BIO-TALES

Southern Babtist Sissy

My grandparents were charter members at Westside and my grandmother, Lucille Livingston, was church secretary. I was a constant bemusement to this wonderfully kind and deeply spiritual woman. She loved me with a fierceness that blinded her to all but my most angelic qualities and she must have spent a lot of energy rationalizing my willful exhibitionist tendencies. She wrapped her love around me like an impenetrable armor and I knew no fear in that church while she was alive. It seemed to me she had real power there and the lake of fire that was talked about as the future home of homosexuals was of no concern to me. Lucille Livingston would never allow such a punishment to befall me. There were, I would learn, limits to what my grandmother could do to protect me. As I grew into my teenage years, I realized my future with the Southern Baptists was going to be troubled at the very best.

Baptism on a rainy Sunday in a lake near Birmingham Alabama circa 1919. In a white hat under an umbrello is my grandmother Lucille Livingston witnessing the Baptism of her husband R.M. Livingston (front row fifth from left in the water).

I knew I was attracted to boys rather than girls from my earliest memory. I thought I was alone in this predicament and it was my deepest and most well guarded secret until the fall of 1969 when at seventeen I told my parents the truth and opened a Pandora's' box of drama and exiled myself from my childhood religion forever.