Steven LaChance Blog

Can you imagine being a kid, going to church, doing your best to be good, and then hearing something that changes your world? The very thing you were born to be, they are saying, is unholy. That you are unholy.

You go to school, so happy to make friends, and that’s when you’re called “fag” or “gay” for the first time because of the way you move or the way you talk. So you adjust. You change to fit in. You hide the parts of yourself you’ve been taught are bad and unholy.

You don’t understand it because how can a God create you only to hate you?

This is how it begins for many LGBTQ+ children.

I never understood the idea that we chose a lifestyle. When you are a child, you choose nothing about your sexuality. You simply are who you are, just as those who are heterosexual are.

Life is such an early betrayal for many of us. You feel betrayed by your faith, by your community, and sometimes by your own family. There are a lot of emotions involved, and it takes a long time to work through them. In truth, some of that anger never fully goes away.

You grow up carrying those wounds with you. You become careful about how you speak, how you walk, and who you trust. You learn to read a room before you enter it. You learn when it is safe to be yourself and when it isn’t.

For many of us, coming out is not a single moment. It is a lifetime of unlearning the shame that was handed to us when we were children.

Some of us lose friends. Some of us lose family. Some of us lose our faith entirely because it was used as a weapon against us. Others spend years trying to separate God from the people who claimed to speak for Him.

And yet, somehow, we keep going.

We fall in love. We build families. We make homes. We create lives that are beautiful and meaningful despite all the voices that once told us we were broken.

But we never forget that child. The one sitting in the pew, the one standing in the school hallway, the one lying awake at night wondering why being themselves feels like a sin.

That child stays with us because the older we get, the more we realize that child was never the problem.

And maybe that is why Pride matters so much to so many of us. Because somewhere, right now, there is another child sitting in a church pew or standing in a school hallway, wondering if there is something wrong with them.

There isn’t.

You were never unholy. You were never broken. And you never deserved to hate yourself for simply being who you are.