Today I talked with Sun News Network's Michael Coren on his show, The Arena, about my attitudes to Pride and same-sex relationships. I used to treat Pride as a kind of holy day of obligation for myself, and I objected when gay acquaintances announced they had other plans. By the time I last attended, though, in 2000, after my conversion was well underway, I had major reservations about the event. I was so uncomfortable I realized I could not go back.
As to the headlines, I don't use terms like "reformed homosexual" myself, as the noun tends to reduce a person to a set of sexual inclinations. In a similar way I say in the clip: I'm not gay, I'm not ex-gay; I'm a person who experiences some same-sex attraction.
UPDATE (28 June 2012): Tune in to The Arena tonight when Michael welcomes Melinda Selmys from Sexual Authenticity. While we don't share her vocabulary, we believe she's genuinely trying to think with the mind of the Church as she grapples with interesting questions about identity and desire.
Meanwhile, a reader asked if there's anything I wished I'd said. Second thoughts abound, of course, but if I could do it over I'd be explicit about God. It was the security of a newly rediscovered relationship with God that made it possible for me to look dispassionately at the question of whether gay sex was actually any good for me (or anyone). And has given a community of same-sex-attracted folk the strength to resist the insistent cultural rationalizations for simply yielding to our desires.
I readily acknowledge there can indeed be love between same-sex partners, so it would have been good for me to say that without prompting. But what such a relationship lacks relative to marriage is the fruitful tension arising from sexual complementarity, a tension that draws the husband out of himself and the wife out of herself. (Ending up married not just to a woman but to a real girly-girl has made me especially conscious of this, so she and I will surely have more to say about complementarity in future.)
What I was starting to say when the show ran out of time was that the highest fulfilment of the marital act is the conception of a child. The act itself is oriented towards new life outside ourselves even when circumstances render conception unlikely or impossible, so it calls us to self-giving in a way that an intrinsically, structurally sterile act cannot. And it's in self-giving that any of us, whatever our sexual desires may be, can find fulfilment.
Any further questions, dear viewers, that you'd like to raise?
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