A former gay rights activist — now a Catholic convert — spoke of how his prayers helped him leave the “gay lifestyle” behind at his presentation “How a Former Gay Atheist Found His Place in the Catholic Church,” Wednesday night at the University of Idaho.
Paul Darrow, who joined the church after 40 years of inactivity, said he had an epiphany during an HIV scare where he heard the reassurance of a spiritual voice.
He said the voice told him “do not worry, Paul. You do not have AIDS because you have too much to do
to make up for the way you’ve been living — I took that regarding the self-indulgent lifestyle I was living. The lifestyle that the freedom of homosexuality gave me to use my body in any way that I desired,” Darrow said.
Referring to his “live fast and die young” James Dean inspired “hedonistic” lifestyle, Darrow said he enjoyed the pleasantries afforded to him as an international fashion model. He said he had been with thousands of men, drank alcohol, partook in drugs and often partied until exhaustion.
He did all of this despite having Hepatitis B and his doctor saying he should eat healthy and avoid bad habits if he wanted to live until his 50s, where he would likely develop scarring of the liver and liver cancer.
Darrow said his chronic and seemingly incurable disease was somehow cured and he had developed an immunity to it, which he said was a sign of his prayer’s being answered.
Darrow is one of three subjects in the film “Desire of the Everlasting Hills,” which is about three Catholics “navigating the waters of self-understanding, faith, and homosexuality,” according to the film’s website.
While he recognizes people all live unique lives, Darrow argued being gay “lends itself to a lifestyle.”
“When I mentioned going to the bathhouse, when I mentioned going to the bars, when I mentioned the music, the entertainment — It’s a generality, but it’s a very powerful one,” Darrow said.
While he said his life is not indicative of all gay people, he said he believes the “lifestyle” does not include monogamy because all of the couple’s Darrow knew had multiple sexual partners simultaneously.
“In that lifestyle,” he said, “the last thing we wanted to do was get married.”
When the presentation opened up for questions from the audience, one student questioned the existence of the “lifestyle” Darrow described.
“When I say ‘I’m gay,’ I don’t just mean I like to fool around with boys on the weekends,” fifth-year UI psychology major Samson Lyman said to Darrow. “To me, being gay is so much more than that. It’s my icons, it’s the music I listen to, it’s the people I call my friends. It describes the kind of relationship I have with my lovers, my partners.”
The notion of the “gay lifestyle” is a harmful generalization, Lyman said, that undermines the diversity present in the gay community.
“Well what is the lifestyle?” Lyman said in an interview after the event. “We know people like Tabitha (Simmons) and Kathy (Sprague), who are like the mother gooses of our gay community here, who put on our drag shows, who are the most pleasantly married couple, who run a comic book shop and own ducks. That gay lifestyle?”
Lyman, who was involved in the Catholic community his first two years at UI, said the event could have been a platform for discourse between the gay community and the Catholic church. While he appreciated hearing Darrow’s experience he said it failed to provide perspective and could have been a better chance for engagement.
In hopes of providing more engagement, Lyman said he asked the LGBTQA Office’s Programming Coordinator, Julia Kehler, earlier Wednesday to offer the event for engagement and dialogue. He said Kehler chose not to participate.
Kehler declined to comment.
“We either hear about engagement at anti-gay events as protests, or we hear about people engaging at pro-gray events,” Lyman said. “But never a peaceful engagement, a peaceful dialogue starting at an event like this.”
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @pfannyyy