Thursday, February 26, 2009

My Friendship with my Brother – Part 2

I don’t know if Brad actually succeeded in having gay sex in high school, but he definitely did in college. At that time monogamy was less common among gays and he threw himself into a very destructive promiscuous lifestyle of random encounters. He graduated from high school one year after me, and he and Tiffany decided to go to the same college where I was. He shared a dormitory room with me there that next year. This was before cell phones were common, so we shared one wall phone in our room together.

I remember hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night and getting up to answer it. Jeremy (not his real name), the caller, thought I was Brad and asked me for sex in very graphic, almost poetic, words which I will not repeat here. I firmly shouted back at him, “You have the wrong number!” and hung up immediately. I told Brad that it was an obscene phone call from someone who sounded like Jeremy. This was my hint to Brad that I knew everything he was doing with guys. Embarrassed, Brad just remained silent. We never actually talked about his gay sex out loud until he was publicly outed about a year later. I hope I never act like that again. Brad needed me to compassionately talk through this situation confidentially. Instead, I just dropped hints and put him down.

By this time, God had brought me to a place where I was very serious about following Jesus Christ. Also, I believed (as I still do) that gay sex is sin. I knew if I stayed with Brad I would be tempted to start having gay sex with one of his friends, so I left the dorm and moved in with a group of Christian guys. Actually, that was when I moved in with BC as I told about in a previous post.

To be continued...

Sunday, February 22, 2009

My Friendship with my Brother

This post will be about a unique kind of friend – my brother! I decided to post this after discussing it with several friends. I would especially like to thank Jay from Adventures of a Christian Collegian for his very helpful input and encouragement about this.

Brad (not his real name) was a year younger than me and we were always together in my earliest childhood memories. Um, there is no easy way to say this, but we were also together at the very end of his life, too. I was right there when he died and I literally saw him take his last breath…….

Brad also had same sex attraction, but unlike me, he went after gay sex with reckless abandon. I first noticed this when he was about 12 years old. He would stare at good looking guys a little too long and a little too often, and since I felt the same attraction I definitely noticed Brad doing that. We both kept quiet about this to each other and to the family. I saw him spending time with his male friends in high school and I could tell he valued those guys above his “girlfriend” Tiffany (not her real name). I pretended everything was normal and acted like I didn’t notice. I just didn’t want to deal with the trouble that would happen if the garbage hit the fan. You have to understand the environment at the time. We lived in the “Bible Belt” and went to a large (300+) youth group in a megachurch. Any confession of homosexuality would bring down ridicule on the family and repeated public humiliation for us in school, maybe even worse. So, Brad continued to “date” Tiffany and sneak around trying to get sex with guys. I kept my mouth shut about both Brad and myself.

To be continued…