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.: THE TESTIMONY OF KEVIN - An Ex-Jehovah's Witness Delivered from Homosexuality

I was born in Connecticut as the youngest of four children in 1955 when gas was still $.39 per gallon. At this time in culture, people didn’t talk about homosexual feelings. It was taboo to even insinuate such things. When the word “gay” was used, people would not think of homosexuality. Instead, they would think of being “happy” or a having “joyful” time, like a festival.  So, people wouldn’t say, “he’s queer” or “he’s different.”  If someone used the term “queer,” it made you feel that you were really a FREAK of nature.  And you were totally ostracized from society. So, to be sensitive, people would just say, “He’s one of THOSE.” 

My mother did not know how to show affection.  Never once did she cuddle, hug me or tell me that she loved me.  My first recollection of her is a statement in which she told me:

“You were a mistake. I wish I never had you. You remind me of a BEAST!” 

I was only about six or seven years old at the time when she made this statement to me. I remember feeling rejection, hatred, depression, but I simply couldn’t explain these feelings because I was so young. All I can say is that I could feel these emotions coming upon me.

When I was eight years old, these feelings were confirmed that she really didn’t want me or like me because she tried to put me in an oven on Thanksgiving evening. I fiercely fought back and was finally able to break free of my mom’s grasp, while my father just stood there and watched.  My father was anything but masculine. My mother ruled the house with an iron rod, and everything she said went. I mean everything!

While my brother and two sisters had their own rooms, I slept with mom and dad in their bedroom until I was thirteen years old. At about the age of six or seven, I was raped by my male dentist while he sedated me.  I had no male role model to follow.  I even remember watching my brother put makeup on before he went out to parties, and since my dad would not connect with me at all, my brother was the only male image I had to identify with.

School was nothing but a nightmare because of the lack of male companionship and because I didn’t know how to bond with boys my age. Since my father never connected with me, I looked for another male to fill that gap. The urge to have normal male friends, play football, and wrestle, do things that boys do, was never allowed.  Instead, I began to bond with girls. 

My mom took me everywhere with her. I was forced to follow her around, like I was her shadow.  She held me captive to helping her with her things. She would buy me little girl things to play with, like dolls and toy refrigerators.  She had me knitting things for her. Meanwhile, my father was an object who was just there, but never interacted with me. Instead, my mom bossed him around like a little kid. Therefore, I had no idea how to interact with other males in a healthy way. This left a whole inside of me.

As I grew up through puberty, I noticed that I was looking at men in a different way, with a strong desire to be with them.  During puberty, these feelings became erratic and sexual. So, I began to fanaticize about men. As I tried to get closer to boys, they started telling me that I was feminine and used the word “faggot.”  So, I took the label of “faggot” and thought of myself in that way.  Eventually, I tried suicide and started cutting my arms with razor blades, doing self-destructive things like this because I really hated myself. 

At thirteen, I had a mental breakdown. I was taken away from my parents and put into a state mental hospital.  At first, it confirmed to me that I really was the FREAK of nature that my mother said that I was. But while I was in the hospital, my family and I went through an intense therapy program. I stayed in the hospital for four months before being released.

In order to be able to go home, my parents were required to give me my own room.  This happened when my brother and sister moved out of the house. The counseling helped me recognize that things weren’t meant to be the way my mother had projected them and that a father should bond with his son. So, by the time I got out, I realized that I wasn’t a “Monster” or a “Freak” of nature and that God wasn’t up there somewhere “cursing me” and “making me this way.”  However, the counseling did nothing for my homosexual feelings.  By then, the gay movement was starting to come alive and the word “gay” had begun to change meaning to refer to homosexuality. 

I was released from the hospital and was able to resume my last year of school. I had what I thought was a fresh start on life—new friends and people who would not know about my past.  I even started to study the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had come to my door so that I could get closer to God.  But one thing puzzled me. In all of this, I still had feelings for the same sex. I wondered, “Why weren’t these feelings going away?”

I went to a psychiatrist to see if there was a pill I could take to make me heterosexual. He told me that no pill existed like that, and that I just needed to accept myself with my feelings the way they were.  As I went through high school, I made new friends by stuffing my feelings and hiding behind weight lifting. I built myself up to the point where I was very big in stature so that my friends would accept me and not suspect that I had any homosexual tendencies.

I had many sports friends who played football. As I gained acceptance among the jocks because of my muscular size, we became friends and bonded. Eventually, we tried sex together and even though it was only a couple of times, inside me I was raging with homosexual feelings. So at 16 years of age, I started acting out on my feelings and I went to my first gay bar.  It was for people over 16 and under 21 years of age because there was no drinking allowed in this bar. 

At this point in my life, I truly believed that I was born “gay.” So, I began to search out different means of having my gender changed from male to female in order to justify my homosexual drive.  I reasoned that if I could change my gender into a woman, I would then be free to enjoy sex with men and be accepted in the culture.

The one thing that prevented me from undergoing surgery to change my gender was the fact that I knew internally that I was born male.  For example, I could see that my outward anatomy was male, not just in relation to my sex organs, but my muscular layout, my facial features (even without a beard) and my expressions were all male.  Internally, I knew that if I became a transgender, it would not really change the core me into a female.  So, I abandoned the idea of gender surgery and continued my homosexual activities.

Meanwhile, I was still attending Kingdom Hall meetings and regularly studying the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I felt so guilty over my double life and the fact that my feelings weren’t going away. I simply couldn’t get myself to respond to the opposite sex.  It was my deepest, darkest secret. Finally, I approached a Jehovah’s Witness elder to try to get some help for my feelings. All he did was to hand me a book entitled, Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Divine Purpose, and told me to read it.  After a week, he asked if my feelings had gone away.  Of course, nothing had happened, but I continued to study with the Jehovah’s Witnesses because I didn’t know anything else to do that might help. 

After another year of studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses, I prayed to Jehovah and asked Him to show me the Truth because my feelings weren’t going away.  I prayed not only to Jehovah, but to Jesus, to Mary, to Buddha and to any other “god” or “saint” I could think of to pray to make sure that I was covering all spiritual avenues.  I asked:

“Do Jehovah’s Witnesses have the truth? Or was it Catholicism? Or Buddhism, etc?” 

Shortly after this prayer, a lady came up to me and asked me if I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.  I said, “No, I never really have.”  So, she invited me to go to her church, and a week later I went forward to talk to the pastor about my homosexuality. He responded by putting his hand on my head and rebuking “the spirit of homosexuality” that he said needed to come out of my body.  I went away embarrassed because I felt that nothing had happened to me, but I acted as if something did happen so that I wouldn’t make the pastor look bad. 

I attended the church regularly and studied the Bible with them.  It was an Independent Oneness Church that denied the Trinity and was very legalistic with a lot of rules to follow. This appealed to me because of my Jehovah’s Witness background. Yet, even though I accepted Christ in this church, it wasn’t the real Jesus of the Bible.

My homosexual feelings never really left me, but I quit going to gay bars and I played along with the hype of getting “delivered” by hiding behind body building to look masculine.  The church even ran my story of deliverance in the local papers, and I was featured on a TV show. I married a lady in the church and made myself respond to her. We had two sons together and lived what appeared to others as normal, happy life for about four or five years, but it was all a cover-up.

My wife was very controlling and physically and emotionally abusive.  As her violence and anger escalated toward me and our kids, she turned to the pastor and others at church for help.  Little did I know that the pastor would comfort her with open arms and tell her how wrong I was and that she shouldn’t listen to me because he said that I was deceived by a “spirit.”  This created quite a wedge between us, and as she pulled away from our relationship, my homosexual feelings for other men became stronger.

In desperation to save our marriage, I got down on my knees and begged her for us to start over by changing churches and considering the possibility of moving out of state.  She flat out refused and insisted on staying with the support system she had at her church.  Then, one day I came home from work to find one of our sons black and blue from being beaten by my wife. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had to do something to prevent the same thing from happening to our sons that had happened to me growing up.  I reported the abuse to the authorities, divorced my wife, and gained full legal custody of my sons.

As an athlete, I never thought I would take an aspirin for pain, much less start using drugs.  But when somebody gave me my first alcoholic drink and some drugs, I was immediately taken by the feeling of freedom from my pain.  It was the first time in my life that I felt such a euphoric feeling.  I dropped my career as an athlete and started dabbling with drugs and alcohol.  As long as I was under the influence of the drugs, the pain seemed to go away, but it was only temporary. I dabbled with drugs and alcohol and ran in and out of homosexual relationships until I was 43 years old.

After over 100 relationships with men, I could see the damage this was having on my physical body and other men who were engaging in these activities with me. The devastation I witnessed in others was so bad that I didn’t want to let my body deteriorate to that level. I knew God did not create the human body for this!  One day, I screamed out to God saying:

“Aren’t you there? Can’t you deliver me?”

It was then in the middle of the night when I was crying out for help that God brought into my mind a memory that I had forgotten from my childhood.  I remembered the time when I was eight years old and my mother was beating me and had thrown me against the wall. I had vowed then in my innermost self that I would never have sex with a woman or marry one.  I had completely forgotten about this vow that I had made with myself and had blocked it out of my mind, but this vow that I subconsciously held inside me is what had created the seed of my homosexual feelings. 

God opened my eyes to the realization that I had carried this resentment toward my mom and projected her personality upon every woman who had tried to become close to me.  I had been looking at women as being ugly, unloving, mean and harsh and had irrationally reacted to them with the same resentment that I had carried toward my mom.  I realized that this was a mischaracterization of women in general and that there were truly soft, loving and gentle women out there in the body of Christ.  When I saw these women in a Christian church who demonstrated genuine love, gentleness and affection toward their husbands, this convinced me that not all women were domineering, bossy, and possessive.  From this point on, my homosexual feelings really started to change, and I started noticing women and having feelings for them.

I began to go to pastoral counseling and saw a professional therapist for my homosexual feelings and substance abuse. This counseling helped me see that the problem was that I had never forgiven my mother or my father and the women in my life that had hurt me.  As I learned to forgive from my heart, my homosexual feelings completely left me along with the resentment and anger I had held inside for so long.  I am healed and I am free!  Thank you, Jesus!

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. ...If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”—Matthew 7:7-8, 11

“You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”—Jeremiah 29:13

FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE:

  THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESS VIEW OF TRANSGENDERS, HOMOSEXUALS AND LESBIANS  

  IF JEHOVAH HATES HOMOSEXUALS, WHY DID HE CREATE ME THIS WAY?

  HOW CAN I FORGIVE MY ABUSIVE JEHOVAH’S WITNESS FATHER AND THE ELDERS WHO DID NOTHING ABOUT IT?

  SALVATION - What is required to have eternal life? (www.4witness.org)

  EXODUS INTERNATIONAL – Largest Support Website Addressing Homosexual Issues (www.exodus-international.org)

LOVE WON OUT – Support Conferences for Homosexuals Wanting to Change
(www.lovewonout.com)