Pastors who are gay

He became a successful evangelical Christian minister and was preaching to crowds of people all over the southeastern United States. But he was deeply unhappy because he held a secret that would ruin him if it were found out — he was gay. At the age of 30, Don decided to change his life and moved to Europe, eventually settling in Prague.

That was difficult, being raised in a fundamentalist Christian family in the Deep South. So you did realise and you did have a name for it when you were still Christian? And those things in the South did not equate — being gay and being a Christian, especially not a pastor. The only way I could do that was if I were straight.

Gay pastor of Myrtle Baptist Church in Newton seeks to open minds

Then when I went to university — I went to a Christian university — I who still struggling, trying desperately not to be gay. By that time I had met my first boyfriend and moved in with him. Nobody on campus knew that we were gay. I was madly in love, I was 20 years old. At night we were together, and by day we were at the university or working at the church, trying desperately to be straight.

I willingly put myself in gay conversion therapy after that, and that lasted probably almost 10 years. I put myself through conversion therapy in the form of exorcisms, as well as psychological counselling, from the time when I was 20 or 21 until I came to Czechia. How did you square all of that in your mind — still being Christian but living with the knowledge that you were gay?

The pressure was so intense. And knowing secretly that I was gay, while meanwhile my ministry after university became quite successful. By the time I was in my mids I had my own weekly two-hour pastor as a radio evangelist. I was travelling, preaching in churches all across the south-eastern US.

I left the US on October 31, Because inI had met some friends online who lived in London in a Christian commune. It was so radically different from anything I had experienced are the US, where religion had become nothing more than a business. I called it corporate Christianity. And when I got back home I went to my desk — although my vocation was as a pastor, my job was as a mortgage banker — and when I got to my desk, there was a stack of mail and on top gay it was a letter from the US Social Security office.

Working with them for four or five months was different to visiting. And I realized I had spent my whole life not asking questions, but giving answers. I emailed some pastors who lived in Prague that I found websites for and I told them what had happened, that it sounded crazy but that I thought maybe I was supposed to be in Prague.

After about two months here, I had a lot of time on my own.