Got a question that would scandalize your group chat? That’s what this column is for. Go Ask Alex is an anonymous space for queer readers to ask the questions they’re afraid to ask anyone else — about sex, love, life, and everything in between. It’s judgment-free and completely anonymous.
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I don't want to be gay. If I act on being gay, I'll go to hell. A short life of meaningless sex and a temporary relationship (meaningless in the sense that one of us will die and the relationship will end) is not worth all the pain that will come after.
I want a man to love me, but I can't have one because it's an abomination, so my only choices are to be lonely and celibate or try to love a woman and believe that God will change me. I don't know what to do, I'm so scared of being myself because it's wrong. I want to be good and go to heaven, but I also want someone to love me in the way I want.
I know that God doesn't love practicing gays and that gays don't go to heaven. I don't know what to do.
Hey,
I'm so glad you wrote. I'm proud of you and, in a way that I hope doesn't come off as too strong, I want to show you love, because I felt and thought the same things for years of my life and wish someone, even a stranger online, had helped me through it.
Writing that message and sending it took real courage. It forced you to do the hardest part: Confess a truth about yourself out loud, at least to the page, and share it with someone. I'm sure even writing it was terrifying, and I hope you know you're in safe hands.
I am not a theologian. I am not a pastor. I won't pretend to know with certainty what God thinks about anything, including you. What I can tell you is what I've seen, what I've lived, and what I believe.
You've been told something very specific: that God doesn't love "practicing" gay men, that we don't go to heaven, and that our love is an abomination. I want you to understand that this is an interpretation. It is one reading of certain texts, held by certain people, in certain traditions. It is not the only reading. It is not even the majority reading among Christians worldwide anymore.
There are gay priests, gay theologians, gay deacons and pastors and monks who have read the same Bible you have, in the original languages, with more scholarly rigor than most of us will ever bring to it, and arrived somewhere very different. Entire denominations have: the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and large wings of Lutheranism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism. These are not fringe groups. These are serious people of serious faith who believe, with conviction, that God's love is not conditional on who you love.
I'm not telling you what to believe, but I am telling you that the voice in your head that says this is settled, that the verdict is in — that voice is not God. That voice is a specific tradition, passed down through specific people, and it can be questioned.
You are allowed to question it. If no one had ever questioned the doctrine about God they were taught, we would never have had the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, or, indeed, Christianity at all. At the time of Christ, the prevailing religious establishment was Second Temple Judaism, run by the Pharisees and Sadducees: If Christ did anything in his life, it was to question the rules and doctrine of that world, and so we too must be inspired and challenged by his courage, and do the same.
The world we live in is, in many respects, much like his. It is still filled with liars and vipers. It is still plagued by autocracy, violence, and greed.
I don't know much about Christ beyond what I've read, same as you. I'm not even sure he existed as described. But I have a feeling, and always have, that Christ had a message of love that was a little bigger than gender and sex, a little broader and more pure than who you bond with. I think the scriptures, in their shocking specificity, translated and retranslated over thousands of years by translators who are largely unknown to us and to each other, are unreliable and suspicious when they claim to know exactly what God thinks about men who have sex with men. I think that is the biases and cruelties of the world layered on top of something good. I think that is people ruining something pure. It would not be the first time.
My friend, I grew up in the Deep South. My dad is two clicks shy of a Southern Baptist minister. I was a missionary kid. My parents pulled my sister and me out of the U.S. to live in Africa on a half-baked idea to save the "heathens," and we lived there for years. I grew up in the Bible-thumping, gay-hating, gun-toting, redneck backcountry of America. I am effectively banished from that part of the world because there are Trump flags littering the roadside now, and it's simply no longer safe.
Where I grew up, that voice you're hearing was everywhere. It was my dad and my mom. It was my church. It was in school, and in the way grown men around me talked about guys like us, and I understood early, before I had language for it, that I was one of the kinds of men they were talking about. At first, that filled me with terror, and now it fills me with rage.
I know what it's like to grow up in a framework that tells you your nature is a mistake. I know the exhaustion of praying for yourself to be different and waking up every day the same. I know the shame.
I also know what's on the other side of it. In my life, the shame did not disappear cleanly or all at once. For a time, I had a very complicated relationship with the idea of any God, with all religion. I won't say I've found quite the same faith I had before, that kind of blind, unquestioning belief I grew up with. What I have now is a lot more gentle and open. If we can call it God, I see it in love.
When I rub my boyfriend's back because he's homesick or kiss him in public because he's not used to that, and when I feel him getting a little braver every time, that feels like God. It took me questioning everything to learn that if there is a source of truth and meaning in the world, a source of care and creation, it loves us — you and me and all the men I've loved, and all the men I hope you will someday love — exactly as we are.
When I grew up and got away from my parents and their version of Christianity, I found something they, and the Bible, had not prepared me for: Gay men who loved each other with a devotion and tenderness I can only call holy. I found community and generosity and joy. You can too.
I want to address something you wrote. You describe gay life as "a short life of meaningless sex and temporary relationships." I understand where that image comes from. It's the image you've been given, the caricature of gay life that exists in the framework you were taught. But I am a gay man living a gay life; I am, if anything, an expert on what a gay life can be, and that is not an accurate description of what gay life is. That description is a punishment fantasy, a way for your church and your parents to make sure that even if you're tempted, the thing you're tempted by seems worthless. It's not.
Being gay is the greatest honor of my life. If gay love is meaningless because one of you will eventually die, then all love is meaningless, because every love ends in death. Every single one, straight or gay, monogamous or not, sanctioned by the church or not, ends. The briefness of love has never been an argument against it. If it were, no one would love anyone.
And the world is held by love. It is the only good thing, the only saving grace, we have.
I've watched gay men take care of each other through illness in ways I cannot describe; it is too beautiful and painful to try. I've seen relationships between men that lasted 40, 50 years, built in eras when those relationships had no legal recognition, no sanction, no protection of any kind, but built anyway, borne of stubbornness and devotion.
I've held the hands of men who were dying and watched their partners hold on until the last moment. Don't tell me that is meaningless.
Here's what I know to be true: Yhe men who try to pray themselves straight and marry women, hoping God will change them, and who spend decades performing a life they don't want, do not escape it in the end. They carry their suffering and their wives' suffering — women who deserve to be loved fully and aren't — into a terrible, painful coming-out later in life or, worse, a lifetime of unfulfilled dreams and desire.
Denial and self-hatred are truly how you ruin a life. And loving yourself is how you honor a life. That is, actually, the only thing you have to get right. You can fail everything else. If you can do it, loving yourself as you are is, actually, the only success, the only luxury, the only thing that matters. It has to be your totem, your fire. It will carry you through coming out, through religion, through others’ rejection. Sometimes you have to burn down everything in order to live. Self-love is the match.
Coming out was the hardest thing I've done. You don't have to do it now. Some people will be hurt, and things will be hard, and there will be many moments when you think you made a mistake. But somewhere out there is a man who wants to love you and wants to be loved back. Make it through the darkness for him. It will be worth it. He's waiting. We all are.
Alexander Cheves is a writer and former sex worker who spent more than 12 years in the adult industry. He writes Out’s sex-and-culture column Last Call and is the author of My Love Is a Beast: Confessions (Unbound Edition Press), which Kirkus Reviews called “not for squeamish readers.” In Go Ask Alex, he offers candid advice for readers with real questions they’re afraid to ask anywhere else. Send your question to askbeastly@gmail.com — it may be answered in a future column.
