“Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life.” Andrew Lias
My sex life, so let’s think about that for a while… I am your typical lesbian. What I mean is I have gone through the typical gestation period of a lesbian. When I was, about four years old I started to think that there was something different about me but I did not know what it was or how to explain it.
At that time, I was taken to church and told about the proper way of life. I was going to grow up, fall in love with a man, get married, have babies, raise them, grow old with that man, die and go to heaven. I believed at that time that this was like a checklist that if you did not achieve the things that you did not go to heaven.
Therefore, I set out to achieve them in the order that they were taught to me. When I was six I met a girl named Jennifer, she took my best friend away from me and I hated her for it. All the other little girls were falling in love with all the little boys and I dint understand it. This was the first time I remember, “faking it” for the sake of being normal. I continued to go to church and be taught mostly about the fact that kissing a boy before we got married was a sin and that we would go to hell if we did.
I was around eleven or twelve when that Jennifer came back in my life. That was when I first realized the reason I hated her so much was because I felt something for her that God had taught me was a sin. When I was thirteen I had finally learned what it was I felt, what the word for it was, and that I had to say something to someone about it. When I finally told my mother, she told me it was just a phase and that I would grow out of it. I chose to go in the closet as far as my family went but as for my friends, I slowly started to tell them.
When I was in high school I told a friend of mine that was for lack of a better word a Jesus freak, she promptly told me that I made her sick and that I was going to hell. I have had girlfriends over the years but because of my parents and my church, I stuck with men most of the time. I tried to be straight for them and going back to my first teachings, I had a limited time to achieve those milestones that I needed to get in to heaven. I needed to find a man, get married, and have babies. This ruled out being with a woman mostly because I could not have children with her.
I tried… I did everything I could to do what I was supposed to do but to no avail I am now 29 years old and I have not gotten married I have not fallen in love I have not had any babies and I wonder why. One thing that bothers me is that the strongest argument for heterosexual pairings is that we are put on this earth to procreate and yet even though I chose to ignore my feelings and be with a man I still had no children. I am sterile, so why exactly does it matter if I am with a man or a woman I am never going to have children anyways.
I am 29 and I look back on the way I thought about God my whole life and I now realize that my entire understanding of God is wrapped up it what he thinks about my sex life. If the milestones I was supposed to achieve so I could go to heaven were totally unachievable from birth then what have I been wasting the last 25 years of my life for?
– Jolene Lake
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