“You can be a bird, just don’t fly.”

I saw that statement and it’s been rolling around in my brain ever since. It’s said in a way of keeping people we disagree with in restraint. It’s strange to me that we think we get to control people at all. The “love the sinner, hate the sin” crowd has it all figured out until that same sentiment gets pushed back on them.

I’m told it’s okay for me to be gay, but to live the life of a gay man is a whole different story. The sin, some say, is in the action. They said, “Just don’t live the life.” It’s a weird way for the church to feel better about themselves for not calling being gay a sin, while still making sure it costs me everything a straight person gets for free. Partnership. Family. Touch. A name next to mine on a hospital form. The connections that come with a relationship. The fulfillment that comes from a true love. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m fully aware that most religious people do not accept the homosexual one bit. Some extreme ones want nothing more than to remove all of us from the planet.

They want nothing more than to pull the bird from the sky in the name of protection and throw it in a cage called love. But you don’t take the nature out of the bird by caging it. You just take the sky. The nature stays. The desire to fly still sits in the heart whether I ever move again or not. Bury it under enough years of stillness and the vibrancy of life disappears. But open the door and I’ll immediately fly. Because that’s what I am. That’s who I’m meant to be.

Is it fair to tell me to marry the opposite sex because an ancient text says so, and call that mercy? It treats my capacity to love someone like an urge to be white-knuckled through for a lifetime, alone, while everyone else gets to live theirs out loud. “You can be a bird just don’t fly” isn’t a compromise. It’s a fancier way of clipping my wings and calling it self-control. A bird that never flies isn’t disciplined. It’s grounded and miserable. Have you ever watched the life drain out of an animal in captivity, not allowed to be what it actually is?

It’s easy to tell me to stop living when what feels most natural to me doesn’t sit right with you. You want me to stay in my cage when you get to go home and kiss your spouse on the cheek. Hug your kids. Live a full, ordinary life, because no one has ever once called you unnatural or an abomination. All the while I’m kept in the back room, brought out when it’s convenient. A prop for the sermon. A cautionary tale. Never a person who just wanted to fly. Someone who just wanted to live free and exist.

There’s a part nobody wants to admit. The cage was never about my safety. It was about who got to keep the key. And they never tell you that once you’re in their cage, they’ve thrown the key away.

They call my cage an instrument of deliverance. They call it love. Religion built this cage out of the nicest materials it had, scripture. It didn’t drag me in kicking. It handed me the bars one verse at a time and told me I was building a home. I even thanked them for it. I helped build the prison. That’s the part that truly bothers me, not that the cage went up, but that I picked up a hammer.

The caged bird can still sing, like that’s the same as flying. Like a song from inside the bars is worship and a song from the open sky is rebellion. But it’s the same throat, the same nature, just one of them has room to breathe. They’ll stand outside my cage and call the singing proof that I’m content. Too many people can’t imagine the bird having happiness outside that cage.

I used to think if I prayed hard enough the wanting would leave. I fasted. I begged. I wept at altars until I got carpet burn on my knees. I asked God to take it from me the way someone would ask a surgeon to remove a tumor. I was certain that if I just believed hard enough, hurt long enough, wanted it gone strong enough, I’d wake up new. I never woke up new. I woke up tired. Every year. Every day. The same bird, a little more bruised from throwing myself at the bars, a little more convinced the bruising was proof of being truly pious.

Nobody ever tells you that’s what faith asks of you when you’re the wrong kind of bird. Not belief, but exhaustion. They call it sanctification. They call it dying to self. They never say it plain, that the self they want dead is just you, just the shape you were born into, and once it’s dead there’s no resurrection story waiting on the other side. Just an empty cage and a bird with no life left. I’m done praying to be someone else’s version of clean and pure. I pulled myself out of that cage and flew just like I always should have. It was and is my nature.