Thank you so much for your response. When I started wrestling with and fighting my homosexuality at age 23, shortly after my honorable service with US Air Force (where I earned three letters of commendation), I was terrified. Then while studying at the University of Maryland I found a book by Dr. Wainwright Churchill, “Male Homosexuality: A Cross-Species and Cross-Cultural Study” (I have a pristine copy in my personal library). The study is tedious, but comprehensive. Churchill was a psychoanalyst and obviously a very gifted one.
His “conclusion” was that religion has contaminated and corrupted human sexual behavior. I have been a senior manager/exec in the private business sector for more than 30 years. But, I also am an ordained Christian theologian with degrees in business and theology. Churchill’s conclusion about the adverse affects on human sexual behavior are spot on. Christianity as practice has become the greatest “sin” of all. Even Jesus says in Matthew 19, “There shall be those born as eunuchs from their mothers’ wombs”, a passage that inspired a lengthy pamphlet in 1977 created by then Reverend Dr. Edward W. Bauman of United Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, DC. The pamphlet is titled, “Reflections on the Gay Life”. Dr. Bauman believed this passage was Jesus’ way of addressing same-sex emotional and physical love.
My point is NOT to promote homosexuality for anyone. I know the pains and fears of growing up “gay” — “queer” in my day. I would never recommend homosexuality to anyone. Society is way too cruel on that one. However, if one discerns that he or she is a homosexual, then they MUST NOT live in denial. I reconciled with my own homosexuality when I met my first partner in 1968. He had just turned 19 and a month later I turned 24. I came to terms with the fact that I would live and love as my heart told me to; not in a lie to please society and family. That partner and I were together for eight years; then closely bonded until his death in 1996. Talk about passion and love? It could “move heaven and earth”.