Something I've Known for Quite a While
I was twelve years old when I knew for sure.
I was twelve years old when I knew for sure.
I’d noticed things before that felt different, but by twelve I was certain. I was just beginning middle school in a new school district and was two years into what would become a fifteen-year struggle with depression.
With sixth grade came sex ed, and at an evangelical church that meant “True Love Waits,” purity rings, and entire Sundays dedicated to teaching boys how not to think about girls. How to look away and do what they called “flee temptation.”
It became obvious very quickly that I didn’t have any of the same problems as everyone else.
The strict heteronormativity showed me who I wasn’t. Purity culture described “the norm” so specifically that I could easily see I wasn’t it. This of course deepened my depression, and left me clinging to the furthest edge of any room I was in.
By twelve I was sure.
I was gay.
And I didn’t tell anyone for a very long time.
The Consequence of Those Years
Depression was really the theme of those years. That was what I felt every day. When you hate yourself that much, friends are hard and girlfriends are out of the question. I did have some friendships, especially as I got into high school.
Depression had taken up a lot of brain space, but as it lifted some in late high school, my sexuality became a greater concern. The Southern Baptist Church I was in almost never mentioned it. The “gay agenda” hadn’t yet become the invented enemy the “church and state” would make it.
I genuinely assumed it would go away. It didn’t.
The voices in that world had a term for what I was experiencing: “same-sex attraction.” You weren’t gay. You just had this “struggle.” The distinction mattered to them theologically. If it was an identity, it was something you were. If it was an attraction, it was something you fought. Their faith required the second option. So that’s the language they built.
I understand it. I even appreciated it once. Many used it because they were honestly trying to create belonging. They wished to avoid the slurs and to leave a door open. But it had a cost.
John Ortberg, borrowing from Dallas Willard, described the soul as the thing that integrates everything—will, mind, body—into a single life. A well-ordered soul is one where those things are in harmony.
How you love, who you move toward, who you let in—that isn’t a secondary feature of who you are. It runs through the center. When you build language that separates who someone is from who they're allowed to be, that's what you're doing to them. You're not managing their struggle. You are breaking the integration they were designed for.
Finally Telling Others
At New Year’s toward the end of my senior year, I was at a youth camp. There was a pastor speaking—someone I’d heard of, who seemed caring. He was someone who had no history with me and no stake in my future. He seemed safe.
I walked up to him completely terrified and told him.
I want to say more about that conversation later, because it deserves more than a paragraph. What I will say is this: I walked up to that man carrying something I had carried alone for six years, and he received it with a kindness I still haven’t forgotten. He gave me his cell phone number. Told me to reach out whenever I was ready for next steps, on my own time, in my own way. That conversation was the first step out of something I wasn’t sure I was going to survive. This man is and will always be a hero in my story.
That summer I came out to a youth intern, then my youth pastor. They encouraged me to tell my parents.
My parents handled it well, especially for the times we were in. I had kept so much from them—the depression, my sexuality, and most of my interior life. Now that I have kids, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for them to learn what I’d been going through. They listened. The tears came when I got to the parts about my depression and what I had thought of myself. My parents got me into counseling.
Christian counseling at a Southern Baptist Church is usually the part of this story where conversion therapy comes in. Exodus International was everywhere. I encountered their literature. But this counselor—and everyone I interacted with, by what feels like sheer luck—didn’t go that direction. The counselor saw, correctly, that the depression was the thing that needed attention. Not the orientation. Someone finally started treating the thing that was actually killing me.
I started dating. Haltingly, awkwardly. But everyone dates awkwardly at first. And, the church taught us the “boundaries” of dating. So my lack of temptation felt a bit like what was supposed to happen. Looking back, I was dating them for friendship more than anything else. That was the part I was drawn to. I always found women easier to connect with and interact with. Everything was easier. I didn’t have to be anything in particular.
And then I met Elloa.
Every minute I ever spent with her was perfect. We were so opposite but it just worked. She loved what was different about me. I loved what was different about her.
We dated, broke up, got back together, broke up again. Later that next year we found ourselves back in the same orbit, knowing it would be awkward for our friends if we didn’t find a way to be civil. We agreed to meet. Coffee. Breakfast. Whatever.
She came out to me that morning. She was the brave one.
Then I came out to her.
What began in that moment was an impossible miracle of a relationship. She became family in the deepest sense of the word. The person who saw me exactly as I was and chose to stay. I still thought, then, that this was what I was supposed to do. I didn't know if it would work.
We got married. We built a life. We raised kids. We found community. We worked in ministry together and it was good—genuinely, surprisingly good.
(I’ll speak for myself here and not for Elloa.) Over time I became theologically affirming. It was slow, then all at once. But I was married. I didn’t need to come out, even to friends. It would just cause problems. And I was never really comfortable.
Hell, I’m not comfortable now. I’ll probably have a panic attack when I post this.
But it’s beyond time.
My life has been wonderful. Full of love, full of friendship. Elloa knows everything about me and is still my closest friend in the world. We are still raising our kids together. There is no word for what we are, and I've looked—married, partnered, nesting partners, best friends. None of it fits. I'll write another piece someday about the absence of that word.
What I know is that nothing I love in this world would exist without her.
And we both know that neither one of us lived the life we were supposed to live.
Those people never got to exist.
What’s next? Neither of us knows. But we’re excited to find out. We are excited to meet the people we were always supposed to be.
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
— Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot) —
Love you so much.
Thank you for sharing. We have loved you both in many seasons and can’t wait to love you in this new one too.