I always thought I was born gay. Today, I’m a happily married dad.
I grew up believing myself to
have been born gay having always, and only, had the most powerful,
all-consuming, erotic attraction towards my own sex.
Teenage years were hell. I often
thought of suicide, occasionally self-harmed and had a growing problem with
alcohol. I lived in a rural mining community in the north of England believing
I would never be accepted among my own as a gay man, particularly as I watched
a male cousin some ten years older than me – now deceased from a drug overdose
– struggle to find his place as a gay man in the late 70s and early 80s among a
society dominated by working men’s clubs.
In floods of tears I came out to
my parents when 17 years old. Dad and Mum were amazing. They said they had
known I was gay and affirmed their unconditional love for me. My mates in high
school also told me they had known I was gay and not only honoured me for
coming out but affirmed me in what they too believed to be my true sexual
orientation. My deepest fears rapidly subsided. I felt a freedom like I had
never experienced before.
At 18, I moved to the all-consuming
metropolis of London and fully embraced my gay identity. I wholeheartedly
served the gay community and actively preached its messages of diversity and
inclusion, challenging every “intolerant, homophobic and bigoted” individual
and institution that dared to suggest that being gay was somehow a choice, or
even wrong. I have since come to see that our fight was not merely to have the
concept of abnormal accepted but was rather to make normal taboo and to place
it under ideological suspicion.
I was raised in a Christian
family and always had a niggling desire to know more about God. I regularly
went along to the monthly London meetings of the Lesbian and Gay Christian
Movement and learnt a lot about safe sex, but little about God. I led a very
promiscuous lifestyle, eventually settling down with a long-term boyfriend. We
discussed travelling abroad to find a place to get married or at least to
celebrate a civil union.
It was while I was in this
long-term relationship that I was invited one evening to attend a series of
weekly gatherings called Life in the Spirit Seminars attended by some of my
fellow university students. I came to a place where I made the decision to
enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ. There were no dramatic changes
overnight to my life but my long-term boyfriend noticed that I was becoming
calmer and less self-focused. He decided to come along to the weekly
gatherings, gave his life to Christ and was profoundly touched by the person of
the Holy Spirit. Almost overnight we were being upheld as the archetypal gay
Christian couple.
As I developed a spiritual life,
daily reflecting a little more deeply on my life, within months I came to
realize that I had issues which affected my relationships with others, and
especially with my boyfriend. I hadn’t seen them before. They had always been
there and yet unbeknown to me I had been living under layers of denial which
the Holy Spirit was now beginning to reveal to me.
I came face-to-face with my
deep-rooted fear of rejection. I had commitment issues, and could easily be
riddled with anxiety. I had used others for my own pleasure, and allowed them
to do the same to me. Although I felt accepted by those around me, I realized
that I had an innate fear of men – this was the real homophobia
-- an intrinsic fear of, and a chasm between me and the normal heterosexual
male -- and not the false homophobia the gay community projects onto mainstream
society.
I came to a place where I knew
that I needed to terminate my relationship with my long-term partner, having
recognized that we were both trying to satisfy the mystery of manhood using
each other when neither of us really possessed it.
I embarked upon an incredible
journey of forgiveness, having many people from my past, and especially men,
that I needed to forgive. The therapy and prayer sessions I now regularly
engaged in never focused solely on my being sexually attracted to men, but I
was encouraged to look every aspect of my present and past in the eye. This
included the painful process of accepting that I had been consistently sexually
abused by a number of men as a child over a three-year period.
Much of my spiritual journey
became concerned with recognizing where, during my infancy and childhood, my
little soul had chosen to build walls within myself against significant others
in my life, especially against my parents, siblings and other prominent people
from my past.
I eventually came to realize that
as a boy I had failed to interact with other men on any significantly
integrated emotional, physical and intellectual level. I realized that I
had been rejected by men even as a small boy; that I had made an inner vow as a
child never to deeply trust men again; and that I had lived out this decision
throughout my formative years.
Only later did I see that other
males had in fact tried to reach out to me at different stages during my
childhood, but that I had always responded out of my perceived hurt and so
became more distanced from other guys until they eventually gave up trying to
interact with me. This included to some degree my father and two older
brothers.
No wonder men and all things
masculine had become a mystery to me. By the time I hit my teen years I had
become obsessed with all things masculine and yet externally I felt wholly
separated from, and unable to enter, the world of my own gender. No wonder being
gay was so painful internally. Once testosterone kicked in at puberty I was
erotically craving men with every fibre of my being and began to further feed
this craving with pornography and sexual fantasy, two insatiable fabrications
of truth and love.
My greatest strength across all
of these hurdles was my spiritual life. The relationship I had now fostered
with the Holy Spirit brought me immense comfort and wise counsel. I came to see
that I needed to ask God for forgiveness, that I needed to forgive all the men
whom I had pushed away for how they eventually had stopped reaching out to me
and had abandoned me. I also had to forgive myself for making an understandable
decision as a child to protect my heart, a decision that would have a
devastating and stunting effect on me as an adult male.
Because I had failed to take my
place as a man among men, I had had to find a place for myself in the world
somewhere. I could not live without relationships. Through prayer, I began to
see how, as a child, I had chosen to make my primary gender friendships among
women. I had become emotionally embroiled with everything feminine and had
nothing truly masculine alongside me with which to balance this.
I came to see that I also lived
out of heterophobia. I despised women on many levels, but mostly for their
natural ability to woo and engage every aspect of a heterosexual man, which I
could not do. I found myself needing to forgive women as a whole for how they
had, mostly unknowingly, enticed me into a place of false identity. They had
graciously given me a place of belonging among them, and yet this, I came to
learn, was not where I truly belonged. I needed to ask them for forgiveness for
how I had taken my place among them instead of rejecting their invitation and
walking away. I also needed to ask God to forgive me for my past mistakes and
to then receive his forgiveness. And as ever, I needed to forgive myself for
making poor decisions.
As I found resolution to past
hurts, mostly through extending and receiving forgiveness, but also through
periods of intense grieving and sorrow related to my lost childhood, changes
began to take place deep within me. My fears gradually subsided. My anxiety
levels steadily decreased. My sense of acceptance among both men and women began
to rise. A strong sense of dignity and self-respect began to take hold of me in
a way I had never experienced before.
My gait changed from being
feminine to one of very deliberate footsteps. My posture changed and I began
unwittingly to hold my head up higher. What was most noticeable to others was
the change in my voice which suddenly dropped quite distinctly in my
mid-twenties as I engaged with the process of forgiveness through therapy and
prayer.
Even more challenging than
accepting as a teenager that I was gay, I began to see that perhaps I had never
truly been gay and that there was a man hidden deep within me as real and as
noble as the men I had often admired, worshipped and yearned for, a man who was
waiting to be freed and released. No one was more shocked and frightened by
this than me.
For a few years I then lived
chastely which permitted me to enjoy non-erotic heart relationships with all
men and women. Subsequently, the ever-present erotic attraction towards men
within me slowly subsided.
The more inclusive my friendships
became with other men, and the less mysterious men’s hearts became to me, the
more I began to desire an exclusive connection that contained “mystery” to it.
I began to see woman in a way I had never seen her. I began to notice her
curves. I began to get caught up in her scent. I started to see her as wholly
different, mysterious, and yet complementary to me. Here I was in my late 20s
experiencing what most males go through in their teens. Before long I began
dating women. Eventually I got married and today I am a father, something the
gay community and selected others told me I would never, and could never, be.
I had envisaged myself spending
my entire life preaching that people are born gay, and yet the opposite has
become true. Today I am socially excluded for rejecting the gay belief system
and "deathstyle" in favour of a predominantly heterosexual identity
although years ago I experienced no exclusion or rejection even when I was the
first person to come out in high school and at university.
I was unknowingly given the
freedom, and took it, to open a door that enabled me to scratch well below the
surface of my conscious mind and to think outside the box of what has now
become mainstream society’s beliefs about sexual orientation.
Today, I find myself a million
miles away from where I expected to be half a lifetime ago. I am
surrounded by the richest of relationships and am certain of God’s eternal love
for me. Nothing can replace this. Can life really get much better?
James Parker originates from the
UK and moved to Australia having married an Aussie lady nearly ten years ago.
He now lives in Western Australia and is passionate about the recovery and
restoration of men and women.
Reprinted with permission from MercatorNet.
