By Jim Larkin
FLINT –
It took her lesbian daughter's suicide, followed by a year of intense study and prayer, for Mary Lou Wallner to conclude that being gay is not a choice.
And that's not an easy conclusion to make for a then extreme fundamentalist.
"Quite honestly, had she (her daughter Anna Wakefield) lived, I don't think we ever would have come along to where we are today, because we were so close-minded," said Wallner, 63, from her North Little Rock, Ark., home. "It's embarrassing to admit that, but it's true."
Wallner will be bringing such honesty and frank talk with her when she comes to Flint on Oct. 13 to be the guest speaker for a 6:30-8:30 p.m. Out 'N About event sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church and the Genesee County chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. It will be held at Unitarian Universalist Church, 2474 S. Ballenger Highway.
Her talk will follow the showing of the documentary "For the Bible Tells Me So," which charts the course of five different families as they react to discovering their child is gay. Following her talk, there will be a question and answer period, during which Wallner promises to be brutally honest.
And following that full night, there will be Advocacy Training from 6-8:30 p.m. Oct. 14, during which those in attendance will follow "step-by-step training to move people of faith and congregations from acceptance to public advocacy," said Terri Dinsmore, PFLAG vice-president and one of the presenters of the training.
It took Wallner a long time to reach that acceptance and she is portrayed in the documentary as the most rigidly opposed to homosexuality of all the five families.
She and all her relatives were, after all, immersed in an extreme fundamentalist environment. So when her daughter, Anna, then a college freshman, told her she was a lesbian in 1988, Wallner was horrified.
"We thought it was a terrible sin. We didn't reject her, what we rejected was what we believed at the time to be her chosen lifestyle," Wallner said. "All of the families, all of her cousins, were in the fundamentalist, James Dobson-like environment. Any one of us at any time would preach at her and throw scripture at her. She didn't accept herself because we didn't accept her."
So on Feb. 28, 1997 at age 29, Anna took her own life, and Mary Lou Wallner's life was never the same.
"On the way to the funeral, I said to my husband, 'You know, I don't want her life to be in vain,'" Wallner said. "At that time, I didn't know what shape that would take."
At the funeral, Wallner said there were a lot of gay people and admits that at the time "I had no use for them." It wasn't until a friend loaned her the book, "Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay & Christian in America," by the Rev. Mel White, that she and her husband, Bob, started on their own journey to resolve how they felt about Anna being gay and why she committed suicide.
She called White and talked to him at length and he invited her to an anti-violence forum that included 200 people.
"They treated us with such incredible compassion, incredible understanding, that we were forced to rethink how we felt about homosexuality," Wallner said.
So she started reading everything she could on the subject. She intensely studied the Bible and prayed like she had never prayed before, she said. She believes the Holy Spirit guided her to a new conclusion.
"Who in their right mind would choose this and all you have to go through if you're gay if they had a choice?" she now asks. "We don't believe it's a choice. We don't believe it's a sin"
She also believes that her daughter's inability to accept herself as a lesbian was the reason she committed suicide. Now, she travels across the country to encourage other Christians to embrace their gay children and to fully understand that one's sexual orientation is not a choice.
A retired nurse, she said a parent never really gets over the death of a daughter or son. But she and her husband, Bob, a retired architect, have found solace in founding TEACH-ministries, an acronym for To Educate About the Consequences of Homophobia.
"We started telling our story to anyone who would listen," said Wallner, who is now a member of a community church comprised largely of gay men and women. "We've been very blessed to have a ministry come out of it."
