Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E257: "I Was Looking for Dad": His Journey of Same-Sex Attractions and Healing w/Joe Dallas | Lila Rose Show

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E257: "I Was Looking for Dad": His Journey of Same-Sex Attractions and Healing w/Joe Dallas | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

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  I was openly gay when it was hard to be openly gay.
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  Wasn't even attracted to them. I mean they were men of all
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  shapes and sizes. How old are you?
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  13 and 14 and 15. How did these guys find you?
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  Driving down the street. But it's no coincidence the only
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  males I was ever attracted to were at least 30 and I was
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  looking for dad. But I thought I must be the only
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  Christian on the planet who has homosexual temptations.
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  The church was influenced by the contempt the world had.
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  Or the homosexual. Now I think we got the same
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  problem but at the other extreme.
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  First time in my life life, age 29, I started to feel like one
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  of the guys. He was a talented athlete, dated
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  the homecoming queen, and still wrestled with deep attractions
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  to men. Welcome back to the Lila Rose
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  show. Today I'm sitting down with Joe
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  Dallas as we discuss his journey through abuse, a tumultuous
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  relationship with his father, and confusing sexual desires.
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  We also discussed the real examples of homophobia in the
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  church as well as false teachings on sexuality and how
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  neither option is the right path.
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  As you can tell, some elements of this episode are for mature
• 1:02
  audiences only. On the Lila Rose Show, we're
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  seeking flourishing lives and relationships in this life and
• 1:08
  the next. And if you want to partner with
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  That's patreon.com/lila Rose show.
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  Joe Dallas. Well, welcome to the podcast.
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  Thank you for having me Lila, Appreciate it.
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  I've heard great things about you from some previous guests,
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  including Jean McConnell, who we had on Good Guy few months back.
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  And I know we have a lot of mutuals.
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  Beckett Cook and then Joseph Nicolosi senior who I never got
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  to meet in person, but I feel like I know him through his son
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  a little bit. Yes, that would be the late
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  Doctor Joseph Nicolosi. And I knew his son, Joe Junior,
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  when he was a boy. I haven't seen him since then.
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  I think probably you have. But yes, wow.
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  Carried on his father's work. Yes wow, thank you for coming on
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  the show. This topic we cover a lot just
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  sexuality issues and your ministry caught my eye.
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  I thought, what a what an important ministry to be
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  involved in in today's day and age.
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  Your story's really powerful, so I'm really excited to dive in
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  with you. Good, good.
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  I am too. And you're you're a fellow
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  Californian. Yes, we got that going.
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  Yes. Tell me, so the ministry today,
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  what's the name of your ministry?
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  What's its focus? And then I want to go go into
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  your story. Sure.
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  Cloud Fire Ministries in Tustin, CA Yeah, we're about equipping
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  the Christian population to respond if they've been impacted
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  by homosexuality, pornography, adultery, any of the sexual
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  variations that scripture condemns as sin.
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  A lot of believers want to overcome homosexuality.
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  We offer counseling to them. A lot of couples have been
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  impacted by adultery. They want to repair their
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  marriages. We work with them.
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  A lot of guys get hooked on porn.
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  We work with them as well. And then we work with pastors
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  too. We offer monthly zoo meetings
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  and consultations for pastors who want to address this in
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  their own congregations. One thing I feel passionate
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  about Lila is, is seeing this brought more into the church.
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  We talk about it so much as a cultural issue, but we're not
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  recognizing that within the Christian population, the body
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  of Christ, there are many people affected by this on many levels,
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  and they need ministry. They need people to address it
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  in their own congregation. So that's what we're about,
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  equipping the church to deal with these issues.
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  What's so remarkable to me is the fact that I think it's not
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  100 every four or five. I think millennials and Gen.
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  Z are identifying as LGBTQ. Plus porn is ubiquitous.
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  It's everywhere. It's lost its shock value.
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  Abortion 3000 children killed a day.
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  Many of these are people who might even identify in a survey
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  as Christian. They're not maybe not all going
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  to church every week, but you know, this is a these issues,
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  abortion, sexuality, adultery, porn everywhere in our culture.
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  And yet, for most churches on Sundays, you're not going to
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  hear this talked about. Lila, that's what's kept me busy
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  for the last 38 years. You know, when when I first
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  started counseling people who were affected by this, I served
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  the Christian population, although I'd be glad to counsel
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  anybody, Christian or non Christian.
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  But I thought, well, I'll, I'll do it part time and then I'll
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  find other work to support my family because I was married by
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  then. I've been kept full time busy
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  largely because this isn't addressed directly in the
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  churches. And candidly, this is one of my
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  sort of soapbox issues. I think that a lot of people are
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  going to church today for inspiration, but not necessarily
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  for instruction. So they're getting inspired,
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  Jesus loves me, I'm saved, I'm going to heaven.
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  But when it comes to the the, the nitty gritty of how do I
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  deal with my temptations? How do I determine what is a
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  right or a wrong feeling? How do I define life?
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  How do I define marriage? That's more in the area of
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  doctrine and instruction. And I think there's a crying
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  need to address that more directly in the church as well,
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  because otherwise, you know, if people aren't getting
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  instruction from the church, they're going to go to TikTok or
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  YouTube or Oprah or, you know, whatever.
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  And as a result, we've got a mixed bag within the Christian
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  population. I mean, people who name the name
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  of Christ and are, are truly believers, but are not informed
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  from a biblical base about these issues.
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  And so they carry with them a very worldly viewpoint on
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  critical issues, you see. Your story with regard to your
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  passion and activity in this area of morality and and
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  pastoral counseling and sexuality and all these things
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  started early on for you. Yeah, Yeah.
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  In your early childhood experiences.
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  Tell me about your childhood. You know it experience leads to
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  passion, doesn't it? Like a lot of men who wrestle
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  with their sexuality, I had developmental problems.
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  I'm not saying this is true of every man who's been homosexual,
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  but I felt very alienated from my own father.
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  As a boy. As a boy, yeah, as a young boy.
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  And I had a real craving for male affirmation, which left me
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  feeling like I'm not very likable as a boy.
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  I'm not one of the boys. I'm kind of always very awkward
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  and shy and, and even timid. And unfortunately, 8 years old,
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  I walk into a movie theater by myself.
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  I'm waiting to see a show. A very nice man, seemingly nice,
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  walks up to me, introduces himself, kind of chats me up and
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  he's interested in me. I mean, I drank that in Lila and
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  was like, wow, a male, A man seems to like me and I just
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  opened up to him completely. I'm sure it showed in my face.
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  I'm a hungry boy, you know, scary.
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  I once heard a pedophile say if you fathers don't love your
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  kids, I can spot an unloved boy a mile away.
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  This guy did. And so I thought he liked me and
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  he asked me if I needed to use the restroom.
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  He followed me inside, waited till everybody was gone, shoved
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  me into a stall. And for the next half hour, he,
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  he molested me. And you've probably heard
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  testimonials, you know, from people who've who've survived
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  that. To me, one of the, the, the
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  foundational problems, the terrible thing that happens when
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  a child is abused, whether physically abused or sexually.
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  There's the physical damage, sure, and the emotional
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  wounding, definitely, but there's the lie, a really deeply
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  ingrained lie that if this happened to me, there's
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  something fundamental about me that probably deserved it and
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  maybe this is what I'm here for. In fact, he, he kept whispering
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  that to me while it was all happening.
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  This, you're good at this, like an 8 year old kid can be good at
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  that. You know, this is this is love,
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  this is good, you know, and then of course he said, and if
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  anybody finds out, we're both going to jail.
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  You know that, don't you? He was an adult.
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  I believed him. OK, so that lodge deep.
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  I'm different. I'm defective.
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  This is how I get love. And as disgusting and yeah, you
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  know, I know. Pathetic as it sounds, by the
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  time I was 14, I would go downtown in Long Beach and just
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  stand on the street and hope some guy would pick me up.
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  Any guy just long as it was some male who would kind of be father
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  to me and and touch me and make me feel valued.
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  So that of course played into a lot of my confusion as as a
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  developing adolescent. The good news is age 16, I'm
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  dating a girl, she takes me out to Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa
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  1971. The Jesus movement, what we call
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  that now was just this this revival among young people.
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  I was born again, I received Christ.
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  It was wonderful, but I mistakenly thought if I become a
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  Christian, all my sinful desires are just going to vanish.
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  Well, they didn't. Well, I mean, I know now that's
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  the lesson. Scripture doesn't teach that
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  we'll get that type of an immediate transformation in this
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  life. But the point is, nobody did
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  what you and I are doing today. Nobody talked about this in the
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  church. And so as a result, I thought I
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  must be the only Christian on the planet who has homosexual
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  temptations. And I guess I'm harping on this,
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  Lila, because there is to this day, a very large, unaddressed
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  population within the Christian Church who silently wrestle with
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  sexually unnatural feelings that they don't want to have, but
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  they don't know what to do with. And because they stay silent,
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  you know how that plays out. What what goes on, confessed,
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  eventually lodges, and eventually gets acted on, which
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  I did by the time I was 23. I just thought, I'm sick of
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  struggling with this. I'm sick of feeling
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  misunderstood. I'm sick of denying this part of
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  myself. And by then, it was 1978, the
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  gay rights movement was taken off.
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  And so I heard that there's this option, See this, this
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  trampoline you can jump into, out of the building that if
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  you're unhappy in the church as a gay person, there's a whole
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  community that you can jump into and we will affirm you.
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  You can belong to us. We even have our own churches.
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  That's what started my life as an openly gay man and even
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  eventually as a man who identified himself as a gay
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  Christian man. So that's how it all started for
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  me. If I may, going back to the
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  beginning of feeling sort of shy, not connecting with your
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  dad as you were saying you get molested at a movie theater
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  after that, did you tell anyone no?
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  No. What?
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  What did, How did you experience or what did you do with that
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  memory, that reality of what had happened to you in the years
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  that followed? Yeah, if you've ever kept what
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  you'd call a really dreadful, ugly secret because you feel you
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  have to, man, it's the loneliest feeling in the world.
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  It's like, oh, but number one, I didn't really know what had
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  happened to me. I had no idea what that meant.
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  I mean, I didn't know what sex was.
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  I sure didn't know what sexual molestation was.
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  I knew somehow it was shameful. I knew somehow it was wrong, and
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  I knew somehow I'd be in big trouble if anybody found out.
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  So of course I didn't tell my parents.
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  I thought they'd blame me. Because he told you, you got to
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  keep this. He.
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  Told me that yeah. And again, 8 years old.
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  You believe adults? And and and when he was abusing
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  you, you were probably terrified.
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  Horrified. Horrified at at first, I will
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  admit, when he first touched me, I thought a guy likes me, he's
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  touching me. I love this.
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  And then all of a sudden it was. But wait a minute, what's that?
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  So then the real terror seeped in and I, I froze, which I think
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  most kids who go through this will tell you is I just froze.
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  Some, some will even report I kind of left my body.
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  I don't think I did that, but I, I was paralyzed.
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  In fact, I remember standing there when it was over a long
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  time after he left, just standing in the stall, you know,
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  And then I don't even know how I made my way home.
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  But the point is, the confusion and the fear, all of that kept
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  me from telling anyone. Now, I'll tell you something
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  especially weird about all this. For most of my life, I never
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  considered myself a person who had been molested.
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  It's not that I blocked that out, but somehow I didn't think
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  that applied to me. I, I told myself at some level,
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  Oh, well. When I was a kid, I I had sex
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  with men because I wanted it. And it wasn't until I was
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  pushing 30 and got into therapy myself that I realized what the
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  heck? No, that's, that's not what
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  happened. I didn't enter into consensual
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  relationships, but that absolutely set up the confusion.
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  And I believe that certainly not all men or women who are
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  homosexual have been sexually violated.
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  And I know that plenty of people who are sexually violated do not
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  become homosexual. But I also know this.
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  Anytime you tamper with a developing child's sexual
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  structure, you are going to confuse the daylights out of
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  that child. Something is going to go wrong
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  later in life. That's going to have to be
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  addressed someday and corrected someday.
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  And, and the only ultimate hope we know is to be born again.
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  It's Jesus Christ. It's to know you belong to God.
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  I'm not saying that there's no such thing as emotional healing
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  and improvement apart from that. But ultimately the sin issue,
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  not to mention the ability to forgive and to move on with a
• 13:34
  healthy sense of who you are that absolutely came from
• 13:38
  finally, a proper relationship with God through Christ.
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  You said at 16 I think you had a girlfriend.
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  Yeah, yeah. Isn't that something?
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  Were you just deeply closeted and that you were not attracted
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  to her at all and you were just like, this is what I got to do,
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  this is what I got to do? She was like a good friend.
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  How did that work? It's the weirdest thing.
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  I was attracted to her, but I was also attracted to guys.
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  In fact, by then I was in high school, I was dating, She was,
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  she was one of our homecoming princesses, beautiful girl.
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  And I was in a fraternity, Bunch of jocks, you know, I mean, I
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  was very closeted. But then on weekends I'd hang
• 14:18
  out with my high school friends and then Saturday nights I'd
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  take a bus out to West Hollywood and and hang out with adult men
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  who would Take Me Out to gay bars.
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  I looked older than I was, you know, And so I had a double life
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  going on. But I genuinely did like her and
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  I was attracted to her. But she was a Christian.
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  It wasn't ideal that a Christian was dating a non Christian, but
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  she wasn't. She was wonderful.
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  She witnessed very aggressively to me and finally I told her,
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  you know, this is where I'm at because I thought it was only
• 14:48
  fair. It was a little late in the game
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  but I told her and she said, well, you still need the Lord.
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  You told her that this is where I'm at, that you had same sex
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  attraction. Yes, I did.
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  And in 1971 that could get you killed.
• 14:58
  That could get you killed. She was wonderful about it.
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  She said, well, obviously we're not going to be boyfriend and
• 15:03
  girlfriend, but I want you to know everything I told you about
• 15:05
  Jesus is still true. I was under intense conviction,
• 15:09
  you see, And, and the big mistake I made when I was born
• 15:12
  again was I didn't honestly address problems of the soul and
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  I didn't do what the Bible tells us to do.
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  You confess your faults to one another and you pray for one
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  another that you can be healed. I mean, you got to be open about
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  this. I'm not saying you got to be
• 15:26
  like an exhibitionist and tell everybody every little struggle
• 15:29
  you got, but you've got to be able to be in godly
• 15:32
  relationships where you can say, you know, Lila, this is what I'm
• 15:35
  dealing with this week. And I'd really like your prayer
• 15:37
  and your encouragement. And if you see some blind spots
• 15:39
  in me, let me know, you know that that's what I needed.
• 15:43
  But instead I I covered it up. And so I went whole hog into
• 15:49
  what was at that time called the swinging gay lifestyle, which
• 15:53
  again, not all gay men lived that way, but I did.
• 15:57
  And a lot of promiscuity and heavy drinking and all the disco
• 16:00
  scene. After about a year of that, I
• 16:04
  thought, well, this can't be the answer.
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  I missed fellowship with the church, but I wasn't quite ready
• 16:10
  to surrender, because that's what this was really about.
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  I was 23 by then. About seven years after I'd been
• 16:16
  saved, became a. Christian So.
• 16:17
  So you became a Christian in high school?
• 16:19
  In high school. And that girl you were dating
• 16:21
  helped with this. She had a huge role to play and
• 16:24
  we remained close friend, close friends for a couple of years
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  after that. And so I, I always to this day,
• 16:30
  I bless her name, she was a very solid witness for Jesus and very
• 16:35
  steadfast and, and very clear with me.
• 16:37
  And I needed that. I needed that.
• 16:40
  But I still was very secretive. But I think one of the problems
• 16:44
  was since I was a boy, I had felt so disrespected.
• 16:48
  I'd felt like such a loser that finally in the church, I felt
• 16:53
  people love me, people value me. I mean something to people.
• 16:56
  Well, I'm not going to blow it if I tell them that I have these
• 16:59
  feelings, even though I'm not giving in to them and I wasn't.
• 17:02
  But if I tell them I even have these feelings, they're going to
• 17:04
  think I'm a freak. So keep it down, wrestle with it
• 17:09
  privately, you know, And that was a fatal mistake.
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  What? What was it in your childhood
• 17:13
  that made you feel so disrespected?
• 17:16
  What was the dynamic? Combination of what I really
• 17:18
  experienced, I'd have to say now I had a good dad in so many
• 17:21
  ways, Lila strong work ethic, a great provider in many ways a
• 17:25
  good man, but he he tended to be pretty gruff with me.
• 17:29
  I mean very insulting and you can, you can feel.
• 17:32
  I think he would shame you. Oh.
• 17:33
  Shame me constant. What's an example?
• 17:35
  About being a Sissy. Called me Josephine.
• 17:39
  Feminize me, demean me, and I I do.
• 17:42
  If you were too emotional, you would cry.
• 17:43
  Or even if I wasn't, you know, so I felt like I, I, I don't, I
• 17:48
  can't get anywhere with this guy.
• 17:49
  I mean, he just doesn't like me. Now I I know that sometimes we
• 17:54
  can misinterpret what our parents are saying.
• 17:56
  Hey, I'm a dad of two grown boys.
• 17:58
  I know that happens. But I also know he had problems
• 18:01
  of his own and he I. Think he might have been treated
• 18:03
  that way as a kid. Who knows?
• 18:04
  He lost his dad when he was young.
• 18:06
  He was a child of the depression.
• 18:07
  I mean, I don't know, but but I I only know that things really
• 18:10
  went S between him and me. That's a large part of it
• 18:13
  because. And if you've spoken with Joseph
• 18:15
  Nicolosi junior, who carries on a lot of what his father did,
• 18:18
  and I usually agree with his father, the developing boy has
• 18:25
  got to feel that he is bonded with the main man in his life to
• 18:29
  give him a strong sense of solidarity with a with a male
• 18:32
  and a masculine identity. And if he doesn't feel that
• 18:35
  acceptance from his father, he's going to go into his peer
• 18:39
  relationships with deficits. Well, if you remember,
• 18:43
  especially like elementary and junior high school, one of the
• 18:47
  most unforgivable things is to be different and to be insecure.
• 18:51
  Kids pick up on that and the little monsters really Peck at
• 18:54
  you, you know. So I felt very disrespected even
• 18:58
  when I might have been respected.
• 19:00
  I, I tended to just presume people won't like me unless they
• 19:05
  are so demonstrative about it that they've done somersaults to
• 19:08
  make sure I know that they respect me and like me.
• 19:11
  And I think that's why I carried into the church this sense of no
• 19:15
  matter what you do, don't say anything that will cause people
• 19:19
  to think you're anything less than quite a guy, you know.
• 19:22
  You are starving for affirmation.
• 19:25
  Good, good way of putting a job. I was starving for affirmation.
• 19:28
  In fact, I've had to look at a lot of my own behavior during
• 19:31
  those years I was out as a gay man.
• 19:35
  And I would have to say for me, it was a lot more about
• 19:37
  affirmation than it was about sex.
• 19:40
  If I was not sexually active, I felt unaffirmed.
• 19:43
  And if I felt unaffirmed, I felt like, well, there's the old
• 19:46
  voices again telling me I'm not good for anything and I'm not
• 19:50
  likable and so I need to go get a fix.
• 19:52
  Some man who will affirm me sexually because I thought
• 19:55
  that's all I had to offer. In fact, the the beauty of it,
• 19:59
  when God called me to repentance in 1984, I just couldn't keep
• 20:02
  pushing the truth down. The Holy Spirit's conviction was
• 20:05
  very strong, very strong. Why?
• 20:09
  The best thing that happened to me was having to start at Ground
• 20:11
  Zero and reintegrate within the church and develop relationships
• 20:15
  with men. And for the first time in my
• 20:16
  life, Lila, age 29, I started to feel like one of the guys,
• 20:22
  something that I, I guess most boys take for granted.
• 20:26
  For me, it was like a person who was raised homeless and all of a
• 20:29
  sudden, whoa, I got a roof over my head.
• 20:31
  What do you know? That's what it's like, You know,
• 20:33
  from there I could build a sense of security with my own manhood
• 20:37
  and even dare to call myself a man.
• 20:40
  Not that I wanted to get into this, you know, big macho thing,
• 20:43
  but, you know, I wanted to feel comfortable with what God made
• 20:45
  me. Then I was ready to respond to a
• 20:49
  woman. And that's around about a year
• 20:51
  later I met my wife and that kind of primed to the pump for
• 20:56
  it. I think if I hadn't worked
• 20:58
  through my issues with men, I would have never been able to
• 21:01
  take on the responsibility and the challenge of marriage to a
• 21:04
  woman, you know. There have been so many times
• 21:09
  when I've been looking for an OBGYN or a pediatrician or a
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• 23:30
  What was your relationship like, going back again with your
• 23:33
  mother? You talked about this distance
• 23:35
  emotionally with your father. Yeah.
• 23:37
  Well, God bless you. I think mom tried to
• 23:39
  overcompensate, I think. Well, I think I know because she
• 23:43
  commented to me on the fact that, you know, dad doesn't seem
• 23:46
  to really, he talks down to you a lot, doesn't he?
• 23:48
  And I don't think she helped by saying that, you know, but I
• 23:51
  think that she tried to overcompensate by saying, well,
• 23:54
  Joe, you really are wonderful. Believe me, you are.
• 23:56
  And I, I can understand why she was doing that.
• 23:59
  But that made me feel like, well, the only one who can
• 24:02
  validate me on the one hand is, is a woman from a motherly
• 24:05
  perspective. But that didn't make me feel
• 24:08
  very manly, especially as I was getting into my adolescent
• 24:11
  years. So she tended to, I think, hover
• 24:14
  over me more, worry about me more.
• 24:16
  Yeah, exactly. And that made me actually feel,
• 24:19
  although I know she didn't want that to happen, but it did make
• 24:22
  me feel like, well, I guess I am weak.
• 24:24
  My mommy has to take care of me. My daddy doesn't want to be
• 24:29
  around me, you know? So what does that mean?
• 24:31
  I relate better to women. I'm more identified with women
• 24:34
  than men. I never felt like, transsexual
• 24:37
  or like, I must be a girl. Not at all.
• 24:39
  But there was still the feeling of, well, Mom is sort of my safe
• 24:45
  place, and therefore I bond with her.
• 24:48
  Well, I think you should bond with your mother, but not
• 24:51
  identify with your mother, not if you're a boy.
• 24:53
  I was identifying more with her, with, with female softness and
• 24:58
  less with the rough and tumble, the masculinity.
• 25:00
  And that made me feel even more alienated from other guys, even
• 25:05
  though heaven knows, I tried as a boy.
• 25:07
  I mean, I did play football and baseball and, you know, in my
• 25:10
  humble opinion, I mean, I know it was pretty good at him, but
• 25:12
  that didn't matter. And this is an important point.
• 25:15
  I mean, if a kid does not feel that he's accepted and doesn't
• 25:21
  feel he's competent, that's what he's going to respond to
• 25:25
  emotionally. That particular lie he feels,
• 25:28
  not what is necessarily true. Because looking back on my
• 25:30
  childhood, I actually was athletic.
• 25:34
  I never walked away from a fight.
• 25:36
  The fights I was in, I won. You know, I mean, I wasn't like
• 25:40
  the proverbial what people, some people would call the Sissy boy
• 25:43
  or whatever. That didn't apply to me.
• 25:45
  But what Joe Nicolosi, senior taught, and I believe his son
• 25:48
  teaches as well, is the perspective we have as children
• 25:52
  is what we respond to. Even if it's not the reality, we
• 25:55
  respond to the perspective. And emotionally, I responded to
• 26:00
  the perspective. Joe Dallas is not acceptable as
• 26:03
  a male. That would play hugely into my
• 26:06
  development. Doctor Nikolosi talks about how
• 26:09
  there's almost, I don't know if the word is contempt that's
• 26:12
  used, but the familiarity with the the feminine and the over
• 26:17
  sort of connectivity with the feminism feminine, feminist
• 26:22
  feminine, excuse me, femininity makes it less later on the other
• 26:27
  that's sexually attractive. Bingo.
• 26:29
  Because that's exactly it. That's exactly it.
• 26:32
  Because when your body is going through puberty, then I mean, if
• 26:36
  if everything's happening the way it should and the way God
• 26:38
  intended it to, the boys bond well with the boys and the girls
• 26:41
  with the girls. That's why the girls frequently
• 26:44
  in in elementary school think the boys have cooties and the
• 26:47
  boys are like, oh, the girls, you know, well, we need to
• 26:49
  solidify our identity as male and female.
• 26:52
  Then when puberty kicks in, we're ready emotionally to take
• 26:55
  on the challenge of the other in the mystery of that.
• 26:58
  Now, if the other isn't a mystery, then that's going to
• 27:01
  lose a lot of the normal sexual tension that should develop.
• 27:05
  So by the time I was ready to date girls, yes, I was attracted
• 27:08
  to them to a point, but there was too much of A been there,
• 27:10
  done that feeling within me that made it less of the.
• 27:15
  I think part of what God intended was the beauty of
• 27:19
  exploring the mystery, the mystery of the other.
• 27:23
  And by the time I was dating girls, why, there was already a
• 27:27
  little too much of the other. The more mystery Lila was the
• 27:32
  male, and I think that made the male, especially the older male,
• 27:35
  more attractive. It's no coincidence the only
• 27:38
  males I was ever attracted to were at least 30 and up.
• 27:44
  I was looking for Dad. How old was the man that had
• 27:46
  abused you in that movie theater?
• 27:48
  He was probably in his 40s. I think about, I think 30s or
• 27:53
  40s. Did you, can you explain now?
• 27:57
  I know there's so much more we're going to get into here,
• 27:59
  but the psychology in your experience of abuse and how the,
• 28:05
  you know, your first sexual experience was being abused by a
• 28:08
  man and how that may have impacted you later and why?
• 28:14
  The sexual system is very delicate.
• 28:17
  God intended that because God's intention was that it be
• 28:20
  treasured and protected until you could go into the covenant
• 28:23
  of permanence marriage whereby you can celebrate and enjoy that
• 28:27
  with No Fear, with inhibition gone, knowing that the
• 28:30
  relationship is solid. It's not going to end and it's
• 28:33
  all that it's meant to be, including adult and
• 28:35
  heterosexual. To be abused is to have that
• 28:38
  part of you tampered with. So that gets LinkedIn with other
• 28:41
  things that are more childhood needs.
• 28:44
  The child needs safety, affirmation, friendship, fun.
• 28:50
  This gets introduced. It's it's like that somehow gets
• 28:53
  mixed up with all your toys. And for the child, there is not
• 28:58
  the realization of how inappropriate that is, because
• 29:02
  what does the kid know? The kid will feel something is
• 29:05
  weird about all this. But if I feel weird about it,
• 29:08
  the problem must be me. So I thought what happened
• 29:12
  between him and me was an indicator of the way I'm
• 29:16
  supposed to connect with people. Your own organization.
• 29:19
  Exactly that was. My system was OK.
• 29:22
  What do I have to offer? I play the piano.
• 29:26
  I'm pretty good at blocking in football, I can throw a ball.
• 29:30
  I'm a reasonably nice guy and I, I didn't know the word sex.
• 29:35
  I do this thing with men that's all part of the same.
• 29:40
  It's, that's the repertoire. And I thought, OK, well, that's
• 29:45
  that's who I am. That's how I relate.
• 29:49
  Now here's the kicker. If that's how you relate, if you
• 29:52
  realize that as a boy, there's something else you realize
• 29:54
  pretty early, Lila. And I think if you talk with
• 29:56
  most anybody who's dealt with homosexuality, they'll use this
• 29:59
  word different. You can say, well, when did you
• 30:02
  first start feeling you were gay or lesbian or trans?
• 30:05
  Usually people will say, I'm not quite sure, but I'll tell you
• 30:08
  this. I felt different from early in
• 30:11
  life because I realized this thing I do with men, this thing
• 30:14
  that was done to me, this is not what other boys experience.
• 30:19
  This is not what other boys feel.
• 30:21
  I'm different now. What does that do?
• 30:24
  That adds layers of secrecy to that part of your life.
• 30:29
  So by the time other boys are celebrating, I'm turned on to
• 30:32
  girl, She's going steady with me.
• 30:34
  We're going to the Sawkop together, whatever you're like.
• 30:38
  Not me, man. Because that part of me is
• 30:41
  shameful and defective and different.
• 30:45
  And when you have that conviction that you're very,
• 30:47
  very different, you're going to be more loath to connect.
• 30:51
  You're going to feel at a core, at a core level, you're going to
• 30:55
  feel you don't have as much to offer as others do.
• 30:58
  So there's not only the sexual confusion, the system, it's,
• 31:02
  it's almost like in an involuntary way, Lila, the wires
• 31:06
  get crossed. It's like if your car's not
• 31:08
  working and you hit the button for the window to go down, the
• 31:11
  windshield wiper comes on instead.
• 31:13
  Wrong response, wires got crossed.
• 31:16
  That's what happens here is all of a sudden through no choice of
• 31:20
  my own, Wow, I look at grown men and I feel this sexual arousal
• 31:25
  now. It's not just a longing, and I
• 31:27
  think that's what what I would call sexualization, which is not
• 31:32
  my own term that's been around for more than a century.
• 31:34
  When a normal emotional need takes on a sexual component, OK,
• 31:40
  like the young girls say, who's been totally abused or rejected
• 31:43
  by her father, She's going to look for dad.
• 31:45
  Don't be surprised if she's promiscuous.
• 31:48
  That's a sexualized need for a father's love.
• 31:51
  Well, that's what I had, basically.
• 31:53
  An emotional need that crossed wires with my sexual responses.
• 31:57
  Homosexuality. That's how it all started.
• 32:01
  There is. A big push in our culture today,
• 32:04
  Joe, to take those kids that feel different for all the
• 32:07
  different reasons, right? Is it nature?
• 32:10
  Is it nurture? Maybe they weren't abused, maybe
• 32:12
  they were. I mean that everybody's story is
• 32:14
  going to be different. There's certainly patterns to
• 32:15
  the stories, but to say, well, we don't want you to feel so
• 32:20
  alone and ashamed and different. We want you to embrace your
• 32:24
  identity as gay by trans, whatever it is, that's your
• 32:30
  identity and be open. Get out of that closet.
• 32:34
  You are the you are as good as anyone else.
• 32:36
  Of course you're you're another human being.
• 32:38
  This is your orientation. You should be respected for it.
• 32:41
  In fact, there's a club to celebrate it on campus, right?
• 32:44
  You got it. And now these kids are not going
• 32:46
  to feel ashamed and alone anymore restricted.
• 32:49
  Now they can be free for to be who they're meant to be and
• 32:53
  where. Has that gotten us?
• 32:56
  How has that helped the kids? Well, they would argue it is
• 32:59
  helping. They they they do because
• 33:01
  there's a temporal relief I. Agree with that.
• 33:03
  And I will tell you this, when I came out of the closet, at
• 33:05
  first, Lily was like, I just lost 50 lbs.
• 33:08
  Yeah, no more secrets. This is who I am.
• 33:10
  Or you know, I get it. There's a million videos on
• 33:14
  TikTok. Right now of the freedom to have
• 33:16
  shed living, you know this in secret.
• 33:19
  Now I live it in public. I'm so happy I'm transitioning
• 33:23
  now. I'm so happy I'm gay like that
• 33:25
  is that is the the battle crier, the mantra.
• 33:28
  There's so many today, and yet what do we see?
• 33:31
  When we look at the stats, the higher rates of alcoholism,
• 33:34
  chemical dependency, depression, suicidality, even in 2025 Lila,
• 33:41
  when you'd think if coming out of the closet is going to make
• 33:44
  all these people ultimately more permanently relieved and happy
• 33:48
  and whole, why do we still see such a a discrepancy between the
• 33:53
  mental health stats regarding lesbian and gay and trans people
• 33:56
  versus those who are heterosexual?
• 33:58
  I'm not saying the whole heterosexual population is
• 34:00
  healthy and wonderful. I'm just saying that this is
• 34:03
  clearly not solving the problem, but it is offering a temporal
• 34:06
  relief, which is why I think this is where the church has got
• 34:09
  to get more prophetic. You know, it's like wisdom
• 34:12
  crying in the streets in Proverbs saying, you know what,
• 34:16
  this is madness. There is a better way.
• 34:18
  Now, what should we offer if not compassion to kids who are
• 34:22
  confused? Lila, I think we should be
• 34:24
  saying to them, hey, you know what?
• 34:25
  God loves you. We love you.
• 34:28
  You are a valuable, wonderful created being.
• 34:33
  And the one who created you has intentions.
• 34:36
  Help us to help you understand what those intentions are and
• 34:40
  how to walk in them. Because in this life, and this
• 34:43
  is where I think we need to talk a little more about fallen
• 34:45
  nature as a result of the fall, What happened to Adam and Eve?
• 34:49
  What happened through Adam and Eve?
• 34:50
  I should say God basically said to them, well, because of this,
• 34:54
  the human experience is going to contain all kinds of things I
• 34:58
  didn't intend. So I think we can look at our
• 35:01
  appetites, for example. I mean, how many times do we
• 35:04
  want to eat what we know is not in our best interest?
• 35:07
  And yet what are we hungry for in the middle of the night?
• 35:10
  It's not steamed broccoli, is it?
• 35:11
  It's it's the drunk you know well sexually the same is true.
• 35:17
  We know it's it's spelled out in Genesis and Jesus reiterated it
• 35:21
  what God intended for the sexual marital union that a man leaves
• 35:24
  his father and mother cleaves to his wife that to become one
• 35:27
  flesh. No, you're not.
• 35:28
  He created them male and female. It should be independent,
• 35:31
  permanent, monogamous and heterosexual.
• 35:34
  That's in our own and open to life should be fruitful.
• 35:36
  Multiply. It's the only design that can
• 35:38
  bring life into the world. And by the way.
• 35:41
  This is what's interesting to me.
• 35:42
  Not only was I able to, by the grace of God through my own
• 35:46
  restoration experience, this is what a love for a woman is
• 35:50
  supposed to be. And this is what is supposed to
• 35:52
  come from this. Life is supposed to come from
• 35:54
  this. And life did come from it, which
• 35:56
  never would have come from it, Lila, if I had continued to
• 36:00
  think this is the way I'm meant to be.
• 36:02
  But properly expressed within the marital union, the union is
• 36:09
  life giving as well for the man and the woman, And then of
• 36:12
  course, the life that springs from it.
• 36:14
  And I think that this is where we say, hey, when we veer
• 36:16
  outside of that, which we started doing when I was a
• 36:22
  little kid, we started redefining marriage, sexual
• 36:26
  revolution. We.
• 36:27
  Basically said. That if mom and dad aren't happy
• 36:30
  together, it would be cruel for them to be forced to stay
• 36:33
  together. So let's create no fault
• 36:34
  divorce, then let's do away with the concept of adultery and say
• 36:38
  that there's such a thing as swinging.
• 36:39
  It may be legitimate or sex before marriage.
• 36:42
  That paved the way for the gay movement, then for the trans
• 36:45
  movement. Now we're into furries.
• 36:47
  There is a growing pro pedophile movement.
• 36:49
  I don't think there's any bottom to this, not really.
• 36:51
  Once you once you go down that hole, it's fathomless what evil
• 36:56
  we're capable of. And then we go back to the Old
• 36:58
  Testament and we see what we're we are really, we're throwing
• 37:04
  our kids to Moloch, aren't we? We are 3000 there.
• 37:07
  They go, yeah. What was your?
• 37:12
  Experience So you, you, you're actively hooking up with other
• 37:18
  men in your childhood. You're a minor, early teens.
• 37:22
  And there's and these are these are men who are taking advantage
• 37:25
  of you. I mean, this is statutory rape.
• 37:27
  This is statutory rape. You're being raped again and
• 37:30
  again. Did any of these men have an
• 37:32
  indication that you were so young?
• 37:34
  They knew. Of course they knew I was.
• 37:36
  I was 1314 years old. This is such a similar story.
• 37:39
  To Becketts Beckett cook similar thing under you kind of living a
• 37:43
  double life family didn't know and older men.
• 37:47
  So you're you're kind of being initiated again and again into
• 37:50
  the gay lifestyle. Then you have this Christian
• 37:53
  experience. You believe, you know, I want to
• 37:55
  accept Jesus. You try to be like, I'm going to
• 37:57
  be a good Christian here. You're very secretive about what
• 38:00
  you're struggling with because it's shameful to you.
• 38:02
  You want people to see you and esteem you.
• 38:04
  You did open up to the girlfriend, to her, yes.
• 38:07
  And. Is that because you were felt
• 38:09
  so? Comfortable with the feminine,
• 38:10
  she was almost like a little mother to you that, partially
• 38:13
  that and then. Partially guilt.
• 38:14
  At least I had some conscience going on to realize I think
• 38:17
  she's in love with me. Doesn't she deserve to know that
• 38:21
  there's no future in this and and I got to ask you.
• 38:24
  So you really thought there was no future because you did feel
• 38:26
  some attraction to her? I did, but I also felt.
• 38:28
  Like, yeah, but I'm also exploring the gay side of
• 38:31
  myself, and I'm having a great time because I got to tell you
• 38:33
  now, this again, it sounds so stupid in retrospect, but to a
• 38:37
  kid who had been so unvalued when I discovered backtracking
• 38:43
  just a little, I had had these seedy little encounters with men
• 38:46
  in their cars. Grubby, quick, wasn't even
• 38:49
  attracted to them. I mean, they were men of all
• 38:51
  shapes and sizes. How old are you 13?
• 38:54
  And 14. And 15 How did these guys find
• 38:56
  you driving down the street? Is that a thing?
• 39:00
  Well. I'm not sure.
• 39:02
  That it still is. But now I, I will say in the 70s
• 39:04
  hitchhiking was very common. So to pick somebody up was not
• 39:08
  that weird as as far as just picking you up to give them a
• 39:11
  ride. So it was ostensibly, oh, I need
• 39:13
  a ride, but always the guy pulling over to pick me up would
• 39:17
  would be like he'd make small talk and then reach over and
• 39:19
  start grabbing me. It was just understood.
• 39:22
  Today we have grinder. I think, yeah, that's the point.
• 39:24
  Things have changed, but but the the principle is still the same,
• 39:27
  just the quick immediate hookup. But then I was introduced
• 39:32
  through actually through an underground newspaper at the
• 39:35
  time. It was called the LA Free Press,
• 39:37
  kind of a hippie newspaper, and it had an ad for what they
• 39:40
  called Gay Sexual Freedom, where you could get the phone numbers
• 39:42
  of other gay men. I thought, fantastic, I'll do
• 39:45
  it. I signed up for it.
• 39:46
  By then I looked older. I was 16.
• 39:49
  I could pass for 1819 even. So I joined and I got phone
• 39:55
  numbers of adult men in the West Hollywood area.
• 39:58
  So by calling them, many of them actually were handsome.
• 40:02
  Some of them were even models. And so when I met them.
• 40:06
  And they would they would pick me up.
• 40:08
  They would initially think I'm an an adult and I would tell
• 40:12
  them because I had to explain I have to be home by a certain
• 40:14
  time. I'm 16 years old.
• 40:16
  They were OK with it. Some of them thought it was even
• 40:18
  kind of neat. But the point is, they would
• 40:21
  Take Me Out to bars and restaurants and wine me and dine
• 40:24
  me. And it was all very glamorous to
• 40:26
  me. Like, wow, I'm sitting in a
• 40:28
  house overlooking Sunset Strip by a swimming pool sipping
• 40:31
  champagne with a male model. Isn't this amazing?
• 40:34
  So all of that was so intoxicatingly affirming.
• 40:40
  That overrode whatever normal desires I had for Anne.
• 40:44
  And I really fully intended as soon as I was 18 to come out of
• 40:48
  the closet and say I'm gay. That's it.
• 40:50
  And why were you going to wait till 18?
• 40:52
  Because there were no. Options.
• 40:53
  I couldn't. I couldn't tell my parents that
• 40:56
  I couldn't come out as a 16 year old.
• 40:58
  Why? What would they?
• 40:59
  What do you think they would have?
• 40:59
  Done, Lila, they would. Have at least shipped me off to
• 41:03
  some private institution. And I really did not want to
• 41:07
  hurt my father and my mother anyway.
• 41:09
  I mean, my father used to brag to me that when he was a a
• 41:11
  lifeguard, he and his buddies used to enjoy going up and down
• 41:14
  the beach finding quote UN quote the queers and beating them up.
• 41:17
  So I knew it wasn't going to go over well if I told my dad I'm
• 41:20
  gay and there were no, there were no options for gay
• 41:23
  teenagers at that time. And I'm sorry that there are
• 41:26
  now. But the point is, I just felt
• 41:28
  like I can't possibly come out as a teenager at this age.
• 41:32
  The kids at school would kill me.
• 41:33
  There were no gay clubs. There was no affirmation for
• 41:35
  that. In fact, most people didn't even
• 41:37
  use the word gay back then for this.
• 41:40
  So I felt like, no, I'll have to wait till I'm an adult and then
• 41:43
  I can say I'm on my own. I'll do whatever I please.
• 41:45
  And for that reason, I only told Dan.
• 41:48
  Well, and then of course, having become a Christian, I no longer
• 41:50
  intended to do that. I thought, I'm going to live my
• 41:53
  life for Christ. But I thought, oh Lord, please,
• 41:55
  someday, just by the power of your Holy Spirit, make these
• 41:59
  feelings go away. Now I really believe that part
• 42:03
  of our sanctification is the healing of our soul, and I think
• 42:06
  that there's biblical precedent for that.
• 42:08
  David even saying the Lord's my shepherd, he restores my soul.
• 42:11
  That part of growth I denied, I only wanted to be spiritual.
• 42:15
  I read chapters of the Bible every day, prayed whole 9 yards.
• 42:19
  And in that sense, I'm where a lot of believers are today.
• 42:21
  The men I work with, they are usually men who have had a
• 42:25
  genuine Christian conversion and they are followers of Christ,
• 42:29
  but they haven't ever addressed this because they haven't even
• 42:31
  known that it was OK to say openly.
• 42:33
  These are the feelings I have. I'm not going to identify by by
• 42:37
  them or with them, but I'll admit that they are there and
• 42:40
  this is how I can deal with them.
• 42:41
  And 1st it means resistance. But then real important, I had
• 42:45
  to look at what are the legitimate needs behind the
• 42:48
  feelings. When I did that, it
• 42:50
  revolutionized me. But I was 29 by then.
• 42:53
  In those earlier years when I was a young Christian, I just
• 42:57
  prayed on everything, read the Bible and thought the Lord would
• 43:02
  come and suffered. You suffered.
• 43:05
  Well suffered alone. Suffered very silently, but I I
• 43:09
  thought suffering silently was at least safer than daring to
• 43:13
  admit I have an issue. And I'm, I'm afraid that through
• 43:17
  this day in our churches, there are women who've been violated
• 43:21
  or who've had abortions or men who have a secret drug problem
• 43:25
  or who are attracted to the same sex or who knows what.
• 43:30
  It's almost like we think in, in the Christian population, we
• 43:35
  know we're all sinners saved by grace.
• 43:37
  We know that. But if, if there are any
• 43:40
  temptations we still have as Christians, it's almost like
• 43:43
  we're saying, well, it's OK as long as the sinful temptations
• 43:47
  you have are the nice kind. You occasionally want to yell at
• 43:51
  somebody who cut you off on the freeway or something, you know?
• 43:54
  But for people with really deep, dark struggles that they're not
• 43:58
  giving into, but the temptation is there, there's still a lot of
• 44:03
  shame to admit that that that happens.
• 44:05
  And unfortunately, that's what leads a lot of people to say,
• 44:09
  OK, I'll feel better if I just jump and let the gay LGBTQ plus
• 44:16
  trampoline catch me. And there is I and I, I will
• 44:21
  attest to this first hand. I under, I get it every year
• 44:24
  October we're going to see national coming out day, people
• 44:27
  going. I'm so glad I did it.
• 44:28
  I'm sure they are, I'm sure they are.
• 44:30
  You feel a lot of freedom at 1st and you do have community and
• 44:36
  you no longer have to hide. But then with time, you have to
• 44:40
  ask yourself at least the hard questions I had to ask myself
• 44:43
  that finally brought me to full repentance in 1984.
• 44:48
  Do I or do I not have a Creator? Well, I do.
• 44:51
  OK. Did He create me with
• 44:53
  intentions? Well, of course he did.
• 44:56
  Nobody creates anything without an intention.
• 45:00
  How do I know what those attention intentions are?
• 45:03
  Well, in the natural sense, I can observe anatomy.
• 45:06
  I can observe the contrast between male and female.
• 45:08
  And I could admit that this inspired document, the Bible is
• 45:12
  stood the test of time as an authoritative document.
• 45:16
  And that testifies against what I'm doing now.
• 45:19
  What do I do now? This is where I think we have to
• 45:23
  get serious in our own faith. Lila, I had to say, OK, the
• 45:28
  cross, the whole idea of discipleship.
• 45:31
  If any man come after me, let him deny himself, take up his
• 45:34
  cross and follow me. I think we've got too much of A
• 45:38
  mentality that while I'm just a believer, that's nice.
• 45:41
  And I mean, of course, if that's where it starts, right?
• 45:44
  Without faith, it's impossible to please God.
• 45:45
  But the cross is what the disciple is.
• 45:49
  I don't just believe, I follow. And part of following means I
• 45:52
  say no to whatever is outside of God's will.
• 45:56
  OK? That must apply to this most
• 45:58
  intimate part of my life as well.
• 46:01
  And that's when I had to wrestle with the fact that, look, I'm
• 46:04
  attracted to the same sex and I can't just turn that switch off.
• 46:09
  Therefore, if that is outside God's will for me to pursue that
• 46:13
  I will, by the grace of God, follow Him and He will give me
• 46:16
  the strength to say no to those attractions.
• 46:19
  That's where it had to start. I didn't think of going
• 46:21
  straight. I didn't even think I would ever
• 46:24
  get married. My whole prayer was make me
• 46:27
  obedient, help me be celibate. Yeah, exactly which?
• 46:31
  To me was obedience like stuff, the feelings like let's.
• 46:35
  Just stop the sexual. Attraction.
• 46:37
  Tap it, clap it down, be self controlled, right?
• 46:41
  Somehow by the Holy Spirit's power, so I can reject these
• 46:44
  inclinations, right? And I.
• 46:47
  Don't think that was a bad start.
• 46:48
  I think it was a little limited, you know, even a little dreary
• 46:52
  now that I look at that. This was when you first
• 46:55
  converted. It well, both and then both
• 46:56
  even. When I repented again in 84,
• 46:58
  except the big difference was I knew OK, this time around I'm
• 47:02
  going to do it right. I'm not going to pretend I don't
• 47:04
  have these feelings. You're going to not let let
• 47:06
  other. People help you, I that was my
• 47:08
  point. Like.
• 47:09
  Exactly. I'm going to be honest about
• 47:10
  them now. One thing that I really feel was
• 47:12
  made clear to me when I repented that night, I still remember it
• 47:15
  very plainly in 1984. Crisis of truth, Joe, are you
• 47:19
  kidding yourself? Do you really believe in what
• 47:22
  you're doing? Because I was by then, I mean,
• 47:25
  Lila, I was on staff with the pro gay church.
• 47:29
  Where, where was that? It was in Long Beach and it was
• 47:31
  called the Metropolitan Community Church.
• 47:33
  Now, at that time, 1978, when I joined it, that was about the
• 47:37
  only game in town. If you wanted a gay affirming
• 47:39
  church, that's where you went. Now now there are many, but at
• 47:42
  that time that was it. And I had adopted a pro gay
• 47:46
  revisionist interpretation of the Bible that that basically
• 47:50
  was tailor made for someone like me.
• 47:51
  I want to be gay, I want to be Christian and I want no
• 47:53
  conflict. Thank you.
• 47:55
  But if you if you approach the word of God with that idea, I
• 48:01
  already know what I want it to say.
• 48:03
  Well, you can choke it hard enough to make it say what you
• 48:06
  want it to say rather than submit yourself to what it says.
• 48:09
  So I was living that out. And that's when I had to ask
• 48:12
  myself, now wait a minute, have you been kidding yourself all
• 48:14
  these years? And I had to be honest and say,
• 48:18
  yes, I have been. So now I repented.
• 48:21
  That was genuine repentance. Lord, I have sinned.
• 48:24
  I want to come back to you like a prodigal.
• 48:26
  I want to come back to my father's house.
• 48:28
  I have led other people astray by preaching this false gospel
• 48:32
  and I have been deceived myself and I've deceived myself.
• 48:36
  Help me to live obediently. I knew I had to relocate.
• 48:38
  I relocated from Long Beach to Orange County, got grounded
• 48:42
  again in a Bible believing church, found a very good
• 48:44
  Christian therapist to help me sort out a lot of my own
• 48:47
  conflicts internally, really developed healthy relationships
• 48:52
  with guys and found that Oh my gosh, I'm finally getting the
• 48:55
  real deal. I've been on junk food all my
• 48:57
  life. Now I've got a healthy diet.
• 48:59
  This is great. Only then I think, like I
• 49:02
  mentioned earlier, was I ready. When I met my wife, I still
• 49:05
  wasn't saying, Lord, give me a wife.
• 49:07
  It was just, Lord, make me obedient, thank you.
• 49:10
  But she comes along and I'm finding that, well, I do like
• 49:12
  her. So what?
• 49:13
  I'd always liked women, but it was more this time I felt not
• 49:18
  just the minor attractions I had felt before, more like the
• 49:21
  longer I knew her as a friend. We were in the same choir
• 49:25
  actually, so that's how we got to talk so much, which by the
• 49:28
  way was great because there was no pressure.
• 49:30
  I didn't have to ask her on a date, I just saw her every week.
• 49:33
  Then I realized I don't just find this to be a lovely woman,
• 49:38
  I want her. And so I finally asked her out
• 49:42
  and I told her on our second date.
• 49:44
  I said you need to know before this goes any further.
• 49:48
  I repented of homosexuality about a year and a half ago and
• 49:53
  that has been a part of my life since I was a boy.
• 49:57
  I've left it, but I'm still wrestling with the feelings,
• 50:00
  although they are diminishing, you know.
• 50:03
  But I don't want you to go any further without knowing what
• 50:06
  you're getting into. And she said, well, let's take
• 50:08
  it slow, which we did when we dated about a year and a half.
• 50:12
  I proposed and then a year and a half later we got married in
• 50:17
  August of of 87 and we've raised 2 grown sons since then.
• 50:22
  And she also helps me out now. I mean, she's got a real passion
• 50:26
  for what I do, which is wonderful because I didn't
• 50:29
  intend to do this. I did want to be a counselor,
• 50:32
  but I was training for the California marriage, family and
• 50:36
  child counseling license to do drug and alcohol rehab.
• 50:40
  And only when I realized that there was such an untapped
• 50:43
  market in this area did I switch over and say, no, I'm going to
• 50:45
  be a biblical counselor instead and operate as an ordained
• 50:49
  minister instead of a licensed counselor because I knew I
• 50:51
  couldn't do this as a licensed therapist in California.
• 50:55
  And so that's how my own work took off.
• 50:58
  And that's when I realized there are many more people in the
• 51:02
  Christian population who are affected by this than we
• 51:05
  realize. And it gives us a base, I really
• 51:08
  believe to to speak to the culture from as well in saying,
• 51:11
  you know, there is a better way. This is something I think
• 51:16
  Charlie Kirk modeled for us beautifully.
• 51:18
  He spoke evangelistically, didn't he?
• 51:21
  And he spoke prophetically and he spoke apologetically.
• 51:24
  He did all three. He he always made Jesus the
• 51:28
  reference point of it. You need to come to Christ.
• 51:30
  That's ultimately the remedy for sin is the cross.
• 51:33
  But he spoke prophetically. Hey, it's kind of crazy for a
• 51:36
  boy to try to be a girl. That won't work.
• 51:38
  And apologetically, as an apologist, he reasoned with
• 51:41
  people. And this I believe we can all do
• 51:45
  to whatever extent we have influence.
• 51:47
  And that's what what I've tried to do in my ministry as well,
• 51:50
  for obvious reasons that springing again out of so much
• 51:54
  of what I experienced, there are people today.
• 51:57
  Who would say, who would hear your story, especially those
• 52:02
  years of leaving the proactive gay lifestyle?
• 52:05
  And I'm a Christian and I'm gay and everything's OK.
• 52:07
  And then, like you had this moment of realization, like, I
• 52:09
  can't keep doing this. You said you did some therapy
• 52:12
  and then you find yourself attracted to this woman.
• 52:14
  You got married to her. Now you're, you know, doing this
• 52:16
  ministry. And they would say you are an
• 52:19
  example of the harm of conversion therapy.
• 52:23
  They would say you're, you know, you're promoting something that
• 52:26
  maybe it's kind of working for you, but it's going to make
• 52:27
  other people miserable. And they might also say, well,
• 52:30
  you're a closet. Like they would just, I mean,
• 52:32
  I'm sure they've called you that, right?
• 52:34
  And you're just married because you want to be, you know, look,
• 52:39
  normal, basically, in your church.
• 52:41
  That is bigoted. Yeah.
• 52:44
  What do you say? To that.
• 52:45
  And what has your journey been like?
• 52:47
  The jerk at me. Who wants to say, are you crazy?
• 52:51
  I was openly gay when it was hard to be openly gay, OK?
• 52:55
  I have never been the kind of guy who would conform just to
• 52:57
  make people happy. You know, when I came out of the
• 53:00
  closet, you could still get arrested just for putting your
• 53:03
  hand on the shoulder of another guy in a gay bar.
• 53:05
  OK. Yeah, that wasn't fair.
• 53:08
  It really wasn't right. But no, it was true because 1978
• 53:11
  a lot of bars were like what you call no touch bars because if a
• 53:14
  guy touched another guy, if vice was in there, they say I'm
• 53:17
  taking you in for lewd act. What were you going to do in
• 53:20
  1978? Fight it in court?
• 53:22
  And that's going to force you out of the closet, you see?
• 53:24
  So there was it was hard to be gay in those days.
• 53:27
  I'm not saying it's all easy now, but I will say this.
• 53:31
  When I was openly gay, I had to go against the tide in every
• 53:34
  possible way. The culture was against
• 53:36
  homosexuality, the church was against homosexuality.
• 53:39
  I didn't care. I'm no perfect guy by any means,
• 53:43
  but I'm enough of an individualist that I would never
• 53:46
  in a million years get married just to make my church happy or
• 53:50
  claim I was something just to make my church happy.
• 53:53
  Because I'm not that kind of guy.
• 53:55
  I'm a, I'm a bit of a rebel by nature.
• 53:58
  And I think God has used that. Actually.
• 54:00
  It's, it's come in useful in my work because you have to be kind
• 54:02
  of a lizard as far as your skin goes.
• 54:04
  If you're going to do this type of thing.
• 54:06
  What you're going to have a thick skin.
• 54:07
  Yeah. Absolutely.
• 54:10
  But I, I think when people say, oh, this is classic harm of
• 54:13
  conversion therapy, that's actually a very dishonest term.
• 54:18
  Conversion therapy used to apply to a psychoanalytic approach to
• 54:22
  homosexuality based on Freudian theory that attempted to change
• 54:26
  the sexual feelings of the client using things like porn.
• 54:30
  Even right there are times yes and.
• 54:32
  Those, I believe they're highly. Damaging.
• 54:34
  And I think Nicolosi and many others would agree.
• 54:36
  Yes. I mean, there was a time in the
• 54:38
  mental. Health industry you could be
• 54:40
  committed against your will and in some horrible cases even
• 54:44
  receive electroshock therapy or even lobotomy.
• 54:48
  Homosexual, but Lila. You know what, you could also
• 54:51
  receive all of that abuse for being depressed or being
• 54:55
  hysterical. So it's a little dishonest to
• 54:58
  say it was just anti-gay. Sentiment in the 30s forties.
• 55:02
  And 50s you had this horrible, even barbaric approach sometimes
• 55:07
  in in the psychological or psychiatric field that that
• 55:11
  applies to the to treatment today.
• 55:14
  In other words, the fact that women were mutilated or
• 55:18
  electroshocked or lobotomized for being hysterical, or men
• 55:21
  received that for being depressed in the 40s and 50s,
• 55:25
  that does not mean that you shouldn't treat hysteria or
• 55:28
  depression now. It the problem was with the way
• 55:31
  it was treated, not the fact it was treated.
• 55:34
  Yeah, I think about what happened to Rose.
• 55:35
  Kennedy Well, see, that's the point.
• 55:39
  Fine. I mean, she had, I think anxiety
• 55:41
  and these issues. She had mental health issues.
• 55:43
  And they literally the Kennedy family lobotomized their child.
• 55:48
  And, you know, the horror. Of that is it's like saying well
• 55:51
  the surgery was a success but the patient died great, you know
• 55:56
  yeah, you you she became severely mentally.
• 55:59
  Intellectually disabled, of course.
• 56:01
  And this, yeah. And.
• 56:02
  And there are other cases. I mean, some of them have been
• 56:05
  popularized, like I believe the the actress Frances Farmer was
• 56:09
  put through that and and you can kind of see the OR what, I don't
• 56:12
  know that story. She was a.
• 56:14
  Very well known film star in the 40s and she was antisocial and
• 56:21
  at times very violent and aggressive.
• 56:23
  I don't think she would ever be classified as what we would call
• 56:26
  insane, but she was institutionalized against her
• 56:29
  will and evidently eventually lobotomized and she and she came
• 56:32
  out just with a flat effect and so forth.
• 56:34
  Now the problem is, again, to say the conversion therapy does
• 56:37
  that would be just very dishonest it.
• 56:40
  Psychiatry did that decades ago, but nobody today I challenge
• 56:46
  anybody to look at the work of like Joseph Nicolosi junior at
• 56:49
  my ministry, any therapist or ministry that approaches
• 56:53
  homosexuality from a biblical perspective and find any of that
• 56:57
  kind of abuse that doesn't exist, but that doesn't keep
• 56:59
  people from using it because it's classic straw man.
• 57:03
  I believe the problem is if you hold the viewpoint, not only
• 57:06
  that there is a standard, but that there is hope for living
• 57:10
  that standard, there's going to be pushback.
• 57:13
  So when when you say to a woman in crisis pregnancy, your only
• 57:17
  option is abortion. And if you tell a woman of any
• 57:21
  other option, you're being cruel to her, what you're, you're
• 57:24
  going to get a lot of pushback. You're going to get a lot of
• 57:26
  attack. And I think the same is true of
• 57:27
  this. The issues are closely linked
• 57:30
  because they're both about life, aren't they?
• 57:32
  And what God intended, we've got remarkable.
• 57:34
  Pushback on this show from having folks like Beckett on
• 57:38
  Beckett Cook. Yeah, because they say you like,
• 57:41
  maybe it worked for Beckett, kind of, although he's probably
• 57:44
  just continually closeted, you know, whatever.
• 57:47
  But how dare you say that there are some people that will never
• 57:51
  be free of same sex, deeply seated, same sex attraction.
• 57:56
  They have to be. They they must be celibate the
• 57:58
  rest of their lives. And to suggest that there's some
• 58:00
  sort of therapy that they can undergo to alleviate their
• 58:04
  struggle is patently unfair to them.
• 58:06
  Do you agree that that's maybe true in some cases or do you
• 58:10
  think that that's well, I think the therapeutic?
• 58:12
  Approach not the therapeutic standard is the problem.
• 58:16
  If the standard is biblical. I Lila I would agree for people
• 58:20
  who are outside of Christianity and they don't have a particular
• 58:23
  worldview at odds with homosexuality.
• 58:25
  I don't believe homosexuality is ever a good thing or normal
• 58:29
  because I don't believe God intended it.
• 58:31
  However, adult women and men have the right to choose if they
• 58:35
  want to live out their sexuality in that way.
• 58:39
  I think the right understand is what you're saying.
• 58:41
  Absolutely. Just like people.
• 58:42
  Have the right to sleep together before marriage.
• 58:44
  Don't tell me that I have to say that it's.
• 58:46
  Right. And don't tell me that I can't
• 58:48
  offer help to people who have that inclination but don't want
• 58:52
  to give into it, you see. But as far as making those kinds
• 58:58
  of promises, like if you come to me for quote UN quote conversion
• 59:01
  therapy, I will, regardless of how deep seated your homosexual
• 59:05
  feelings are, I will offer you the formula by which you can be
• 59:08
  freed from them and not have them any longer.
• 59:10
  No, I don't know anybody who says that, Lila.
• 59:13
  Nobody. What I do, nobody promises for
• 59:15
  sure. I'll free you from saying what
• 59:17
  we do promise is that. I will help you assess what
• 59:21
  potential you have for heterosexual response.
• 59:24
  I will help you deal with homosexual desires when they
• 59:27
  emerge. I will help you learn how to
• 59:30
  embrace a healthier identity and not be limited by that identity.
• 59:34
  And then to whatever extent those desires remain, I will
• 59:37
  help you with the tools to equip you to deal with them the way
• 59:40
  people deal with a lot of desires they don't want to have.
• 59:43
  You see what I don't want to do? To kind of put it plainly, I
• 59:47
  don't want to put demands on God and I don't want to put limits
• 59:50
  on God. I don't want to say, OK, I
• 59:52
  promise you just demand of God that you're going to be straight
• 59:55
  if you're gay. But I also don't want to put
• 59:58
  limits on God and say you'll never be straight if you're gay
• 1:00:01
  because I think the experience of people tends to be on a
• 1:00:03
  spectrum. Like my story is not every man's
• 1:00:06
  story. I've got a dear friend by the
• 1:00:07
  way, so who's done this kind of work for 40 plus years.
• 1:00:11
  He's never married. He is not attracted to women,
• 1:00:14
  never has been. He's done everything right.
• 1:00:17
  He lives a godly life. He lives a full life.
• 1:00:19
  He's a vibrant, healthy, celibate man.
• 1:00:22
  And it, you know, he says a lot of what Paul said about being
• 1:00:25
  single. You know, he's not sitting
• 1:00:27
  around, oh, I'm so miserable because I'm not married.
• 1:00:29
  He's like, I can do things that Joe Dallas can't do because Joe
• 1:00:32
  Dallas has a family to take care of me.
• 1:00:34
  I'm free at the drop of a hat. You can send me off to Nova
• 1:00:36
  Scotia to preach and I can do it.
• 1:00:37
  Well, good for him. That doesn't mean he's not
• 1:00:40
  lonely at times, but then again, since when does marriage come
• 1:00:43
  across as the complete cure for loneliness?
• 1:00:45
  I mean, we, we, we seem to look at it as the happy ending that
• 1:00:48
  solves everything. It doesn't.
• 1:00:50
  It's work, it's wonderful. I'm glad I am married.
• 1:00:53
  I'm only saying I'm not going to say that if a man does not
• 1:00:56
  develop sexual attraction for the opposite sex, he must have
• 1:01:00
  done something wrong for reasons.
• 1:01:01
  And this to me gets into God's sovereignty.
• 1:01:03
  Now we have to allow for the fact that God will work in
• 1:01:06
  different people's lives in different way.
• 1:01:08
  The standard is the same. We are all meant to live up to,
• 1:01:12
  but how that will play out in the lives of each person, that's
• 1:01:15
  unique to the individual and we take that into account.
• 1:01:17
  So I say phooey really to somebody who says, oh, you make
• 1:01:21
  promises that don't happen. No, I don't.
• 1:01:23
  The only promises I make are the biblical ones.
• 1:01:26
  If you come to Christ, He will give you an abundant life where
• 1:01:29
  you have wayward desires. He will give you what you need
• 1:01:31
  to resist those desires. The more you walk with Him and
• 1:01:34
  trust Him, the more He will make your life into what He intends
• 1:01:36
  it to be. I say that with confidence.
• 1:01:39
  So yeah, if that makes me a conversion therapist, shoot me.
• 1:01:42
  I guess I am. What was the process like?
• 1:01:46
  For you, when you were convicted, you were living as
• 1:01:49
  the gay Christian out and about Long Beach doing that or you got
• 1:01:53
  convicted like no, this is not Christianity, I can't be acting
• 1:01:56
  out on my own same sex attractions.
• 1:02:01
  Then you said you went through this process where you started
• 1:02:03
  to develop these deep male friendships and understand the
• 1:02:06
  need that underpinned the attractions you're experiencing.
• 1:02:11
  Tell me more about that. What did that process look like?
• 1:02:14
  Yeah, even. That was involuntary to a point.
• 1:02:18
  What I invested in was voluntary.
• 1:02:20
  I invested in good Christian counseling.
• 1:02:22
  I invested in good relationships.
• 1:02:24
  I invested in daily Bible study, daily prayer, fellowship several
• 1:02:29
  times a week, connecting with people in a healthy way that I
• 1:02:32
  had to do. The involuntary part was the
• 1:02:35
  effect it started having on me. I started feeling more and more
• 1:02:39
  comfortable with men as a peer and the more I bonded with other
• 1:02:46
  males in a healthy, non sexual way, the less I felt the desire
• 1:02:50
  to sexually fantasize about men. Now I had to repent of the
• 1:02:55
  behavior. I had to make the decision I'm
• 1:02:57
  going to relocate from Long Beach because I knew if I stay
• 1:03:01
  in the middle of a burgeoning gay community there, I'm not
• 1:03:04
  going to make it because of the temptation.
• 1:03:06
  Yeah, I, I there were too many. Reference points all around me.
• 1:03:09
  My favorite bars were just down the street.
• 1:03:12
  My gay friends and I, I didn't like losing my friends.
• 1:03:15
  A lot of them were pretty wonderful people.
• 1:03:17
  But you, you're not going to keep your gay friends if you
• 1:03:19
  tell them you're pretended of homosexuality for obvious
• 1:03:22
  reasons. I I got to pause.
• 1:03:23
  Really. Quick and ask you something
• 1:03:24
  about that. So you you had gay friends?
• 1:03:27
  Oh yeah, but they were not gay lovers.
• 1:03:30
  No, I had. I, you know, this is funny.
• 1:03:32
  I, I tried having gay lovers. I wasn't very good at it.
• 1:03:35
  You know, I never was in a relationship more than six
• 1:03:39
  months. I tried, I even tried live in
• 1:03:41
  relationships, but I had lesbian friends who I was very close to
• 1:03:44
  and some gay male friends who I was not at all attracted to.
• 1:03:47
  They were just friends, you know?
• 1:03:51
  And I'm asking this because. You say later that you had these
• 1:03:54
  male friendships where you bonded with men in a non sexual
• 1:03:57
  way and that helped you shore up this identity as a man who
• 1:04:01
  didn't just see other men as sexual, right?
• 1:04:03
  But you did have some friendships with men who were
• 1:04:06
  gay that you did not feel attracted to that weren't sexual
• 1:04:09
  as well. So how how are those different
• 1:04:11
  in your experience? The main difference was they.
• 1:04:13
  My openly gay friends reinforced my conviction that satisfaction
• 1:04:17
  was to be found in a sexually intimate relationship with a
• 1:04:20
  male. And then I could have gay male
• 1:04:22
  friends as well, and you just weren't attracted so.
• 1:04:24
  Since there was no attraction there, there was.
• 1:04:26
  No threat in that way. And that was very different than
• 1:04:29
  when I started bonding with male friends in a completely non
• 1:04:32
  sexual way and had rejected the overt sin aspect of it.
• 1:04:37
  One thing I really believe, it's kind of like alcoholism.
• 1:04:40
  I don't want to be too tight on these analogies, but frequently
• 1:04:45
  when people go sober from alcohol, a lot of the emotional
• 1:04:50
  stuff that they've been medicating with the alcohol
• 1:04:54
  starts emerging, but that will not emerge until they do away
• 1:04:58
  with the medication. And that was why I think my
• 1:05:01
  friendships with men, even though some of the more
• 1:05:03
  wonderful guys who were openly gay men, the reason they didn't
• 1:05:07
  have that same impact on me as my later friendships with
• 1:05:10
  Christian men did is because I was still reinforcing the
• 1:05:14
  dynamic of getting my needs for bonding met through sex with
• 1:05:17
  men. That would have been like my
• 1:05:19
  alcohol. And until I gave that up, then I
• 1:05:23
  was I would not be vulnerable to and and cognizant of my need to
• 1:05:29
  bond in a non sexual way. So that was probably the main
• 1:05:33
  difference as as I can see it. So when I did relocate and
• 1:05:37
  started bonding well with men, I didn't do it as a means to an
• 1:05:41
  end because I had never heard these theories.
• 1:05:44
  I only knew, well I need to have fellowship.
• 1:05:47
  But I'll tell you, I still remember.
• 1:05:50
  It's funny how certain things stand out.
• 1:05:53
  When I first repented and that was, again, a very important
• 1:05:56
  start. I feel we sometimes overlook it
• 1:05:57
  is the need to repent. I didn't know anybody anymore.
• 1:06:01
  I mean, I'd walk up and down in this, you know, what night in my
• 1:06:05
  neighborhood in Costa Mesa where I moved, just looking up at the
• 1:06:08
  sky saying, God, what have I done?
• 1:06:09
  I am so alone right now, but I'm going to church.
• 1:06:12
  I'm trying. But then when I started finally
• 1:06:14
  connecting, made friends and guys asked me to join their
• 1:06:17
  softball team and the men's Bible study and the BBQ.
• 1:06:21
  I remember the first time they said, Joe, hey, you got to come
• 1:06:24
  over to our place. We're having a bunch of people
• 1:06:25
  over for BBQ. It'd be great to have you and
• 1:06:27
  all. I was high.
• 1:06:30
  I was manic. I, I, I went home that night.
• 1:06:34
  People want to be with me just for me.
• 1:06:37
  I'm not going to have sex. We're not going to get drunk.
• 1:06:40
  We're not going to March in a parade.
• 1:06:42
  It's just for me and I, I can't tell you how exhilarating that
• 1:06:46
  was. It was like I couldn't sleep
• 1:06:48
  that night after I got home. You'd think I'd been on a hot
• 1:06:50
  date or something, but it wasn't like that.
• 1:06:52
  It was I'm wanted just as a guy by other guys in a normal way.
• 1:06:57
  What do you know? This is what it feels like.
• 1:07:00
  So that was when real healing started.
• 1:07:01
  Now did they know you were same sex?
• 1:07:03
  Attractive. Yes, they did, I told them.
• 1:07:05
  Early on and and that was part of the healing too.
• 1:07:08
  Like they know, they accept that this is.
• 1:07:10
  Part of me. I'm not hiding it, but they're
• 1:07:12
  not wanting to use that part of me because they're not in it for
• 1:07:15
  sex. I'm not in for sex.
• 1:07:16
  We're Christians and we truly see each other, know each other
• 1:07:20
  all together, and remember what. I said earlier about the lie.
• 1:07:23
  This is one of the greatest things we can do for each other
• 1:07:26
  as Christian people. Challenge the lie.
• 1:07:28
  I mean, we don't, we don't do it strategically, tactically within
• 1:07:33
  the church, but it still gets done.
• 1:07:35
  If we have godly relationships, godly friendships, honesty,
• 1:07:39
  transparency, mutual love and exhortation and and
• 1:07:42
  encouragement. It challenges whatever lies we
• 1:07:45
  have brought along with us that are still in our soul.
• 1:07:47
  These guys challenged my lies about being different and
• 1:07:50
  unacceptable. In fact, they said to me, one of
• 1:07:53
  the smartest things you could say to a guy in my position.
• 1:07:55
  They said, look, Joe, we don't relate to your struggle, but we
• 1:08:00
  relate to struggle. Boom.
• 1:08:04
  Because I thought that's it. Of course, they don't know what
• 1:08:07
  it's like to be attracted to a guy.
• 1:08:09
  Well, good for them. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
• 1:08:12
  But they know what it's like to have attractions they don't want
• 1:08:15
  to have. They know what it's like when
• 1:08:17
  their eyes go where they shouldn't go, their thoughts go
• 1:08:20
  where they shouldn't go. Well, and they're basically
• 1:08:23
  fighting the same kinds of battles I'm fighting.
• 1:08:25
  Well, what do you know? I'm not a freak.
• 1:08:28
  You see, that opened up. It released so much in my own
• 1:08:32
  soul. And I've started feeling more of
• 1:08:34
  a vibrancy and a confidence and a peace as a man.
• 1:08:38
  So by the time I started to get to know Renee, my wife, I felt
• 1:08:43
  like I could have the audacity to say I would like to be a man
• 1:08:47
  with a woman. And it's not only an ideal I I
• 1:08:52
  noticed when I started dating her, I am having very specific
• 1:08:55
  erotic attractions, which I I determined I'm never going to
• 1:09:00
  marry if I don't feel like I can fulfill the sexual covenant.
• 1:09:04
  That's a very important part of marriage.
• 1:09:06
  So when I realized that was happening, I thought, OK, this
• 1:09:10
  is worth nurturing and protecting.
• 1:09:12
  Which made me all the more zealous to resist homosexual
• 1:09:16
  attractions and temptations, so that to this day now I I am not
• 1:09:21
  conscious of attractions to guys.
• 1:09:24
  But I'm never going to say that could never happen, because it
• 1:09:27
  could. Did it happen while you were
• 1:09:29
  dating? Still in like in in your early
• 1:09:30
  marriage, it would still occasionally.
• 1:09:32
  Crop up less and less. Of course in In fairness, it
• 1:09:37
  also happened less and less because there weren't many
• 1:09:39
  options for it to at least get to me from the outside.
• 1:09:43
  I didn't go to gay bars. I I cancelled with temptation.
• 1:09:47
  Yeah, I didn't. You weren't consuming material.
• 1:09:49
  Yeah. Yeah, So I didn't.
• 1:09:50
  There were very few. Things that would trigger me.
• 1:09:51
  But you, you know how the head is.
• 1:09:53
  I mean, it's a library of all kinds of garbage, so thoughts
• 1:09:55
  would still come up. But I found that two things
• 1:09:59
  simultaneously I think we need to do if we're having those
• 1:10:01
  kinds of thoughts. One is, of course, actively
• 1:10:03
  resist them in the sense of, OK, it's there.
• 1:10:06
  I have to refocus. I don't need to feed it.
• 1:10:08
  But also don't stress over them. Don't, don't let that.
• 1:10:12
  Oh, no. Yeah.
• 1:10:14
  Because all you're doing is. Feeding it when you do that.
• 1:10:17
  And I thought, OK, I read a terrific book, my brother, I
• 1:10:21
  think it was called Brother Lawrence.
• 1:10:22
  It was called The Practice of the Presence of God.
• 1:10:24
  You heard it's wonderful book. Yeah, spiritual.
• 1:10:25
  Classic, really. I mean, he's.
• 1:10:27
  He's so beautifully put it when he said and when that happens to
• 1:10:31
  me, I say, thus shall I always be, unless and until you, by
• 1:10:34
  your grace change me. I thought thank you Lord, This
• 1:10:37
  sort of beep has like just. Let the temptation come and go
• 1:10:40
  and not kind of give the devil that.
• 1:10:42
  Full total of you see what a terrible person.
• 1:10:45
  No, that's that's part of the human experience.
• 1:10:48
  I will not indulge it, but I also won't stress over it.
• 1:10:52
  It worked. Wow, so.
• 1:10:54
  Powerful. I've got to ask you, you were
• 1:10:57
  talking about this earlier and, and so much of your ministry
• 1:11:01
  takes this into account because this is the culture we're in.
• 1:11:04
  But today the decision for the kid is, you know, affirm,
• 1:11:08
  affirm, affirm, right? If you have these feelings, then
• 1:11:11
  you must be that thing, and you are being suppressed if you
• 1:11:14
  don't act on it. And Christianity is largely out
• 1:11:17
  to get you, you know, as part of that.
• 1:11:20
  But then you go back to the 70s, you go back before the sexual
• 1:11:23
  revolution really came in full gear and there were some
• 1:11:26
  miserable closeted kids. Oh, sure there were, you know,
• 1:11:28
  and you. Talked about how.
• 1:11:29
  Like they were made fun of, They were excoriated.
• 1:11:32
  Your dad even joked we're going to go beat up the queers.
• 1:11:34
  I mean, it was bad. What is the right tone to have
• 1:11:39
  as a culture? Well, there's an important
• 1:11:41
  question. Because I don't want to go back
• 1:11:43
  to what I grew up in Lila. That wasn't godly.
• 1:11:46
  That wasn't that was true homophobia and.
• 1:11:48
  That was the real thing. You.
• 1:11:50
  Know. But I think it in a way, if we
• 1:11:54
  talk about this from the perspective of the church, I
• 1:11:56
  think a problem the church often has is worldliness.
• 1:12:00
  We adopt the attitude of the world and then eventually we
• 1:12:03
  even adopt the ways of the world.
• 1:12:05
  Now, when I was a boy, the attitude of the world towards
• 1:12:09
  the homosexual was pure contempt.
• 1:12:12
  The standard was that homosexuality is wrong, but the
• 1:12:16
  rationale behind that standard wasn't good, you see.
• 1:12:19
  So it's not godly to say homosexuals are a bunch of
• 1:12:22
  freaky queers. We ought to beat them up.
• 1:12:23
  There's nothing biblical about that.
• 1:12:25
  And I think that the church was influenced by the contempt the
• 1:12:29
  world had for the homosexual. Now I think we got the same
• 1:12:33
  problem, but at the other extreme.
• 1:12:35
  The world has shifted to a gay affirming position and the
• 1:12:39
  church is slowly shifting in many cases towards a gay
• 1:12:44
  affirming position. In both cases, it's worldliness
• 1:12:47
  affecting the church. Now I I believe there's always
• 1:12:50
  the balance of grace and truth. Grace has to be offered when we
• 1:12:55
  see anybody who is in confusion, even if they don't know they are
• 1:12:59
  in confusion. We need to be showing them
• 1:13:02
  through our respect, through our willingness to listen to them,
• 1:13:06
  through our willingness to engage with them.
• 1:13:08
  I care about you and I respect you as an individual.
• 1:13:11
  My love for you is not the patronizing, Oh, I love you, you
• 1:13:14
  poor junior. It's like as a fellow human
• 1:13:16
  being, as one imperfect human being to another, I would like
• 1:13:20
  to know you, I'd like to talk to you.
• 1:13:22
  I respect you. I care about you.
• 1:13:23
  I think that is the right, but that is the right approach while
• 1:13:26
  simultaneously not caving. I guess if I were to put it in a
• 1:13:30
  more specific formula. Let's not be coy and let's not
• 1:13:34
  be jerks. We don't have to be either one.
• 1:13:36
  I'm I'm discouraged, Lila by how many Christians today are afraid
• 1:13:41
  to simply say this is where I stand.
• 1:13:42
  I I saw your show with it was Kerry.
• 1:13:47
  Berjean. Excuse me?
• 1:13:48
  Yeah. Now, she modeled that very well.
• 1:13:50
  I still remember when she said what she said that was about as
• 1:13:53
  threatening as a marshmallow because all she said was, look,
• 1:13:57
  I'm glad we live in America, but this is how I was raised.
• 1:14:00
  This is what I believe. But that's what we want to
• 1:14:02
  basically be saying is I believe that there is a better way.
• 1:14:06
  I believe we have a creator. And what I have found is that
• 1:14:09
  His intentions are in our own best interest when we live them
• 1:14:12
  out. And this is what he has spelled
• 1:14:14
  out. You see, that's how we're not
• 1:14:16
  being coy. We don't lead people to truth by
• 1:14:19
  withholding truth, but we don't be jerks either.
• 1:14:23
  We cannot come to people from a morally superior attitude.
• 1:14:26
  Well, because I think the the. You mentioned it earlier, sexual
• 1:14:30
  sin is sexual sin. There's degrees of disorder,
• 1:14:33
  yes, but it's all sin and it's disordered in the end to
• 1:14:37
  obviously have same sex attraction.
• 1:14:39
  That's a that is a disordered attraction, but it's just as
• 1:14:42
  morally wrong. It's equally morally wrong to
• 1:14:45
  fornicate heterosexual fornication as it is to do gay
• 1:14:48
  fornication. 1 is more naturally disorder, but that doesn't add
• 1:14:52
  more culpability to the soul. And I think that's not, and you
• 1:14:55
  could even say it may even remove culpability from the soul
• 1:14:58
  if that person is acting out without full will because of
• 1:15:01
  their own childhood traumas or other other issues.
• 1:15:04
  So that's another conversation. But, and I, I, I think if the
• 1:15:07
  Christian community really treated fornication as seriously
• 1:15:14
  as we, we should treat same sex formification, you know, any or
• 1:15:18
  masturbation, even sex with. Yourself.
• 1:15:21
  Which is against God's design as well.
• 1:15:23
  And and that's disordered by the way.
• 1:15:25
  That is, that is very disordered you notice in Scripture.
• 1:15:28
  Whenever homosexuality is mentioned, Leviticus 18,
• 1:15:31
  Leviticus 20, Romans one, First Corinthians 6, First Timothy
• 1:15:34
  one, it's listed alongside many other sins, sexual and non
• 1:15:39
  sexual. We're the ones who yanked
• 1:15:41
  homosexuality out and said it's it's somehow at a higher level
• 1:15:46
  than the other sexual sins. And I don't think that's a
• 1:15:48
  biblical approach to it. So I think that we can say,
• 1:15:51
  yeah, we've all fallen short in some way and that you're exactly
• 1:15:55
  right. I mean, if we look at the sin
• 1:15:57
  nature, sometimes it expresses itself in ways that I call
• 1:16:00
  universal. We all know what it's like to
• 1:16:02
  want to punch somebody out. And then there are some that are
• 1:16:05
  unique to a minority. Homosexuality would be one of
• 1:16:08
  them, but all of them come from the same root.
• 1:16:11
  You know, I think a couple of things are happening culturally,
• 1:16:14
  Lila. I mean, on the one hand, we've
• 1:16:15
  got the fact that, hey, if you adopt that label, you have built
• 1:16:19
  in community deep sympathy, affirmation.
• 1:16:22
  Aren't you brave? And by the way, aren't you quote
• 1:16:24
  UN quote evolved? You could admit you can go both
• 1:16:27
  ways. Wow, that's a very swinging kind
• 1:16:29
  of a mentality. So there's that, but there's
• 1:16:32
  also A cause factor. You know, when I first as a kid
• 1:16:35
  studied the Holocaust, I was intrigued by the European
• 1:16:39
  underground, these brave people that sheltered Jews in their
• 1:16:42
  homes, you know, and, and stood against the Nazis and risked
• 1:16:45
  their own lives. And I thought, how cool, how
• 1:16:47
  wonderful to be part of something noble.
• 1:16:50
  Now, I think a lot of kids are adopting this as a cause,
• 1:16:53
  whether even if they don't identify as Garrett trans
• 1:16:57
  because people have, I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
• 1:16:59
  In fact, I, I kind of think it's a good thing.
• 1:17:00
  I think people have a need to be a part of something meaningful
• 1:17:04
  good. But we're darn lazy today.
• 1:17:08
  We don't examine things for ourselves.
• 1:17:12
  So when we hear there's a cause and somebody says here's the new
• 1:17:14
  cause, fight the church, fight the homophobes.
• 1:17:16
  Trans is good and we need to protect trans kids.
• 1:17:19
  People without first examining. Are those claims legitimate?
• 1:17:23
  Is this a legitimate 'cause they're just like a good 'cause
• 1:17:26
  I'm in And I think they start mouthing what people say, they
• 1:17:31
  start speaking through the echo chamber.
• 1:17:33
  And I think there's something I got to tell you when I was a gay
• 1:17:37
  activist, it was a good high because I felt morally superior.
• 1:17:42
  I felt like I'm enlightened and you're not and I, I'm edgy and
• 1:17:48
  you're not and I have a noble cause and you're on my way.
• 1:17:51
  And you know, it's, I think the, the sin of the Pharisee, I have
• 1:17:56
  an enlightenment that you don't have.
• 1:17:58
  I have a 'cause that you don't have.
• 1:18:01
  That's a real high. And I think that fuels a lot of
• 1:18:06
  the identity politics we're seeing in its most evil
• 1:18:10
  manifestation. We know it leads to violence.
• 1:18:13
  I I see it too. On both sides is the thing.
• 1:18:17
  It's like before, but for the grace of God, there go I so we
• 1:18:21
  can all fall into the spirit of the Pharisee, everyone,
• 1:18:24
  regardless of your 'cause even if your cause is righteous, and
• 1:18:27
  that can be the most dangerous, is the person with the righteous
• 1:18:29
  cause, with the spirit of the Pharisee, because that's where
• 1:18:32
  Jesus says. I didn't even know.
• 1:18:33
  You when I started my ministry. And in fact, I was just telling
• 1:18:37
  my wife this a few days ago. People will often say, oh,
• 1:18:40
  you've done this for all these years.
• 1:18:41
  I'll bet you've gotten all kinds of death threats and terrible
• 1:18:44
  hateful things that people have said to you all that it's all
• 1:18:46
  bounced off and it's never hit me where I live.
• 1:18:49
  But I'll tell you what's knocked me for a loop is people within
• 1:18:52
  the church. I can't tell you how many times
• 1:18:54
  in my early days of ministry especially, people were saying,
• 1:18:57
  oh, that's ridiculous. If you would just tell them to
• 1:18:59
  repent and get their act together, you know, there's
• 1:19:01
  something wrong with you. And oh, meaning high, high, high
• 1:19:04
  and. Mighty rollers saying those gay
• 1:19:06
  people, they just need to like get in line and we don't want
• 1:19:10
  them in our. Church and we don't don't bring
• 1:19:11
  that here and I remember I still remember during my first what
• 1:19:15
  10-15 years in ministry one of the most well known figures in
• 1:19:21
  ministry publicly said the Lord has shown me that by such and
• 1:19:25
  such a year the entire homosexual population is going
• 1:19:27
  to be burned up with fire and the whole there's a massive
• 1:19:32
  stadium full of people applauded.
• 1:19:35
  Can you imagine? Did that hurt?
• 1:19:37
  When you heard? That oh, I thought, are you
• 1:19:38
  crazy? What, you're going to preach the
• 1:19:42
  gospel to people who just heard that?
• 1:19:45
  Thousands of Christians are glad to hear that they're going to
• 1:19:47
  die? Who's going to believe that?
• 1:19:49
  I even, you know, it's like that slogan.
• 1:19:53
  There's enough. There's no love like Christian
• 1:19:54
  hate. Oh yeah?
• 1:19:55
  Well, I mean the AIDS. Epidemic that really showed it
• 1:19:57
  to me Lila I was in my early 30s when that really was
• 1:20:02
  skyrocketing. My ministry was just starting
• 1:20:04
  and in so many churches I frequently heard otherwise very
• 1:20:11
  good pastors say we don't want people with AIDS coming to our
• 1:20:14
  church. This is the judgement of God.
• 1:20:17
  It's on them. They're reaping what they've
• 1:20:19
  sown and where that left a lot of gay people with, and I saw
• 1:20:24
  this first hand, was the conviction that well.
• 1:20:27
  I will reject God because obviously he's already rejected
• 1:20:30
  me and they went into eternity with that belief.
• 1:20:34
  So this isn't, you're right. I mean, the error on both sides,
• 1:20:39
  It is a more awful thing if it is.
• 1:20:42
  If it comes from Christians, there's a greater judgement for
• 1:20:45
  that. I'm sure there is.
• 1:20:47
  Joe, tell me. About your ministry, Thank you.
• 1:20:49
  I I. I love talking about my
• 1:20:52
  ministry, but I think one of the reasons I love it if you failed
• 1:20:57
  massively like I have, I failed massively when I backslid.
• 1:21:01
  I don't really beat myself up over the insane stuff I did as a
• 1:21:06
  kid. It was wrong, but I'm a little
• 1:21:08
  more gentle than myself over that.
• 1:21:09
  But as a Christian, I deliberately rebelled against
• 1:21:12
  God. I knew better and I said Nope.
• 1:21:14
  I'm tired of God's way. I go my way.
• 1:21:17
  Well, the fact that after I repented, I felt so alone in my
• 1:21:23
  process, I thought, Lord, please will you give me one day at
• 1:21:26
  least one man who's going through this so that I can be to
• 1:21:29
  him an ally and a mentor that I wish I had right now.
• 1:21:34
  I've been able to do that with 20 plus men per week since 1987.
• 1:21:38
  So to me, Lila, how many men total have you?
• 1:21:40
  Accompanied like that. How many is that if I do?
• 1:21:44
  The math we're in the. Thousands.
• 1:21:45
  That's the thousands of men these are.
• 1:21:47
  Men who are we're either living the gay lifestyle or they
• 1:21:51
  identify as gay, or they have suppressed gay attractions.
• 1:21:54
  And you are doing biblical counseling.
• 1:21:57
  With that biblical counseling. Here's what happens.
• 1:21:59
  Most of them come from within the church.
• 1:22:01
  A lot of people have said I have an outreach to the gay
• 1:22:03
  community. That's not quite true.
• 1:22:04
  That would be a good thing, but I just don't Mine is I mentor
• 1:22:08
  Christians. I it's disciple in really is is
• 1:22:11
  what it is because they're saying, look, I know this is not
• 1:22:14
  the way God needs me to live so I won't.
• 1:22:16
  But Joe, what do I do now? And so I get to work with them,
• 1:22:20
  which to me is like, it's, it's the world.
• 1:22:22
  Because it's like, Lila, I get to say, hey, thank you, Lord.
• 1:22:26
  I at least get to do something about that massive failure on my
• 1:22:30
  own part that I'll never fully forgive myself for.
• 1:22:32
  And yeah, I'm not beating myself up in that sense.
• 1:22:35
  But there's always a pain there. And I think even Paul, you know,
• 1:22:38
  towards the end of his life, he still would occasionally say,
• 1:22:41
  Yep, I persecuted the church without measure.
• 1:22:43
  I don't think he ever felt great about that.
• 1:22:46
  But here's the deal. If you can do something
• 1:22:48
  redemptive about something that's a source of pain to you,
• 1:22:50
  awesome. That's what I do.
• 1:22:52
  But also, more than that, we also offer education.
• 1:22:56
  I hear from a lot of parents who are like, OK, my son just told
• 1:22:59
  me he's trans. He's 16 years old.
• 1:23:03
  He wants to identify as a girl. He wants to get breast implants,
• 1:23:07
  and he's telling me he'll kill himself if I don't.
• 1:23:09
  What do I do? I love to walk with parents
• 1:23:11
  through that. What do you tell them?
• 1:23:13
  Well, I, I tell them. First of all, you cannot be held
• 1:23:15
  hostage to threats, but you must show respect for the pain your
• 1:23:19
  son is in. So you tell your son basically
• 1:23:22
  three things. I cannot tell you what to think.
• 1:23:24
  I will not try to do that. I'm not going to try to tell you
• 1:23:27
  what you may or may not think, and I am not going to tell you
• 1:23:30
  what you may or may not feel because your feelings are your
• 1:23:32
  own. I will because I'm in a position
• 1:23:35
  that you're not in. I will tell you what you may or
• 1:23:38
  may not do in expressing this If when you become an adult, you
• 1:23:41
  decide to live out a female identity, you are free to do
• 1:23:45
  that. Of course you are.
• 1:23:47
  But I do not believe that you are fully equipped to make such
• 1:23:50
  a radical decision. Kid, you can't even smoke, you
• 1:23:54
  can't drink alcohol, you can't get a tattoo, you can't vote and
• 1:23:58
  you can't get married and you can't go into the army.
• 1:24:01
  You're going to tell me that if you can't even make those life
• 1:24:04
  decisions, you are. You have the wherewithal to
• 1:24:08
  decide to make permanent changes.
• 1:24:10
  I want you to talk to me. I love you.
• 1:24:13
  I want to understand better how long you felt this way.
• 1:24:16
  I want to understand what your expectations have been of me.
• 1:24:18
  I want to understand your pain. But I will have to, with love,
• 1:24:22
  protect you as I always have. Even if it means from your own
• 1:24:26
  decisions. Because I also would have made
• 1:24:28
  stupid decisions when I was 16 and I was not allowed to make
• 1:24:32
  them. I would have married the wrong
• 1:24:33
  person. I would have pursued the wrong
• 1:24:35
  life. You're going to have to trust me
• 1:24:37
  on this one. But I do want you to keep
• 1:24:39
  talking to me. I hope we can have dialogue
• 1:24:41
  because here's my ultimate hope for you.
• 1:24:43
  Before you make a decision like that as an adult, I want you to
• 1:24:47
  know how wonderful you are, as you are.
• 1:24:48
  You are a boy, and that's a good thing.
• 1:24:52
  God foreordained that, and you never will be able to change
• 1:24:57
  what cannot be changed. Your DNA will always say what
• 1:25:00
  you are. I hope you can understand that,
• 1:25:03
  you know, so that's I I mean, the point is a lot of parents
• 1:25:06
  are wrestling with that. And that's the kind of thing
• 1:25:08
  that Ioffer them. Then we also offer services to
• 1:25:11
  pastors. I do a monthly free Zoom
• 1:25:13
  meeting. I've got about 580 pastors from
• 1:25:16
  around the world to join me. And what we do is it's called
• 1:25:19
  the challenge and we talk about different ministry issues that
• 1:25:21
  come up for pastors. How do we address them?
• 1:25:24
  Like our topic a few weeks ago was policies in the local
• 1:25:28
  church. What is your policy going to be
• 1:25:31
  when a man comes in and says I identify as a woman, may I use
• 1:25:34
  the ladies room? Or when a gay couple comes in
• 1:25:37
  and says may may we become members of the church?
• 1:25:41
  Or in a lesbian woman who has a partner says I believe in Jesus,
• 1:25:44
  can I be baptized? How do we clarify what our
• 1:25:47
  policies will be and what is the biblical rationale behind each
• 1:25:51
  of them? Because we weren't ready for
• 1:25:52
  this. We, I don't think most churches
• 1:25:54
  ever thought there would come a day when they would have to
• 1:25:56
  spell it out. Nowadays, it's not enough for a
• 1:25:59
  church to say in their statement of faith, we believe that
• 1:26:02
  marriage is sacred. What's marriage?
• 1:26:05
  It's the definition of it in our culture is morphine as we speak.
• 1:26:10
  So we have to be a little more didactic about that.
• 1:26:12
  So that what we do is we try to tackle those kinds of topics.
• 1:26:16
  So basically what Cloud Fire Ministries is about is we want
• 1:26:20
  to equip Christian believers individually and as families and
• 1:26:24
  as churches and as leaders to respond with truth and grace to
• 1:26:28
  these issues. And, and that's basically what
• 1:26:31
  our passion has been for 38 years now.
• 1:26:36
  It is so desperately. Needed.
• 1:26:38
  Great, SO. And I'm so.
• 1:26:40
  Grateful for your willingness to so vulnerably and humbly and
• 1:26:45
  beautifully share your own testimony.
• 1:26:47
  Like the power of the testimony. I know that alone people are so
• 1:26:50
  moved by. And then to make it your life's
• 1:26:52
  work to serve. It's a crazy honor, I can tell.
• 1:26:56
  You, Lila, I will tell you this. I swore I would never tell that
• 1:26:59
  story when I was going to be a counselor.
• 1:27:02
  I was. I was going to go, like I said,
• 1:27:05
  for a certification as a drug and alcohol counselor.
• 1:27:09
  The woman at the master's program I was in at the time
• 1:27:13
  said the only internship open. None of those are open.
• 1:27:15
  None of the drug and alcohol rehab places.
• 1:27:17
  But there's a little church that counsels homosexuals who want to
• 1:27:20
  come out of that lifestyle. Would you like to do an
• 1:27:22
  internship there? I said not on your life.
• 1:27:25
  I never want to talk about that. And I did say I came out of that
• 1:27:28
  myself and I am not going to get up and talk about it and I'm
• 1:27:32
  going to raise a family. I got to I got to serve a
• 1:27:35
  population that I can make a living off of.
• 1:27:37
  There aren't enough people who deal with this that I could
• 1:27:39
  make. I didn't know I was dive, you
• 1:27:41
  know, but this is what I found. I was very reluctant to tell my
• 1:27:45
  story because I was still not comfortable with it.
• 1:27:49
  And I still wince a little whenever I said because this
• 1:27:51
  isn't like saying I was a straight A student who was a
• 1:27:54
  quarterback. You know, this isn't nice stuff.
• 1:27:57
  But there's also the eagerness of, you know what, by the grace
• 1:28:00
  of God, I am what I am because ultimately all of our stories,
• 1:28:04
  if we talk about the good, the bad and the ugly, we are
• 1:28:06
  preaching the gospel. We'll look, we're like the
• 1:28:08
  Samaritan woman who said, look, come see for yourself.
• 1:28:10
  This guy I'm talking about. OK.
• 1:28:13
  So for that, I'm like honored, like super honored.
• 1:28:17
  Thanks for the opportunity. I always say that to God and to
• 1:28:20
  anybody who will let me act the way you so graciously have.
• 1:28:24
  I appreciate it. Beautiful.
• 1:28:26
  Joe, we got to have you back on now that now that I know you're
• 1:28:29
  a local because you have this course out.
• 1:28:31
  So I'm going to tease it when someone you love is gay parents
• 1:28:34
  and family course, I know there's so much.
• 1:28:36
  I mean, you've been in ministry over 30 years, so there's so
• 1:28:39
  much more to your work. So can you come back anytime you
• 1:28:42
  let me know? It's an honor.
• 1:28:43
  Thank you for sharing your story.
• 1:28:44
  Thank you, Lila. It's such a.
• 1:28:46
  Blessing. And for your courage and your
• 1:28:48
  love and I, I hope everyone listening can check out your
• 1:28:51
  work. How can people find it?
• 1:28:53
  Joedallas.com. It's pretty easy, just my name,
• 1:28:56
  all lowercase one. We're Jo edallas.com.
• 1:28:59
  You got me. Amen.
• 1:29:01
  Thank you SO. Much Joe.
• 1:29:02
  Thank you. God bless you.
• 1:29:03
  Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Lila Rose
• 1:29:05
  Show with Joe Dallas. I hope you found it helpful and
• 1:29:08
  inspiring. Make sure to share this episode
• 1:29:09
  with a friend and make sure that you are subscribed.
• 1:29:12
  Thanks so much and we'll see you next time.
• 1:29:14
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• 1:29:16
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• 1:29:19
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• 1:29:22
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• 1:29:25
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