Seeing marriage equality at work in the Bible Belt is heartening for this native Okie

By Guest Blogger

By Mark Phariss

Several weeks ago, I read an article about two women, Kaitlyn Henson and Jessica Upton, tying the knot before the Comanche County District Judge Ken Harris in Lawton, Oklahoma. This news left me almost speechless, grasping to comprehend that same-sex couples can marry in Lawton while Vic, my partner of 17 years, and I still can’t marry in Texas.

See, I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in Lawton, the third largest city in Oklahoma with a population then of about 75,000. Lawton was a conservative town, its largest employer being Fort Sill, a U.S. Army base.

Shortly after moving to Lawton in 1962, my twin sister, my younger brother and I were baptized at the First United Methodist Church. Later, our family joined St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, also in Lawton.

My mother, who read the Bible each morning, made sure my siblings and I attended church service every Sunday and vacation bible school every summer. At home, we regularly sang religious songs around the piano, including “Do Lord,” “Clap Your Hands,” and “Heaven is a Happy Place.”

A painting of Jesus hung in my bedroom and other religious knickknacks decorated our house. I read the Bible regularly and at one point in my youth I wanted to be a preacher. My paternal grandmother, Maggie Phariss, a stern but loving woman born in the late 1800s, encouraged me by saying she “always wanted a redheaded Baptist preacher in the family.” (I ultimately opted to be a redheaded lawyer instead.)

From at least age 6, I knew I was gay. And I didn’t want to be. I prayed almost nightly for the Lord to make me straight. Or, if He/She wouldn’t make me straight, I prayed not to wake up, to be taken in my sleep. Many nights I cried myself to sleep.

Although I was a relatively happy child, I struggled with the usual teenage angst. But mostly I struggled with the recognition I was gay. I simply couldn’t figure out why I was or how to change it.

I feared that, if I was found out, I would lose all my friends. “Fag” or “queer” were the worst insults one could hurl at another when I was growing up, and one of the two fights I ever had in my life (other than with my younger brother) was when a kid in junior high called me a faggot. I have no idea why he did that, and although I lost the fight, I won the war because no one in junior high or high school ever called me that again — at least not to my face.

A junior high classmate recently told me he and others resisted being friends with me because they suspected I might be gay and, in his case, he literally was afraid his father would beat him if I later turned out to be gay.

When I was 17, just a junior in high school, the former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant began her successful, and hateful, “save the children” campaign to repeal a Dade County, Florida ordinance that simply prohibited discrimination against gays in housing, employment and public accommodations. In 1978, the following year, the Oklahoma legislature passed a law allowing Oklahoma public schools to fire teachers for “advocating” homosexuality. Presumably, “advocating” included being openly gay or supporting equal rights for gays and lesbians. (The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled the law unconstitutional.)

As a person who has always followed the news, all of these developments scared and scarred me. I worried I would not be able to get a job or rent an apartment and would wind up homeless and penniless. In short, if I needed a reason to keep my sexual orientation a secret, I had them in spades. Even to this day, it is still perfectly legal in 29 states, including Oklahoma and Texas, to fire someone simply because of their sexual orientation.

When my parents died in 1986 within two months of each other, I was distraught. Only 26 years old, I was just out of law school and my parents were gone. Still deeply closeted, I honestly believed I had just lost the only people in the world who might still love me despite being gay.

It took me years to realize that God didn’t make me gay to hate me, that despite my repeated prayers — both as a teen and as a young adult — there was a reason God didn’t make me straight or take me in my sleep. I now know that there was nothing wrong with me, that being gay is a gift, and that it has made me far more compassionate, caring and open-minded than I might otherwise have been.

Now, 36 years after I graduated from high school in Lawton, gays and lesbians are able to marry in 32 states, including Oklahoma. Thanks are owed to Sharon Baldwin and Mary Bishop, the two lead Oklahoma plaintiffs who, along with their lawyers, bravely sued Oklahoma 10 years ago after the state passed a same-sex marriage ban. Because of that lawsuit, not only were they able to marry in Oklahoma, but also a same-sex couple was able to marry in my hometown where I never, ever dreamed one could.

Because of them — and the tireless work over decades of many advocates, allies and organizations too numerous to name — more gay and lesbian couples, including Vic and me, are one step closer to being able to marry in those states, like Texas, that still do not permit it. And more gay and lesbian children in Oklahoma and across this great nation will go to sleep tonight praying they will one day find the love of their life to marry, rather than that they won’t wake up.

Mark Phariss is a Plano, Texas corporate attorney. He and his partner of 17 years, Vic Holmes, are co-plaintiffs in the Texas case challenging the constitutionality of Texas’ ban on same-sex marriages, which is now pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.