Can I be totally honest? Stupid question I know. I believe that God led me to start this blog. For so long I have been fearful of any opposition to the stories I share in my writing. That is one thing that kept me from blogging for so long. I would write a story from my past in homosexuality or a story about leaving homosexuality behind and the naysayers would attack. This time around I was more afraid of God’s wrath than theirs. God asked me to begin to share my struggles and my triumph. He gave me the courage to step through that great curtain of fear that has plagued me for far too long. As I began to write I felt my courage grow. The title of my blog jokingly refers to creatures of legend and myth. As an ex-gay man in the Post Gaga culture, I am also a bit of a creature of myth. Christ calls me a new creature. The old me has gone away. The new me has taken his place. 2 Corinthians 5:17 “…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
My goal in writing this blog is not to set myself up to be a hero or a villain to either side. It would be awesome in both cases if they forgot me altogether and pleaded or argued their case before a great and all powerful God. What is my goal? To share my life with such a ridiculous amount of honesty that no church would ever hire me and the gay agenda can’t deny that my homosexuality was indeed lived out and not gleaned from a studious and thorough reading of “Becoming a Man” by Paul Monette. What is fresh on my heart tonight is how my homosexual struggle drove a wedge between my family and myself.
There was a point in time when my family life was good. Granted it was a long time ago, but I remember it. It is a good memory. My struggle with homosexuality wasn’t the sole cause of our family dysfunction. My mom was bi-polar. My dad was determined never to sin again. My brother’s life was lived in the shadow and fallout of sexual abuse he received at the age of 13. Then there was me: Artistic, Sensitive and Creative. I guess you could say I was “born that way.” Those are the attributes that God gifted me with. My family never openly rejected me because I was gay. I was afraid they would though and that is what coaxed me out and away from them. A whisper from the enemy, “You are different, special. They will never understand you.”
1 Peter 5:8 calls us to “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Lions kill the prey they coax away from the herd. They target the weak, old and young. That is satan. I was young when I began to feel different. I can see now that what I felt was misidentified as homosexuality. I believe it was in fact that God had created me different (Artistic, Sensitive and Creative) for His purpose, not for the fulfillment of another man’s sexual fantasy. My journey away from family was an emotional one at first. After all, not many 6 year olds leave home to strike out on their own. Little by little I let the enemy conquer my mind with whispers, pornography and fantasy. When my mom would rage, and she raged often, I would slip away to a place in my head where I could shut out both my emotional pain and eventually my physical pain.
The next leg of the journey was a spiritual one. I wanted nothing to do with the God these crazy people in my house served. Besides, when he found out what I was, he would condemn me to hell anyway. The last leg of my journey was the physical disconnection with my family. I remember sleeping on the living room floor of my childhood home, because all of my belongings were packed. My mom came in to me to say goodbye, grasp at the last tattered threads of our disintegrating relationship and she began to weep. “You don’t have to leave,” she sobbed. “I don’t care if you are sick, or you’re dying or you are gay,” she pleaded, “You don’t have to leave.” I stared back at her, emotionally bankrupt for her, with staid, soulless eyes. I had waited years for this moment to finally severe the cord and move out in the world, unhindered by her mind numbingly, stifling, life altering “love”. It was the first time I had ever heard my mother acknowledge my homosexuality. I knew she knew. All mothers seem to “know”. At this point though, it was the one area of my life that she hadn’t pervaded and conquered and I was damn well not going to let her have the only piece of me that was truly my own. So I stood there motionless. I let her cry and wail and then slink back to her room. I am sure a piece of her heart died that night. I know that, because mine did, too. That night, standing in that living room I signed my life over to the enemy, because when I was six years old, the whispers of the enemy, drowned out the heartbeat of my God.
My journey into to homosexuality would take me further and further away from my family. I had to live two lives. They loved me, but they didn’t love the path that I was following. Homosexuality, kept me bound to one guy for a period of time as a source of my everything. My pursuit of all things gay, cheated me out of the social aspect of college. When I returned for our 10-year reunion, I didn’t know anyone, except a few close friends. The enemy convinced me that not only was my family against me, the world was too. I would need to fight and defend my homosexuality. Protect it at all costs. After all, I was “born that way”. On and on the lies and separation continued. My father never stopped praying. Never stopped entering the arena to fight the enemy for my life. Even as I sided with the enemy against him, time and time again.
When my life began to crash down around me, the phone calls from my father began. “You can always come home,” he’d say. I would always tell him no. Ultimately, I accepted my father’s offer. A 21-year contract with satan came to an end that day. God proved to me He is the God of restoration. God began to show himself as loving Father and unconditional lover. I look back now and regret fills my heart for those lost years, yet I am thankful for my struggle, because without it, I would not have known my Jesus. I would not have known the Holy Spirit moments that have saturated every year of my life for that last 14 years. I praise God that he rescued me, not from sin or really even from satan. God rescued me from myself. He pulled me out of the wreckage of my life, healed my wounds and set me along a new path.