"The War Within"

If I'm ever at a loss for what to write about here, one of the places I check out is Peterson Toscano's blog "A Musing." I was not disappointed, finding his post titled "The War Within."

What I really respect about Peterson's writing is how he gets right to the bone in sharing his personal experiences, many of them traumatic, and is therefore able to relate to others well enough to help them do the same. He shows that again in this essay. Here are some excerpts, but I encourage you to click through and read the entire post.

Many lesbian, gay and bisexual folks live with internalized homophobia. We grow up in a society that insists that heterosexuality is the approved norm, and anything other than it is not only "less than" but actually a perversion. Even when we did not hear bad things said about gays, lesbians and bisexuals, we have almost exclusively heard good things about heterosexuals while virtually nothing positive about people not heterosexual. We experienced heterosexual lives, loves, and desires prominently celebrated in pop songs, romantic comedies, religious services and billions of images. We got the message that non-heterosexuals were not fully human.

Not too long ago I spoke with an ex-gay survivor who grapples to understand the difficulties in his life and why it remains so hard for him to move beyond his ex-gay experiences. He wonders why it cannot be a simple recovery without all the pain and difficulty he suffers.

After we go to war against ourselves, we find ourselves in the midst of the carnage. We sliced up our hearts. We slandered ourselves daily and did all manner of cruelty to ourselves. Aided and abetted by an anti-gay Church and world, we can now find our souls sliced and diced and in bleeding tatters.

I went to war against myself. Actually I joined someone else's war, recruited to drive out a part of myself even though that part of me did nothing wrong. After I stopped the battle, I assessed the ruin. I remember the first few years before I began to process my ex-gay experiences and the damage they brought to my life. I felt angry and bitter, cheated and deceived while still battered by daily onslaughts of guilt and doubt and fear. No wonder it took me nearly 10 years to begin to feel good about myself again.