**Disclaimer (added in 2021): When I wrote this blog post in 2017, I used the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual” to refer to people who were open to being in same-sex relationships. I was not intending to make a statement about whether or not I believe Christians should apply these labels to themselves. To read the following as a stance on that particular debate is to misunderstand my original intent.**

(Because I come from an Evangelical Christian perspective, I am assuming an interpretation of scripture that views homosexual behavior as sinful. I do not intend to engage in a theological debate concerning whether God condones homosexual behavior.)

I’m not gay. I’m not lesbian. I’m not bisexual.

I’m same-sex attracted.

I have chosen same-sex attraction as the next conversation to tackle because I felt that it was time. It’s time we talk about it, and it’s time I tell my story.

When I was 12, I found myself in the middle of a battle that I did not understand and had never asked for. I was experiencing a romantic attraction to a female friend, and I was so terrified of what I was thinking and feeling that I convinced myself that it wasn’t real. I convinced myself that I had simply misunderstood my desire for female friendship. I had just come out of a period of loneliness after being transplanted into a new city, and I needed friends. I really wanted friends. That’s all it was. Satan just wanted to mess with my head a little bit, but I knew the truth. I was straight. I didn’t want to be gay, and if I liked girls, I was gay, right?

I went on in this state of denial for 6 years. Each time I felt myself getting too attached to a girl, I just reminded myself (and others) that I was “as straight as they come.” I liked boys, and they liked me, and so I dated a lot of them. And as long as I liked boys, I was straight, right?

When I started college, I was forced out of denial. I found myself attracted to someone who I was spending an exceptional amount of time with, and I was angry. I was angry that my narrative for what I was experiencing was falling to pieces. It had been working for me for 6 years, but I was no longer convinced that what I’d been telling myself all those years was true. I was angry that God would keep letting me feel these things that I so adamantly did not want to feel. I prayed angry prayers at least once a day. “God, I keep telling you that I don’t want this. Why won’t you just take it away? Why would you let me keep sinning when I keep telling you I don’t want to?” I wasn’t in denial anymore, but I swore to myself that this was the secret I would take to the grave, and I believed myself.

God answered my prayers in far different ways than I wanted at the time. He got that person out of my life, and it was painful, but also inexplicably liberating.

At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I began to break under the weight of shame. In a whirlwind of equal parts fear and courage, I told my closest friend (and roommate at the time). I was shaking and scared, and trying to explain my way around it so that she would not be scared away from friendship with me. I thought that she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore, or that she would start treating me differently. I was convinced that she was going to be uncomfortable around me. Quietly, patiently, she listened to me stumble through my confession. And then she opened her mouth to speak.

Her response rocked my world.

“Megan. Lust is lust. Lust is a sin, whether you’re lusting after a woman or a man. You’ve done the right thing by not acting on your feelings.”

What?! But surely God would rather me look lustfully at a man than a woman. Surely. But that’s not what my friend said. Instead of shaming me for feeling a desire for women, or trying to fix this flaw in me, she applauded me for living faithfully through my same-sex desires. And since then, I have had so many more people respond with the same grace, including my fiancé. I am surrounded with a support system that has only been encouraging and loving. I had been beating up on myself for nearly 7 years, fighting tooth and nail against my same-sex attraction. The problem was not that I was same-sex attracted, it was that I had been fighting on my own. I had felt like I was fighting by myself against the whole world, God included, but God wanted to fight this battle with me. That’s why he sent his Son: to fight the battle with me, and when I’m not strong enough to keep going, he picks me back up again. That’s why God intentionally put the right people in my life at just the right time: he knew that I couldn’t fight alone.

The shame had built up for 7 years, and that much shame doesn’t go away overnight. It has been a process, and there is still shame, but I am at peace. I know that this is likely my reality for the long-term, and I am at peace. I have made a conscious decision to live faithfully through my same-sex attraction, just like all Christians are called to consciously live faithfully despite their own temptations, whatever they may be. I choose to find my identity in Christ rather than my sexual orientation.

I’ve been in the church my whole life, but I never heard anyone differentiate between same-sex attraction (SSA) and a gay identity until I was 19. Many don’t, and some have so much trouble reconciling their faith with their SSA that they leave the church and adopt a gay identity. In Mark Yarhouse’s book, Homosexuality and the Christian, Yarhouse says that the gay community views SSA Christians as “their people,” and they feel that they’ve failed them, “sending them to a group that, in their minds, took advantage of them and misrepresented research to the detriment of sexual minorities.” In response to this, Yarhouse says,

“It got me thinking about why the church doesn’t lead with the thought and attitude that Christians who struggle with homosexuality are our people. Think about that for a second: sexual minorities in the church, by which I mean believers who experience same-sex attraction, are our people. Framing the issue this way can lead to greater compassion as the church tries to find ways to provide support and encouragement to those in our own communities who would benefit from it.”

Not surprisingly, SSA is something that typically is realized during adolescence, and the shame begins very early. Adolescents don’t know how to think or talk about homosexuality, and often the conversations among young adolescents are very degrading. They use the word “gay” to refer to something or someone that they don’t like, and the young person experiencing SSA internalizes this. Can we blame them?

The question I want to ask of you is not whether or not we should talk about this with teenagers, but how we should talk about it. How can we help teenagers understand the difference between SSA and adopting a gay identity? How can we help teenagers with SSA understand what living faithfully through SSA looks like? How can we help the SSA individuals in our youth groups and schools feel less marginalized, and more like our people?

While I welcome your feedback on this issue, please keep in mind that this is a sensitive subject to many who may read this blog. Please be mindful of treating our stories with dignity.

**Note: I reserve the right to use comments left on this blog as part of my research for this project and any further related projects**

This past week, I’ve been reflecting on what seems to have been a critical experience in the formation of a lot of people’s understanding of their sexuality as teenagers. It happens in schools (particularly Christian schools, I would assume, but correct me if I’m wrong) and youth groups, and it is so well-intentioned, yet so damaging to many. Teachers or youth leaders separate the guys and the girls, and male teachers/leaders talk to the guys about pornography and masturbation, and female teachers/leaders talk to the girls about modesty. Let me outline some problems that I’ve seen with this, both from my own personal experience and from others I’ve talked to.

***DISCLAIMER***

I’m not trying to make truth claims, and I’m not intending to over-generalize the effects that I’ve observed. I’m just presenting some thoughts I have formulated. I’m not a boy, so some of my points concerning boys were based on inferences I’ve made over the years. Feel free to (respectfully) correct me if you think my views are inaccurate.

(1) The girls often walk away feeling ashamed of their bodies.

When we tell girls they need to cover up because it’s their responsibility to keep the guys’ lustful eyes in check, we’re encouraging them to be ashamed of their bodies and the message is often interpreted as “your body causes your brothers to stumble, so it’s bad and you should cover it up.”

(2) The girls begin to view men as dangerous brutes who are incapable of controlling themselves.

When girls are told that it’s their responsibility to keep guys from lusting, they are given the idea that guys cannot control themselves, so it’s up to the girls to carry that weight on their own. This idea undermines girls’ abilities to respect guys as humans who are capable of being decent. I experienced this with my fiancé, and even now, over three years into our relationship, I still find myself occasionally overcompensating for his (imagined) inability to treat me in a respectable manner. He’s never given me any reason not to trust him to treat me well, but my past experiences trained me to see him in a negative light.

(3) The guys begin to view themselves as dangerous brutes who are incapable of controlling themselves.

Not only are the girls’ views of guys negatively impacted, but the guys also are given the message that they have little control over their sex drives. They begin to see themselves in the same negative light as the girls. This may lead to justification of sexual sin, because they think that their sexually driven actions are out of their control, or “normal.” This also may lead to compounded shame because they feel out of control and they want to be in control.

(4) Talking only to guys about pornography and masturbation perpetuates the false idea that those are exclusively guys’ problems.

This is one lie that continues to astound me. When we lead girls to think that pornography and masturbation are guys’ problems, we heap truckloads of shame on the girls when they are struggling. So many girls struggle with this, and yet, it’s never been something we talk about. Covenant Eyes has a statistics pack that is a downloadable PDF on their website. It says that in 2008, more than 560 college students responded to an online survey. The results were astonishing — the report states that according to the survey, 93% of boys and 62% of girls were exposed to pornography before the age of 18 (www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats/). The report provides pages of information, and I would encourage you to take a look. 

This is also a problem for the guys, because it leads them to normalize pornography and masturbation. I once dated someone who tried to downplay his pornography use by telling me that I would be hard pressed to find a guy who didn’t watch porn. Guys try to justify it because everyone does it, and they are almost expected to. Girls also begin to normalize it, as I did, and they expect that every guy they date watches porn. This is a perspective that is hard to change.

(5) Talking to the girls and guys separately causes division where there should be unity.

We have established by now that we are all sexually broken. We are all impacted in some way by sexual sin, and we can’t combat that sin effectively if we are not combating it in unity. The separate conversations make teenagers feel like it’s inappropriate or taboo to talk to members of the opposite sex about these issues. Our battle against sexual sin should not be a battle we are fighting alone. Sure, dressing modestly is important, but how can we level the playing field? I think we need to show teenagers that it’s not exclusively the girls’ responsibility to keep the guys from stumbling, but it’s also not exclusively the guys’ responsibility to keep themselves in check. After the separated conversations when I was in high school, classmates would make jokes about it. Girls would mock the teachers who emphasized the importance of not “causing our brothers to stumble.” The girls and the guys felt really awkward because we didn’t know how to talk to each other. The conversation had been initiated separately, so there was no room for it to become a joint conversation. It may be awkward, but talking about pornography with high schoolers in a co-ed setting does not seem like something to avoid just because it can sometimes be uncomfortable.

That being said, I’d like to hear about your experiences! Here are some discussion questions to guide your responses. Don’t feel limited by these questions — I just want to hear your thoughts!

1. Did you experience something like this? What happened? How did it shape your view of yourself and the opposite sex?
2. Do you see any particular benefits to having this (initial) conversation take place with the girls and the guys in separate settings? Do you see any other problems with it that I did not mention?
3. What solutions would you suggest as an alternative to this method?
4. My perspective is sorely limited as a female. Guys — are my inferences correct? What kinds of effects (good or bad) do you think these types of conversations had on you or your friends? What was the tone like and how was the message interpreted?

**Note: I reserve the right to use comments left on this blog as part of my research for this project and any further related projects**

While there are a lot of problems that stem from the purity movement, and the resulting purity paradigm, I want to start with a more basic issue. This is a problem that has particularly impacted females, although males have played a role as well, and I would love to hear feedback from both sides. In following with the purpose of this project, I will only give a very brief introduction to this first issue that I want to discuss. I could say so much more, but I want to leave room for others to talk! So, here it is…

We have a tendency to unintentionally communicate the idea that sex is dirty. It is crucial to understand that our sexual nature is not a mistake. It is part of the way that God created us [on purpose!]. To talk with our teenagers as if sex is something nasty or even just uncomfortable to talk about brazenly disrespects one of God’s very good parts of his good creation, and I believe that is what the purity movement’s well-intentioned, but damaging emphasis on purity has done.

In her book, Faithful: A Theology of Sex, Beth Felker Jones says, “In this paradigm, sexual purity turns the body into a commodity.” The purity movement put an emphasis on virginity as a most valuable possession. The terms “purity” and “virginity” seem to have become nearly synonymous; if you “lost your virginity,” you “lost your purity,” and neither was something you could recover. Virginity was a commodity to be clung to, and once you lost it, you could never get it back. Sure, there is truth to this — once someone has sex for the first time, they technically can never get their virginity back. The problem here is that the emphasis is being placed so strongly on the value that purity carries, and that value transfers to the holder of the purity. The one who remains pure has value, and once he/she loses that purity, he/she loses their value.

Let me give just one example of how this message was delivered. I remember hearing the metaphor that each time you date a guy, you give a piece of your heart away. If you date too many guys, when you finally find your husband, you will only have scraps left to give him — you can no longer give him your whole self. The fundamental problem with this is that it leaves no room for Christ’s redemptive work in our lives. It has made many people, girls in particular, feel unworthy of their spouse’s love because of mistakes they have made.

One long-term problem that this message has created is that when two Christians get married after being steeped in this purity message, it can make for a difficult adjustment into married life. How are they supposed to go from it being the most wrong, dirty thing they could do to being the most right, beautiful thing that they are supposed to do… all in one day? I think it comes down to intentions. Sure, we should abstain from sex if we are unmarried, but what is our motive behind abstaining?

This brings us to the discussion questions that I want to raise. I want to hear your responses and thoughts, and they don’t have to be specifically answering these questions, but here are a few starting points:

1. How can we emphasize the importance of saving sex for marriage while simultaneously avoiding devaluing and objectifying teenagers based on their purity? How can we balance the message that “sex is good” with the message of “don’t do it yet”?
2. In what ways has this purity concept been explained to you? Have you heard other metaphors similar to the one I heard? Have you experienced conversations that helped you to build a stronger, more biblically rich foundation for understanding your sexuality and reasons for abstaining from sex until marriage? Or, on the other hand, have you heard damaging rhetoric that led to an unhealthy view of yourself and your sexuality?
3. How can we make this conversation more equal between guys and girls, so that the brunt of the pressure is not being put on girls?

**Note: I reserve the right to use comments left on this blog as part of my research for this project and any further related projects**