‘Bible-banging homophobe’ lives as gay man for a year
In a new Timothy Kurek, once a self-described “bible banging homophobe”, took part in an eye-opening one-man social experiment: He pretended to be gay for a year to see what life is like for those in the LGBT community.
He thought up the year-long project in 2009 after a gay female friend came out to him, having been disowned by her hyper-religious parents. He went on to publish his experiences in a book entitled The Cross in the Closet.
Kurek was raised in the Bible Belt of America by heavily religions parents, attending a conservative school and one of America’s most Christian universities. After ‘coming out’ to his family and community, most of them disowned him.
“Overnight I ceased to exist,” he said in a recent TEDx talk about his experiences, ‘Walking in the shoes of the other: Relearning the Practice of Intentional Empathy’. “It felt as though I had died.”
He went on to immerse himself in the local LGBT scene over the course of the year: going to gay bars, joining an LGBT softball team and working in a coffee shop situated in the only local gay bookstore. Kurek says his biggest surprise came when he attended a karaoke night and found a drag queen singing a “praise song” he had often sung himself in church.
“Never in a million years did I think, as a straight Christian under cover in the gay community of Nashville, that I would hear that song, because I was taught to believe that gay people were Godless,” Kurek said. “My ‘normal’ and other people’s ‘normal’ are not all that different,” he concluded.
Check out his fascinating TEDx talk in full:
Words by LOUIS SHANKAR.
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