Oh I know, it could certainly be a lot more strained relationship then it is. We’ve varied from my being invited to attend, but not participate in his wedding. (He wanted ‘Men of God’ to stand with him) And now he and his wife have spent the last two Thanksgiving dinners in my home with my partner.
We tend to have fairly superficial conversations and will probably never be super close like when we were kids. He thinks I’m going to Hell and I think he’s wasting his life. The main difference is he wants to change me and I’m happy to let him life his life how he wants.
Realized I forgot to actually talk about the counseling thing. I spent about 6 weeks the summer I was turning 18 travelling with IBLP and working at the children’s seminars. Those were basically a kid friendly version of what the adults were learning. Things were going fairly well until I was involved in a conversation with a group of the other teens and the topic of ‘what type of guy/girl would you be interested in?’ came up. This was a huge no-no, as it went totally against the courtship principles. Someone tattled about it and a few of us got called in to talk to the girl that was in charge of us. She called our parents, Bill Gothard and who knows else. Several of us were required to stop working at the seminar and were driven back to the Indianapolis center.
I thought I was going just to meet my mom and go home, but it turned out the plan was for me to spend a few days there in a sort of therapy with one of their counselors. We covered a massive amount of topics, from ‘had I ever used a Ouija board’ to drugs, alcohol, sex and I don’t even remember what all else. I was required to pray for forgiveness, even for things I hadn’t actually done in case I had somehow allowed an evil spirit to have a presence in my life. We also discussed that I was exactly living up masculine gender roles in the way I walked, talked, that I wore a bracelet and so on. The only decent thing that came out of it was he basically told my mom that being gay was a phase because OF COURSE I knew that God hadn’t made me that way. I just agreed with what he said because I wanted the hell out of there.
I have since found out that the ‘therapy’ I was given was fairly mild. It wasn’t uncommon for the teens that worked at the Indianapolis or Chicago centers to be hauled in front of a group of their peers and beg forgiveness for their sins.