Until very recently I never bothered to look into all the gay ministries out there. I’d never heard anything good about any of them and I suppose I’d always just considered them all more or less vile and despicable. Before I gave my life to Christ I don’t mind saying I hated and despised all of them. I largely assumed they were the product of those wacky Christian fundies out there who were all so obsessed with a puritanical stifling of their own sexuality that they felt compelled to control everyone else’s as well. It didn’t surprise me one bit that whole ministries would spring up designed to do nothing more than prey on people’s insecurities and lure the confused into their clutches to be cruelly tortured so that the evil fundies could alleviate their own self-loathing.

Naturally when I became a Christian myself it never even occurred to me to seek out any of these ministries for help or guidance. I still assumed them to be abominations at worst and dangerously misguided at best. I knew some strong, faithful and fairly wise Christians already and knew enough about basic Christian beliefs that I really didn’t feel compelled to seek out anything like that anyway. I already knew that the bible condemns any sex outside of marriage, though I’d never read that personally. I’d been told this several times by the Christians I knew before. When it came time it only took a couple of hours of research for myself to confirm that pretty solidly. So it seemed logical to me that my sexuality was suddenly a non-issue. I should no more fornicate with a woman than with a man so what the heck difference did that really make in the end? Not a bit of difference. So I didn’t fornicate any more. Problem solved. No big deal.

Well, actually…it was a big deal but I was at least wise enough to realize that it shouldn’t be. While I was blessed enough that my rebirth as a Christian brought with it a rather profound change in my sexuality I was still somewhat hypersexual and still attracted to women. I simply, suddenly lacked the parching thirst I never even realized until then that I’d had. I’ve since learned that even that is actually rare among homosexuals who experience being saved the way I did (although to be honest, I think that’s generally more of a gay male thing). In fact, it seems there is a wide variety of ways people experience it in the first place. Some don’t even have anything like a single seminal transformative event and spend years of their lives slowly changing spiritually instead. Folks with my bible-belt background tend to expect a sharper, more specific conversion. The whole face down in a hotel bathroom kind of thing or being called down the aisle at church service.

But, no. Let me be bold and come right out and say that I rather strongly doubt those that claim to be Christians but didn’t experience such a thing. I know plenty of atheists and agnostics who claim to have been Christians all their lives until one day for one reason or another they just lost their faith. I don’t know of any of them who claim to have had a conversion experience, though. I tend to assume any “Christian” who hasn’t experienced this is a church-club Christian. Not saved, not redeemed, not bought by Christ. Just a member of the church club. The “depart from me, I never knew you” kind of “Christian”.

But back on topic. Once I accepted Christ and experienced that spiritual overhaul I was still sexually unhealthy and still attracted to women. The thing that surprised me was that the complete and sudden loss of my craving for this perversity seemed to have had a dramatic effect on the actual attraction itself. While I still found women sexually attractive, I didn’t crave the perversity of it the way I had in the past. Instead, I disliked this attraction of mine. It bugged me.

The perfect example of what I’m talking about here is one of my new favorite movies. “Prey for Rock and Roll“.

Love that movie. Love it! The star? Gina Gershon. Love Gina Gershon (well, as an actress, not so much as a person). The thing is though that I discovered Gina Gershon first in “Bound” (nope, not even gonna link to it, find it yourself), another movie she starred in and the one that made her a fave for lesbos everywhere. Even though she plays a presumably straight rock and roller in “Prey for Rock and Roll” I’m sitting there watching that movie and I keep getting distracted thinking about Corky from “Bound”. Consequently Gina’s looking pretty hot to me and that just bugs me. I totally identify with Jacki (Gina Gershon) in that movie and that’s the reason I love it soooo much! The character “Animal” really reminds me of my guy, too. So I really get a serious thrill over the scene in the tattoo shop when the sparks first start flying there. Thinking about the infamous kiss with Corky in “Bound” turns me on to Jacki though and that just irritates the heck out of me. Really ruins the ride. In the end I can’t help watching “Prey for Rock and Roll” and wishing someone else played the lead role there. But who the heck could? I gotta admit, I don’t think anyone else could pull it off. But, dammit, I want to watch “Prey for Rock and Roll” and identify with the main character not want the main character. You get what I’m saying here?

In the end though that’s about as much of a bother my sexuality ever was for me for the first year or two after I became a Christian. Which really kind of makes me feel bad for complaining. How many Christians who struggle with homosexuality would kill for that to be the extent of their difficulties? I’m really such an ungrateful little brat sometimes.

Which brings me around in my typical round-about way to the point of all this. For the longest time I despised gay ministries. Even after I became a Christian I despised them. I never even considered seeking such a ministry out for guidance. Instead I did what seemed obvious to me and simply rejected fornication itself, like any new Christian with a lick of sense. I spent a year or so with no romantic interest in my life and, frankly, no interest in romance in my life. Now, sure I would have loved to be in love and all that but it just wasn’t that big a deal. I had plenty of friends and many of them were intimate friends. My loneliness was thus tempered and being a new Christian I was still quite enamored with God Himself, choosing that particular personal relationship over any other. Even when I did find myself pining for a romantic partner of some kind I didn’t find that particularly difficult to deal with. I simply reminded myself that I was essentially in no different a situation than if I’d ended such a relationship a month or even a week before. As I’ve said elsewhere, celibacy is the default state of being anyway, right? Pining for a romantic relationship is an emotional trap that you set for yourself and willfully walk right into. I considered the whole thing basically foolish.

The thing is…once I’d lived that way for a good while and learned how to be celibate naturally and comfortably (rather than forcing it on myself as some rigid self-imposed limitation like the very word “celibate” seems to imply) that’s when things changed for me, right out of the blue. I never approached celibacy like some nun who felt compelled to spend the rest of her days in knee-length black robes, struggling with desire. I simply shrugged it off. I lived my life and simply gave my flesh an irritated frown (and sometimes a little kick to the shin) whenever it whined about not getting any. Sure it was irritating and sometimes frustrating but I never let it convince me it was the all-important end-all be-all of existence, as it seems to be to so many people these days.

I never prayed to God to remove homosexual lust from me. What a ridiculous thing to pray for! I prayed instead that He help me keep a healthy perspective about sex itself. Sex isn’t necessary to survival. You don’t need it. It isn’t required. Yes, believe it or not you can even go all day without it.

So months down the road when I did finally take a look at all the controversy surrounding these ministries, what did I see? Every single time I saw a bunch of homos bitching and whining about looking for a cure to homosexuality in Christ and being abused by those awful homo-hating Xian fundies. Always the homo in question defined “cure” as replacing their homosexual lust with heterosexual lust. Always they wanted to change fornicating homosexually with fornicating heterosexually.

You idiots. You bunch of total idiots. And you’re surprised that this didn’t work out?! So what do we find when these morons are allowed to wrap up their snarky little bitch sessions? Why, we find that they naturally found another church. One that catered to homos. And how, in that church, they were taught that God made them that way and being a homosexual Christian was just hunky dory. Oh and of course the minor fact that they had a homosexual lover they were fornicating with regularly now and just how happy they were with that.

Now back up and take a second look at that. A church in which they’re taught fornicating is fine and dandy. Once you get that simple observation firmly ingrained in your brain then add in the fact that the fornication we’re talking about is homosexual in nature. Do you see now what we’re talking about? Having finally taken a look and seeing all this for myself the whole problem with these ministries seemed glaringly obvious to me. Those homos don’t want to be cured of their sexual immorality, just their homosexuality! And they don’t even see any intrinsic link between the two! They are incapable of perceiving that you cannot even begin to touch your homosexuality until you first deal with your sexuality!

In my own life the answer I suppose seems so obvious. 20/20 hindsight, I guess. I lived a celibate life and I let it be natural. And it really is natural, after all. It is fornication that is unnatural! I was naturally celibate and I allowed my lust to be the aberration, not the other way around. Homosexuality hardly even entered into it. It was clear to me that the gay ministries then were all approaching the whole matter from a seriously screwy direction. They were not only trying to teach people to control and suppress sexuality, rather than simply let go of it. No, even dumber than that they were trying to teach homosexuals to do this. That all involved in such idiocy would fail in a stunningly spectacular fashion didn’t surprise me in the least.

Now let’s flash forward a good bit so I can get to the my real point. Yes, there’s lots of interesting details I’m remiss in not laying out here but I really want to get to my main focal point of fury. Here we are today and I’m married. Of course I suppose I must specify that I’m married to a man, since there seems to be so much confusion about what the word “marriage” means anymore. Apparently one can marry a cucumber these days and get it legally and socially recognized as a marriage. But no, here in reality-land a marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman.

Having come to this point in my life I find that I have all these issues that I have no one to talk about with. I have God of course and we do indeed discuss these things often and at length. But we all desire and do most certainly benefit from fellowship with other human beings as well. I find I really, really want another woman to talk to who’s suffered the things I’ve suffered and deals with the same problems that I deal with. I tried a Christian incest survivors forum for a while but I eventually had to give up and accept that I just didn’t belong there. I tried to hang in there long enough to become eligible for the restricted forums where I hoped I would find people I could identify with and discuss some very specific issues with. I simply couldn’t hack it, though. I won’t say why because that would require characterizing that forum in an unfair way. I’m very thankful the forums exists and I know that it helps those who visit it but it honestly got quite severely on my nerves.

Since then I’ve tried a couple of times to surf the net looking for something similar. It just doesn’t seem to be out there. I suspect in fact that if it does exist then it’s so deeply buried under the morass of pro-gay crap out on the internet that no selection of search criteria will ever reveal it, no matter how many “I’m a happily fornicating gay Christian!” sites I might wade through looking.

But it isn’t just pro-gay crap burying it, though. I noticed a few gay ministries here in there in the mess as well. It didn’t take long for my frustration at not finding what I was looking for to give way to curiosity. I finally realized that my certainty that gay ministries were all abominable was based almost exclusively on secular media and the testimonies of “ex-ex-gays”. It finally occurred to me to actually look at the ministries themselves and see what they had say.

Now I’m pissed off. Really, truly and completely pissed off. I’ve spent years firmly convinced all these gay ministries are all homo-hating pits of hellish sadistic torture. And yet when I finally take a look at Exodus International I find they’ve been saying for some time exactly what I’ve been saying for the last fifteen minutes.

And who convinced me that they were all homo-hating sadists? So much so that it never even occurred to me to listen to what these ministries had to say? The God damned (yeah, I said it!) homos and the homo-loving media. BEGOTTEN OF DOGS, the whole lot of you! How the heck it ever entered my mind that these perverts and pervert-loving freaks would ever DARE present anything remotely approaching an objective view of such ministries boggles me. What a fool I’ve been!

I thank God that He was there for me, loving me and teaching me the simple truth. Were I at the mercy of the world I’d be fornicating with my girlfriend right now in the pews of some pseudo-Christian church in California, wondering why I’m still so utterly miserable when I have everything the world says I should have.