I stand my ground. I am a gay man; I love Jesus Christ as a gay man. Jesus isn’t repelled by this; He doesn’t curse me out for approaching Him this way; He doesn’t push me away; He isn’t turned off. He allows me to rest my head on His breast the same way the Beloved Disciple would do at banquets. Jesus instituted a way that He could commune in me and I with him in a way so intensely physical that it is also sexual without being genital. His Love is more powerful than that.

My life experience and my studies have led me to understand that Jesus Christ is an ongoing ever-present reality in my life, a person and a force at the foundation of all reality. The first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John which used to be read at the end of every Mass before Vatican II said what I still believe, that everything in the universe was created in Christ, “and without him was nothing that has been made.” This has some obvious implications when I realize that in Christ I was created as homosexual.

I categorically reject all the notions and theories that have been posited by those who have tried to figure out what it is that turns people queer. I no longer believe that anything turned me queer or caused me to be queer. I simply was. And when that little boy held Jesus in his mouth on the day of his First Holy Communion, he was filled with an indescribable peace and joy, that little boy was already queer and would remain so for his entire life, because nothing—absolutely nothing—can change a person’s sexual orientation any more than one can change the color of a person’s eyes, or what we now understand as a person’s DNA. Things simply do not work that way.

For some reason known only to God, God creates some of us queer. And God loves what He has created.