My brother didn’t really come out of the closet, really. Rather, he replicated himself. You see, he tried to cast out his sin. He begged and pleaded, with guttural tears of abject abandon, to the almighty God to remove those feelings for men. He put his shame into a safe and dropped the safe to the bottom of the ocean by an island in the middle of nowhere. Because he knew not even his family would accept him, he marooned himself there, guarding his secret that somehow, inexplicably, kept rising to the surface like a buoy instead of the crushing weight it was.

It seemed that no matter what he tried, he couldn’t suppress and he couldn’t hold down. So he began to dip his toes into the waters of his sexuality, but it was not without consequence. As he came to terms with his wants and needs, he kept one part of himself still stationed on that island, and the other part sailed away, watching that other person grower smaller and smaller and smaller.

When he finally admitted to being gay, my brother was really two people. The public persona was proud and unrepentant about who he was. This is the one I saw when we had a family meeting to discuss his lost soul. I was speaking to someone who I loved that I’d lost to the devil, thanks to the grave sin of homosexuality. I thought of how I felt as a younger girl when we heard him crying in his bedroom and how my heart turned into cement inside of me. To think that this fragile, sweet boy would burn forever in hell and spend the rest of eternity crying out… I couldn’t physically bear the thought. I still remember desperately warning him, “This isn’t a game, this is your soul!”

It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I believed it wholeheartedly. It’s my fault, but it is more my parents’ fault. Because I was groomed into believing these lies, trained everyday of my life to categorize people as good or bad and damned or saved. It doesn’t matter the fault really. We all rejected my brother. It’s called disfellowshipping where I come from. This biblical principle is designed to bring about a change of heart in the sinner. We cut him off as if we never knew him, as if he were dead to us, so that he would see the errors of his ways and come running back to the Lord when the world had beaten him down.

There was still the second person, though, that we didn’t account for. It was the brother who was scared and ashamed of his secret, who didn’t tell us to stick it in our tailpipes. Perhaps some small part of him thought we were right for disowning him. Or maybe he was still too sweet to strike back at his enemies.

We told him goodbye and I listened to him cry.