My Faith Story, Part III

In the spring of 1994 I finally came to terms with the fact that I was gay. I had suspected as much for a few years, had endured a couple of hopeless relationships with women, and finally accepted that my feelings towards other men were more than just a fascination or a curiosity. The first place I went after coming to this realization was my father's grave. I lay on the ground above my father's interred body and cried, asking for his help and forgiveness. The next place I went for comfort was the church. Unfortunately it was locked -- literally. I went to two different churches near the NC State campus, hoping to find a clergy person to speak with. Instead all I found were empty buildings devoid of anyone willing to listen to my story of confusion and pain.

Over the next year I came out to my close friends and eventually my mother. It would be another ten years before I told anyone else in my family that I was gay. Cowardly though this may be, I figured that being unmarried at 31 and not having brought a girlfriend to a family function since I was 20 might have clued some of my more astute family members in to my "orientation."

In those ten years, I also grappled with what it meant to be gay and a Christian. I spent a lot of time soul-searching, trying to figure out if it could ever be acceptable to engage in sexual acts with other men and still be counted among the righteous. The de jure attitude of mainstream Christian churches was that sex was a gift from God reserved for married people. The de facto situation, however, was that lots of Christians engaged in sex outside of marriage. I figured this meant either that this particular tenet of Christianity wasn't all that important, or that there were a whole wompload of hypocrites running around. Turns out I was probably right on both counts. But that didn't change the fact that, by acknowledging my sexual orientation, I was putting myself in a position to question and perhaps defy one of the central tenets of Christianity with which I had always agreed. I don't mean to say that I always lived up to the expectation of chastity outside of marriage, but I did acknowledge that such behavior was sinful and to be avoided.

Gay men could not marry per se in any mainstream Christian church of which I was aware, at least not 12 years ago when these events in my life were occurring. Even today the list of churches that officially sanction gay marriage is indeed quite small. Could there be a loophole? Could I possibly still find salvation if I reserved myself for a "life partner"? Would God acknowledge such a situation as on par with marriage?

This moral conundrum kept me out of the church for nearly two years after I came out. I was afraid of God, afraid of His judgment, afraid of the judgment of His ministers on this earth. The easiest way to deal with this fear was to avoid it, which I thought meant avoiding church. After all, that's where God lives, right? It turns out God has a way of leaving His house, wandering down the street and catching up to you as you walk down the block minding your own business. Like Noah before me, I would soon learn that fleeing God's calling is about as futile as ice skating uphill.