How I Lost My Faith . XIV - The Choice Which Lay Before Me

One might ask, “How could a promiscuous, young gay man such as myself, who had been completely out of the closet for four years, suddenly turn all of that off and do a complete 180°, taking a stance against homosexuality and all it stood for?”  I’ve asked myself that question numerous times over the years, and the simplest answer I can come up with is that I genuinely loved and believed in God and His Word, and my desire to be a good, moral person and a loyal, faithful servant of Jehovah was stronger by far than any temptation the Devil could place in my path.  I believed my sexual tendencies were a result of the female-dominant environment in which I grew up; I never actually chose to be gay, and I didn’t believe that I was “born this way,” that God made me homosexual: 

How could a loving God create me to be gay then tell me that being gay is a sin worthy of death by stoning??

I didn’t buy it for a second, and I never bought into the “gay Christian church” concept. Their God condemns them in their own Bible, and they build a church in which to worship Him??  I simply could not wrap my head around that, any more than I could a Baptist church celebrating witches and demons in a house of God and angels. For many years I couldn’t even walk into a church, or any house of worship,  that wasn’t a Kingdom Hall without being deeply offended at all of the “false worship” that went on there; it would later make attending funerals very difficult for me.  I knew too much about the history of Christendom’s beliefs—thanks to books like The Two Babylons by Presbyterian Rev. Alexander Hislop (1919), and “Babylon the Great Has Fallen!” by Jehovah’s Witnesses (1963, the year of my birth)—and would not allow myself to be exposed to idols (crosses, statues, etc.) and false religion.  I took my faith and service to Jehovah very, very seriously, and I would allow nothing to sully it.

I believed to my very core that the Bible was God’s Inspired Written Word and that Jehovah’s Witnesses, alone, had “The Truth.”  The Baptist church from which I’d turned away in disgust one Halloween as a child certainly didn’t have it—and from what I’d learned in years past and was learning anew, neither did anyone else; no other religious organization could give clear, concise answers to mankind’s most basic questions of existence straight from the Bible, without making stuff up as they went along, as so many religious leaders and preachers were doing.  From my point of view, practically all of the so-called “spiritual nourishment” offered by the churches of Christendom was filled with speculation, wishful thinking, and out-right falsehood, with practically no Scriptural support—and at age 22, I could prove it “twelve ways to Sunday.” 

In spite of my horrible experience with the elders back east four years before, in my eyes Jehovah’s Witnesses—viewed as a whole—were the embodiment of Christian faith and moral fortitude.  They were to be the core of the ‘unnumbered great crowd’ of Revelation 7:9 who would survive Armageddon and live forever in Paradise, and I particularly admired the older generation who had lived through the likes of Hitler and Stalin, as well as violent religious intolerance even in the U.S. during and after both World Wars; the 1974 Yearbook I’d borrowed from Michael years before had numerous accounts of Witnesses who refused to compromise their faith even in the most extreme circumstances.  After living through my own version of that hell at home, I wanted to be like them—loyal, faithful, unselfish, morally clean and upright, and full of holy spirit.  I looked up to them and strove with every fiber of my being to emulate their faith; what I didn’t realize at the time was that I’d raised Jehovah’s Witnesses up on a pedestal so high it would prove to be utterly impossible to reach.

During the four years I’d been “out and proud,” the teachings I’d absorbed during my teen years—from the Bible, Watchtower books and magazines, and meetings at the local Kingdom Hall—were always hovering way in the back of my mind, particularly those regarding the ever-imminent Battle of Armageddon.  I just figured that I’d lost that hope by openly embracing a lifestyle completely at odds with God’s will, so why even think about it?  Once I stepped into that Kingdom Hall in Denver for the first time, however, the hope that I might actually become acceptable to Jehovah washed over me like a tidal wave; I felt like I’d finally come home.  I knew it would not be easy, but I was determined to do what I knew was right, and if that meant changing the very nature of my being “for the sake of the Good News,”—suppressing the sinful, unnatural tendencies that had estranged me from my Creator—then so be it!

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that homosexuality is unnatural and demonic.  For the vast majority of my life, I believed as they do, thinking that will-power, prayer and faith could change me into someone with more “natural” inclinations.  I knew everything the Bible and Watchtower literature had to say on the subject, and resolved to be in complete agreement, even nodding my head in approval when a brother would denigrate my previous lifestyle from the podium.  I discovered years later that some of my closest friends at the Hall would look to see my response during such talks, worried that I might be offended, but I took it all in stride.  After all, the Bible was clear, was it not?  

I was bound and determined to prove that even someone like me—unclean, immoral, utterly sinful—could take a stand for “the Truth.”  I’d read accounts in Watchtower and Awake! magazines of others who had been gay but made drastic changes in their personalities to be part of Jehovah’s organization.  If a transsexual could teach him/herself to walk, talk, dress and act like a straight man in order to worship Jehovah acceptably, then so could I overcome my past!  These examples gave me courage and the knowledge that I wasn’t alone in this battle between good and evil.

The efforts I went through to change my personality had an unexpected side-effect: swearing became offensive to me. I used to cuss like a drunken sailor, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the sound of even “mild” words like damn-it and shit; it was strangely like flipping a switch, but none of my new friends cussed, being Christian and all, so it wasn’t a difficult habit to break.

I also realized that, while I would occasionally “look” at guys walking down the street, I could’t do that with male Witnesses; unconsciously, I'd created a wall of sorts that made even the idea of intimate relations with a Witness offensive. Regular guys I’d see in public were, as far as I was concerned, doomed anyway without a relationship with Jehovah, so they were fair game; but not the Witnesses—they were Jehovah’s sheep, not to be lured away, tempted from their walk with God; it was exactly the same way Richard felt about me when we first met.

When I told Ted at our first meeting that I hated being gay, it wasn't that I hated myself—that would come later (I had a measure of self-loathing and low self-esteem before 1985, but it was nothing compared to what lay in store).  It was because my sexuality was the one thing that got in the way of my faithfulness to Jehovah God and prevented me from reaching my goal of baptism, and I was desperate to excise it from my soul.  

The reason I bring all of this up is to help you, the reader—as well as myself—understand that I had a choice: I could remain openly gay, ignoring the growing void in my soul and accepting the consequences, which included an ever-nagging guilty conscience and eventual death at Armageddon; or I could walk away from sin and death to become one of Jehovah’s loyal, faithful Witnesses, with the prospect of “everlasting life in Paradise on Earth”.

If this were the end of the story—had I “lived happily ever after” as one of Jehovah's Witness—my recounting of these events would be utterly meaningless.  But it wasn't the end at all; it was merely the beginning...

Completely oblivious to what lay ahead, I chose Jehovah.