A New Take on an Old Hurt

My older sister Marsha has been a devout Jehovah’s Witness for almost 50 years. The world has changed a lot in that time. So have I. So has my sister. And so, to this observer from my small window onto the faith, have the Witnesses themselves … at least in their views on homosexuality.

In the 1980s, when I came out and bought a home with Ted, my then-partner and now-husband, Marsha mailed a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet to me describing homosexuality as an abomination.

We took the cover off our backyard grill, doused the pamphlet with lighter fluid and set it aflame. My husband cheered. I watched in stunned silence. I had always looked up to my sister, nine years older than I. But on that day, a chill descended on our relationship. A chill that has taken a long time to thaw.

Fast forward nearly four decades from that incendiary event in our backyard, and you’ll find my husband and me on one of our frequent visits from our home in Atlanta to Northern California, where my sister lives in a nursing home. She is 81. A recent stroke has left her right side paralyzed. Once a great conversationalist, she struggles with aphasia, severely curtailed speech.

On those visits, we have found rewarding friendships with numerous members of my sister’s JW family. And the rift between my sister and me is healing.

“I love you,” she says. “So good to see you. Good for the soul.”

It’s good for my soul, too.

We sing old songs together. “When You’re Smiling” is a favorite. Though she makes only limited conversation, she impeccably remembers lyrics, and reads aloud from the books I bring her. At mealtime, I lift small forkfuls of food to her mouth.

Her brothers and sisters in the faith invite my husband and me to dinner in their homes, treat us to meals at nice restaurants (where we laugh and chat away the hours until closing time), give us gift cards to the local Peet’s Coffee shop, and recommend great hiking trails. They also delivered food, ginger ale, over-the-counter meds and test kits when Ted and I came down with Covid on our most recent visit.

They do everything but preach at us.

In fact, we don’t hear the slightest suggestion that they find my husband and me … or our nearly 50-year relationship … an abomination. Instead, they’ve accepted us as equal members of the care team for my sister, who was widowed in 1982 and never remarried. Because of her love of Northern California and her strong network of friends in the denomination, I can’t imagine moving her to Atlanta. Her friends’ frequent visits to the nursing home, their updates to me on my sister’s condition, and their Zoom call setups are making the situation work. My sister is content.

In short, I love these Jehovah’s Witnesses for their efforts. Whew! I never dreamed I would say that. Why? Because for many years I believed the Witnesses stole my Big Sis from me.

Here’s the backstory.

I have always loved Marsha. While she was a Pan Am stewardess (that was the term for flight attendant in the 1970s, and she was proud of it), she took me to London to celebrate my high school graduation. It was great fun. In the photo below, we’re playing a piano duet over the holidays in the early ’70s.

In my college years, when we’d both be home for Christmas, we’d stay up till the wee hours, sharing a bottle of wine and talking about everything … except my homosexuality, of which I had grown fully aware in college. Though I’d confessed my feelings to no one and had limited sexual experience, I trusted that my sister would be my confidant should the time come to share my truth.

A few years later, when she announced to our family that she had become a Jehovah’s Witness, I felt like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football out from under him.

What had happened to my cool, sophisticated sister?

How could she be one of those annoying door-to-door proselytizers?

Not celebrate Christmas? Or birthdays?

Believe we were in the end times?

Our family was mainstream Presbyterian, for heaven’s sake. How had she become so extreme?

I told myself that she must have found a sanctuary in her newfound faith. I could only imagine that something, or several somethings, had caused her to turn from her jet-set life to a quieter one, with people whose feet were planted firmly on the ground.

Whatever the reason for her conversion, it’s a fact that I must accept. And accept it I finally have. Here’s a photo of Marsha and me on Ted’s and my visit to see her in July 2024.

I acknowledge that she might not have intended the pamphlet to hurt us all those years ago, but simply to offer some big-sisterly advice against the backdrop of AIDS, which was a scary reality in American life in 1988, the year she sent the pamphlet.

And I continue to seek the common ties that bind us. In my memoir, I write how important “a family beyond my family” was when I came out, the allies who embraced me when my biological family pushed me away. Hadn’t my sister done the same with her brothers and sisters in the faith—found a family beyond our family?

You might say that I have caved to the opposition, but I don’t see it that way. Rather than the white flag of surrender, I see it as a handshake—the acknowledgment that even in tough circumstances, we can form bonds and break bread with those outside our immediate circle. We need more of that in these divisive times.

Jehovah’s Witnesses continue to “disfellowship” non-repentant queers and other members of their congregations who don’t follow the rules, but the denomination’s website makes it clear today that “the Bible doesn’t promote hatred of anyone—gay or straight. Rather, it tells us to ‘pursue peace with all people,’ regardless of their lifestyle…. So it’s wrong to engage in bullying, hate crimes, or any other type of mistreatment of homosexuals.”¹

To my mind, this appears to be a softening of earlier views of homosexuality by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In a cringe-inducing 1986 brochure, for example, homosexual “love” had apostrophes around it, homosexuality was blamed as the cause of serious diseases, and statements like “[t]here is nothing gay about the gay harvest” abounded.²

Today’s JW website also encourages its members to remain neutral on discussions of same-sex marriage, neither to advocate nor oppose governmental laws involving same-sex marriage or homosexual conduct.

I believe Ted and I have had a firsthand look at this neutrality in action on our visits to Northern California.

Yes, my heart aches for the young people who struggle with their sexuality, dreading the day they will have to choose between their faith, their family, and their right to be themselves. Having the freedom to exercise that God-given right is a tenet of Ted’s and my faith as Presbyterians. It is also the central theme of my memoir.

Still, at 72, I’ve learned that we can’t have everything. Instead of arguing with or turning our backs on people who have different beliefs, perhaps the best thing my husband and I can do is to be us—a real-life example of a decent, ordinary gay couple. Maybe that is our best tool for changing hearts and minds.

I also make sure to share stories of Marsha so staff and other patients at the nursing home know of her past accomplishments, like the young adult book she wrote in the 1990s, cover photo below. (In a conversation with Marsha not long after her stroke, she managed to convey that it is important to her that others know she has led an interesting life. It broke my heart to hear this, but then I realized it is one of the simplest gifts I can give her now.)

Another gift, I realize, is to embrace her faith family.

So, Ted and I are planning a return to Northern California soon. And we already have a winery visit on the books with one of my sister’s closest friends.

“Let’s do something fun,” she said.

Who are we to say no?

1. “Is Homosexuality Wrong?” Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, accessed May 23, 2024, https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/teenagers/ask/is-homosexuality-wrong/.
2. “The Homosexual Life-Style—Just How Gay Is It?” Awake! 1986, Watchtower Online Library, Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, accessed May 24, 2024, https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/101986204?q=gay&p=par.

Author’s Note: This essay appeared in slightly different form in the July 2024 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review online. The photo at the top of this blog features Marsha and me on a family vacation in Florida in the mid-1950s.