AP

I remember having always been same-sex attracted. I first spoke about this to someone on a lesbian and gay helpline when aged fourteen. Within several minutes of chatting, the man on the other end of the phone diagnosed me as being gay, telling me to embrace it, that all would be well, and that I was born this way. I was a vulnerable teenager, and I took every word to heart.

It is no surprise, therefore, that I came out to my family and school friends at 17. They affirmed me as gay and said that they had known this for years. A huge weight lifted from my shoulders as I publicly shared how I had been ‘born gay’. I noticed that my self-harming and suicidal feelings slightly reduced as I did this. I began to taste freedom.

When aged 18, I moved to a city university. I was the first person ever to come out publicly, and saw it as my duty to establish a lesbian and gay group.

I was very promiscuous at first as was everyone else in the gay community. Then I met my ‘Mr Right’. He was ex- military, externally exemplified manhood, and ticked all my boxes. I was loud, effeminate and wore make-up, yet he said that I ticked all of his boxes too. We were committed to one another and were monogamous throughout our long-term relationship, something very rare among gay men.

Sometime later, a fellow student approached me at university and asked me if I wanted more love in my life. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Who doesn’t?’ This man was known to be a committed Christian and, once I had given my life over to Jesus, I soon found myself under his instruction. He taught me to pray and to reflect upon God’s Word.

I began to ask deeper questions about myself and the world around me, experiencing an increase in peace. My boyfriend recognised this. He too wanted more peace and said ‘Yes’ to Jesus. We both began to pray daily. Almost overnight, many gay men and women hailed us as the model gay Christian couple. Life couldn’t get better – or so I believed.

Months later, as my prayer life deepened, I felt an increasing unease with this ‘perfect’ relationship. I began to recognise that men were still a mystery for both me and for my boyfriend and that neither of us had ‘demystified’ men so had instead ‘eroticised’ them. This was a painful place to be in. I came to see that we were both in different ways at war with our souls, with our identities, and with other men.

I chose to outrightly reject the illusory label of ‘gay’ and walked away from the LGBTQ+ community. I chose to visit a professional therapist who helped me to deal with such a dramatic social change in my life. What then transpired shocked me to the very core.

Through daily prayer, accompanied by an insightful Christian therapist, I came face-to-face with crippling inner wounds I had never previously seen which I had pushed deep into my unconscious. I found myself facing traumas from having been abandoned at birth, being incubated, fostered, orphaned, and adopted, from years of childhood sexual abuse, from a deep-rooted distrust of men, and a crippling fear of women.

I learnt to face my pain and shame. I learnt to forgive, to ask for forgiveness, to exchange “my truth and feelings” for “the Truth and reality about my biology and Natural Law”. As my soul slowly healed, I learnt precariously to trust men and women, and so the true man hidden deep within me began to rise.

As my heart learnt to trust and to deeply engage non-erotically with other men, my erotic preoccupation with everything masculine lessened, as did my sexual compulsivity, and my anxiety levels. My self-harming completely stopped. My addictions to alcohol, to work, to performing, to pornography began to fall away. I was no longer at war with being male, and I began to love being in my own body, a miracle in itself after so much historical sexual assault and rape. From this place of healing, I went in search of a new “mystery” and discovered this in the complementarity of woman. I later married and became a father, which was everything I had been told was impossible and which I had never expected or sought after.

Today, I am very far from perfect. However, the ever-increasing peace and dignity I experience today is beyond words. I have inner freedom significantly more than when I was a gay man and an LGBTQ+ activist. The lesbian and gay helpline lied to me as a teenager. I wasn’t ‘born gay’, and all didn’t end well for me and for most of my peers whilst in the gay community.

Politicians now set out to ban any practice which has successfully helped to diminish or completely eradicate my and so many others’ past mental anguish, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harming. They need to wake up and to stop listening to LGBTQ+ ideologues who themselves operate out of deep fear and a lack of knowledge. No one should be forced into any therapeutic or pastoral situation against their will, but neither should anybody seeking proven therapeutic or pastoral care be denied what can increase their overall well-being.

It would be selfish, foolish, and deeply unloving of me not to want others to experience the same freedom and fulfilment in life which Jesus has poured into me.