Gay Like Me: A Bible Belt Conservative Walks in a Gay Man’s Shoes

This is a very interesting article:  A Straight, Liberty University, Right Wing Christian guy pretends to be Gay for a year to learn about Gay people, who they really are and what their journey entails.

And this journey seems to take him on an interesting personal journey as well.

To give away the story, he ends up re-affirming his Christian faith, but also going from a bigoted Fundamentalist to supporting Gay Rights as he begins to understand how Gay people really live, how diverse the Gay Community is, who Gay people really are and the impacts of prejudice, bigotry and hate…

I may have to read the entire book-“The Cross in the Closet” by Timothy Kurek.

Here is an excerpt from and a link to the RawStory.com piece:

For an entire year Kurek lived “under cover” as a homosexual in his home town of Nashville. He told his family he was gay, as well as his friends and his church. Only two pals and an aunt – used to keep an eye on how his mother coped with the news – knew his secret. One friend, a gay man called Shawn – whom Kurek describes as a “big black burly teddy bear” – pretended to be his boyfriend. Kurek got a job in a gay cafe, hung out in a gay bar and joined a gay softball league, all the while maintaining his inner identity as a straight Christian.

The result was a remarkable book called The Cross in the Closet, which follows on the tradition of other works such as Black Like Me, by a white man in the 1960s deep south passing as a black American, and 2006′s Self-Made Man, by Norah Vincent, who details her time spent in disguise living as a man. “In order to walk in their shoes, I had to have the experience of being gay. I had to come out to my friends and family and the world as a gay man,” he told the Observer.

via Why a Bible belt conservative spent a year pretending to be gay | The Raw Story.

The book is  “The Cross in the Closet” by Timothy Kurek.  Here is the link to Amazon.com where I bought the Kindle version today for only $2.99:

http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Closet-Timothy-Kurek/dp/0983567743/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350180978&sr=1-1&keywords=the+cross+in+the+closet