The black church is an institution that has provided comfort, support, spiritual healing, and a sense of community to so many people. Churches all over the world embody different missions with an overall goal of spreading the Gospel. As a child growing up in the church this was clear to me. I was taught that I am a disciple of Jesus Christ with a responsibility to spread God’s Words. With this being imparted in me at such a young age, I thought the preacher’s Sunday messages was the Good News of Jesus Christ. Many times his sermons would include hurling attacks against homosexuals and anyone who supported them. I personally remember a minister who was extremely passionate concerning this subject, it seemed as if he was personally charged with throwing homosexuals in the blazing fires of hell.

Similar to the clergymen I too began to publicly condemn others. Despite my personal struggles with homosexuality I too ridiculed others just to be accepted in ministry. Soon after, it became clear to me that I was not the only one having this struggle and condemning others. From the choir stands to the backdoors of the church were same gender loving people. Many of them had been in church most of their life and have become numb to the verbal and spiritual abuse.

Regardless of this revelation, if I was going to survive and to be elevated in the church I had to keep my sexuality a secret. So like most gays and lesbians in the black church, I did. My sexuality was hidden beneath the fear of not being accepted by others and also by God. The fear that I lived in made me question everything I did. Questions came in my mind such as; is this shirt too tight? Should I be wearing this bright pink shirt? Should I wear shorts and expose my legs? How should I talk? Am I walking like a man? Questions like these are what I constantly thought about every day. The black church was destroying me and I was destroying others because of it. Still ignorant of God’s unmerited love for me, I continued to live a life of self-hate. I spent one summer so disgusted with myself I had black curtains hung in the windows of my room to block the sunlight from illuminating the room. There in that room I spent many days contemplating death. When I looked at myself in the mirror I was reminded of the words of various preachers condemning my soul to hell because my desires were “not of God”. No one knew of the immense inner turmoil I faced. Outside of that lifeless room I had to pretend every day to be someone other than my authentic self. I played football for my high school and stayed at a friend's house all day playing NBA 2k. I rode DMX bikes with my neighborhood friends and did a substantial amount of community service. To my friends, family, and others in my community I was your average guy, and that I was, but there was just a small piece of me that was missing. The missing piece was the understanding of God’s unconditional love for me. When I began discovering how deep God’s love was for me my entire perspective change. I no longer cared about conforming to the standards of an institution that lost the essence of Jesus’s ministry. I understood that God loved me so much that he came to show me how to love so that I won't have to figure it out on my own.

As time went on the church closed their doors to me. I was told that since I was a gay man that I had a spirit of perversion on me and I was damned to Hell. Parishioners no longer saw me as the anointed man that I was, but a sinner. Instead of hearing “God bless you” the most common phrase I begun hearing was “we love you, but we hate the sin”. If homosexuality is indeed a sin, why can’t you love me more than my sin? Is that not what Jesus did? The sin of being black is what promoted slavery in America. The sin of being a Jewish is what started the holocaust. The sin of being a woman is what oppressed women for hundreds of years. So if homosexuality is a sin than what scripture will justify the creation of the next concentration camp that will be used to kill me?

Do not allow the church to pimp your gift so that they may benefit from it. What would the church be if all of the homosexuals left? God accepts gay men and gay women just as he accepts straight men and straight women. Do not be fooled by the rhetoric that gays are going to hell. The love of God is unimaginable to us and we cannot comprehend it at all. Today, I live a life that is free from ridicule, free from sin, and free from church abuse. My life is more meaningful now than it has ever been all because I love myself beyond what others might think of me. My challenge to you is to find that same love and show it to everyone.