Brendan David Creel was born in the eighties in sub-suburban Florida to a laboror and an educator. He was raised in a poor but devout household with his sister, where they were well-loved. They grew up appreciating the virtues of social and economic responsibility.
The elementary school years were confusing. Brendan could not easily understand the unprovoked cruelty he observed in other children, nor the powerless hypocrisy of the adults whose purpose was to be fair and right. He became regularly upset with a world he percieved as cruel and chaotic.
Brendan became a target of bullying and ostracism in middle school. He was physically and socially awkward. His religious upbringing left him little exposure to the secular pop culture that interested his peers, and his low-income family could not provide him the trendy possessions to be even superficially popular. Fortunately, he never understood why either of those things were important.
Brendan's natural talents were realized in high school. He proved an exceptional student despite the mishandling of prior administrations. He excelled in math and science, but his English teacher was the most fond of him: She encouraged him to pursue creative writing, and he placed twice in young writers' competitions for poetry and prose. Brendan eventually joined the marching band; He wasn't athletic nor musical, but he found acceptance among a large circle of friends for the first time.
Brendan's Senior year of high school was spent at his local community college where he was educated in art, astronomy, and technology. However, this meant he would miss prom and other social events for the sake of educational advancement. His pursuit of knowledge led him to abandon many old joys, and he stopped writing poetry. Sacrifice would become a recurring theme in his life.
Brendan was accepted into the university of his choosing, which he could fully afford with the scholarships he had earned. However, his university raised tuition for three consecutive years to pay for facilities Brendan would never get to use. While he graduated with honors and a degree in the sciences, Brendan had to take on debt to pay off his final year; this soured him against institutes of higher learning that he no longer believed put students first.
During those college years though, Brendan had his sexual awakening. Like most things, love always came second to his studies. He admired a woman like a work of art – something nice to look at, not to hold. Then, one day, he opened a door to behold the most beautiful man he had ever seen. Apparently, that feeling of floating on air was not an exaggeration! The other man was brilliant and witty as well as handsome, and they flirted in good fun. However, Brendan couldn't commit. He feared what his family, church and god would think of him. He finished university that year and would never see his first love again.
With a stellar academic record and work experience, Brendan was ready to make his debut in the the world of business. Unfortunately, America was now in recession. Brendan continued to interview, but employers were using the economy as an excuse to underpay, and Brendan knew there'd be no economic recovery pay raise when things got better. He refused to work for less than he was worth. Today, his generation is the poorest due to the moral and financial bankruptcy of predatory lenders, the institutions that empowered them, the government that rescued them, and the businesses that further exploited the crisis at the expense of the working class.
Brendan survived on series of paid internships, gigs, and part-time jobs, eventually paying off his debt. It was character building: He took inventory for a local bookseller and was valued for his rapport with customers at his service and sales jobs. In addition to the free software testing he provided for worthy causes, he also volunteered as an elementary school assistant. He eventually taught himself web development and became a techweb specialist for a land holding corporation.
However, in that optimistic time between graduation and employment, Brendan was interning far from home. With the prospect of a high-paying job, he rented an apartment and began dating men online. Still devout, Brendan filtered his matches by religion, and – astonishingly – many of his visitors had considered seminary. Brendan asked one of his dates about this. He learned many Catholic homosexual men become priests because they are taught celibacy is the only way to be right with god, and the priesthood offers convenient incentive to stay celibate. He also learned many gay priests can't keep their vow of celibacy and live in sadness and self-loathing. What a terrible thing, this dark curtain of The Church that is so obvious and yet so well-hidden! It would be one of many curtains he would pull back.
Brendan came out to his family that year. His sister was supportive, but his mother suggested his feelings were a choice, and his father told him to stick a pin in it. They remained family, but now the relationship was strained and conditional. When the political arm of The Catholic Church, The Knights of Columbus, donated one million dollars to dissolve the marriages of homosexuals in California, Brendan's crisis of faith lead him to study his religion with the same rigor he once studied his coursework. He needed multiple independent sources as unbiased as possible. So, acquiring scholarly Jewish, Christian, Atheist, and disinterested secular sources, he learned.
He learned the history of his religion; the evolution of its god; the origins of its book; the motives of its authors; the politics of their time. He re-read scripture, absorbing what it said as opposed to what he was told it said. He found contradictions, barbarity, and outright nonsense. Considering that, and how easily its followers used it to harass people, he concluded that even if his religion could be true, it couldn't be good. Too many of its core doctrines were spiritually abusive and exploitable for that purpose. Brendan knew good trees don't produce bad fruit, and the fruit of his church was rotting from every branch. It was time uproot the tree and plant something better in its place.
It was earth-shattering for a decades-old ethical framework to collapse in so short a time. Brendan needed to rebuild quickly with a reliable method for determining truth and purpose or else he might replace his old religion with something worse. He spent years fine-tuning a collection of philosophies — humanism, skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism — that worked for him.
Brendan phased The Catholic Church out of his life by skipping prayers and services. When its widespread sexual abuse scandal was exposed, Brendan recalled the moralizing it used to justify California Proposition 8. He was disgusted to learn that pedophile priests were relocated to other parishes. Brendan listened to The Church's apologetics, which blamed the victims in addition to homosexuals. Catholics pointed fingers at Protestants pastors, as if that absolved their own clergy. Catholicism claims its authority comes from the touch of god through a hands-on ritual started by Jesus, but that would mean only the hands of a Catholic priest could abuse a child under a chain of authority tracing back to Christ himself. It's damning evidence that the Catholic Church is not guided by his benevolent hands.
Brendan started a poetic diary in 2019. His entries were sorted into three chapters about “Life and Grief and Disbelief.” It was first intended to explore meaning from an atheist perspective, but when his father fell ill that year, he added another chapter on loss. Brendan's father died without accepting his son's sexuality, and would never see him truly happy. It was another thing The Church had stolen from him. Inspired by anger and sorrow, Brendan rewrote his diary as an anthology and titled it Upon Another Why and When. It doubled in size to eight chapters. These latter four, in part, are examples of how the themes of the former - Love, Freedom, Nature and Death - can be inverted or exploited.
In 2020, a single exposé by National Catholic Reporter demolished The Catholic Church's pro-life reputation. Its oft-cited report described how the US Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied against passage of the National Suicide Hotline Designation Act for providing affirmation and support resources for queer youth. Even congress, in a rare act of bipartisanship, passed the bill unanimously. The excuse the USCCB made for spending pro-life parishoner's money to fight a suicide helpline was the same it used against domestic violence protections and employment non-discrimination : acknowledging the mere existence of sexual and gender minorities was "unnecessary."
Denying resources to suicidal queer youth is an indefensibly evil anti-life act:
If you donated a tithe to a suicide helpline every week for the remainder of your life, you wouldn't match the what The Catholic Church has spent harming them. But you should donate, nonetheless.
You who have ears, hear and heed these words:
Whosoever claims to love you, but helps destroy you, does not love you.
Whosoever calls you “friend”, and aids your enemy, is your enemy.
Do always and everywhere to give up hateful ways.
The world can be cruel, and it is chaotic;
But we may choose to be something better than cruel
And we can create meaning out of chaos.
My name is Brendan David Creel.
I am Queer. Atheist. Individualist. Existentialist.
As a youth, I had no cause to write.
As an adult, I have more cause than I ever wanted.
This has been the story my life.
This has been the making of a poet.