Pride month is coming to an end and I wanted to close it out with a piece I wrote about Coming Out. I’ve read it aloud at different events and every time I do, I feel the same sense of release and freedom. Here’s hoping one day “Coming Out” won’t even have to be a thing...

I’ll tell you a story. Four years ago I sat at the end of my chair at seven at night. I was tired, no exhausted, desperate, fearful and as hopeless as I have ever felt in this false world I built around me and played a make believe character in, and I knew. I don’t know how I hadn’t known before. Maybe I had. Maybe I had always known. But right then I knew for sure.

It was a lie.

It was more clear to me in that moment than it had ever been before. I knew it without a doubt in my mind. I knew it and nothing and no one could ever change my mind.

It was a lie.

I did all the things you should do in that situation. I bent my head and covered my face and prayed. I prayed and I prayed and then I prayed some more. Tears streamed down my face, dripping on my shoes. The harder I prayed the more I knew.

It was a lie.

I had come to this place, this holy sanctuary three years earlier, searching, pleading for healing. I’d spent 27 months on my knees in earnest prayerful repentance. I’d sat in circles surrounded on both sides by sexual addicts, pedophiles and the sexually broken searching for sexual healing. I’d listened for the voice of god to speak to me and fix my brokenness. To make me whole, make me straight. I’d sung songs, read verses, prayed endless prayers and nothing. But I tell you that night as my tears ran off the sides of my shoes and dripped to the floor, I knew.

It was a lie.

There was no amount of prayer or repentance that could make me straight. There was no sickness to heal in me. There was no sin to forgive. I was a lesbian not a sexual deviant, a lesbian. Everything they were telling me was false.

 It was a lie.

Today I know as I did that night that I am whole just as I am. I’m not broken. I’ve heard a great deal about reparative therapy and trust me when I say it doesn’t work. Whatever else you read, whatever else you hear, remember this, it is not true. You cannot fix a homosexual and make them straight.

IT IS A LIE.