Up until now, our names have been synonymous with “God Hates Fags.” Any twelve-year-old with a cell phone could find out what we did. We hope Ms. Kyle was right about the other part, too, though—that everything sticks—and that the changes we make in our lives will speak for themselves.
Megan and Grace
February 6, 2013
As I flew back to Rapid City from New York, my eyes traced the final version of the “statement” again and again, until I was on the verge of vomiting. I knew that the only people who might care about these paragraphs were my family and a handful of curious Twitter followers, but I was still terrified of how they would be received. Public apologies in the age of social media could be brutal, every word parsed to ensure that no unacceptable sentiment remained in the offending party—and anything less than full repudiation of one’s “sins” would exacerbate the public flogging. Twitter mobs could tear a person’s reputation to shreds, demanding that they lose their job over an errant tweet or a joke that didn’t land—transgressions that were far less egregious than the dedicated campaign of condemnation in which I had been a willing participant for many years.
My apology was not a blanket condemnation of Westboro, a desperate plea for forgiveness, or a complete recanting of all my previous words and deeds. As I’d stood weeping and packing the day I left the church, Jael had insisted that these were my only options—that the world would make my life a living Hell otherwise. But even though they might have seemed like better strategies, I could not bring myself to employ them. This apology would not be for show. I would not begin this new life guided by expedience over truth. Regardless of the response, I could only be honest and hope for the best.
I had put agonizing thought into writing the words that would be published the following morning, to be sure they conveyed exactly what I felt, meant, and believed in that moment. It seemed to me that part of the enormous disconnection between Westboro and the rest of the world resulted from how we communicated. We had long invited confusion and hostility with language and methods that were deliberately grievous, provocative, and recondite. “Westboro is responsible for their own PR,” a friend told me one day, articulating a sentiment I had found so frustrating after I joined that the church’s refusal to consider how our words and actions would be construed by our targets had caused much unnecessary pain for everyone involved. Why were we endlessly translating our signs and behaviors so that outsiders could understand them? Why didn’t we just begin our efforts by speaking with clarity, gentleness, reasonableness? Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.
Honesty and good intentions weren’t worth much, I decided, if they were lost in translation.
To ensure that mine wouldn’t be, I had turned to a group of family members and new friends. In the multitude of counsellers there is safety. Among these were two writers I had met while they’d been visiting Westboro for research, and with whom I had maintained friendly communication via Twitter after their departures. Daniel Shannon and Jeff Chu were both incredibly kind, both gay, and both living in New York. I spoke with them by phone from the inn’s living room, but by chance, I had the opportunity to visit them in person—another occasion to push back at the Us/Them divide. As one of very few ex-members of Westboro who had chosen to be open about her experiences, my cousin Libby had been invited to New York to be interviewed on the Today Show and Anderson Cooper’s Anderson Live at the end of January. She asked me to accompany her for moral support, but when the producers pressed me to join her for the interviews, I insisted that it was impossible. I could not imagine standing in front of an audience—not now, not ever.
Away from the studios, I arranged for us to meet Daniel for dinner in Manhattan, and then Jeff and his husband, Tristan, for coffee in Brooklyn the following morning. We spoke of Daniel’s atheism and Jeff’s Christianity, and how strange it all felt, this transition from picketing gays in Topeka to brunching together in New York. Like so much of this new world,