Being Gay Part 1

I Used To Be A Lesbian...


When I say “I grew up in the church,” I mean my earliest memories were of school, home, and church. One of my earliest memories that stick to me this day is one of my most jarring, probably why it stuck with me so much. I was old enough to understand what was going on, old enough to be “saved” (in the church I grew up in, saved basically meant you accepted Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, knew that you had sinned (committed bad things), and that he died for those sins on the cross a long time ago so that you could be forgiven for those sins. In exchange, you were to live for him, do good things in his name, ‘earn out your own salvation with fear and trembling’, love him, and live, breathe, and die for him…oh, and don’t let any demons into your life), and old enough to partake in an exorcism.

I know what you all are thinking. It’s not like in the movies. Basically what happened is we were praying for people and sometimes a demon would “manifest itself” but not as crazy like in the movies. Usually there might be a little spit, a weird voice, maybe some tremors, but that was it. We would pray, it would resist, we would pray some more, it would resist some more, finally it would scream and/or faint and then be over. Then the ex-demon possessed person would give their testimony and we would all go on our way feeling like we did something good.

This time though, she started with “well, I used to be a lesbian”, and everybody took a step back, me to grab a primo seat before they were all gone because I knew this was going to be a good story. I don’t remember the rest of the story, weirdly enough. I think she used to be an alcoholic too, used to sleep around from place to place. Hearing it wasn’t as thrilling as seeing it overdramatized in the soap operas my depressed mother watched on a daily basis.

And that was that…or at least I thought that was that. Until a few years later and everyone else was talking about the girls they liked and I…didn’t… It was one thing to study everyone and see their social cues and figure out how to have a conversation with them without making them angry or laugh at me or give me weird side glances, but then to hide who I was attracted to on top of that. I felt the lies start to pile up. 

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