Key quote: ‘Don’t tell me, “It’s okay for women to be with women, for men to be with men.” It’s not okay. It’s in the scriptures. It’s against nature.’ Time spent singing while researching this chapter: forty-five minutes. IS IT POSSIBLE TO stop being a lesbian? Get straightened out? Un-gayed? De-faggoted? I’ve met people who say it can be done. If you’re struggling with unwanted same-sex desires – and the key word is ‘unwanted’ – you’ll be relieved to know that it’s possible to become an ex-homosexual, walking proud and straight down the path of hetero-righteousness. They’ve seen it happen to others and it’s happened to them. All you need, they say, is willpower. Willpower and faith. They didn’t hate gays or lesbians. How could they, when they had been one themselves? And no one was born homo sexual, they told me. People became gay. No one knew how, exactly, but there seemed to be a lot of different factors: traumatic childhood experiences like abuse, parental neglect, divorce, teasing, the time you accidentally shat your pants when you were nine, and that other time when you were six and that girl chased you around the playground and kissed you on the mouth – which was, you now realise, actually a form of sexual molestation.
