I am an out gay man. Ask me anything.

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Exalt

You surely won’t be surprised if some here suspect that at that age your real reason for leaving the Catholic Church was your disagreement with its teachings on homosexuality.

The primary reason, though, was that I came to a realization that the evidence for Christianity was not adequate for believing in it.

Can you be more specific? Which particular evidence did you find least adequate? And do you think that at the age of 20 you were fully adequate to the task of deciding how adequate the evidence is? Most people take a whole lifetime examining the evidence. The ones who give up early seem to be the ones most likely to become atheists, or at least agnostics or secular humanists or libertarians. Take your pick! 😃
 
Exalt said:
I think the most surprising reason for me was that finding a romantic partner with lots of common ground has been very easy. I’m something of a nerd. I’m into games, nerdy movies, books, science, and it’s been incredibly easy to find other guys who’re also into all those things. Most of my straight friends don’t have that luxury.

Also, I sort of like being a little different. I’ve grown to like that I’m not just another white, heterosexual guy. There’s something special about me, something that makes my experience as a human being a little different from everyone else. I appreciate that, on a fundamental philosophical level.
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I think we would actually be good friends if we were to meet in real life, assuming you could put up with the idea that I am personally a devout Catholic. In fact you sound very similar to my best friend who is also gay, we are even the same approximate age.
 
Exalt said:
I actively seek relationships (one at a time, of course) with other men. I do not attempt to remain celibate. In fact, I make an effort to have what I consider to be a fulfilling, healthy sex life.
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If you could be loyal to one man, would you? Or do you like being promiscuous? Because it’s not very healthy to have sex with a lot of different people.
 
Cristiano said:
…Now going to your sexuality, I wonder why do you say that you are thankful to be homosexual?
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Exalt said:
…I think the most surprising reason for me was that finding a romantic partner with lots of common ground has been very easy. I’m something of a nerd. I’m into games, nerdy movies, books, science, and it’s been incredibly easy to find other guys who’re also into all those things. Most of my straight friends don’t have that luxury.

Also, I sort of like being a little different. I’ve grown to like that I’m not just another white, heterosexual guy. There’s something special about me, something that makes my experience as a human being a little different from everyone else. I appreciate that, on a fundamental philosophical level.
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Your first statement has nothing to do with being homosexual, it has to do with being nerdy and finding someone that shares your interests. The fact that most of your straight friends do not have that luxury means that the choose to settle on something out of convenience.

So you are different while all the white heterosexual guys are coming out of a stamping machine? Can you please show me to human beings that are not a little bit different from someone else?

I am not saying that you are not happy but I really think that you are trying to rationalize your choices and how you feel according to some standards that you reject.
 
Exalt said:
My life is indeed ordered, balanced, and totally in line with what is healthy. I experience joy that goes far beyond instantaneous pleasure or comfort. 🙂
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If you’re mating with someone of the same gender, it is in fact not ordered, no matter how subjectively you spin it. Homosexuality by its very definition is not an ordered behavior. Nor is it psychologically healthy from the viewpoint of interrelationships. It is an extreme (therefore unbalanced) invasion into the healthy boundaries that exist within each gender.

It does not mean that in other respects a person cannot be “balanced” in a limited understanding of that word. But our primal relationships (i.e., with intimates) do indeed order and determine our more comprehensive health, balance and order, psychologically. That is the entire underlying basis for the field of psychology and psychiatry, which is to uncover the un-health and un-balance and dis-order in our primary relationships beginning with those that exist with our parents and within our households of birth.
 
vsedriver said:
Who gets to decide what ‘well-qualified’ means? According to the Catholic Church one of the requirements of a well-qualified applicant is that the home includes a married man and woman to fulfill the function of mother and father since every child is entitled to a mom and dad. Catholic adoption agencies have had no problem placing children with these ‘well-qualified’ applicants.
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totally untrue the adoption agency in MA that shut down (the Catholic Agency) had adopted to gay couples for years … they already had a policy against discrimination -
Nothing changed in Boston except the law -
In 20 years they completed many adoptions to gay couples …
When the law was passed that you could not discriminate the Bishop shut them down in a political hissy fit basically …
The agency itself did not have to change any policy due to the law-

In DC where they shut down those anti discrimination laws already existed before same sex marriage laws changed -
so nothing changed here not even the law

These charities get tax money and have to abid by laws.
Adoption is a legal process not a church process

On top of that in DC the church decided they would stop feeding the homeless and close varies Catholic Charities if gay marriage were allowed…
Clearly the homeless should suffer because same sex couples can get married …
 
PatrickSebast said:
If you don’t consider what happened in your youth ministry scene private I would be very interested in hearing about it. If it is something you would rather not discuss then I understand fully.
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Nope, I don’t mind at all!

Here’s a quick run-down of what really grew to bother me:
  • It became more and more apparent that appeals to reason were not effective ways to evangelize young people. But over the course of the couple years I worked on youth ministry, I concluded that it *wasn’t *because there was anything wrong with those kids – it was rather because Christianity’s case is very difficult to prove rationally. If you’ve ever tried to explain Christianity to someone who has never heard of it before, you’ll understand what I mean.
  • The persuasion that we did engage in was primarily emotional. We were encouraged to engage in ‘relational’ ministry, for example. It’s the technique of building up a personal relationship with kids over the course of your time with them. You build up trust, a sense of group identity, and *then *you ask them for some kind of religious commitment. No appeals to reason, no debates, no rational exploration of ideas. I started to get involved with the more charismatic branch of Catholic youth ministry, and was pretty disturbed by the speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, etc. The low point of that was when we had an ambulance on standby to help deal with the kids who had passed out during a charismatic adoration session at a Stuebenville conference.
  • Some of the hypocrisy I observed in my tenure as a youth volunteer really bothered me. Another one of my fellow college youth ministers was engaging in a secret relationship with one of his high school teens (legal, but against the rules of the youth group). Heck, I was a hypocrite, and that bothered me. I preached against masturbation but personally struggled with it, and suspected that almost everyone else did.
 
Cristiano said:
Your first statement has nothing to do with being homosexual, it has to do with being nerdy and finding someone that shares your interests. The fact that most of your straight friends do not have that luxury means that the choose to settle on something out of convenience.

So you are different while all the white heterosexual guys are coming out of a stamping machine? Can you please show me to human beings that are not a little bit different from someone else?

I am not saying that you are not happy but I really think that you are trying to rationalize your choices and how you feel according to some standards that you reject.
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Well, I can only talk about my own experience. Personally, I’ve enjoyed the fact that it’s very easy to find romantic partners with tons and tons of common ground. We play games together, go see nerdy movies together, geek out about astrophysics together, and so on. Every night is guy’s night. From what I’ve observed, that kind of girl is a bit harder to find. Nerdy dudes seem to be far, far more common that nerdy girls. That’s something I appreciate about being attracted to other men.

And I didn’t mean to speak bad about heterosexual men. I only mean that I have found value in being part of this particular minority. There are many other things that make me unique, of course. My sexuality strikes me as being especially special.
 
The only reason I’m here is that I am curious and interested in religion and religious people

why are you curious and interested in religion?
 
Exalt said:
My sexuality strikes me as being especially special.
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Intimacy in same-gender friendships is not dependent upon having physical intercourse with them, nor does it make such same-gender friendships “especially special.” It means that the friendships have violated healthy borders. It’s sad, but not surprising, that you have bought into the self-validating Gay Propaganda that there is something more “special” about acting out sexually within a strong, intimate friendship, and further, that supposedly heterosexual white males are impaired in the friendship department, and would only become enlightened in the mind of the gay religionists if they would consummate such healthy friendships sexually, thus making them unhealthy.
 
Elizabeth502 said:
If you’re mating with someone of the same gender, it is in fact not ordered, no matter how subjectively you spin it. Homosexuality by its very definition is not an ordered behavior. Nor is it psychologically healthy from the viewpoint of interrelationships. It is an extreme (therefore unbalanced) invasion into the healthy boundaries that exist within each gender.

It does not mean that in other respects a person cannot be “balanced” in a limited understanding of that word. But our primal relationships (i.e., with intimates) do indeed order and determine our more comprehensive health, balance and order, psychologically. That is the entire underlying basis for the field of psychology and psychiatry, which is to uncover the un-health and un-balance and dis-order in our primary relationships beginning with those that exist with our parents and within our households of birth.
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Whoa!

Wait up here a sec…

How on earth can two men “mate”? Are you trying to re-write the dictionary just like the gay lobby is attempting to do? I mean, they are trying to get us to beleive that two men can “marry” and now you are writing that they can “mate”? Mating is a procreative act and has been considered to be so ever since, well, ever since Adam and Eve. Even hormone charged animals that attempt to mount one another are not considered to be “mating” unless it is a pro-creative sex act. Are you now trying to tell us that one man sticking his sex organ up another man’s excretory orifice is “mating”? You gotta be kidding me…🤷
 
Neelam said:
The only reason I’m here is that I am curious and interested in religion and religious people

why are you curious and interested in religion?
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That makes at least two of us who have asked this unanswered question. 🙂
 
Hello Exault, admire you for doing this.

This is what I want to ask - how do many homosexual men expect their sexuality and identity to be taken seriously when many “gay bars” are often very promiscuous in nature? And when many dress as women? I ask this because I have a gay friend who tells me that almost every gay bar he’s been to have lots of half-naked men. This same gay friend also wears make-up and long hair, and sometimes wants to look like a girl but considers it natural homosexual behaviour. Can you see how many people would point to that and think it was more of an “identity crisis” situation as opposed to “normal” homosexual behaviour? Why do many gay men like to dress as women anyway?

I know of course that “straight” men have strip clubs etc, but it seems to be the norm rather than the exception with homosexual men, it also appears very predatory and competitive/judging - gay men appear to be more critical of their’s/others appearance than the average “heterosexual!” person.

Finally, how do you feel about the homophobic/anti-gay attitude often displayed on this forum? A few I suppose will respond to this by saying that “Hey we’re not anti-gay! We’re just anti-sin!” But let’s be honest here guys, if I had a penny for every hateful post aimed at homosexuals on this forum I wouldn’t have to worry about my rent this year.
 
Post 91:
“mate” as in simulated “intercourse,” Mate. 😉

Not as in ‘reproductive act.’

I trust your tongue was in your cheek. 😉
 
Exalt
**
  • It became more and more apparent that appeals to reason were not effective ways to evangelize young people. But over the course of the couple years I worked on youth ministry, I concluded that it wasn’t because there was anything wrong with those kids – it was rather because Christianity’s case is very difficult to prove rationally. If you’ve ever tried to explain Christianity to someone who has never heard of it before, you’ll understand what I mean.
  • The persuasion that we did engage in was primarily emotional. We were encouraged to engage in ‘relational’ ministry, for example. It’s the technique of building up a personal relationship with kids over the course of your time with them. You build up trust, a sense of group identity, and then you ask them for some kind of religious commitment. No appeals to reason, no debates, no rational exploration of ideas. I started to get involved with the more charismatic branch of Catholic youth ministry, and was pretty disturbed by the speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, etc. The low point of that was when we had an ambulance on standby to help deal with the kids who had passed out during a charismatic adoration session at a Stuebenville conference.
  • Some of the hypocrisy I observed in my tenure as a youth volunteer really bothered me. Another one of my fellow college youth ministers was engaging in a secret relationship with one of his high school teens (legal, but against the rules of the youth group). Heck, I was a hypocrite, and that bothered me. I preached against masturbation but personally struggled with it, and suspected that almost everyone else did. **
Nothing you have said here persuades me that you ever had a real handle on the inadequacies of the Christian religion. All that I am persuaded of by this anecdotal info is that you were suffering from a recognition of your own inadequacies and the inadequacies of others. At the proud age of 20 you dismissed as inadequate what Christ did to save you.

**My life is indeed ordered, balanced, and totally in line with what is healthy. I experience joy that goes far beyond instantaneous pleasure or comfort **

Now that you have left Christ behind and rejoice so much in your homosexuality, why are you here? Is guilt gnawing at you? Are you trying to make converts? There is yet something of the preacher in you; you find so much fault with this Christian flock. 😃
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Exalt

You surely won’t be surprised if some here suspect that at that age your real reason for leaving the Catholic Church was your disagreement with its teachings on homosexuality.

The primary reason, though, was that I came to a realization that the evidence for Christianity was not adequate for believing in it.

Can you be more specific? Which particular evidence did you find least adequate? And do you think that at the age of 20 you were fully adequate to the task of deciding how adequate the evidence is? Most people take a whole lifetime examining the evidence. The ones who give up early seem to be the ones most likely to become atheists, or at least agnostics or secular humanists or libertarians. Take your pick! 😃
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That is absolutely not surprising at all. I totally expected that reaction. And to be completely honest with everyone here, it definitely was a major factor in my journey out of Catholicism. But it wasn’t the only factor. And it was not the most important factor.

At the age of twenty, I do indeed think I was more than intellectually mature and learned enough to look at a collection of evidence to support a hypothesis and say that the evidence does not meet the standard required to believe the hypothesis.

Before you read the following, can we both agree to not get in a big atheism vs. theism debate? That’s not really what I’m concerned with, and I hope you guys aren’t interested in that either – for now, within the scope of this discussion. Also, I think it’s banned by the rules of this forum. I’d really just like to share my own personal experience with this debate, and leave it more or less at that, if it’s okay with y’all. I’m not interested in getting into an actual debate on the merits here.

To be more specific, the claims that Christianity makes about the world struck me as extreme. The idea that an omnipotent supernatural being sent his son, who was also himself, to be murdered to atone for a rule that he made, and that his son was also raised from the dead, is a very extreme claim about the world. What kind of evidence exists to support that claim? A collection of manuscripts, the earliest of which can be traced back to a few decades after these things supposedly happened. It takes *much *more evidence to prove that someone so much as bumped your fender in today’s world, and for totally legitimate reasons.

This realization came slowly, though, for me. It takes a while to realize just *how *extreme the claim is when you’re already believing it. In actuality, I started disbelieving in one doctrine, which led to me disbelieve in another, then another, then another, until a few months later I realized how extreme the entire claim was all together.
 
Cristiano said:
Please read posts 60 and 75. I think that his reason is explained in those two posts.
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I did. I’m especially good at reading. 😉

However, what he is posting contradicts any innocent ‘desire to dialogue,’ i.m.o.
 
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