Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity
About this audiobook
Let’s make a deal, you and me. Let’s make promises to each other. I promise to tell you my story. The whole story. I’ll tell you about a boy in love with Jesus who, at the fateful onset of puberty, realized his sexual attractions were persistently and exclusively for other guys. I’ll tell you how I lay on my bed in the middle of the night and whispered to myself the words I’ve whispered a thousand times since: “I’m gay.” I’ll show you the world through my eyes.
I’ll tell you what it’s like to belong nowhere. To know that much of my Christian family will forever consider me unnatural, dangerous, because of something that feels as involuntary as my eye color. And to know that much of the LGBTQ community that shares my experience as a sexual minority will disagree with the way I’ve chosen to interpret the call of Jesus, believing I’ve bought into a tragic, archaic ritual of self-hatred.
But I promise my story won’t all be sadness and loneliness and struggle. I’ll tell you good things too, hopeful things, funny things, like the time I accidentally came out to my best friend during his bachelor party. I’ll tell you what it felt like the first time someone looked me in the eyes and said, “You are not a mistake.” I’ll tell you that joy and sorrow are not opposites, that my life has never been more beautiful than when it was most brokenhearted.
If you’ll listen, I promise I’ll tell you everything, and you can decide for yourself what you want to believe about me.
Ratings and reviews
- Flag inappropriate
- Show review history
About the author
Gregory Coles is an author, playwright, and songwriter. He spent fifteen years growing up in the Muslim neighborhoods of Bandung, Indonesia, in the shadow of a golden-domed mosque marked by a spire with a silver crescent moon. The son of two committed Christian teachers, Coles learned from a young age to look for God in the world around him. He learned to speak several languages and published his first short story while still in high school. At age eighteen, Coles returned to the United States to pursue his education, earning a bachelor’s degree in communication with emphasis in English literature—and graduating at the top of his class. Today he is a doctoral student and part-time English instructor at Penn State University.
Wesley Hill (PhD, Durham University, UK) is assistant professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (Zondervan, 2010), Paul and the Trinity?: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters? (Eerdmans, 2015), and Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian (Brazos, 2015). He is on the editorial board for Christianity Today and writes regularly for that magazine as well as for Books & Culture, First Things, and other publications.
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
