Timothy Kurek, a homeschooled Christian, decided to spend a year living as a gay man to learn more about the homosexual lifestyle. Kurek staged the faux coming out after watching a close friend be disowned by her family after she revealed that she is a lesbian. The Portland man wrote, The Cross in the Closet to chronicle his journey and detail how his lifelong beliefs were altered by the experience.

When Kurek, 26, pretended to be a gay man for a year, he experienced the same type of isolation from his family and friends as the woman who prompted his social experiment did, when she informed her loved ones of her sexual preference. During an interview with ABC News, he discussed how the friend he met while doing karaoke suffered emotionally after being disowned when she told her family that she was attracted to women.

The young author also noted that for many years, he had been taught that his response to such news was to tell the friend she was an abomination and encourage her to repent if she ever wanted to get into heaven. Timothy shared that when he was confronted with his friend’s startling news, the idea of telling her to alter her sexual orientation made him ashamed of himself. While spending a year living as a gay man, The Cross in the Closet author even recruited a fake boyfriend to help him pull off his ruse, the Daily Mail notes.

Kurek had this to say about his experience:

“I feel god really kicked me in the gut. She was crying in my arms and instead of being there for her, I was thinking about all the arguments to convert her. The thing that struck me most was the isolation. Before I came out a gay, I had a very busy social life. After I came out, I didn’t hear from 95 percent of my friends.”

When Timothy snooped through his mother’s journal he came across a passage where she had written that a terminal cancer diagnosis would have been preferable to finding out she had a gay son. The conservative Christian also revealed that when he first began living as a gay man the idea of hanging out with gay people repulsed him, but now he proudly admits that his lingering homophobia has vanished.

A Homeschooled Christian Spent A Year Living As A Gay Man And Wrote A Book About The Experience is a post from: The Inquisitr