I once read a novel about a closeted, celibate gay man named Pawel in Nazi occupied Poland. He was frequently being tempted to have sex with underage boys but would one day shelter a young Jewish refugee and barely avoid taking him into his own bed which would eventually allow him to escape the Nazis and become a monk who would try to convert the antichrist right before Armageddon destroyed humanity. Heavy, I know, but thank goodness he didn’t try to have sex with that boy, huh?

I remember being terrified of that book. Not because of the antichrist or the Nazis, but because of Pawel. I was maybe twenty-two when I read it and all I could think about was becoming a lonely old bookstore owner who is tempted to invite teenage boys into his bed to keep warm. Would that be my life? Theoretically heroic but only given some kind of meaning by the most random of impossible plot twists? I was gay and was doing my best to listen to my church, but did I have any role to play beyond silently hoping someone I wanted to have sex with might go on to save the world?

The Catholic Church I grew up in has two foundational principles when it comes to gay people:

You must treat us as equals.¹ You must insist we are broken in a way no other humans are.²

I have yet to meet a person who is actually willing or able to live out both of these principles. Either they stop trying to be treat me like the rest of their friends — number one — or they stop thinking I’m intrinsically disordered — number two.

I came out in stages. Family. Close friends. Less close friends. Coworkers. Anyone else who might care. And it meant different things when I did. Growing up in a religious setting, saying I like boys was different than saying I date boys. To some that might be splitting hairs. But where I come from, it’s the distance between being different, and being dangerous.

The Catholic Church expects celibacy of its members, claiming an intrinsically disordered sexuality is beyond redemption in the form of a romantic relationship. Most other Christian denominations I grew up around found similar formulations to reach the same conclusion — if you’re gay, you’re incapable of marriage.

After years of celibacy I told people from my church that I was in the I date boys camp — something explicitly forbidden — and most people seemed to just move on. That’s a shame I felt them saying behind my back, and I haven’t heard from them since the days they approved of me.

A small handful who reached out to me told me they agreed with our church, but that they still loved me and this wouldn’t change a thing.

It was a sentiment I held on to with everything I had. If they could make it real, gripping onto both these principles at the same time, that meant I might have a chance in my church. Of course I had many others who told me they never agreed with our church to begin with, and their joy at knowing what was going on at the heart level of my life was like a cool salve. But it was those who represented disapproval mixed with steadfast friendship I was desperate not to lose.

My home in North Texas is a land of churches. Some are small, ethnic, strip-mall pop-ups. But most grew with the exploding population and found themselves with a congregation exponentially greater than their foundation. With membership in the thousands, the evangelical churches began developing community groups — essentially small groups that would meet outside of the Sunday service, grouped by stage in life to provide support and accountability. Church is more than getting talked at, and nobody should get lost in the masses, they reasoned. You have to be known by those who are capable of knowing you best to become who God wants you to be.

Quickly, other denominations like my Catholic one caught on and began implementing this emphasis on community being your pew companions whose life looks like yours. Young adult singles. Young married couples. Older married couples, etc. No one came down and said you had to hang out with this or that group exclusively, but if that was your surest path to holiness, most people I knew saw their emphasis shift that way. Add in a burgeoning career and toddlers and a new house and all the things life starts giving you in your late twenties and thirties and pretty soon making time for your community group is about the only thing outside of your immediate family you have time, let alone emotional energy for.

And so I saw my friends who once said this won’t change anything fade away. Their evenings filled up. They stopped responding to my texts. I became just another person in the pew they enjoyed shaking hands with on Sunday. That’s the most generous explanation I can offer. That a vibrant church which doesn’t affirm gay people is just not set up to support them, even indirectly. Its members will be asked to focus on those most like themselves, and as long as the gays are told we aren’t capable of being like them, they’ll pass us by.

Churches who ask celibacy of their gay members take on the assumption that while it might be difficult, with God, a celibate life is at least possible. I was often told to look at the priests, they can do it, so why can’t you? Well, a couple reasons.

A priest — or a sister for that matter — gets to choose to be celibate. They don’t go to hell if they don’t take their vows and instead start a family. If they do say their vows, they either join a religious community of deep fellowship or are the pastor and instantly become the most popular, cared for person in the entire church.

So no, that’s not even remotely the same as being a celibate gay man or woman alone in a church.

Other times someone would point out a person in the church who hasn’t been known to date and say Well what about them? Maybe they’re gay. And they seem happy! I shake my head so hard I get whiplash at this point because while I would never say it, I am always thinking — if you only knew how many closeted gay men from my home church have hit on me on dating apps or reached out to me to say they are happy for me and ask for advice.

I’m not claiming that every single, celibate person is living a double life, but I am definitely comfortable saying that what a married straight person sees when they look at that church member is not going to be the reality. Life experiences so divergent are incapable of recognizing what goes on beneath the surface of trying to fit into a community’s expectations of celibate normalcy.

After college I got a job teaching at a local Catholic high school. It was the first time I was trying to live out a celibate life alone, and right at the age most Texans start pairing off like exotic birds on a BBC documentary. Every mom in the church seemed to know of the perfect girl. I was young, good-looking enough, and I even used to be a seminarian. In church life, that’s the jackpot. Girls would openly admit to being on the lookout for former seminarians like we were a forbidden fruit put back on the menu. I just wasn’t the least bit interested. And couldn’t tell a soul why.

I considered confiding in friends about being gay, but thought better. It was a small enough community that word would inevitably get back to the school where I worked. I would see news reports about a choir director or an English teacher shown the door after Catholic administrators found out about a boyfriend or students discovered a hidden detail somehow. People from my church would casually share the story on Facebook with a warning about the creeping lack of religious freedom if anyone wanted the teacher reinstated.

But what kept me closeted even more than a fear of getting fired was a fear of losing my community as well. Texas has its progressive pockets, but they felt lifetimes away from my town. I didn’t know what would happen if people found out I was gay, but I could guarantee they wouldn’t stay the same. At least like this I had a happy life on the surface.

Friends’ weddings were the most bittersweet of occasions. I was in my early twenties so there were plenty to attend, but I always knew they would be followed by a depressive funk. Most of my friends were involved in church, so they had been marinating for years in the knowledge that this was a divine act. Not just a decision, but a vocation. The priest would preach on the heroic and beautiful sacrifice the spouses were making. They would be open to kids. They would live for each other. They would be the very foundation of humanity. I sat through those weddings wondering why I was so unsuited for all those things. What kind of person I must be to be incapable of such love.

As one wedding ended, when we all bowed our heads to pray, I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like to be standing in front of the altar myself. Wearing a tuxedo for the first time since I took my best friend’s sister to prom. I pretended I was holding my fiancée’s hands, afraid to look away from his eyes for fear the moment might not last forever. My friends and family would all laugh because the priest was telling us to do something but we were too caught up to notice. I remember staying seated as my friends walked down the aisle, my head in my hands and tears streaming down my cheeks. What I sensed imagining my own wedding was not relief. It was the first time I had ever actually allowed myself to picture it happening to me, and it felt like the dirtiest thing I had ever done.

There was a lake nearby I would drive to when feeling depressed. I would go sit with my feet in the water and imagine a world where I wasn’t hopelessly broken. Sometimes a close friend or family member would casually remark how gross a gay kiss on TV was and it would be enough to send me hyperventilating to the water’s edge. How could I be so well-liked on the surface and reviled underneath? I loved my job and accepted that I would have to be single for life, but loneliness would gnaw away at me at night until I began to realize I would not be able to keep up this path for much longer.

A priest once told me that gay couples were much more violent than straight couples, that they had much higher occurrences of domestic abuse. I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say to that. I’ve looked it up since and it turns out the statistics are inconclusive at best. But he seemed quite pleased to have discovered this fact. He didn’t explain why he thought it was important, but I think I understand. If gay relationships are inherently wrong, then there must be something wrong about them. Christians can get pretty abstract when talking about this stuff. You start floating in a sea of terms like procreative and unitive and telos. It helps to just be able to say “Hey, romance makes them more violent.” It’s not true, but it’s helpful.

What I do know is that listening to this priest I looked up to telling me about this violence I had curled up inside me like a dragon sleeping in a cave awaiting anyone foolish enough to say they loved me felt like I was being hollowed out. I didn’t know there was no good evidence to support his claim. I trusted him. I imagined myself cooking a meal as my partner came home, turning and punching him in the face while Tony Bennett crooned in the background because he forgot to pick up milk on the way home. I had never been in a fight before in my life. Is this what awaited me if were to try a relationship? Forget going to hell. Were those my only options? Stay single and alone or become a monster?

When I was in high school I once came close to driving my car intentionally into oncoming traffic. It was dusk and the steady stream of headlights whooshed by, each one like an invitation heading straight toward me only to miss at the last moment. I knew that would be an awful way to do it, inevitably taking a bunch of lives with me just because I didn’t want keep on living mine. But the desire for some relief, any kind of break from how much I hated myself for the way I was — perverted and unfit for love — in that moment I would have welcomed the crash. I made it home safe that night and even though for years I would wish I could die young instead of letting this loneliness go on, I knew deep down that I shouldn’t let myself get to that point again. Where the headlights seemed to be calling out to me. There had to be something better than killing myself. On the surface I was calm but inside the rubber bands of my stamina were being stretched to their raw ends. Soon, I could feel, they would snap.

I watched all my friends fall in love and marry and move on. I wept as everyone I cared for celebrated this thing they thought I was completely incapable of. My friends became younger and younger as I sought those who had space in their lives for me. Eventually they moved on too. The soul can only take so much.

I know the community I grew up with well enough to know that some reading this will be thinking I just didn’t learn to truly let go and let God. To that, all I can say is try and recognize just how far from grace you’ve strayed in claiming to personally know how much another can carry, and how heavy a cross God has given them.

Some people tell me that those who once said this won’t change anything between us were lying. Is it any coincidence that the only ones who still keep in touch are those who think there’s nothing wrong with me? The rest may have meant well, but they didn’t actually intend to keep company with a gay man.

That’s certainly the case for some, but I don’t think it fits all those who no longer treat me as they do their other friends. There exists this theoretical space where you don’t approve of a person’s actions, but also choose not to judge them for it. We all have our issues, all have our sins. I think the problem is in trying to put this into practice in a church. The real world outcome is different from the textbook.

Another priest once suggested to me that maybe all us gay guys in the church could get together and form a community group of our own for support and accountability. Well no, he huffed, I suppose that’s just temptation begging for action. As though a group of gay men under any circumstances will inevitably lead to an orgy in the parish hall. I am not seen as just another sinner, not actually seen as just like you.

Most Christians who insist this is a line-in-the-sand issue will claim that yes it is important to be compassionate to gay people, but with the alternative being hell, this is the most compassionate way to treat us. Real compassion demands truth about our limited options in life.

I don’t believe this anymore.

One, because I’ve never met someone who is actively engaged in a gay person’s life who claims this. If you’re close enough to a gay Christian to know which days are harder for them than others, then you know that you’re the one making it harder. A good friend of mine once told me that it sucks, but if I were to ever get married, he wouldn’t come to the ceremony. It pained him to say it and I appreciated his honesty, but that was one of the last times we talked. Maybe he felt the pressure to emphasize more on the community group that looked more like his young family. Maybe he just realized you can only say something like that to a person so many times before principle one about treating gay people as equals starts to look a little suspect.

Two, because it is such a head in the sand approach. I have no doubt some reading this can point to someone they know who is gay and celibate and will claim their mental health is in perfect shape. Great for them. But is that the case for the majority of gay people you know? After the lengths I’ve gone to deal with my sexuality, I have known a lot of gay Catholics. Many of them started celibate. The ones who are still alive and committed to it are very few. You can have all the reasons in the world to believe God requires a different life of gay people, but if we tell you consistently that we can’t actually do it, how long will you keep yelling jump! while we lie wounded on the ground?

A group of religious sisters I know once introduced me to an old gay couple. The men cared for a dying woman they met years back, taking her into their house and accompanying her in her final days. They had invited the sisters to come spend some time with her as they shared a common first language. This couple and the sisters were the only ones in the hospital as she died, her family another country away and uncaring. I watched as the men weeped near inconsolably for this woman who would have died alone were it not for them. With the dawn one of the sisters told me, “maybe the care they showed her will be what saves them.”

No.

We are not so incapable of humanity that if we fall in love we must commit some herculean act of charity to convince God not to abandon us forever. To know us is to realize this can’t be true. To read the Gospels is to know this isn’t true. Some may choose celibacy if they feel called. But to demand it of us, even if you believe it is the most compassionate, Scriptural thing you can do, is to ignore the reality of our lives played out before you. We are your sons and daughters, your friends and neighbors, your pew companions whose hands you shake and whose personal lives you discreetly avoid. But to ignore us is to lose us. One way or another.