Never do I feel more like a pagan than when I am wandering around your downtown on a Sunday morning. It is as if you are shaking your head in that distinctive Midwestern-verging-on-Southern disapproval, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I really should be in church. But perhaps that is the Springfield, Missouri experience par excellence: everyone can end up feeling like a pagan, whether or not they are religious, and that means either a proud nonconformity or, perhaps more often, a guilty conscience.

I am in town for a summer wedding, and in the few hours before the rehearsal, I grab a cold brew and pastry from one of the downtown coffee shops I frequented in my college days. It seems all the baristas I knew then have left, except one—he does not recognize me. I have heard many say that Springfield has more of three things than any other city—churches, liquor stores, and tattoo parlors—but coffee shops are a contender as well. Since my last visit, another one has popped up down the street where a grocery store used to be. As for churches, I count another two, one of which meets on the floor above the boutique a few feet away.

I sit at a table outside and crack open a book, hoping to finish a chapter or so before doing some more exploring, finding out what has changed in the area in the years since I left, and what has, against all odds, stayed the same. I should have known sitting outside without headphones on is a kind of invitation—a stranger at another table strikes up a conversation, asking about what I am reading. A book on prayer, I say. He promptly stands up, picks up his iced latte, and plops down in the seat across from me, diving into conversation.

His name is Jacob. It quickly becomes clear that he is also a man of faith, and we chat for a half an hour or so on a wide range of topics: universal healthcare, the dangers and promise of the free market, what drew a former Southern Baptist like myself into the Catholic Church, interfaith dialogue, the LGBTQ+ community. My guard is about halfway up—a reflex when it comes to church folks—and I am reminded of how contentious and divided this city can be. But he is friendly and does not push our discussion in any unwelcome directions. He stands up to smoke a cigarette halfway through. We both sense—with a mixture of hesitancy and glee—that we are breaking certain unspoken rules of conduct, but it is exactly the kind of conversation amongst strangers I have come to expect here.

As the conversation winds down, he (predictably) invites me to his church—a non-denominational plant he sheepishly admits is more Southern Baptist than anything—that meets within the hour in an old theatre nearby. I don’t have the heart to decline his invitation outright, so I say maybe, and feel a little guilty as I drive past that theatre on the way back to my friend’s house, where I am sleeping on a sofa for the weekend.

Coffee and Christianity are intertwined here.

Not only are coffee shops the places where someone might go to discuss faith with friends on their lunch break or the weekend—and in a city as deeply religious as this one, that is common—but they are also where a swarm of mostly evangelical campus ministers and student leaders go to mentor younger students on the basics of the faith. Making disciples. I have fond memories of those mentorship relationships, both as one who benefited from the guidance of older believers and as one who attempted to pass on my own knowledge and faith experience. The coffee itself was a buffer, a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of spiritual conversation go down–making it feel less awkward and stilted, more natural.

This is likely a reason many churches in the area choose to meet in coffee shops instead of a traditional church building, and why many coffee shops are launched as ministries of local churches or Christian non-profits. “Church” and “coffee shop” are less like two distinct concepts and more like two ends of a spectrum, with lots of combinations in the middle. Some of the most formative spaces in my own life were in that middle space.

Located directly across National Boulevard from Missouri State campus is the Potter’s House, a non-profit coffee shop that has been a fixture of student life for decades. Faith is not shoved in your face there—even the explicit biblical reference in the name is often masked by its most common nickname, “PoHo”—but it is the perfect spot for faith conversations, and it hosts a handful of Bible studies and Christian book clubs every semester. I was spiritually nourished there, and it was where I met an older Christian gay man for the first time, someone whose life, witness, and simple presence had an enormous impact on me.

Christian community, for me, has always been complemented by caffeine. But coffee shops were also places in which the tension between faith and sexuality could be most acutely felt, most precisely expressed. Coffee could be a buffer, but it could also be a decoy.

There is a well-known trope among Christian sexual minorities from culturally and theologically conservative environments: the fellow church-goer or pastor who has heard gossip about your “lifestyle” and reached out to you to get coffee and “pick your brain,” which is, upon meeting, revealed to be a kind of ambush. Stereotypes and unfounded accusations of wild, drug-laced, promiscuous living, demands to discuss in-depth and with academic precision the same six passages of Scripture that have been wielded as weapons against you and your friends for your entire lives, pleas to return to the “straight and narrow” (pardon the pun). Leaving frustrated, defeated, exhausted, picked apart.

Invariably, they don’t even pay for your drink.

Coming out of the closet in college was like wading through molasses. Even though at the time it felt like I was moving at lightning speed, I was really only taking baby steps. Simply calling myself “gay”—rather than “same-sex attracted,” the designation of choice for those who wish to distance themselves from the gay experience—felt radical, and it led me into many a conversation with those who wished to “pick my brain”.

A lot of Queer folks from conservative religious environments come out swinging, which I understand. Religious environments can be extremely unsafe, and radical rejection and departure is in some ways easier, and maybe even sometimes more desirable, than negotiating for space at the table of a community intent on oppression or exclusion. But for better or worse, I felt constrained (or alternatively: grounded) by my commitments, by my faith, by my cautious temperament. The initial opening of the closet door revealed a series of doors I opened, one after the other, over many years—darkness giving way, by almost indiscernible degrees, to light.

When I was still living here, I had a local acquaintance (from another church or coffee shop or some combination of the two) reach out to me to have a conversation about my sexuality. “I believe God is always on the side of healing,” she told me. “God always wants to heal you.” For her, this meant that coming to accept that I was gay, and my consequent decision to pursue lifelong celibacy, were dangerous concessions that revealed a lack of faith. If I was not “healed” of my homosexuality, it was because I refused to believe God could heal me, or refused to ask. Healing would, of course, look like the development of heterosexual desire, and eventually, marriage to a woman and several biological children.

Her sentiment—that being gay is like an illness God would heal if one would simply let go and let Him—is frequently in the back my mind when I find myself in a charismatic Christian environment common to Springfield, the international headquarters for the Assemblies of God (one of the largest charismatic denominations in the United States). But more dangerous than the “gayness-as-illness” line of thinking is its cousin: “gayness-as-rebellion”. The response to both is faith and prayer, but the latter requires prayer of the more bellicose variety: being gay is understood as deriving from some kind demonic activity. Spiritual warfare. Either way, it is never understood as just as complex and complicated (and, well, normal) as being straight; it is always something to be healed, eradicated, stamped out entirely.

Experiences like these, held in tension with more positive ones of welcome and encouragement, have cultivated in me a deep ambivalence toward charismatic Christian culture in the Ozarks.

On the one hand, it seems inexorably wrapped up in the culture wars: faithfulness measured by how passionately one opposes and separates oneself from the “other”. In my first year of college, I attended James River Assembly, a local megachurch with several satellite campuses that often feels more like a high-energy show in nearby Branson than Sunday morning worship. There is so much I still appreciate about that church (the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, after all). But years later, what I remember most about James River is that the pastor and congregation were crucial in overturning a city-wide anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ with protections from discrimination in housing, jobs, and public accommodations. My first real political experience was volunteering for the “No Repeal” campaign, going door-to-door, trying to convince citizens to vote to keep the policy in place. Defeat was crushing.

But on the other hand, never do I feel more loved, cherished, and encouraged in my faith than when I return to the church community I attended in my later years of college (one which gathers in another local coffee shop). I first met the pastor at the Potter’s House; I heard him chatting in another room with a friend about issues of sexuality and gender, and could not resist offering my own thoughts. His response was not one of  fearful opposition or distance, but fascination and eager welcome. It was at his church that I began to feel at peace with myself, that I was invited to share wisdom from my experience as a gay man, that I felt necessary and gifted by God, not merely broken and in need.

All this is in my mind when I return to the city after an extended time away and begin to long, a little against my will, for what people call the “worship experience”. I hate that phrase—I think it makes worship out to be a commodity rather than an expression of love for God—but I have to admit, charismatic worship offers something unique. It is not the impassioned extemporaneous prayer I miss most, although that is a part of it. And it is not the earnest embrace of the supernatural and miraculous, although that too is something I have come to love. It is the combination of all this (and more) in the context of extended musical worship, the kind during which time seems to stand still, that scratches an itch nothing else does.

I am very grateful for the church I currently attend. Several years after graduating from Missouri State, I entered the Catholic Church and began attending a Jesuit church in St. Louis, populated every week of the school year by a sea of college students from nearby Saint Louis University. But the liturgy there rarely offers an opportunity to sway side-to-side, with eyes closed and arms raised, while the chorus repeats, mantra-like, for a seventh time and no one minds–to get lost in the moment. For me, “getting lost” was a necessary precursor to being found—it gave me the space I needed to be unformed, unstructured, undone, so that I could be transformed, made new again.    

I never spent much time in the gay bars while I was in college, for plenty of reasons. For one thing, Springfield did not have what one would call a thriving Queer scene. I remember there being a singular downtown bar where many of my Queer friends congregated, not because it was especially exciting, but because it was basically the only show in town.

But perhaps more importantly, I was still wrestling at the time with significant internalized homophobia: self-hatred planted in me from the outside. I could not imagine feeling comfortable being surrounded by other Queer folks, who seemed so radically different from me (and who I wanted to believe were so different from me). I imagined that the scene was little more than a swirling vortex of sexual temptation, and that my convictions would fall apart as soon as I made eye contact with a pretty boy across the room. Looking back, I can see how dehumanizing this was, reducing others to the possibility of sex. But at the time, Queerness still felt so other to me; I was estranged from it, estranged from myself.

Shortly after the news of the shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando broke, I found myself simultaneously thankful I had stayed away from the Queer scene and wishing I had been there more.

I was struck by fear and anxiety; I found it easy to imagine myself as one of the victims. If I had processed the self-hatred and worked up the courage, I could have been dancing and drinking at a bar like Pulse. Street noises late at night reminded me of gunshots. I became aware of how easy it was to recognize me as gay without my saying anything, without me wearing any rainbows. I remembered how my high school bullies seemed to know I was gay years before I did, and I felt the weight of my extreme vulnerability. It did not matter in the end what I believed about sexuality or how devoted I was in my faith, there were forces at work in the world that wanted me dead simply for existing.

And yet, I longed to enter more deeply into the pain and suffering of what I was beginning to recognize as my people, my community. I wished I had experienced the kind of safety and belonging a local gay bar provides, wished I could mourn as one who knows firsthand the freedom and magic of a place like Pulse. Gay bars have historically been something like community centers or even churches in the Queer community—places which offered freedom and love and acceptance in a world hell-bent on keeping these things from us. Like it did so many others, the tragedy at a sacred space like Pulse wounded me, enraged me, and radicalized me.

A few years after graduating and leaving to work for an evangelical campus ministry in Southern California, I returned for a week or two during the summer and stayed with my younger brother. He accompanied me to my first real drag show, the monthly downtown show that was the evidence of a newly blossoming drag scene. I had seen drag performances before—I have an especially vivid memory of a bejewelled queen lip-syncing to Katy Perry’s “Unconditionally” at a student program on Missouri State campus—but this somehow felt more authentic, more real. A milestone.

I do not view this particular show through any rose-colored glasses. It was not heaven on earth (in fact, I had to leave early due to a combination of over-the-top vulgarity and unwanted sexual advances). But the performances—gorgeous, creative, mesmerizing—helped to crystallize and clarify something I had probably known intuitively for years: drag is a public depiction of the closet in reverse. All the years I had spent paying attention to detail for the purpose of camouflage, putting on a performance in order to avoid detection, suddenly I saw them turned inside out and used for the exact opposite purposes. Before my eyes, all the survival tactics of the closet became the skills of a genuine craft, an art form.

It was, I came to see, a kind of resurrection.

The morning after the wedding, I head back to the same coffee shop before beginning the long drive out of town (the cold brew is even better than I remember). Another stranger approaches, this time asking if I could spare any change or buy them a drink, “Tahitian vanilla, if possible.” I take seriously the idea that what we who follow Christ do to the “least of these who are members of my family” is done to Jesus himself. So this morning, Jesus comes to me as a young homeless trans woman named Alexandria.

When I return with the coffee drink and a couple muffins, she takes a sip and begins to share some of the basic facts of her life. She is a regular at the Rare Breed, a local non-profit dedicated to caring for homeless youth, where she can get a shower and pick up necessities five days a week. She is schizophrenic; she mentions matter-of-factly that when I sat the pastries down on the table in front of her, voices in her head congratulated her. And she is a death metal vocalist. Without skipping a beat, she demonstrates, and her growl echoes off the brick buildings on either side of the mostly empty street. She is clearly talented.

According to recent estimates, between 20% to 40% of the population of homeless youth in the United States identify as LGBTQ+. The most common reason given for experiencing homelessness is family rejection, followed by abuse, aging out of foster care, and neglect.¹ In Springfield, the percentage of Queer kids in the homeless population seems even higher. In a place striving, supposedly, to be known for exhibiting the love of Jesus (and with more churches per capita than almost anywhere else), Queer kids are running away from, or being kicked out of, their homes. I wonder to myself how Alexandria came to experience homelessness, and if family rejection or abuse has been her experience as well.

As the conversation winds down, one of her friends passes us by, and she holds out one of the muffins to him, inviting him to sit and eat with us. I am struck by her generosity, freely offering a large portion of her first and possibly only meal of the day. Later, I am reminded of the generous widow who makes an offering in the temple: two small coins, worth far more to God than the plentiful and performative offerings of the religious elites, because they are all she has, given without show.

On the other side of the street from this coffee shop is a window boarded up with plywood and covered in graffiti, one of many scattered throughout the downtown area. In its corner are two sentences written in white spray paint with an even hand: “Springfield, sweetheart, I love you. But sometimes I think you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

I cannot agree—Springfield has made a huge impact on me, in some of the absolute best ways—but I recognize the ambivalence. Springfield has both hurt and healed, and whenever I return, I feel in-touch with something real. I feel nostalgic and alive, thankful for having lived here, and thankful for having moved on. Both.

You can take the man out of Springfield, but never Queen City out of the man. And so I will keep coming back to visit every now and then, and I will remember how in love I still am, how irrevocably shaped by this city.

Springfield, sweetheart, I love you, from one queen to another.

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