Ten Things I’ve Learned About Gay People in Ten Years PART TWO

Rather than discounting the genuineness of same-sex relationships, we should be impressed that they have survived without the benefits of legal contract and the support of family, society and religious communities.  Get honest.  How many of us straight married people would have walked out on our spouses had it not been for a legal agreement, children and the positive tension placed on us by families and faith communities?  Lacking all of that benefit, gay couples stay together.  Get to know some gay couples and families; they are as partner- and family-focused as the rest of us.  True story.

4.  Every word translated as “homosexual” in the modern versions of the Bible is speaking of same sex behavior in an extreme circumstance.  I have consistently asked God, “Is the truth as I understand it, Your truth?”  I love the Word of God, the challenge to follow Jesus and the faithfulness of the Holy Spirit.  I know thousands of gay Christians but still needed to align my understanding of the Bible with what I saw in their lives.  It was another simple question I asked:

Why, God, did You create people that you would reject?

Theologically, I knew that was not possible; no one makes a choice to be gay, and all God creates is good.  Once again, the thinking I used to understand the five verses had to be flawed.

When I finally took several days to study this on my own in earnest, I got very angry, very angry about the lies I believed about gay people.  I had believed what I had been too lazy to investigate for myself.  You can start on my VERSES link, but nothing will substitute doing the Bible study for yourself.

I am quite strong in discussing these sections of Scripture, yet I encourage readers to go through the process I went through.  Believing what others told me caused me to consider gay people as “less than” in God’s eyes for three decades of my adulthood.  I am confident enough in God to let go of the process and let Him talk to His people when they earnestly ask and listen.  Until I met gay Christians and did the work myself, I was exactly like the silently judging majority of the church.  I read the verses used to investigate same-sex attractions as stand-alone verses out of context and with the English translations of words. investigate same-sex attractions as stand-alone verses out of context and with the English translations of words.

It is risky to lay down a belief and study it.  The far greater risk is casting aside people in our laziness.  For parents with gay children, please read “Dear Moms and Dads, A Letter to Christian Parents of Gay Youth” — you have even more at stake.  Make sure you go after the truth; your precious children are jewels and deserve your personal investigation of these verses.

Ten years of experience show that people rarely study the verses without prejudice until interaction with a gay, lesbian or bisexual person challenges their theology.  When I could not reconcile the lives I could see with the words I thought I understood, then I did the work.

5. The church is not offering a model of being gay and Christian and living a virtuous life before God.  Gay people exist, gay Christian kids exist (even gay preacher’s kids exist) and they are in your churches. In most churches, we give them two options: “stay and hide” or “get out.”

For gay youth, this is the message: “Sex is only appropriate inside marriage.  However, you gay kids, it is never appropriate for you.  God has called you to a life of celibacy, forever.”  Do you remember being a teenager or a twenty-something?  The sexual drive is strong.  Most churches do not give gay youth a “wait until” time and they take away all hope of normal relationship and family.  They effectively trapped this kid.  He cannot be gay, he cannot be holy, he’ll always be alone, he is broken.

The most common reactions will be either:

                  internalized shame with a reaction of rebellion or depression; or

                  he or she will walk away, never able to please you, and rebel against all the hopeless and impossible teachings on sexual morality.

For most faith communities, we do not offer a place of safety for gay Christians.  The affirming churches offer strong gay Christian role models and the balance of the churches offer up condemnation.  When kids find me, I point them to a list of welcoming churches and suggest they get back in community where they are loved and safe.  In lieu of a nearby church, there are online churches who will feed them spiritually.  I always point youth to The Gay Christian Network, an online community of over twenty thousand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christians and their allies.  I also try to find them gay Christian mentors on Facebook that I know and trust.  Many of us will do what it takes to keep these kids in a faith community where they feel loved, supported and hopeful.

6.  Asking gay people to deny their natural sexual orientation is destructive.  Recall, homosexual orientation is no more a “behavior” than is heterosexual attraction.  Both are orientations, innate attractions.  Reparative therapy (Exodus-type programs that offer results that take away “unwanted sexual attractions” or allude to a gay-to-straight conversion) treats homosexuality as if it were a “behavior” akin to other life choices like drug and alcohol usage, adultery, cheating and lying.

You would expect that the elimination of bad behaviors would result in life benefits.  However, if you force a gay person to “not be gay,” loneliness, depression, isolation and shame can result.

Some gay people do make a choice to live celibate lives.  This is called “Side B” for gay Christians; they come to a personal conviction that God is calling them to be celibate.  This is not the same as the imposition of celibacy by an outsider for acceptance before God.  Celibacy does not take away attraction; it only means a person is not engaging in sex.  A celibate straight person is not “no longer straight” simply because they are not being sexual.  Likewise, a celibate gay person is not “no longer gay” simply because they are not being sexual.

 The rejection or insistence on change is destructive.  Statistics on gay youth prove this.  Gay youth, unaccepted by family, are:

                  eight times more apt to attempt suicide than those who are accepted

                  six times more susceptible to depression than those who are accepted

                  three times more likely to get involved in drug and alcohol abuse than gay youth that are accepted

                  three time more likely to contract HIV/AIDS and STD”D than gay youth that are accepted?

If a person is indeed gay, then no amount of a wishin’ and a hopin’ and a prayin’ will make them straight.  Of course, you will hear of “success stories” of people who are “no longer gay”. I have hundreds of friends who tried to play the “I am not gay anymore” game. I know dozens of former leaders and founders of Exodus type programs and all say they do not know one person who was strictly gay and is now straight. I have never met one such person either.  I did register for an Exodus Conference and was uninvited. I was and am willing to be wrong and see the other side of the reparative therapy issue and meet some “success stories”.  Of course people can “live as heterosexuals”, they’ve been doing it for millennia. Some of those success stories are actually bisexual people.

7.  Bisexual people are attracted to both sexes in varying degrees.  It would be wrong to say bisexuals are equally attracted to both sexes.  The Kinsey Scale, for which there is no definitive “test,” classifies sexual orientation on a spectrum from zero (strictly heterosexual) to six (strictly homosexual).  Bisexuals might be mostly attracted to the opposite sex and somewhat attracted to the same sex and be a two or a three on the Kinsey Scale.  Conversely, bisexuals might be mostly attracted to the same sex and somewhat to the opposite sex making them maybe a four or five on the Kinsey Scale.

Perhaps you believe that people who identify as bisexual just “want to have sex with anything that moves.”  I actually hear that too often because it appears that way to us zeros, and even some sixes.  That is a patently wrong and hurtful assessment.  Simply, bisexuals are somewhere on the continuum of one to five on the Kinsey and they are about 5% of the population.  Bisexuals can be satisfied emotionally, relationally and sexually with either a man or a woman.  They are not hard-wired for only a man or only a woman.  Oh my, this is not at all comfortable for those of us who live in a construct of pink and blue.  Some of the “no longer gays” are indeed bisexual who have chosen to be in relationship with the opposite sex.

An illogical, fear-based statement I often hear is: “If we accept bisexuals then we have to redefine marriage and let them have two spouses.”  Nooooo.  Marriage is a contract between two people, not three people; two people. Two adult people.  Bisexuals would and currently do, marry only one person.

Online church services to “test out”:

Diversity Christian Fellowship International, Tulsa, OK

New Covenant Church of Atlanta, Atlanta, GE

Church of the Holy Spirit Song, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Covenant Community Church, Birmingham, AL