Change?

Some of my gay friends ask me why I got married. I always respond that it was because I was trying desperately to change. I thought that it would fix me. I wanted to be straight…because this is what society and the church wanted.

On December 12, 1982 as we celebrated our first anniversary in the place we spent our honeymoon, I had a long conversation with “Lovey”.

“I think I’m gay,” I blurted out.

After a moment, “Lovey” said that as a team, we could fix this. We would pray. We would fast. We’d look into those ex-gay ministries.

So with renewed excitement we proceeded to enjoy our celebration of one year together.

Upon our return, I began the long and tortured process of trying to change. I soon found myself in the midst of an ex-gay ministry that practiced the 12 Steps of Homosexuals Anonymous.

Don’t laugh.

It is a real group. Now, over twenty something years later, the 12 steps have increased to 14

For years I carried the little card with me in my wallet and would recite the steps over and over again. It became my mantra.

Here they are…I’m reprinting all 14 steps from its current Web site:

· We admitted that we were powerless over our homosexuality and that our emotional lives were unmanageable.

· We came to believe the love of God, who forgave us and accepted us in spite of all that we are and have done.

· We learned to see purpose in our suffering, that our failed lives were under God's control, who is able to bring good out of trouble.

· We came to believe that God had already broken the power of homosexuality and that He could therefore restore our true personhood.

· We came to perceive that we had accepted a lie about ourselves, an illusion that had trapped us in a false identity.

· We learned to claim our true reality that as humankind, we are part of God's heterosexual creation and that God calls us to rediscover that identity in Him through Jesus Christ, as our faith perceives Him.

· We resolved to entrust our lives to our loving God and to live by faith, praising Him for our new unseen identity, confident that it would become visible to us in God's good time.

· As forgiven people free from condemnation, we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, determined to root out fear, hidden hostility, and contempt for the world.

· We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs and humbly asked God to remove our defects of character.

· We willingly made direct amends wherever wise and possible to all people we had harmed.

· We determined to live no longer in fear of the world, believing that God's victorious control turns all that is against us into our favor, bringing advantage out of sorrow and order from disaster.

· We determined to mature in our relationships with men and women, learning the meaning of a partnership of equals, seeking neither dominance over people nor servile dependency on them.

· We sought thorough confident praying, and the wisdom of Scripture for an ongoing growth in our relationship with God and a humble acceptance of His guidance for our lives.

· Having had a spiritual awakening, we tried to carry this message to homosexual people with a love that demands nothing and to practice these steps in all our lives' activities, as far as lies within us. - copyright 2001 HA Fellowship

Although I did everything I could possibly do to “heal” myself from this “horrible” sin, I found that most of the meetings associated with this group I attended were more about how the folks “fell” during the previous time period and all the sexual encounters they had had that weren’t pleasing to God. So after a long while, it became apparent that these people weren’t really “changed”…they had merely learned to try to “repress” their feelings.

Please note, I'm only reporting from my own personal experience here and do not mean to portray this for every HA chapter.

After spending at least a year actively involved in this group, I began to slowly realize that I was as I was made: a normal, red-blooded gay American male.

It was time for me to leave this group.