All my life I always felt different growing up. I was shunned as a sissy and a whimp from an early age. I had few friends early in life and was always acting out to seek any attention.

Around age 12, my mother began seeing a man who attended the local Church of God (Anderson, IN denomination). He got her to start bringing me and this was my first exposure to religion other than bits and pieces of my grandparent's Catholic church. I heard and accepted the message that if you did not repent you would go to hell. I was "saved" on the altar at age 12.

I quickly became very active in learning god's "will" for me. I began reading and digesting my Bible and trying to become perfect like Jesus, which would later come back and bite me. I started researching the history of my denomination and found that in the late 19th century and early 20th century they were even more conservative, forbidding the wearing of jewlrey, neckties, and short sleeves. They also forbid the attending of carnivals, theaters, concerts, and forbid the use of musical instruments in their churches. I believed that this was still the will of god and found a splinter group still in tact that practiced these things with more updated rules (no TV, no shorts, limited computer.) Thus I began my involvement in the Church of God, Evening Light group.

I began preaching shortly after I was "saved" after hearing about another child preacher on TV. When I discovered the "Evening Light" I stopped attening the Anderson denomination and began preaching at a local park that I had the end time message (very dramatic for a middle schooler). Alas, though, few responded to my "message" and I soon became discouraged.

I went through the rest of middle school and early high school depressed and thinking I was going to hell. I experiemented some with a few girls, which I was sure would lead to my damnation. With a renewed interest in the Evening Light denomination I began preaching damnation once again. This would not last, however, as I began meeting the friends who would eventually support me for the most difficult times in my life thus far.

When I was 16 I started surfing the web and discovered Christian chat rooms. I began to realize that none of them had any answers to my tough questions, only commands to "obey and trust god". A year later my life began turning upside down. My boss was breaking child labor laws and forcing me to work till 2:00 a.m. on school nights. My grades started dropping and by the end of my junior year I had gone from an A-B student to a F student. I began fervently praying to god begging him answers. "Why was this happening to me?"

To make matters worse, I had also discovered the abundance of gay porn on the Internet. I had a name to fit the unspoken feelings I had felt since elementary school but I could not accept it. Being a homosexual was sinful and I would not give into it.

My depression reached a high in 1998 at the beginning of my senior year. I was continuing to be forced into working long hours on school nights and I finally could not take the stress. I dropped out of school and began working there full time. (Yes I am well aware I should have turned my boss in or cussed him out and quit but I was a mess and was too scared to stand up for myself.)

I spent the rest of what should have been my senior year depressed and begging god for answers. I was not attending a formal church at the time and the answer of the people in the chat rooms was that this was why I was such a mess. Little did they know.

Around summer of 1999 I attended a youth meeting of a local independent charismatic church. It was not my first exposure to the Charismatic movement but I thought that maybe they were the answer to my prayers. I began attending church there and quickly experienced "deliverance" (a fundy watered down term for exorcism). I found out that my problems (homosexuality and masturbation) were being caused by demons. I experienced "slaying of the spriit" and "speaking in tounges" for the first time in my life. (An interesting side note, my depression was never dealt with in those deliverance sessions.)

I thought my life was finally beginning to look up. I reenrolled in school and started attending church weekly again. All was not good, though. I quickly began to relapse and quit school after the first semester. I felt unworthy to attend church there any longer and by early 2000 I was deep in depression once again. This continued into the spring and by early summer I was very suicidal. I felt like god had abandoned me and I had no reason to live.

It was one day that I was finally determined to reconcile my homosexuality with my Christian belief that I did a search on Yahoo and accidentally found the homepage of an agnostic. I began reading and for the first time in my life my beliefs were being challenged in my mind. I read Russel's "Why I Am Not A Christian" and it was as if my eyes were being opened after all those years as to how rediculous Christianity is. I formally deconverted in August 2000.

Although it took me quite a while longer to work out my depression, I was finally free. I realized my depression was over the repression of the fact that I was gay. I accepted that and began to live a much better life.

I do not believe that I ever would have accepted that I was gay if I hadn't deconverted. I would have ended up in a loveless marriage and maybe eventually killed myself. Who knows...maybe atheism saved my life.

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