I remember the experience like it was yesterday. Just weeks after coming out to some of the important people in my life, a few of my closest Christian friends staged what I would consider a well-meaning intervention by signing me up for an Ex-Gay weekend conference in a nearby city. To their credit, they signed up for the conference, too. It was a married couple (the husband having recently come out as gay) and a straight female friend of mine who convinced me this would be an important step in sorting through the issues around my recently revealed sexual orientation. I have to admit, it was a tremendously important step for me, but probably not in the way it was intended.
As I sat through workshops and plenary sessions conducted by men who claimed to be healed of their same-sex attraction, the most vivid feeling I can remember was the sensation of someone taking a dull knife and trying to sever the connection between my spirit and my physical body. I know that sounds dramatic (the conference itself was rife with dramatic flare as well, imagine that!), but what was happening inside me was a gut-wrenching, visceral experience. As one of the more prominent ex-gay converts pranced around the stage, swishing and lisping while giving too much detail about the fulfilling sex life he had with his ex-lesbian wife, I remember thinking to myself:
"This cannot be the answer. This is a charade. There must be a more genuine, less self-centered way of life than what is being acted out on this stage. There must be a different way to be a gay man and please God at the same time. This cannot be the only option!"
The minute the conference was over I remember driving directly over to my then-boyfriend’s house, walking through the door and collapsing onto the floor in a pile of tears. For the next three hours I sobbed my heart out, to the confusion and concern of my boyfriend who couldn’t believe I’d agreed to this in the first place. It felt like I had just exhausted the only option the church would ever extend to me as a gay Christian. I knew I could never be a true ex-gay, and with that admission came the realization that I could never fully be part of the evangelical Christian community again. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, on that Sunday evening I took my first critical step down a brand new path; a path I hope to see opened up for young gay Christians who, like I did, feel they have reached a dead end in their journey toward an honest joining of their faith and sexuality.
For me, the first step on a journey toward wholeness was to give up the fight I was waging against myself. Many people will likely take issue with this statement out of concern that young gay Christians will hear these words as an admonition to stop living Godly lives. That is not at all what I’m saying. It was my experience that in order to have the energy, resources and resolve to begin the real struggle of reconciling my sexuality with my faith, I had to stop focusing every fiber of my being on beating myself up and then hiding the bruises from the whole world. In order to keep the truth about myself a secret, I was spending all of my time and energy on the wrong struggle and thereby neglecting the more important process of developing a life that reflected the true priorities of my faith.
This is exactly where I believe the evangelical community and the ex-gay movement (which often overlap) have caused thousands of Christians to miss the point. Let’s think about it… For most gay and lesbian people, same-sex attraction is as inseparable from one’s identity as being right-handed or left-handed. When we first had feelings of attraction in adolescence, it was toward people of the same sex. While others were having those first dreams and longings for a life partner of the opposite sex, that longing for us was focused on someone of the same sex. Our bodies and minds simply awoke to this orientation as naturally as any adolescent’s body wakes up to those first feelings of sexual attraction as a normal stage of development. There are LGBT people with different stories, but for many (myself included), being gay has always been as natural as breathing.
In order to change something as fundamental as one’s sexual orientation (and the jury is still out on whether this is even possible in most cases), a person would have to become solely focused on that task for years or even a lifetime. All of one’s energy, emotions, spiritual practices, finances and relationships would have to become centered around one thing: Sexuality.
Somewhere during the course of my ex-gay intervention weekend, the question that came into focus for me was two-fold. First of all, if I really committed my life to the process of changing my sexuality, what would I have left of my life to give to other endeavors? More specifically, wouldn’t Jesus rather have me acknowledge my sexual orientation, entrust that sacred part of me into God’s hands, and then use my life to love and serve other people and make a difference in the world? It occurred quite clearly to me that to make my life’s work the changing of my own sexual orientation would be a narcissistic (and likely futile) endeavor. I wanted to have room in my life to serve other people, to love and be loved by other people, and to allow this one aspect of my identity to shrink back down from the all-consuming monster it had become. In that moment, I began to embrace a way of life that I believed would please God with all of who I was.
That moment was the beginning of a journey filled with struggle and failure ultimately leading to a life of openness, integrity and freedom. These are the stories I want to tell through this blog.
As someone who gave up the fight against myself and forged a new path at the age of 24 without a wife or a family, I realize that my experience has been much different from that of many friends who’ve faced these decisions with the lives of people they love at stake. For most of these friends, they entered marriages because they were told and believed that marriage to someone of the opposite sex would be part of their deliverance from being gay or lesbian. I can only imagine the heart-wrenching pain of dealing with these decisions in the context of a marriage. However, regardless of one’s life circumstances, I’ve seen that the path of openness leads people out of shame and shadows and into a place where one can honestly forge a path that honors God while coloring outside the lines the church has drawn for us in the past. There are paths that lead to either honoring or ending existing marriages. There are paths that lead to both celibate life and loving same-sex relationships. None of these paths are without their own perils, but each is scattered with surprising encounters of grace.
I sit here on a Sunday morning nearly a decade after my journey began. Right now there is gospel music playing softly in the background. As I sip my coffee and write these words I am overwhelmed by the excessive grace I feel in this moment. I write with the hope that someone will read these musings and have the courage to take a more complicated and honest path toward wholeness. I write with the hope that the parent of an LGBT child will be able to offer something more than alienation when affirmation is so desperately needed. I write with the hope that a church leader will become a champion for the tortured and confused young Christians looking for belonging in a congregation.
Coming out as gay and Christian isn’t the end of the road; it is the beginning of a meaningful journey for those who aren’t satisfied with a disjointed existence characterized by fear and shame. Thanks for riding along for a few miles of my journey...
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