http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/tag/rainbow-lounge

It seems that all kinds of hate & bigotry are alive and well in the Lone Star State.

Sounds like she’s not straight, she just wants a church to accept her as not gay.

For all your self-reflection here, you have failed to condemn the police violence in Fort Worth which was confirmed by several witnesses.

That, and your assumption that we haven’t tried to change, raise the likelihood that you fundamentally misunderstand people who are honest about their sexual orientation. You seem to be clueless about the injustices and inequalities that gay people of faith confront and courageously overcome.

You are not the victim here. The folks in Fort Worth are.

Even if that is not the case, and you had an unwanted same-sex orientation that really did change, we have to bear in mind that some women’s sexuality is more fluid than men’s. For us gay men, our sexuality is NOT a chosen lifestyle but a given; it very seldom changes; and there is no credible evidence that a change can be deliberately engineered. Any gay male who is waiting for God to change his orientation is probably going to wait till the Day of Judgment.

You ask why so many people try to change their sexuality. You must know perfectly well why. Usually it’s either because they want desperately to “fit in” and be like everyone else or because their religious upbringing has taught them that their natural sexuality is somehow “bad” or “wrong” or even “evil”. Fortunately, thank God, the number of people buying this has diminished, is diminishing and will continue to diminish.

I won’t recount my own experience in detail here, as it’s very similar to James’s, except that I didn’t go through “ex-gay” therapy – I don’t think that there were any such programmes around in England when I was growing up; if there were, I never knew about them, which is a blessing. Suffice it to say that I was a practising Christian since childhood, and no amount of sexual abstinence, prayer, reading the Bible, attending church etc. altered my sexual orientation one whit.

After running the Courage Trust (UK) for fourteen years, its founder and director, Jeremy Marks, finally conceded that he had failed to change his own sexual orientation; that “none of the people we’ve counselled have converted no matter how much effort and prayer they’ve put into it”; and that he had ceased to be a believer in the “ex-gay” process.

My advice to any gay man is: ignore all the hot air coming from the ex-gay lobby, and – unless you feel a GENUINE vocation to celibacy (i.e. NOT one based on the mistaken belief that homosexuality or gay sex is “wrong”), which is very rare – find yourself a proper boyfriend to love and share your life with, if you haven’t already got one. Such a relationship is good and beautiful, and can be positively therapeutic. To encourage a gay man to reject that option and to hang on expecting or hoping that he will become heterosexual is misguided, cruel and irresponsible.

What purpose do you have for coming here? Don’t the “ex gay” ministries say that their purpose is to rid homosexuals of their “unwanted” homosexual desires?

Because my homosexual desires are not “unwanted” and niether are a lot of others here. So you got no business coming here.

During my course of “ex gay” therapy I have tried to be in relationships with girls. No matter how many girls I was in a relationship with, I could never find myself happy. The only thing that made me happy was to be in a relationship with another man. It is so fulfilling for me. In my ENTIRE life I have NEVER felt the same way about a girl, never been attracted to girls the way I am with other guys.

I am not going to take part in the destructive heterosexual lifestyle any longer.

Sit there and argue with me all you want, but I know that my homosexuality is a part of who I am, regardless of whether or not it is true for you.

I am not going to agree on anything with you Charlene. I went through “ex gay” therapy, it did not work for me and the only thing that worked was to accept myself as gay, who I was.

Now you’re just sitting there calling me a liar, but yes I have tried to change, and it failed. Don’t tell me to try again, and don’t sit there and tell me that change is possible for anyone, I know that’s a lie too.

I must ask you Charlene, what made you think you were gay? Did you experience homosexual feelings from an early age, even before you knew what gay was or anything about sexual orientation? Because I did. No one “turned” me gay, I did not have an absent father figure, no I liked guys before I even knew what gay was. That was what was confusing about it. It wasn’t until AFTER I found what gay was that I knew to call those feelings gay.

Now what about you Charlene? Did some other girl have sex with you and you liked it and you thought you became gay? Because sex and sexual orientation are 2 different things, you can have sex with other girls, but it does not mean you LIKE those other girls in a romantic way, thereby meaning you are not necessarily gay.