ARTICLES

NEWS

ROAMIN' CATHOLIC

Contents © 2000
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

I Found Out How Weak I Really Was

Two Continent Homosexuals Tell Their Stories

By Christopher Zehnder

"I was literally dead," said Philip Thorson. He might have been speaking of his spiritual state, but he wasn't. "I died thirteen years ago from a drug overdose," he said, "I had a massive coronary. The man I was with at the time -- I can remember it vividly -- me leaving my body, and him running out of the room screaming, 'he's dead! He's dead!'

"I was taken before the Lord's judgment," continued Thorson, "and He gave me my life back. 'Philip,' He basically told me, 'you have to be absolutely willing to change absolutely everything. There isn't an ounce of your life that's worth anything, let alone..."

...Thorson's homosexuality. Philip Thorson, 38, is what some might call a "continent homosexual." For about two and a half years he has been a member of the San Diego chapter of Courage, a nation-wide ministry to homosexual Catholics who want to remain faithful to Church teaching on sexuality. (The San Diego chapter is led by Father Richard Perozich, pastor of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart church.) "I do not go continually [to Courage meetings]," said Thorson, "because that's not where I'm at. As Father said, 'your are one of the strange ones; you've come to me at the end of your journey, instead of at the beginning, like most of these guys.'"

Thorson said he was raised in the Catholic Church, but "didn't get a lot out of it." Though his mother was a strong Catholic, his father, an alcoholic, left home before Thorson was born. "As I found out," said Thorson, "my father's father molested him, and he molested my brothers, and they molested me. I was being fondled from the time I was born till I was about seven years old. Then it finally stopped. I was being incested [sic] both inside the home and outside the home -- pedophiles know an incest victim a mile away."

Years later, Thorson said members of the Adults Molested as Children group he belonged to got upset with him because "I said I needed to own up to the fact that I did not do as much as possible to stop the incest. To a certain degree there were parts that I allowed to go on because there were things I was getting out of it, sick as they were." The incest, he said, was a springboard for his later homosexual "lifestyle." "I had an experience when I was about four and a half years old where I was visited by what I now understand to be a demon, that took what was happening to me and perverted and put a seed in me that would eventually blossom into that [homosexual] lifestyle."

Another member of the San Diego chapter of Courage, "Daniel" [he asked to remain anonymous], had a different background. Daniel, 40, has been a member of Courage for a month and a half. He said he came to Courage from "talking to Father Rich in the confessional, basically. He just told me about it, there. After two or three or four weeks, I decided to give him a call and check it out."

Daniel, who is from Orange County, said his family life growing up was good. "Dad was a doctor," he said, "a very busy man, and so I didn't get a lot of.... My case is mostly a physical thing: bad nerves, which put me into an education handicapped class [where you go] because you're dyslexic and you have an abundance of energy and you couldn't sit still; you had to take medications. You know, what I call 'MB', the sin of masturbation -- that's still a problem, that's kind of hard to just up and leave -- but that sin is because of bad nerves and always living under unavoidable stress, or whatever it might be. Maybe I needed to be held more, like in my pre-teens; maybe I needed more attention that way. I wasn't satisfied. Even though my parents and my brothers loved me, and we had a relatively good life -- but maybe because of my bad nerves, or just my physical limitations, I needed compensation, and that just caused me to use my mind to fantasize."

Daniel said that he has had homosexual tendencies "for the most part" of his life. Though he said he thinks homosexuality is "more of a chosen thing," he thinks his physical and mental condition were contributing factors. "But like any cross," he said, "you deal with it. I take full blame for myself. A lot of its ignorance, and stuff like that. I went into a power dive. I didn't pull out at all costs. A lot of it is that I didn't know how to control the airplane. With help and experimentation, I would level it out. Sometimes I would start to pull it up, and start to lose control again. For me it was just, as time went on, I found out how weak I really was. 'I can't do this,' I said, 'I'm failing, time after time after time.'"

Thorson said he was singled out as a "faggot" from the time he went to pre-school because he was overly emotional and sensitive. "I was just a very neat and tidy person," he said. "Since I did not have control on the inside of my life, I could have control on the outside. Oftentimes fastidiousness is perceived as a very homosexual tendency. After a while, I started to believe it."

"Throughout my teens," said Thorson, "I was living as a prostitute, going back and forth to San Francisco and L.A. from San Diego. The plane tickets back then were so cheap, I'd fly up there on the weekend and go dancing and clubbing. I used to go to all these private parties, sugar daddy parties, where all these older men would seek younger guys. It was a real sick cult, but I got sucked into it, and that's where I picked up AIDS."

During his twenties, Thorson said he experienced long periods of chastity, "sometimes eight months to a year." "I was delving into Scripture and prayer," he said. "I've known all along the life was wrong -- most people who engage in it do -- that's why they're so defensive against the Church. They're tired of the fight, and they don't want to fight any more. They have surrendered, as I did, to Satan. And one of the reasons I eventually died from a drug overdose is that I couldn't live with it. I needed to do more and more drugs to squelch the ache in me. I was dead inside."

His homosexuality, according to Thorson, was an attempt to heal a "fractured nature." "I didn't feel like a man," he said. "I was looking for acceptance and affection from other men in my manhood, I was looking for validation. I was looking for a father figure, and I realized that at the time. I was looking for control. I was allowing myself to be molested and raped in my teens by pedophiles to gain control as an adult what I didn't have control of as a child. I became desensitized -- I should have thrown up when it first happened. I was so starved for affection that I was willing to accept anything."

Thorson said he found out that "the sex itself is not what most of the people are after. I was after the power -- I could get this man to come after me and subdue him to want me sexually. Once I had that, I wanted the sex over with. I was off to the next prey. It was a hunt to get control over my abuser. My abuse started in my childhood, and I picked up where they left off and took it umpteen times further. They never could have hoped to do to me what I did to myself."

Like Thorson, Daniel said he knew all along the homosexual life wasn't right. "I would try to keep from sinning, but yet have my friendship, and go to the bars, be promiscuous -- not going right into it, but kind of tempting Satan." During this time, for about eight years, Daniel said he had a girlfriend. "But that didn't work out," he said.

Finally, "more than three years ago," said Daniel, "I just said, maybe the Catholic Church is right. In her past, traditionally, when there's an occasion of sin you avoid it. I thought that, rather than doing that haphazardly, I'm going to do it [all the way]. Kind of like, if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out-- to that severity. No more of my friends, I just literally cut them off. I started eliminating the friends, anyone who was gay, anyone who wasn't trying. I figured, well, this is wrong, I'm not going to try and say that it is right. I like it, I'm attracted to it, but that's all it is. But it's wrong, it's displeasing to God." Breaking away from his past life, however, proved difficult because one man remained for whom he still had an attraction.

Finally, a business opportunity came up in San Diego, and, said Daniel, "I figured this is really my opportunity to break away, really to do the avoiding of the occasion of sin right."

The change for Thorson was more violent and dramatic. He died and, as he says, the Lord gave him back his life. "I knew where I was going, if He had opened the Book of Life," said Thorson. "He decided to show me mercy and give me a second chance. He said to me, 'before you can deal with anything else, you have to get sober. From there you're going to have to deal with a lot of other things and, eventually, you're going to have to walk out of your homosexual behavior. Until you understand how you're fractured and how you're damaged, you will not be able to walk in the freedom of the light of my love.'"

Thorson's journey included a year and a half's stint with Adults Molested as Children to help him understand and deal with the incest he had undergone and what it had to do with his homosexuality. During this period, he also tried various Christian churches, including "some of the holy roller denominations." However, he said there was always "something missing for him" in Pentecostalism. "The Pentecostals were very abusive," he said. "The minister would say (if you had a little bit longer hair) 'Hi there, pretty boy!' They were not helpful; if anything, they drove me further into it."

It took Thorson seven and a half years before he returned to the Catholic Church. "The last I tried before the Catholic Church was the Unitarian," related Thorson, "and the third time going there, the Lord said to me very clearly, 'Philip, turn around, go home, open your Bible and continue to seek me. These people do not know me, and you will not find me here.' On my way home I walked by a church I had walked by a hundred times, and the sign became so big that I saw the time schedule for the parish, and He said, 'this is where I want you. I want you to come back to the Catholic Church and finish the work that your mother began,' because I had left the Church just before my confirmation," at about age 12.

Coming back to the Church, said Thorson "was a phenomenal experience. It was about six months back into it that I really began to see the beauty and the miracles and the joy in the sacrifice of the Mass. The miracles that were happening before me, and experiencing the joy of feel the Lord well up in me as I received him in the Eucharist gave me that power to go through that day and the next couple of days to do what I needed to do. I felt enveloped and cradled in the Lord's arms in the Catholic Church."

Thorson had been in the Church for three and a half years when he discovered Courage, whose goal, he says, is to help homosexuals "become Christian people, to live and walk a path of obedience to God's laws and His commandments, to live the life God intends us to live, and to deal with the issues that come up around the homosexual tendencies that still plague those members that are there. Those who have better foundation in those areas share their experience, strength and hope so that we can help each other."

Daniel said that, at first, he didn't trust Courage. "I figured this is just another occasion of sin; you're just going to meet other gay guys, and they are not going to be all that serious. So I avoided it. Maybe I was right in the past -- down in Orange County, who knows what kind of people there are. My [the San Diego] Courage -- those people are serious and it was good thing. I'm just going, 'whoa, if I did this a long time ago, I would have been in much better shape.'"

Courage meetings, said Daniel, consist of prayer, a visit with Father Rich, reading of the gospel, and conversation. "We'll reflect on the gospel in silence, and then Father might pick something out -- what Christ is to you, or how you want Him to come to you. Then there's a free-for-all -- comments, reflection on what is said, especially if it is something about how to avoid a particular sin, or just how one views the things of God, and the importance of why we're doing this. When I leave there I feel very fortified and it gives me more reason to fight against sin -- so I can obtain the grace to help the others out."

Unlike other homosexual groups in the Church, Courage, said Thorson, does not embrace the sin along with the sinner. "Of course we're supposed to welcome the sinner through the doors," said Thorson, "but you have to tell these people that, at some point in their journey, they're going to have to renounce the behavior, and the Church is here for you in that. You may not renounce it at the beginning; it may be three or four years down the road -- until then you may not receive the Eucharist, but we will be here to minister to you and support you in your journey. Many of the [ministries] are afraid to chase them off. Better to chase them off with the truth, and let them think about it for a while, than to coddle them, and then say, 'oh, by the way....' That's going to chase them away forever.

"You have to have compassion for the person," continued Thorson. "The person is sick and most likely had it done to them -- that's all well and fine, but the buck stops at about ten percent of that. That person needs to be called to stand on his own two feet to seek the Lord and answer for his or her problems. I'm so sick of these people who say 'oh I had these problems as a child!' There isn't a bad choice I made in my life that I did not consciously think through. Not a one. Not when I had AIDS and had sex unsafely with people... It's by looking at those things honestly that I walk the walk I walk today. Once I begin to believe my own lies, I am lost. God help me."

Daniel says that, through Courage, he has learned that "God wants me to do something extraordinary. I don't know exactly what it is, but I'm just going to keep seeking, and maybe one of these days I'll do some extraordinary action. One thing I'm going to do is find someone who has a comparable problem. It doesn't matter whether it's the bars or MB -- I'll say, I will make the biggest sacrifice I can ever make, that I ever made in my life. I will stop doing whatever I do to obtain the grace for that person to give him the grace to keep out of his sin. If I fall into sin, not only am I letting God down, letting a good idea down, but I'm letting that person down."

For more information on Courage, call (714) 751-5335, or (619) 280-0515.

TOP