Blue Babies Pink

"In the American South, homosexuality is often viewed as a spiritual issue. But for me, it's always just been a physiological one—like sneezing or sweating or laughing."

The story begins on a rainy night in Alabama as a group of Baptists march through the night with rams' horns in hands, praying for the miracle of a lifetime.

"Being a preacher’s kid in a small town is a low form of southern royalty, and I was aware of this at an early age. As a kid I could basically wander the halls of our big old church at will, anytime, without interference. No one questioned a Trapp boy—not the organ player, or my Sunday School teachers, or the janitor...especially not the janitor."

"I was small and gangly—like a little spider monkey amongst gorillas—so I couldn't do much damage. But I knew one surefire way to get the big guys' attention: pinching. I'd hang on the fringes and then swoop in like a tiny crab from hell..."

A dark movie theater and a first kiss...

"For me church had always just been a very ho-hum thing. Pastor's kids can get jaded to it all because we're around church stuff so much. It's just another part of your life like school or sports or video games. That's how Christianity was to me. If Christianity was a football game, I'd just casually glance at it on the TV on Sunday afternoons. But I certainly wasn't on the field..."

Brett has a bizarre spiritual encounter on the floor of a church in Pensacola, Florida.

Brett is crushed by the worst news of his life...

"A few years earlier, in junior high, I first noticed that I looked at the boys more. It was very subtle and innocent. It was like I envied them...I wanted them to like me. It didn't feel like a sexual attraction back then, but they definitely caught my eye. It never crossed my mind that this could be ho-mo-sex-u-a-li-ty. But I knew what the "h" word was by then because the Christian culture had already schooled me in it. I knew allll about it..."

"Part of me wonders if I was running back then, running from the very faint idea that just maybe this badness was inside of me, like a crocodile—waiting—nestled deep in cold mud at the bottom of a lake. Maybe sports was my attempt at misdirection—a front, a mask, a smokescreen. I don't know, really. I know I genuinely liked sports, and they were fun for me. I always felt very manly in high school, at least in the Southern traditional sense of the word. I didn't mind sweating or getting dirty. I've always liked being a man..."

"One of the lesser known burdens of being gay is that you live a lot of your life in your head. At a young age, you start having little conversations with yourself. And you keep having them—over and over and over again. And the conversations evolve . . . they intensify. They're all about how you got this way, and what went wrong, and what if so-and-so finds out, and what if _________ or _________ or _________ happens. These conversations are led by fear, fueled by self-doubt, and they all end with the same urgent warning echoing around in my skull: "TELL NO ONE.” A beautiful world spins around us—wild with life—pulsating with the beats of festival-joy, and here we are, staring at a cracked mirror hung crooked on the concrete walls of our minds. And this constant internal chatter, this constantly bubbling brain babble is never-ending . . .It's time-consuming, stressful, exhausting. It's a unique prison. It's an on-ramp to narcissism. It's like a starving man diving into a feast and then discovering it's his own soul he's eating..."

The most emotional episode from the series....

"Boobs have always kinda freaked me out. They're very scary to me, and the thought of touching one is like the thought of touching a wet bag of earthworms..."

"Because of its near universality, heterosexuality is one of the most unifying forces in all of humanity...Imagine missing that one key piece of your humanity and what that would feel like. It's a slow terror. And once you are gripped by that fear, a glowing red-hot brand ascends from the depths of the earth, up through rock and soil, and bursts forth to sear three black words right onto your heart . . . You. Are. Broken Part of being young and gay is the feeling of being broken, of being trapped inside a fleshy machine that is inexplicably flawed. And you have no idea why."

"Maybe it was because that cat slept in my bed every night. I mean . . . my brothers aren't gay, and they DEFINITELY DIDN'T have a cat sleeping with them every night. Maybe it's because our family had small dogs. Maybe we should have had bigger, manlier dogs. idk. Maybe it was because dad never took me hunting when I was a kid . . . shooting wild animals might have made me straight."

Everyone deals with their pain somehow. Brett discloses his coping mechanism of choice...

"But those who have kept pet secrets know they are hard to keep caged. They thrash and bite and wiggle around inside of you. They aren't well behaved, and they have a life of their own. All that inner chaos had become too much for me. I couldn't keep hiding it, but I needed someone who I could trust 100 percent. I needed ironclad, lockdown, never-tell-a-soul, government-grade confidentiality. I'm talking Area 51 style secrecy. People with big secrets know there's a giant difference between someone you can 99% trust and someone you can 100% trust..."

"I think I was like a lot of people in that I WANTED it to be a choice. If gay is a choice, I thought, then it makes the Christian theology of it so much simpler. Religion is hard, because it requires faith. It's mysterious and, at times, inscrutable. Faith is the bridge that gets us through the uncertainty, but it's tough to hang with faith sometimes. Because of this, people of faith love the parts of it that are certain and agreed upon by everyone. I know I do..."

"Yet while I was praying against it, I was simultaneously denying that same-sex attraction was a thing in my life.  Back then, I denied that same-sex attraction was an intrinsic part of me. If anything, it was a clinger, a hanger-on, an invader, a tumor, a trespasser, a most unwelcome guest. It's like the 1986 movie Aliens, where Sigourney Weaver fights off a horde of alien invaders inside her spaceship. Same-sex attraction was like one of those aliens—not part of the ship—just freeloading, wreaking havoc, and ripping people apart. So it was simply a matter of beating it back into outer space. The problem with fighting same-sex attraction is that, unlike a 12-foot tall alien, it's invisible. You know it's there. You see its effects. But you can't touch it, can't punch it, can't roast it with your flame-thrower. You feel like a shirtless old man in whitey-tighties swinging wildly in the night at a ghost he swears he's heard a thousand times. And fighting an invisible enemy is something crazy people do. Being gay can make you feel crazy sometimes."

"A lot of my friends got married in their mid-20s. And I began to notice a trend: When friends would get married, you wouldn't hear from them much anymore. This was new to me, because, before that, friends had always been portable. I could collect friends in elementary school and take them with me to middle school. I could collect a few more in middle and take them with me to high school. And then a lot of those stuck with me through college. Life before 22 was just moving from one single enclave to another. But not this time. This was different..."