Being raised in the rural south, not too far from a Southern Baptist church and within five miles of a fundamentalist rattlesnake-grabbing Holy Church of the Good and Sacred, my youth was spent perplexed by the supposed relationship may parishioners had with their Lord and Savior. It freaked me out, to be honest.

Maybe it was the struggles for power, the pettiness, the gossip and the overall zealous cruelty and hatred that emanated from those Sunday pulpits. Maybe I was naïve about how adults dealt with problems and situations that were beyond the control. What I noticed was the absurd social stratification that occurred at church. If Church was supposed to be about praying, then why was it that all it seemed to be about was who was out drinking on Friday night and whose daughter was knocked up by some "Cath-o-lic?" Nothing is more terrifying to a gay kid than growing up in a dry, Baptist-infested, just-this-side-of-Deliverance county.