Sex acts between men are unseemly and unfulfilling

My Problem: Too Scared to Speak the Truth

I entered the public debate on gay issues when Ryan Anderson asked me to write one essay about growing up with a gay mom and I said yes. Ergo, “Growing Up with Two Moms” came out in Public Discourse and thus began seven years of my life in a political hurricane.

My first crime was cowardliness and insecurity. Instead of being myself and telling the world what I really thought, I tiptoed around everything and over-strategized.

My main reason for opposing the gay agenda had almost nothing to do with big ideas. My reason for opposing homosexual culture came from far more basic causes. I had grown up around tons of gay people. Starting from the age of thirteen I had had sex with many men.

The sex was horrible. Because the sex acts between men are unseemly and unfulfilling, gay courtship mostly involves mutual admiration based on superficial appearances. Like most gay men, while in the lifestyle I spent my waking hours trying to have a nice physique. The only real satisfaction I could get was knowing that gay men found me nice to look at. Everyone knew this was a ticking time-bomb. With age, one’s metabolism slows and men get pudgy.

Nobody is really gay. Nobody is fated to live the life of a gay man and engage in that kind of degrading sex for their whole lives.

Gay activists like to have it both ways when confronting stories like mine. On the one hand, they want to say I am still gay and simply self-hating. On the other hand, they claim I was never gay or I was always bisexual so that they can separate my experience from their own. I know the truth. I was as gay as they are, which is not at all. Because nobody is really gay. That is, nobody is fated to live the life of a gay man and engage in that kind of degrading sex for their whole lives.

Gay men can come out of every closet save one. They will never admit that what they do for sexual pleasure is a half nightmare, a half farce.

I got out of the gay lifestyle because I met a girl, fell in love, and gained the confidence to pursue what I always wanted: a lifelong romantic relationship that involved true sexual fulfillment, intimacy, pleasant companionship, and children. That’s heterosexuality. Homosexuality provides none of those things.

What I Should Have Said

So in 2012, when I entered the Colosseum, I should have just said this to the public:

Look, I know we want this to be profound. As a Christian, I understand we want to speak in higher spiritual terms. But this is a brutally physical issue. Gay sex is horrible. If you know men who think they ‘are’ gay, you should help them abandon their misperception. They can spend a whole life chasing after a happiness that will never come to them. 

Gay sex combines the banality of masturbation with the danger of promiscuity. You get all the disease, shame, misery, alienation, embarrassment, pain, filth, disease, and self-doubt; but you get no spontaneity. You can never sire children in the same act that gives the other person pleasure. And you will never get the wondrous feeling of knowing your body parts can bring your sex partner to a level of ecstasy that one can never achieve alone.

For this reason, I oppose homosexuality. We should never tell people that it is normal. We should respond to any homosexual propaganda with our free speech making clear that it is wrong. And we should support laws that discourage homosexuality even if we do not impose penalties on people who engage in it. We should not expose children to it. In fact, we should teach children that it is bad for them. We should help anyone falls into homosexual thought or conduct to get away from it. Because nobody is homosexual and homosexuality is not natural. Heterosexuality is a good thing that everyone should pursue.

I didn’t say anything like that. Nobody else did, either. Words such as “anus” and “penis” were too much for people to deal with. So they talked about the sanctity of marriage and shifted to stories about Christian bakers and florists. In my view, we avoided the main point. The main point is homosexual intercourse is very bad, not just for me or you, but for everyone.

Mistake 1: Just Making It About Marriage

Marriage only matters here because marriage has been a way of designating who you can have sex with. If you cannot discuss sex openly then you can never really explain why you do not want to give marriage licenses to gay people.

The problem is that nobody is gay. If you love your friends you should not reduce their being to sodomy.

The talk about children, religious liberty, and supporting healthy marriages, uncoupled with frank talk about homosexual activity, was bound to end in defeat for our side. Tons of straight couples do not have kids. Many children are born out of wedlock. It was not that hard for gays to found their own churches. Marriage mattered in large part because we didn’t want gay sex, which is dirty, to increase in society. We should have said that.

Mistake 2: Conservatives With Gay Friends

Almost every conservative outlet ended up compromised because someone in power has a gay friend or relative. Let’s call it the Meghan McCain Syndrome (see what happened between her and writer D.C. McAllister.) It goes like this: powerful conservative worry about gay friends feeling accepted, so they block any publications that refer truthfully to the harms of sodomy. The problem is that nobody is gay. If you love your friends you should not reduce their being to sodomy.

Because of the Meghan McCain Syndrome, conservatives spent years talking about gay rights in libertarian terms and avoided the fact that gay sex is dirty.

Mistake 3: The Pro-Life Pro-Gay Position

Many supposedly conservative platforms saw that pro-life positions became more acceptable while pro-gay ones did not. Hence groups like CPAC banned Mass Resistance in 2018 while claiming CPAC had socially conservative content — that is, pro-life speakers.

The problem is that homosexuality is a life and death issue. We had an AIDS crisis and a host of new STIs among gays. And there are vulnerable victims — children brainwashed, groomed, or molested into homosexuality. To show concern for the unborn but disregard for these other impacts reveals conservatives as callous and opportunistic rather than principled.

Mistake 4: Be Winsome and Charitable, and Don’t Be Seen With Meanies

No list of mistakes would be complete, of course, without mentioning the Winsome Warriors. Whether it’s David French attacking pro-Trump evangelicals or evangelicals warning readers on Facebook never to read Pulpit and Pen, many of the harshest voices are actually the ones attacking others for sounding too mean. Instead we should speak “the truth in love.” Yet truth is love, and conservatives simply did not want to tell the truth about homosexuality.

No human being, created in the image of God, can be reduced to an identity based on sodomy. Gay sex is dirty, dangerous, and bad. If our discussion standards stipulate that we cannot speak about dirty, dangerous, or bad things, then we might as well not have a discussion.

Mistake 5: Not a Hill to Die On

I could go on and on but this is another big mistake our side made. When we fail to read the Bible dutifully we lose sight of proportionality as God views it. Through God’s perspective, homosexuality is a huge deal. Sodom stands out as the great symbol of evil and its downfall went hand in hand with rampant homosexuality. The first chapter of Paul’s key epistle to the Romans places homosexuality front and center as it discusses the process by which people deceive themselves and become delivered to a depraved mind.

Even today, the FBI estimates that about 1 in 6 males gets sexually abused before the age of 18, overwhelmingly by other males. In other words, homosexuality is a big deal.

Homosexual intercourse was forbidden and vilified for thousands of years because it is too vile to be placed on par with normal sex. Homosexuality coincides overwhelmingly with slavery, rape, prostitution, prisons, drunkenness, and pedophilia precisely because gay sex requires at least one party to be damaged and humiliated by sodomy in real time. Only someone who has been forced, paid, brainwashed, or groomed to accept self-harm as pleasure can make homosexual acts possible.

Even today, the FBI estimates that about 1 in 6 males gets sexually abused before the age of 18, overwhelmingly by other males. In other words, homosexuality is a big deal, and where it becomes acceptable, it leaves devastation in its wake. Conservatives misfired tremendously by avoiding the confrontation with what gay sex has always been and protecting people from its harms.

The Equality Act is no small battle. This is our last stand. We can be like the Spartans at Thermopylae and turn our failing side around. Or we can be like those in Constantinople in 1453, and bid farewell to a culture of which people will say, “They once were civilized, but somehow they ruined themselves.”

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.