Reconstructing after Evangelicalism

As individuals who love and celebrate the queer people in our lives, we are very aware that their journey to accepting themselves is not always an easy one.  There are lots of intersections that come together to make every journey unique, and yet we find common threads. Today In the Den, Jen visits with Mike Maeshiro about his experiences coming out as gay, deconstructing evangelicalism, healing from religious trauma, and helping others to do the same. 

Special Guest: Mike Maeshiro

Mike Maeshiro is the founder of Numa, an organization that supports people recovering from religious toxicity. Mike is gay, an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, and a queer theology enthusiast. Mike is a former instructor at Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, best known for his class, “Discerning of Spirits.” He now teaches on emotional health and redemptive deconstruction. He is a consultant and coach for gay men recovering from evangelicalism. He also has a team of coaches who work with people whose faith is evolving. He is a social media influencer and thought leader. Mike loves Japanese food, movies, and playing volleyball, and has a depth of useless knowledge about the X-men. 

Links from the Show:

• Mike’s website: https://www.mikemaeshiro.com/welcometonuma 
• Mike on IG: https://www.instagram.com/mikemaeshiro/?hl=en 
• Mike on FB: https://www.facebook.com/mikemaeshiro/ 
• Mike on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH5vGo6yRl6Gay-wbJ7F6og 
• Join Mama Dragons: www.mamadragons.org 

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Transcript

JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through this journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.

As individuals who love and celebrate the queer people in our lives, we are very aware that their journey to accepting themselves is not always an easy one. And there are a lot of intersections that come together to make every journey unique. And yet we find common threads. Today, we are going to talk to Mike about his own path to discovering his identity and eventually being able to celebrate it. His path and beliefs are his own, of course, but I’m hopeful that we can all find commonality with our own experiences and those of our children.

Mike Maeshiro is the founder of Numa, an organization that supports people recovering from religious toxicity. Mike is gay, an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community, and a queer theology enthusiast. He now works as a consultant and a coach, and he has a team of coaches who work with people whose faith is evolving. Mike loves Japanese food, movies, and playing volleyball, and has a depth of useless knowledge about the X-Men. We’ll have to talk about that after. Welcome, Mike, to In the Den. We are super happy to be with you this morning!

MIKE: Thank you. I’m honored to be here. I’m excited to be part of this space. I’m loving that you’re doing this.

JEN: So, I want to start, actually, with your early years. Those childhood years, like focus on elementary school. What do you remember about your family and your neighborhood and your community? What do you think about when you think about young life as Mike?

MIKE: Yeah. Context wise, my dad is Japanese. My mom is American. I was born on Guam. So that’s an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that’s a US Territory. So I was born American. But, culturally, the environment was Chamorro. Those are the natives to the island. So I was raised by two different cultures in my home that were different from the culture in the world I was living in. So that was a big theme of my upbringing, just being culturally diverse and feeling kind of estranged from both my parents just because I didn’t look like either of them in my mind. Now people say that I look like my dad and I can kind of see it. But when I was a kid, I was like, “These aren’t my parents.” It was kind of a fear that I had for a while.

JEN: I was going to ask about that intersection.

MIKE: Growing up in Guam, there was obviously the diversity component to that that I had to learn how to make sense of really early on. But I was also pretty aware that I wasn’t like the other boys regardless of culture. I had another layer of culture embedded in my psyche where I was a lot more sensitive than the other boys and a lot more emotional.

JEN: And were you aware of that all the way in elementary school?

MIKE: Yeah. I think as early as probably like five-ish, five or six, I wouldn’t have called myself gay at the time; I didn’t know what gay was. But I did know that I wasn’t like other boys. I enjoyed hanging out with girls. I wanted to be the Little Mermaid. I wanted Barbies. I wanted the hair and the lipstick and the skirts and the high heels. That was a very strong awareness that I had that I was like, “I’m not supposed to want these things,” even just within my family I was shamed for showing any kind of interest or gravitating toward those things. So I was learning at that age, “Oh, I’m not supposed to like this.” And I didn’t ever once convince myself not to. I just had to learn how to hide it, how to enjoy it in secret and not let people know that I would prefer the Barbie toy from McDonalds instead of the Hot Wheels toy, right? So it showed up like that first where I was like, “I don’t know why this is the case for me,” but it absolutely was. It was not a question or like a struggle for me. It was very clear when I would watch The X-men, I wanted to be the girls. When I watched the Power Rangers, I wanted to be the pink ranger or the yellow ranger. I don’t know why. I just affiliated myself with women. And then even around that age, maybe a little later like seven, eightish, I was noticing that I liked boys but the way girls like boys. I was aware of that. Again, I would not have said that out loud because, when I was four, my parents took me to a Baptist church for the first time. And I heard the “Gospel”. And I’m putting air quotes on that because I don’t know what we’re calling “Gospel” because this was a nightmare. But I learned about Jesus and sin and forgiveness and hell and eternity and Satan and Crucifixion and whatever all in that first Sunday school class. And I’m like, “How did we ethically let people teach children this at this age?”

JEN: That’s a lot for a four-year-old.

MIKE: A lot. It’s a lot. And I was conceptually trying to imagine, “So I’m supposed to invite this Jesus, I guess he’s a ghost, because he’s going to come into my heart. And so now I’m going to get a ghost in my heart which allows me to not go to the horrible fiery torment place. And instead, I’m going to go to heaven.” So just out of survival, I was like, “I’ll take Jesus.” So I got saved at four. And then that same next week, they put me in private school at that church. And so I started going to Baptist private school. And for a few years I studied the Bible and memorized passages of scripture for a grade. I look back at what we were doing at the ages that I was at and I’m like, “What in the world? This is wild.” The word “Indoctrination,” this is what this was.

JEN: At the time, did you think it was awesome? Or at the time were you a little bit uncomfortable?

MIKE: I don’t know if I had an opinion about it being awesome. I was just absorbing it like the grass is green and the sky is blue. Like this is reality, right?

JEN: Okay.

MIKE: So I didn’t really have much of an opinion about whether I liked it or not and more just like, “Okay. How do I survive this? How do I make this work?” because our teachers spanked us. They all had paddles. So if we were naughty, they’d spank us. And it wasn’t just physically painful, obviously that’s true too. But it was also humiliating, right?

JEN: Did they do it in front of the class?

MIKE: They take you outside, but then you have to go back to your seat and you’re not done crying by that point, right? You have to march back to your seat and you’re wailing and your peers are all watching you. And it’s humiliating. So I watched my friends get spanked. So I watched them come in after the spanking, so you’re watching each other in these really intense emotional states that you don’t really show in public that often at this point of your development. But you’re doing it regularly, that you’re seeing each other cry. And I’m like, “That’s not normal. I don’t think that’s how that should've gone.” So that was another major theme of my religious indoctrination. I would say education, but that’s not the right word. I was being told what to think and what to believe. I was not being taught how to think about these things. And so being afraid of authority was a really strong theme. My dad was intensely patriarchal. And so the Bible just fits right in, right? And just really emboldens and empowers that power structure. And my mom fell in line. She followed suite and just upheld and maintained the patriarchy in our home like a good Christian wife. So that was like my upbringing. There’s lots of details, lots of directions I could go. But that’s me answering the question.

JEN: So you’re about seven or eight and you start figuring out that you’re actually maybe thinking about boys the way the girls around you are thinking about boys. Did you tell anyone about it?

MIKE: No. No. No. Jen, of course not. No I did not. I could not because by that point, I knew – again, I did not think of myself as a gay person. But I knew that boys weren’t allowed to like boys – I knew men who liked men went to hell, didn’t inherit the kingdom, were abominations. God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of people like that. So in my mind, they were those people, they were othered. I was not those people. But I was aware that I liked boys the way girls like boys. And I didn’t associate the two but I did know “I can’t let people know this. I’m not supposed to be this way.” It wasn’t until I was ten years old that I connected the dots and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m THAT.” Right?

JEN: And then did you internalize all the messages that came with that like, “Oh no. I’m going to hell. Oh no. I’m depraved.”

MIKE: That’s a fair question. At that point, when I was ten – this is so funny. I’m going back to a psychological state that I was in when I had these experiences. But they’re very marking so I can remember them – when I was ten I didn’t immediately assume “I’m going to hell. I’m not inheriting the kingdom. God has abandoned me.” I didn’t ever think that. What I did think was, “I’m going to have to marry a woman or I’m going to be single forever. I don’t want either of those options. That sucks. How am I going to live the rest of my life lying like this?” But that was the only option I had, either be miserable and married to a woman and just have a miserable marriage – which in my mind I conceived that was a reality that I could have – or I’d be single forever and be judged. I wasn’t afraid of being single. I was afraid of being judged for being single and all the questions and the stigma that would come with that.

JEN: So at age ten, you’re pondering marital life, what that’s going to look like?

MIKE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s my future, right? That’s where we’re going.

JEN: Okay. That’s actually pretty mature for a ten year old to be thinking about marriage, not the immediate.

MIKE: Well, I wasn’t thinking about it in a positive way. I was thinking about it like a prison sentence, right?

JEN: Right.

MIKE: But I mean, I knew at that point, we’re supposed to get married at some point and build a family and you know. But thankfully, at that time in my life, it was so far away that it wasn’t a pressing matter that I had to figure out right now. But it was this deep realization that this is where I’m headed. And eventually I will have to face the music and do something about this. So I thankfully could just distract myself enough in the meantime to not have to bear the full brunt of, “I’m going to hell. God hates me.” It didn’t go there yet.

JEN: So as you entered middle school and high school and stuff, did you try dating girls, be like, “If I’m going to have to marry a woman, I’d better test the waters and see if I can make it work?”

MIKE: I did not. I did not. Okay, maybe context. I’m enneagram 4. I don’t know if we know about the enneagram here, but as a four on the enneagram, one of my highest motivators or priorities in my experience is being able to be uniquely myself. And anything that gets in the way of that, I will fight and protest or whatever. So that’s a funny, maybe cruel, variable in the midst of this journey that I got to go on. But I, as much as I knew what was expected of me and the path I was supposed to go, I would not force myself, at least at that point, to try and date a girl when there was no part of me that wanted that. On the contrary, my best friend who was a guy from youth group, at around 12, we started fooling around in the bedroom. It wasn’t ever overtly… we didn’t have sex, but we were absolutely sexual and we were fooling around with each other, right? And that lasted for two and a half years and we never talked about it. We never told anybody.

JEN: That’s a long relationship for a 12 year old.

 MIKE: I was in love with him. This was my boyfriend. I never thought that. I never said that, of course. But that’s basically where this person sat in my soul. I was in love with this person.

JEN: And then did everybody in the outside world just think you were best friends because you were hanging out?

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the story. I mean, we were convincing ourselves we were best friends. But I knew better, right? I assumed at the time, and I don’t really love sharing this because it’s kind of humiliating for me. But at the time, I assumed he was a straight guy and just put up with, or engaged in our relationship the way he did because he was just horny and it was an easy way for him to have sexual experiences. And for me I was like, “Man. I’m in a worse position than him because I’m in love with this person.” And I just kind of bore the brunt of that shame and terror. So it lasted for two and a half years. Everything only ever happened in the dark and we never talked to each other. We never looked at each other. So I look back, I’m like, “God, my first sexual experiences were so bizarre and specific and prolonged, you know?” So that was happening in the closet and all the while he and I were both just well respected key leaders of our youth group of our church. And so there was this major contrast and intense religious shame, spiritual shame – I would even say, right – of just feeling like a hypocrite and a liar and filthy. Then I’m getting toward the, not damnable. I genuinely never believed that God was condemning me for being gay.

JEN: Good.

MIKE: I never actually believed that for myself. I don’t know why. Was I not paying attention? Because I understood the material. I got it mentally, but I also was a deeply spiritual person and I genuinely believed that God loved me and that we had a relationship. And the God that I conceived of at that point in my life could not hate me for something that I had no control over. I believed that that God didn’t want me to do anything with my friend. But I didn’t believe that he hated me for it. I believed he understood and probably had pity for me. That’s kind of where I was at that point in my process in my spirituality.

JEN: I love that you adopted this super compassionate, empathetic God.

MIKE: I don’t know how I pulled that off because what I was being taught about God at church was nasty. That guy was so critical and sensitive, and narcissistic and punitive. I don’t know.

JEN: I love that, that you created the God – not created but . . .

MIKE: Well, maybe

JEN: . . . worked with the God that loved you. I love that. Were you at any point thinking, “I’m fooling around. It’s going to be bad. I’m going to repent. And then eventually I’ll pray enough and then I can be straight?”

MIKE: That was kind of a weird far-off fringe hope. I hoped that that was how this was going to play out. I had no realistic expectation that was going to happen in the present. But it was always this fantasy future that is what’s going to have to happen. “And I will just go on a journey and evolve as a person and discover things that are possible in the human experience that I just can’t figure out right now. Right now I’m just stuck being in love with this person.” I wouldn’t even have said gay at the time, just being in love with this person that I assumed, from a denial, far-off, fantasy future place, that eventually God would strike me straight.

JEN: Strike you Straight. I like that. I know you weren’t talking to people. But were you talking to God about any of this at the time?

MIKE: I did. And most of the time when I would talk to God about my sexual orientation and my sexual experiences, the prayer was, “God. I’m sorry. God, please change me. God, please fix this. Heal me. Make me straight. Help me like girls. Help me not do this with him.” It was that. So I would talk to God, but it was always like a repentant, sorrowful, sad, apologetic thing. And when I was enjoying it and whatever, it was always in the heat of the moment and then it was followed by shame and regret and maybe some self-hatred, you know? So whenever I talked to God it was always like this, “I’m sorry. Help me.”

JEN: Did it help? Did you feel like God was saying, “Yep. I do forgive you?”

MIKE: I never actually – so the reason I’m going to be distinct about this is because in my journey, I did experience God talking to me at some point and it wasn’t then. So at the time, for that period of my life, I never heard God or experienced a communication from God that was affirming. I just felt a sense of, at least, moral and relational responsibility that I was at least leveling with God and being honest.

JEN: “We can’t lie to God,” sort of ?

MIKE: Right? Yeah. Exactly.

JEN: Is there anything else you want to touch on before you head to college? Had you talked to your parents yet? Anything like that happen?

MIKE: Oh, no. No. No. Jen. Well, let’s stay in high school for a second. So when I was 15, I was going to Bible camp over the summer, Bible summer camp. And one year the speaker – I don’t know why – but every session he preached against sexual immorality of any kind. And obviously, he hit homosexuality pretty hard and was like fire and brimstone about it. And I had this almost panic attack in one of the sermons because I had this genuine terror that God was going to reveal to this scary preacher that I was a homosexual and fooling around with this guy next to me. And I was like, my life is going to be over, right? So I freaked out and had to get up and walk out of the session and find my breath again outside, which didn’t really happen. So I was like, this is intense. And that was kind of like a wakeup call for me. So when that school year started, I conveniently started distracting myself with a bunch of other people and just stopped hanging out with my best friend and stopped having time for him. I stopped inviting him to my place. I stopped accepting his invitations to go to his. And we just drifted apart, which is sad. I wish that I was maybe a little more gracious about that. But I couldn’t talk to anybody about it, right? So I didn’t know what to tell him. So we just socially drifted. And so then I became like a celibate monk. That sounds silly, but I did not have a ton of sexual thoughts at that point which is strange for a high school male, right, with the hormones and the changes. I had gotten so good at repressing my sexuality that sexual thoughts and feelings were sparse and limited and far away from me in a lot of ways. Because in my mind, and probably unique to me and I’m sorry if this is too explicit for this space, but for the nature of the content, I did not know what masturbation was until I was a senior in high school. Because, in my mind, in my experience, the only way I could experience an orgasm was with my friend. That was the only way that that happened. So I didn’t know there were a bunch of people doing stuff by themselves and then all the other ways they could have sexual pleasure. I didn’t know. I was just so purity culture-gated from all that stuff and sheltered, you know. So anyway, when I was in small group in high school at church and these guys are talking about masturbating and porn, I’m like, “What are we talking about?” I did not understand what the problem was and why everyone just kept bringing this up. “What are you doing?” I didn’t get it and I wouldn’t admit to anybody that I didn’t get it because I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about sexuality because then that forced me to have, you know, so there was just a lot of denial and avoidance on that subject for years. And then, shortly after high school, I went to church, was at an adult Sunday school class and they were sharing testimonies of the week. And this woman, who I knew was a lesbian just based on my gay-dar and divine – but she was a self-proclaimed ex-gay at that time in her process. She shared her testimony of a gay guy who played the main role in a Christian film called “End of the Spear.” It’s a movie about Jim Elliott’s life, the missionary. And he was playing the male lead and so he came out to the film crew in the middle of the production of the movie and just felt like they deserved to know that the main actor for their film was gay. And so the leadership of the movie got together, they prayed, they came back to him, and they told him they felt like God wanted him to play the role. And that was her testimony. She shared that as like a win or a victory. And it was just like crickets in the room. It was so awkward. People didn’t know what to do with what she’d just shared. I was not prepared to hear what she said. And I kind of blacked out a little bit. But, by the time I got to our adult service, or the main service on Sunday morning, I was not okay. Something was happening to me that I could not anticipate. I wasn’t conscious of it. I remember being kind of in a daze and doing small talk with people and just trying to move on, get past every moment and get to my seat, and just not have to talk to people.

JEN: Like all the suppression was oozing out.

MIKE: Well, I couldn’t have told you that at the moment. I didn't know what was happening. I just felt exposed and unsafe and uncomfortable. I would not have been able to say that at the time. But when I look back and at the state that I was in, I was very uncomfortable because I felt really exposed. I felt raw. And I didn’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to admit why. I think that’s probably more accurate that I didn’t want to admit that that story meant more to me than it should have. I didn’t want to admit it to myself. And I had developed such a unique, keenly, well-oiled practice of denial and lying to myself about this area that this experience was so confronting and my skill and practice just wasn’t enough to meet whatever was going on that morning, for whatever reason. So we started singing our same worships songs that morning – I mean, I could sing those songs in my sleep – I mean, we sung them all the time. They weren’t new. But all the sudden, this Sunday morning, they were different. And I’m singing these songs like I always did and I lose it. I cannot keep my composure. And I hadn’t cried in years at that point. I was so emotionally repressed and detached from myself. And I just start sobbing at the thought of Jesus and God loving us and whatever. So then I just kind of fall into this intense, emotionally charged, day of reckoning. I was experiencing the presence of God is how I would say this. And I want to be sensitive to all the people listening to this. We’re all on different journeys with our spirituality and our theology and all that. I’m not trying to convince anybody this was God. I don’t know that. I can’t prove it to anybody. But I’m going to share this story the way that I interpreted it at the time and kind of still see it.

JEN: Yeah.

MIKE: So in my mind, in my experience, God was there and I did not know that you could know God. I thought Jesus lifted off the ground 2,000 years ago and floated into the sky. Literally, I thought that’s what happened. So you couldn’t know Jesus. I know we all talked about knowing and loving Jesus. But I thought it was metaphorical. And then, all the sudden, this morning I am very aware this is not metaphor. Got is right here and I can know them just like I know anybody else, if not more. I can know this person deeper and more intimately than I know anyone else in my life. And this person loves me. And I couldn’t not compute what I was experiencing. It did not make sense. God couldn’t love me because I was still gay. I would not have said it that way, but that is, I think, where my soul was. It was crusty and hard and defensive. And so this love and humility that I was experiencing from God was very difficult to process. I did not know where to put it. So I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I lost it. And after that service, I was trying to talk to a friend about what happened, and I just sobbed in front of her. And I had never lost my composure like that in front of someone else since being spanked in kindergarten in public. I had not bawled like that except for at home. So it was bizarre and wild. It was beautiful and painful and shocking and revolutionary for me. But it changed my life because at that point, Christianity was kind of boring. “I’ve done all of it. I’ve reached the pinnacle of Christianity and it’s not that good. I don’t really know what we’re offering the world. This kind of sucks.” It’s like, “Fine.” And that moment kind of recharged my sense of value for Christianity, the Bible, maybe there’s more to this than I've experienced up to this point. Maybe there’s a depth to spirituality and mysticism and connection that I didn’t know was possible, that all the sudden is on the table. And then eight months later, it happened again. I was at a college group going on Friday nights to this other church because this pastor was – they probably would have used the word “anointed” – I didn’t have a [inaudible] for that at the time. But the guy, when he preached, you were like, “He’s right. Whatever he’s saying, this is true.” I don’t know why, it was just like his words would bypass all these gates and barbs and whatever and just get into you. And you’re like, this guy – I don’t know. So I was going to that Friday night service regularly. And then one night – OK, Jen, I’m going to tell you a story. Sorry. I’m going to hit this and then we can move on.

JEN: Okay. I love a good story.

MIKE: This just was really incredibly relevant to my spirituality. This will impact the rest of anything we talk about. So, he’s preaching out of Mark 1. A leper falls on his knees before Jesus and says, “Lord, if you’re willing you can make me clean.” And Jesus says, “I’m willing. Be cleansed.” And he’s immediately healed of his leprosy. And then the pastor stops reading the Bible and starts preaching out how God was there to heal us. And I had never heard a preacher say that before because I was Baptist. We didn’t believe that God did that. So he’s like, “Whatever it is, however long you’ve had it, it doesn’t matter. The Holy Spirit is here. He’s going to heal you.” And this church wasn’t charismatic or pentecostal. They were just pushing the fringe of evangelicalism in their own way, not realizing or embracing the fact that there were other iterations or denominations who were already doing this, right? So he was doing it in a more muted, conservative way. But still hinting at the possibility that supernaturally, God could invade the room that we didn’t believe was possible. So something happened to me. I all the sudden become aware that my life’s about to change. I don’t know how or why. I just know something is about to happen. So I get my community cup and my cracker. I got back to my seat. I get on my knees like that leper and I’m like – pause before I say this. I had one prayer in my entire life that I can remember that I prayed consistently. “God please make me straight, make me not gay, heal me, fix me, change me.” Right. It was that prayer in all these different iterations for years. My deepest heart-cry. – So I get on my knees like that leper and I said, “Lord, if you’re willing, you can make me clean.” And then I fell away from my body. This had never happened to me before. I didn’t know what was going on. But I descended fast and I ended up in this really dark, quiet, solitary place. Earth was far away, a long time ago, that way somewhere. And I’m alone. And I just know me and God are there. And then I hear, in my being, “You’ve only ever told me what to do with this in your life.” And I immediately know that that’s true, and that it’s inappropriate because in this place, I’m in the presence of God and God, in that place God knows everything. God is not just all knowing, but all loving. God was so humble and lowly of heart and kind and painfully gracious. It was like unbearable. And they were innocent and they moved toward me and wanted to care for me. and I could not, I couldn’t do it. And so when they’re like, “You’ve only ever told me what to do with this in your life.” I was like, that’s true. Immediately it was obvious, like how did I not know that. And immediately it’s this repentance, this sorrow is the language I would use. I’m immediately sorry that

JEN: “Sorry I’ve been trying to boss you around, God.”

MIKE: Yeah. “Sorry for telling you how to do your job or be you as if I know better than you how to lead.” And I repent and my heart actually changes in that moment and I’m in a new place of consideration in that space. And then this giant left hand comes over my shoulder and they said, “And you’re right. On the one hand, I can change you. I can make you different. You can leave this building a different person and the world will be different to you.” and I’m aware that in that hand is the very thing I’ve been asking for my whole life. It’s right there. And I would’ve associated it with straightness. “In that hand is my straightness.” And then this giant hand comes over my right shoulder and they said, “But on the other hand, I want this to remain a little longer.” And I’m like, “You’re not allowed to say that to me.” – I didn’t say this to God, but I’m thinking “They can’t say this to me, right? That’s not biblical. None of my pastors would approve of this, my family, my church community, nobody would be okay with this.” But there’s also no question in my experience that this is God Almighty talking to me. And so I’m also aware that I don’t’ get to tell this person how they’re supposed to do their job or be who they are, right? So I’m over here having to face this very splitting moment, experience, in my theology. Do I trust and respond to the Deity that I have a relationship with? Or do I cling to the opinions of men about this old book that they have, right? And there was no question. So I was, “Okay.” So I realize in the moment, I can never tell anybody what’s happening right now. I can’t deny this is happening but no one will believe me. So this is going to be a solo journey. And I just embraced that. And so then I genuinely consider, because they’re waiting for a response from me. I’m like, “Okay. What do you say?” I’m like, “Okay, God, I want what you want for my life more than what I want. So if you want this to remain a little longer, then so do I.” And then the moment was over. I was back in my body, tears were streaming down my face, the lights were on, people were talking. I’m like, “What just happened?” Did a quick scan of the room. Looked at any pretty girl I could find, “Am I straight, did it change?”

JEN: Did it work?

MIKE: Not paying attention to the conversation, just thinking, “Well, I think maybe God just made me straight.” I’m looking and I’m like, there’s nothing there. And I’m like, ‘But that guy’s really cute.” And I’m like, “No.” So still gay, but deeply held, seen, known, accepted in the most rejectable part of my soul. My life changed that day. And so from that point on, I never once doubted God’s love and affirmation and acceptance of me as a person. But I also didn’t want to talk about the gay thing. So that was a moment of change that set me on a path.

JEN: Okay. So you’re in college at this point.

MIKE: I didn’t go to college right away. So I was actually working in Portland at that time. But, yes.

JEN: So you’re an adult, but not in college.

MIKE: Yes, correct.

JEN: Somewhere in this journey, if I understand correctly, you became a pastor.

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. So I went on [laughs]

JEN: Right?

MIKE: Yeah. To speed this up because it’s too much drama, fast forward some years. I end up moving to Japan to do a discipleship training school with Youth of the Mission. I was there for six months. I found out about a church called Bethel Church in Redding, California. Had a lot of really important, life-changing moments there, came back to Oregon for four months, had some other really intense spiritual moments happen that landed me in Redding, California. So I moved to Redding, went to Bethel church to just be part of it. And then I enrolled in their ministry school there. So I did first and second year at Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. I got kicked out of school on the last day because somebody outed me, because I was still gay, you know? And so I got kicked out of school and then went back to the dean of the school a couple of months later to confront the decision and was like, “I don’t understand this?” He apologized. He cleaned it up and gave me my diploma. And then I started working at the church. And then I started taking a bunch of other training and things and moving up in leadership at that church. And just, over years, started to take interns and leading mission trips and then I started teaching at the ministry school. And at some point in that journey, became credentialed and ordained and started pastoring and traveling and speaking. I started flying all over the world and teaching and training churches, conferences, worksophs, whatever. I’m jumping years. We fast forward a bunch of years. So at some point, several years later, I’m a pastor at Bethel and I’m living my dream. I’ve reached further than I thought my ministry career would ever go and I’m loving it, and I’m also intensely closeted. So I just fast forwarded all that.

JEN: I’m interested in that. So you’re, obviously, trying to be faithful. You obviously are Christian. You’re a Christian pastor.

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah.

JEN: You’re doing all that stuff. Were you finding peace? Because you’re still closeted? Were you waiting on God because one day he’s still gonna . . .

MIKE: Yeah. I was waiting on God because one day God was going to make me straight. Eventually one day, I’d meet the right girl. Everyone kept telling me I was going to meet the right girl. I was like, “Well, maybe. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never met the right girl.” Also, I got put on a purity plan when I got kicked out of school. So I had to go to a men’s sexual purity group. So for two different years, they were very specific in instructing me on how to manage my sexuality. I went, I did counseling. I did inner healing. I reached some of the best of the best at Bethel and what they did in those areas. And I received a lot of really harmful messages from them. I was convinced that I was molested by somebody in my family as a kid. Somebody in my family sexually molested me at some point, which wasn’t true. But they convinced me that probably happened and I just repressed it. Because, otherwise, why the hell am  I gay, right? So otherwise, why am I gay? I became convinced that I didn’t get enough love or affection from my dad and my mom was overbearing and therefore, that’s what threw me out of sorts and I sexualized my need for male affection and acceptance. And I failed to fully actualized my identity as a man and it’s because I’ve just been deprived by – I needed ten years of solid male affection before would actually develop an attraction for a woman. Which is not true. That’s not scientific. That’s completely false propaganda.

JEN: Yeah.

MIKE: But I’m internalizing this stuff. I’m genuinely drinking deep because, maybe, they have the answers. I don’t. Help me? right? I was convinced that my need for male affection, I turned it to an empirical obsession and then sexualized it. And now I’m attracted to men because I’m trying to get from them something that I don’t think I have myself. There’s all these weird specific narratives that when you’re in an echo chamber like that, kind of start to make sense. And you believe them. And you accept, this is true. So I went on some years of conversion therapy-type processes and counseling and whatever. And so the men’s sexual purity group told me the next step in my process was I needed to date a girl. That was the “last thing that I needed to do to achieve my straightness.” And so I dated my best friend at the time who was a girl for two months and then I was like, “Okay. I can’t do this. This is not…” She’s accelerating in her attraction and connection to me. And I don’t feel that. Nothing’s changed. If anything, I’m just more uncomfortable. And so I broke up with her and then she moved across the country a week later. And it was really painful and jarring. So I had dated two girls over the span of ten years thinking that that was the thing that I had to do. And I believed I was just so terrified of intimacy with women because they would just know me too well, and that’s why I just couldn’t experience this attraction. It was this deeply repressed fear of intimacy, which is not true. It is not true. My God. Anyway, so two women in my adult life that I seriously tried to date and it did not work.

JEN: Did they know you were gay?

MIKE: They knew that I struggled with being attracted to men from time to time. That’s what I knew.

JEN: So were your parents included, because at this point you’re not a baby anymore, right?

MIKE: I’m not a baby.

JEN: You’re a full adult.

MIKE: It was around 25. I was 25 when I told my parents, “I know you guys have watched me go through my life and I’ve been pretty single most of this, right? I don’t experience attraction to women. In fact, I actually struggle with being attracted to men,” is what I told them. And they were surprisingly cool with it, is how I would’ve said it at the time. And that is not what happened. They did not want to talk about it. And their response was, “Oh, yeah. You’re fine. You’re fine. Don’t worry about it. You’ll figure it out.” That was their response. And I was like, “Cool. Yay. I thought it would be a lot more dramatic and painful.” And it wasn’t. They were basically like, “Yeah, it’s not a problem.” And then they just kept behaving for the rest of that time as if I never said anything. It was a phase. I don’t think they understood or maybe they didn’t want to understand the gravity of what I was trying to communicate to them at the time. So, anyway, I did come out to them at 25. But even then, it wasn’t, “I’m gay.” It was, “I have this problem.” Right? So that’s how they got invited the first time.

JEN: So at least they didn’t say anything horrible.

MIKE: Sure. Yeah. That was nice.

JEN: But they sort of left this with your struggle on your own.

MIKE: To them it just didn’t, it was, “What are we talking about? It’s not a big deal. Why are you talking to us about this? You’re going to figure it out. It’s fine.” I was like, okay. Great.

JEN: So at some point, you stopped trying to be straight. Something changed, right?

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

JEN: You stopped hoping for this and wishing for this and came to accept and maybe affirm – I’m going to say celebrate, come to be like, “I’m gay and it’s awesome.” How did you jump that cliff?

MIKE: I’m going to condense so much detail that really matters to me and is really important and precious to me and my story. I’m going to condense it.

JEN: I’m going to tell people that if they want the details, that you have a podcast.

MIKE: There’s a Youtube video I put out and my coming out story. If they want more into the details, that video covers it. It’s like an hour, but that covers a lot of what I’m going to skip right now.

JEN: And all of that will be in the show notes.

MIKE: Great. Thanks. So in 2020, Taylor Swift released a documentary called Miss Americana. And on February 1st, I watched it by myself in my living room. And halfway through the film she goes hard at advocating for LGBTQ+ people. And something happened in that moment. There was a lot of precursor for months before this moment. But something happened in that moment definitively where I was like, I could feel the onset of what I understood as spiritual conviction in that moment. And I’m like, “Why is that happening right now with Taylor Swift?” But I knew in that moment, she knew something that I didn’t. She was connecting to something that I hadn’t yet and I was on the wrong side of this. And I knew it was something about the gay thing. I wasn’t like, “Gay people are cool. We’re going to affirm them now.” That wasn’t it. I was like, “I’m missing something. And she is right. And I’m missing it.” So that was troublesome. And then I just pushed it away because I didn’t know what to do with that. And two weeks later, I’m pacing my living room, praying out loud – like rage praying – because I’m really mad at how I’m being treated by certain leaders at Bethel at that point, which is a side issue. That’s not even like the main point of any of this. But it was relevant because I was angry and pacing my living room praying out loud. And in the middle of this prayer, I get interrupted again with this very specific, distinct spiritual conviction kind of feeling. And Acts 10 drops in my head. I didn’t know it was Acts 10. It was the story of Peter, who goes up on a roof, falls into a trance, and then sees a sheet come down from heaven, right, with all these animals that jewish people aren’t allowed to eat. And God says, “Rise, Peter, Kill. Eat.” And Peter says, “No, Lord. I’ve never eaten anything unclean.” And God says, “Don’t call anything unclean that I’ve made clean.” That happens three times and the sheet goes back up. So I look it back up on my phone. I read the whole thing. And all I know is, whatever this is right now, this random disruption of Peter on the roof which has nothing to do with what I’m praying about, what I’m feeling right now is the exact same feeling I had two weeks prior with Taylor Swift. And I’m like, “Is this about the gay thing? Is this about the gay thing again?” Right? I was like, “Is God trying to tell me that being gay is acceptable? Maybe at some point it wasn’t, but now it is? Is that the message?” I don’t have proof or I can’t substantiate this. I’m just “Okay. I’m paying attention.” I don’t know what to do with that. I push it away. Three weeks later, I’m in the woods behind my neighborhood and I’m even more rage praying. I’m literally yelling in the woods because I’m so angry and I have to get the emotion out. I just cannot believe how I’m being treated at Bethel by certain leaders, the way decisions have been made, how they’re impacting me and my team. I just could not believe what was happening. And then, again, in the same way, I get interrupted. This time, it’s in the Gospel a couple places, but in Luke, Luke 20-something. I had the verses in my head. I don’t know the actual reference. So I pull them up on Google and find the actual passage and read it outloud. Jesus is rebuking the preachers of the law. And he says, “You keep rules and requirements on the people without lifting a finger to help them.” He goes off about the prophets and their tombs and the hypocrisy of this generation and whatever. And at the end, he concludes his rebuke with, “You prevent people from entering the kingdom while you yourselves refuse to enter.” And in that moment, that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. That moment changed my life because all the sudden – I had heard God communicate to me, probably eight to ten times in my life up to this point, distinctly about my sexual orientation, about me as a gay person. And I just continued to push and ignore it. Push it away because I couldn’t accept that. It did not compute with the world I lived in. – And in this moment, this rebuke comes and I feel this rebuke hit me. Now I am also included in the people who are being rebuked by God for oppressing and excluding and preventing people from participating in what God made available to everyone. And I was like, “Oh God. I can’t do this.” It was the breaking point. And so from that moment. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what is going to happen. But I have to get off this road. I cannot keep being a successful Christian. This has become my hell. I love it in so many ways, economically, socially, career-wise. This is incredible. But spiritually, it is violating to me. I cannot keep doing this.” And so I made a decision that day, like, “Okay. I don’t understand the theology. I don’t know the details of this. But I’m going to go listen to anybody who’s affirming the queer community. I’m going to go listen to – I don’t even care if they’re Christians – I don’t care. I just need to hear what the affirming side of these arguments are because I’ve never genuinely, actually, listened to what they have to say. And I’m going to listen this time without being biased or defensive. I’m going to genuinely discern: is there any validity, is there any truth to what they’re saying And I’m going to listen.” So I went hunting. And I just started finding books and podcasts and Youtube videos and whatever, and I was surprised at how many people were out there saying stuff that I never heard in my life. So it revealed just how echo-chamber of a world I was living in, right? And within a few short months. I was like, “[cuss word] we were wrong. We’re wrong. We’re wrong.” I didn’t have it all figured out. I didn’t understand all of it. But I was touching the substance of this struggle, this controversy, the nature of it, and I was like, “We are hypocrites. We are terrified. And we are wrong. And God is not okay with this. And I have to fix this at least for myself.” I spent nine months – and by the way, we’re in a global pandemic when this is happening at this point . . .

JEN: Oh, good timing.

MIKE: Yeah. So I’m like isolated and just like furiously studying and losing my mind just having such fundamental beliefs that I’d been ingrained in my whole life starting to change in substantial ways. And I’m being validated and affirmed and humanized in the process. And so it was really healing and so painful, like a lot of trauma tears just kept emerging out of nowhere, just like an intense grieving process of how long I had subjected myself to these horrible beliefs that stole years of my own psychological well-being and sexual development and social progress. I could not participate in those things because these beliefs were choking the life out of me. And I’m finally for the first time, at 32, discovering that these beliefs are not valid. They’re not true. They’re not substantial. Substantiated by scripture. This is bigoted. This is propaganda. This is not true. So on a theological level, after about nine months of this, it clicked. And I was like, “There is not a single argument about scripture condemning LGBTQ+ people. This is about other stuff every time.” Fully convinced in an evangelical mindset that we were wrong.

JEN: Yeah.

MIKE: So that was like a huge turning point for me.

JEN: So, now, obviously, you're affirming, you’re celebrating, I’m going to call it ministry, I don’t know if you do, a reaching out to other people trying to catch, right, that struggle that you experienced for well over a decade, tried to catch other people and tried to save them that same trauma.

MIKE: Yeah. Yeah.

JEN: Are you still a pastor?

MIKE: No. I’m not a pastor. I, I’m an ex-pastor. It’s not like it’s – I’m still pastoral. I still absolutely wear my pastor hat at times in the work that I do. But I don’t want to participate in that hierarchical structure anymore. There are so many things that I think are problematic with it, not just the anti-queer rhetoric. There’s so many other things that I have problems with. That I had problems with it while I was in it, this bothers me, but it just keeps getting rubbed out by all the positive benefits that you can have. So you’re incentivized to deny your conscience and ignore these problems and questions and just figure out how to make it work. I can’t do that anymore. So, no, I’m not a pastor anymore. But in my coming out process, probably a year and a half, two years later, I had moved to Nashville by that point. I had to get away from Redding, California. I had to get out of that bubble that I was living in because I couldn’t go places in public without people seeing me, knowing me, recognizing me. I’m like, “How am I supposed to come out as a gay person in this fishbowl of a life? I can’t do this.” So I moved to Nashville to get around a mentor who is so instrumental in helping me affirm myself. And then I came out publicly in 2022. I came out swinging, unapologetic, and confronting the toxic theology head-on, explicitly. And the onslaught of internet hate that I got was overwhelming. I knew it was going to happen and it happened at a level and a degree I did not expect. For months, for months it was every day I would see hateful comments about me specifically, about things I’d said, things I was claiming about my life, my experience. Just constantly, like “You’re demon-possessed. You worship Satan. You’re a false prophet. You’re leading people astray. You’re taking people to hell.” All this. “You’re a child molester. You’re a pedophile.” It was all this horrible stuff, repeatedly. It was shocking. And so through that process, I was like, “I have been such a privileged person in this coming out experience, my theological training, the relational connections I have, the network, the access, the opportunities, the resources, the tools.” I was equipped. And also my deep spiritual, whatever, journey. All these things were so instrumental in me finding my way out of the closet. I came out of the closet because of my relationship with God, not in spite of it, or I didn’t abandon who I understood God to be so I could be gay. I embraced who I was as a gay man because of God in my life. And I was like, “How are people supposed to survive these social and theological barriers of having been raised in this world as a queer person? It is too high. It is a gauntlet of a marathon.” It’s like Frodo and the Ring, how are they going to get there? This is unbelievable. So I was like, “I can not imagine someone who wasn’t in my position with all the things I had going for me, coming out of that world okay. You are going to lose some significant things in the process if you choose to come out.” And so I was like, I want to make this stuff more accessible. I want to get the stuff lower on the shelf. I want to help break down these theological concepts and these arguments and the social stigma and the bullying that happens in Christian spaces that try and get people to be silenced and erased about the truth they’re living out, or trying to. I wanted to help humanize people in their own minds and restore their self-image and their dignity as whole people. They were always whole, this whole time, and they were convinced something was wrong with them, by the people who have the actual problems. So that changed my career and the focus of my work and I used everything that I’d learned and developed at that point to start helping queer people survive evangelicalism.

JEN: I love that. And so that kind of leads into my next question. A lot of members of our group and our children, have had to wrestle with their own religious beliefs, that deconstruction and then reconstruction of how you exist in the world and how you perceive reality, is hard. It’s painful. It’s really a difficult thing to do both spiritually and socially, on multiple levels. And now you’re coaching people through the process. Do you have some advice to offer to the people in our group that are starting on that deconstruction process or starting the reconstruction part?

MIKE: Yeah. I do. I have so much advice. I’ll reduce it down to a couple of things. The first thing I would say – this one’s not very emotional, so it’s not, probably as exciting, but it is essential – many of us raised in high-control religions where theology is a major emphasis, we spend years, decades even, learning the doctrine, learning tenets of the faith, the theology. That doesn’t change overnight. That stuff doesn’t just go away just because you had a feeling. Just because your queer kid came out to you, it doesn't change those deep-seated ideas that you don’t even know are still there. That stuff is there. And so you can, as a parent, feel empathetic and so protective and affirming of your kid, your queer kid, and have toxic, homophobic, transphobic beliefs or ideas at the same time. And I think a lot of parents have that and it’s scary and embarrassing. It’s hard to be honest sometimes, to admit some of those beliefs are still sitting in a deeply held place because they’ve seen and witnessed their kid and loved their kid. So what my first piece of advice is, you have to confront those ideas, which means you need to re-educate yourself. So I’m like, read books. And I’ve got a lot of books I’d recommend depending on what faith tradition you’re coming from. But especially around the Bible, you have to change your idea and relationship of what the Bible is. because, at least from my experience in evangelicalism, we are taught things about the Bible that are not true, that are not even biblical. There’s a superstitious, magical, idolatrous obsession with the Bible as a constitution, as a rule book. And that is not what it is. And to relate to and treat it that way is actually going to lead to heinous, harmful beliefs for lots of kinds of people in the world, not just queer people. That stuff has to be confronted. So if you actually do want to be responsible with having spent decades of your life learning that stuft, you need to relearn. You need to find some better ideas. Those need to be replaced. You can’t just ignore that because it’s happened. It’s gotten in. So you need to go back over what those things are and substantiate the truth, confront the bigotry of what you’ve been taught. So to me, the first one is you have to re-educate yourself. I know that’s not fun for some people to hear. But it is necessary because you spent so long being indoctrinated and now it’s time to figure out how to think about this stuff.

JEN: And there’s some really, really lovely Christian people who use the Bible and history and combine that with Jewish tradition and how they originally approached the Koran and help us understand how maybe the Bible was weaponized in the way it was taught to us. So people don’t have to walk away from the Bible to do this deconstruction.

MIKE: Yeah.

JEN: Okay. I’m ready for number two.

MIKE: Number two is – I’m assuming parents know this. But part of the reason I’m doing my Allyship Bootcamp is because I’m finding allies don’t know this stuff. So I’m going to say this at the threat of repeating something you already know. But, I would say: recognize that you are not a queer person. If I’m talking to the parent of a queer child, you’re not queer. So that does put you as a disadvantage in terms of understanding what it’s like to be a queer person in a queerphobic world. In a heterosexist patriarchal world, to be queer is a really painful experience. And so you being straight, you aren’t going to get it. And that’s okay. I think my advice to you is to embrace the reality that you cannot, the beauty that you cannot understand how painful this is, how difficult and estranging and dehumanizing this experience is. And so then from that heart posture, hopefully there’s a humility that comes with that and an empathy that you’re able to cultivate. And then you give your queer child and the queer people around you the benefit of the doubt. Does that mean everything a queer child says is absolute truth and they’re right about everything? No, that’s not true. Your queer kid could be 14. They don’t know everything. They need to get educated about the world. Some of this stuff they just don’t know because they’re not educated. But when it comes to the queer experience, they might not know how to say it. They might not know how to compel you to understand. But there is something behind what they’re expressing that does matter, that probably is true. So I’m not saying this is a pass for queer kids to have no accountability for how they behave or what they say or think. That’s not what I’m saying. However, when it comes to trying to be seen and to express the pain of years in the closet and survival mechanisms you developed and cultivated, energy you invested into these defense mechanisms to survive, not being understood as the baseline, recognize that it’s not easy for queer people to express how they feel or what they’re experience is like and you’re probably going to need to bring some compassion and emotional intelligence, right, like empathy to wanting to understand. I’m not going to go out of my way to express what it’s like to a queer person to someone who does not visibly demonstrate they want to understand it. I will just accept that they’re not going to get it and I’m going to move on with my life just out of default. But if someone goes out of their way to demonstrate a priority of listening, I’m inclined to want to at least try and share what I have and connect there because I want to be seen and known in that place. I want straight people to know me. I’d like to be known by them as well. So in whatever way that can inform you, bring that humility and a visible demonstration that you are prioritizing listening to them, that you want to hear what they have to say, right? And then looking for ways to understand. You’re going to have to fight for it because some of what they say you’re going to translate in your straight brain and then you’re probably going to conclude that’s not true: “You’re being dramatic. You’re exaggerating.” And to me, I’m like, “Red Flag. You’re not listening.” So learn how to listen. To me those are probably some of the main pieces of advice I’d give to people in that position.

JEN: That’s actually perfect. Most of our listeners, I assume, are trying to be allies and are interested and want to be allies. But that reaction you talk about is very true. We often hear, right, this idea of “I never even think about that.” Well, you don’t, but maybe someone else did and learning how to listen and set those feelings aside, especially when we’re steeped in – my own religious beliefs I talk about how it’s in my blood. And trying to extricate that from your bloodstream is not an easy process. It’s something that takes a lot of intentional effort and just saying to your kid not-mean things and leaving them to flounder or saying, “I love you and I support you,” but refusing to join them. We talk about the idea of culture, visiting your kid in their culture and learning about their culture and participating in their culture, recognizing that you’re a guest in that space is super important.

MIKE: Yeah.

JEN: So I asked about deconstruction and I don’t want to let you go before: you have an Ally Bootcamp course that you offer that people will be able to access through the website that we link. But, sometimes as allies we think we’re pretty smart and we make mistakes. So I’m hoping you’ll touch on what you see as some of the most basic mistakes that some of us are probably making?

MIKE: I said the phrase “Straight Brain” earlier. I’ve never said that out loud before. But I do think that’s a really helpful way to term this. In your Straight Brain you can’t help but listen to a queer person describe a scenario or an experience or whatever, and then filter it through a straight person’s experience with a straight person’s privilege and then logically solve the queer person’s problem with your straight privilege that the queer person actually doesn’t have. It’s not on the table for them. So one of the things that I’ve noticed – I’ll use this as an example just to make this nice and spicy. This is really an explicit, pointed thing that might actually rile some of you. I saw a queer content creator make a post that said, “If you have a transphobic or homophobic partner, you are not an ally.” And the dialogue, the comment section of that thread blew my mind because I read that and I’m like, “Oh, that stings, dude. That’s not a very gracious way to say that.” But when I filtered through my own offense at the idea, I agree, actually I think this is true. I agree, this sentiment, I share it, I believe this. So I shared it on my story and I got some shocking responses from allies in my DMs. But then I looked at his comment section and I was shocked at the comments. And I was like, “Oh my God. There are people out here running around claiming to be allies and this is what they’re saying. This is blowing my mind.” So he had straight people with homophobic and transphobic partners getting in the comments section, getting mad at him. “How dare you say this. What are we supposed to do?” Which is a really common practice, I’m noticing. Allies will put the cognitive and emotional labor on the queer person when what they’re expressing makes them uncomfortable, now the queer person needs to tell them how to fix it. And I would like to take this moment and say, “Dear Ally, that is not the queer person’s job.” It’s not their job to fix your homophobic life, your homophobic circumstances or environments that you find yourself in. It’s not their job. It’s not their job to fix it. It’s not their job to convince you that it needs to change or that it’s a problem. It’s not their job. We can express ourselves and let you know how we feel and how we’re experiencing things. You can decide to understand what we’re saying and believe us or to do the other thing, that these people were doing in the comment section. And I would say that’s a huge red flag that I see repeatedly in the allyship space, people getting upset at how queer people are expressing their discomfort or their pain and then putting the demand on the queer person to fix their discomfort. And I would like to just say, it is not the queer person’s job to deal with your uncomfortable feelings. That is your job. You fix it. You figure out what it needs to look like. Is it the queer person’s job to tell you that you should get a divorce or exonerate your homophobic or transphobic journey and justify it in your life? It is not their job. And yet, for some reason, allies seem totally entitled to be willing to just throw that back in their face and be like, “You can’t be right because you’re giving me this feeling. Fix this feeling before I believe you.” And I’m here to say, that is incredibly inappropriate. As an example, so there’s like a lot of that. There’s a straight brain filtering queer people’s expressions and where the discomfort shows up, they retaliate with defensiveness and demand from the oppressed party to do the work. Not okay. As an example, does that answer the question?

JEN: Yeah. That’s a perfect example. And I do think some people will feel a little prickly about it and I think that’s super good practice, right? If we’re trying to learn how to ally, every time we feel that prickly uncomfortable feeling, we get to stop and lean into it and learn from it instead of pushing back. So I think that’s actually a really good opportunity for people. Because, like you said, no queer person is out there going, “You must get divorced right now.” These aren’t simple questions. But if you’re in a relationship with someone who’s homophobic and you have a queer kid, maybe that’s something to think about and examine and talk to a therapist about and maybe you need to revisit and work through some of those things. So it’s a great example. And we’ve actually had a couple episodes on that very topic. And I like the idea of discomfort to help us improve. 

Thank you so much for coming and sharing your story. You talked to us about not only your story which is really compelling, but also allyship a little bit, and deconstruction. Really, we should’ve had three full episodes but instead we squished it into one little hour. I just want to tell you how much we appreciate you coming and helping us.

MIKE: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for holding this space.

JEN: Thanks for joining us here In the Den. While we have you, we want to let you know about the inaugural LUV Conference coming up this October 18th and 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference is all about learning and connecting and creating a more supportive environment for LGBTQ+ individuals and their families. Get more information at www.luvwithoutlimits.org . That’s L-U-V- without limits.org. Or find the link in the show notes under the links from the show. We hope to see you there. 

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