On Being Gay

It’s always awkward to come out, but the lead-up is always the worst part. Once it’s done, it’s done and I move on with my life. I have been out to my family and most of my friends for a few years now, but as one of my friends described it, I’m about as out as the sun on a cloudy day. Well, I guess it’s time for the sun to shine a bit more.

I’m gay.

Two words, but they are still difficult to utter or write. But, I feel the need to do so now because of a confluence of events which have caused me to reevaluate a lot of things which were once constants in my life. I feel like writing here is one of the only ways that I am comfortable expressing myself.

The rest of this post is my story. It’s something of a brain dump. I’m not really sure who the audience is… I think it’s just me. I think I need to process all of this by writing into the void of the internet.

Growing Up

I grew up in a Christian household, and I have been very devout for my entire life. The church and Christians have shaped who I am. I met all of my best friends through church or Christian communities (mostly centred around the homeschooling community). Most of my best memories are with Christians. The church gave me a sense of belonging that helped me get through middle school, high school, and college. Then, during the COVID lockdowns, the church (specifically the college and career group at Littleton Bible Chapel) was instrumental in getting me out of the depression that the lockdowns caused. I wouldn’t be who I am today without Christians in my life and being involved in Christian communities.

I was never interested in girls. The first time that I remember feeling like I was different was around middle school. I was in a once-a-week program for homeschoolers and I was friends with a guy who was a year older than me. I remember him saying that he had a crush on this girl in the class. I didn’t think any of the girls were cute, but I just wrote it off as him just being older than me and that I’d eventually have a crush on one of them. Looking back, I think I did a crush: it was a crush on him.

At that same program, I remember one of the teachers making a joke along the lines of “you can tell the boys are growing up when they stop thinking girls are gross” which I thought was funny. I still thought girls were gross, so I figured I just wasn’t at that point yet. Little did I realise that point would never come.

I had a lot of crushes during middle and high school, but I didn’t have the words to describe them as such at the time. I had crushes on boys I met on vacations, I had crushes on boys I did taekwondo with, I had crushes on boys I played soccer with.

Call me slow, but I really felt like I was just good at making friends with boys. Objectively I was. I obviously never had a girlfriend, so I wasn’t consumed by girl problems, but I always had time for boys, and boyish activities. As I became an upperclassman, I always had a cadre of younger boys who seemed to latch onto me at everything I was involved in from youth group to soccer. I think it was probably because I wasn’t always flirting with the girls, so I was the cool older teen who was always willing to play a game. I felt cool. I felt important. To my parents (and probably to other parents), I was a model of someone who was dedicated to not frivolously pursuing relationships that wouldn’t last.

I played high school soccer for a homeschool team that played in a league against mostly other Christian schools. It must have been senior year after a soccer game hanging out with the boys at a restaurant celebrating a hard-fought win. One of the underclassmen made some mention of the struggles of looking at girls and having to control his lust. When he said that, it was surprising to me: a younger boy having the urges that I was supposed to be getting at some point? This was one of the first times that I started thinking that maybe something is wrong with me: a younger boy was interested in girls? (Now mind you, he was like 15, so of course he was.) I’ve always been a bit socially slow, so I thought maybe I’d just figure that out later.

Love Is a Choice

By the time I started at Mines, I knew I was different, but if you had asked me if I was gay at the time, I would have said no. I thought that who you love was a choice. Of course, there is some truth to that statement. Every person that I know who is in a relationship would say that loving their partner is not always easy and requires constant effort. It’s really hard to say what was going through my head at the time. I think that I thought that I would just have to choose a girl to love, and that it would be a constant effort to have feelings for her.

Meanwhile, I had begun to acknowledge that I had feelings for guys, but I think I believed that true love didn’t have anything to do with attraction. Sure I was attracted to boys, sure I didn’t have any feelings for girls, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t choose to love a girl, right?

During my time at Mines, I blossomed academically and socially. I thrived in the nerdy environment of the CS department (especially the ACM and LUG clubs), and I became embedded in the Christian ministries of Navs and Cru. I made lifelong friends in those groups and my fondest memories of school revolved around the friends I made in those groups. Just like in high school, I had no problem relating to guys: the friendships just felt natural. I’m still friends with many of the guys I became friends with at Mines. Girls, however, were an enigma.

If you asked my mom candidly, she would probably describe me as “special”. I’ve always been bad at reading other people. Maybe I’m borderline spectrum, or maybe I’m just a run-of-the-mill awkward nerd. Regardless, I cannot tell if someone is flirting with me to save my life, nor do I have any idea of how to flirt with someone else.

So there I was: an awkward nerd trying to decide which girl I was going to choose to love from among the eligible girls at those Christian groups. It didn’t work. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to try and identify a partner when you cannot read the signals coming from girls, and when you don’t have any internal feelings for them either.

Despite this, there was one girl that I managed to actually have some connection with. She was kind and down-to-earth and she was one of the only girls I felt like I could talk to as a friend without being awkward. I even asked her out at one point. She rejected me and I didn’t pursue it further. When she said no, I was a bit surprised by how little I cared. I spent more time being sad about being rejected by Google than by being rejected by her.

Luckily, excelling academically put me on the top of many of the hierarchies that I and other people cared about, and so I felt very good about how things were going in my life. Choosing a girl to love could wait.

Coming Out

One of the best things about Mines is that I came in close contact with other gay people. Of course, at the time I didn’t consider myself gay, but I encountered many people who did identify as such. I wasn’t totally sheltered as a kid, so I knew gay people existed. I’d interacted with a handful over the years, but not many. But despite realising that I was attracted to guys, it never really crossed my mind that I myself could be gay. (Remember, I’m “special”…)

It sounds ridiculous now, but it was sometime in the middle of my time at Mines where I finally put two and two together: maybe I’m actually just gay.

Once I finally came out to myself, I still had to grapple with a lot of things. I was very embedded in Christian circles, and I knew I didn’t want to become a liberal Christian, so being Christian and being in a homosexual relationship was out of the question for me. Maybe I could just be single following the example of the Apostle Paul? I developed a personal theology of voluntary celibacy in service of God. Conveniently, being single in college (especially at a nerdy school like Mines) is totally acceptable so people rarely asked questions, and I could easily brush them off with “I’m focused on school right now” answers.

After I graduated, I joined a Bible study with Navs 20s. A lot of the Navs guys that I had graduated alongside attended, and it provided a lot of continuity in my life. The first study we did was by The Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender and covered the Church’s relationship to LGBT+ people, and how LGBT+ people who are Christians should live. The story of one man in particular caught my attention: Greg Coles, a Christian who is gay and committed to singleness. I bought and read his book: Single, Gay, Christian and it really resonated with me. For the first time, I realized that I was not the only person who was in the same boat, and who had arrived at the same conclusion.

I still wanted to follow God, and I felt like committing to celibacy was the best way to do it. In many ways it was freeing. No longer did I have to try and conjure up love for a woman. No longer did I have to ignore the fact that I was attracted to guys (although I still had to avoid lusting after them). No longer was I alone in my struggles.

The first person I came out to was my best friend. We’ve been friends since high school. We went to Mines together, we were roommates for two years after Mines, I was in his wedding, and we actually now work at the same company. Like most of my friends from high school, he is a Christian. It was late 2019 when I visited him in his apartment an hour away, and it took me a couple hours to get the courage to tell him. I was very grateful that he was understanding and helped talk through my feelings.

I came out to my sister and a few other close friends and then, during the start of the COVID lockdowns I came out to my parents. I highly disrecommend coming out during a lockdown. My relationship with my parents was already strained because of the lockdown (a lot of it was my fault) and coming out didn’t help. We have a good relationship new, but that was a hard time.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, the college and career group at Littleton Bible Chapel was instrumental in getting me through the COVID lockdowns. My job had gone remote, and I was starved for human interaction with people my age. During the summer of 2020, LBC met in person outside in the parking lot, and the college and career group met in small groups. It was one of the only communities that didn’t go crazy during the lockdowns.

I didn’t want to lose the Christian community, and so I remained committed to singleness.

Dilemma

If I were straight, I would…
 have dated in high school and college
  have had a first kiss
   have found a cute girl to marry
    have a girl to cuddle with
     have bought a ring for the love of my life
      be married to my best friend
       have kids the same age as my friend’s kids
        have someone to come home to every day who is excited to see me return home
         have someone to share my life with
          have people who rely on me to provide for them
           not be questioning if God is good
            not be questioning if God exists
             not be wondering if my life is pointless
              not be alone.
               But I’m gay. So I…
              am alone
             wonder if my life is pointless
            doubt that God exists
           doubt that God is good
          have nobody who relies on me to provide for them
         have nobody to share my life with
        have nobody to come home to every day who is excited to see me return home
       have no kids
      am single
     have never gotten down on one knee in front of the love of my life
    never cuddled anyone
   am not married
  never had a first kiss
 never dated in high school and college.

In the five intervening years since the lockdowns, almost every one of my friends has gotten married or is in a serious relationship. But I obviously haven’t.

I feel stuck. I feel like I’ll never be able to take the next step in my life. I’ve been successful in literally every life-metric up to this point. I am set in my career to make a ton of money, but it’s all pointless if there’s nobody to enjoy it with. Even an early retirement is not appealing, because I would have nobody to share it with.

Weddings have became harder and harder to attend. I am always happy for the couples, but it always feels like something that I will never attain. At first, it was OK because the people getting married were a couple years older than me, and there were still many singles in my friend groups. But one by one, they’ve found girlfriends and gotten married. Even many of my younger friends have gotten married. My younger sister got married and she made me an uncle a year and a half ago.

Maybe the hardest wedding for me to attend so far was of a friend who is about three years younger than me. He was a freshman on the high school soccer team when I was a senior. He sorta followed in my footsteps by doing concurrent enrolment at community college and then attending Mines. I know it sounds conceited, but watching him “surpass” me in “life milestones” was really hard. It reminded me of what I couldn’t have due to being committed to singleness.

The Christian communities that have brought me stability have become harder and harder to be a part of. For example, I don’t have any friends in College and Career group anymore because they are all paired up in serious relationships, engagements, or marriages. Not to mention, I can’t even attend that group anymore due to being too old. At a recent Mines Navs reunion, I was one of only a few singles, and the oldest of the singles by a few years.

It feels like the adult Christian community is built for couples and families, not singles. There are so many things that are off-limits to me due to being single.

Additionally, the questions keep piling up. Every time somebody asks when I will get a girlfriend, a part of me dies inside. I’m not really annoyed that they assume I’m straight, but every time they ask I’m reminded that I’m single.

My biggest fear in life is dying alone, but every day that passes I feel more and more like that is exactly what will happen if things don’t change. My parents are getting older, and they aren’t going to be around for forever. My sister lives in Wisconsin, and intends to stay there with her husband. All my friends are moving away and/or caring for their beautiful and growing families and don’t have as much time for hanging out with a lame single guy like me.

I worry that one day I will wake up and there will be nobody in my life who loves me. Nobody who cares about me. Nobody who would even notice if I were gone.

So I have a dilemma: do I continue to be committed to celibacy for Christ’ sake, destined to be alone, or do I abandon Christianity and everything I know to build a new life for myself with someone I love? It really comes down to whether Christianity is true.

If it is true, eternal torment sure sounds worse than a loveless, lonely life.

If it isn’t true, why would I subject myself to its moral teaching on sexuality?

Prioritising Myself

I have spent my entire life identifying as Christian. The Christian community has made me who I am. But I have this nagging question: do I actually believe in Jesus as revealed in the Bible, or have I just enjoyed the community of believers?

I am nearly 100% confident that if I were straight that I would be married, have kids, and have zero doubt about Christianity’s truth claims. I would have seen them in action: those who follow God’s law and Jesus’ example are rewarded with full lives.

However, the more I introspect myself and the less I feel like I belong in the Christian community as a single person, the more I lean towards it just being that I enjoy the community. It’s terrifying to say, but I don’t really know if I’m a Christian at this point.

A few months ago, I found myself in a hotel bar with the mom of one the taekwondo students from our school while at a national tournament. She is a married lesbian, and she asked me who “my person” was. I just wanted to avoid the question but she said something that I’ll never forget. She said “you have to prioritise yourself”. A pretty simple statement, but it made me think: have I been prioritising what other people think of me too highly?

I’ve spent a long time wondering what my family and friends would think if I had a boyfriend. But I’ve not thought very much about how I would feel if I had a boyfriend.

I think I would feel loved.
I think I would feel needed.
I think I would feel like my life has purpose.
I think I would feel excited spending time every day with someone I love.
I think I would feel excited to share my life with someone.
I think I would not feel alone.

I’ve never been in a relationship (I haven’t even tried), so I don’t really know how this works. All I know is that I’m not getting any younger, so if my man is out there, I’m taking applications.