Growing up gay in a rural Christian family in the 1980s, Ron recounts how he survived to eventually thrive.
*This story was originally published in Christian Courier. Used with permission.
You can read Ron’s story here or on Christian Courier’s website.
– By Marlene Bergsma
Ron Greidanus was born with the twin gifts of being prodigiously talented and being gay.
But being born in the late 1960s, the fifth child of six to a hard-working, modestly-educated farm family in the Dutch immigrant community in Huron County, Ontario, it would take a long time before he could accept both of those gifts.
The musical talent was easier.
In fact, his career as a church musician, which started when he was still a teenager, became the pathway to belonging for Greidanus, who is now an accomplished and beloved concert pianist, soloist, harpsichordist, choral conductor and music director.
HAPPY CHILDHOOD
Overall, Greidanus says he had a happy childhood. He wasn’t a strong student at his local Christian school but he loved living on a farm, and even today, living in Southern Ontario, he takes on seasonal work for a local farmer, throwing bales during haying season.
“Some of my happiest moments on the farm were with my mother and my aunt on the hay wagon, and I still work for a farmer occasionally,” he says. “I enjoy the physicality of it. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, throwing enormous amounts of hay.”
His mother recognized his musical talent early and arranged for piano lessons. An excellent piano teacher, Mrs. Lear, lived on the next concession, just a bike ride away.
He always knew his mother and sister adored him, and the aunts, uncles, and cousins in his large extended family enjoyed his precociousness and the ways in which he fit in well with adult conversation. Greidanus was only beginning to understand the ways in which he might be different from his siblings or the other boys in his class, but he looks back on his childhood and considers it mostly normal.
ABUSE
Yet from the time he was an adolescent, there was something more sinister going on.
As Greidanus was attempting to reconcile his sexuality with both his family and their Christian Reformed faith, he was dealt a more tragic hand. Someone within his immediate circle recognized his vulnerability and began sexually abusing him, abuse that continued throughout his adolescent years. It made his journey towards wholeness and authenticity even more fraught, and although he did confide in another adult, this was before adults in positions of authority had the duty to report crimes of this nature.
“You get used to it,” he says. You cope by “getting numb to it.”
Today, Greidanus would say he has moved on. He never followed up. His abuser has never been confronted or held accountable.
Greidanus expects it will stay that way.
BEING BULLIED
The abuser was not the only one who made Greidanus a target. When he was ready for Grade 9, his family’s financial situation led his parents to decide they couldn’t afford to send him to Christian high school, so he was enrolled in public high school. By now, his sexual orientation was something he recognized but did not dare admit. In Huron County in the 1980s being gay was not something you talked about. At church and in his family, it was understood that homosexuality was a sin that jeopardized your salvation, “sending you on a spaceship to hell.” At school and at summer camp, it made him a target. He was bullied relentlessly.
He was called “homo” and worse, and told his name was “Rhonda not Ron.”
“If I wanted to go into the science class, I had to wait for the teacher, otherwise I’d be spat on, kicked, punched, named every horrible name under the sun,” he recalls. “So yeah, it was tough, and the aftermath of it is terrible – the stress it puts on kids and the effect on their growth and development. I just had to learn to be resilient.”
A PROMISE
But his high school also offered hope. A notice from the Huron Centre – a youth mental health agency – invited students to sign up for free sessions with a school counsellor. Greidanus did.
At his first appointment, he begged the therapist: “Please help me to be not gay.”
Her reply?
“Ron, I can’t help you become not gay because you are gay. But I am going to help you learn to love yourself.”
The idea was so shocking, he wept.
“I was just crying and crying, probably for 10 minutes. And I said, ‘Please stop, don’t say this.’”
But the counsellor also made a second promise. If Greidanus kept coming to see her,
“by the end of the year, you will be in a very different spot.”
He kept going back and his parents never knew or suspected. And miraculously, she did help him begin to accept himself, which helped him survive.
The abuse and bullying “could have been fatal,” Greidanus says. “I could have been another kid who died by suicide, and there were days I wanted to,” but the presence of that counsellor is proof, for him, of God’s love.
“When you have people coming into your life exactly when you need them,” it’s evidence of God’s providential care, he says. “It was such a pivotal point in my life, but I was being given that huge gift, to accept my homosexuality.”
UNLIKELY HOPE
Despite the bullying and fear of damnation, Greidanus says there were other glimpses of hope.
One came from an unlikely place – the pulpit of Clinton Christian Reformed Church. For a short period of time in the 1980s, Rev. Homer Samplonius preached sermons that raised the topic of homosexuality. Greidanus can’t remember exactly what was preached, but he remembers it as being life-giving.
“He made it clear that this God that we celebrate is not that judgemental God that is being shown to us,” Greidanus recalls. In this preacher’s sermons, Greidanus heard evidence of “people with open minds and loving minds and embracing arms. It opened me to much healthier possibilities.” The mere suggestion of acceptance gave Greidanus hope. He wasn’t invisible. He might be worthy of love. Being gay was something that even ministers could talk about.
MUSIC AS ESCAPE
While Greidanus was still busy with the hard work of coming to terms with his sexuality, his musical talent was another gift that helped him survive.
“I was in Grade 6 when I fell in love with Baroque music,” Greidanus says. Singing hymns in church from the blue Psalter Hymnal, the Baroque melodies and arrangements made him come alive, and he searched the Index of Composers to find other tunes by Bach. Somehow, he sensed music “would be my ticket out of Huron County.”
It also made him popular.
He was the star of his elementary school when he played “Star of the East” at the Christmas concert in Grade 8, and by the time he was 15 years old his mother had found a job for him as church organist at St. James’ Middleton Anglican Church. The income from the church gig helped pay for music lessons with a music professor at the University of Western Ontario in nearby London, which became a pathway to a university degree in music at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and graduate school at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam, where he studied piano performance.
Greidanus came back to Canada in 1998 and moved to Georgetown, Ontario, where he founded the Georgetown Bach Chorale and eventually became the director, accompanist or music leader at five other choirs and churches. Now, he makes his favourite kind of music every night of the week, and regularly performs around the globe.
COMMUNITY
In June 2024, he was preparing for a Toronto Beaches Chorale concert at St. Anne’s Anglican Church in downtown Toronto. The day before the event, he delivered his custom-made harpsichord – “my baby” – to the venue so it would be ready for the afternoon performance. A devastating overnight fire destroyed the church, countless works of art, and Greidanus’s beloved instrument, worth over $25,000.
But his friends and fellow musicians rallied, launching a GoFundMe campaign to raise enough money to replace it, showing him a circle of love in a way that had not been part of his Christian Reformed childhood.
For Greidanus, the acceptance and support he has found in the Anglican and musical communities are life-giving. He is appreciated for both his musical talent and who he is. He doesn’t have to hide his identity or pretend to be someone or something he isn’t.
“It amazes me that there are other people in the world who want to do what I do,” he marvels.
Greidanus, whose parents have both died, never doubted his mother’s love in particular. She probably suspected he was gay, especially because he had confided in her about the schoolyard bullying, but it was a topic she would not broach.
“Her favourite show was ‘Three’s Company’ and she loved Jack [who played the role of a gay roommate], but she was never going to have a son who was gay,” Greidanus recalls. When he did come out to her, after his father died in 2006, she pretended to be surprised and might have thought he was “going to hell,” but her love for him did not wane.
GOD’S LOVE
Greidanus knows his musical talent is a gift from God, and the fact there was an “extraordinary” music teacher near his childhood home is part of that gift.
“I mean, the math and the DNA shouldn’t really add up, but Mrs. Lear was literally a bike ride down the farm road around the corner. It was great. She shouldn’t have existed that close to me, but I was given this amazing gift that allowed me to flourish. Making that early connection to classical music was so strong, I have to believe that also was a gift from God.
“And that is why when I feel doubtful, or get despondent, I think of those things and know there is a bigger picture. I am not world famous; I am just doing my thing in my little, wonderful world, but I am doing my part.”
Some of that means simply being himself and doing what he loves.
He also wants parents and pastors to know that all “kids need to know they are loved, regardless of dogma.”
And Greidanus hopes his life can be an encouragement to other young people coming out as gay in Christian spaces.“If I can make a difference in anybody’s life, especially younger people’s lives, knowing that ‘this is what it was like, but this is what you can become,’ then that’s amazing.”
– Read Ron’s story on Christian Courier’s website.