Craving for identity
I said that our incomplete male identity, besides determining the direction of our sexual attractions, is also the engine that drives our homosexual behavior. The enormous power of the homosexual drive is seen in the incredibly foolish, even insane things that many homosexual men will do to make some kind of contact with maleness.

What causes an otherwise sensible man to pick up a tough-looking young stranger and take him to his apartment, knowing full well he risks being robbed and beaten or even worse? Why does an intelligent, married business or professional man risk arrest and public humiliation by making sexual contact with another man in a public restroom? Why did I repeatedly go into a gay bar on a main thoroughfare in Baltimore, knowing I could be seen by anyone and have my whole deception uncovered?

We did these things because of the enormity of the craving within us. We were driven to make some kind of contact with anything that represented or symbolized maleness: a hard, tough look, muscles, a man’s penis. These were symbols of manhood – the manhood that we did not have – and we were driven, often obsessively, to gaze on them, touch them, smell them, taste them, become one with them in some way. Our incomplete manhood cried out for this, cried out for its missing elements.

Leanne Payne illustrates this craving for manhood with her cannibalism theory. In The Broken Image she describes how cannibals ate only the people they admire, believing that by eating them they can acquire some of their traits. This “consuming” drive for manhood in the homosexual male becomes obvious: A man who feels he lacks complete manhood satisfies his need for it through his homosexual behavior, hoping to acquire some of the other man’s manhood.

The key point to remember, however, is that the craving for another’s manhood is only present in a man who feels he lacks his own manhood. Is that not the case with all covetousness? We crave the things we don’t have or believe we don’t have. So intense is that craving – so powerful the engine that can drive a man to homosexual behavior – that even when such behavior flies in the face of both his fundamental human desire to protect himself and his most basic religious beliefs, he still cannot stop himself.

The identity issue manifests itself in another way. Many of us see the failure to have been affirmed by men (or conversely the feeling that we were rejected) as a key element in the development of our homosexuality. In this regard, the powerful homosexual drive is a desperate plea from the little boy within: “Won’t some man show me that I have some value as a man to a man?” This is not just a craving to ease the pain of low self-esteem. A man may be quite valued by the women in his life, and he may recognize that he has extraordinary gifts in certain areas, but the cry of the little boy is still there. His value must be shown by a man, and the area being valued must express manhood.

As with so many parts of life, especially areas of deeper need, this need can be sexualized. From that point on, a sexual liaison or simply receiving a signal that another man desires him, even if only as a sex object, somehow temporarily satisfies the craving. This accounts for much of what I call “dry cruising” that homosexual men do, going where other men may come on to them, even at a time when sexual contact is not desired. Sometimes, on the way home from work, when I knew I could not explain being more than a half hour late, I would still stop at a gay bar. I was not looking for a contact but only hoping that some man would show me that he wanted me.

No shortcut to growing up
God could zap any one of us and give us total victory over our sexual sins in an instant. There was such a zapping in my healing in that I was set free from desire for sex with men at the time of my conversion. But because He has a far better plan for us, this is not the way God usually operates. He is not content to see us merely fulfill our desire to stop our sinful behavior, nor is He satisfied to find us merely being turned on to women sexually.

He wants us to become the men he created us to be, true men in every respect. He may allow sinful behavior to continue so as to bring us to the point at which we will surrender the powerful stranglehold that has us in bondage. Likewise, He may allow the pain of undeveloped manhood to continue in order to make us finally willing to go through the painful process of growing up into the men He created us to be.

When my children were growing up, I hated to see them get hurt physically. However, I still took the training wheels off their bikes. I would rather see them get a little bloody and bruised than have them never able to ride a bike. I would rather see them try, fall, and try again than see them grow up to be fearful individuals.

If this is your circumstance, does it seem as though God is playing games with you? Is He letting you dangle in the wind in your homosexuality until you finally figure out what you are supposed to do? Certainly not. One of the principal metaphors that God uses to describe the relationship that He wants with us is that of a father and a son. What does any man desire for his son more than that he grow into the fullness of his manhood?

If we then, who are sinful, desire this for our sons, how much more must God desire this for us? He who planted in each of us all the attributes of manhood could not want anything less than that these attributes grow and blossom to their fullest. And just as a good father disciplines the son he loves, so will our Father let us suffer in our brokenness until we hear His voice and start to seek the very best that He has for us, our full manhood.

God established the family in which each father would teach his son what it means to be a man. We know that life hasn’t always worked out this way. Sin came into the world, and fatherhood, like everything else, became imperfect. However, God’s ultimate plan for us has not changed. While His original plan for our lives may have failed through human sin, redemption is ours through Jesus Christ. God will be our Father, and He will walk us through the process that will bring us into our full manhood. All things become new in Jesus Christ.

Reprinted from Growth into Manhood: Resuming the Journey by Alan Medinger. Copyright © 2000. Used by permission of Harold Shaw Publishers, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. All rights reserved.

Alan Medinger is the director of Regeneration, an ex-gay ministry in Baltimore, MD.