I was raised to believe that homosexuality was a sin, one of the many ways that we fall short of the goodness toward which we all strive. I now believe, as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, put it, that some people are created by God to love people of the same sex. This conversion took a long time to accomplish, and you may find it strange that it matters so much to me. I have all the blessings of normality, after all. Books, television, and movies were filled with descriptions of romances like the ones I desired. I was given advice on dating, courtship, and marriage by approving and watchful parents. And I was married to the woman I loved at a young age by proud parents with the blessing of the church.

My conversion has been important, though, if only to me. It has fundamentally changed the way I understand myself, my life, and my faith.

I marched into college hungry for great arguments, for ways to strengthen my ability to know and to defend that knowledge. In a certain sense, I am, by nature, fundamentally evangelical: I desire to convert, or be converted by, those around me in all ways. I long for common life: for community in the radiance of universal truth. I came armed with many arguments about sexuality, having heard the subject preached on many times and having debated the subject frequently with friends. Sexual morality seemed a natural subject to focus on, to me, as someone who felt every attractive woman I passed like a magnet. My hormones kept themselves busy telling me to hurry the hell up and put all the work they’d done to recreating my body to good use. A lot was at stake in my belief about whether or not I ought to be having sex, or waiting to be married to someone. As my desire to have sex was considerable, the reasons for waiting had to be goddamn good ones, and continually fleshing out the arguments for abstinence was an effort, in part, to convince myself that waiting was worth it.

To put it another way: the idea that it would be possible to have sex immorally was absolutely fundamental. Sex was, in and of itself, pretty much all immoral except when placed in the context of marriage, at which point it became absolutely awesome. (This last point was often reiterated by pastors at church camp in special, gender-separated talks. I guess they believed in leading with the carrot rather than the stick. I remember once hearing: “You want to have the best sex in the world? Save it for marriage.”) The impression I got was not so much that sex was bad or dangerous, but that it was fundamentally for the purpose of marriage. Its end was to serve the sacrament of marriage, so any use outside of that context was like taking a robot out of the assembly line at Ford motors and putting it in a shopping mall. It’ll never build a car, and it’s likely to hurt somebody in the process.

The argument that homosexuality was moral because many people had homosexual desires, then, didn’t strike me as persuasive at all. I was filled with sexual desires that made me want to do things I considered immoral (namely, having premarital sex). And, really, the argument that homosexuality could be natural to a person was sort of academic: I believed in a fallen world, where, frankly, things like pedophilia, or compulsions to steal could be natural. It didn’t make such desires moral. In fact, the argument for the legitimacy of homosexuality struck me as, essentially, an argument against the legitimacy of any kind of sexual restraint. If we ought to do what our sexual desires tell us to do, then everything goes. Things like pedophilia have taboos at the moment, but those taboos struck me as arbitrary and doomed in the context of the pro-homosexuality argument. Human sexuality exercised without restraint was a nightmare, an impulse that pushed inevitably toward orgiastic annihilation.

I viewed myself as a microcosm, after all. I was tremendously lustful, yet wracked at the same time by jealousy at the fracturing of ideal monogamy that happened after my first high school girlfriend and I broke up. We hadn’t even kissed, but I felt physical pain at the idea of her holding hands with another man. Clearly, my body was telling me it wanted things it also didn’t want, that if I listened to it I would be churned up in alternating tidal waves of pleasure and pain. Wasn’t it obvious that the mind was absolutely necessary to reign over this chaos?

College was also the first place I knew people who were openly gay. I felt attracted to and threatened by my openly gay friends at the same time. They were proof, of a kind, of my broadmindedness, and my disapproval of their lifestyle didn’t change the many reasons I wanted them as friends. I was resentful, honestly, of the idea that my friendships should be limited by my opinion of their moral choices: when one of my friends dragged me into an argument about my beliefs about homosexuality and told me that my disapproval was really a problem for him, I felt rather put out. How intolerant of him! And as much as individual gay people were proving the awesomeness of, well, individual gay people (something I had never really doubted), the stories of gay [especially male] culture horrified me. The tales of random hookups and essentially anonymous sex with dozens and dozens of partners seemed to paint in the details of that nightmare scenario of sexual excess I had feared.

I didn’t believe that sexual orientation was something one was born with. Sexual desire seemed, as I have said, excessive by its nature. I was able, quite naturally, to desire dozens of different women sexually while, at the same time, desiring absolute fidelity from any theoretical woman I slept with. Men, throughout history, have done their level best to indulge both of these appetites. (Besides being fundamentally oppressive of women, this was clearly not good for men, either, as it led them to make possessions of women, rather than partners.) One was obligated, then, to learn to rule and guide one’s desires toward moral uses of those desires.

It seemed to me that I was quite capable, if I were honest, of sexually desiring all sorts of horrible things. Hadn’t I, from the very beginning of puberty, had societal conditioning to react to the idea of some things in a sexual context with horror and to others with desire? The whole landscape of my sexuality could have very easily been shaped by these moral filters, some arbitrary, some not. I could appreciate, after all, the beauty of many men; if I had been amenable to the idea, or if I didn’t think anything were wrong with it, couldn’t I have been sexually attracted to men, too? The idea seemed plausible to me. I knew, after all, plenty of bisexuals at college. This seemed like a perfectly natural step for unrestrained sexuality.

Didn’t I find the idea of gay male sex repugnant, after all? I did not, importantly, find the idea of lesbian sex repulsive. Why? Because lesbian sex posed no danger to my self-identity, it’s simply an example of people to whom I am sexually attracted being sexual. Gay male sex, however, challenged me: it shared many traits with something I might find titillating in a depiction of heterosexual sex. If there were no possibility of me finding other men sexually desirable, why would I have an instinct to recoil? Recoiling implies the possibility of danger. If I found the idea of gay sex gross, it seemed to me that it was proof that part of my sexual attraction to women was by choice.

But why on earth did I think there was any important difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality? How could I believe in a God who didn’t want people to love each other? Or, to put it as the woman who was to become my wife would frequently put it, “Why, exactly, is homosexuality immoral, again?”

The strongest argument to me was that homosexuality seemed to deny the importance of gender identity. This is the claim behind questions about gays raising children, for instance. I believed that the genders possessed unique attributes. These attributes were fundamentally complimentary, which is why, I believed, Genesis does not describe man as made in the image of God, but man and woman together. Only a male and female coupled represented the divine vision of God-breathed human life.

And, as much as I rejected much of the older gender roles (barefoot, pregnant women in kitchens), believing them to be sexist, I felt I was discovering in my own life that I needed to be more open to becoming distinctly male.

As a teenager, I innocently believed, as R. Crumb put it, that girls wanted someone like them. So I proudly wore what I believed to be my sensitivity, my love of poetry, my gentleness. I didn’t insist on my own way: if we were to go eat somewhere, I always said, “Whatever is fine with me!” I was deferential, I loved to chat. I would brag about liking things that were perceived as “for girls”, like knitting, MGM musicals, and movies like Steel Magnolias.

What I discovered was expressed once by a female friend of mine this way: when she was in high school, she couldn’t stand how all the guys were into sports, and she always thought she wanted to date a guy who liked more important things. When she got to college and met guys who weren’t into sports, she discovered that she wasn’t attracted to them. Or, to put it a way I heard from a woman just the other day, “I know I shouldn’t be turned off if a guy tells me on a date that he has weak ankles, but I am!”

I needed to learn some lessons in old-fashioned masculine virtues, as it turned out, like being the one to come up with date ideas and, honestly, to be a bit assertive about things in general. Clearly, these virtues had dark sides: it still wasn’t good to be an asshole. But I had been wrong, I thought, to eschew the positive sides of these attributes.

And, frankly, in my observation of the women around me that I interacted with, it seemed many of them had opposite errors: that they believed they needed to be assertive, masculine, and independent in a way that they were discovering they didn’t really want. And even the women I knew who were most “alpha male” were only interested in dating men who could out alpha-male them.

Homosexuality, by locking the sexes into sexual relationships without their complements, reinforced the weaknesses of their fundamental attributes and undermined the strengths. Homosexuality was an error that denied our identity as sexed, gendered beings, as humans created male and female in God’s image.

As a Christian, there was, finally, for me, the argument about scripture. I banged my head in frustration as I watched a West Wing episode where someone tore a conservative radio host to pieces by reminding her that though the Bible condemned homosexuality as an abomination, it also said that eating shrimp, for instance, was an abomination, and it prescribed horrors like stoning as punishment for things like adultery. Augh! It wasn’t simply the Bible, it was the Old Testament, and any Evangelical (I thought) could explain the fundamental differences between the law in the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the New Testament, Paul argues explicitly that Christians are freed from the law, the law which is itself actually a curse, by Jesus’ death on the cross. Jesus’ death was a triumph over the law, a redemption from it. So, for Christians, laws about eating kosher, for instance, didn’t apply.

However, Paul did clearly condemn homosexuality, something he describes as being much more than an arbitrary prohibition of the old law:

“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”

—Romans 1:25-27

My evangelical Christian faith was important to me. I took the Bible seriously, and I also wanted to wait to have a serious romantic relationship with a fellow Christian, a relationship that would at least have the potential to lead to a Christian marriage. Instead, during my freshman year of college, I fell in love with an atheist. Due, in large part, due to my guilt about the relationship, we had a painful break-up. A year later, I hadn’t gotten over her. I lay at home on Christmas break wracked with anger and grief about it all, and finally surrendered to my feelings for her. We ended up getting back together. We took the relationship much more seriously, and I was able to be at peace with the fact that she wasn’t a Christian. (I felt, in a certain way, like an Old Testament prophet: stripped of everything but the certainty that I loved her, and could not do otherwise.) We got engaged. She ended up converting to Christianity before the wedding. I was humbled, grateful, and ecstatic.

I mentioned before that my wife would ask me, “Why, exactly, is homosexuality immoral, again?” The “exactly” was meant to gently communicate how inadequately convincing she had found my argument the previous time I explained, and, really, all previous times. She didn’t need to be convinced of the virtues of monogamy or, generally, of sexual restraint. But sexual fidelity and restraint were at least possible within the context of homosexuality. There had to be proof that such things were not by themselves sufficient to make sex moral.

I would embark on another explanation of gender identity, another attempt to articulate and convince my wife of my opinion. “Gay culture, you see, shows that the excesses of either gender on its own: men are led to self-destructive, all-indulgent excess, for instance. (It was harder to say what was wrong with lesbian culture.) If there were fundamental differences between the sexes, then I argued that there was an essential component of moral sexuality that was absent when one chucked one gender out of the equation. All of my explanations, however, shared something important: they were ornate, complicated, and not especially convincing. And if one piece fell out of them, they were dashed all to pieces.

After we were married, we began to attend an Episcopal church, where many gay men attended, and where much of the church enthusiastically endorsed the morality of homosexuality. When I found out someone was gay, I reacted privately much as I did as a kid when I found out someone I knew to be Christian was a smoker. I knew it wasn’t exactly a big deal, but it seemed like something of a hypocrisy, a nagging sin that should be politely ignored. While I had no desire to call out people who smoked cigarettes, I sure as hell was not going to say they weren’t bad for you.

To be continued tomorrow. Read part two.