I have to admit that I go through phases when it comes to coming-out stories. Sometimes I really do think, “oh Jeezus, not another one,” because under all the variation there is one central theme: freeing ourselves from inflexible, vicious-circle thinking. And yet it’s the infinite variety of ways in which humans succeed in becoming entrenched in such thinking, and the events that lead to their partial or total collapse. Even more fascinating is how, just like the proverbial old lady who refuses to leave her house that has been ruined by a flood, the mind has a tendency to cling to the skeleton of its former confines. Each one illustrates some new way of poking through the wall of rote thinking, and so I'll add mine as well. It's long. I left out a lot of information, and it's still long. Ultimately it's not so much about sexuality per se as it is about trusting in my own inspiration.

My coming out story is a bit different from those of many who struggled with religion in that I had no strictly religious upbringing. It’s also different in that I did it groundhog style – I came out, went back in for thirteen or so years, then came out again.

Our family’s religious background was quite mixed – Southern Baptist on my father’s side though I have no idea when he last went to a Baptist church, Greek Orthodox and Presbyterian on my mother’s side. We did go to the Presbyterian church for a few years while I was in elementary school, but what I remember from the classes was more about values such as sharing, kindness and mercy. Later we joined the Lutheran church and though I was aware of my sexuality then, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the fire and brimstone that rained down upon them (because they were all homosexuals of course!) left no impression upon me. I saw no reason to believe it.

Sunday school was great socially but church seemed irrelevant, and when it came to God and faith, I’d already decided when I was about eight years old that most people didn’t really believe it but everyone went through the motions because they were somehow supposed to. I remember wondering, “can I ‘make myself’ believe something that I don’t believe?” The answer was “no, but I can get so used to pretending that it becomes a habit.” This isn’t to say that I didn’t wonder about spiritual things. I remember puzzling long and hard about why it was that I was born a six year-old in 1964 in Iowa City, Iowa instead of a Chinese kid 100 years ago. I also never believed in the God that sat up in heaven, sometimes happy (when were good) and sometimes really, really angry when we did bad things. Later on I figured that with people murdering each other and being generally horrible to one another, that kind of God would not have a moment’s peace and his life would be miserable, consumed with all that anger! I mean just imagine, God gets up, on the wrong side of bed as usual, and before he can even have his morning coffee, “Rooooaaarrrrgggh! Little Johnny Stevenson in Akron, Ohio masturbated, again! I’m soo fuckin' pissed off I could...lesseee...flood Bangladesh! No...I promised I wouldn't do that again...ah, okay, no rain for three years in Somalia, that's it!” It just couldn’t be and I never dwelt on it. It also seemed absurd to me to sit in church and plead, “God have mercy upon us” over and over, as if by the pleading, we would somehow change His mind. It reminded me of the little kid who thinks if he says “pleeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaasseeeeeeee” enough times, mom and dad will eventually give in.

I also never quite understood how we were somehow “saved” by Jesus’ death. I asked one pastor, “If a man has five kids and four of them are evil while one is good, how does killing the good one help the evil ones to become any better?” His answer was “that’s a mystery we can’t ever really understand, but we have to believe it.” And that pretty much settled the question for me – I didn’t believe it and saw no reason to try and make myself believe it, since I didn’t really believe in the hell that was held up as the consequence of nonbelief.

I was a bit of an oddball kid, I hated baseball and football, and loved nature, language, plants. This was enough to make a kid unpopular. Kids in a neighborhood are always in search of someone to be at the bottom of the pecking order, and I had the honor. In elementary school it only got worse; I even acquired my own personal brand of “cooties,” which were transmittable merely by a glance. Having a funny last name that rhymed with “queer” didn’t help. It’s absurd now, but at the time I internalized it all, and by the time I reached fifth grade, had unwittingly accepted that respect, good friendship, companionship, and later love, were things that other people got, but not me. I learned early that attention, even favorable attention, just made me stand out, and standing out set me up for more trouble. So I stopped singing out in music class, began to purposely fail spelling bees. The less I was noticed, I thought, the less I would be teased. I saw my tormentors mostly as idiots and never longed to be accepted by them; but I always dreamed of having a friend who like me. The friends I was really in awe of were mostly remarkable oddballs themselves.

I am also convinced that while I had no idea about sexuality of any kind, the seeds were already there. When I was maybe in first grade, I was watching workmen at the house and was especially struck by one very handsome guy hammering away on the roof. I had dreams about two neighbor boys that I can now see were completely homoerotic but again, had no idea what it meant, or that it even meant anything at all. I look back on my longing for a friend who had moved away and realize now that I was in love with him, even though it never occurred to me at the time.

When adolescence kicked in, erotic became sexual, and I started having my first outwardly sexual dreams. They were so graphic that they left absolutely no doubt as to where I was headed sexually (they would make some very interesting science fiction erotica in retrospect!). Still I thought nothing of it. That is, I was vividly aware of what my life would become if others found out, but it never occurred to me that there was “something wrong with me.” By the time I was sixteen or so I had realized “I’m gay,” and even wrote it on a bathroom wall in high school just to see what people’s reactions would be. Interestingly, there was no response at all.

Our home environment was also not hostile – though my father did come out with the occasional talk about what he’d do if some queer touched his kids, I knew we had gay family friends and this was mostly stuff he figured he “had” to say. My parents were both professional musicians after all. My mother would visit a good high school friend who lived with another woman and once when I asked if she never got married, she said “No, I think they’re more interested in each other,” and that was that.

I came out at nineteen, and there was no great explosion. My mother told me that it had crossed her mind, and that she loved me, period. She asked how long I’d known. I said “since around thirteen,” and her answer is something I’ve shared with many people who can’t imagine a parent accepting them: “I’m sorry you thought you had to hide it for so long.” As a matter of fact, it’s the only thing that still bothers her about the whole thing.

So with all this coolness and acceptance, how on earth did I ever get caught up in any sort of attempt to “straighten myself out?”

In college, I joined a folk dance club and became very close friends with a woman in it. She was a Christian Scientist. All I’d ever heard about Christians Scientists was one statement by mother as we drove by their church one day: “They don’t believe in doctors and let their kids die of horrible infections instead of taking them to the hospital.” Well, that seemed pretty heinous and wing-nutty to me. But my friend was not a wingnut at all. She was logical, friendly, non-judgmental. I came out to her and there was never any talk of “you should change.” Of course we argued religion a lot but her answers always seemed to be grounded in logic rather than any sort of blind faith; and that we actually saw eye-to-eye on many issues. When she revealed to me that Christian Scientists believe in the non-reality of matter, I thought “now this is going too far,” but Buddhists believe the same thing and they are hardly viewed as crazy people except by the most bigoted.

She eventually graduated and moved away. One day, completely on my own, I just felt spurred to go to a Christian Science reading room and get a copy of Science and Health (the textbook of Christian Science, read together with the Bible at services, written by the church’s founder Mary Baker Eddy) to read for myself. I was completely absorbed. Though couched in rather Victorian language, the basic premises seemed so logical and straightforward. Certain passages especially moved me:

God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is intelligence. Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at the open fount, which is pouring forth more than we accept? The unspoken desire does bring us nearer the source of all existence and blessedness.

How empty are our conceptions of Deity! We admit theoretically that God is good, omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, and then we try to give information to this infinite Mind. We plead for unmerited pardon and for a liberal outpouring of benefactions. Are we really grateful for the good already received? Then we shall avail ourselves of the blessings we have, and thus be fitted to receive more. Gratitude is much more than a verbal expression of thanks. Action expresses more gratitude than speech.

Christian Science is quite different from traditional Christianity in its view of God and man. God is not a stern judge, nor a being that intercedes if we believe hard enough. God is Principle, Life, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Truth, and most important, Love. Not a being who loves, but omnipotent, all-encompassing, ever-present divine Love itself. Man is God’s image and likeness – but as God is infinite and spiritual, then this likeness must also be spiritual. C.S. sees what appears to be a finite, temporal, material and mortal world as a limited, illusory view of reality, which fades to allow our true nature to shine through as we understand our true nature. “Sin” is not a “transgression to be punished” but rather confusion that results in more confusion and misery, “punishing itself” until one turns back to his/her essence. Grace is the reality that we can do nothing ourselves to make Truth more true or infinite Love more infinitely loving, but by faith – trust as in a loving parent – we let go of our limited thinking and allow God to be more and more fully expressed right here and now.

This was the God I was looking for, that made sense to me, and finally nobody was telling me I had to “just believe something or go to hell.” I read the book from cover to cover. Finally I decided to go to the church. A group of people who believed in the same sort of God I did! I went, and found them to be loving, friendly people. And I wanted to be accepted by them so badly that I conveniently ignored a streak of very stodgy conservatism there that was in direct conflict with the central message of Science and Health. And though there is nothing in Science and Health to support the idea of a stern, judgmental God, I’m convinced this view is part and parcel of our culture, our ideas of justice and discipline, and it’s very difficult to be completely free of.

Nobody in the church ever knew that I was gay, and I was never attacked by anyone in any way. But even though the spiritual man of Christian Science was neither male nor female but rather a complete expression of God, the official position of the church was that homosexuality was something that could and should be healed. The application form for the Mother Church even listed homosexuality as one of the things that were unacceptable for members. So I never became a member, either of a branch church or the Mother Church. I started on an attempt to heal myself of homosexuality, convincing myself that heterosexuality, though also a material condition, was somehow “closer” to man’s true spiritual state than homosexuality. I look back and see that it was all about a longing for acceptance – all the while subconsciously denying the possibility that I could ever receive such acceptance.

In 1983 I went to Greece to live for three years. There was a Christian Science church there, but as I adapted more and more to Greek life, the Christian Science church seemed so out of context that I soon stopped going. I started hanging out at a very nice and friendly gay bar in my neighborhood, and had a moderate amount of sexual experience. There was always a bit of guilt about it but it faded into the background.

Then, in spring of 1985, I got sick. A light cough, a sore throat, increasing fatigue and weight loss. AIDS was just beginning to be talked about in Greece as something more than “something you got from sex with Americans.” During the next few months, I lost nearly 40 pounds. In reality it was probably an autoimmune reaction to Athens’ incredibly polluted air; when I went to Turkey and spent a month in the clean air of the Black Sea region, my strength came back and I felt wonderful, then as soon as I got to Istanbul I was once again knocked flat with fatigue and sore throat. But at the time I was convinced that I probably had AIDS, especially when a throat swab revealed Candida albicans as the cause of the irritation. For those who don't know, Candida infection in the throat (but actually far beyond what I was experiencing) is one of the early sypmptoms of AIDS. The doctor gave me two different prescriptions, and neither worked. I had experienced physical healings before in Christian Science, and decided to trust God with this.

There were several stages but two stand out: One night I was lying in bed, sweating with fever and pain in my limbs, and I realized that I truly was frightened for my life. I asked, “Am I going to die?” I stopped and prayed – and prayer here meant that I listened. Immediately the thought came: “I have trusted my life to you, to Love, and I am safe.” And that moment, I had a powerful mental image of a filthy, plugged-up sink clearing, all the gunk and muck swirling down the drain pipe. And at the very same moment, I felt all my fear and anxiety drain away in exactly the same way. And as that happened, my fever disappeared, I felt calm and comforted, and had my first good sleep in a long time. The next stage came several days later when I was reading an article on joy. It said, “We may feel that we cannot experience joy because of something lacking in our lives; we may even believe that because of something we have done, we don’t even deserve to feel joy.” Bingo…I had left my attempts to cure myself of gayness and now here I was looking for help! But the article went on (and I’m paraphrasing): “But we don’t have to accept that for a moment, because our joy is complete now, because we are this very moment the complete expression of Love.” At that moment, it was as if a flash bulb went off in my brain. Not figuratively but literally: my vision, my senses were completely flooded for an instant with pure, white light; it was all that existed. And afterwards, a calm, pure joy. I went in and took a shower. Keep in mind that I was looking pretty skeletal by then and many people had become very concerned about me. I went out onto the front balcony. The next door neighbor walked by, took a look at me and said, “what happened, you’ve gained weight!” I hadn’t, but I did feel better. About half an hour later, an Iranian friend, a Sufi, who had been very supportive of me, came by. He took one look at me and said “What did you do, you look so good!” And so it went through the day. Over the next few months I put on all the weight I’d lost.

And I also knew I was just as gay as I ever was.

Now if I could have an experience like this, you’d think I’d wake up and realize that being gay was not an impediment to God’s love or my spirituality. But the truth was that this did not have anything to do with being gay per se. It was about having internalized all the bullying and belittling I’d received as a kid, and continuing to bully myself. Gayness was just the most convenient handle, after all I could always find people who would agree that that was bad. So rather than appreciate the real significance of that healing, I chose to view it as “one more step towards my freedom from homosexuality.”

Of course I did continue to have sexual fantasies, none of which ever involved a woman. And one of the things that disturbed me most during this period was what happened to my fantasies. Whereas when I was a youngster and would have a fantasy, it would last long after I’d had my orgasm; I would imagine being held tenderly and sharing of that warmth. Once I’d decided that my desires were wrong, my fantasies become completely physical; and the image of my imaginary partner was erased from my mind almost before the orgasm was over. This is a pattern I’ve seen so many times in people who harbor guilt over their sexuality – go out, get the sexual desire met, then flee.

I also had some real sexual contacts, but they were mostly one-night stands. One was with a man from Brazil who was so sweet, and wanted a deeper relationship. He called me several times and I always made up some excuse to blow him off. I wish there was some way I could reach him and apologize, and tell him that it really was not about him. But I suspect he knows that.

In university I also began taking some anthropology classes, and witnessing how sexual mores paralleled the demands of patriarchy and patrilineal inheritance was a real eye opener. I also became involved with the Buddhist Cambodian community and noticed how their idea of deity fit with how they saw and disciplined their children. All of this was slowly taking chinks out of the mental wall I’d surrounded myself with.

Finally, the conflict and loneliness became too much. I’d struggled for thirteen years and nothing at all had changed except that my sexual orientation had now become the single biggest thing in my life; in my mind it was the reason for every failure (never mind the many successful gay men out there) and every sadness (the happy ones must be just so entrenched in sin that they aren’t aware how miserable they are). “If I can get rid of this, then everything else will fall into place,” I would think, conveniently ignoring how well things had fallen into place and how I’d repeatedly backed away from opportunities. (After all success was for others, right?)

I’d come to a turning point and made a decision: I would call a Christian Science practitioner (a person who helps others through prayer) and either be done with this once and for all, or live my life as a happy gay man. I called a practitioner who was known to be very good. “Of course I’ll help you,” he said. And we began to pray together. It was the second or third day, I don’t remember which, when all of a sudden I realized with a start: “I have no idea why I’m doing this! I have no real idea why there’s anything wrong with being gay!” I had rationalized why it was wrong but never truly understood why it was, and in my desire for the acceptance and approval of others, I had completely forfeited my own power of judgment to them.

I immediately called the practitioner and our conversation went more or less like this:

- I was praying, and suddenly realized that I have no idea why loving a man is wrong.”

-- Loving a man isn’t wrong. But why the sex?”

- Why do you have sex?

-- Because it’s how we procreate.

- So you are saying that after you last child was born, you told your wife “Gee, thank God we don’t have to do that any more”?

-- Of course not!

- Then why do you have sex?

-- Because it brings us close together, it’s an expression of our love.

- That’s why I want to have it.

-- But at least there’s the idea of procreation!

- Well, since you haven’t been pumping out kids right and left, it seems that if there’s any “idea” about procreation here, it’s the idea of preventing it. Are you telling me it’s okay to have sex for the joy of it only as long as we keep in mind that the rubber might break?

-- Now you’re not taking this seriously!

- No, I guess I’m not, because I don’t see that you’ve given me a reason to take it seriously. 

Actually I later found out that they never had any kids, and that he was himself a closeted gay man. I shouldn’t have been surprised. But just as my spirituality had continued unimpeded by my conviction that belief that gayness was wrong, so had his, and I do give him credit for helping me to see through my delusion. I even wrote him a couple years later and told him so.

For a long time after that, I had no desire to have anything to do with anything that smacked of religion. To those who are mourning the loss of their faith over this, all I can say is, “be patient, God has your answer as soon as you’re ready for it.” For me a couple years passed before I began to feel the need for a more regular spiritual practice. Going back to the Christian Science church was out of the question; I didn’t want to be somewhere where I’d have to watch my back or hide. By this point, “prayer” had ceased to have any ritual attached to it; it was about trusting. I felt that the desire for spirituality, coupled with the trust that God knew my needs before even I did, was enough. And so it was; a friend in Australia sent me a book by a local author who had had his own struggle between sexuality and Christian Science. I wrote to him, and we began corresponding. I thought, “if there was ever some personality I’d love to have lunch with some day, it would be him.” A few weeks later he wrote and let me know that he would be in Vancouver in a month, and if I had the time, would I like to come up and have lunch together? I did, and we had a wonderful conversation about our experiences that left me more convinced than ever before that I didn’t have to be afraid to trust God.

Later I put that desire out in the form of prayer once more, and that week I had conversations with four different people in completely different contexts, who seemed to share my spiritual views. It turned out that they all went to the Church of Religious Science, a congregation which embraced gay people. I went for several weeks in a row, and though I knew from the start that I wouldn’t become a member (oddly enough I didn’t find the spirituality as radical as I liked it!), it served as a sort of affirmation that it was perfectly all right to pray, listen, and trust my own answer without holding it up to someone else’s opinion for approval. I love that they’re there, and I usually stop by at least once when I’m back in Seattle.

I can’t say that it was all rosy after that. Now that I felt free to be part of the gay community, I found that gay bars and clubs were not places I felt at home in. More importantly, now that gayness could no longer serve as my smokescreen for the real issues in my life, there they were, staring me in the face, demanding to be dealt with. I had many more experiences, some of them painful, which allowed/forced me to face my fears and the self-hatred that lay beneath them. There is always something new to learn, some old assumption waiting to be blown out of the water. But it’s like clearing the dirt off of a beautiful stained glass window, each time a bit more beauty is revealed; beauty that was always there, just waiting to be seen.

To sum up, I see most of what passes for religion as little more than the formalization of cultural values, fears and prejudices. Jesus said that it was better not to marry, to come out and be separate, even leave family for the Christ if necessary,  – and mainstream religion somehow uses the Bible to force the institution of marriage, conformity and a monolithic concept of “family values.” The Bible speaks of understanding and trust, traditional religion emphasizes blind belief. The Bible emphasize showing one’s faith by one’s works; traditional religion emphasizes blind faith as being more important than anything else. Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you;” traditional Christianity says “trust the priest, the clergy, the pope, the elders, the herd – anything but your own inner voice. And the same scenario plays out over and over and over throughout history: Anyone who has the courage or conviction to go against the culture’s entrenched ways of thought is threatened with rejection and expulsion or worse. In my mind, it was just this deadening tyranny of material, mechanical, fossilized thinking that Jesus came to destroy – to “overturn, overturn, overturn, [until] it shall be no more…” And it was for this overturning that Jesus paid the ultimate price. 

I think it’s quite significant that Jesus established no formal worship, no church dogma; he gave his followers no book. I suspect that he knew quite well that whatever he said, people would eventually twist to satisfy their own ends. Of course plenty was written and people have done just that. I’m convinced that we find what we need when we’re ready for it. I needed the experiences I had; there were plenty of alternatives but I had to be forced by my own misery to confront my assumptions. I don’t look down on anyone who still feels the need for traditional religion. Who knows, maybe it will come into my own life again, in another form. But I rather doubt it. The human mind has a tendency to cling to its assumptions and reinforce them; I've seen that this is often much more powerful than religion per se. But in that it takes those assumptions an puts them in a place that is then deemed untouchable and unquestionable, formal religion executes a double-whammy. It tends to say "come on in, let your guard down and believe, we'll offer you comfort," when what it's asking is that you forfeit the single most precious thing you have - your own capacity to comprehend and demonstrate your higher reality - and put it into the hands of others, whose motives are almost always questionable.

And yet as I look at the messages of the greatest spiritual thinkers throughout history, the thought that seems threaded through it all, glimmering through the doctrines, is this: “Come out and be yourself, God/Mind/Infinite Consciousness is right where you are, infinitely conscious and active, and is sufficient.”