by Joe Stoutzenberger

Many years ago, I met a friend I hadn’t seen in a while on a Philadelphia center city street. He told me he was meeting a friend at a nearby bar and invited me to join them. Once inside the bar, I realized fairly quickly that it was a gay bar. All the clientele were men, and some men off in a corner were dancing with each other. I told my friend that I didn’t feel comfortable there, and he said, “How do you think we feel in a straight bar?”

I never thought of there being “straight bars.” In my mind at the time, there were regular, normal bars, and then there were abnormal bars—gay bars. Gay bars were not just different; they deviated from what is the norm, just as heterosexuality is the norm and homosexuality is deviant from that norm.

As a left-handed person, I might have been more sensitive to how difference does not have to be negative. The Latin word for being left-handed is sinister. According to my Cassell’s Latin dictionary, the word also means “wrong, perverse, unfavorable, evil.” We “sinister” lefties should be attentive to when people are being denigrated for their differences. Just because we write, throw a ball, and use a fork differently from righties, we would not label ourselves as deviant. FYI: about thirteen percent of Americans are left-handed, and a little more than eight percent self-identify as LGBTQ+. Being left-handed has its challenges—some kitchen utensils are clearly designed for right-handers. Those challenges are minuscule compared to the challenges of navigating through life as a homosexual. No one chooses to be homosexual or heterosexual any more than someone chooses to be left- or right-handed.

American society and the Catholic Church have made great strides in making sexual minorities feel more welcome and less like persons bearing a stigma. Pope Francis was a warm and welcoming person, and he didn’t hesitate to express his affection for gay men and lesbian women. He encouraged two American Catholic ministers, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Father James Martin, to continue their ministry to sexual minorities. He told Sister Jeannine that we need to show “respect for personal history” when relating to people. He acknowledged that a cookie-cutter understanding of gender identity does not take into account each person’s unique history and experience. He even told her: “Transgender people must be accepted and integrated into society.”

I have left-handed friends who attended Catholic school, and they tell stories of their first-grade nun hitting their hand with a ruler if they tried to write with their left hand. I was spared such treatment by Sister Adelaide, so I write with the curved style required of left-handed writers. I have friends who knew they were gay at a very early age, others who came to the realization during adolescence, and even some who only realized it after they were adults and were even married to a woman and had children. As Pope Francis said, personal histories are varied. Catholicism has a tradition, adopted from the ancient Greeks, of determining morality based on what is often a narrow understanding of what is natural. “Left” is synonymous with wrong and unnatural. A sexual orientation other than a heterosexual one is unnatural and therefore wrong. In this tradition, morality is determined by fidelity to the natural order and not by whether anyone is getting hurt. However, there’s another window into what determines moral behavior. Rape and child abuse are egregious, not because they are unnatural, but because people are being hurt. That is true even when rape occurs in the context of marriage. Pope Francis had a great knack for seeing persons who were hurting and knew that suffering was often caused by societal attitudes that were unwelcoming and condemnatory. Left-handedness is not just accepted but often celebrated in society. Left-handed pitchers are prized in baseball, and some studies suggest that being left-handed taps into the right side of our brain, stimulating creativity and an artistic sense. Have the church and society arrived at the point of both accepting and celebrating the contributions of people who identify as other than heterosexual as well? That attitude is part of the legacy of Pope Francis. LGBTQ+ and left-handed people are not going away. Hopefully, their personal history and identity can be viewed as the source of good that God desires for all people.