Around this time last year, I was having lunch with some Christian friends when I brought up my concerns about Truelove.is. As a gay man who spent eight years in Christian society, I was interested in the church’s latest attempt to reach out to gay people. Even though Truelove.is insists that the church loves people who are not straight, I found that the campaign ultimately teaches tolerance without acceptance; “we disagree with his decisions, but that doesn’t mean we love him any less”. To me, Truelove.is advocates a worldview in which gay people must either strive to be heterosexually married, celibate, or be judged by society; a sad impasse for anyone to inhabit.
That’s what I said when my friends asked me for my thoughts on this issue. After hearing what I had to say, one of my friends was consumed by a sudden wave of hatred. After I said that I think Truelove.is essentially promotes euphemised conversion therapy, my friend shouted, “I thought the only thing controversial about conversion therapy is that they electrocute people?”
Taken aback by his spite, I mentioned that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and that any attempt to repress a natural instinct would be both painful and foolish. To this, my friend spat, “that’s just what the liberals say!”
Needless to say, that lunch date did not end nicely.
Ever since then, I have been troubled by how hateful my friend became once we discussed homosexuality. Out of curiosity, and out of a desire to understand this traumatic rupture in our friendship, I attended the Truelove.is x Heartbeart Project Symposium held on 30 April 2019 at Church of our Saviour. Re-entering Christian society felt like a return to muscle memory. Re-embracing my dual-citizenship status between Christianity and homosexuality, I attended the Symposium to see if returning to the society that my friend still inhabits — a society that I left behind — would help me understand him better.
Attending the Symposium provided me with clarity; it also reminded me of why I left Christianity. Previously, I was confused by the difference between my friend’s usual self and the hatefulness he expressed once it came to gay issues. Attending the Symposium gave me a window into my friend’s mind by giving me a look into his society. Across the event, speakers ridiculed critics, ignored responses to their campaign, and portrayed themselves as the target of persecution by what they call “the liberal and mainstream media”. According to this worldview, my friend — and Truelove.is supporters — are not wrong, but misunderstood. It is not on them to explain themselves to gay people, but on gay people to understand them.
All in all, Truelove.is talks about gay people, speaks at gay people, but does not know how to talk with gay people. This is how my friend reacted because this is how they talk about us behind closed doors.
Just to clarify: Truelove.is announced two prohibitions at the beginning of the event. Firstly, unauthorised media was not allowed. Secondly, the Symposium operated under Chatham House rules, which means that the organisers are happy for people to cite things mentioned during the event as long as anonymity is preserved. Out of respect for these regulations, I have blocked the identities of the people I am citing. I am also sorry that I do not have the space or lived experience necessary to discuss The Heartbeat Project.
Talking About Gay People
I’ve heard enough homophobia from the pulpit during my time as a Christian. I’ve heard about the Gays’ plan to ruin society, about my supposed desires for incest, paedophilia and bestiality. This pushed me away from the church; I couldn’t live with people who insisted on believing that I was always a lapse of self-control away from actual immorality.
To Truelove.is’s credit, I haven’t heard any explicit homophobia from them. Indeed, Truelove.is has moved away from the overt homophobia and slippery-slope arguments that dominated my time in church. However, several moments during the Symposium suggested that implicit homophobia remains a problem.
As Truelove.is writes, “we are enslaved by sin — powerless and addicted, so to speak — and lose our ability to choose good”. This seems to be a guiding principle for the campaign: straight Christians occupy a higher moral ground and must lift gay people up to their level of morality. This might be fine in itself — after all, most Christians think that all who do not accept Jesus will be barred from heaven — but only gay people are treated with a special sort of loathing that emphasises their inability to be anything more than their sin.
Even though Truelove.is insists that people should not be defined by their identity, some of the speakers seem to do so anyway. One speaker told the audience about a counselling session he was conducting for a man with same-sex attraction. During that session, he heard God say “[Redacted — A], give him a hug.” He then told the audience:
“To be honest, I was really struggling. Because I think I am dark, tall and handsome — what happens if he like [sic] me?”
The audience laughed. I retreated into the body of my eighteen-year-old self — I recalled what it was like to feel like someone was always suspicious of me, afraid that I would burst out of my Christian self-control to reveal the sex monster inside.
Do you really think I am just a swarm of bodily instincts without reason? Would you ever express a fear of hugging a straight opposite-sex person in the same way that you fear hugging me?
To be fair, A did give this man a hug. I am glad that A overcame his homophobia to believe the best in other people. What scared me, however, was the way he wrote this off as a joke, and how the audience interpreted this statement as something funny. When we laugh at a joke, we internalise the ideology that supports the joke; we unite ourselves against an enemy that we can ridicule together. What scared me about the Symposium — and what turned me away from Christianity — is this hidden but pervasive judgment. Even though they keep these thoughts hidden, this is what they think of me in private; these are the jokes they crack about me when they think I can’t hear them.
Speaking At Gay People
Any meaningful conversation has to involve two sides understanding each other, speaking with each other. If one speaks to conquer, one ends up speaking at people. Perhaps this is a consequence of the Truelove.is dictum that gay people “are enslaved by sin — powerless and addicted, so to speak — and lose our ability to choose good”; since gay people are wrong by definition, Christians stand to gain nothing from understanding their points of view. What saddens me about Truelove.is is that in spite of their earnest belief that they are engaging with gay people, they deny gay people the dignity of being engaged as equals.
Anyone following the social media storm that followed Truelove.is’s debut will have noticed that criticism of the campaign frequently came down to the notion of conversion therapy. Even though Truelove.is falls short of the traditional definition of conversion therapy in which physically abusive techniques such as electroshock torture are used to (unsuccessfully) recalibrate the brain’s sexual responses, many critics think that Truelove.is amounts to a psychological version of conversion abuse. According to Grace Yeoh from Rice Media, Truelove.is “mask[s] homophobia as holiness” and “claim[s] to demonstrate unconditional love, yet stop[s] short of all-encompassing acceptance and affirmation”. Similarly, Gay Star News is troubled by Truelove.is’s insistence that homosexuality can be repressed.
To many and to me, Truelove.is might as well be conversion therapy: it coerces gay Christians into suppressing their sexual desires in exchange for social affirmation. Any campaign manager worth their salt would have reacted to this recurrent critique, but Truelove.is doesn’t seem to think this point is worth addressing. While giving the audience an account of Truelove.is’s progress, Speaker A flashed screenshots of the aforementioned websites on its screen, and said:
“We have been called many, many things… homophobia… we have been accused of using conversion therapy — which, actually, I don’t even fully know exactly what that means… I have been accused of things I don’t understand.”
Once again, the audience laughed. I felt that old sense of alienness rise up again; this is a society that doesn’t understand, and doesn’t want to understand, the pain that I go through. It is unimaginable that anyone interested in “curing” homosexuality doesn’t know what conversion therapy is. Truelove.is’s wilful ignorance is a return to an “out of sight, out of mind” strategy that discounts the critic as someone worth engaging; if I don’t understand you, I can’t be guilty, and I don’t have to change for you.
Why, then, are these critics not worth listening to? Truelove.is seems to think they are either liberal or stupid. Later on in the event, we are introduced to a Truelove.is social media response squad — they are “a group that [has] faithfully been responding on social media”, a group of “lawyers and writers who gather together and say, ‘hey, we cannot let lies and fake news triumph.’”
Instead of engaging with criticism, Truelove.is discounts criticism by deeming these arguments wrong by definition. To Truelove.is’s online response team, it’s not about what you say, but who you are. If you lean left, your opinions are fake news; as my friend put it, criticism should be ignored because “that’s just what the liberals say”. In their worldview, Truelove.is is criticised because they are Christian and not because they are wrong. This is how they disavow responsibility for self-reflection; all criticism is interpreted as attacks on their identity and not their ideas.
In addition to discounting your thoughts if they don’t fit their narrative, Truelove.is simply doesn’t think very highly of people who disagree. As the speaker introduced two members of the Truelove.is online response team, he jokingly mentions — to the audience’s laughter — that one of them likes to “pour oil on anger”. This laughter went on for quite a while; it seemed like the audience was aware of this person’s enjoyment for online fighting, and that watching this person stick it to the liberals brought them pleasure. In fact, in response to being asked why he joined the team, this online response team member goes on to say:
“I think it really comes from a point of having seen the church being beaten down left, right, centre… and knowing that I can no longer stay silent about it, especially if the Lord has given me a brain.”
On some level, this made me feel like things weren’t just about winning people over for Jesus. At play somewhere in this social movement is a desire to simply win. It’s about winning the liberals, about defeating fake news, about proving Christians are smarter.
I left the symposium feeling like I had to take a shower.
Talking With Gay People
I attended the Truelove.is x Heartbeat Project Symposium with the intention of finding out how my friend’s mind worked. I left remembering why I decided to leave Christianity. I felt like I was viewed as a product of my sin, not someone to be understood but an objective to be conquered. My friend’s behaviour reflected a social trend of dismissing and ridiculing ideas that contest his worldview. It’s more important to him that he continues believing in his gay horror fantasy instead of looking beyond his fear to realise that I am not that fantasy.
I don’t doubt that Truelove.is has the best intentions at heart for gay people. What I am saddened by is the way they shut out criticism by deeming it liberal nonsense because they think gay people and their frustrations do not deserve respectful consideration. Truelove.is might insist that they are here for conversations and not conversions, but these are conversations they will have about you and not with you.
In these closing moments, I turn again to my Christian knowledge and to the verse that gave Truelove.is its name:
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7).
At the Truelove.is meeting, I realised that even though the campaign strives to embody these values publicly, it ultimately returns — even if unknowingly — to a self-affirming, self-serving sense of moral superiority that masks itself as love. As a gay man, and as one who used to be Christian, I was reminded that I left the church because I was unconvinced that it would protect me, trust me, and persevere in understanding me.
I am sorry I don’t have much advice for the church on how they can reach out to people like me better. If I had any, I wouldn’t have had to leave.
But I do know Truelove.is will read this. I hope you won’t dismiss this letter as liberal nonsense, but ask yourself whether your outreach attempts actually come from Christ-like love. As the Ethos Institute study on LGBT hospitality in Singaporean churches has shown, while only 13% of church leaders think churches are not at all open to LGBT people, 50% of LGBT respondents felt so. This is the gap in perception that arises when you talk to but not with, when you force all conversations to occur on your terms.
It’s not about nice product designs and well-produced short films. We know when you don’t actually want to listen.
You have already lost me; I hope you will help make the church more hospitable for those who still want to stay.
Edit, 5 May: changed a typo.
