If I can just get my ass in gear someday and finish more episodes of A Coming Out Story, I might soon get to the part of things where I relate what is probably the central reason why I seemed so confused about my sexual orientation back when I was a kid.   Looking back now it seems obvious: I was always attracted to the other guys, and never once felt the slightest shred of sexual desire for the girls.   But when I was fourteen years old I sat in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, that included a brief, but very brutal lesson on homosexuality. I’ve written about it many times before…

I was 12 years old. By the end of the year I would turn 13, and enter my teen years in an America where the common view of gay people were that we were sick tortured twisted sexual deviants who ought to be locked up for the safety of the community. When I was 14 I would sit with my grade school peers in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with, and preferred to kidnap and rape children and seduce young heterosexuals, rather then seek out other homosexuals for sexual trysts, precisely because we knew how dangerous we were. They taught us that homosexuals would become so excited during sex that we often mutilated the genitals of the people we were having sex with. They taught us that we were confused about which gender we were, and hated ourselves, and would take out that hate on other people by killing them horribly. Most unsolved murders we were told, were committed by homosexuals. That was the world I came to know myself in.

And every time I relate this, I just know that some people are going to think I’m exaggerating.

No…I’m not..

Pastor: “Homosexuals account for half the murders in large cities”

Senior Pastor Tom Vineyard on Tuesday, November 15, proudly stood up in front of the Oklahoma City Council and railed against a  bill that would, if passed, extend a  little bit of equality to a  much-​maligned minority: LGBT people. The bill passed 7 – 2, and added “sexual orientation”  to Oklahoma City’s anti-​discrimination law. But Dr. Tom Vineyard, a  Baptist Minister, used the occasion anyway to do as much damage as he possibly could to the LGBT community — no doubt, some of whom are his own congregants.

“Judge John Martaugh, chief magistrate of the New York City Criminal Court stated, ‘Homosexuals account for half the murders in large cities’,” Pastor Vineyard decried…

…the good Pastor Vineyard said, “Homosexuals commit more than 33% of all the reported child molestations in the U.S. Many homosexuals openly admit that they are pedophiles because they cannot actually reproduce, they resort to recruiting children.”

There’s more at the link, including a bit of research someone did on where this man got his figures.   Turns out it was from a judge who, back in the 1950s, led a crusade against perverts in his city.

That was the almost universal mindset back then when it came to gay people.   We just weren’t human.   We were dangerous psychopaths who were responsible for most of the violent crimes and murders. We killed people and raped children to turn them into homosexuals too.   That was what I was taught about homosexuals and homosexuality, in school, by my teachers, in 1968-69.

And for years afterward, no matter how strongly attracted to the other guys I became, I figured I couldn’t possibly be a homosexual because I didn’t want to kill or rape anyone.   In a way, and perhaps ironically, the shear brutality of what they taught me kept me from that period of self loathing and self hatred other gay people of my generation suffered through.   The image of The Homosexual I was given was so completely grotesque I just couldn’t fit myself into it no matter how strongly attracted to other guys I became.   So I glommed onto a phrase I’d often heard the adults using: He’s   going through a phase.   And that’s what I told myself for years, though I had not the slightest idea of what it meant.

I didn’t hate myself, but what I was taught had its effect all the same.   During a time when all my heterosexual peers were tentatively beginning their way through the dating and mating maze I stayed away from it, telling myself that all that sex and romance was boring, a pastime for idiots, but not me.   I would go live on a higher plane, above all that confusing sex stuff.

And so when the day finally came that I fell deeply in love I had no idea what to do about it, and I was terrified.

It isn’t homosexuality that kids are recruited into.   Gay or straight it happens naturally, of its own accord.   You are what you are.   What kids are recruited into is hate.

“Judge John Martaugh, chief magistrate of the New York City Criminal Court stated, ‘Homosexuals account for half the murders in large cities’,” Pastor Vineyard decried…

Hate.   And…loneliness.