Dare To Be Derek

This has been a long time coming. A few years ago I had written something titled this same thing, but that was a very angry and frustrated Derek that wrote that. He believed he was audacious, but really he was scared and it was his fear that wrote in that angry voice. Today I write this from a place of contentedness and joy, knowing that the goodness of the Divine is present in my life. Having now tasted of that goodness I refuse to allow anything different to correct what I have come to know. That the fullness of who I am is called good by God and that includes pieces of my heart that I previously called bad. I now believe in the deepest places in my heart that the God I was raised to believe in truly is GOOD and truly is LOVE!

Growing up, I always knew I was a bit… different. At the very least I was different from the other boys that lived around me. I loved playing with dolls, I wanted to be a gymnast, and the Pink Ranger, Kimberly, was my favorite… (and not because I thought she was cute). Now, none of these things in and of themselves means anything in particular, they were just things that, as I reflect, I notice were facets of my lived experience that are culturally seen as “feminine” even though femininity and masculinity are just social constructs… but I digress. I suppose I want to note this because, eventually when I realized that I was gay, I felt so “other” in the world that I lived in, but I am able to look back and see that my status as an “other” didn’t start there, I had a history of that being the case for me.

I want to say I was 13 when I officially started to realize that I was gay. Kids in my class at school had mentioned a porn site and I remembered what they had said and being the curious youth that I was, I went to the site when I was the only one at home. I noticed something about my experience that I was not prepared for and that scared me so much. As I looked at these images that were not the best for me to be viewing, I realized that I wasn’t at all interested in looking at the women… I was only attracted to the men on the screen. I remember instantly feeling massive amounts of shame, firstly because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be looking at porn, but then that initial shame was multiplied as I recognized that the person that I was drawn to and that… got my motor running… was the man. Now I wasn’t just a perverted little kid, I was gay… and in the world that I inhabited, that wasn’t okay. As the son of the youth pastor, I was terrified of someone finding out my secret. I had always understood that to be gay was wrong and I was now that wrong thing and I desperately did not want that to reflect poorly on my Dad.

It was probably around this time that my dreams of non-existence started. On the least harmful days, that just looked like running away and getting a new identity and living a new life that wouldn’t hurt anyone else. On the worst days, this looked like trying to find a way to un-alive myself, though any time I thought about that I was always aware of how much that would hurt my parents, so as much as I thought it may be a solution, I could never go through with it (something I am now SUPREMELY GLAD of). This was a dark time of my life. I didn’t know where to turn, I felt so isolated and alone, though nobody probably knew that. I was a happy go lucky youth who was in choir and marching band and who was active in youth group and the Christian group at school. Unfortunately, because I believed that I needed to hate the gay part of me, I was never very kind to my classmates who were openly LGBTQ+. I was preachy and unkind and it is one of the greatest regrets that I have, that I handled myself in that time the way that I did. Little Derek needed love that he didn’t believe could exist for him and because it couldn’t exist for him, it couldn’t exist for anyone who was like him. I am so glad that my beliefs have changed since that time.

As I left high school behind, I went to university in mid-Michigan and had some experiences early on that would expand my worldview… unfortunately, those times got overshadowed by my jumping all in to be a part of a campus ministry. While I was a freshman, the movie “Rent!” came out (which I LOVED), I attended programs in my residence hall about LGBTQ+ inclusion and I was able to see outside of my own box for a moment. That was a brief time however and mostly concluded with me having more grace and kindness towards people around me, but it did not do much to liberate me. Over the time that I lived in Mount Pleasant, I became more certain that my being gay was some sort of illness and that only Jesus was the cure. So I read the Bible voraciously, I joined ministry teams, I led mission trips, I went overseas, I led small groups, I did every single thing that I could think of to win the favor of God. Again, nobody would have known what was really going on, I was always dancing around the auditorium singing about the love of God and boldly declaring my love for Jesus to anyone who would listen. I don’t think that I was always conscious of the reasoning behind my behavior, but I can look back and see the ways that a deeply rooted fear of my queerness led to my radicalization as a university student. Please don’t read that last line in a way that is overly critical or negative towards this time of my life, I have some amazing friends that I made in that space and it will always be a part of me. But it still is very much the truth.

Leaving Mount Pleasant was one of the most difficult things I had done at that point in my life, but I also felt a little claustrophobic in a small town and felt like God was calling me to serve overseas, so I headed to Cambodia to work with an organization in Phnom Penh that was working to fight human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Before heading across the ocean, I submitted myself to a conversion therapy style program which sought to assist me in leaving my homosexual desires behind. This never worked, but I wanted to do everything I could to try to safeguard myself from collapsing into the monster that I believed myself to be. I was specifically going to help start a ministry that worked with men who were being sexually exploited working in massage parlors. Looking backwards I think this may have been a little bit of a projection of wanting to help the people that I believed I would have hurt if left to my own devices. This season of life, like all seasons, was full of ups and downs, but being in such a high pressure job definitely took its toll on me. After two years in this environment, I found living there to be untenable, I had become so unhealthy in my coping mechanisms and had so much hidden shame that I needed to get out of there. So after doing a speaking tour for the organization that I worked for, I landed a job as an assistant youth pastor in California.

I thought for sure that in this new environment I would be able to thrive in ways that I had not previously. Still believing that my gay-ness was sinful, I participated in church life with great fervor. I sought to be open and honest about my “struggle” with my sexuality, which eventually got me what I now like to call “Christian fired” where I was assured that God had a bigger vision for my life that I couldn’t fulfill if I still worked at the church… sure that made me job and housing insecure, but I believed that God had better things for me… but I digress. While I was living in California, I was led to believe that the root of me being gay must be due to either paternal neglect or some abuse that happened when I was young. I opted for the idea at the time of a strained relationship with my Dad and believed that maybe if I just learned to identify with God as my Father that I wouldn’t be gay any longer. Obviously, that didn’t work the way it was supposed to, and I sometimes look back at my audacity to ever believe that my Dad wasn’t the amazing man that I know he is and get frustrated! Again, please don’t think that this season wasn’t also full of life and goodness, it very much was and I am so grateful for my time in California, even if I have some criticisms for some of the things that happened in my time there.

Somewhere in the two years that I had there, I began to understand that maybe my queerness wasn’t the issue, maybe the shame and the self hatred that I had piled on over more than a decade were what had taken their toll on me. I had some amazing friends in this season that cared for me so well and created a generous space for me to ask questions and push boundaries that I never felt like I had the permission to. I began to truly have revelations of God’s love for me in this season as I allowed myself to let go of the shame that I held onto which had become my security blanket; I perceived something more generous and good about the Divine as I refused to hate myself and allowed myself to realize that I am part of the creation that God says is good. When I left California, I believed that I was headed home to bring what I had learned to Detroit.

Once I arrived back in Detroit in 2016, I had a very jarring experience where I saw people that had drilled into me that “truth is absolute” (part of the defense I had always used to stand in defiance of my queerness) and people who had influenced my perceptions of how truly loving God is who were willing to ignore truths about a political candidate that didn’t truly stand for all they believed in, but said the right things in the right moments and checked enough of the boxes that they gave him their seal of approval. It is one thing to disagree, there is infinite space for disagreement, but I had moments where I felt like the character from Zoolander who says “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” as I watched video clips of this politician saying abhorrent things only to have people of faith make excuses for his behavior or his words that never addressed the issue but only made themselves feel better. When President Donald Trump was elected it was the wrecking ball to a faith structure that had been failing to hold my lived realities for quite some time. It was a lonely freedom that I began to experience as I continued to push boundaries and ask questions that I believed I needed to ask.

I was very lucky to have a truly vibrant community for the next three years as I continued to pursue answers that were not the usual “Sunday School” answers that we had been raised with. In March of 2018 my former students in Cambodia were preparing to open a restaurant and I desperately wanted to be there to celebrate with them. The community that I was involved in started a Go-Fund-Me and raised the amount of money that I would need for my plane ticket, so I was able to go and spend two weeks in my former home.

While I was in Cambodia I had the opportunity to meet with my former boss who is someone that I admire very deeply. While we were having lunch she asked me what I felt God was leading me to do with my life now that I was back in Detroit. I told her that I had a dream to plant a church in Detroit, but I wasn’t sure if there was space in church world for me to lead since my gay-ness still hadn’t gone away. She looked at me, and with the most lovely Southern drawl said “Derek, I don’t care if you’re full blown gay, half gay, or not gay at all, I will always love and support you.” This was the first time in my life that anyone had ever given me permission to just exist as myself without feeling the need to become something different to be accepted. I remember the walk away from the cafe that we had lunch at by the Russian Market in Phnom Penh thinking this was the first day of the rest of my life and as hyperbolic as that sounds it is genuinely the truth. Something changed in me that day that I will forever be grateful for.

So much of my life to this point had been consumed with a fear of existence and now I began to crave it! Being the former bible study leader and ever a student, I searched for books on what it meant to be gay and hold on to faith. I shared this moment of conversion (yes I am reclaiming the term conversion to talk about my coming out… mind ya business!) with my community when I returned to Detroit and was surrounded by so many amazing and supportive people that I am eternally grateful for. I pushed my boundaries of what I thought I was allowed to feel and experience and truly began to inhabit my life as myself, not as others imagined me to be, but as I knew myself to be. I wrestled with the “why”‘s behind so many “what”‘s it would take far too long to share everything that I learned in that season. I came up with one of my favorite metaphors in this season, my life is a book and I previously had a ghost written copy of the text but it just didn’t fit anymore, so now I had a new book to give to the people who loved me. This book is my life and (hopefully soon) I will be writing an actual book so I can share all of this much more in depth with all of you. But for now, just know that this is the intro to the book of who Derek is now daring to be.

From 2018 to now my life has been… well… life. It is full of ups and downs, but damn does it feel good to face it as my whole self. Fully loved exactly as I am. I have been pretty open about all of this on my Instagram and if you have followed me there, you know. But I wanted to write this out long form here to share with whoever still reads blogs. I am so blessed to have stayed alive long enough to see this version of me emerge and I am so excited to see what this next chapter of life has in store!

If you have made it this far, you are a REAL ONE and I am so grateful for you! Know that there is so much space and grace in the embrace of Divine Love and if you have any questions for me or want to grab a coffee and talk about anything you read here, please hit me up! I love a good chat! I love you all so very much and I hope that each and every person reading this feels that love! Be blessed friends.