Our Life Experience Is What Sets Us Free

The other day, I picked up a novel, and opened it, and here is what was written as a front piece:
Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them. ~ Deuteronomy 4:9

This hit me powerfully because it was one more confirmation of something I am beginning to see is very important to each of us as we grow and heal from years of oppression. I am only now beginning to realize how much our own life experiences are incredibly powerful truths and testimony against the Anti Gay Industry. Talk about scientific studies all you want, but I KNOW with my full intellectual capacity, my heart and even in my soul, how wrong it is to ask someone to change the very soul of their LGBT nature, even if that person wishes to due to societies pressures. I KNOW because for 30 years I tried just that. During that 30 years, it is true, I never acted on my desires, but that was accomplished only by shutting down every one of my very normal, very human emotions. No amount of praying, no amount of pleading with God to take away the very nature I was created in, literally on my face before him, would allow me to be whole. I finally learned it was only the fear of what others believed that caused me to even try to change. It wasn't the will of God that I change who I was created to be after all.

Now and then I run across someone that tries to tell me that if I just would try harder I could learn to be heterosexual......I am sorry, but I could have 30 PhD.'s in heterosexuality as hard as I did try. There are others who have suggested I should just be celibate then, and give it to God, OK, I say, you go first. The look of amazement on their face is priceless. Why are they asking me to do something I have not been called to, especially when neither have they obviously. Physical relations with the one you love is a wonderful gift from God, why should I deny this gift when I have been given it?

Being a lesbian or gay is not about just sex. It is not just about who I want to sleep with, but it is everything about how I react to the world at large, yes it is about who I love, but it is also about having deeper feelings and passions than I thought possible, and not just towards the woman whom I love, but towards humanity and life at large. To deny this, to suppress it, means not only do I go back into the closet, but all that I am, all who I love and all that I do goes back into that closet as well.

Anyone who goes back in takes everything they have to offer to this world back in with them. These are our true colors and we should be proud of them, not ashamed any more, nor should we continue to listen to those who suggest that we return to a life of loneliness and shame once more because their motives are based on fear and discomfort. It is simply their own problem that they must learn to deal with.

I was inspired today, by this video suggested by a friend of mine on Facebook: