I was eighteen when I was subjected to an exorcism against a “spirit of lesbianism.” I hadn’t told the person praying for me that I liked girls. But I went to the girls’ school where our pentecostal church was held, and the school had a reputation for being liberal and feminist. The person praying for me must have decided on that basis that I was susceptible. To the sin of lesbianism. I had never said a word to anybody of the thing I had begun to know at puberty. That I could love a woman. That loving a woman felt like it would be the most natural thing in the world.
I was fourteen when my mother told me that a man at church used to be homosexual, but a Christian group called “Exodus” had helped him change and now he was married to a woman. I don’t know why she felt she needed to tell me this, but the moment is etched in my memory. Also etched in my memory is the pocked face of the serious man in question, and the long face of his equally serious wife.
I was nine when I saw a naked woman, other than my mother, for the first time. I opened the door on her getting dressed, and the image of her breast as she turned towards me in surprise has never left me. I was ten when I played families with a friend at school - she wanted to be the father, me the mother. The feeling was incredible.
I was thirteen when I sat round a dinner table with a bunch of church women and listened to them gossip about one of their sons, who was gay. How terrible it was. How sad it was. How bad he was. The things he got up to. I sat silent at the table, frozen. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t have told you what that was.
I was fifteen, seventeen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-four, when I sat in church and heard the message from the pulpit, veiled or otherwise, that homosexuality was a sin. I was so thoroughly brainwashed that I said the things with my own mouth; that it brought a curse on the person who practiced it, that a gay person couldn’t be a Christian, that churches which condoned gay relationships were cursed.
I was sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-three when I sat in church and heard the male preacher wax lyrical about the sanctity of marriage, the spiritual significance of the union between a man and a woman, and the role of a woman in marriage and family. I was filled with a fiery passion for something, for making something of my life, and I translated this into a religious calling. I saw few women doing "important” things in the church, and those I did see were married. It was obvious.
I turned twenty-seven two weeks after marrying a man I’d known for six months. I was convinced I was in love. When you’ve never been in love before - how can you be sure? He was intelligent and fun and that seemed enough. We had three incredible children together, and I have no regrets about that. I’d always wanted to be a mother.
I was thirty-nine when finally, after years of unpacking and rearranging beliefs about myself and the world, I finally accepted that it was ok to be gay. Ok for other people to be gay, mind. That couldn’t possibly include me. But self-knowledge was a geyser that bubbled up when I least expected it. I was forty-one when I announced, via my blog, that I was bisexual. It was an earth-shattering moment, although it changed absolutely nothing about my actual life. I still couldn’t be gay.
I was forty-two and a half when I sat my husband down at the end of a sleepless week and told him I was lesbian. “I’m not bi,” I said. “I’m gay.” Finally the truth was out. After sixteen years of trying to make the relationship work, I set myself free. A year later I met a wonderful woman and fell miraculously in love. I’ve never looked back.
I’m writing this now because I need to get it off my chest. I’m also writing it now because submissions for the Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill close on Wednesday. We can be confident the bill will pass, but our submissions will make it better. Our stories matter.
Meanwhile, churches of the ilk I grew up in have pushed their congregations to make submissions against the bill. They are rattled, and so they should be. In reality, the bill will not curb their rights to a pulpit, will not stop them preaching straightness as next to godliness to their congregations every Sunday. The bill won’t stop parents advising their trans children against puberty blockers. The bill can’t do anything about the parents who use that sleezy, manipulative line “I love you but I can’t support your lifestyle.”
But the bill will mean that ministers and counsellors, (and those quasi-counsellors the church is full of), are no longer allowed to engage in practices which try to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Practices which manipulate the vulnerable into believing that they are inherently wrong, that the very fabric of who they are and how they want to live in the world is a sin. Practices like exorcisms under the guise of “healing” prayer. This bill is a long time coming.
I feel as though we must surely have gone to the very same pentecostal church. Thanks for writing this. There are so many similar stories of sexuality, identity being judged, shamed, policed. I am heterosexual and was slut shamed by my pentecostal mother and by the church when I was 14 AND a virgin. I am going to write about my experiences because the church took away my childhood. As for the exorcisms! I was terrified that I was going to be dragged up the front of the church, possibly by my mother and pushed to the ground where I would wail and flail. I would always try to be in the middle of a row so that somebody else would be picked, someone foolish enough to be by the aisle.