Some moments in your life, you just don’t know whether to put your face in your hands and cry, or put your fist through a wall. 

So I’m following the links Mike Airhart  put up on Ex-Gay Watch to a discussion about whether or not the term "ex-gay" is offensive (to other ex-gays apparently…) and I find myself scanning the posts on various blogs of gay people who just want to not be homosexual anymore if they only could, and it’s making me sad and then it starts making me angry, nail spitting angry once again, at the Dobsons, the Falwells, the Bauers, the Wildmons, all the pusillanimous bigots of this world who just can’t feel fulfilled in their own lives unless they’re sticking a knife in some homosexual’s heart and twisting it once in the name of Jesus Christ and once more in the name of love…  And I’m following the discussions and the links on their blogs to various other blogs, those of other ex-gays and also those of out and proud ex-ex-gays, and I run across this post at Disputed Mutability:

In my last post I shared how I recently learned that several years ago my mother prayed for God to "take me" (i.e., kill me) if being gay was a sin. Many parents ask for similar or less drastic ills to befall their gay children. Sometimes they actively pray for misery that will drive the child in question back to the Lord and the straight and narrow.

HuH?  So I follow the link…

Christine over at Rising Up Whole recently wrote about parents who hope or pray that their gay children’s lives are made difficult or cut short. The opening paragraph:

I just had a conversation with a friend who found out her mother had prayed that if being gay was a sin, that the Lord would take this daughter before she had drifted too far from God (yes, as in "take this daughter" out).

Yeah, so that’s yours truly. My mom dropped that bomb on me Saturday, telling me she prayed that prayer about nine years ago. I guess she thought it would be okay for me to hear about it now, because I’m evangelical and exgay and happily married and all that. Apparently she thought I would approve. But I must admit I still find it very, very disturbing.

I can’t imagine why.  Just one of those little rites of growing up I reckon.  You know…the day your parents tell you that they’ve been praying all along that God would kill you…

So I follow the link to Rising Up Whole… 

GCB at This Gay Christian’s Blog writes about his Beau and the phone call he recently received from his parents:

And among it all comes the proclamation that, among the church gossip and woe-is-me’s about their so-called wayward son, his mother is praying that the Beau and I would have unsettled lives.

This is in line, though more blunt, with my own mother’s proclamation that “God will never bless me.”

A commenter on the above entry related the following:

I know the feeling. My mother sent me a letter saying that she used to (before I came out) pray that I’d find the right woman to marry, but after I came out, she prayed that I would never fall in love (with another man)…So, I remember well the ‘punched in the guts’ feeling of knowing your mother is/was praying against you.

Well I’m sure as shit glad I don’t know that feeling.  I had it rough in some sense growing up in the biological middle of two families who didn’t much like each other, and in particular the constant crap I got from people on my mother’s side for just being my father’s son.  But I never doubted that my parents, both of them, loved me, and especially mom, the most gentle kind-hearted sunshine and light kinda person you ever met, until one of her relatives started bad mouthing me when they thought they were doing it behind her back and then you never saw her get so angry.  Had she ever told me that she was praying for my life to be miserable I think that would have been the thing to make me just go stand in front of a train.

So I follow the link to This Gay Christian’s Blog… 

Unconditionally

Good Friday. Work let out early, I got to get out of Dodge and come home while it was still light outside. Wonderful! So as I recline on the couch, soaking in some old Will and Grace episodes on DVD – a birthday present from The Beau – he goes off to answer a phone call from his mom. Usually innocuous except for the occasional sigh and hell-bound innuendo, we figured it would just be another dull parental chat.

Until about a half hour later I start to hear the just-this-side of yelling voice coming from the bedroom. Alarmed, I rush in to lend my boyfriend moral support for the rest of the fundamentalist bashing he was going through. And as I stood there, arms around him listening in, I hear the weepy voice of his mother claiming how much Beau hates them (he doesn’t), has said they abused him (he never said that), and refuses to call (who needs to when they call every third day?). And among it all comes the proclomation that, among the church gossip and woe-is-me’s about their so-called wayward son, his mother is praying that the Beau and I would have unsettled lives.

Wait – replay that back a bit – you read it right. Beau’s mother, is praying, against her own son.

This is in line, though more blunt, with my own mother’s proclomation that “God will never bless me.”

And it’s this sort of thing that makes me appreciate the mission of Soulforce all that much more. You can argue for or against the gay Christian activist group, but the fact is they are fighting against spiritual abuse that is laid on our people by our own mothers.

Interestingly, what hurts Beau the most is not the words themselves. Remarkably, he ignores the words themselves and can absorb the sting of their cruelty. None of the surface level attacks stuck to my beloved. No, what set him to tears in my arms that day was the fear his parents would never understand what it means to love unconditionally.

…and I’m reading this and for a second I think I’m going to start crying, and then I think I just want to get up and put my fist through a wall.  Well…I didn’t take it out on my poor walls. 

What the Fuck are these people doing to their children!?  There are adults out there would would gladly raise those kids with all the love they’d ever want in their lives.  My own mother had tons of love to spare for every other kid she ever met and every single one of my friends felt it and told me so.  Children are precious.  If you don’t feel that, even if like me you don’t have kids of your own, there’s something wrong with you.  To wound one like that is a crime against all humanity.  You’ve not only taken wholehearted love away from the kid, you’ve taken it away from everyone in their lives that they could have loved wholeheartedly.  What the Fuck is wrong with some people.

My children had to die to be saved.  They were not righteous.
-Andria Yates.

Yates merely drowned her children.  So did Susan Smith, watching from the shore as they sank, terrified, strapped in their car seats, beneath the water.  At least their pain ended.  What do you say to someone who throws their kid into a pit of abandonment to drown in for the rest of their lives?  What words could possibly be enough?  Lady I don’t give a flying fuck what some babbling mental case with a bible told you about your kid…is there a fucking heart beating inside that miserable body of yours?  Does it work?  Did it ever?  There are no words for it. 

The real monsters here, of course, are the ones who encouraged these parents to withdraw their love from their children.  James Dobson.  Stephen Bennett.  James Hartline.  Jerry Falwell.  Donald Wildmon.  et. al.   In the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of Love, they’ve made this world a smaller, lonelier, meaner place. So many people in this world, so many gay people, walking the streets of their hometowns, coping as best they can with a part of themselves inside that should have been filled with love, empty.  Its unforgivable.  Sometimes you just want to cry.  Sometimes you just want to hit something.  Hard.

You want to know what this does to people?  Wandering around the blog links in this discussion of parents praying for their children’s misery or death, I finally found my way to the full text of Jack McIntyre’s suicide note.  McIntyre was the friend of Love In Action co-founder John Evans back in the early 1970s.  Wayne Besen documents the founding of Love In Action in his book, Anything But Straight, and writes of McIntyre:

Even’s best friend, Jack McIntyre, was also part of the ministry.  He along with the rest of the participants, struggled mightily with temptations and did everything in his power to change his sexual orientation. As with nearly everyone else in the original ex-gay cast of characters, however, he could not change and remained as gay as the day he walked through the door.  For McIntyre, the ministry led to feelings of inadiquacy and intensified his belief that he had failed God.

To save himself from his homosexuality, and keep himself from sinning in the eyes of God, McIntyre killed himself.  I’d never seen the full text of his suicide note before, and there it was, staring me in the face like a sign at the end of a dead end street.

TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?

I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.

I loved my job and my clients.

I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.

I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.

All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.

However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.

It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.

I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.

Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.

I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?

May God Have Mercy On My Soul.

A Brother & A Friend.

Love your children.  Just.  Fucking.  Love your children!  If you can’t love your children, don’t ask for forgiveness.