"The cross in the closet"

This is a most interesting story. 

A straight conservation Christian in the US has spent a year pretending to be gay to see what sort of issues they face, and has written a book about it released today I think.


 
I'm behind in my reading, haven't hardly picked up my current book, it happens when I've been depressed for a while. I thought about buying this one and put it in the line of next books to read. I dunno if I could handle all the talk about God and everything though. I mean I don't even believe Jesus existed at all, so I'd probably just be skipping over a lot of the book. Not worth bothering really.

However it's interesting to see the news articles about it all. He had been taught from a young age that gays were evil, the enemy, and pretty much had horns coming out of their heads or some shit (fuck knows what he'd have thought about an HIV+ gay). It was a challenge for him to even go into a gay bar as he was so repulsed by them, sad. 

Eventually he came to see that gay people are just people like the rest of the world, and in fact there were no forehead horns at all. Some of the stuff he went through was pretty intense.

"There was always an elephant in the room," he said. "I snooped in my mother's journal one day after I had come out and she'd written, 'I'd rather have found out from a doctor that I had terminal cancer than have a gay son.'" more

For the most part I was accepted, but my family operated off the Christian cliché "love the sinner, hate the sin," so while they didn't disown me, it was hard for them to accept me as a gay man. It wasn't long before I realized that "love the sinner, hate the sin" is almost as insidious as being rejected outright. How truly comfortable can you be sharing the ups and downs of your life with a family that doesn't know how to respond to your orientation? The answer is not very. It was a major eye-opener for me! more 

It's interesting to see how living in their world made him have much more empathy and compassion for gays. I wish more Christians could have that sort of outlook.