Saturday Night Meltdown

I grew up in Sarah Palin’s Alaska, before any of us knew who Sarah Palin was. My family went to the kind of Alaskan Evangelical church that she made famous, and we would even pass by her specific church on the way to the cabin (an uninsulated A-frame on Cristal Lake, with no running water or electricity).

I liked church as a kid, and I especially loved youth group. I felt close to God when we sang together. I felt conflicted about the messages to convert my friends (mostly the long-suffering Meghan, one of the few people I knew who didn’t go to church or synagogue), but I loved the community of it. It was a place where the boys and girls I knew from church and school could all hang out together in a group and people were kind.

The summer I was 13, I went on a mission trip to Chicago. I guess that’s where they send kids from Alaska to do missionary work. I was excited to be traveling with my friends and to do God’s work, though I was unclear on the details of what that would entail.

First we went to the Cornerstone music festival, an annual festival that drew about 20,000 people. I remember eating funnel cakes and drinking cokes and freezing at night because my mom had sent me with a sheet sewn together instead of a sleeping bag (someone had wrongly informed her that was all I needed). I learned about crowd surfing and that some Christians smoked pot. I sang along with Audio Addrenalene and listened to bands whose names I didn’t know.

Most of the people in our group were kids I grew up with and knew like family, but there was one boy who was new. His name was Matt and I liked his quiet sense of humor. We circled each other shyly. He seemed different from the loud youth group kids I knew from before, and I wanted . . . something. I didn’t know what yet.

After the festival was over, we went to stay with the Jesus People. We were there for several days. At first, they divided our group into boys and girls. The girls were supposed to help watch the children and the boys were going to help build a playground.

This seemed like bullshit to me. I did not go on a mission trip to just do more babysitting. So I started a mutiny, leading the girls through inner-city Chicago to the place where the boys were building a playground. I figured I basically knew the way, and it all worked out fine, though the adults who found out where we had been walking were horrified.

After the trip, Matt and I continued to shyly seek each other out. We would go for quiet walks together, talking about music and God. I liked spending time with him.

In the fall, just after my fourteenth birthday, Matt asked me to Homecoming. It was the Homecoming at his conservative Christian school, so there wasn’t any dancing. I’m not sure why my parents let me go. They had a stated policy of no dating until I was 16, but I guess they thought a Christian school Homecoming was pretty harmless.

It was. We ate dinner together and didn’t touch each other. A few days later, Matt called my house and asked if I would like to go out with him again.

“M-my parents won’t let me,” I stammered.

I felt embarrassed, but he took it in stride. We kept seeing each other at youth group, seeking each other out for serious discussions about God.

The song “What If God Was One of Us” was very popular that fall, and the youth group had a competition to see who could write the best response to Joan Osborne, so that she would know God was one of us.

I felt torn. I loved writing competitions, and the reward for the best letter was the new Audio Adrenaline tape. But I had read an interview with Osborne in which she said she was so tired of getting these kinds of letters. I didn’t want to add to that.

I told Matt about my struggle and he did the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for me: he made me a copy of the Audio Adrenaline tape so that I wouldn’t have to compete for it. I thought I might be falling for him. One night during a church lock-in, I pretended to sleep on his shoulder (basically second base for Christian school kids).

At the same time all of this was happening, I was starting my first year of public high school. I went from an eighth-grade class of 11 to a school of 2,000. It was thrilling. I had applied and been accepted to the School Within a School alternative program (SWS), known to the rest of the high school as “the gay school.”

I met brilliant people there—that alternative school was fed by the highly gifted program where my mother would eventually teach. I took classes with future National Merit Scholars, neurologists, and climate scientists, and the guy who plays Tina on Bob’s Burgers (he was weird then, even for SWS, which is saying something). That’s where I met others who read as much as me, if not more. I felt giddy and like I had found my tribe.

As I made friends at school, I began to distance myself from the youth group. This was all taking place during the lead up to Alaska’s marriage amendment (amending the state constitution to say that marriage was only between one man and one woman, as if anything else was available at the time). Although SWS was not quite as gay as the rest of the school made it out to be, it was my first time spending time with out queer kids, and I loved them fiercely.

I also started to develop a crush on the boy who would become my first boyfriend, a cellist who had built a computer network in his mother’s condo (he would later go on to work for Microsoft). I didn’t know what to do about Matt, so I started awkwardly ignoring him. He quietly got the message, and we drifted apart.

In early 2020, Matt and I reconnected. We found each other on Twitter and Facebook, and Matt asked me if it would be okay if he asked me some questions. I knew he had married young, but other than that I didn’t know much about his life past high school.

We wrote back and forth on messenger, talking about God and music much like we had when we were teenagers. I was happy to see that the sweet, considerate boy I knew had grown into a funny, thoughtful man. He recommended a recent documentary about David Bazan, in part because it had coverage of the Cornerstone festival.

I watched it and said:

Me: You were so right about the David Bazan documentary! It was wild to see all the stuff about Cornerstone in it.

Matt: Yeah, the Cornerstone stuff really took me back. What a trip that was.

Me: No kidding. Did you hear about the sexual abuse allegations against Jesus People USA? Not really surprising, considering how loose everything was there.

Matt: Yeah, I did. Really sad to hear, but like you said, not all that surprising.

There is a phenomenon that youth pastors see all the time called the “Saturday Night Meltdown.” This happens at festivals and weekend retreats. Everyone is exhausted by Saturday night and boundaries are blurred. Some youth pastors use this moment to create an emotional release. I witnessed many of these. Kids would cry, be slain in the spirit, and dedicate their lives to Jesus. The pastors prayed over them and said, “Amen.”

Did you catch that offhand comment about the Jesus People? How they were sexually abusing kids like us? Kids whose parents sent them there, with little supervision. It didn’t happen to me or to Matt, but it could have. It did happen to other kids.

And here we are in our 40s, trying to pick up the pieces and put them back together in a way that makes sense. There are so many of us trying to do this work, all with our own scars and wounds. We were children, caught up in systems that we did not understand. And the people who were supposed to be there for us, to protect us from harm and predators, were nowhere to be found.