FROM MY HEART: Pain, Pride & Pat Robertson

Born gay, raised Christian, enduring pastors who told me I was irredeemable

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post has been revised to remove privileged information that had not been cleared for publication.

Sex and religion are a thorny tangle of values, dogmas, taboos and needs. Sinfulness and sexiness are two sides of the same coin. It’s taken me a very long time to understand my feelings about sex & sexuality, and my religious background has made it agonizing to grow into a healthy, well adjusted gay man. LGBTQ Pride Month has never been quite right for me, and although I love my community, it has never felt 100% like home.

I have men like Pat Robertson to thank for that.

Pat Robertson

On Thursday, June 8th, Robertson died at his home in Virginia Beach, VA. He lived to be 93. Robertson packed an enormous amount of influence into that life: founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (which announced his death), co-founder of the private Christian college Regent University, and a key architect of the Christian conservative movement in America. His empire was born from The 700 Club, a television show that’s been on the air since 1966.

Homophobia has been a constant of Christian conservative leaders, but few took it as far as Pat Robertson did. His outlandish remarks are well documented (examples here and here), but the remarks matter less to me than the climate they created. The net effect of them was harsh for a kid like me, growing up in the early 80s during the AIDS pandemic. Homosexuality was, they told me, incompatible with Christianity, salvation and simple decency in every way. My first lens on the world was as a Christian: even before I understood what it meant to be Black, male, or American, I understood that God loved me. I also understood that God had high expectations of me. Those would come into dreadful conflict sooner than I expected.

Thankfully, I never tried to kill myself, though many LGBTQ young people do (and far too many succeed). A 2021 study by the Trevor Project shows that 45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide the year prior. What’s the biggest factor in this? Honestly, that’s the wrong question. That’s like going on a grueling hike and asking, “What one aspect of the hike made it hard?” It’s the entire environment that makes a situation like that miserable. Likewise, Robertson’s dogma fed and fueled a political environment that dehumanized many people, especially gay men, for power and profit.

No, I never tried to kill myself. But I did the next worst thing.

I doubled down. I spent years trying to shoehorn my sexuality into the religion that actively rejected me. For years I attended a variety of gay-affirming churches, including a number that were part of the Metropolitan Community Churches. They were extremely welcoming, but I never got the depth of biblical instruction that I wanted. For all their faults, many conservative churches dissect the Bible in great detail, especially the “megachurches”. So naturally, that’s where I ended up: at the two megachurchiest churches of them all, both in my native South Florida. Maybe one day I’ll tell you the story of my time at Christ Fellowship in Palm Beach Gardens, FL. That one ended quite well, actually. More relevant for this article is my membership at Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale.

Two years after joining I wrote a letter to its Founder and then-Senior Pastor, Bob Coy. He never wrote back, as I expected, but the letter was cathartic enough to begin a process that continues to this day: the process of laying down the shame, judgment and terror that my Christian upbringing metastasized into. No one intended for me to live my adult life inside a thick cloud of internalized homophobia and condemnation, but boy do I ever live in it. These days it’s down to occasional whiffs and wisps, but back then it was a category 5 hurricane of self hatred. It pervaded everything around me, including and especially my career. Maybe if I’m great at my very public job as a broadcaster, and am a perfectly exemplary role model in public, that will excuse whatever judgment God may still have against me and give me a little bit of redemption.

If you ever listened to me on NPR, hosting 1A from 2017-2019, you heard me while that cloud was suffocating me. I was not okay back then. I’m amazed that I survived.

The thing is, when you learn something that powerful as a child, it does more than shape you as an adult. It pervades other areas that emerge as you grow up. We make sense of the present by looking at the past, and that childlike simplicity makes us very vulnerable to what we’re taught. This is how parenting works, of course, and I firmly believe that the people who raised me did what they did because they loved me and wanted to see me thrive. 99% of what I was taught affirmed me and galvanized me. But that 1% — those rare, fleeting, focused messages about homosexuality — exploded into 100% of my relationship with God. After my same-sex attraction emerged at age 13, it began redefining me as an unlovable contradiction. It made the song “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” feel like a cruel joke.

Bob Coy heard that song differently… or so he said.

Bob Coy, former Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale. By CalvaryFTL - Previously published: http://www.calvaryftl.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25732411

I remember sitting in Calvary Chapel sometime in 2007 or 2008, having rededicated my life to Christ months prior. The pastor of the church I grew up in died in 2007 — a wonderfully loving man, Rev. R.J. Hendley, Jr. — and his death got me feeling guilty about my lapsed relationship with the church. Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale is gigantic, with a deep long main sanctuary that feels like a convention center’s main hall. Pastor Bob, as he was known, referenced the song in one of his 45-minute sermons, but he changed the lyrics somewhat. He said that to him, the song should not say “Yes, Jesus loves me / for the Bible tells me so”. It should say:
”Yes, I love Jesus / because he first loved me.”

To him, being a Christian was about our devotion to Christ for his salvation and guidance. We showed our love by acting in the ways that Jesus called us to.

And yes, I do mean a 45-minute sermon. Funny, insightful, conversational… the man was a masterful communicator. He knew how to make time fly. The services lasted about an hour and ten minutes, and the sermons were the bulk of them. Coy preached multiple services each weekend, plus Bible study on Wednesday nights. It was a big job, but he seemed to handle it well. I started bringing a yellow legal pad to every service, as did many members, leaving each night with at least two pages of newly handwritten notes.

In 2009 I wrote that letter to him, outlining the pain I was in over trying to reconcile my sexuality and my spirituality. Reconciliation never came, and it forced me to essentially starve my religious conviction to death. It didn’t really die: it just languished in a kind of hospice of the heart, like a terminally ill patient with no plug to pull. Every passing Sunday reminded me of my cancerous connection to God: the faith community that falsely claimed to love me unconditionally like Christ does. Now, years later, the wound has scarred over and stopped hurting. Mostly.

…not really.

Because every now and then, someone says something sexy to me hours after a conversation with my father about spirituality (and we do not see eye-to-eye on religion, at all). Or a hot guy walks by on the same day that someone from my hometown said they’ve been praying for my success. Every now and then my sexuality and my religious upbringing intersect in ways that, damn it, should have not one single goddamn thing to do with each other, but they almost always do. So neither aspect of me goes satisfied. And I end up in pain. Often, so do the people around me: people I care about who never asked to be any part of my psychodrama.

Today I still think of myself as Christian in some ways, especially the core humanistic values that informed the man I became. The teachings of Jesus are pretty universal, in my opinion. If more Christians just lived out what he said and left the rest alone, then I believe the faith would not be declining in America. And that decline is projected to grow, according to Pew Research Center. Ultimately I simply could not reconcile why God, in his mercy and love, would make me gay if being gay was unforgivable. Homosexuality is the only sin you can commit in your sleep: a state of being that’s defined by much more than sexual activity. And being gay can involve self expression, community, camaraderie and care. All of those things are tainted for me. Hopefully not forever, but maybe.

Ultimately I never really solved the problem. My search for closure failed, and with no other recourse, I just walked away and got on with life.

Pat Robertson’s impact on the world is being felt now in the form of a national wave of repressive legislation, spurred partly by the rhetoric he spread for decades. That won’t soon go away, especially with 2024 being an election year. In lieu of flowers, CBN says the Robertson family requests donations to the organizations he founded. An IRS filing from the 2020 tax year shows that Pat Robertson received compensation of $374,534 from CBN: very little in the form of direct pay. His son, CBN’s CEO and 700 Club co-host/executive producer Gordon Robertson, received $629,341 in pay and other compensation.

As for Bob Coy, he was removed from his post as Senior Pastor of Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale in 2014 for issues with pornography and for cheating on his wife. Years later, an investigation in the Miami New Times revealed that he had been accused of molesting a girl for years, beginning when she was four years old. According to the New Times, Coy was never charged in the case. I’m unclear on exactly where he is now, but he appeared in a 2022 YouTube video as the senior VP of marketing for a roofing company.

This is Pride Month: a time that’s always been challenging for me. I’ve walked in the parade, and I’ve kissed cute boys on the street, and I’ve flown my freak flag as high as I can. That old cloud of condemnation has hovered on the horizon, usually in the far distance, but rarely out of sight. Sometimes I wish I’d never been raised in the church, just for my sanity’s sake. I hope other young gay men have an easier time finding peace and strength than I have. Anything they need to break free of this self hatred and doom spiraling, I’m here for them. And I wish Pastor Bob had been the Christian he claimed to be, especially when I wrote that five-page letter to him on Palm Sunday 2009. I ended the letter somewhat melodramatically, but from the heart:

I am a man in great pain. This is a critical moment in my life: one in which I believe God will either reveal himself to me and bring about positive change, or I will drown in the unfathomable depths of despair. Easter is a time of resurrection, and something has been dead in me for nearly a year. You have cut me to my core, Pastor Bob, and pushed me away from a church I’d grown to not only love, but need. It is my fervent prayer that you never do such a thing again to anyone else: that you remember how powerful even a few words can be to the people who hear your voice. And if it is in God’s will, may He guide me safely to a new spiritual home where I am loved and validated, where I can be challenged and accepted, where my loneliness will end once and for all.