God And The Gay Folk
Copyright 2007 Clayton Kinnelon Greiman
"Truth varies from person to person; the beauty of divinity is that it can bear many faces. We all see the world through different eyes, yet each eye, each thought, bears its own truth.”-Joseph Wayne Groah
Having read my brief bio and noting my commitment to celibacy, an individual contacted me and suggested that I join an ex-gay ministry. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, an ex-gay congregation is comprised of those who feel God has cured (or is in the process of curing) their homosexual longings. These individuals view homosexuality as something unnatural in the eyes of God, and that, without enough prayer, God will transfigure any penitent homosexual into a heterosexual.
What follows is my reply to the invitation to become an ex-gay.
I was raised in a Pentecostal Holiness church, wherein wearing short sleeves was considered a sin punishable by damnation. I grew up reading scripture and watching people ‘possessed’ by the Holy Ghost speak in tongues. When I came of age, I was told to go to the altar, to pray for forgiveness, and to invite the Holy Ghost to come into my soul.
I went and I wept…over and over, night after night…pleading for the Lord to come into my heart, but my prayers went unanswered.
In the days that
followed, I went
to school, where the young members of the congregation who had been 'saved' would physically assault me because they could tell I was gay before I
even knew what being gay meant. Their
rationalization was that all homosexuals were abominations before God, so they
were acting as good Christians in beating me. Even
at home, my Pentecostal grandmother would physically assault me for no other
reason than I was taking breath.
It seemed the only
people who could come to know God’s grace were violent, hate-filled
individuals who thrived on excluding anyone with ideas different from their own.
Truthfully, if that’s what it took to be saved, then I wanted no part
of it. I still hold to that creed to this hour.
Admittedly, it took a
while to escape my brainwashing by the ‘Chosen of God’; I didn’t
lose my virginity or truly embrace my homosexuality until I was 19.
(Though I had been attracted to men, perhaps not sexually, but
aesthetically, from about the age of five).
When I did accept my homosexuality, I abandoned God. I had been taught that God hated homosexuals, so why bother trying to know Him
if He hated me from the outset? Consequently,
I became a self-avowed atheist who baptized himself the ‘slut of
Charlottesville’ and went on a wild tear through any man who’d cast me
a second glance. I was trying to fill a
void hollowed out by an absence of God and self-love.
Through it all, I was fighting Dissociative Identity Disorder (split
personalities in layman’s terms), which had developed as a result of the abuse I had
suffered as a young adult. I had
compartmentalized everything: rage,
religion, sexuality, goodness…until the only way my mind could process those
concepts was by developing a different personality for each of them.
I was losing time, ‘waking up’ to find that relationships had
been destroyed, and losing jobs as a result of near-violent behavioral displays of which I held no memory.
This is what I refer to as “The Darkness” in my writings; there was something, theologians may refer to it as demonic possession, which had burrowed itself into my soul and forged a symbiotic relationship with my true self. I never sought help because I was a thin, blonde, taciturn, effeminate gay male who had been abused his entire life…and I was finally a force to be feared. Over time, I ceased trying to fight my illness; when I did try to ‘wake up’ later in the disorder, I could actually hear 'The Darkness' talking to me, telling me that I wasn’t strong enough for the world, and that it would protect me from anyone who would ever do me harm.
The only stipulation was that
I let it become the dominant personality, to which I agreed, since I had
no feeling of self-worth.
Then, at the age of twenty-six, I met an eighteen year old with whom I fell in love. I wanted to reclaim my life and spend it with him, but when I tried to retake control, ‘The Darkness’ manifested itself as never before; I thought I was becoming schizophrenic, because it was a constant force in my mind, belittling and threatening me. Yet, I refused to seek professional help because I thought I was beyond help and that I’d be institutionalized for the rest of my existence.
However, I knew I couldn't continue to place that young man in danger; I tried to distance myself from him several times, but he refused to give up on me. It would have been better for us both had he done so.
At the time, he was an
undiagnosed manic-depressive; his moods would shift uncontrollably, and 'The Darkness' would
go into ‘threat’ mode, eclipse my true self, and tear into him.
During one such instance near the end of our relationship, it got loose
and told the young man that if he really loved me, he would kill himself to
prove it. He was so distraught by
the collective hell through which that thing had put him that he went out, found
a man who showed him some measure of kindness, slept with that man, and
contracted HIV from the encounter.
Split
personality, demonic possession, whatever it could be named, the thing that had driven the
young man to self-destruction had been born of me. Consequently when I learned of what had occurred, my first impulse was to kill
myself…life for a life…eye for an eye…it seemed just…and it was what
‘The Darkness’ was commanding of me. Then,
I thought of how that young man would be alive and suffering a protracted
illness when I would have shot myself and been gone in an instant.
I decided I would punish myself instead by never again allowing anyone near me; I would deny myself the love of another human
being and be alone until my last breath.
With my fate decided, there was still the matter of the thing inside of me. I got down on my knees, and I asked God (to whom I hadn’t prayed in years) to help me be rid of 'The Darkness' and to forgive my sins. The latter request, for the sum of my transgressions, was impossible to imagine. I had been taught that God only forgave conditionally, if one adhered to a strict code of life. Anyone else who made the attempt wasn’t really sincere in their devotion to God and would be ignored.
When I began to
pray, I heard the voices of those Pentecostal Christians from my childhood
echoing that sentiment, but
this was more of ‘The Darkness’ trying to take my soul. The truth is
that God’s ability to forgive is infinite.
It is forgiving one’s self and having faith in God’s mercy that is
the real test of faith.
My struggle to cure myself wasn't an easy one ; I continued to battle with ‘The Darkness’ even after I began to pray, and I almost lost faith that I could be redeemed. In hindsight, I’m glad the struggle was a difficult one, because the more ‘The Darkness’ struggled, the more I prayed, and the closer I came to God.
The difference in my knowing God as an adult and knowing God as a pre-teen was that I no longer had people surrounding me who said I had to transform myself to know Him. I came to understand that there wasn’t a litmus test when it came to salvation; just because I couldn’t speak in tongues or wasn’t heterosexual didn’t mean God was absent from my soul.
God had always been there, waiting to accept me for everything that I was, homosexuality not excluded.
My coming to know God wasn’t filled with special effects, angels, or reciting a language no one could understand; I knew God had come into my heart through the immense feeling of peace that had taken hold of my soul. I would walk down the street smiling simply for reason that I was alive. I felt myself wanting to reach out and touch the leaves of trees just to feel God’s presence in them. I was like a child in the world, looking at everything with a wonder and sense of awe. I felt whole, as though I had been made complete. An overwhelming feeling of self-love had washed over me, and I knew it was the love of God cleansing all the insecurities and false needs from my heart.
As for that young man whose life had been so adversely impacted by my struggle
for my soul, I came to the understanding that I was not responsible for his
contracting HIV. The decisions he made in the aftermath of our
relationship were his own, and the individual responsible for his
illness was the man with whom he had unprotected sexual intercourse. To stay in
the past and to continue grieving for what had been lost would be to lose my
soul in a quagmire of
guilt.
Yet,
even after I
reached this conclusion, I kept to myself, because I
was afraid I really didn’t have a hold on what was inside of me.
I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, and it seemed a just punishment that
I should be alone for the rest of my life.
Then, I remembered that God had forgiven me, and it was long past time
that I forgave myself. So, I
decided I would find someone to love. I started dating, and the men I dated were beautiful;
I
thought to myself how easy it would be to fall in love and to be with them
until my last breath. Yet, I was
always prevented because they wanted open relationships (meaning they wanted to have sex with other people) or they had vices (such as drinking heavily, using
drugs, or swearing with every other breath)…and after about four or five of
these encounters, I said ‘no more’.
I asked myself what I was lacking in life and found the answer was precious little. I had love for myself and love from God; for what more could any man wish?
The last time I
had a sexual encounter with a man was October 28, 2005. I
never stopped being gay; I just stopped needing another gay
male to love me. I retained my appreciation of the sculpted male form, but I
had come to see that the form was an illusion.
What mattered was the soul of the man, and I came to understand that only
if the soul was pure should I let a man into my existence.
I didn’t become celibate because I stopped being gay; I became celibate
because my standards for the morality of my partner became so high that no one
could meet them. All that
being said, if I found a man who was noble and kind to whom I had a physical
attraction, then I would allow him into
my life, and I know God would bless our
union as he would any heterosexual pairing.
Jumping back a few paragraphs, I bought up the whole Dissociative Identity Disorder aspect of my past because the condition occurred because I couldn’t resolve warring aspects of my personality. You’re undergoing a similar struggle, because one side of you is telling you’re gay, and another side (more or less the outside world) is telling you can’t be gay and be a true Christian…that in order for you to be accepted in the eyes of God, that you need to have a woman at your side.
Do you see that whenever man argues about the
salvation of a soul that
sex always has to be involved? You’re
not being told to love yourself and to be true to God; you’re being ordered to be
untrue to yourself, to go out and bed a woman, and through coital intercourse, the
Kingdom of Heaven will be yours. Consequently,
you’re subjugating your gay longings and cutting off the parts of your
soul, those not to God’s distaste, but to man’s.
Your congregation, like so many others, has taken on the credo of frat houses, where you
have to prove yourself one of 'the boys' before you can join the club…and God
never intended initiation into Heaven to become a test of who can provide the
best clitoral stimulation.
How can I be so sure that God approves of
homosexuality?
Because the truth of my gay soul tells me so.
It cries out that it is a creation of God and that it is a thing of
beauty, purity, and grace. Homosexuality
occurs within every species on our planet; it’s an integral part of God’s design for
the universe. It’s only wrong to
be gay when you’re a pig about being gay (though the same rule applies to
heterosexual males). There’s a
huge difference in being monogamously gay and going out and blowing five men on
a Saturday night. If you act like a
pig, regardless of your sexual orientation, then you are a pig, and a sinner in God’s eyes; however, if you find ONE man and you love him with
all your might and he loves you in return, then that Love is a blessing unto The
Lord. God loves Love, because God
is Love. A creation of Love in this
world of darkness is a blessing, no matter the sexual orientation of the
individuals creating
it.
I wish I lived near you, because I would come over, take you in my arms, I would tell you how beautiful you are, and relate how much God loves you for EVERYTHING that you are…that you don’t have to take a chainsaw to your soul and cut out all the parts of yourself the members of your congregation are saying are unnatural.
The ex-gay congregation with which you are affiliated is telling you that once
you’re cured of your homosexuality that you will become a heterosexual.
It’s a lie, and you’ll be living a lie.
You’ll always have gay longings, because God
crafted them into your nature, and you can’t run from God.
You’re being promised a ‘Road to Damascus’ moment, and the hand of
man cannot craft such a transformation.
You state that the process of being cured of your homosexual longings has
already begun, and that heterosexual yearnings are becoming more prevalent. What
I believe has occurred instead is that with the cauterization of one portion of your psyche, another
is starting to
form in its absence. Because you
are starving yourself of your gay identity, a divergent sexuality is arising to
fill the void.
I don’t mean to use such a disturbing example, as it will in all
probability destroy my credibility in your eyes, but priests
turn to molesting children because they’re made to live celibate existences;
they are forced to subjugate a part of themselves, and an unnatural limb, pedophilia, rises in
its stead.
On top of this body of evidence, you’re forgetting the inherent truth that a majority of men, though they will never admit it, have thought of having, or have actually had, a homosexual experience. Think back on your eleven years of living the lifestyle. How many men did you send back home to their girlfriends or wives and children? If we've shared similar sexual experiences, then you have to admit you've had quite a few such encounters. There’s only a few degrees of separation between straight and gay males in the arena of lust, and no lust is more pure than any other.
If you believe I’m leading
you down a path of damnation, then turn from my words and continue with your
congregation’s recommendations. Just
know that my sole objective is to get you to reconcile the difference
between being gay and living the lifestyle.
Certainly, if you go out and whore yourself, then you’re in danger of
losing your soul; however, if you’re true to yourself, and if you find one
person who will love you, or just remain alone and love yourself for the
entirety of your being, then you’re being true to yourself and to God.
In closing, when confronted with our differing viewpoints on homosexuality and God, you wrote, “The god in which you believe cannot be the God in which I believe.” Such sentiments are the hallmark of organized religions who divide mankind and defame the name of God. There are many paths to God for every man, woman, and child on this planet; they exist through Allah, Buddha, Christ, and a myriad of other deities. Just because you step through the doors of a church and become a member of a congregation doesn’t mean you become sole guarantor of God’s salvation. My belief is that my god is the God of the Bible; he is the God of the Koran; he is the God of the Buddhists; each is interchangeable with the others. It is how we interpret our God and allow that interpretation to mold our souls that determines our salvation.
I
hold to the creed that so long as an individual
shows devotion to their god and lives a life of
kindness, then that individual will be granted peace in the
afterlife. If
every man, woman, and child woke up tomorrow with no knowledge of their religion, and each was instead imparted with the desire to be the
embodiment of kindness, this world would be a far better place for the absence of its
gods. It is religion and our gods that divide us, and through that
division, we have forgotten that God, above all else, is Love, and if we are Love, then we will be blessed
in the eyes of God...no
matter to which god our prayers are directed...or whom we lie down beside at
night.
I
hope this letter helps you on your journey.
Sincerely,
Clayton
Kinnelon Greiman