At the age of forty-two, after living publicly as a lesbian since the age of eighteen, I finally agreed with God that the homosexual lifestyle was immoral. It was end of a long and arduous detour from the path I started on as a child.
I was raised in a tiny Kansas town of 102 people. The town had one church—Methodist—and one summer Bible camp—Baptist. The Baptist minister came to town every Tuesday morning to lead a Bible study for the women of the town. As a young child of five and six, I couldn’t wait for Tuesday mornings. I sat at the table with the adults, reading and discussing the Bible passages of the day. I started attending Bible camp at age eight and attended every session except the all-boys one, when they made me go home. My mom says that I was in love with Jesus from an early age.
I was blessed to meet and visit with a number of missionaries at these summer camp sessions, and I felt early on that I was called to be a missionary, marry a preacher, and eventually come home from the mission field so he could pastor a church.
A burden of shame
At some point in my childhood, I developed a burden of shame. The feeling was subtle but pervasive. As I entered my teenage years, I began to struggle with questions about my sexuality. I was teased and periodically ostracized throughout my school years for being a “Jesus freak” or “holy roller” or “goodie two-shoes.” But in junior high school—perhaps it was because I was a tomboy or because I didn’t care about clothes and makeup—peers started saying that I was gay. I believe now that it was not because my peers saw something in me that I didn’t see; it was just the de rigueur hurtful label of the day. But it contributed to my growing sense of shame.
I was a vociferous reader, and during this time I discovered the soft porn of Danielle Steele and other “romance” novelists on the grocery store bookshelves. These books, in the early 1980s, were beginning to add same-sex women scenes to their storylines. I remember thinking that I could be bisexual if it wasn’t against God’s law.
Once planted, however, the seed of same-sex attraction grew into a tenacious and choking vine. Although I dated boys in high school, I was unable to bond with them. Again, hindsight is 20-20, especially when it’s a forty-year-old looking back on her teenager years, but, at the time, I believed I was unable to bond because there was something wrong with me. Recently my mom and I have discussed my lack of success with boys back then, and she thinks that I had a mind only for Jesus in my early teenage years, and boys just couldn’t compete with that.
I had awesome Christian role models—men and women who lived their Christian beliefs and loved me. I was active in both the high school and church youth groups, went to Mexico on a month-long mission trip, and attended church every Sunday morning and evening. But when the devil is whispering in your ear, it can sometimes be difficult to remember all that you’ve been taught. Unfortunately, two factors played into my failure to abide by Christian teachings.
First, I believed that I needed to keep my thoughts and struggles secret. They were embarrassing, and I was too proud to admit that I had such a huge sin in my life. Furthermore, I read in popular magazines such as Ms. and Cosmopolitan that many women fantasized about same-sex relationships or were secretly lesbian. Phil Donahue (I’m dating myself here) had women on his TV show, nearly every week it seemed, who were coming out as lesbians after twenty or thirty years of marriage, stating that they’d always been gay. I came to believe that many more women were lesbian than anyone knew.
Second, the Christian teachings I heard as a preteen and teenager were woefully mistaken. I was taught that if one were truly saved, one would not have sinful desires. If you had sinful thoughts and attractions, then you weren’t truly saved. Since I had answered any number of altar calls and asked Jesus into my heart more times than I could count, I figured that if I wasn’t truly saved by then, maybe I never would be.
Going to hell anyway
A month after high school graduation, I went to a “gay” bar with friends. The next weekend I went back alone and got picked up for a one-night stand by a woman ten years older than me. It was my first sexual experience. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but, as I understood Pentecostal and Baptist teaching, the same-sex attraction itself was a terrible sin. I figured I might as well do what I wanted, because I was going to hell anyway.
I had intense aching in my belly and my heart, but I drowned the pain with alcohol, cigarettes, and sex. That aching was shame, and I recognized it as such, but I believed that if I could just find someone to love me enough, in the right way, I would be relieved of the shame. Unfortunately, it would take me more than twenty years to discover that no creature could heal me. Once I started engaging in the gay lifestyle, my path was sealed.
There was one woman, a youth minister in our church with whom I was particularly close, who took me out to lunch three or four months after my first night in the gay bar. She spent several hours with me, but I wasn’t hearing her. My ears were blocked. My stomach was in knots, but my ears could not hear.
Most of the lesbians I knew were into New Age spirituality. Almost everyone consulted psychics, thought crystals had magical properties, and believed that they or others could “travel” through time and space in out-of-body experiences. I fell into this way of thinking, delving deeply into the pagan culture. Eventually I started calling myself a witch, apprenticed myself to a Native American shaman, and began “traveling” to other worlds.
I had many sex partners through the years, some anonymous or nearly so, others that I “dated” for a year or two. I was open to any and all new experiences, because I was seeking. I was on a quest. It was so obvious that sometimes people would ask my friends, “What is Michelle looking for?” No one knew, especially not me.
Two years after graduating from law school I got a job with a prosecutor’s office, and I had to conform to the culture of that workplace. I stopped going to gay bars, and I stopped renting porn or shopping for sex toys unless I was away in another city. I discovered that there was plenty of porn available online for free.
Search for meaning
My life was unsatisfying. I wasn’t depressed, but I did feel a powerful internal restlessness. I felt unfulfilled, and I was angry at everyone around me for not fulfilling me. Nothing helped. I’d given up on alcohol years before, quit smoking, and worked out at the gym sometimes two or more hours a day. My pagan religions were leaving me empty. I needed something more. At the time it was well-publicized that the singer Madonna was into Kabbalah, so I started exploring that. After reading twenty books on the subject and talking to practitioners on the phone, I decided that I wouldn’t be able to fully immerse myself in Kabbalah without converting to Judaism.
I began meeting with a Reform rabbi once a week. (Reform Judaism is very accepting of the homosexual lifestyle.) I met with him for more than a year, and he eventually told me that it was time to pick a date to make my conversion complete. I wanted to convert but I’d had a difficult time getting involved in the synagogue. Then my Aunt Jan died unexpectedly of heart failure. She’d beaten cancer in the 1980s, and losing her was a devastating blow to the entire extended family.
I drove to Oklahoma for the funeral. As I sat there listening to an inexperienced preacher give the eulogy, I heard a voice say, “You can’t give up Jesus.” I looked at the person seated next to me, but they gave no sign of having heard what I heard. “You can’t give up Jesus,” the voice said again. Now, I was pretty used to weird experiences—you can’t be involved in New Age, paganism, and witchcraft without being played by Satan or his minions.
The voice repeated this phrase a third time and then with a great welling up in my heart, I said to myself, “I can’t give up Jesus.” This became a phrase that I said to myself repeatedly.
I did not convert to Judaism. I began to search for a church that I could attend. Since I was still operating under the belief that I needed to find a church that would accept me as a lesbian, I was limited as to what churches I could explore. After attending services at some of these “open-minded” churches, and exploring the websites of others, I finally decided that I just didn’t want to be a member of a church that would accept me. It seemed to me, even through my worldly spectacles, that a church who would accept me would accept anyone and anything. I saw one church whose website announced it was proud to accept LGBTQ people and showed a picture of a male leather couple with their naked buttocks hanging out of leather chaps. I abandoned my search.
Why not the Catholic Church?
In recent years I had developed an abiding love of Dean Koontz books, and unbeknownst to me, had been exposed to quite a bit of Catholic theology cleverly written into the storylines of his novels. I had read Thomas Merton off and on since law school, as well as Mother Teresa and Mother Angelica. Finally, in December of 2009, a friend saw me reading a book comparing Christ and Buddha. She knew a little about my life journey, and she said, “Why don’t you try the Catholic Church?”
Why not, indeed?
I called a priest, Fr. Jim, and began meeting with him on a regular basis. In our third meeting, I told him that I wanted to be Catholic but that I was gay. Fr. Jim could not have handled the situation better. He was gentle and pastoral. I do not remember exactly what he said, but I left his office thinking that I needed to figure out what I was going to do.
I researched the Catholic position on homosexuality and discovered that being homosexual was not the sin. Acting on those attractions and feelings was the sin that separated us from God. I battled the idea that something that I was, a part of my very being, was something I would have to give up. It was as if I was left-handed and the Church was saying that being left-handed was okay but acting on it was sinful, and that I could use only my right hand.
Because I was thoroughly steeped in the Bible from birth to age eighteen, I knew about Matthew 5:30— “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell”—and Mark 9:43— “And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, to the unquenchable fire.”
It turned out to be not as much of an intellectual leap to accept the Catholic Church’s teaching on same-sex attraction as it was an emotional one. My entire adult identity was tied up with being a lesbian. Everything about me shouted “lesbian,” from the shaved head to the labrys tattoo (a double ax symbol adopted by lesbians in the 1960s and ‘70s as an identifier and symbol of solidarity) on my shoulder. I’d marched in pride parades, exhibited public displays of affection as political statements, listened to lesbian music, watched lesbian movies, and was “out” to everyone. If someone asked me “Who are you?” my first response was, “A lesbian.” Then there was the thought that I would never love or be loved again, would never have sex again.
These two hurdles are difficult for same-sex-attracted people to get over.
Called to love as Jesus loves
I’ve encountered such people on the Internet who state that they are faithful to the Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality but refuse to give up their identity. It was online in the Catholic Answers Forums that I met many of these people, and the discussions that ensued helped me solidify my own thinking. If a friend came to me and told me that she had had a long adulterous affair with someone but that she’d broken it off, I would not encourage her to tell people that she had been an adulterer. In fact, I would strongly counsel her not to identify with the sin but to pray for the grace of healing. If she went into church and insisted that her fellow parishioners acknowledge her specialness as an adulterer, she shouldn’t be surprised that people would assume that meant she was unrepentant and even proud of her sin.
As for the love objection, I came to understand that we are all called to holiness and we are all called to love as Jesus loves. We are not called to use people for our own pleasure and satisfaction, nor are we to find fulfillment and completion anywhere but from God. Because it is literally impossible for two women or two men to produce a child from their sexual interaction, the purpose of that act cannot be procreation but only pleasure. The same-sex couple is not seeking to expand their love into another life but to fill the vacuum of their own self-love. By attempting to unite physically with someone who is like oneself biologically, one is attempting to learn to love oneself.
I am not living a life of despair, and I am not getting through each day by gritting my teeth and feeling deprived. I am abundantly happy and grateful to God for my loving friends. I have an abundance of love, through the grace of God, to share with others, and I pray that God will use my life to help others heal their own woundedness. In my old life, I believed that my worth to others was found only in my willingness to have sex with them. I have learned that people—men and women—love me and find me valuable simply for who I am.
The Church needs men and women of sacrifice to love others in their emotional need so that each person can see that he or she is valuable and lovable without having to perform sexually. This wound is so prevalent in America that many people are unaware of their own internal beliefs regarding themselves and sex.
Within two or three months of my first meeting with Fr. Jim, I had broken off a sinful relationship with a woman, wholeheartedly accepted the Church’s teachings, and started RCIA. Although I have struggled with temptations, I have discovered that what I am tempted by is the emptiness of self-gratification at the expense of another person. There is nothing there for me, and certainly nothing that can compare with being in love with Jesus and the fulfillment I receive by living my life according to His plan.