The Fourth Definition of Love by Kelly Ann Jacobson
The sun’s rays slip through the gaps in the gate, and your children ask for a snack to hold off hunger until you finally decide to leave the pool behind. Fruit snacks, ritz crackers, goldfish. A boy at a table next to you is crying—he does not like his snack, and his brother wants yours—and so you offer to trade. Thank you, says the boy’s parents as he munches goldfish from the bag and his brother pulls saltines from the sleeve.
You get to talking, as parents tend to do when in close proximity for this many hours, and you say that they look familiar. He has a hipster haircut and cool glasses, which you read as falling on your side of the Lynchburg divide. She has the hands-off parenting style of most of your close friends.
“From church, maybe?” they ask, and you say no, that can’t be it.
They exchange a look, and you know that you have already taken a wrong turn.
“What’s church?” your daughter pipes up through a mouth full of fruit roll-up, though you both know she knows exactly what church is. Not from going there—she probably barely remembers her grandmother’s Christmas service—but from all her friends at school and the many conversations you’ve had about where they go on Sundays. You worry about the way religion has seeped into her life: Straight up to God, she says when you push her high on the swing; What is hell? she asks not long after you receive a warning that a child at the daycare has gone around telling everyone they are going to end up there.
Now she is showing off for them, or perhaps descending into a tantrum, for asking the meaning of things is one of her tells that she is getting tired and furious at the world.
You explain about church again anyway, which prompts another definition request: “What’s religion?”
The parents are listening intently to your explanations, and they apologize now for bringing it up, as though you are the kind of parent who shields your child from anything.
“No worries,” you say. “We talk about it all the time.” Then, again, you explain religion, and pastors, and everything else she asks.
She knows she has an audience—you both know it—and so what happens next is both completely unexpected and perfectly predictable.
“Mom,” she says, not exactly loudly but not whispering, either. “Do you think religion could tell me what a unicorn plus a unicorn is?”
***
Later, during bath time, you look up the church they mentioned. They implied it was progressive—nondenominational, which you assumed meant something like unitarian, and the kind of place that allows them to read speculative fiction—which came up right after you mentioned you were an author of queer young adult novels. Sure, that detail earned one of their not-so-secret looks, but you figured that anyone who left their church here to attend somewhere less strict couldn’t be all bad.
There, on the church’s website, under “Our Beliefs,” you find a nineteen-page document. Boiled down, it explains that though desires for homosexuality may occur, to act on them is forbidden. One may choose marriage with a member of the opposite sex or celibacy—these are the only two options. Those not following Holy Sexuality may not participate in any leadership roles. Changing one’s biological sex or gender identity is forbidden. Being a heterosexual cisgender person is explicitly taught.
And there is that word, throughout the document—the one that has been corrupted:
Love.
For in this “redemptive” community, all are welcome. None are judged on their past—as long as they are willing to change. All will be loved in their teachings, and no one will be shamed—as long as they are willing to change. All will be praised for their choices to control their sexual desires through marriage or celibacy—as long as they are willing to change.
But is that really love?
Not according to the first three definitions on Merriam-Webster. Not according to “strong affection for another,” nor “attraction based on sexual desire,” nor “affection based on admiration”; not according to “an assurance of affection,” nor “warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion”; not according to “the object of attachment, devotion, or admiration,” nor “a beloved person.”
But then there is that fourth one: “Unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another: such as (1) the fatherly concern of God for humankind, (2) brotherly concern for others.”
Ah.
That’s the one.
For in this “love,” there is a power difference, isn’t there? Above is God; below is humanity. Above is the person doing the loving; below is the person receiving the loving, who is the object of concern and receiver of knowledge.
Above are those two parents whose child eats saltines from your bag; below is you, and all of those like you.
***
You are shaken. You shouldn’t be—after all, this is Lynchburg—but for some reason, you had been so convinced by the words that they had used to describe their church that you’d assumed…
Well.
Your eyes water as you scroll through the document again. Your cheeks flush. You are hurt. You are angry, furious even. You wonder again if you can ever truly live here in this place—not just physically take up space here, but live, in the way one needs the freedom to do in order to claim somewhere as home.
“I’m upset,” you say out loud.
“Why?” asks your daughter.
“Well,” you say, turning off the phone screen. “Remember I told you about the people here who don’t like people like me?”
“Yeah.”
So you tell her.
***
Some people will think that you shouldn’t have shared how you felt. That the right move for a child is to shield them from the bad in the world for as long as possible. You think that too, sometimes, when you remember the way you were brought up, in a world scrubbed from the news. You wonder if you are making the wrong choices.
But the bad seeps in anyway, doesn’t it?
Like the day another child tells her she is going to hell. Like the day another child insists that a girl cannot marry a girl. “It’s the law,” you explain when she asks you, but your daughter is not convinced, for the other child clearly is being told the opposite. Over and over again, she asks you. Over and over again, the children debate. Law. Love. Law. Love.
Already, they are all filled with such concern.
***
Long before you live here, you venture into Virginia for a book festival. You are not on a panel, but rather have been paid to speak to the GSA at a local high school about your job as an author of queer young adult fiction.
“They got your funding pulled,” the sweet coordinator tells you when you are just steps from the school.
“What?” you ask in surprise.
“They pulled your funding. But then a local LGBTQ group stepped in to pay for it, so everything turned out fine.”
You step into the cool air of the school entrance and take a deep breath.
***
“I wouldn’t visit that high school,” the chair of a former department warns you after you are invited at a recent gala to visit a high school English class in Mississippi. “We are worried about you. They will get you fired.”
***
A friend texts you out of the blue to ask if you are able to speak on the local news about an incident with a pastor and his yard sale. Apparently, the yard sale is some kind of fundraiser for repairs after a storm, and only Christians are permitted to purchase items due to the fact that apparently sin is what caused the damages in the first place. “NO LBGQ!! PERIOD!!!!!” supposedly wrote the pastor on the since-deleted post.
You stare at the text message box for a long time before you reply. Then you type out that it would probably be most effective to find a Christian to speak to this bigotry, firstly because you are an atheist and secondly because it will infuriate the people of Lynchburg, making it even harder to get into the schools. But if they need someone to generally talk about being queer in Lynchburg, its complications and hurts, then you can do that if they need you to.
What underlies this message is the hard truth that you hold deep in your core: that this is not an anomaly, but a natural progression. There is a reason that you have tried, and failed, to speak in the public schools of Lynchburg—not about being an author, but about the craft of writing in general, which is your only emphasis during the school day unless asked to do otherwise by the administration. Even those who “love” you fear you, or fear the other ones who “love” you.
Yet here you are, speaking on it.
***
A library nearby is supposedly wiped of all queer books on the Pride display by a single individual hoping to stop anyone in the area from reading them. Families were waiting to read these books, and now they are all gone.
You are asked to donate your books to the library, which of course you do, mailing them from the USPS where the cashier asks you about being an author and you never mention what kind.
Before your books probably even arrive, the entire library board is disbanded for the children’s Pride display. The vacant seats are reported to have been filled with several of the original members and some new members who agree with the retained board members’ ideas about LGBTQ+ books being reshelved or potentially removed from the library.
You wonder if your books are discarded upon arrival.
***
“The teens all love it,” a different librarian says of Tink and Wendy. “We can’t keep it on the shelves.”
***
In the spring, you go on book tour for your new novel, Robin and Her Misfits. Some of your stops always include Pennsylvania, your home state—though, like Lynchburg, the term home is always complicated here. As the event draws closer, you receive word that there has been a news article written about you—about how the event is apparently “targeting teens” through the promise of pizza. Much concern is voiced about parents not knowing about their teens attending this event.
Let me get this straight, you say to your family. Their biggest concern about teens these days is that they are reading books? And that, of all the places they could go, they are somehow sneaking out to go to bookstores behind their parents’ backs on a Saturday night?
Of course, these ideas are laughable. They betray the complete lack of awareness these adults have about technology—anyone can read queer fan fiction for free online, so how is taking the traditionally published books off the shelves helping anyone?—and of what really goes on at these events.
These parents actually think teens are sneaking in to hear you speak?
The truth is the complete opposite.
The queer teens who show up at your book events—and, yes, pretty much the only kids who attend already identify as queer already—have usually been driven there or encouraged to attend by supportive parents who voice their concerns to you about the safety of their own children. One of them was even given the choice between attending the event or doing chores. Over and over again, the topic of conversation during Q&A turns to the fact that these teens feel endangered in their schools. That people call them “it.” That people threaten them with physical harm. That the teachers look the other way. That the teens have been suicidal. That they feel completely alone. Oh, and as an aside, Nazism is apparently rampant—the “cool” teens are drawing swastikas on their arms.
And concerned citizens think you are grooming these kids?
For what?
For sitting in the back room of a bookstore while the counter protesters stand in a line in front of the glass display talking to your own parent, who has driven you an hour and a half to speak, about the harm they fear might come for you after last year’s Pride Festival protests?
For not dying?
***
You would ask, in return, about the children who are taking a marker to their forearm. Who only befriend gay kids in order to make fun of them more openly. Who physically harm them.
You would ask about the parents who have brought these children up with such entitlement that they assume that they should put effort toward changing these queer teens under the guise of saving them.
You would ask, Who has taught them that what they feel as they harm a child is some version of benevolent concern? That they are loving them?
And then you would tell them to stop.
Kelly Ann Jacobson is the author of many books for adults and young adults, and she is the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Lynchburg and an Instructor for Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing. Kelly received her PhD in Fiction from Florida State University in 2021.
17 July 2024
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