How I Lost My Faith . XIX - What is The Truth?

After turning my back on Jed and the gay scene in D.C., I attended meetings at the Kingdom Hall fairly regularly, but after the confusion over my HIV status, the pendulum swung back the other way and I decided to move back to Denver to be with my gay friends there. In the fall of 1987, after a grueling three-day bus ride, I finally arrived back in Denver, feeling thoroughly disgusting; I don’t remember ever feeling that gross while living on the streets, and vowed to never again take a Greyhound bus cross-country.

Glenn, my cute-as-a-button Navy friend, invited me to stay in his new house for a while, and we again grew very close. I celebrated Christmas with him for the first time in years; there was a fireplace and a tree, and we exchanged gifts. It was the first time I’d felt like I had a real life with a partner who loved me. It was the kind of gay life I’d dreamed about since seeing the movie Making Love in the early ‘80s, and I didn’t want it to ever end. But there were obstacles, not the least being whether or not I was really HIV-positive. I got retested not long after settling in, but the test came back negative, so I relaxed for awhile. 

 

After a month or so I found a part-time job at a 7-Eleven, then decided to enroll in Barnes Business College to learn computer programming. I needed a real career, some way to make a name for myself and finally live the kind of life I’d dreamed about for years: financially independent with a large house on a huge walled-off property, where I could grow gardens and orchards...and this was my chance. The curriculum including programming in BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Cobol and Machine Language, as well as Accounting and general business practices. I took to BASIC like a fish to water! My teacher had the entire course written out, with easy-to-follow instructions on modifying the coded examples one step at a time to see what would happen as you went along. I finished her entire course in half the time it should have taken, and began helping fellow classmates who were still struggling with early lessons. To say I was bored out of my mind would be an understatement; she’d made her course way too easy, at least for me. 

 

Fortunately, there was another instructor who also taught BASIC, but with a completely different approach, one that was straight up my alley. Instead of telling his students how to write each line of code and what each variable stood for, he gave his class a goal—write a program to organize a library of books, records or whatever, with input and output functions—then he wrote a few hints on the blackboard, and set them loose to figure it out on their own. This required they do their own research to solve problems, and he would be there if we really got stuck. Since I’d finished my course so quickly, both teachers allowed me to sit in on his class. One girl allowed me to copy her project so I could get caught up, and I took it from there. It was the most exciting, interesting class I’d taken since Mechanical Drafting in high school, and I took ate it up.

That teacher also taught me a lesson that I still live by to this day: always, always save your work! I’d been working on enhancing my library application for nearly an hour and was making incredible progress, but I was too engrossed in my work to pause and save the file. Suddenly, someone walked into the room and turned all the lights and computers off! I was furious and jumped out of my chair yelling, “Do you know how long I’ve been working on this??!! What’s your problem?!” Turns out it was the teacher, and I never forgot his response: “I guess you’ll save your work more often, won’t you?” To this day, I save everything as often as I can.

During the whole time I lived with Glenn, I began delving into aspects of the occult like Earth Magic, crystals, runes and tarot cards. I also began reading a series of books by one Elizabeth...something; I can’t remember her last name, but her books enthralled me. She wrote of messages she’d received from supposed-angelic guides who warned of a coming global apocalypse during which the earth’s crust would become unstable and crack into pieces. Her “guides” suggested potential safe zones, including the upper mid-west of the United States. 

 

I knew from my previous Bible studies that something was coming, some catastrophe that would change the face of this planet and all humanity forever. But, no longer interested in the inevitable conflict between my sexual identity and the Bible, I began to believe the things I was reading in these books. I also began a project that I felt would greatly benefit the survivors of the coming apocalypse: a Book of Law. I was very familiar with the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, and felt that its basic principles, without all the animal sacrifices and stoning of people to death, would be an excellent start, so I began cataloging and organizing that Law Code for the future of what would be left of mankind.

Then came the sudden realization that something was terribly wrong with the course on which I’d placed myself. After enthusiastically reading several of Elizabeth’s books, I read a particular sentence that completely stopped me in my tracks: her “angelic guide” mentioned Jesus Christ as being an advanced human (not God’s Son, mind you) who’d died on a cross.

I was confused. All my life up to that point, I’d believed that Jesus was put to death on a stake, not a cross, and I’d heretofore not run into anything in these occultish books to suggest otherwise, but now there was a major conflict. Jehovah’s Witnesses have been adamant about the real instrument of Jesus’ death for nearly a hundred years, ever since discovering that the Greek word usually translated as cross is stauros´ — σταυρός — meaning “an upright pale or stake” and translated “torture stake” in the New World Translation.

Now, this “angel-guided medium” was relaying that Jesus died on a cross; if it really were an angel from which she was getting her information, it would have been an eye-witness to Jesus’ execution and would have known the truth. If the Witnesses were right about the “torture stake” then the “angel” was lying to the author, which meant it wasn’t an angel at all. I had to find the truth...everything now hinged on this one thing: who was telling the real truth??

I scoured the shelves of the Denver Public Library until I found an actual Greek New Testament, all in Greek with no English, as well as a Greek Lexicon. I found one of the Scriptures where most Bible translations use the word “cross” —and there it was, plain as day: σταυροῦ, a grammatical form of σταυρός. And the lexicon confirmed the meaning: “an upright pole or stake...without a cross-beam forming the letter ‘T’.” The Witnesses were right! For me, that was all the proof I needed to realize that this woman had been receiving messages from someone or something, but it sure as hell was not an angel of God.

In the spring of 1988, after months of living a nice, quiet life with Glenn, I made the choice to return to “the Truth” as taught by the Witnesses. Once again, I had strayed from “the path of righteousness” and needed to try once again to “get it right” so I could finally get baptized and find real peace for the first time in my life, in the knowledge that I had Jehovah’s approval. I disposed of everything spiritistic—all books and tarot cards—as well as a very nice set of mystical Runes— broke the news to Glenn and began looking for a place to live. Fortunately, a Witness family that I’d met during my first visit to the Hall in 1985 invited me to stay with them and their boys.

I was still attending Barnes Business College, but my decision to serve Jehovah led to another: I could not continue pursuing a career that would have no real future, as Armageddon was just around the corner (still) and all my efforts needed to go to the furthering of the Good News. I had learned all I needed to know about programming and all that was left were a couple of boring classes on English and how to “dress for success.” I thought the latter was completely ridiculous; the class had to dress in business attire two or three times a week, as if we adults had no idea how to dress ourselves for a job. I was completely bored with school by then, and even though I only had that one semester to go before graduating, I took “the higher road” and dropped out. 

 

Later, it would prove to be one of the worst decisions of my working life; I stood to make a lot of money in those days as a systems analyst/programmer, but I chose a spiritual “career” over materialistic gain, thinking “This time I’m never leaving Jehovah’s organization!” I wasn’t even baptized at the time; I hadn’t proven myself “clean” long enough to qualify, but I was determined to do so this time.

But the spectre of HIV still haunted me, and I realized I needed to have the test done again. the first one back home said I was Positive, then they told me I was Negative. The first test back in Denver said Negative, as well, but that spring in 1988, I had them test me again. This time it was Positive. After running the test again to be sure, it came back again as Positive. Now I knew for sure that I had “IT.” But the test only proved that I’d been exposed to the virus and developed antibodies. It didn’t mean I had AIDS, so I simply accepted it, as I had other STD’s like gonorrhea, and got on with my life.

Although I was determined to be one of Jehovah’s Witnesses “come hell or high water”, I simply could not get away from the fact that I had sexual urges that I could not control. I was gay, but still determined to someday overcome it, but after a few months I found myself once again at a gay bar and surrendered to my flesh, renewing the soul-crushing guilt and shame with which I’d become all-too-familiar.

And so the Great Pendulum continued to swing, back and forth, from hedonism and demonic propaganda to Bible-based “Truth” and back again. I went through this process so many times I lost count, and so lost complete track of who and what I was—of ME and what I stood for.

What would it take for this nightmarish roller-coaster ride to stop??

This cycle would define the next twenty years of my life: six-to-twelve months as a would-be Witness followed by the same amount of time hanging out in gay bars, getting drunk and laid, until my conscience would again start assaulting me, leading me to return once again to Jehovah. I reached the point where I was certain that something was intrinsically wrong with me; why couldn’t I control myself for more than a few months? Was Satan’s hold on me that great that I was incapable of self-control, or had I sinned so badly that Jehovah simply would not give me his Holy Spirit to face and overcome these demonic urges?  I had no answers and finally all-but-gave up trying to find any.

The real test, however, was yet to come, as my whole world changed in 1989, the year I got "the news."