“There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs and empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.
Here they talked of revolution.
Here, it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about ‘tomorrow.’
And tomorrow, new came.”
Those Les Misérables lyrics continue to haunt Side B elders and me.
As December 1st approaches, most people in our community remain unaware of World AIDS Awareness Day. Perhaps, in some ways, that’s a mercy.
Flash back to New Year’s Eve, 1979. I was on the exclusive parquet dance floor of New York’s legendary Studio 54, surrounded by the rich and powerful, famous actors, models, recording artists, gays, straights—and, in true Studio fashion, a few gloriously unemployed dreamers. The Village People’s “Ready for the ’80s” thundered from the towering JBL speakers, heralding the dawn of a dazzling new decade. Champagne flowed, sparklers blazed, and from a cloud of glitter descended the adult New Year’s baby onto the dance floor. In that electric moment, it felt as if we were living the promise of Fame: we would live forever, and we would all be stars.
The reality, though, was stark: none of us were ready for the ’80s. With the arrival of one unnamed disease, the dream of living forever dissolved into something unreachable. Hope gave way to despair as fear of the unknown—and the very real possibility of dying in your twenties—cast a long shadow over our community.
The new decade ushered in an era of fear and paranoia.
Doctors refused to enter the hospital rooms of AIDS patients. Food trays were left outside their doors to spoil untouched. People lost their jobs, their homes, their friends; families fractured under the weight of fear and stigma. Young men wasted away before our eyes. It became heartbreakingly ordinary to see someone carrying a frail, near-lifeless body up the steps of a West Village brownstone.
Sadness and despair settled over everything, a heavy fog that dimmed even the most ordinary moments of life. A therapist once told me I had an underlying sadness whenever I spoke. Another asked why I don’t have friends my own age. Before I could answer, someone else chimed in, “His circle of friends, they’re all dead.”
Culturally, within the old ex-gay movement, those of us who were same-sex attracted were portrayed as conquerors in Christ, celebrated by the church as shining examples of joyful, transformed lives. We smiled, we shared our testimonies, becoming poster children for the “new creation.” But we were never given permission to lament.
St Francis Xavier Church on 16th Street, Manhattan, is where I first encountered Christus Dolor, the Suffering Christ. This was not the “No Christ-on-the-Cross” of my evangelical upbringing.
As my eyes looked up above the altar, I was confronted with the Christ of Isaiah 53, the Christ who was “despised and familiar with pain” and where people “hid their faces from him.” Overwhelmed by sorrow, lament mixed with grief, I became immersed in the beauty of our living-suffering Savior, the high priest who sympathizes in my weakness, providing supernatural comfort.
Ann Aherns honestly expressed, “Celebrating and praise have been the way we cope with pain, pushing it down, or even denying it because we fear acknowledging it might make God or our faith appear weak.”
I am only beginning to realize I exchanged years of grieving and lament for years of exclusive praise.
After giving a talk at a Revoice conference a few years ago, a younger attendee asked me, “Have you ever had time to fully grieve?” That question—just those few words—opened a door for me to finally grieve, to truly lament. The honesty of the Side B community has been a profound gift.
The psalmist cries out for being alienated from his immediate community. Claus Westermann reminds us, “There is not a line (in scripture) which would forbid the lamentation or which would express the idea that lamentation had no place in a healthy and good relationship with God.”
Nearly half of all the Psalms are songs of lament, yet we rarely lift such cries in our modern worship services. I still remember the first time I heard the hymn “From the Depths of Woe.” Now that was a worship song I could truly grasp—raw, honest, and real. It has since become my favorite.
To quote Scott Ellington, “When the biblical writers lament, they do so from within the context of a foundational that bonds together the individual with members of the community of faith and that community with their God.”
As an elder within the Side B community, I may not share all the same experiences as most, yet our shared lament—spoken and unspoken—has bound us together in Christ. For that, I am deeply grateful.
