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

A dark movie theater and a first kiss...

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

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

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

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