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Society holds up the athlete, the jock, the handsome hunk as the ideal man. Believing that lie, I didn't stand a chance while growing up. I was average in appearance, awkward as an athlete, and short. Physical education classes in junior high and high school were nightmares. I was always chosen last. When we lost games, I was often the scapegoat. The gym teacher at my Christian school once joked about my lack of coordination in front of the class. My peers laughed. My heart sank. My already poor self-image was battered with the abuse. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

It was during those years that I started struggling with homosexual desires, beginning when I saw two male classmates in my Christian junior high school engaging in sex. Even though I had been attracted to girls when I was younger, my feelings for males intensified. In high school, the guys ridiculed gays. On the outside I laughed, but on the inside I was dying.

No matter how much I battled, suppressed, and prayed against these feelings, they not only didn't go away, they strengthened. At times I would cry out to God, begging him to change me. But no change came. God was silent.

Thoughts of men occupied my mind every day. Sometimes I fought them. Usually I gave in. Not only did the fantasies bring pleasure, but they were also a convenient escape from the pain of life.

When I saw an attractive guy on the street, I took a second look. I regularly scanned men's clothing ads in the Sunday paper. When I went off to college, I began to peruse porn at newsstands and then visited adult bookstores, looking for a picture of the perfect man.

While I had never acted out my fantasies with another man, I knew my desires were something I couldn't share with others. My Christian parents used words such as "disgusting" and "perverted" when talking about homosexuals. I would rather have died than be found out. The shame and despair were often overwhelming, and I wondered why life had dealt me such a cruel hand. I felt defeated and hopeless.

One day, 15 years ago, I read the following: "Change may be possible for a small number of homosexuals, but for the majority, change is not possible."

This confirmed the conclusion I had already reached about myself. I was part of the majority. Change was not possible. It didn't help that groups such as the American Psychiatric Association no longer classified homosexuality as a mental disorder and frowned upon "reparative therapies" as harmful.

Today, however, I no longer count myself in the "majority" who can't change. So what happened? Three critical issues come to mind.

Years of daily fantasizing, hundreds of pornographic images etched in my mind, deeply rooted patterns of same-sex thoughts, patterns of dealing with pain through escape into the world of lustful fantasies—they all began when I observed some of my junior high peers engaging in homosexual activity. Naïve as I was, this fleeting exposure played a major role in my same-sex fantasy world.

I logged years of homosexual fantasies into my memory banks. I plastered the walls of my mind with sexual images of men. I learned patterns of dealing with life and pain in sexual ways. For years, the central part of me made choices to lust, to fantasize, to look at pornography. These served to solidify my homosexual identity.

C. S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, "[E]very time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature."

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April 2007, Vol. 51, No. 4