A Long Introduction from a New Contributor

Even as a little girl, I loved to defy stereotypes. Gender stereotypes in particular were a lot of fun, though I suppose that comes with the territory of being a little girl who loves dinosaurs and bugs and reptiles and science in general.

Too, I always loved boys. Not like, Oh, he’s so dreamy! boys, but more like Are they really doing THAT!? Boys are so hilarious; girls would never do this kind of stuff! Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the girls around me would do dumb things like stand and talk to each other when they were supposed to be guarding second base in the gym class kickball games, or would scream and carry on for minutes about the fly that buzzed past the lunch table. In short, even before I started liking them romantically, boys had always held a certain charm for me. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always taken pride in the fact that I’ve had about as many close guy friends as close girl friends.

But don’t think that I didn’t enjoy being girly. I was some creative variation on “princess” for many a Halloween, and I thoroughly enjoyed dressing up in a fancy dress for Christmas and Easter, adorned with a corsage from my father. It’s just that there was a time and a place for everything. And besides, I delighted in seeming contradictions. (“What? That girl in the ball gown over there can burp on command louder than I can and will gladly demonstrate!?”)

Then, when puberty hit, I was just like most other preteen girls, oooing and aahing over the “hot” (read: popular and conceited but admittedly attractive) boys from a distance. After a few of these crushes, though, I realized that all the boys to whom I was attracted physically were jerks, so I put a lot less stock in that.

Not that I’d ever cared a whole lot about the looks department. From childhood, I was feminist enough to want to spare my future husband from having to measure up to an impossible Prince Charming ideal in my head, so I never made one. Never dreamed about my wedding, my husband, my family. (Well, not until college, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.)

I dated a few guys in high school. Each relationship was different but not unexpected – I had the cute best friend-turned-boyfriend (our relationship was little different from our friendship), the gangsta with whom I had nothing in common (except that we were both good kissers – but maybe I should’ve taken the hint when I had to take his hand out of my bra twice on our first date), the long-term high school boyfriend. Over the year that I dated that last one, I gradually lost touch with my other guy friends and spent more time with his (I went to an all-girls high school, so I had to go out of my way to spend time with guys); consequently, when I entered my senior year of high school a single girl, I didn’t have any interaction with guys whatsoever.

Gradually my circle of friends shifted; I spent less time with my classmates and more time with my sports teammates and fellow actresses. One of them confessed after several months that she’d only liked one guy in her life, but always girls, always women.

This took a little getting used to. I’d been raised Catholic, so gay relationships were a no-go, but most important was to love and not judge (because everyone sins; it’s just how we sin that’s different). Up ‘till this point, I’d read up on arguments for both sides of the homosexuality debate, and it seemed to me that both sides had good, solid arguments, so who was I to choose one?

Eventually, she admitted she was attracted to me, but I was quite used to guy friends having unrequited crushes on me, so what difference did it make this this was a girl friend who had such feelings? Well, over a few months of soccer practices and play rehearsals nearly back-to-back with this girl, we started “playing games.” It started as the old isn’t it funny when we pretend to be lesbians? look at the guys’ mouths water as they watch us! shtick, but quickly progressed to how far can I push before I make you pleasantly uncomfortable... and before you know it, we’d spent the night together in what was clearly either a one-night stand or the beginning of a relationship.

Well, my Catholic upbringing had succeeded in impressing upon me the importance of sexual acts, so I didn’t like the one-night stand idea, and I didn’t want to have to stop our little games, because I was quite good at them. I wasn’t attracted to her any less than I’d been to my previous boyfriends; in fact, I’d always found the female form beautiful. Besides, a man doesn’t know what a woman wants; you have to make such efforts to communicate with him, and it so taxing on both of you. On the other hand, I could walk into a room and give a significant glance to a woman, and she would know exactly what I was desiring or feeling. Besides, I read somewhere that Vatican II said to follow your conscience over objective teaching, and that was enough: we were dating.

It was a tumultuous time, inside of me. I was absolutely terrified that I was doing the wrong thing, and consequently clung to it more tightly. (My parents even brought me to confession once, and it was my only experience of imperfection contrition: not so much sorrow for sin as terror of going to hell for it.) I told my parents after a week, thinking that since they were great parents who supported me, they would support my every decision. They did what they were supposed to do, to love the sinner and hate the sin, to support me but not that lifestyle, but I felt completely rejected and pulled back from them entirely.

The last few months of my high school career (and the summer following) are a blur. When she and I were intimate, I couldn’t help but think to myself, This is good, but imagine how good what she’s doing now would feel if it were a guy doing that! I knew from experience that, while the things she did produced quite a charge, it was nothing compared to the charge of even lesser actions from the previous boyfriend. (I was lucky: I was wired right.)

Long before we broke up, I knew it would be just a fling (though a months-long one) and I’d never date another girl. But we made the most of every moment, even hiding away in places as absurd as under the blankets with other friends in the room to have our moments.

But I wasn’t about to enter college with a girlfriend, and especially not the out-of-state conservative Catholic university at which I was quite excited to begin my college career. Going there was really a turning point: the people I met and the things I learned while I was there opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe those people against gay relationships did know what they were talking about. Slowly but surely, I considered this more and more thoroughly, until I reached a point where I wanted to go to a priest and confess this relationship as a sin.

Unfortunately, confession turned out to be exactly what i’d feared: I knew in my head that I was forgiven, but I didn’t feel it in my heart. But I’d met these people who called themselves “charismatic,” and there were two things that stood out about them: 1) They were really serious about living their lives radically for Christ, in a way I’d never encountered before, and 2) They had this idea that the dumb things we did in our lives left us with baggage that we carried around, and if we invited Him in, the Lord would come and heal us – in His own time of course, but He’d take that baggage away from us and free us from those worries and insecurities. That sounded cool. So I told God He could heal me of this relationship if He wanted.

One night, He took me up on that offer. Through receiving His Body and Blood in the Eucharist, and later in the evening through nearly two hours of prayer with four of the aforementioned charismatics, He removed from my heart, mind, and soul all the baggage that I’d accumulated from my relationship (friendly and romantic) with her.

But every healing has a moment and a process. My process began with the assurance that, though I had homosexual sins in my past and none of my peers did, that didn’t make me categorically different from them. They had other sins in their pasts that I’d never come in contact with, some of which were much worse than what I’d done! But I was different, my actions and experiences had set me apart. After a while, I got over that, and began to accept that what truly mattered was that I was a person, not that I was a person with a history including homosexuality.

That was a hard lesson! Once I finally learned it, though, the Lord’s work in my heart changed. True, I was not categorically different from any of my friends. But the sins I had chosen had left a different kind of mark on my psyche and my heart. One relationship does not a disposition make; there had been other things askew, dating back to childhood, that needed to be corrected in order for me to be truly healed.

That semester, I took a class on Christian Marriage and learned the philosophical and theological reasons why homsexual relationships are wrong (a summary is linked in the sidebar). For the first time, I read a book that changed my life: The Homosexual Person by Fr. John Harvey (founder of Courage, linked in the sidebar). This book unpacked the psychological underpinnings of homosexuality, and his words still ring true for every single homosexual person I have ever known. I found a few other people who were in various stages of dealing with same-sex attraction or relationships, and we worked together to iron out what God was doing with us and how to leave behind the bad from what we’d done and felt, and move forward towards the good and the true. Finally, I spent a lot of time with one group of normal guys (I have often been the one woman among men), and learned through them that men don’t really mind most of the silly female stereotypes I’d hated so much. For instance: it’s not a big deal if a woman owns thirty pairs of shoes, so long as she doesn’t have to mortgage the house to pay for them.

I read a book on Christian femininity that semester, Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge. It didn’t touch me at all, because they spoke to childhood dreams of being the princess or the bride, and playdates where the girl is the damsel in distress. Not that we ever played that sort of game when I was a kid, but I would’ve been hard-pressed to have willingly sat there and waited as the princess. I totally would’ve gone with the more exciting adventurous part (actually, I probably would’ve volunteered to be the bad guy. The bad guy parts were always more fun to pretend). But at the same time I began to see the positive side to some of the quirky things women did. No longer did women go to the bathroom in groups because they were too insecure to go on their own (though that did happen); more often, though, they went to express candid observations about the evening, and even to keep the guys wondering just a little bit (which they kind of enjoyed). And besides, if I missed some great joke or something at the table while we were gone, it wasn’t the end of the world.

I suppose what I’m trying to express is that I was relearning what it meant to be a woman, letting go of a lot of the baggage I’d just heaped upon myself because I saw the world as unfair and insecure. When I reread Captivating a year or so later, I found that I’d grown enough that I could relate to heteronormative Christian feminine spirituality. I found that those desires I didn’t remember as a kid had emerged late (like, in college).

I’ve been at this too long, and the later healing bits are always the hardest part to write; I’m rambling like nobody’s business! The point, I suppose, is that there’s hope. Maybe I wasn’t as firmly entrenched in the gay lifestyle as you are. Maybe you’ve experienced only same-sex attractions, which I was pretty well spared. But there are others with stories like mine. Others who have been there, and are there no longer. Others who have found in Christ a peace unlike anything they’ve ever known, and One who understands their suffering and bears it with them.

There is hope. You don’t have to choose this just because it’s what you feel. The road won’t be easy, but it will be entirely worth it.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, my physical attractions to men have become much more frequent. One day, I will date a man who is positively hot, and I won’t feel like a liar when I tell him that. :)