Peter
When I was in middle and high school, “gay” was still a lazy — but nonetheless effective — insult.
Whether or not the popular boys in my seventh grade phys ed locker room had a good gaydar or not, it was an easy way to bring me down. Looking back, I understand their line of logic to be, “Peter is different from us — therefore he’s gay — therefore he’s worthless. Let’s bully him.” It’s sort of ridiculous looking back and breaking that logic down, but I made it my mission over nearly a decade to prove them wrong. Because if I really was gay, then the bullies were right.
Pronouns: he/him
Photo of Peter
My family has practiced affirming mainline Christianity my whole life, but I chose on my own terms to take a hard-right turn into conservative evangelicalism in high school and attended a well-respected Christian college. A toxic cocktail of evangelical theology and past middle school trauma led me to craft a false persona of “strong biblical manhood” — and rejecting the man God actually made me to be: Charming. Witty. Empathetic. All of that went out the window when I was spending all my energy making sure everyone around me knew I was a “strong biblical man”.
The false persona won nobody over. By sophomore year, I had alienated pretty much everyone by pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. One night, everything caught up to me. I realized I couldn’t keep living like this — so I changed. I began dismantling this fortress of fear and evangelical theology I had built around myself since I was twelve, confronting my theology first: I became egalitarian, then affirming, then before I knew it, I had rejected the evangelical label altogether... but I still had to do the thing that scared me: I had to relearn who I am.
My sense of self had grown so warped, I had no idea if I was straight or gay — I just had unhealed wounds. After spending so much of my life twisting everything to fit an arbitrary box, I had to learn to engage reality at face value. This was the first time I really started to trust God — like I had always told people I did. So I let go. I watched how my heart breaks. I watched how my heart flutters. Words cannot cover the joy it felt to once again feel at home within myself. I’m gay. :)
Photo of Peter
