FOLLOWING MY PATH: Growing Up Gay in a Christian, Fundamentalist, Right - Wing, Conservative Family During The 1940's - 1960's

Imagine growing up in small Indiana towns in the 1940s in a very strict religious family and then realizing at the age of six that there was something sexually “wrong” with you. You had no name for it, and you didn't really understand it, but you knew it all the same. By the time you were seven and eight years old, you heard adults talk about sexual perversion and teenagers using the terms “faggot” or “queer” as if they were describing the plague. But you knew deep inside it was you they were talking about! Then skip forward a few years when you felt compelled to find someone else like you. You knew you couldn’t be the only one, and you didn’t think you could survive on erotic dreams or daydreaming. And so you began to sexually experiment with older men who called themselves queer, but you knew it didn’t describe you. Then, at age seventeen, you found yourself in your first small gay bar, where you finally discovered you weren’t the only one like you on this planet! But when your mother discovered you’d been invited to a gay party, she told you that you would burn in hell if you didn't become heterosexual. And that was just the beginning. Following My Path is the true account of the author discovering who he was and all the things that happened along the way. Some of the things are serious, and some are funny, but all are interesting and vital to understanding what many gay people have had to endure. Reading Following My Path may: * change your mind about whether being gay is a choice or not; * make you see gay people differently and with more understanding, particularly those who are older and in the closet longer; * teach you to love your children unconditionally, even if there are parts of them you can't understand or accept; * teach you not to lay guilt trips on your children; and * teach gay LGBT people not to leave God out of their lives, as we, too, are made in his image, and he wants us to lead happy and fulfilling lives. Following My Path is the author’s confirmation in his belief in God and his comfort with being an “outed,” gay Christian.