Closet Curses Part 5–The Abused Becoming The Abuser

This is the final installment of the Closet Curses series on why so many rabid anti-LGBTQ+ conservative leaders are gay and living in the church closet. (Other series posts linked below.)

Quick Note: Here are links to the previous posts concerning this series:

Closet Curses Part 3–Social & Peer Pressure

(Part 3 has links to the first two IG Reels discussing money and self-loathing)

Closet Curses Part 4–Negative Attention Seeking And People Pleasing

Hard Writing…

I’m an abuse survivor, as I’ve mentioned in my book and this series. I suffered physical abuse at least three or four times a week. My trauma therapist asked me to describe a few people in my life, and I called them my daily emotional terrorists. I was sexually assaulted several times as a child, including by a family member, a babysitter, and a man 20 years my senior when I was 17. I had major abandonment issues and never felt valued, loved, or safe. Remembering all of that, again, still hurts. Knowing I became a part of the problem with conversion therapy against others, hurts even worse.

Writing this post was challenging. I understand the topics in this series, but this one differs from expectations.

In abuse-driven dysfunction, people assume childhood abuse shapes beliefs and leads to repeating the same abuse. This is true for me, but only to a degree. My transformation into a monster was more directly caused by the consequences of abuse.

My abuse caused extreme emotional and relational deficiencies. I didn’t become like my abusers even though their abuse set me up for an even more pernicious form of abuse. I eventually came to believe that conversion therapy via exgay ministry was normal, healthy, and what God wants. In the context of my life, it was more “normal” to me than anything I had experienced up to that point.

Yeah, a complete mind-f*ck.

Becoming The Monster

Conversion therapy is abuse but in my frame of reference at the time; no one was beating, raping, mocking, stealing, helping me abuse substances daily. I was in consistent community that wasn’t afraid of my purposeful antagonism, let me cry without shame and in a lot of ways could relate to the abuse I went through.

Now, the cult-like ideology is you know… cult-like. And, the emotional abuse is deceptively presented as God’s will. Even so, for me, it was one of the safest environments I had ever been in to that point. I didn’t realize I was in quicksand that was trapping me into repeating every dysfunction under the guise of my fictitious heterosexal potential and spiritual maturity.

I didn’t know any better and thought that the exgay world was my “normal” and God loved me and would never forsake me like all the others have throughout my life.

And to be clear, the exgay world is as bad or worse than most traumas because it takes advantage of vulnerable gay people’s trauma while presenting itself as “healing.” My getting the true help I needed took way too long to obtain and only after everything in the exgay world blew up and fell apart as pseudo-intellectual gibberish. Shallow talking points wrapped in spiritual language, ideals, consequences, and expectations.

And because everything I was learning and experiencing, even though misleading, helped me feel consistency in community and friendship, two things I was desperate for.

Because I did experience some healing on peripheral issues that had nothing to do with my being gay, being gay was taught that it was at the root of all my trauma. Being gay was blamed for the abuse and dysfunction. As a result, when I started being able to have healthy boundaries, it was not as a gay man learning boundaries; it was healing from homosexuality by working through unresolved issues. The more issues I healed from, the more I would reach my heterosexual potential.

Absolute bullsh*t, I know now that being gay should not have been considered a root problem underlying all hurt and dysfunction. As a gay man I should have gotten the same type of help as any other person, but exgay ideology is vampiric. It will use those peripheral issues and seek to suck out all the energy behind it without really dealing with the true underlying issues.

Back then, I dove in hard as a true believer. I discovered that while I was never allowed to speak up as I grew up, that I loved communication and creative efforts. I discovered that I am a natural leader and a lot more confident and resilient than I ever dreamed of. However, this was all discovered in this cultish context, I was using my superpowers for evil. When I promoted exgay ideology as God’s will, I hurt people thinking I was helping them and honoring God when in fact I was dishonoring their truth and misrepresenting God.

I always wanted to help, not hurt, people. It was a very shocking and cataclysmic day when I realized that what I was doing was actually harming LGBTQ+ people in profound ways. That I hadn’t grown into “spiritual maturity” like I thought.

And The Full Moon Sets…

Picture this: a werewolf transforming into their wolf state—it sounds like a real pain in the neck! Bones resetting, faces changing, internal organs being jostled around violently—ugh, no thanks! Now, imagine a werewolf transforming back into their human form that they’ve never known existed. That could really unsettle even the most serious of Lycans. It’s painful as f**K, and when they finally achieve that transformation, their true self emerges. But here’s the kicker: that true self is someone they’ve never known, naked and completely vulnerable.

Hi! my name is Randy and I used to be a werewolf (figuratively… ahhhwwooooooo!), WTF do I do now?

When suicide of a friend ripped off my blinders and I realized exgay ideology killed him, every bone in my body ached (not kidding). My authentic self came flooding in and it scare the absolute snot out of me. Everything I thought I was and the career I had built was a lie that hurt people, despair was so deep I can’t even explain the tsunami of pain that came my way and I was completely vulnerable and terrified. It was the second time in my life that I entertained suicidal ideations.

I didn’t want to go back to being a werewolf, an abuser. How could I when the unvarnished truth was horrifying? At 45 years of age, I didn’t have any respect for myself and didn’t even know where to begin, and decided to just take the next right step, one at a time. The first step was simply to stay alive, and as time went on, I came out of the church closet. Now ten years later, I know and understand my dark side, but I nurture and celebrate my true self.

A number of people have said that I am a head-to-toe completely new person; more confident, happier, more content, more healthy in troubled times/situations, more unlikely to put up with or promote b*llsh*t. I accept/embrace me. I am no longer a vulnerable mystery but a truly “known” person who loves and is loved in true life-giving ways.

I also have to say, I don’t miss the fangs.

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More about Randy…