I want to join a conservative Christian Church which promotes abstinence and prayer as a solution to homosexuality. However, I do so with a degree of guilt [my motivations are suspect]. I delayed coming out until I had left the house at 19. Coming from a strict clergy family, my parents were devastated and broken by the news. Over the subsequent months my mother suffered a nervous breakdown and my father put on a great deal of weight and receives regular counseling. However, it is not to appease them and their fears of promiscuity, AIDS and eternal suffering that I have decided to return to Church, but for a man. I have fallen for a closeted gay man within the ranks of the Church. It is with Catholic guilt that I have decided to approach him, strike up a friendship and make my intentions known. Am I a sinner?
Isn’t it possible to meet this man without returning to the church? You live in a fairly large city, Belfast. There are more readily available men. You obviously don’t feel guilty about being gay or you’d enter the church with a motivation to change (which isn’t possible), not with motivation of meeting a man of the church and to let your ‘intentions’ be known. It sounds to me as if the question is “why am I trying to make my life more difficult and miserable?”.
I don’t think you’re thinking of the good of this person you say you’ve fallen for. He won’t thank you much less love you for rubbing his nose in things he’s choosing not to face yet.
Begin with a friendship. If he truly is closeted, he needs all the gay friends he can get. It may only be through experiencing the world through the eyes of another, that he’ll realize his own situation and begin to come to terms with himself.
Be gentle. Be his friend first. See what comes of it.
I wish you both well.
I really hope you read this. I was the secret occasional “something” of a priest 23 years my elder when I was 19. Now I’m 24. Don’t do it. I also wanted to become a priest, for him. I loved him back then. Now, you may have noticed I defined myself as his “something”. He felt so guilty for his feelings over me that he never allowed me to think of me+him as an “us”, as “boyfriends”, as a romance, as a couple, he stopped being sexual with me except when he gave in to “sin” (he called me “sin” once, and also to his confessor I had this alias), he made me responsible afterwards for his slips and always made me see myself as manipulative, seductive, I became everything he asked of me and left friends, left my style, changed my hair, changed my voice, my manners- he told me how to walk, which gestures he didn’t like. And worst of all: I saw myself as impaired by my homosexuality, according to Church teachings (explained in Ratzinger`s- the actual Pope, Benedict- “LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE PASTORAL CARE OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS”) where it basically says “hate the sin but not the sinner”. I really hope you don’t do it. Feel free to contact me, as someone who’s been through it.
You shouldn’t deny yourself a full life (including sex exploration and enjoyment) like the one heterosexuals enjoy for granted only for being gay. I know that is why they say is right, but at least for me, I decided God would want me to live fully. God is loving and he made you gay. He accepts you gay, don’t be confused by Commandments or Bible teachings with a human origin, prone to be faulty.
I’m from Londonderry/Derry, and…well, I shouldn’t have to say it, but I’ve seen cases of this happening. I advise you not to. There is no way that this can end well, and you will be denying yourself a fuller life with people who will not put you through what this will.