Can those of us who are orthodox Christians and who are attracted to the same sex say to ourselves or to others, “I am gay”?

If I am a Christian who has admitted that my desires are real, but chosen to renounce them and not act on them, then why do I describe myself by what I have renounced? Like a cheating businessperson who has renounced his ways of cunning greed and quit the business world for a humbler job, I have renounced the way of homosexuality and disowned it.

Someone will say, “You have renounced it, but you must nevertheless face that it is a struggle that defines you. You must accept it as a perpetual, characteristic weakness, and admit the ways that the continual burden of that has shaped who you are.” Very well, but what defines me is not the thing I struggle with in itself, but my struggle against it. I am not free of my struggle with it, but, by the grace of God which is efficacious through my struggle, I am free of it, now in part, and in the resurrection, fully, if I do not give up.

Does living with a constant temptation make it any more a part of my identity than if I had acted on it before and then later begun to deny it? Is the Lord any less my savior? For he who pulls us out of the pit when we fall into it is also he who “is able to keep you from stumbling” into the pit at all. Even if I cannot say, “That was my identity, and now it is not,” I can still say, “That would be my identity, but it is not.” We pray to our Father not only that he will forgive us our sins, but also that he will “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

But to let a congenital orientation to sin itself slip so deeply into my sense of self that it becomes simply part of who I am is to give up my struggle. When I begin to identify myself with the sin that “is crouching at my door, and desires to have me,” I risk losing my grip on the hope that I will be free of it one day.

And here’s the crux of it: language that speaks of identity, that simply says, “I am that,” without speaking of the struggle–without relentlessly bringing it up as a caveat and a reminder that holds the identity in check–is to allow the thing itself to eclipse my struggle with it, in my speech. The dark thing itself, spoken alone, will block out the light of hope afforded to us by our struggle.

And whatever I speak will become what I think, and the reality to which I eventually acquiesce.

Congenital orientations toward sin are immense opportunities to question the goodness of God. “Why have you made me this way, God?” That is why, whenever we admit them, we must also proclaim our struggle with them, for only in doing so can we preserve our faith in the triumph of Christ in us, and avoid despondency. In the Jesus Prayer we admit that we are sinners, yet in the same breath cry out for Jesus’s mercy on us. In naming our struggle is our hope, and if we cease to remember it, the clouds of despair are waiting to close in around us.

And that is why it is better for me to describe myself as experiencing same-sex attraction, or better yet, struggling with it, than it is for me to say “I am gay.”

For the record, it’s about the verb “am,” not the adjective “gay.” Or, in fancier grammar-speak, it’s about the fact that it’s an adjectival predicate describing a perpetual characteristic, rather than a verb that expresses action toward and against the object. A “be” verb doesn’t allow any room for struggle, because it doesn’t allow movement. It just “is.” So what I mean is that “gay” vs. “same-sex attracted” is not the issue. It would be fine to say, “I struggle with gayness.” But I doubt that will catch on.