"Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World" (excerpt)
by Michael Kim
If I found a genie in a bottle, after my Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse and BMW 760, I would wish upon everyone in the world a coming-out experience. Forget sexuality, I am talking about the kind of critical existential moment that provokes unsettling questions about faith, religion, truth, society, and norms. I am talking about the kind of terrifying moment in which one perceives the limits of provincial sensibilities and questions the intellectual and moral constructions of one’s upbringing. This moment might come in meditation on the logic of Christian belief and on the reasons for being a Christian apart from parental admonition. It might arrive in the exploration of the personal and social complexities of being a second-generation Asian American. Often, it comes in dealing with being gay. In this essay, I will ask—you and myself—what it means to come out at the intersection of all three, to consider the complex but underexplored world of a gay Korean American Christian man.
I spent every Sunday morning from the time I can remember until the time I graduated high school at Grace Baptist Church, a 3,000-member Southern Baptist congregation that practiced compassionate conservatism well before George W. Bush gave it a label. The congregation enjoyed Sunday-morning fellowships, Bible study, a 150-member choir, a thirty-piece orchestra, and a transcendently charming preacher. My family thrived within this warm and inviting community, without any feelings of exclusion despite the fact that we were one of three Asian families in the entire congregation.
As a child, I demonstrated a special aptitude for playing piano and as a result came to be celebrated and embraced widely within the church community. I became the church pianist and organist and made myself blissfully indispensable to the music ministry of the church. I played so happily for choir rehearsals and with the orchestra that this welcoming bunch of white Christian adults took me in collectively as their adopted son. It was of no consequence to them that I was Korean American; perhaps more important, it was of no consequence to me that I was Korean American.