I Am What I Am – Season Two, Episode 3

Assumptions

We all know that Kyle is bisexual. And many of us questions about what that means for Kyle and how he got here. In this episode, Kyle tells Daniel his story of how he came to understand his sexuality and they talk about the implications.

Sponsors:

Assumptions is sponsored by ATB Financial’s Entrepreneur Centre and the Alberta Podcast Network. This week we mention The Daveberta Podcast.

Show Notes:

Daniel describes how author (and Assumptions guest) Wesley Hill describes the desire to feel loved by others in his book

Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality. Here is the excerpt Daniel alluded to, and we will be featuring our interview with Wesley Hill on a future episode.

"All our lives we're searching for someone who will take us seriously. That's what it means to be human," a friend of mine once mused. Whether straight or gay, people are wired, it seems, to pursue relationships of love and commitment. Maybe it's possible to be more specific: it seems that we long for the experience of mutual desire. We're on a quest to find a relationship in which we can want someone wholeheartedly and be wanted with the same intensity, in which there is a contrapuntal enhancement of desire. For many people, entering into this kind of relationship means stepping into a new world of radiant wonder and breathtaking beauty. The tingly, life-changing sense that I am wanted! and I want another person in return! makes everything look fresh and bright.

Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, expresses it this way: "To desire my joy is to desire the joy of the one I desire: my search for enjoyment through the . . . presence of another is a longing to be enjoyed . . . Romantic partners 'admire' in each other 'the lineaments of gratified desire'. We are pleased because we are pleasing." Relationships of love show both partners that they are lovable. [...]

In Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, the title character describes how she first fell in love with Nathan, the man she eventually married. "To know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light," she reminisces from the vantage point of her old age. "The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me" without warning, she said.

Hannah reflects, "A woman doesn't learn she is beautiful by looking in a mirror . . . She learns it so that she actually knows it from men. The way they look at her makes a sort of glimmer she walks in. That tells her. It changes the way she walks too . . . It had been a longish while since I had thought of being beautiful, but Nathan's looks were reminding me that I was."

Kyle talks about Alfred Kinsey and his Kinsey Scale and briefly alludes to the Liam Neeson film Kinsey.

Daniel and Kyle allude to Kyle’s interview with Rabbi Seth Goldstein. We will be featuring the full length interview on an upcoming episode of this season.

Kyle described the impact the TV sitcom Roseanne had on him, and when Ellen Degeneres came out as gay (the year was 1997). The Oprah interview that Kyle mentioned can be found on YouTube.

Please email us your questions, comments, or thoughts. We’d love to include them in a future episode. Send an voice recording to [e-mail]

Daniel’s website is www.danielmelvilljones.com. Kyle can be found on twitter.com/thekylemarshall or www.thekylemarshall.com.

Further Reading

For a Christian response to the now infamous Mike Spence rule, Daniel recommends this article written for Vox by his friend Karen Swallow Prior.

Speaking of the Kinsey scale, our forthcoming interview with Joy Beth Smith will talk more about the similar Purple-Red Scale

Credits:

Assumptions is written and produced by Daniel Melvill Jones and Kyle Marshall.

This episode edited by Kyle Marshall.

Our soundtrack comes from The Parson Red Heads.

Podcast artwork designed by Chris Taniguchi.

Photography by Josh Boak

Assumptions is available wherever podcasts are found, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Soundcloud, Spotify, and iHeart Radio.

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