As a little boy, I remember sitting next to my father in church listening to sermons of how prayer would fix everything. Just ask and you will be given.
I would watch when my father would read from the bible to us. He was the epitome of what I thought a man should be. He was killed in a car crash when I was 14. Helpless I stood watching his coffin being lowered into a dark grave and as every shovel of soil thudded upon his coffin I asked Jesus why he had taken my father away from us. But Jesus was silent. Jesus didn’t want to talk to me.
I had heard at church and school what an abomination homosexuals are in the eyes of the Christian god. I thought I was being punished because of my homosexual thoughts. I wasn’t worthy of being a child of god and that is why he punished me by taking my father away from us. It was all my fault.
I started praying for forgiveness and promised this god that I will fight my homosexuality like alcoholics have to fight the bottle.
But Jesus didn’t want me. No matter how hard I prayed for this homosexuality to go away, the lonelier the road became strewn with rejection from all. I was forced by society to hide my homosexuality as deep as I possibly could. I used to stand at teenage parties and admire the other boys becoming men making out with girls.
I would go home after a teenage party and start praying all over again. I thought if I prayed long enough Jesus would eventually forgive me for my thoughts and cure me.
But it never happened. Jesus didn’t want to know about me and so the agonising road to adulthood started. A deep knowing that I wasn’t worthy of being alive. I hated my homosexuality and I hated myself.
I spent countless nights wishing if only I could have my father back so I can ask him what I needed to do to fix myself. There are actually no words to describe the hopeless feeling of wanting to talk to a dead person and they are never coming back again.
It was a sombre Monday some 7 years ago that I decided to end the agony. I was absolutely exhausted of fighting this world about my homosexuality. I stopped going to church at university because I couldn’t face myself in the perfect image Jesus wanted me to be. I stopped playing rugby because no matter how many goals I would score, I remained what I was.
I managed to steal my grandmother’s sleeping tablets, bought a garden hose and some vodka. It was late at night, probably past 10 when I arrived at the graveyard and parked my car close to my father’s grave. I swallowed the pills down with the vodka and inserted the garden hose into the car’s exhaust. I turned on some serene music and sat back in my car seat slowly drifting away hoping I would sleep before I smell the carbon monoxide.
It was glorious. At last all of this living hell would end. The queer is going to die.
I don’t know who would come to a graveyard at that time of night, but someone found me and I woke up in hospital a few days later being told how “lucky” I am to be alive.
It was the most difficult path I had to walk. Waking up and having to face this straight world all over again. The only way I could cope at the time was to bury my head in my books at university. For every minute I studied, it was a minute less thinking about my unworthiness.
To help myself cope with my unworthiness I started exploring religion. If none of my desperate prayers were answered then is there a god at all? My deep desire to be cured had some pretty sincere motives and this almighty god that can fix everything doesn’t seem to come to light.
I couldn’t and didn’t talk about my homosexuality to anybody so I had to find answers for myself and this is how the spiritual journey to the centre of my soul began.
I started looking at Christians with a whole different eye. The hard reality is that they are all people filled with hatred and prejudice. They use Christianity like a weapon to slay others. Testament to this is the last homosexual article written by a very deluded judgemental man on here.
To me Christianity and probably every other religion has become a label people hang around them saying to the world how false they are. It is synonymous with living a fake life. It is in fact no different from me running around the streets trying to pretend I’m straight.
I will die wishing I was a straight man, but have now at least got to a point in life where I have the guts to say I’m a homosexual. I might not like my sexual orientation, but after many years of praying to a nothing I have now accepted myself.
There is nothing out there that listens to prayers. Nothing at all.
I know.
So the next time you read that we homosexuals choose this lifestyle, know that it comes from a person that hasn’t got a clue about anything in life, probably not even his own sexuality
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