Author’s Note: I am in the middle of sharing a series of essays written for a memoir class I’m taking. Each is sharing different vignettes of my life working for megachurches, in gay conversion therapy, and coming out. This week’s essay is about the first time I saw the light.
Being the good church kid I was, I had recited hundreds, if not thousands, of prayers, but I can honestly say one prayer changed my life.
My eyes were closed tight, and my hands were folded. My arms rested on my knees, and my head was bowed down. My right leg was shaking due to copious amounts of iced coffee and my usual dose of anxiety. My breaths were deep, and my exhales were shallow. My mouth was dry from having too many cocktails the night before, and my head felt heavy, pressed against my hands. My heart was racing, and I bit my lower lip as if I was unconsciously trying to stop myself from saying the words that were beginning to form.
With one final deep breath, which I was convinced could be my last, I exhaled and quietly whispered the words I knew would mean the end of my life as I knew it:
"Thank you, God...
for...
making...
me...
... gay."
I stopped breathing momentarily, waiting for a lightning bolt to come down from Heaven. There were no bright flashes of light or loud claps of thunder, so I took a few more breaths, sat up, and slowly opened my eyes. I was fully expecting to find myself somewhere in the afterlife outside the pearly gates or already drowning in a lake of fire with the souls of the condemned, but I wasn't. I was at a makeshift church service in a dingy hotel ballroom in downtown Nashville. On second thought, that could be Hell or close to it, depending on how you feel about cheap hotels, religion, or the South.
As my eyes readjusted to the fluorescent lighting and I returned to reality, a trickle of tears turned into a flood, like a damn had broken open inside my soul. Looking around the room, I felt like the world I had known was collapsing all around me, yet I somehow felt safe and relieved God didn't strike me dead. I couldn't believe the words that had just come out of my mouth--it was one of the most honest confessions I'd ever made.
There was a crowd of a few hundred other people participating in the church service, which was unlike any I had ever experienced. There were musicians, singers, and a choir onstage singing familiar songs that, in this context, took on new meaning. People began forming a line in the center of the room to receive communion, and I sat paralyzed with fear.
"This may be the first time some of you have received the sacrament of communion in a long time," the speaker said as the musicians played Amazing Grace softly in the background. "But know that this table is open to anyone and everyone, regardless of what you may have been told. You are beloved children of God. And you are welcome to come just as you are."
***
All of us in the room were the product of Evangelical Christianity in the late 1990s and early 2000s. When many of us were in our formative teenage years, toxic beliefs about marriage, sex, gender roles, and sexuality, commonly referred to as "purity culture," were spewed from the pulpits of our churches. The Religious Right was waging a full-scale war in the name of God to defend traditional Christian values. We, being queer but afraid to admit it to others, let alone ourselves, were caught in the crossfire. We were told that good Christian teenagers needed to "kiss dating goodbye" and save sex until after marriage to keep ourselves pure and holy. Neither was a challenge to us because we silently battled with ourselves and our sexuality. We wished our carnal desires were for the opposite sex, not our own. We loved God and learned to hate ourselves, feeling split between faith that meant so much to us and having feelings we couldn't control no matter how hard we tried. For whatever reason, we hadn't given up on God, even if we felt He had given up on us.
Our fear of God and what coming out would mean kept us silent and in the closet. We sat quietly and observed how our families, friends, and churches reacted to things like the AIDS crisis, Matthew Shepherd's death, "Don't ask, don't tell," and Ellen coming out on her prime-time tv show. We internalized their judgment of these events as a harbinger of things to come if we dared to embrace our sinful desires. That's how we learned to label ourselves as being broken, Sodomites, an abomination, or worse. We knew God hated fags, so that meant He must hate us.
We didn't see embracing a queer identity as an option. Many people, like me, went to drastic lengths by undergoing conversion therapy. We hoped we could be cured of the fatal disease plaguing our souls with the help of Divine Intervention.
I made a deal with God when I was 16 and said I'd spend my life serving him if he would change my sexual orientation. Oddly, even though I already knew I was gay and how the church felt about people like me, it was the safest place I could hide because my home and family were a bit complicated. My church community was the only real family I felt like I had, and I was willing to do anything to keep the relationship intact.
I kept my part of the bargain, skipped college, and began working behind the scenes of some of the largest Evangelical Christian megachurches in the world when I was 19. These are the kinds of churches you see on television when flipping through the cable channels late at night. The churches celebrities go to where the pastors dress in designer clothes and have millions of followers on social media. The ones you read about in the New York Post because those same pastors had adulterous affairs. I was in a prison of my own making, suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. Not only was I in conversion therapy, but I was also working for churches and people that would fire me if I was gay.
For nearly a decade, I lived my life in two halves. The part of me that tried to not be gay and the part of me that felt like I was becoming gayer by the minute. As much as I prayed and tried to do everything I was told to do in conversion therapy, nothing changed, and I wondered if something was wrong with me or the program. The vicious cycle kept me in the grip of shame, self-hatred, and hopelessness.
After eight years in conversion therapy, I could count the number of people I knew sticking with it on a single hand. Many had rightfully abandoned their faith in God and came out loud and proud. Some came out, but the shame of it led them to addiction, or other self-destructive behaviors we were warned would happen if we succumbed to our sinfulness. And others had gone to "the dark side," as we referred to it in my conversion therapy group, meaning they said they were now gay AND Christian, finding a way to somehow reconcile their faith and sexuality. I thought that idea was heresy until I found myself in Nashville at the Gay Christian Network Conference, the eighth gathering of its kind, in January 2010.
I was tip-toeing over to the dark side.
***
I joined the communion line and was struck by another wave of emotion, realizing I was in the company of people just like me. We were outcasts and outsiders, saints and sinners. We were desperate to bring two very conflicting parts of our lives together in some way to feel whole, even though we'd been told we were broken all our lives.
When I reached the front of the line, a man in his late 50s wearing a cleric's collar quickly glanced at my name tag, locked his tender eyes with mine, and said, "This is the body of Christ, broken for you, Tim." I reached out my trembling hands as he dropped a round styrofoam-like communion wafer in my hand. Stepping to the side, I submerged the wafer into a bronze chalice held by a woman wearing a rainbow stole. In a compassionate but firm voice, she said, "This is the blood of Christ, shed for you, Tim."
Walking back to my seat, the words my pastor always used to say with fiery urgency rang like a warning in my ears, "Don't take communion if your life isn't right with God. If you take it in an unworthy manner, you will be guilty of sinning against God and the blood of the Lord and drink damnation on yourself. Don't blaspheme the Holy Spirit!"
I clutched the communion wafer between my thumb and index finger, unsure of what to do. I hadn't taken communion in at least eight years out of fear that I would be taking it unworthily. But as I sat there and processed everything I'd heard that weekend, I started to feel like maybe the thing that was broken wasn't me. What was broken was the idea that I was broken in the first place. Perhaps God's lack of an answer to my prayer to change me was His way of telling me there was nothing that needed to be changed in the first place. Maybe I was worthy after all.
Since I'd survived praying the most dangerous prayer I've ever prayed moments earlier, I figured I'd tempt fate one more time with one more blasphemous act. If I was going to sin, I might as well sin boldly.
Holding the wafer to my lips, I said, "thanks be to God."
I made the sign of the cross as the wafer dissolved in my mouth, and I tasted the syrupy grape juice. Even though I'm not Catholic, it seemed wise to cover all of my bases, just in case.
Everything in my life was about to change. What I knew I needed to do when I got home would cost me my career, community, family, friends, and life as I had known it. But the truth is, I knew I'd rather stop living than keep living the life I had been living. At this moment, I was genuinely being born again...or born a gay.
I got up from my chair feeling lighter than I had in more than a decade and joined the chorus singing, "I once, was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see."
Thank you for your story. You probably don’t remember me, but we were in Kem Myers first communications coaching group. I have been following your journey and I believe you are very brave, and I thank you, as the mom of a gay child brought up in the “church”, that you are telling your story and breaking down boundaries.