When I stepped into the gay community, in its political and cultural heart of San Francisco, I was searching for something. At the time, I didn’t really comprehend what I was looking for; I just knew that I was unhappy and discontented with my life and hoped here I would find the contentment and the answers I sought. I was lost. But, I had had this feeling for many years; probably since the day I opened my first porn magazine and I began to wonder what was the meaning of it all: why were these images exciting, why did I get drawn into viewing hardcore porn, and why was I now attracted to men? I wanted to know why; and in this paradise of sexual freedom and acceptance – I thought I would discover what had eluded me. Then, the scant religious training I could remember, seemed trite and irrelevant.
Once there, and after a few days of mingling about the various bars, clubs, and bathhouses, I half realized that I had been thrust into a world of the purely material – that worshiped the flesh and sought the salvation to be found in sex; I loved it. Like porn, it did not seem transcendent or fleeting, but wholly present and tangible – as I could hold it solidly in my hands. Religion was swept from my mind, and I only bowed in front of the human altar. Yet, bodies were always in motion, and the things I tried to grab onto would inevitably pull away. Somehow, I was constantly left longing for more; seeking another point of pleasure. Then, like my childhood obsession with porn, that which was in front of me no longer took away the pain.
Midway through my sojourn in hell, I started to feel a twinge of desperation; the realization that this was not working and that I was not finding what I sought. I felt myself spinning into nowhere. I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to understand some sort of philosophy that would throw everything together and create order out of the chaos that was my everyday existence. And, since this was the early-1990s, all around me was the burgeoning interest in the so called New-Age. All these divergent movements, condensing witchcraft, astrology, and UFO science, were all about “making contact:” bringing the transcendent to Earth and controlling the powers within. In gay circles, this always stayed with the purely sexual: combining strains from Crowley, LaVey, and neo-pagan homoeroticism. It didn’t set out to create a new religion, or was even consciously aware of its own uniqueness, but at its core this faith had an overriding belief in the power of the phallus; hence the constant obsession in gay conversation with penis size; even to the minutia of dimension, color, and shape; then, the ultimate conjoining of god and worshipper takes place in sodomy - this is constantly and mercilessly maintained in a dogmatic kind of frenzy throughout gay culture with the prevalence of the leading question among gay strangers: top or bottom? For this reason, according to the CDC: “Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) are more severely affected by HIV than any other group in the United States.” This obsession has reached an apogee with the current prevalence of bareback films in gay porn and a recent recommendation by the US government that all sexually active gay men take the preventive pill Truvada: simply because homosexuals refuse to abstain from the most dangerous forms of sex. The reason? Because it’s their religion.
A Pew research survey conducted last year found that LGBT adults are less religious than the general public. Roughly half (48%) say they have no religious affiliation, compared with 20% of the public at large. Of those LGBT adults who are religiously affiliated, one-third say there is a conflict between their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation or gender identity. And among all LGBT adults, about three-in-ten (29%) say they have been made to feel unwelcome in a place of worship.