Dear brothers and sisters in Christ: you are not your attractions, you are not your sufferings, you are not your own. You have very real temptations and very real troubles, but you have a great God.

I’m thankful to God for the opportunity to share this vignette of my testimony. Truthfully, I share my story with very few people and it is not something I generally like to discuss. But I think there may be a few of you who bear the same struggles as me, and I am hoping that you might take something away from my testimony which relates to a little-discussed topic in Christian circles: same-sex attraction.

My story probably does not sound too different from that of other Christians who struggle with same-sex attraction. I do not have great watershed moments to share or surprise endings where my attractions are fixed and I am happily married. But what I do have to share is the incredible grace shown to me in the Gospel through Christ.

Let me tell you a story of darkness, lament, suffering, and great mercy.

Feeling Different Before I Had Words for It

I grew up in a loving Christian family. My parents raised us deep in the faith, not just saying it to us but living it out and making it the center of our home. It was never a question of “does God exist” or “is the Gospel real.” I have, for all intents and purposes, been saved my entire life.

From an early age, I felt a strangeness of feeling different from other boys, an otherness. Just not quite fitting in. My best friend in elementary school was a girl, and the same in high school. Even to this day, I have greater comfort interacting with women versus men.

Hurting and Fighting in Silence

I can’t even pinpoint a time but maybe as early as 5th grade, I started developing a fascination and attraction for boys though I was too young to know exactly what was going on. I also felt the wrongness of it, but had no outlets or mechanisms for healthy coping. I kept my mouth shut for a long time, keeping mostly to myself and trying to be a good kid, following the rules.

As I aged into adolescence, the emptiness that longed to be filled only grew. I did not feel like I was or could ever be masculine enough. I felt uncomfortable when others would attribute masculine traits to me, because those traits didn’t truly belong. I felt like an imposter among guys, fearing that just one misstep would expose me. Even though I didn’t think I had any rightful claim to masculinity, I wanted it. This emptiness began to manifest in my relationships and interactions with my guy friends. I craved their approval. I wanted physical affection from them, as if affection would signify my status as “accepted” instead of being labeled as “other”.

I knew that God said that homosexuality was wrong and so it was not even a question in my mind that I had to fight. And I fought hard against the desires in my heart as best as I could for a long time. Over time however, lust and idolatry began to occupy more of my thoughts and my heart. I wanted to give myself over to the boys I liked and the crushes I had.

All the while, I curated an external perception that all was fine. Questions like “who do you like” or “what’s your type” gave me great anxiety. I made up stories and pretended that I was more mature and wiser to not date in high school. But a quiet battle raged deep within me unknown to anyone else.

It wasn’t until sophomore year of high school that this tension could no longer remain. I mustered up the courage to tell my family. I dreaded so deeply about what would happen, but I knew that things could not remain as they were. To this day, I have never seen the expression on my mom’s face as I did that night many years ago. A hollowness in her eyes wondering what she and my dad had done wrong all these years. But God showed me great mercy, and my family gathered around me and supported me in Christ, praying with me and loving me as they always had done.

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