The Nature of My Love is Not a Choice

I was raised in a very religious household in a very conservative town in Georgia. Whenever someone says that a person isn’t born gay—that it’s a choice—I have to wonder from whom they are getting their intel. It’s always a straight person who says this, and I think, How would you know? What makes you an expert on the complex and drastically unique experiences of all homosexuals everywhere? Please, show me your degree in Homosexual Studies.


There was nothing in my childhood environment that told me it was okay to be gay. Nothing about the Deep South in the 1980’s, as I remember it, promoted homosexuality or even suggested that it was an option. If you wanted to drink something other than Coke, sure. There was Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Tab. But when it came to love and marriage, if you were a boy, your only option was to grow up and marry a woman.


When I was about seven or eight, my little brother and I were fighting about what to watch on TV after school one day, and he called me “gay.” When my dad heard him say that word, he got very angry and yelled, “You DON’T call your brother that! NEVER call him that again!"


He had yelled at us many times before for fighting (my brother and I fought often over a lot of small, petty things), but there was something different this time. His anger was scarier than usual—as if there were something else behind it. In hindsight, I think it might have been fear; the fear he had that my brother might be correct.


I want to make it very clear that I have an incredible father. In many ways, he is my hero, and I wouldn’t trade him for all the world. But he too was raised in a religious household in a very conservative town in Georgia, and nothing in his upbringing told him that it would be okay for his son to be gay.


He made my brother apologize to me, and I just remember feeling afraid and confused, wondering why my dad had gotten so mad. I had never heard the word "gay” before and I had no idea what it meant. Later, I looked it up in the dictionary, which defined “gay” as “happy and merry."


And I wondered, What was so wrong with being happy?

In the mid-90s, by the time I reached middle school, I had learned the other definition of the word. Middle school was a jungle, and middle school boys wielded the word "gay” like a weapon, slicing each other through and cutting each other down with it. They’d constantly make homophobic jokes in the locker room, as if being gay was something to be laughed at—something that made you weak. In middle school, the last thing you wanted to be called was “gay."


I actually didn’t realize I was gay until a few years later. Sometimes, the attraction to members of one’s own sex manifests itself at a young age, and sometimes, it’s latent. In my case, it kicked in when my teenage hormones did. I had just started high school, an environment where everyone is simultaneously trying to find themselves while figuring out where they belong and how they fit in. Once again, nothing about that environment said, "Hey! Be gay! It’ll make you widely accepted and ensure your popularity!"


It was in my senior year that Matthew Shepard was murdered, a victim of a hate crime because he was gay at the wrong time, in the wrong place, around the wrong people. Growing up in a religious household in a very conservative town was one thing. Realizing that there were people all over the world who had never met me but hated me enough to kill me was another. Suddenly being gay wasn’t just sinful or uncool. It was dangerous.


There I was, this teenager with this terrible secret, afraid of what would happen if anyone ever found out. Night after night, I would pray for God to take it away, but He didn’t, no matter how much I cried and pleaded. I felt like I had no one on my side. Not even God.

When that’s your reality, you don’t choose to be gay. There was not one single thing in my life that made being gay seem desirable. If it were a choice, I would have taken the easy road and opted to be straight. Lord knows I tried. But no matter how hard I resisted, the truth of the matter always remained: I was gay.


It was a fact; not a choice.


After high school, I enrolled at a private Christian college in north Georgia, and it was there that I started asking why. Not why was I born gay, but why being gay was considered weak, bad, and sinful. I had been told those things my whole life, but why?

During my freshman year, I discovered a website about religious tolerance that looked at the issue from both sides—providing arguments that supported, but also countered the traditional view of homosexuality as a sin—via an examination of various Bible passages. Until then, I’d never even considered that what I’d been taught wasn’t true.

Then, the summer after my sophomore year, I went to the school library, and I found every single book that Christian college had on the subject of homosexuality—which, to their credit, was more than one might assume. Each day, I sat at a table piled with books, and over the span of a week, I went through volumes of scriptural analyses, scientific studies, historical explorations, and fictional works.

I read about same-sex relationships in Greece and Rome. I read about the Kinsey scale. I read short stories about gay men looking for love and acceptance amidst the horror of the AIDS epidemic. Essays by queer men like me, attempting to reconcile their sexuality and their faith. And opposing arguments by biblical scholars on whether or not homosexuality was a sin.

And as I read, I got answers to questions I never would’ve asked if I had not been gay. I learned that the original Hebrew and Greek texts never once mention “homosexuality,” because the word and how we know it today didn’t exist when the Bible was written. I learned that same-sex attraction occurs naturally throughout the animal kingdom. And I learned that King James, who commissioned one of the most well-known English translations of The Bible, had gay lovers himself. I learned all that, and so much more.

Regarding those who condemn homosexuality, how many do you think have done the same kind of research so that they too could make a fully informed opinion about the subject? To be fair, I only did so out of necessity. Because as a Christian wrestling with homosexual urges, the fate of my soul was at stake.

Although I wasn’t able to choose sexual orientation, after all of my research, I knew that I had a different choice to make. I could choose to accept myself even though society might reject me, or I could choose to deny who I was to fit in. Realizing that the real sin would be to go against my nature, I chose to accept myself. Just as it is unnatural for a straight man to be attracted to another man, it’s unnatural for me, a gay man, to be physically attracted to a woman. I dug deep, and it’s just not there. And for me, to pretend that it is, to live a lie, that would be the sin.


It frustrates me now when people say homosexuality or gay marriage is a sin. Who are they to say that my love is sinful? I am a man who hopes to someday fall in love and marry another man—a human who wants to love another human—and there is nothing immoral about that. That is how it is in my nature to love, and in this terrifying world filled with chaos and destruction, I don’t see how love between two consenting adults could ever be wrong.

I often think about what I had to go through in high school, college, and the past few years to come to terms with my homosexuality, and I know firsthand that being gay does not make me a person weak. It has made me undeniably stronger—more courageous, more empathetic, and more enlightened than I might’ve been otherwise. Being gay made me question things most people take for granted. It forced me to not only accept myself but also to stand up for myself in a world that did not tell me that I was okay or normal or good. Because deep down, in my heart, I knew that I was all those things.

I’ve been out for a few years now, and there are so many people who love and accept me for who I am. Including my parents, in their own religious way. My little brother can even call me gay now, and it’s not a big deal. The little rabble-rouser was right all along.

My only regret is all the time and energy I wasted hiding, being worried and afraid. For years, my light wasn’t shining as brightly as it could have been, because I didn’t think the world would accept it, when the truth was, the world desperately needed it. The world needs the light in all of us—that very best part of ourselves that we can’t give if we’re holding anything back. I know that now, because I can feel that light shining brighter than ever.


When I thought God wasn’t answering my prayers, I was wrong. I just wasn’t listening hard enough. When everything around me was telling me that it was bad to be gay, He was the only one saying, "Hey, kid. I’m not gonna change you. You’re okay, just as I made you. Now, get out there and shine."