"I would have done anything to just not be alone, to have at least 1% of hope that I wouldn't feel like this forever. And people who have felt hopeless before know that 1% of hope is a whole lot of hope. That's all I needed, but the Bible was clear. I had to figure out life without it."

Brett practices for a lifetime of loneliness—at an isolated cabin in the mountains and at a football stadium surrounded by 100k people...

"And still other failures feel like brands seared deep into the soft flesh of our souls. After the initial pain, they scab over, then scar over. And looking at it each day, we get used to it. It begins to look more like a birthmark than a brand. And we may even forget that it was put on us. We may forget life before it. We may forget that failed moments aren't supposed to stay with us forever. After all, it was just a moment. And moments never last."

"Closets are dark, and when the gay child—or in my case, young professional—decides to stuff his soul in there, it has a warping effect. It forces you deeper inside yourself. You become a mapless soul in a haunted maze, and you lose your bearings on who you really are. You begin to furiously reshuffle your inner life to present to the world the parts they want to see..."

Brett hears a friend say something about gay people he will never forget...

"Deep inside every workaholic man is a little boy who never felt big enough, strong enough, worthy enough. And that little boy can be very loud. He reminds the man of his lacking, of his lessness. Work is very noisy in the soul, so the workaholic uses that noise to drown out the little boy. Obsessive work can't deliver peace, but that's not the point. The point is that it's louder than the pain. This was me..."

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

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

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

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