True love waits.

If you’re like me, it sometimes takes a documentary or a news segment or a song or an out-loud recollection with an old friend to get you dwelling more feelingly in the facts of your own past.

I say this to call your attention to a recent NPR Morning Edition story conducted by Magnolia McKay. Please click on the link above before reading further unless you’re someone who can listen and read all at once and you feel like doing that.

I like the headline: 30 years later, the evangelical purity movement still impacts sex education.

I mean, it’s true, right? But and…what thrills me is the fact of people who’ve been immersed in and, in my case, kindasorta perpetuated…a toxic conception of self and others and God speaking candidly of where they were then and where they are now in light of what they know now that they didn’t know then. I love a good debrief.

I especially love a good debrief that includes a friend like Claire McKeever-Burgett (who appears in the story). More of this please!

This particular story got me recalling a thing I did as an English teacher at Christ Presbyterian Academy. Yes, there was the True Love Waits campaign. Most students knew about it. But there was also a Radiohead song called “True Love Waits.” It existed via bootleg and B-side years before it appeared on their most recent album.

At the time, Radiohead got me thinking about how the statement (True love waits.) could be deployed differently and in more than one direction. Art is integration, y’all.

I’m someone who’s perhaps always been irked by people breaking in line. In the late eighties, I addressed the fact of my fellow students breaking in the lunch line in a chapel talk at Franklin Road Academy. I read aloud Jesus’ words on the last being first and the first being last and then I let them have it. I was moralistic but also at least a little bit funny. This seems to be my jam.

So…in my role as a classroom teacher at Christ Presbyterian, I wrote “True love waits” on the dry erase board and invited students across the popularity spectrum to sign their names to signal their commitment to not break in front of other students in the lunch line. True love waits…for those who appeared in line before you did to procure their food and drink to procure their food and drink uninterrupted by you. Reader, my campaign touched a nerve. A lot of young people signed up. Solidarity coalesces sometimes.

Joe Strummer is alleged to have said: “Punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.” Together, we got a silly but meaningful and hopefully punk rock thing going within our context back then. Many of the folks who affixed their names to the effort are still in my life. *waves from Nashville*

So…if the prurience movement of those days which is…not unrelated to the white supremacist terror movement of those days and these days was a part of your life and….if it hits different now, I’d like to encourage you to discuss and share Magnolia McKay’s story with someone. Expand the space of the talkaboutable one convo at a time.

This is what it takes. Thank you Magnolia McKay and Claire McKeever-Burgett and Radiohead, for your witness.

UPDATE:

It gives me great joy to announce that Sarah Smith Holton, who once graced the classroom assigned to me at Christ Presbyterian Academy, captured one moment in the life of our True Love Waits subcult in a photo. Art is documentation. The state of the thing also serves to remind me that the group effort got erased regularly which only heightened the drama of signing up again. More the fun. Fascists are bound to lose. You can’t stop the beat. *sighs* Our world.

Thank you, Sarah!