Through the Rain

Moving Out to My Own Closet So there are three different beliefs in the LGBTQIA+ community, though I have only personally seen it addressed for the LGB parts of the community. Side X is that everything is a sin. Side B is that everything “gay” is outside of God’s will, whether or not it’s in a committed marriage, and Side A, which is that God loves you as you are, and that a committed relationship pleasing to God. I hope I got that right. Please someone correct me if I am wrong. For a long time after “struggling” I was Side B. That God would allow me to be in a marriage and have someone I could spend the rest of my life with, especially since I was a romantic seemed too good to be true for me. I went from being a romantic to being a cynic when I found out I was gay. I would gag at straight marriages and relationships because I was envious of what they had. I could never have the American dream, and churches always tried hooking up single people. They never had a space for celibate sing...

AND NO, I AM NOT GAY!!!! Trigger Warning: Talk about porn So everyone blossoms at different ages, and it affects how we socialize with different people. Who becomes our friends and who we don’t even talk to centers somewhat around who we are attracted to, who we are supposed to be attracted to, and who we find common interests with. I was fortunate to be one of the smart ones in my grade. The nerds had their own clique that spanned gender. It wasn’t the jocks and the cheerleaders or groups like that which had to be separated into boys vs girls, which was good for me, because most of my friends were girls. Well, most of my friends were boys until the ages of seven or eight. Then we all drifted apart. I became interested in science and religion and movies, and they became interested in girls and cars and sports. I still don’t see the interest in girls and cars and sports. Through the years, I had a couple emotional crushes on girls, and I thought “this is it! I’m straight!” But it never ...

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 it...