What I Can Do For You
by Marc Adams

As a former exgay and former fundamentalist Baptist Christian, it's
important to state something that is NEVER said in these articles.
Being gay has nothing to do with religion, spirituality, etc. It just
doesn't. We've allowed an unholy union to happen between homosexuality and religion. Religion is a choice. Orientation is not.

You can be gay and any religion you choose or you can be gay and choose not to join a particular religion.

No one ever wakes up one morning and says, "I'm an evangelical Christian."  But every day millions of people wake up to a day where they understand their sexual orientation.

As a boy growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist home, going to Jerry Falwell's university, going through years of restorative therapy, it's easy to understand why I, my peers and many like I once was, choose restorative therapy. (And, even after 20 years, many of them are still trapped in a simulated heterosexual lifestyle.  Still others ended their lives early when the strain of changing one's behavior was too much to bear.)

I used the smoke screen of religious beliefs as a reason for me wanting to change my behavior After all, my religious choice dictated that I change everything human about myself anyway.

However, years down the road, I realized I was changing my behavior not for religious reasons but because I had a need to be accepted. Back then, I was very uncomfortable with the thought that I would not be accepted by my choice for religion, my family and friends.

So I changed myself so that they would be more comfortable. I used my "spirituality" and my religious journey to make others, including the god I believed in, feel comfortable with how I lived my life.

I am so grateful that I was able to escape that way of living. I am not sure how I was able to do it. I had no outside influence, no books, no internet and no gay friends. I guess listening to my own heart, the one thing that my Bible warned me about the most, was the only thing for me to do.

That was the only way I found lasting, personal peace and the only way I would become a whole person.

While I understand why people change themselves for the acceptance of other people and their religions, I feel sad for them. Life is SO short.  We get just a few years to live in a world that for all of its faults is still filled with life and love and happiness.

Somehow, the blindness that comes from changing oneself for the acceptance of others seems to infect all of us in one way or another.

Those who find themselves recruited into a simulated heterosexual
lifestyle give up not only their own opportunities to find personal peace, love and happiness, but also affect the lives of others around them who see their "example" and believe in it.

So when Love Won Out comes to town, I see them as a group of people that sadden me. People who are just like I used to be. People who have been tricked into thinking that changing your behavior makes you, your god and others happy. I see leadership who continue to perpetrate their belief system to recruit more struggling gay people into their churches, destroying lives with the lie that the simulated heterosexual lifestyle is somehow better than self acceptance.

The hope lies here. Before I left restorative therapy to choose life, I was always promised by my counselors, that throughout my life I would fall off the wagon. I would do the wrong thing. They and my Bible convinced me that this was because I was a wretched human being born with a sin nature.  Like everyone else I knew who was part of it all, I fell off the wagon many, many times.

Whether it was actually having a romantic relationship with another guy, or just me alone in my bed at night fantasizing about it, I still fell. EVERYONE involved in restorative therapy falls off the wagon.

That moment, when they fall, is the moment that we as people who have found personal peace can have a real, life-saving impact on their lives.  As broken as our gay sisters and brothers are when they are seduced into  pursuing simulated heterosexual lifestyles, they are even more broken when they fall off the wagon.

It's time for all of us free-thinkers to begin thinking freely about how to help them the most at that moment.

I wish someone would have been there for me.  It would have made the journey so much easier.  Now, I spend my time doing it for others.

What can you do?

Marc Adams
Founder/Executive Director, HeartStrong Inc.
marcadams@heartstrong.org
http://www.exgay.com
http://www.heartstrong.org