Hey.
This is gonna be hard.
So, I want to start this off by saying, this has been a really hard year. I mean, it has been for all of us. But for me personally, there’s just been so much that’s happened.
I got married.
Friends died.
…and a lot of my beliefs changed.
Now, listen… I don’t want to argue with anyone. This isn’t something where I’m trying to stir a pot or choose a side. I just want to talk about where I’ve been, and where I’ve landed. If you’re reading this and you’re family, know that I love you and none of this changes that. I hope that I can take you with me on this journey I’ve been on.
I’m bisexual. Here’s, I think, how I got here.
When I was a kid in middle school, I was told I was gay practically every day. It was the favorite insult of my peers, and to this day I still have a chip on my shoulder when I think about them. Yet, I’ve also healed a lot too.
What I came to experience in high school however was that I… started to notice guys differently. Especially the more muscular ones.
I would have panic attacks about it. I wasn’t allowed to be gay. Gays went to hell. So, like any conservative Christian boy with even a sliver of homoerotic tendencies, I buried it deeeeeeep deep down. I came to struggle with pornography in my 20’s, and as it escalated it came to a point where I started consuming gay porn. Even then I would never admit I had any same-sex attractions out loud.
Until about February of 2019.
I had a counselor, a life-coach with intense therapy experience and training, and a thriving relationship with Jesus, inquire about a guy I was mad at because he had feelings for another guy. He asked me if I was jealous…
…and as awkwardly as I could utter it, I said yes.
Now keep in mind, this is a Christian counselor. Someone who believes and supports a biblical sexual ethic. This was the person who got me to accept I was bisexual.
Did it give me permission to dismiss what I believed about homosexuality according to the Bible? No—but it gave me a chance to stop lying to myself and hating myself, and it gave me a lot more compassion for gay people.
When I met my wife, it was at a furry convention in 2018–a community of fans of anthropomorphic animal characters like Nick Wilde or Robin Hood, or heck even Bugs Bunny, that I had become part of back in 2009. There’s a lot to that, but what you need to know in relation to this story is that furries are very LGBTQ+ inclusive. They pride themselves on being a safe space for people of every sexual orientation and gender identity. A place where you can be yourself.
This idea of Pride for awhile, even after realizing I was bi, was something I disliked very much and didn’t understand at all. It was, to me, a celebration of sin against God. It was abominable.
In late 2019 when my wife and I officially started going out, I said as much… and things went south REAL fast one night while she and I were in the car together. Going into the relationship I knew she was bisexual herself, and had spent a very long time as part of the gay community.
“We march because we’re showing them that they didn’t kill us!” She almost shouted it through tears.
I didn’t know hardly what she was talking about at first… but then, I realized that this was the side of Pride that I had never seen. A side that had spent decades if not centuries advocating for gay people to have a right to just… live.
Around June sometime before or after we got married, we watched Milk, a docudrama about the life and death of Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians to ever run for a public office. The majority of his campaign revolved around compelling gay people to come out of the closet to friends and family, to coworkers even—in an effort to show that when people advocated for anti-gay laws, they were advocating against people they loved. They were telling sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, best friends and top performers in the workplace that their lives had no value because of an orientation they had no control over.
Milk was murdered shortly after his time in office began, but his work has left a permanent impact on the world. When the film ended, I turned to my wife in tears and said that if gay people are going to Hell because they want nothing to do with God, then we, the Christians, sent them there through how we had treated them.
I can’t help but be compelled to think that the American church has failed the gay community for years. Not simply because the church has said homosexual practice is sinful, but because the way that shame has been used to hurt gay people for so long. Homosexual experience has been turned into something that is malevolent, demonic, or at the very least, “other” from the rest of the world.
I say this to interject that yes, I do still believe in and practice what I understand to be a biblical sexual ethic. I’m married to a woman, we have a monogamous relationship at which we strive to keep Jesus at the center. We’re not perfect, we have messy lives and stories, but we believe the Bible as God’s word to us and that it contains pure truth.
However, I and my wife are also bisexual. We both know that within us exists desires for the same sex, and identifying that enables us to share our experiences and struggles together. Being bi isn’t some dark, secret thing that threatens to destroy our marriage—it’s something human we know about each other that we accept and empathize with. Empathy for homosexual feelings or practice doesn’t mean endorsement, but it does remove the shame.
That being said, in having empathy for my LGBTQ+ loved ones, this drove my decision to vote for a leader that would protect their right to exist as equals, without fear of their way of life being threatened. In a theocratic (religion-based and religion-ran) society, it would make sense to prohibit homosexual practice or behavior, as the law of the land would dictate that such practices are unlawful.
But this is not a theocracy. We live in a land full of diverse ideas and experiences, and we’re all striving to just figure out how life works.
Anti-gay laws tell an entire group of people that they do not have that right to figure out life. It punishes their choices and experiences, experiences that are unique to them, and assigns shame to them for even existing in the name of “traditional family values.” Anti-gay laws shame and punish my experience. My existence. And my wife’s. They criminalize desires and an orientation that neither of us asked to have.
From a distance, it’s easy to stay glued to traditional family values and that assert God’s design for marriage and sexuality should be obeyed by everyone. But up close, when you look your coworker, your sibling, your child in the eye and say that their love is against the law, is criminal—that is the absolute last thing that will convince them of that belief. It guarantees that they will live a life where they feel wrong for even existing. For some, this is why gay people kill themselves.
In light of all of this, I have chosen to come out myself and say yes, I am bisexual, my wife is bisexual, and we therein share an experience with the larger LGBTQ+ community. We are persons whom experience some level of sexual attraction for those who share the same sex as us. We are persons who experience this attraction vulnerably with one another, without shaming each other or demanding we repress their existence. We spur one another on to faith in Jesus that meets us in this experience, and longs to meet and love our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters in this same experience.
We are persons who believe homosexual desires to be human and normal. We also believe God has called us to believe and trust in his word as the final authority over our lives as well, and we believe these two sentiments do not cancel each other out. We are called to a model of sexual intimacy between man and woman as Scripture describes, but we are free to admit to and struggle with a sexual desire and temptation that is outside that model.
We are persons who cry out against a society that has shamed and killed other persons for trying to understand their homosexual desires by making choices that society refused to understand or create space for, and persons who believe that we, were a few simple variables different, could be shamed, hurt, or killed for that exact same experience.
I hope this makes sense. And if this doesn’t, then do what any human does and ought to do when they don’t understand—ask, and learn.
From Darker Shores 