Steven LaChance Blog

Personal experience is something we can share with confidence because it is the only truth we fully witness ourselves. During times like this there are always voices trying to muddy reality, so I want to share something honestly from my own life.

I’m a gay man. That is the irrefutable truth of who I am.

Being gay was not something I chose. I think some people would like to believe it works that way, like it is some lifestyle decision or preference you pick from a shelf. For me it was never a choice. It simply was who I was. The choice only came later when the world forced me to decide whether I would live authentically or spend my life pretending to be someone else.

Over the years I have known many men who lived double lives in order to conceal that truth. They had wives, children, careers, entire identities built around survival. There are far more of them than most people realize. Many of them live frightened of being discovered, trying desperately to maintain a version of themselves the world finds acceptable. They survive on brief moments where they can finally breathe and be themselves, if only in secret.

Many of them began the journey toward truth at some point in their lives, but for many the current reversal in attitudes and growing hostility simply pushes them deeper back into the closet and further into secrecy.

You do not wake up one morning and decide to be gay. It was never like choosing socks or deciding what shirt to wear. At a very young age many of us simply understood we were different. We may not have had language for it yet, but we knew.

For many of us, the first words we heard associated with who we were came as insults on school playgrounds.

“That’s gay.”
“Don’t be queer.”
“Faggot.”

Eventually it clicks. You realize society has already decided something is wrong with you before you have even fully understood yourself.

That is where the real damage begins.

I started editing myself very early. That is honestly the best word for it. I learned to monitor my voice, my mannerisms, my interests, my reactions, my feelings. Many of us were taught by the world around us that we were perverse, broken, sinful, defective. Some of us sat in churches hearing we would burn in hell simply for existing as we were created.

Imagine what that does to a child.

I remember wondering if God had made a mistake. If I was created just to be hated. Those thoughts do not leave you untouched.

There were times I hated myself. There were times I desperately wished I could just be like everyone else because life would have been easier. I did not want to feel like an outcast. I did not want to feel defective.

But eventually you discover something very human. You cannot permanently deny intimacy, connection, or the need to love and be loved honestly. At some point the soul pushes back against the cage built around it.

That is why shame is so destructive. When people are taught to be ashamed of who they are, they do not simply hide their sexuality. They begin hiding themselves. And once you begin controlling who you are allowed to love, it becomes very difficult to fully love yourself at all.

The first person you come out to is yourself. That is where it truly begins. It is the understanding that you are not wrong. It is the understanding that you are not defective. It is the understanding that it is okay to be you and that God loved you exactly as you were created.

But that kind of acceptance does not happen overnight. Coming out to yourself is often slow and painful. There is a constant vacillation between acceptance and guilt, between wanting to breathe freely and wanting to disappear back into safety. Years of shame do not simply evaporate because you suddenly understand the truth. You carry those voices with you for a very long time.

Eventually I made it through that part of my life. At twenty-nine I came out to the people who mattered most to me. Even then I still was not fully able to live openly in the world because I was a single father. My first responsibility was protecting my children from a world that could still be cruel and hateful. So even after accepting myself, there were still pieces of me that remained guarded.

It was not until my children were fully grown that I finally allowed myself to take those last steps toward truly living as myself. There is something both beautiful and heartbreaking about reaching freedom later in life. You mourn the years spent hiding, but you also understand the strength it took to survive them.

And maybe that is the part people outside this experience sometimes fail to understand. Most gay people are not trying to become something. We are trying to stop pretending. We are trying to remove the layers of fear, shame, editing, secrecy, and survival that were placed on us long before we ever understood what was happening to us.

What I eventually discovered is that authenticity brings peace in ways hiding never can. Not perfection. Not an easy life. But peace.

For the first time in my life I no longer felt like I was fighting against myself.

I could finally look in the mirror without apology.

I could finally exist without asking permission.

And after a lifetime of fear and self-editing, that kind of freedom feels sacred.

God makes no mistakes.

The parts of myself I once feared were never mistakes at all.