but that year had not yet come. I felt that my writing had been bold, and my spirit had taken the hint and followed suit. I was out to my friends, but not to most of my family. I still feared the repercussions of that particular act of future boldness.

The group of us actors was cast in a production of Frankenstein, and the director, a noted puppeteer from Mexico, wanted to form a script from our ad-libs. It was bliss! We weren't just memorizing lines from a prewritten script, we were forming the script effortlessly, as we played off of each other's imaginations on the stage. I was doing everything Theatre at this point in my life. I practically lived on campus.

One of my many Theatre-related classes had us all write and read aloud a one-act play for a final grade. This is where "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" was born. I was inspired by my outrage at Westboro Baptist Church, which was often in the headlines of the day for their brutal homophobic bigotry. Their leader, Reverend Fred Phelps, was on trash talk shows all the time, red faced and furious, shouting his sinister catchphrase, "You're going to Hell!" at the gay community and their allies alike. He was a raging microcosm of the evils of the Christian church worldwide. Granted, some churches taught "tolerance," but even this was an insult. We didn't want or deserve to be merely "tolerated." We wanted and deserved to be fully accepted and embraced for who we were!

Fred Phelps was the genesis of the character, but Aidan Philips was certainly not a clone of the man. I took the attitudes of other like-minded pastors, the sinister actions of other churches that were obsessed with attacking gay people and their families, and I put them all into one character. I wrote this one-act play for class, performed it, and felt like I wanted it to be more. I wanted to expand it, even if only a tiny bit. I wanted Reverend Philips' bigotry to go beyond homosexuality. There were other hateful headlines. Women being run out of the church for leaving their abusive husbands, children of white mothers being exhumed from the grave when the church learned that their father was black. Monstrous acts being done in the name of Christianity! I wanted Reverend Philips to embody them all in his personal mission.

Script-in-hand, post Intro to Theatre class, I mapped out The Great Debate, planning to expand upon these themes progressively with each story, using "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" as the springboard and "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" as the resolution. It seemed simple enough; write three new stories, stick them between the two I already had, add a scene or two to "Reverend Philips," and bam, there's a new book. I erroneously thought I could knock it out pretty fast.

By the end of the process, I would swear off writing structured anthologies and working with illustrations forever! Here, in 2020, I'm laughing at myself for that, but the feeling was real. This book was hard to write!

I wanted the book to serve as one collective metaphor. It was really about coming out as gay in a community of faith, confronting the hypocrisies, embracing and valuing oneself, and becoming a positive example for others in coming out myself. From beginning to end, the stories told a meta-story about the importance of coming out and standing up to the crippling power of fear.

"The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," was the first step: Recognition. In the coming out process, we first recognize that we are not like the so-called "white fleeced sheep." We are not welcome by them, unless we stay hidden and pretend to be just like them. There are social consequences to not going along with the herd, but there are personal consequences for conforming. We choose our consequences. Do we serve our haters, or do we serve our selves?

In order to come out, we must choose to serve ourselves; to step off of that ledge, to allow them to ostracize us, forcing us to sleep outside in the rain, like the protagonist of that story, with their taunts and promises of Hell.

These evil assurances invariably lead to fear, when you've been brainwashed your entire life into believing these attitudes to be the unequivocal word of God. So, after one has taken the first step, the next is to face one's fear, and that is what "Six Nights to Damnation" was really all about. It was a story about these fears being proven right. It was a story about what we fear will happen after coming out; that it will destroy us, that we will ruin every relationship that matters to us; that we will find no mercy or forgiveness under God; that we will be perfectly damned for what we are.

In order to transcend these fears, we first have to look them dead in the eye.

The novella's protagonist, Anthony Paul, faced his fears, and they destroyed him. He became the very monster that he had feared he would. And, in the end, he was nothing more than food for the creatures of Hell. This story works great as part of the overall metaphor of the book, but I would never give it a solo publication. On its own, it could only be seen as hatefully homophobic; as supporting the corrupt teachings of Christianity and other religions. As a part of the whole, it is redeemed in the end as an honest part of a much larger internal process.

This one was probably the hardest to write for me. "Six Nights to Damnation" was me, as a writer, facing some personal taboos. I wrote a torrid sex scene for the first time, I killed off a child, and even more horribly for me, I killed off a dog! At the time, some of these things were actually funny to me, once I got to them. I have a habit of writing sex scenes to be deliberately over the top and laughing as I do. When people tell me how much those scenes titillated them, in my head, I'm remembering how hard I personally laughed while writing them. I got through it, just the same. I even laughed when Anthony, having just murdered his six-year-old cousin, cheesily told his wife that Christopher was, "Out like a light," when she asked if he was sleeping. This was, of course, before I knew any children as an adult, before I would even write "Night Light." But the murder was still nightmarish for me to write, even if I did let out a few ghoulish giggles as a coping mechanism. In truth, I was utterly disturbed by the murderous nature of Anthony as the story progressed. I was riddled with nightmares by the butchered bodies piling up in the trunk of his car. And, all that considered, the hardest part was killing Patches the dog. I stopped writing for a bit when I got there. I couldn't do it, but I knew the story demanded it of me. In Cry, Wolf, there was a dog, Sampson, slated to die in the outline, who had other and better ideas for himself, in defiance of my outline, that helped to tie up the novel perfectly in the end. Sampson survived, but there was no hope for Patches. I have a powerful memory of taking a shower, trying to put off the moment, and breaking down sobbing, because I had to kill the dog.

Then ... I killed the dog, and it was awful. But I did it. I faced it, and I wrote it, and the story worked. The horrific metaphor of Anthony's fears being realized was complete.

The next step on the coming out journey, after acknowledging these fears, is defeating them; self-forgiveness; taking a side in the great ethical and theological debate; learning to love ourselves unconditionally, despite the abusive teachings of a life-long system of belief. That's where "Christian's Dilemma" came in.

This story was more autobiographical than the rest for me. It was about a man, Christian Rivers, Jr., who had come out in his faith community as bisexual. He had continued to fight the uphill battle, remained a leader in his church, but he had not been genuinely accepted by the Church. He was still told that his very being was a sin, that he was an affront to God, that he was hurting his family. He was struggling with all of the fears that had been presented in "Six Nights to Damnation."

"Christian's Dilemma" also confronts the problem of suicide in the gay community. The suicide rate is much higher among young LGBTQ people who do not feel accepted by their families or other communities. The story opens with Christian being urged by a demon in his closet to take a gun and kill himself, ridding the world of the inevitable pain he was going to cause by his mere continued existence. He was assured that everyone would be happier without him. Then he trips over an angel on his front porch, and a fresh perspective comes to him in conversation with that angel, one of his guardian angels. He starts to pick apart the mixed messages of the Bible, of the Christian faith, of an inexplicable dogmatic presentation of the Supreme Being as a petty monster. In the end, he accepts himself, he doesn't just ponder the possibility of God's love, he accepts it as a reality, and he chooses life; full life, as the man he was born to be.

The challenge in writing this one for me was facing my own inner "suicide demons;" facing the part of me that was filled with self-loathing because I'd been told to feel that way about myself my whole life. Writing this story for the protagonist was the same as experiencing his personal revelations for myself. I came out on the other end of it changed. I was ready to take the next step ... sort of.

There was another story I had planned to put in The Great Debate that just didn't happen. It was about an ostrich who'd been raised by eagles and didn't know he wasn't an eagle until he grew up. This was maybe the only instance of me not knowing where a story was going before I sat down to write it. I did write one scene, as I recall, and I loved it. It was funny and cartoony. It would have added a whole other vibe to the book. I got stuck on the story for a long time. I even spitballed ideas to friends, never coming up with a satisfying conclusion. I finally abandoned it, realizing the cartoony vibe probably didn't fit the book anyway, and feeling the message of self-acceptance would have been somewhat redundant. I may go back and finish this story someday, if the ending presents itself, but in all this time, that has yet to happen. I'm comfortable with my choice to leave it behind.

That brings us back to good ol', bad 'ol Reverend Philips. I thought it would be weird and cool to end the book with a play, rather than prose. I wanted to add a couple more scenes to the one-act, to flesh it out, to make it more about the full hypocrisy of Christian hate groups. I realized pretty quickly, however, that I could get deeper into it through a traditional prose narrative. I wanted to convey thoughts and feelings, beyond the dialogue and stage directions. This meant I would have to do an extensive rewrite of what I already had, which took more time. For the additional scenes, I pulled from the headlines. The aforementioned exhuming of children's bodies being the most gruesome. My main character here wasn't just guilty of hate speech. Unlike the real-world pastor who had inspired him, Aidan Philips was guilty of orchestrating lethal attacks on gay people.

This story openly steals from Dickens, then takes it to the next level. Instead of merely revisiting his past crimes under the guidance of his former protege, Reverend Philips is forced to live as the various types of people he has condemned in the name of Christ. He has to feel a battered wife's anguish as she fights off her husband and escapes with their child, he has to feel the deep and sacred truth of a gay couple falling in love, he has to feel the unconditional love in the hearts of an interracial family. He returns from this astral journey a changed man, with a new mission.

The final step in the coming out metaphor of The Great Debate, then, is that once we have identified our truth, once we have faced our fears and defeated them, once we have accepted and forgiven ourselves, learned to love ourselves, we must become proactive. We must unflinchingly guide and defend others as they make this same journey, whether they are facing discrimination for the same reasons we did or for some other, equally insane reason. We are all equal in value, as humans. The oppression of any  unjustly marginalized group, is the oppression of humanity itself. If we do not accept every opportunity to stand up for others, it means very little that we ever stood up for ourselves. The next, and final step, is to see ourselves in others and treat them no differently than we have treated ourselves.

I had wanted to publish this book in 2000, the year after Cry, Wolf, but it took a lot of time to fight through the first draft. Then I had to go and get ambitious, deciding it would be cool to have illustrations at the top of each chapter, since I already had one for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." It took a lot of extra time and money, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I've learned over the years that it is always best to follow a vision, even if it takes more work to realize it; even if it takes far more time than I had planned to spend with a project. My sister, who had already provided the Website art for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," did another black-and-white illustration for "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." Molly Fine (then surnamed Brimer), did the illustrations for "Christian's Dilemma," and "Six Nights to Damnation." The "Six Nights" illustration caused us insane amounts of grief with the publisher. For some reason, grayscale was declared undoable. Molly had done a brilliant color graphic that looked terrible in solid black-and-white. She had actually done two, to give me a choice, but they both looked equally bad when stripped both of color and the subtitles of grays. She did another in white chalk on black paper that was gorgeous, only for the publisher to change their tune and say that grayscale was fine. This nightmare was the main reason I swore off using illustrations; a vow that would be undone when we got to the world of Metrognomes, but that's a story for the next blog.

The Great Debate was released, at last, on January 13, 2003 in hardback and trade paperback editions, followed by a release party at Lucky Dog Books on April 27. I dedicated the book to my friend Charlotte Deaton, the mother of one of my best friends from my teenage years. Charlotte had been there for me when I needed some extra courage, when I had to get my first HIV test, when I needed someone to hug after getting the word that the test had come back negative and I was in the clear. Facing such fears is what writing The Great Debate had been about for me. It seemed the perfect touch to dedicate it to such a friend, who had been there for me during its writing.

The publication of this anthology ended an anxiety-inducing drought that followed the third chapter of The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. After publishing nothing in 2002, it was a Godzilla-sized relief to get this book behind me and finally have it out in the world, being read.

I tried to get iUniverse to release an e-book, when Kindle started making waves in the publishing world, but they told me that would require an entire new edition of the print versions, that I would have to finance. I went on to work on cutting out the middleman. Meanwhile, they eventually released an e-book of their own in 2011, without consulting me. I found this both irritating and amusing. I released my own revised edition of the book in 2012, in hardback, trade paperback, and Kindle e-book. For the e-book, I was finally able to present the two color illustrations in color. A pocket paperback was released in 2017.

The Great Debate remains one of my most widely read books, and it remains one of the closest to my heart. A forever reminder of where I was when I wrote it; a reminder of my responsibility to speak out and be brave for those who find themselves on a similar path.

Next: "Music of the Metrognomes" (2003)