[Order Jason D. Hill’s forthcoming book, Letters to God From a Former Atheist, HERE.]

In the beginning are first memories, the crucibles in which personal identity is forged, accepted, or rejected. My two earliest memories left me feeling different from other children because I never imagined other children’s memories at age six were of a man lying on top of them, forcing their mouths open with a large tongue and biting their tiny lips until they bled.

Neither did I think of a mother weeping with tears formed like perfect blocks of crystal falling from a well made-up face into a plate of steaming rice and black beans could have been a memory that other children clung to as a source of love the way I did. Only I could stop her from weeping and make the face, twisted by agony, transform into a smiling work of art.

The man who sexually molested me was a gentle person. He smiled afterwards and held me close to him. He quietly told me not to tell anyone. I believed that I had made him happy. Breaking the bond of confidentiality would destroy that happiness. The belief kept the shame and humiliation at bay.

A few months later, I put a plastic bag over my face and watched myself suffocate in front of a full-length Victorian mirror. Sobbing hysterically underneath the bag, I ripped it off and collapsed to the floor, a crumpled heap of what felt like useless trash.

I held these memories without telling anyone of them until a few months ago.

My next memories are of my father, who suffered from schizophrenia, doting on me from about the age of seven, after my parents’ divorce. He always cradled me in a most unusual way; not in any way inappropriate, but in a manner that made me feel safe and strong.

He once whispered to me that I would never be lonely in this world because our bond was like an eternal marriage of souls. He would never leave me. He would, he promised, always fill the void he knew I carried in me. He held my small hands in his large ones and looked deeply into my eyes as he said this. Then he kissed me on my cheek.

Later, I would think of this as emotional pedophilia. But I was also there for him. Twice when he confessed to me that he had tried to commit suicide by drowning himself, I made him promise that if I just loved him harder and a bit more, that he would stay with me. He agreed.

A few years later, just before I turned twelve, my father genuflected before me, took my hands, and told me he had to repudiate me and my brother. He was now married to Christ. He could no longer be a father to me, he said. I would, perhaps, never see him again. I cried every night for the next five years.

During these times and to this day my mother leaned heavily upon me for emotional support. I was her confidante. I held my own emotional pain in silence while I tended to hers and brought relief to her suffering.

The message I received from my mother was: Love me, but never leave me. I dated girls in my teenage years and even had sex with some of them; however, I cannot honestly say that I felt free to love another woman in my life. It began to feel like a betrayal of my mother when I made attempts to do so.

All my life until now, I believed that I was born a homosexual. The idea that I could have been constructed as one from pathological childhood conditions never crossed my mind. In years of psychotherapy, the thought that my molestation, parental abandonment, and being a parentified child could be responsible for my homosexuality was verboten.

So, what changed? I was raised as a religious child. Approaching the age of twenty, however, I discovered philosophy and the power of reason, which became an absolute.  I became an intransigent atheist for the next two decades. My mother, brother, maternal grandmother, and I emigrated to the United States from Jamaica when I was twenty.

I went on to achieve all the goals that I had established for myself. I earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, went on to write several books, gave lectures on my ideas all over the world, including America, and became a full professor of philosophy shortly after turning forty-five years old.

I also spent almost fourteen glorious years happily in love with a man eight years my senior with whom I intended to spend the rest of my life. But during all these achievements a void in me kept widening. I experienced episodic moments of happiness. But an insatiable emptiness filled my soul.

Around twenty years ago, I decided atheism was no longer an option. I began praying to the Lord for grace. I inched my way towards belief several times, only to fall into the abysmal pit of agnosticism and atheism. Need was not belief. I just could not will myself into believing in God.

In the end, broken and metaphysically exhausted, I cried out for grace in desperation and, shortly thereafter, I had a rapturous conversion experience. After a lifetime of rejecting God, He chose me. I renounced my gay lifestyle and since then have taken a vow of chastity. That was around two years ago.

Surrendering to God granted me freedom from the endless pursuit of love from another man. It opened a space inside of me that filled with a deeper and greater love. Gradually my physical attraction to men dissipated, much to the amusement of some friends. The thought of a relationship with another man ceased holding interest for me. Celibacy seemed like an eternal reprieve from chaos, and a life that was more aligned with the will of God.

I began to think more consciously of my sexual molestation. The details had always been seared in my memory, but I had trivialized their significance. If, simultaneously, one felt safe and protected by one’s molester, the damage is inestimable. I felt shame and embarrassment. The taste of blood lingered in my mouth for two days after.

This person, part of our household staff, took me for walks, hugged me, and often threw me up in the air and caught me before I fell in a delightful manner into his arms. Could it have been love that a lonely child was feeling?

Who was I before the world told me what I had to become? Who was I before alien forces shaped me into something antipodal to who I was originally? That is, a consecrated being stamped with the imprimatur of God’s perfection from the moment of conception in my mother’s womb.

******

Homosexuals, I now remain convinced, are made—not born. Many claim they knew they were different from their earliest memories. But the question remains: what unconscious forces and undetected phenomena forged the foundations of a sexual orientation?

I have never in my life met a gay man who hailed from a home with a strong bond with his father. I have never met a gay man who was not in some form of emotional partnership with his mother all his life. I have rarely met a gay man who was not promiscuous.

Polyamory and promiscuity constitute gay culture. Monogamy is a rarity. That most gay men act like sexual addicts is not some dirty secret in the gay world. For homosexual relationships, the meaning of “committed” or “monogamous” means something radically different than in heterosexual marriage.

In all the studies I looked at, including Pew Research Center Studies, 43 percent of all gay men in Western democracies claimed to have had more than 500 partners in their lifetime, and nearly 30 percent claimed more than 1,000. Fifty percent of all gay male marriages in the United States begin as open relationships where men continue to have sex with other men on the side.

The unconscious political and empathic motivations of progressive heterosexuals who support gay marriage stem from, I believe, a drive to legitimize, tame, and conquer the gay sexual imagination.

The truth is that the rampant promiscuity in gay male culture transcends the human desire for novelty. It is rooted in brokenness and despairing emptiness, in the loss of deep human connection to a parental figure, and to trauma. A relentless pursuit of sex betrays intractable pathologies at the heart of gay sexual orientation.

I write from a lifetime of observation and deep introspection. One must cease the rebellion in one’s heart and accept that traditional marriage and heteronormativity are the natural ordering of the universe. Heteronormativity is the concept that human beings fall into distinct and complementary sexes and genders (man and woman) with natural roles in their respective lives. It postulates that heterosexuality must be the norm, and that sexual and marital relations are only fitting between people of opposite sexes.

Gay sex as a lifelong activity even if practiced within the registers of legalized marriage has never been the norm historically and will never be the norm. It cannot be because it abolishes the regenerative principle of biological procreation.

Heteronormativity is the normative standard of an objective sexual reality because it is the only regenerative means by which mores, norms, values, principles and, therefore, a rational civilization are possible. And a civilization is the only social milieu in which any human being can matriculate as human rather than as an animal or some social monstrosity.

If civilization were left exclusively in the hands of gay men and heterosexuals were eliminated from the earth, it is not only obvious that the species would die off; what is less obvious is this: we would live in a state of moral ferality.

This is because the evolutionary basis for morality stems from an ethic of care from which the procreative impulse, centered on care for the helpless young, emerges. When one’s personal identity and rational self-interest are tied to protecting one’s young and one accepts that morality is a code of values that secures human well-being, then one’s sexual identity is in some sense undoubtedly a pre-foundational precursor to a moral identity.

This is not easy for someone who once had a deeply rooted gay identity to admit. It is, however, the truth. So long as gays believe they are born that way, then there is no incentive to form a moral covenant with themselves to explore their brokenness and repressed trauma. Theirs is a crisis of meaning with questions that demand answers – questions such as: How do I get beyond a life focused on sex? How do I procure an understanding of the trauma and the calamity of my past that fuel my current non-regenerative behavior?

The endless series of hookups in gay life—hence the ubiquitous description in gay profiles: looking to play—is arrested development. It is redolent of a child’s endless indulgence in a world of romps. This is antithetical to the achievement of sustained love gay men claim to be looking for.

These endless hookups and cruising for sex are repetitive efforts to make an empathic union with an emotionally lost parent. In the case of molestation, hookups are an attempt to neutralize the repressed pain, shame and humiliation inflicted by one’s abuser by eroticizing and internalizing the abuse. If one owns it, so goes the unconscious belief, one has minimized the evisceration of one’s dignity. But that is never the case.

******

I prescribe no foolproof solutions for those who face the void and the abyss. Each must make his way out of it. I suspect disabusing oneself of the shibboleths and mythologies that cloak one’s childhood, and mourning and grieving for the disowned self might be a place to start.

For me, surrendering to God, and praying that His will and plan for my life supersede my own temporal needs and desires, were the places to begin my journey. The renunciation of my homosexuality and living a chaste life has brought me a peace and joy I could not have imagined. I am filled with plenitude and a simplicity of being that manifests itself in pure stillness.

There is no longing, no ache for another, no desire for flesh that can only lead to a crumpled heap of brokenness with zero knowledge of which way to go. Now there is only a continuous light, equanimity, and moral freedom. They have brought me back to myself. For the first time in my life, I can say: I am free. And I have come home—at last.