My First Flash Mob

My bubble popped in 2012, but it didn’t deflate all at once.

When I started high school a year previous, I began helping out with the school plays, because I didn’t want to keep playing soccer. My freshman year, I worked backstage on our production of West Side Story, and by spring I had transitioned onstage. Acting in front of friends, family, and strangers helped me come out of my shell. I could make people laugh, and that felt good. I could goof off with people in a safe place, and became more involved with the friends I made in the drama program.

All this led me, in the spring semester of my sophomore year, to drama camp (it wasn’t a camp, but that’s what we called it). My school was one of many Minnesotan high schools that was invited to send students to a three-day workshop on the performative arts at a nearby university. I signed up, along with thirty or forty other students from my high school. Some went just to miss a few days of school, some went to hang out with friends, and some were interested in the classes. Personally, I was there for a combo of all three.

So, there we were, a bus-full of private-school kids from conservative backgrounds, piling out onto the campus of a fine arts college. It was the frigid, snowless part of February. The Minnesotan spring had started the months-long ritual of teasing warmer weather, then dashing our hopes with an icy tumult. The sky was grey all three days, and we rushed between buildings to reach our scheduled classes.

The class that most interested me was one on improvisational skills. I attended with three of my close friends, and at the end of the session, the instructor told us we were going to try an experiment. We would perform a flash mob in the student union, where we would pose as statues for five minutes. We got to choose the theme of our flash mob, and the class chose something topical: gay marriage. My friends and I were in a predicament.

It would be another year before gay marriage was legalized by the state of Minnesota, and another three years before the Supreme Court would make it legal nationwide. At the time, I didn’t know anyone who was gay. What I knew of the debate was filtered through the worldview of family members, church-goers, and teachers. I knew the biblical stance, but had no experience backing up those positions to non-Christians. I considered myself anti-LGBT, but hadn’t defined what that meant or looked like. And now, for the first time, I was overwhelmingly in the minority.

As we marched to the student union, we discussed what to do. We settled on a plan. No, we decided, we didn’t want to go against the crowd. But we also couldn’t betray our principles. Was gay marriage really the issue? Sure, people identified as gay, and we didn’t have a right to enforce Christian values on them. But what about people who weren’t gay that were being convinced by teachers and councillors that they were gay. That, we thought, was something worth protesting.

So, when the instructor raised her hand, we froze. All across the student union, high schoolers posed in groups of four or five. Within ten seconds the loud chatter and steady murmur had dropped to dead silence. College students pointed and took pictures. The effect we had was tangible. It was startling to see how stillness could be so loud.

My group’s pose: a teenage boy stood between another boy (me) and a girl. The teen in the center looked confused, and our fourth member pointed him in my direction. Five minutes felt like an eternity, but it passed, and all of the workshop students left the union.

Looking back, I feel disgusted by my actions. I don’t blame myself for them (I couldn’t help what I’d been taught), but it still hurts to remember that I was once in that headspace. It hurts to know that I spent the first fifteen years of my life in that headspace before the cracks started to form.

In the days following drama camp, I felt conflicted about the experience. Being in the flash mob had been electric, and we bragged about it to our friends. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I lacked some resolution. I decided that I needed to confront the gay marriage debate, and define my stance. A month later, I wrote an essay for English class making the case against gay marriage. It was full of bad science, shoddy theology, and demonstrative of my need to supply evidence for pre-existing beliefs. Of everything I’ve ever written, it is the piece I’m most ashamed of.

Even after I had defined my stance and defended it in writing, something still didn’t feel right. I don’t know if it was moral guilt or the dawning realization of my own cognitive dissonance. Over the next months and years, the dilemma stayed on my mind. If we, as Christians, we were commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, then how did that align with a stance that undercut the rights of an entire segment of the population?

It didn’t take long for me to reverse my stance on gay marriage, but it took years for me to chip away at the stigma I had built up around LGBT individuals. I struggled for a long time with the belief that homosexuality was wrong or unnatural, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Eventually, I realized I was wrong.

It’s hard to feel hopeful when all we see is the paranoia and vitriol of intolerance rising around us. It’s easy to feel discouraged, and to think that we should have moved past all this. Facing an ugly reflection is painful. I find hope in remembering that I was once part of that reflection, but now I recognize it for what it is. If I could change my mind, then there are a lot of people who still can.