Be Not Deceived: The Sacred and Sexual Struggles of Gay and Ex-Gay Christian Men

Chapter 3: The Dilemmas of Christian Men Who Desire Men

One summer evening, after an Accept Bible study meeting, Chris and I stood in an apartment parking lot talking about childhood memories of the summer. At one point, he paused and then said, “You know, every once in a while it is still a little weird and scary to say the words ‘I am gay.’ I’m okay with it now, even glad, but still.” When I asked him why those words had been, and still could be, so difficult, he explained: I did not want to be gay. It certainly wasn’t the plan. I didn’t know a single gay person growing up. All I knew was that kids at school called other kids “faggots” if they seemed at all wimpy or different. It wasn’t a good thing to be. Mostly, I wanted a good relationship with God, to be a good Christian, and to lead a Christian life and have a wife and kids. I thought being gay would end all that, so I stayed in denial about my sexuality for a pretty long time and tried to push all those feelings away. Finally, I had to admit it; I had to say the words ‘I am gay.’ But I was also a Christian, and that is so important to me. They didn’t go together. It was like—great, now what do I do? Show me Lord. Chris’s memories are poignant and recall a litany of powerful emotions surrounding the recognition of his homosexuality: fear, anxiety, The Dilemmas of Christian Men Who Desire Men 3 39 40 “ B E N O T D E C E I V E D ” trepidation, confusion, and helplessness. That his faith, which was “so important” in his life, “didn’t go together” with the homosexuality he could no longer deny put Chris in an untenable situation, one in which he held two contradictory identities. This contradiction, once noted and felt, initiated an intense struggle to reconcile the mismatch between these identities. This struggle was shared by all the men in this study. Like Chris, they found the initial realization that they were gay and the resulting conflict between their Christian beliefs and sexuality to be incredibly difficult—cognitively and emotionally. These difficulties , as we will see, reveal the kind of dilemma the men faced and illustrate its gravity and complexity. Chris’s explanation of why it was so hard to name his sexuality (and to label himself) also reflects three common characteristics of the struggle that the men in this study endured to resolve the conflict between their faith and homosexuality. First, this struggle emerged from a process in which the men came to recognize that their homosexual desires were more than a passing phase and that they were gay. Second , all of the men initially had the sense that homosexuality was bad, so bad, in fact, that being gay would adversely impact their entire lives. This negative perception was rooted in the stigma imposed by a heterosexist dominant culture and by conservative Christian prohibitions against homosexuality. Finally, each man wanted, first and foremost , to be a good Christian and echoed this gay Christian’s sentiment: “I am a Christian first. Everything else I am or do must be guided by that fact.” Yet, each found sexual desire an incredibly powerful impulse , one not easily ignored or diminished. As a result, they felt they could not control the sexual desires that collided with their Christian beliefs, making being a good Christian a seemingly impossible task. The struggle to accomplish this task began well before the men joined either Accept or Expell. In some cases, they wrestled with their sexuality for only a year or two before they found a group. For others , the struggle was already decades old. Regardless of differences in duration of the struggle, each man’s struggle began through a gradual realization of his homosexuality, which sparked fear, anxiety, and shame. This realization led each man to the same dilemma: How can I possibly be a good Christian when I desire to have sex with men? To define this dilemma clearly and to understand why it was so important to the men, we must examine its cultural and religious underpinnings as well as how it emerged in the men’s lives. This chapter D I L E M M A S O F C H R I S T I A N M...