Clare McIvor 12/5/22 Clare McIvor 12/5/22

A Tale of Three Andrews: Thorburn, Bolt and Uncle Dan

Look, I’ll say straight up I missed the boat on this issue. My brain was so bogged down in other things that it just stopped working! But seeing the name Andrew Thorburn is still being thrown around in conservative circles as some sort of martyr-cum-hero (hehe, cum), Mamma Kit is going to say what’s been on her mind for a while.

Here’s my hot take - and I know you all love my hot takes — The Andrew Thorburn case wasn’t religious persecution. It was poor sportsmanship and a dog-whistle to Christian Conservatives who want to feel persecuted. Big call? Let me explain.

First, a primer for those following at home.

Andrew Thorburn was the head of a big bank in Australia - the National Australia Bank (the NAB). Following his departure from the bank, which had its fair share of scrutiny during his time at the helm, Thorburn took up a role as the CEO of Essendon Football club. His time at the club lasted 24 hours before it was discovered that he was also the chairman of an ultra-conservative church which had campaigned against abortion and the LGBTQIA community. Being that the Essendon Football Club espouses values of inclusion and diversity, crunch time arrived. Thorburn could not be at the helm of two organisations with opposing values. The result? He was “forced to resign.”

I gag on the words as they fly across my page.

Here’s where the other two Andrews in my corny title factor in: Daniel Andrews, Victoria’s Premier offered comment when questioned on the church’s stance on inclusivity and diversity answered with “Those views are absolutely appalling. I don’t support those views; that kind of intolerance, that kind of hatred, bigotry is just wrong. All of you know my views on these things. Those sort of attitudes are simply wrong, and to dress that up as anything other than bigotry is just obviously false.” [1] (Bravo. Golf clap).

The other Andrew is Andrew Bolt: a right wing conservative commentator/journalist who, I’m just going to say it, should have stuck to writing instead of moving across to host a SkyNews show (Lie News as it is commonly known among those of us who aren’t right wingers). When tuning in to a segment I shouldn’t have for the sake of my poor, beseiged blood pressure, I heard him say that Andrew Thorburn had been sacked. Not only did it grate on me for its factual inaccuracy, it also made me recoil for one simple reason: he wasn’t sacked. He was given a choice. He chose to leave. In doing so, he chose to show us who he really is. And that wasn’t about faith per se.

Why do I say that? Because faith can be inclusive. It can be the beacon of love and reconciliation that Christ always intended it to be. But my observation on the other side of deconstruction is that church and Jesus don’t share a bedroom let alone a bed in many cases. The bride of Christ has got her own digs now and I don’t think the Big Man (Jesus) visits often.

Of course, there’s nuance in this.

I recognise that in a situation like this, it can feel like you are being made to choose your faith or your job. But in this case, it is a patently false equivalence. Here is a man earning a bucket load. Here is a man who is the chairman of his church. Here is a man who can think deep enough to lead a troubled bank through a royal commission. He is privileged up to the gills. Ironically, he left his job at the bank after “he was personally singled out, alongside former NAB chairman Ken Henry, by the banking royal commission’s final report for failing to learn lessons from past misconduct. ” [2]

Let’s think about that: failure to learn lessons. Isn’t that something that the church globally is grappling with at the moment? At the time of writing, Hillsong mega-church pastor is in court defending himself over the cost of covering up his fathers sexual abuse of boys. Houston Jnr. did not report the crimes of Houston Snr. He did not do his due diligence with the legal system, choosing instead to handle it in house. I read on instagram this morning that multiple C3 pastors in the States were up on child abuse charges. Names like Ravi Zacharias, once lauded for his contribution to Christian apologetics, died disgraced as abuse claims went unresolved as he headed for the grave.

Our churchianity heroes are facing their time of reckoning and realising they are not above the law. Nor are Christians in public life above scrutiny. Nor should they be! No one should be — regardless of their creed. This is an awake and evolving society that wants to care for all its inhabitants better. If you want to be a cork in the arse of progress, then you deserve to be called out for that. And you don’t get to hide behind faith, because Jesus went to the cross rather than do that. And he was fully inclusive that whole time. (Yes, I’m using Jesus as an example even though I’m not a card-carrying Christian anymore. But just saying, I’m not a jerk. I’ve also never been truly persecuted for my faith. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation but…)

Across the globe, church scandals break what seems like daily. Are we learning? Are we making our churches safer for vulnerable and marginalised people? Or are we failing to learn the lessons, thus throwing ourselves open to Judgement Day, only this time it doesn’t wait for eternity. It arrives in the form of media or the judicial system, ready, quill and gavel in hand.

One of the lessons church has failed to learn is with regard to the LGBTQIA population.

As Daniel Andrews rightly pointed out in the press conference where he addressed the Thorburn issue, “Aren’t we all God’s children?” A point well made, but there’s more to this story. In the world of law, it is said that ignorance is not defence. It is no excuse. Well, here is the skinny on what some churches stay wilfully ignorant of:

- While participation in religion can be a protective factor for straight, cisgender young people, the statistics on LGBTQA+ youth are very, very different.

- A study found that identity conflict that comes from dissonance felt between religious beliefs and LGBT identity was associated with higher risk of suicide. The sample group in the study turned up statistically significant (science speak for “concerning as heck”) elevated risk for three concerning indicators: suicidal thoughts in the last month, parental anti-homosexual religious beliefs (associated with chronic suicidal thoughts in the last month), and elevated risk of suicide attempts. “In the case of suicide attempts, the two indicators were associated with a more than two times odds of having attempted suicide in the past year.”[3]

- While I make no allegations of whether or not City on a Hill is pro-conversion practices (as I don’t know), it has been known to campaign against LGBT rights. Thus I feel we need to drill down and acknowledge what happens when we don’t actively oppose conversion practices and make our churches safe for LGBTQIA people. One study showed young people who had engaged in conversation practices (which are now defined under Victorian law as wider than therapy alone, thank heavens), were at elevated risk of homelessness, mental health issues, family rejection, greater vulnerability to poor health and wellbeing, decreased engagement in education, sport and employment, and considerably higher risk of psychological distress, self harm and suicidality. [4]

- Analysis by Cornell University found the following when it came to the ‘Success rates’ of conversion therapy. “Of those, 12 concluded that CT is ineffective and/or harmful, finding links to depression, suicidality, anxiety, social isolation and decreased capacity for intimacy. Only one study concluded that sexual orientation change efforts could succeed—although only in a minority of its participants, and the study has several limitations: its entire sample self-identified as religious and it is based on self-reports, which can be biased and unreliable. The remaining 34 studies do not make an empirical determination about whether CT can alter sexual orientation.” [5]

So let’s put it bluntly. You can't and shouldn't attempt to "fix" gay. Not just because it isn't any indication of brokenness. The only study that pointed to anything other than devastating harm with any empirical support was so biased, it was probably loaded with ticking time-bombs ready to explode. All the other evidence points to devastating and ongoing harm.

We do not get to be ignorant of this. Regardless of religious beliefs. If anything, religious beliefs should move us to compassion and empathy, and the abandonment of practices that do devastating harm.

The Third Option Available to Thorburn

When I watched the Andrew Thorburn issue play out, a few of things were immediately clear to me.

1) This was going to play right into the narrative of those who like to jump on the bandwagon of Christian persecution.

2) Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, and Andrew absolutely didn’t do that. In fact, he pretty much turned to the whole world and cried “Look, Essendon Football Club hurt my cheek!” Poor Andrew.

3) He absolutely should have disclosed this jarring clash of values in the negotiation process rather than walking in, fully informed of the clash of values and creating a pseudo-persecutory storm in a media tea cup.

But finally, another thing. There was a third option.

He could have aligned his claims that he wasn’t a bigot and he could get behind the diversity values of the Essendon Football Club by making positive change in the church he is chairman of. He could have recognised the cognitive dissonance between his job as CEO and his job as City on a Hill Chairman and chosen to make that place safer for LGBT people.

My hot take is that Essendon offered Thorburn a chance to look in the mirror and see the damage his church was doing to LGBT people by campaigning against them and maintaining a non-affirming stance, and to choose not to be part of that damage. He could have wielded his impact for good. Instead, he cried persecution and walked away, thus presenting a dog-whistle to far right conservatives to jump on the bandwagon and cry persecution. His claim was that it was now clear that his faith was not welcome in public life.

Hot take: If you have a public life of any sort, you invite scrutiny. So be a good person. Acknowledge your potential for great good and great harm. Own your values. Own your choices. Its not bullying. Its not persecution. Its good old-fashioned scrutiny. Its like my ex-husband always says “Its only persecution if it comes from a specific region in France. Otherwise its just sparkling consequences.”

So lets talk about Christian Persecution.

I’ve written about this at length in another blog post (which you can read here if you can be bothered). But to plagiarise my own work and offer you a TL:DR — a reflection: there is a big difference between persecution and good old fashioned discomfort. Discomfort is good sometimes. I’ve heard countless motivational speakers remind us that no growth happens inside our comfort zone, and I have to agree! We shouldn’t fear discomfort. It is part of life and sometimes good things come out of it!

Persecution, however, is crushing, life-altering, and in so many cases, life-threatening. Open Doors USA, an organisation that exists for persecuted Christians, has this to say on the matter: “While Christian persecution takes many forms, it is defined as any hostility experienced as a result of identification with Jesus Christ. From Sudan to Russia, from Nigeria to North Korea, from Colombia to India, followers of Christianity are targeted for their faith. They are attacked; they are discriminated against at work and at school; they risk sexual violence, torture, arrest and much more.

In 2019 alone, there were:

Over 245 million Christians living in places where they experience high levels of persecution
4,305 Christians killed for their faith
1,847 churches and other Christian buildings attacked.
3,150 believers detained without trial, arrested, sentenced or imprisoned.

These numbers are mind-boggling. But a further look into them (they came from the 2019 World Watch List) is this: Saudi Arabia didn’t even crack the top ten in terms of persecution against Christians. China didn’t crack the top twenty. The United Arab Emirates sat at number 45. Open Doors only carried the top 50 countries in terms of persecution on their list: The United States of America, Australia, and Great Britain did not make the list. Yet, at least from my observation, there is a growing idea that Evangelical Christians are being persecuted, and we seem to buy into this rhetoric all too easily.

In my humble opinion, Church and Christian leaders aren’t being persecuted. They are being confronted with loss of privilege and that is okay with me.

The idea that we, in our privilege as some of the richest nations on earth, with our human rights advancements, our employment anti-discrimination laws, and our religious freedom acts, might be persecuted ignores the very real systematic targeting of our Christian brothers and sisters in other countries like North Korea, Somalia and Afghanistan – places where confessing Jesus as your saviour may cost you your life or your safety and livelihood.

The worst I will face here, in my white Judeo-Christian privilege, is someone calling me names on the internet. Bullying or harassment, but not high-level stuff that makes me legitimately fear for my safety (apart from that one time Channel Nine put me up in a hotel for a few days after a big story, while their hotshot investigative journalist just happened to be finding the guy who had been threatening me to try to suppress scrutiny on my dads church. But thats…ironic in timing and in kind).

What we might be dealing with here is a persecution complex

The persecution complex is actually a worrying mental delusion. To plagiarise myself again (now you don’t need to go read the other article), the Merriam-Webster Complex Medical Dictionary calls the persecution complex “the feeling of being persecuted especially without basis in reality.”

In individuals, the persecution complex may be called a persecutory delusion and fall within a range of “delusional disorders’ in the DSM V (the diagnostic handbook of the psychological profession). In groups though, it is an interesting and perhaps dangerous phenomenon. I found a study resource online that helpfully described a persecution complex in the following way: “A persecution complex is a type of delusion. A delusion is a fixed, irrational belief that one is convinced is true despite evidence to the contrary. In the case of people suffering with delusions of persecution, the fixed irrational belief is that others are plotting against and/or following them. Signs that someone may be struggling with a persecution delusion include:

Increased isolation.
Paranoid behaviours
Verbal statements that make little sense or are not rational.
An increase in angry outbursts.”

If we were to witness this in a friend, we would have the right to be very concerned. But with the rise of cultural and political discourse in the public sphere (i.e. media), it isn’t uncommon for people to face off against a strong or emotive and opposing viewpoint. When this hit to the ego (and we all have an ego, or a sense of self) is combined with a persecution complex, things can get ugly.

So what happens when a group of people holds to the same ideals and experiences similar opposition? You have the potential for a group persecution complex to develop. You have the potential for the group to isolate itself, to believe society is against it, to develop an “us versus them” mentality, and for verbal statements rooted in the persecution delusion to be met with confirmation bias and thus become part of groups’ folklore. My fear is that this can then become the narrative of their lived experience and entrench the persecutory delusion even further.

Let me be real here: this is a terrible situation. Imagine believing society is against you, and the only people who truly understand you are part of a particular group. Imagine constantly thinking everything people write online is geared at you. Imagine the mental and emotional toll that would take. I could unpack this a lot further but I hope the case is clear: Even if the persecution is imagined, the effects of the persecution complex can be very, very real. And thats why the Andrew Thorburn dogwhistle is dangerous.

The Hot Take Wrap Up

If you are in a public role and a position of influence, don’t get scrutiny confused with persecution. How ironic, to sit with six-seven figure incomes and claim “People aren’t being fair to me” when they point out the lack of transparency or complicitness in harm to vulnerable people. There is always a third option. Andrew Thorburn’s third option was to take the hard road and enact profound and positive change for a group of people loved by God but harmed by church.

What a missed opportunity indeed.

Clare McIvor 10/17/20 Clare McIvor 10/17/20

How I Survived LGBTQA+ Conversion Practices

Earlier this year, I blogged on why I became an LGBTQ affirming Christian. It was, at that time, the most important piece I had posted on this blog – that is until today. The LGBTQA+ conversion movement (aka ‘gay conversion therapy’) is an issue that lies largely invisible, deniable, but its effects are devastating. So who better to tell you about this than the man I love best in the world – my husband. This is his story. (Guest blogger: Patrick McIvor)

“While most formal ex-gay/ex-trans/conversion organisations have closed down, the beliefs and ideology that formed the basis of the movement still exist in the form of non-therapeutic, underground conversion practices.”
– SOGICE Survivor Statement, 2019

Why the hell are people still subjecting themselves to a process the United Nations calls “torture”, to be healed from something that isn’t a disease? It seems like an obvious question, but only when you assume conversion practices exist in a vacuum, on their own.

They don’t.

Obviously, I can’t speak for everybody. But what I certainly can do is share my story.

So sit back, grab something to drink, and let’s talk about why a 15 year old high school drop-out with $800 to his name, packed up his Sony Playstation and moved all the way out to a country town called Sale, to pray the gay away.

* All names have been changed for privacy reasons. Except for you, Ben Lorraine.

GROWING UP DIFFERENT

I was a creative, extroverted kid. An intellectual and at times a bit flamboyant, I absolutely loved music and performing. If you asked me what I was going to do when I grew up, it was study music and join Opera Australia, conduct orchestras or something like that. A personality like this comes with certain social challenges for a boy in a world where masculinity was and still is in a state of upheaval and strain.

To quote Steve Biddulph, “Most men today live behind masks.” My mask was first put on in 1998, in my grade six year at St Paul Apostle in Endeavour Hills.

There were a couple of games we always played at St Paul’s. One was “Truth or Dare.” Look, let’s face it: it was poor judgement on my part, not a game someone with a tendency to overshare should immerse himself in. The other game at St Paul’s was British Bulldog. Basically, you run through a bunch of people and try not to get tackled to the ground. As it happened, one day we were playing Truth or Dare. I chose truth. The question was this:

“If you had to kiss any boy here, who would it be?”

I thought back to a game of British Bulldog earlier that year. A boy named Todd, sort of a “class bully” had tackled me to the ground, which in itself was nothing unusual. It’s the aim of the game. The memory that lingered with me though, was that he didn’t get up right away. He didn’t pin me down either. He just lay on top of me for a moment and our eyes met. It was nice. So, with that in my memory, I answered my truth question a bit too confidently. “Todd.” Well, you can probably imagine the response I got in grade six, in the far-less-woke year of 1998.

A little while later, Todd got angry with me. He lifted me up against a wall and choked me so hard that I couldn’t breathe, making sure others could see him doing it. He eventually let me go. To be honest I don’t think he really was that angry, just needed to put on a show of aggression given the situation.

Turns out the whole “Todd incident” was the first of many more lessons in masculinity and masks I’d learn in years to come. After that, I was more careful how I acted around my friends. For rest of grade six, my attempts to be less honest and less caring toward my friends (for fear they’d think I wanted to kiss them) eventually led me to act like a bit of a jerk. Side note: If you’re reading this Ben Lorraine, I’m sorry, I never should have said your song was shit. I just thought if I complimented it you might think I was gay. Turns out Justin Beiber stole your lyrics for his breakout hit anyway.

For my family and I, our faith was life itself, and the Bible was the only road map for life. In this context, the lurch from Catholic primary school to public high school at Lyndale Secondary College was a little rough. Everyone was suddenly dating at school, but a broad trend in church at that time was the purity movement which essentially banned or frowned upon dating.

I was trying to be the best Christian I could be, but also wanted to fit in and survive. I tried dating a couple of girls but was afraid to express any physical affection because my church had taught me it was sinful. I was never one to put out much machismo anyway. So I quickly earned a reputation around the school for being a bit “frigid.” Another F word started getting used too.

Faggot.

So 90’s. Still not a great word, and thankfully not something you hear as much anymore. But it makes me cringe to even write it. Still, when I see the word or hear it, I’m transported back to high school like it was yesterday. I remember the fear I felt, whenever someone yelled “faggot” at me, especially when it was accompanied by shoves or punches. I remember the shame, not just because of the names, but also because my religion had taught me to believe I was vile and sinful for feeling attracted to boys.

I remember the stress and adrenaline I felt every time I had to enter a change room at school, go to the toilet, or just go outside. The possibility that someone would suspect I was looking at them and hit me or call me out, and that everyone would laugh again made me anxious constantly. I learned to keep a total poker face around guys. Eyes forward, not looking at any part of them too long. Definitely not looking them in the eyes. I became socially awkward, and the term creep was added to my list of names.

ISLAND IN THE SUN?

During these years, my brother had moved out of home, three hours away to join a church in a small town called Sale. Ten years older than me, I idolised him. Anything he was doing, I wanted to do. He moved when I was nine, and I visited him as much as possible then and into my teens. The church he joined had gathered up a lot of young people, mostly from broken homes or vulnerable circumstances, and instilled in them a sense of solidarity and purpose. To me they appeared completely impassioned with life; it struck me as a beautiful, unique collection of believers living out “true” Christianity together.

When I visited Sale it was usually on the V/Line. With my Sony Discman in hand, I’d listen to Weezer’s Island in the Sun on repeat. Juxtaposed against a growing feeling of isolation at home, Sale became my own Island in the Sun. Initially, it was a place where I could be my campy self, where everyone laughed at my jokes, and where their faith felt more authentic than I’d ever known.

Over a few years, I watched my brother and two sisters come of age, leave home for Sale, become immersed in the life of the church and connect with what they said was their destiny. My heart ached to escape my own loneliness and one day be old enough to answer my own “call to destiny.”

One small red flag hid in the back of my mind though. In between inspiring, positive messages, the church’s teaching, like so many churches, was decidedly anti-gay.

Around that time, a man in my church (let’s call him Ross, a father figure of sorts) started noticing that where I was once creative, talkative and extroverted, I’d become quiet and withdrawn. One day, he asked what was going on, and I plucked up some courage and said, “Kids at school are saying I’m gay, what if I am?”

Many of our church cultures don’t know what to do with such questions, which leads pastors and elders to be ignorant of the experience of people living in liminal, or marginal spaces. Life is complicated; at times confounding, and for the majority of Christians, church is a place of refuge, clarity and purpose. But for those outside the norm, God’s grace often comes with misleading terms and conditions.

Ross’ advice, based on his interpretation of the Bible, was that gayness is a social construct. He said something like, “There’s actually no such thing as gay, it’s just a political identity that people choose to put on.”

As a young Christian questioning my sexuality, I had begun to grapple with a complex system of conflicting truths, each question and answer looping around to another question. Aside from snide remarks about pop-culture icons like Ellen “Degenerate“, the only wisdom the church had to offer me, could so far be summarised as:

Gays are other people, who choose to live outside God’s plan.

At this point I’d like to acknowledge that if you’re a Christian reading this, it’s probably going to be uncomfortable. This story attempts to shine a light on a specific darkness within Christian culture. It is not a wholesale dig at Christianity or Christians. It’s one person’s story, not personally directed at you, and I believe many of us have contributed to this problem in one way or another.

I grew more detached and isolated at home and school. I wagged many classes and failed some, eventually having to go to a different school. The homophobic bullying was relentless. Maintaining a posture of fight and flight, and adopting various masks to survive in an environment where just being myself was dangerous, was exhausting on every level. Not that I could even conceptualise what “myself” was.

It turns out that changing schools wasn’t a magic pill for the alleviation of all problems. Surprise! Some humiliating events occurred only a few weeks into my new school, and at 14 years old, I announced to my parents that I was never going back to school again. I had been ahead in primary school, in the accelerated program in high school but was now a drop-out by year nine. Crippled by social anxiety, I knew I needed to reclaim some self-confidence, carve out my own path, and find somewhere to belong.

THE GREAT DOUBLE BIND

Life changed dramatically, but I didn’t. I auditioned for a show with Melbourne City Opera, I volunteered, eventually got a full-time job at McDonalds. I didn’t particularly like the idea of working in fast food for the rest of my career, but all I could focus on was my immediate needs – to take off the survival mask that was beginning to suffocate me, and also to just feel a little safe.

While volunteering around this time, I met a guy named Joe – a guitar-playing, Rastafarian hat-wearing hippie sort. I thought he was ridiculously cool. Joe was gentle and caring, completely comfortable showing affection to friends. It must have been an hour we spent, with my head resting on his lap as a group of us watched a Monty Python movie late one night. I’d never before felt so connected to another person, and I could have stayed there for hours.

Years later, during a conversion therapy session in 2011, this “sexual sin” with Joe would be identified as the origin of my demonic possession and idolatry. Yet nothing sexual had occurred. A good memory, one of feeling safe and at ease, had been poisoned and turned into a symbol of depravity.

Living Waters, 2011:
”Renouncing Baal and Ashteroth is a militant act to cleanse our hearts and minds of all effects of sexual sin, whether ours or others’. Thrust every foul image, every memory, every sinful action, every unholy sexual relationship, every habitual compulsion into the Cross. Let God’s presence… inspire a repulsion in you…”

That same year I met a girl named Zoe while volunteering at OzChild Interchange. She was a Triple J-listening, Ani DiFranco-loving adventurer. We instantly connected. The physical intimacy was exciting, but also induced massive guilt on my part. Purity culture meant any affectionate gesture with Zoe felt like it might bring divine judgement down on me. Still, it was beautiful. We talked late into the night about anything and everything, and one night, Zoe confided in me that she thought she might be a lesbian. The line went completely silent.

After some time, I said, “I think I might be bisexual.”

It was the first time I’d even heard myself say it, let alone told anyone else. I felt relief in giving voice to what had previously been unspeakable. But I also felt shame and fear. I had been raised to believe that words have power, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the simple act of speaking it had cursed me with it.

Thus, an internal dichotomy began pulling me in two opposing directions.

I continued to visit Sale. Each time immersing myself in the social and spiritual activity of the church. But when I went home, I also immersed myself in a sort of queer tribe of friends I had developed. Zoe and I, surprisingly, grew closer together as we explored what it meant, and offered each other acceptance along the way. It turned out some of my work mates were bisexual too. I was still constantly mindful of what God thought of all this, but at the same time I was excited to have other people like me to just enjoy being around. I started to come alive again, and for the first time in a long time, was happy.

So I spent my free weekends in Sale, and the rest of my life immersed in the queer, free-spirited work crowd back in Melbourne. On more than one visit to the church in Sale, it was preached that homosexuality was a particularly “vile” sin, not to be tolerated, especially not in church. I didn’t want to be unacceptable to God, or rejected by the church. I coiled up my sexuality so tight every day, everywhere, partitioning it off somewhere inside me, trying not to feel it or let anyone see it anymore.

The more time I spent with the work crowd though, the more my coiled-up self was unwound. A confident, attractive guy named Brad was the biggest personality among them. We drank copious amounts of bourbon together, watched Queer as Folk, and danced to John Mayer’s No Such Thing. While dancing one night, Brad leaned in, looked me in the eyes and kissed me. We were in a crowded room, but unlike the Todd Incident, this time I didn’t have to worry at all about who was watching. We got into his bed and… I was paralysed by fear. All I could think about was endless suffering, fire and consequences.

Living Waters, 2011:
”A reversal of what is sexually natural, they [homosexuals] exemplify the spirit of idolatry which is itself the fundamental subversion of true order.”
“An abomination with death as its penalty.”

It turned out there didn’t need to be a Todd present to hit me anymore. Peer rejection, compounded by anti-gay church teaching and the threat of eternal suffering, had created in me an acute and ever-present torturer. My own heart was now my accuser. Before much else could happen between Brad and me, I panicked, left the room and never went back.

I grew increasingly distressed about it. I ruminated constantly on impossible questions, wondering if God had pre-destined me for hell and why. It seemed so unfair that just wanting to love and be loved meant I deserved relentless self-hatred and alienation from my peers, family and church. I was exhausted from the constant effort required to keep lying to my parents about where I had been. They didn’t raise me to be a liar, and they deserved to know who I really was. I was broken-hearted and riddled with shame over my inability to stop being so “vile”. I was disgusted with myself.

I’d cried and prayed for many hours, many nights, but on October 2nd, 2002 it was different. On this night, more so than before, I really wanted to just die. But I also wanted to find someone to love, even if it meant renouncing my faith in God and risking eternity in hell. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to live. I needed to do something and it couldn’t wait any longer.

ENTERING THE GAY CONVERSION ECOSYSTEM

I remembered how good I felt when I visited Sale, and how intoxicating their image of love and purpose was. I wanted to be loved, to be acceptable, and to escape. I resolved that I absolutely had to go to Sale, or I would die. It was my destiny. I no longer wanted to take part in my life anymore, I wanted somebody else’s and theirs looked pretty damn perfect.

Just weeks later, I said goodbye to my life in Melbourne and off to Sale I went. Like a criminal entering witness protection, I assumed a new identity in a new town, cutting off all contact with anyone I previously knew. They never saw me again. I set about constructing a new mask to live behind and threw myself into church life 100%; I prayed daily, worshipped loudly, evangelised constantly, and read my Bible.

I made so many new friends at my new church, and was never bored or alone. The old me quickly became unrecognisable, a secret only I knew, and kept close to my chest.

I was assigned a discipler, just like everyone else in the church, to help me grow in my Christian faith. We met regularly for mentoring and “accountability” sessions. One day, I decided to share my same-sex attraction with him. He told me I needed to tell our pastor about it. The pastor provided ongoing guidance on why he thought people became gay. His advice was usually glib, uninsightful and to be frank, he had no idea what he was talking about. He said things like, “your father was absent”, or “you’re not gay, you’re just creative”. He told me I needed to talk to several other men in the church on a regular basis. They all offered the same calibre of advice.

Over the years, his advice was that I should behave more dominantly, and suggested various women who I might consider eligible wives. Keep in mind, this was a church that didn’t even encourage kissing before marriage, let alone any other forms of physical intimacy. My whole future rested on the ability to deeply, thoroughly, completely believe I was straight.

I completed Year 12, and having achieved the State’s top mark for contemporary voice in the Music Performance exam, was invited to give a concert in Melbourne. It was an experience I’ll always remember. Encouraged by the result, I remembered my old dream of studying at the Victorian College of the Arts, and I’ll admit I did miss aspects of my old life. I was accustomed, however, to submitting all study, career or relationship decisions to the pastor, as did everyone in the church covenant group.

When I proposed my study plans to him, his pronouncement was “nah don’t go there, bunch of faggots, not the sort of place that will be good for you.” There was that word again. Faggot. It had been a while since I heard it, but it had the same kick it always had. So in an effort to find something that would inspire less passion, to avoid fuelling prohibited desires, I studied Information Technology instead. I got involved in the “manly” pursuit of politics (which I legitimately enjoyed until a certain point). I took my career in a managerial direction. I worked hard, not just at life, but also at convincing myself I wasn’t bi anymore. I was straight.

Then I got to know Clare (aka Kit Kennedy!), she was the girl you always noticed in a room. She also happened to be the pastor’s eldest daughter.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Clare and I were already acquainted as our parents had known each other for decades. And hey, my brother lived in her parents shed for quite some time.

We became best frenemies, renowned for our ability to disagree on just about anything, and yet we spent more and more time together. People thought we couldn’t stand each other, and to be fair there were some spectacular disagreements. Which is why, when her dad sat me down one day and asked, “You and Clare seem to be getting along well? You wouldn’t… marry her, would you?” I was more than a little surprised. It didn’t take long, about 5 minutes after that conversation in fact, for me to see we really did have something special. A few months later, on January 3rd, 2010, our courtship began.

We were sickeningly cute together. Clare made me believe in love again – as cliché as it sounds. I felt I must have done something so right to have found my soulmate. Naturally though, we were anxious about what our sexual relationship would look like. In pursuit of “purity” both Clare and I had totally shut down our ability to intimately connect with someone. My worry was compounded by a still unresolved question of whether I even liked women enough, having never had the chance to freely explore my own sexuality without shame. Our relationship spectacularly fell apart 10 months later, and we were both devastated.

Our breakup was shattering for me, because I felt the full force of the pastor’s anger. He told me I needed to stop being so feminine, stop consuming creative entertainment, and read books about manhood so I could become a man “that other young men would actually want to be like”. I went home and reflected on that. The pain of years gone by flooded in thick and fast. I was completely broken.

A short while later, after ordering four “manhood” books off Amazon, I met with the pastor at the Tall Poppy Cafe. It was January 2011. I told him how much I wanted to try, but despite all my efforts for the past eight years, I still felt deep down that I was “wired up” different. I told him I was still attracted to men, and at a complete loss for what to do about it. He said he had heard of a group called Exodus, who specialised in “Ex-Gay Ministry”, and suggested I reach out to them. A couple of clicks and a Google search later, I found their American website: https://exodusglobalalliance.org/.

SHIT GETS REAL WEIRD

Karen from Exodus took down my details and said a guy named Bob would be in touch. She said he was from a group called Living Waters Australia, which she hoped would be “very beneficial” for me. Fun fact: Living Waters Australia first operated out of Frank Houston’s Christian Life Centre in Sydney, a forerunner to Hillsong. My pastor and I met with Bob at the Victoria Rose Tea Rooms in Rosedale, so that he could suss Bob out and give the tick of approval. (IMAGE: the email trail)

Bob and I met every fortnight for one year, in a counselling room provided to him a church in Traralgon. He showed me a biscuit tin he kept, filled with wedding photos of all the men he had counselled to “wholeness”. I was inspired by this underground brotherhood, and totally convinced that I would one day be in one of those photos.

The process of Living Waters involved reading through a 400 page pseudo-psychological manual together, confessing sexual sins, receiving deliverance prayer with water and oil, and speculating about the sins of my parents.

Living Waters 2011 – Prayer of Atonement:
”Jesus… We are heavy with sin, guilt and shame. So often we have sought to justify ourselves, ignore our sinfulness or try to overcome in our own strength. We confess not only our sin but our pathetic solitary attempts to take hold of Your grace… we lay down our sin (each person names them specifically)… I love You, Lord. Release Your grace upon me now, so that I can be free. Amen.”

Similar to drug and alcohol counselling, it involved identifying triggers of lapse and relapse, and putting plans in place to prevent myself from even feeling attraction.

Living Waters, 2011:
“Addiction starts in the heart, which is both shame based and full of pain.”

IMAGE: (Dangerous Pseudo-psychology from the conversion therapy manual)

Homosexuality was considered synonymous with words like addiction, narcissism and witchcraft.

Living Waters, 2011 – Prayer of Laying Down the False Self:
”Father, we confess how we have schemed in our emptiness to create a ‘false self’… We confess to You the specific means we have employed, like lying, seducing, compromising the truth, boasting and intense self pre-occupation… Where our spirits have been darkened through the use of power to control others, as in witchcraft, cleanse us, free us and release us from the evil grip… We renounce the spirit of seduction and the spirit of witchcraft and repent of our sins of seduction and witchcraft. Reveal our darkness here, O God and cleanse us…”

The program presented sexuality as black and white; you were either heterosexual and part of God’s plan, or homosexual and will die a shameful, eternal death. The word bisexual was completely absent.

It took my pre-existing self-hatred, compounded it, then reframed it as evidence of my sin.

Living Waters 2011 – Prayer renouncing self-hatred:
“Father, we confess the sin of self-hatred. We confess that we have turned against ourselves…”

The program dismantled my identity and criminalised the way I experience desire, reframing any bad thing to happen to me, past, present or future, as a punishment from God; I was the embodiment of God’s judgement on society.

Living Waters, 2011:
“The sex addict [homosexual] bears the full brunt of the consequences of sexual sin in his life, as a reminder to the rest of society what they flirt with when they ignore God’s good order for His gift of sexuality. They bear His judgement in that their lives become increasingly unmanageable, decreasingly able to function, increasingly isolated in relationships and usually end up reeking [sic] havoc in theirs and others lives.”

My self-worth was filled with poison, and romantic memories (with men and women) coloured with regret. Fabricated memories of abuse and neglect wedged me away from my parents, and made me distrust my own mind and heart.

Living Waters, 2011:
“Victims of sexual abuse… have been bound to their abuser’s perversions. God does not hold you responsible for this and yearns for you to be free by engaging your will to renounce the spirit of sexual idolatry.”

Living Waters, 2011:
“You may have experienced the complete absence of a father because of death or divorce. Maybe you were orphaned by the demands of your parents’ career? Or is it just the childhood memory of broken promises or neglect that haunts you? Some of you screamed for hours as babies but nobody came to relieve you of your discomfort and hunger. Some of you whimpered behind locked doors, a small child, forgotten and alone.”

Living Waters, 2011:
“Let God break your heart… Acknowledge how your heart is already damaged by your sin… Acknowledge how your sin hurts God, others and yourself.”

Conversion therapy did indeed break me. But I also thought it was remaking me.

Living Waters, 2011:
“We need to continually put our former self to death.”

And after about 20 gruelling fortnightly sessions… I was still attracted to men. But just like 2 Corinthians 5:17 had promised, I felt I was more in Christ, the old me had died. Or at least shrunk so much he might as well have been dead.

In hindsight, my Living Waters guidebook was nothing short of a death manifesto, a long winded oxymoron to help me find God’s love through self-hatred. An instruction manual on ways to self-harm, but wrapped up as love and delivered with kindness.

VIDEO: Living Water Program Promo

DECONSTRUCTING INTO SELF-ACCEPTANCE

After I completed Living Waters, Clare and I went to Malaysia together for a conference. We were both reminded on that trip just how fun life was together, how at ease we were with each other, and how much we just didn’t want to be apart. Far from prying eyes, it was nice to flirt and feel the chemistry between us. Our romance recommenced and I was finally able to pull the engagement ring from its year-long hiding place in my sock drawer.

Three and a half years into our marriage, on November 11th 2015, Clare woke me with a beaming grin and a positive pregnancy test. As the realisation sank in that I would be responsible for loving, protecting and raising my own child, it became a catalyst for serious reflection. Both Clare and I had already come to believe we were in a spiritually abusive church, but a number of factors had our hands tied.

I knew I didn’t want to subject my own children to another person’s control and I urged Clare to leave her father’s church with me. She didn’t want to leave, preferring instead to stay and fix it from the inside. As it happened, that night I provoked her father’s anger by offering him an unfiltered look in the mirror, and the process of our excommunication began.

In the months ahead, I started to reconnect with my own mind. Inevitably, my newfound free thought gave way to a predictable crisis. I couldn’t repress anymore; my soul had been coiled up so tight and it was about to break – big time. Denying my sexuality hadn’t changed it. Praying didn’t fix it. I finally allowed space for the possibility that after 13 years of trying to be fixed, I might never have been broken to begin with.

Grief, anger and regret hit me like a tsunami. For about six months just about anything made me emotional. I cried most days on the way to work, then I’d pull it together, so I could case-manage other people through life’s challenges and traumas all day. I wore jumpers to hide constant sweating, and took prescription Valium to try to relax and concentrate through the fog that enveloped me. Vicarious trauma from working in a helping profession started to transfer into my own trauma, causing daily anxiety attacks, and eventually derailing my ability to be at work at all.

With our second child just arrived, I could find no rest or joy in anything, and fell further into depression. Clare was heart-broken. Struggling with a newborn and a toddler and now a train-wreck husband, she had already lost so many relationships, and now feared she was losing me too.

She stayed with me though, carrying me through as wave after wave crashed into us; as I worked through the questions I always should have asked – what am I? Am I gay? Am I truly bisexual? Does God love me despite it? What does this mean for us? I found proper counselling, and I also found Kevin Garcia’s podcast, A Tiny Revolution.

We allowed a handful of close friends to see what was going on. They listened non-judgmentally, accepted us as we were, and loved us as we mended. Slowly, with a few steps forward, a few back and so on, I found a place of rest. Clare waited and loved me unconditionally while I found myself, and then we re-found each other.

In May of this year, we renewed our vows. In front of 12 friends who had stood by us through the mud, and the mire, we reaffirmed our love and commitment to each other, fully knowing this time what we both wanted and who we both are.

WHY TELL MY STORY?

I wanted to speak out so I can live my life with no shadows holding on to me. I also wanted to tell it because somewhere, in churches like yours, there is a young queer kid whose faith should be giving them life but instead it’s driving them to suicidal ideation.

I also want to apologise to local LGBTQ folks. My contribution against marriage equality in 2015 was wrong. I won’t make excuses, I won’t dredge up the details. But I want my regret to go on record.

Church-involved young people who are questioning their sexuality, are three times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than questioning young people outside church.

Conversely, for heterosexual young people, church involvement is often a protective factor against suicide.

The society I grew up in was harsher for “faggots” than it is today. Secular society has slowly but surely acknowledged the ways in which LGBTQ people have been marginalised, and sought to build a more inclusive society.

Sections of the church are catching up too.

But others are digging further into denial, refusing to see the harm caused, especially to young people born into or “saved” into church.

There are many Biblical arguments for an LGBTQ affirming stance, but honestly, I can’t be bothered having that argument anymore, and frankly, I don’t care. I no longer need someone else’s interpretation of the Bible to give me permission to love myself and others.

Jesus didn’t need scripture to tell him who He could love either. The Priests were pissed off at him for healing a woman on the Sabbath. He told them to shove their scripture up their ass and look at the pain this woman was in (Luke 13:10-17).

And what I’m asking of Christians now, is to look at me. Wrestle with this the way I have.

Sure, some may say, “If you don’t like it, leave it.” No. I’ve left enough places I didn’t fit in, and now it’s time for me to stay.

Church should be a place where everyone finds refuge, not just those who conform to certain norms. It is a blight on our Christianity that we have excluded many people from faith, on the basis of their sexual or gender expression. But it is not too late for church to change.