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Putting the pieces together:
Making a me that really fits
Brian's Story

I have found in life that people are complex, but we like to try and simplify them. You could spend a whole lifetime getting to know someone, and never know them completely, and yet you have to find a way to connect with people on a regular basis, and so we have these little labels that we connect to people to help us make sense of them and distinguish them for others.

In college I had a several friends named Jared, and after having a hard time keeping them straight in conversation began referring to one of them as “Jared with Blue Hair.” And just like that my friend, who is a complex individual with many terrific qualities became defined by one: his hair colour. The funny thing is Jared stopped dying his hair blue a year later, but to this day my brain still identifies him as “Jared with the Blue Hair” despite half a decade of brown hair adorning his head.

This desire to break down complex people down to one or two phrases that easily describes the nature of who we are extends even to self identity. How do I describe myself? I have worn a lot of labels of the years. In high school I was identified most by my social grouping: geek. I was with the guys that hid in the school basement and read comic books and played role playing games. In the social hierarchy that defined life at that time I think I rated in desirability somewhere slightly above mold growing on lunches forgotten too long in a freshman’s locker. As I moved on an up in the world the labels have changed. In college I identified with my dorm floor, (The Dryer 2 Boartherhood!) and now I am most often identified by my career as Youth Pastor. (My youth all call me PB short for Pastor Brian)

 But none of these labels really define who I am. They are things I do, groups I am associated with. They are not me. So who am I? Well growing up as I tried to sort through the labels of identity I kept coming back to two labels who described me at the core: I was a Christian, and I was Gay. The problem was, from my earliest realization of these things, I also knew that these two things didn’t fit together. So where did that leave me?

Being a Christian came natural to me. I grew up in a Christian family, with two parents who took me to church, taught me about Jesus and strove to show me God’s love from the time I was born on up. Faith was like oxygen to me. When I was growing up I didn’t have to think about it , I just breathed it in and out. I accepted Christ into my heart at age 5 and got baptized while barely into my teens. I knew God was real, and I loved Him.

When I was eight though something happened that began to really shake up my world. I was sexually molested by some older kids at the school I went to at the time. It was pretty confusing for me, on the one hand I was happy to receive positive attention from older kids, on the other I felt weird, and knew something was wrong. But when I was going to leave, one of them looked at me and said “Don’t tell anyone what has happened here, or we will tell the whole school what a little fag you are!”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I guessed it was bad. I felt like I was bad, like what had happened was my fault. And I couldn’t understand that well. And in the time that followed I began to change the labels that I understood myself with. I decided that I was “Bad”, and was pretty sure that God didn’t love me, because I something so bad had happened. Didn’t God protect good kids?

So even though I continued to see myself as a Christian, I saw myself as being on the outside. I was damaged goods, and somehow had to be good enough that God would love me again and bad things wouldn’t keep happening.

And then, in grade six, as the joys of puberty set in, I began to recognize something else core about myself: I was attracted to other guys. The other piece that came to define me in life came clear: I was gay.

In trying to figure out what to do with these pieces I had been given: being Bad, being Christian, and being Gay I went through a couple different phases in life. In the first one I tried to be so good of a Christian that the other two would go away. I figured if I prayed enough, if I read my Bible enough, if I did enough good things, then God would love me again and I wouldn’t be Bad anymore, and he would make all my attractions towards guys go away.

But no matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how good I was (and I was a real good kid. Kinda a brown noser actually.) Nothing changed. I still felt bad, I still was attracted to guys. I tired bartering and pleading with God, nothing worked. So finally I decided that I had had enough. God didn’t care about me. I didn’t care about Him. I was going to throw my faith away. Being a Christian wasn’t working, and so I was done with it.

So I tried to do just that. I told God to get out of my life, and I set our defining myself. A big part of that new identity was being gay, and I figured without God messing things up I could finally be happy. I found a relationship with another guy, and defined myself by that…..and was desperately unhappy.

By grade 10 I had hit rock  bottom. I was sliding into a depression, and began seriously considering depression. My relationship had crashed with me being abandoned by my partner, I had come out to friends only to be rejected and beat up, and I decided that life hurt too much to keep going. So I decided I was going to end it.

In that place of absolute despair in my life, God showed up. There was no voices from burning flames, or writing on the wall, just a still small voice inside of me. God was there, he hadn’t given up on me. I didn’t know what to do, or how to make sense of things, just a sense that God was saying “trust me”. I didn’t know what that meant, but didn’t have much to lose, so I decided to give Him a shot.

My label as Christian came to the fore again, and I realized that despite my efforts I had never managed to get rid of it. It was part of who I was. But now I owned it for myself, instead of just assuming I should believe it because my parents did.

And in the next years God began to really work in my life. I assumed that meant he would get rid of the whole Gay thing. But that didn’t seem to be his priority at all. Instead he spent the next six years or so working hard on the “Bad” label that I had absorbed along the way. Through relationships with other Christians I began to see that God loved me. That I wasn’t bad, and that what had happened to me wasn’t my fault. I began to believe that I was a good person with gifts and talents and a calling that God wanted to use. I went to Bible college and began studying to be a Pastor. God was changing me in tremendous ways.

But one thing that never changed was my attractions. I was still as Gay as I ever was. I didn’t know what to do with that. I began to read my Bible and really dig for what it said about homosexuality. I had heard about Gay Christians, and thought perhaps I could put my struggle behind me: I could have my faith and boyfriend too! But the more that I read and the more I studied, the less Gay Theology made sense to me. It didn’t fit what I believed about the Bible. In my gut, I knew that it didn’t fit me. But dating girls and following Jesus wasn’t making me any straighter either!

I hit a place of absolute frustration while in Bible college. I didn’t know what to do from there. Despite everything I was doing, despite going to counselling, despite growing in faith, my attraction would not go away. Finally I went to my mentor and counsellor and demanded “What am I doing wrong? Why aren’t I straight yet?” He looked at me calmly and asked “If your attractions never change, if you never get married, if you are gay for the rest of your life…will you still follow Jesus?”

It was a question I had never considered before. To me being a good Christian would mean these attractions would go away. To me God loving me was conditional on Him taking them away. “Bad” and “Gay” were just perfectly connected in my mind. At first I resisted. It took some time to process it. But then I finally came to a point of exhaustion. I had been trying so long to be good enough to force God to make this go away so he could love me, and I was too tired to keep trying. I gave up.

And at that point of giving up, I learned something important: God loved me just the way I was. I didn’t have to be straight. I didn’t have to be good enough. I didn’t have to do anything. He loved me just the way I was.  The “Bad” label finally began to drop away.

And as it did, I began to re-examine what the “Gay” label meant to me.  

I began to see that “gay” described my sexual orientation, but it didn’t define who I was. Being attracted to guys didn’t mean that I had get involved in a relationship with a guy. It simply meant that is the way I was attracted. As I talked with my straight friends I came to realize the same thing was true about them. None of the guys on my dorm floor were naturally monogamous! Even those who were happily married continued to be attracted to other girls, and despite those attraction, which as far as I could tell never went away, they chose to only act on their sexuality with their wives! To them their faith and their commitment to their wives trumped their attractions. They didn’t deny that they had them, but at the same time, their attractions didn’t control them.

This revelation was tremendous for me. Suddenly I saw myself as having far more in common with my straight friends than I had differences. And I finally found a way for the Christian, and Gay parts of me to fit together. Both words still describe me, one describes my faith, my beliefs, and how I choose to live and act. The other describes my attractions and orientation. They are different parts of me, but are not mutually exclusive.

With this understood I began to describe myself with the label Same Gender Attracted (SGA) for a while, because it described my attractions without identifying with labelling me. After a while though I realized that not only was the label somewhat clunky, no one else knew what I meant when I said it outside my circle of friends who also were also same gender attracted. So finally I settled on identifying myself as gay again.

And then just to make life more complicated, just when I felt like I had everything figured out in my life I feel in love…with a girl. I had met a girl at an Exodus conference several years before and we became good friends as we both helped out in an online support group. As time went on we became closer and closer, and eventually I realized that I cared deeply for her.

My attraction to her at first was emotional and mental, and as our relationship developed physical, but I was very nervous about the idea of sex. I wasn’t sure if I was sexually attracted to her. As we continued to date and explore our relationship we finally came to a conclusion: we loved each other and wanted to spend our lives together. We were willing to commit to each other no matter what, even if the sexual side never worked out. I was very nervous heading into it, but I knew I loved her, and the fact that I could be completely open and honest with her and trust her made me confident that she was the one I wanted to spend my life with.  After we were married I was happy to discover that I was indeed capable to express myself sexually with her.

For a little while that caused me a bit of confusion about my identity. Was I still Gay? I certainly didn’t feel like it made sense to call myself Straight. I mean I loved my wife, but was still totally attracted to guys. Bi-sexual didn’t sound like it really described me either. After a while I decided to settle back into the descriptor “Gay” again. It just felt right inside.

Now people ask me to describe myself and I tell them that I am a Gay, Evangelical Christian Youth Pastor, who is married to a Lesbian. It always makes people do a double take, and some can’t quite wrap their heads around it…but it is what best describes me. If I have learned anything it is that life is complex, and that people don’t fit nicely into our boxes and labels.

I have embraced the complexity of my life, and integrated all the different parts into who I am today….and I can honestly say that I am truly happy. I have learned through my journey that God loves me, and I am free to love Him back. I have learned to own my sexuality, and to make choices that fit what I believe and make sense to me. I finally feel like all the pieces fit. It’s not that I have it all figured out, life is constantly changing, and there are always new pieces to figure out. People are complex, and life is weird sometimes, but God is Good, and He loves me. And the rest we figure out together.

Brian Pengelly

 















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