Love Means No Shame - Andrew Grey

trailed off, and Geoff could see the confusion on his face.
    “Eli, I know this is hard for you to reconcile with what you’ve been taught all your life, but think about this for me.” Those incredible blue eyes rose from the ground, boring into Geoff’s with the intensity of a hurricane. “The Bible says a lot about many things, but the one thing it always says is good is love. Dad and Len loved each other very much, and the rest just doesn’t matter.” Geoff stood up and paced around the clearing before stopping to pat Kirk’s neck, waiting for whatever Eli had to say.
    “Does that make you… like them?”
    “Eli, the proper word is ‘gay’, and yes, I’m gay, but not because of them. It wasn’t something they taught me. It’s just the way I am, just like I have brown hair and brown eyes. It’s part of the way I was made.” Eli sat there, his face stony. “I’m sorry if this makes you uncomfortable, and if you want to leave, I’ll make arrangements for your pay as soon as we get back to the farm. I won’t hold it against you. It’s a lot for you to accept.” Geoff could 64
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see the turmoil continue behind Eli’s eyes, and he waited for whatever he decided.
    “You and Len have been good to me, both of you. And one of the reasons that I’m taking a year away from the community is because I’ve been having troubles with some of the teachings. Papa says I’m rebellious and that I don’t think right about things.”
    “What are you saying?”
“You’ve been truthful with me, so I need to be truthful with you.”
Geoff sat back down as Eli continued.
    “Papa stays very close to the old ways. Others in the community have telephones or will ride in cars, but not Papa. Not even for business, which even the elders say is acceptable.” Eli hung his head like he was ashamed of something.

    “Eli, you have nothing to be ashamed of. One of the things about being gay is that you tend to accept people for who they are. I won’t judge you, I promise.”
    “I have always looked at things differently from Papa. He says that telephones are wrong and that we should never use them, so he conducts all his business in person. I argued with him that they were allowed for business and that he would be able to get more work if he used one. He didn’t have to have one in the house; he could use the community telephone, but he yelled at me and told me not to talk back to him. When I didn’t turn away, he hit me on the side of my head and told me to never mention it again.”
    “He hit you?”

    “Not hard. Just to emphasize that I should not to argue with him. The point is that I tend to think too much, and I don’t think the way most in the community think. That’s why my Papa and uncle, the one with the bakery, thought I should spend a year away. They 65
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want me to find out how hard life is outside the community so I’ll come back, marry, have children, and take over for Papa.” “What about your mother? What does she think?”
    “I don’t know. Papa runs the family, and mother goes along with whatever he says. She wouldn’t dare oppose him. She’d be brought before the church and shamed in front of everyone.” Geoff didn’t like the sound of that. “‘Shamed’, what’s that?”

    “When you break one of the community’s laws, you are brought before the entire community in church, and the minister tells everyone what you did. If you do it again, they might kick you out.”
    “Kick you out of what?” Geoff was finding it a little hard to follow.
“The community will shun you—pretend you don’t exist.
Completely ignore you. I saw it happen once about five years ago.
One man’s wife accused him of not having proper marital relations.” Geoff wasn’t sure what he meant, but he decided not to interrupt. Eli explained. “He was found in his barn by his wife, taking himself in hand.”
    “That’s against the rules?” Good God, he was glad he wasn’t Amish; he’d done that so many times as a teenager, he’d have been shunned for sure.
    Eli nodded. “At first they shamed him in church, telling everyone what he’d done, but he did it again. This time, the whole community shunned him. They wouldn’t have anything to do with him, his wife, or his children. Eventually they left the community, I guess, because I never saw any of them again. There were rumors about one man in the community, that he was….” Geoff could 66
Love Means … NO