First of all I want to say how inspired I was when I read your testimony. We are all very blessed by your being here and I’m grateful to God that you have decided to share with us. I am grateful because we get so very few people in here who are not Boylovers but are willing to enter into any kind of meaningful dialogue with us. I am also excited because, if I understand your story correctly, you have experienced multiple direct healings from God the nature of which are life altering to the extreme. While this kind of thing is not unheard of, I do not believe it is the only way in which God chooses to heal most people. However, I think I should explain myself a little before I go on.

This might sound a little strange but I must first apologize. I might not get things exactly right in regards to what you wrote. You see, I have to do my online work at the local library and have very little time to read when I am here in the forum. I am kicking myself right now for not printing out your testimony and taking it home with me. I had about two minutes to read what I could before I was kicked out of the library. (Well, I wasn’t actually kicked out…our librarian is a really nice guy.) But I got inspired when I got home and wrote this reply on my home computer, put it on disk, and copied it here today. So please keep that in mind in case I make a mistake or two, ok?

From what I read, you and I have at least one thing in common. You have been a drug addict and were delivered by God from that. I praise God for that! I myself am a recovering alcoholic. And I praise God for that, also. We have both experienced what it is like to be under the bondage of a terrible drug and are now sober by the power of God. But with one major difference. While you experienced deliverance directly from God in a relatively short time, I have had to struggle with my addiction. It has taken me a long time, years in fact, to achieve successful sober living. I have done so through A.A. and a lot of hard work, making lots of mistakes along the way. However, I truly believe that God is responsible for both of our recoveries. I know that I could not have gotten sober and stayed sober without God, and I’m sure you can also say the very same thing. But here’s the kicker…if that is true, then He did it in two different ways. For you it was direct and fast and final, for me it was/is a slow process that requires I maintain a program of recovery.

Why does God work like this? Why doesn’t He just take away everyone’s problems and heal everyone in the same way? He certainly could if He wanted to, right? I think the answer to that lies in within the fact that He has a different purpose and plan for every single person. And I think it also applies to our sexual attraction. I’m going to go out on a limb here, because I’m not sure how you are going to take this, but it is my sincere belief that God can even use us, as Christian Boylovers, for His purpose here on Earth. In fact, maybe He has a wonderful plan for us. I think He does. If there is to be any kind of light to be shed in the rather dark and underground world of Boylovers and Pedophiles, then surely it will come from God through the only people He has in that world to represent Him….namely, us! We aint perfect, but hey, we’re all He’s got.

Recently we had another non-boylover come in here and engage us in dialogue. That person originally came with others who were trying to disrupt our forum, but stayed around long enough to do some constructive writing instead. I wrote my testimony for him to try and help him understand us better. I have included that testimony with this post for you. It is a long one, but I think you might find it interesting. Thank you for having enough interest in us to do some reading and for caring enough to write everything you have written. You have stuck with it a lot longer than many, and I feel blessed for that. Please feel welcome to stay as long as you like; I hope we will all benefit from your being here.

MY TESTIMONY:

I am 45 years old, short, fairly overweight, balding, near-sighted and a Boylover. And those are my good qualities…ha ha ha. No, really, I must say that so far I have had me a tough life. I discovered that I was different from other kids when I was about 12 or 13 or so. When the other boys were beginning to look at girls, I was still interested in boys. And as time went on, I stayed interested in younger boys, so year after year things just kept getting worse for me. I knew I was different, but I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. And I guess if that wasn’t bad enough, I knew I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I couldn’t go to my mom because she was always either drunk, drugged out, or just all wrapped up in her own life to care very much about what was going on in anyone else’s. Going to my dad was out of the question because he was the one I was most afraid of. He verbally abused me all of my childhood and most of my adult life. With both of my brothers he used a belt, stick, fists, or any combination thereof. I might have talked with either of my younger brothers about it but we were actually never on those kinds of speaking terms with one another. Mostly we would fight each other, with two of us ganging up on one.

We did not have a happy household when I was a boy. I’m sure that’s why today we have all gone five different directions. No one speaks to anyone else anymore. I got kind of “lucky” and had an hour conversation with my father four weeks ago. It was the first time we spoke in over three years. But back to my story…

When I discovered I was sexually different, attracted to younger boys instead of girls or women, I thought I was going to probably have to maybe do something about it at some point in my life. I didn’t know exactly what I could do about it, but I figured someday I would be able to find out or figure it out. I spent many hours digging into whatever books I could find about human sexuality, but from 1976 to 1980 (the year I graduated from High School); there wasn’t a lot out there. From what I could find out, Pedophiles were horrible men who lured young boys into their cars with candy and then raped them. That was about the only kind of definition I could find. It certainly didn’t sound like the kind of life I wanted to have, but for a while when I was young I thought I was doomed to be that kind of guy. I spent my formative and High School years as a nerd who didn’t date girls. My guess is that most everyone thought it was because I had no confidence with the opposite sex (which was true anyway), or that I was too ugly or nerdy to get a date or have a girl friend (which wasn’t untrue either). I found out that, although being a nerd wasn’t much fun, it was preferable to anyone knowing the real truth about me. It took me a long time to finally accept the truth about myself, I was sure others would never be able to. But there were some people who knew the truth anyway.

You can’t live with anyone for very long and cover up the fact you are sexually attracted to boys. Lord knows I tried, but I failed. My family knew about my attraction for years. My mother would find my assorted Sears catalogues and stuff like that under my bed. The pages with young boys would be folded over, so it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. But instead of confronting me with it, or talking to me about it, it became just another big family secret. Until the day my father found my “stash”. At first he yelled and screamed at me until I wound up crying with my guitar in my hands. But then, a few years later he sat me down at the kitchen table and told me he wanted me to start seeing a Psychologist. He had already set up the first appointment. Man, talk about embarrassing, but I went. The guy turned out to be pretty nice, but he had no idea what to do about me. We just sat in his office and talked about how I felt. Those sessions went on for a year or more, but my attraction didn’t change at all.

Before all of that, however, I discovered God. I was brought up a Catholic, but some friends of mine were Pentecostal, and they invited me to church. I went and when the preacher did an alter call, I went up and accepted Jesus as my personal savior. It was the best thing I could have ever done. So for a few years I attended both the Catholic Church with my family (one of the only things we ever did together as a family), plus I would go to wedsday evening service at the Pentecostal church. God became real to me during my early teenage years. So I would pray and pray in private, asking God to make me normal. He did not. What I didn’t know was that life had a few more fun surprises for me. When I was about 13 I discovered a different “friend” who I was sure would be the answer to all my problems. My new friend lived in a bottle and I loved “him” so much.

At last I had found something to take away all the pain of being different. I would drink and suddenly the world wasn’t such a bad place. In fact, I could actually stand my life as long as I knew I could drown it all in booze. It wasn’t hard to get the stuff because my mother was a drunk and had a constant supply of the cheapest wine in the cupboard. My dad also drank beer, which he kept in the fridge. My parents also had a supply of hard liquor, so I discovered that I could carefully take a little wine, a little whiskey, vodka, whatever, and get nice and drunk whenever I wanted. At a very young age I quickly became an active alcoholic, secretly numbing out my problems and troubles. A few years later I discovered pot, and the combination of the two was just like magic for me. I drank like that for years and for a while was accepted by the partying crowd at school. But I kept drinking after I graduated. And when a lot of the other kids went to college, went into the military, or eventually got better jobs and/or got married, I found myself still drinking and partying and trying to live off what I made at a low-paying job I had landed during my senior year of High School. Eventually I decided to try and do something constructive with my life and joined the Military in 1984.

My Military career consisted of nothing more than drinking and going to work. I was then a terrible drunk because it’s accepted to be that way in the Armed Forces. And I was still attracted to young boys. Because it looked like I only cared about my drinking, my buddies didn’t think much about the fact I was never much interested in the opposite sex. All I had to do was be the so-called life of the party. It was during those years that I discovered how almost impossible it was to try to quit drinking. So I thought I was probably just doomed to drinking myself to death. Talk about despair. But during this whole period of time, I also knew that my only sexual outlet would be the tried and true method of masturbation.

It was a few years after I got out of the military that I finally discovered Alcoholics Anonymous and quit drinking. It was also at this time I got my one and only Y.F. He was the adopted son of a guy I knew during High School. It was ironic that that guy introduced me to A.A., but then started drinking again and all but abandoned his 8 year old boy. The boy, “L”, and I hit it off almost immediately. I was sober after years and years of destructive drinking, and he reached out to me because he literally had no other adult male in his life who ever seemed to care about him. He was living with his mom in a motel filled with prostitutes and drug users, and she was manager there. She had no time for him, so I would come over and ask if I could take him to the movies or mini golf or something. She saw how much he loved me, in fact the first time he threw his arms around me and said, “I love you!”, she was standing right there. Our friendship grew into something great and she was all for it. That was when I learned what it meant to be a Boylover. I had never even heard the term before but I became one. I was sexually attracted to the boy, but I knew in my mind and soul that sex was something our friendship could not afford. I had plenty of opportunity over the years to do something sexual with him, but I just never did. In fact, because of A.A. in my life, I had rediscovered God and did my best to try and introduce “L” to Jesus Christ. He accepted the Lord one beautiful day in a park near my house. It is something I will never forget for the rest of my life.

I loved “L” with all my heart. It was that love of the heart that made it fairly easy to put aside the sexual feelings. If it got kind of overwhelming, I would simply go to the bathroom by myself and “take care of business’, so to speak. Hey, it worked. But then, after a few years of sobriety, I decided to try church again. I started going to a Baptist church and got into a kind of one-on-one mentoring program with an older gentleman there. Eventually I came out to him as being gay. So he started trying everything he knew to make me a heterosexual. Nothing actually worked, but we had our sessions for a good year or so. It was then that I became increasingly agitated with God. I remember one day just driving around in my car, yelling at God at the top of my lungs, tears streaming out of my eyes. “Why God? Why am I like this? What can I do…don’t you love me?” Shortly after that I decided to try my old friend the bottle again. I began a period of time of drinking, quitting, trying different psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors. My friendship with “L” was still there, but eventually my drinking took precedent. I was still in a non sexual relationship with him, but my drinking made things kind of strange between us. He still loved me, but I became kind of distant. It was at this time I finally discovered something that would help change my life for the better. I got myself a WebTV and got into the internet. I discovered all kinds of bad stuff, but I also became interested in learning more about a new word I discovered….”Boy love”.

I got into the Newsgroups, particularly the ones for BL’s. One day, in a moment of inspiration, I posted a question…”Can a Boylover be a Christian?” I included my email address and waited. I didn’t have to wait for long…man did I get some wild responses. Both in the Newsgroup and in my email. Some were really nasty, as you can imagine. But one response intrigued me more than the rest. It was from a person who would eventually lead me to this Forum; Daniel James. He wrote me and said, “Why not?”, and it was that question that sparked a dialogue between us via email. Because of that dialogue, I eventually quit drinking and because of him, I eventually came to CBLF. That was back in 1998 (or 99, I don’t remember exactly), and I have been here ever since.

I have had other “adventures” since that time, but CBLF has been a constant in my life. I have made some awesome friends in here, Daniel James was first but there have been some others who have been very important to me. Like Andy, who became a father figure to me and the closest friend I have ever had. He passed away a few years ago, but I will never forget him. Or like Nash who has been a friend for so long; or most recently, my friends Cat, Deliverance, and Godspell and many others. I not only accept God in my life now, I have come to know that I have a purpose. “L” is no longer in my life, but I believe my purpose as a Christian and a Boylover now is to stay close to this forum and try to encourage other BL’s who come in here to live good, productive lives. And what about that song I wrote? Let me just say this:

Throughout my life, four things have been truly good for me. God is first, and always will be. Various good friendships rank second. I thank God daily for those people whom I can call my true friends. Many of them are right here in this Forum. Humor has also kept me going from day to day. I have had many terrible bouts with depression and hard times, and my sense of humor is paramount in helping me to get through that stuff. Last is my love for music. I am a Bluesman in more than words. I play guitar and am into the one kind of music that seems to fit…I knew it since I was a young child.

Like I said earlier, I have tried many, many different kinds of therapy to make sense of, or rid myself of, this sexual attraction. So far, nothing has really worked. I have realized a lessening of the sexual stuff, but I attribute that more to my age than anything else. That and I believe God has given me some relief as well. But as far as being rid of it altogether, I doubt that will happen in this lifetime. This does not cause me to despair, I just focus on doing the things in life I CAN do to honor God. In one post in here, someone asked something like, “Why don’t you people try to find the root cause of your problem and do something about it?” I can’t speak for everyone in here, but I am pretty sure that most of us have, like me, tried this many, many times. And I think I am safe in saying that for most of us, the results have been far less than what we would want. One time Cat asked a question in here, “If there were a magic pill you could take to become normal, would you?” I think almost everyone answered yes to that one. Unfortunately there is no such pill. And neither science nor faith has been able to come up with much help for us. After a while a person just decides to quit banging his head against a stone wall and focus on the things he can do. I myself tend to fall back on humor once in a while to just keep the wheels and cogs well oiled.

Here I must end this huge post of mine. If anyone is wondering how I did this with only a half an hour at the library, I didn’t. I wrote this at home on my computer at home, put it on 3.5” disk, and copied it into the Forum from the library. Something I have wanted to try for a long time, and if it works, then cool! After reading Cat’s testimony, I decided I wanted to do one of my own. Hopefully some of the new people, the people from that other board who are really willing to try to understand us, will read this and get a little more understanding. I’m sure it won’t be easy but if we all try to understand one another, we will be better for it. God Bless.

With Love in Christ Jesus,
Chris