In 1988, I was fresh out of college and working as a full-time volunteer for Catholic Charities in Nashville, Tennessee.

I was also a quietly celibate gay man who was living with fellow Christian volunteers.

By day, I helped illegal aliens apply for legal residency through Catholic Charities while my housemates worked with prisoners and the homeless.

When we weren’t working, my unpaid housemates and I spent evenings at home in low-income East Nashville, sitting in front of our portable black-and-white television watching “Facts of Life” and a new show called “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” We shared meals of low-budget jambalaya, chatted on weekends with acquaintances (on their dime, if possible) at the Vanderbilt University Fuddrucker’s, and explored various churches and neighborhoods around Nashville. As my one-year volunteer placement wound down in mid-1988, I sought religious sponsors who might help me work for Nashville CARES or for similar AIDS treatment and support organizations in other cities.

This was my gay lifestyle.

Across town, Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas was, by his own new account, living a very different lifestyle: bar-hopping, using drugs, seemingly oblivious (then and now) to liberal Christian outreach to society’s outcasts.

In a heartbreaking moment of vulnerability, Randy remembers the day when he learned his former partner had died from AIDS: (Read More)