Journey Story
Brandiilyne Dear, a pastor at the inclusive and welcoming Joshua Generation Metropolitan Community Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is an LGBT advocate working to accelerate acceptance in her home state of Mississippi and beyond. Brandiilyne also founded The Dandelion Project, a LGBT organization and resource, and she serves as vice-president of The Spectrum Center, a resource for the LGBT community in…
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Growing up in rural southeastern Ohio, I always knew that I was gay, but I resented that part of myself. I wanted to be “normal,” to be like everyone else. In 1996, at the age of twenty, when I encountered a church that assured me that God could set me free from my same-sex attractions,…
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Living today in New York City, my hometown of Calhoun, Georgia, often feels far away. But when I go home for the holidays and spend time with my friends and family, I’m easily transported back to my childhood, revisiting the house and the town where I spent my most awkward teenaged years willfully ignoring my…
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As I stand in the shower, the water hits my face and I start to cry. I don’t know if it’s being in the enclosed space or the fact that I’m naked and free from the trappings of a “good, capable, and confident person.” Maybe it’s because the water can immediately wash the tears away.…
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They say freedom isn’t free. This is something I know very well. Authenticity is also not free. Lack of authenticity has its cost, as well. The price of authenticity is often added to the cost of living inauthentically and the burden is carried by everyone whose life touches any human being for whom the struggle…
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There’s a scene in the first season of the television show “The Fosters” in which Lena, one of the mothers in a lesbian relationship, helps Jude, her foster son, remove polish from his nails after some kids at school harass him over it. She sits with him and explains that there are times when she…
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Two years ago, I sat at a trendy coffee shop in Austin, TX meeting with the manager of the It Gets Better Tour: a traveling anti-bullying stage show spun off from the popular LGBTQ video website. The manager had reached out to me a few days earlier and explained that at every stop on their…
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I have about zero sense of direction. I have tried, really tried. Years ago I took an orienteering course with wilderness experts, but today I still have to use my iPhone compass when exiting a subway station to know if I’m heading north or south. At this point in life, I accept that spatial reasoning…
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As a younger man I would have questioned someone’s sanity if they told me they saw in my future the experiences I am living now. I had not imagined that there would be a life in ministry for me, when I had decided not only to accept my sexuality, but to live in that truth…
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Each November LGBT centers, local groups, and churches host events for Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s a single evening, a few hours, dedicated to memorializing those who were violently murdered for being transgender. Nearly all of the victims of violence are women, of color, poor, and many likely engaged in sex work. In the United…
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