Hello, my name is Sterling Tull. I’m a gay fourteen year old boy living in the wonderfully uneventful state of Idaho with my wonderful mother, Christy Cottle, and wonderful stepfather, Davin Cottle. Now that my short introduction is out of the way, you can get to the good stuff. Below is a poem that I wrote earlier this year about the trials and tribulations of being a young and gay child growing up in the church. The thoughts expressed in this poem are the exact and true things that I personally believed when I was just twelve years old, otherwise in sixth grade when I was finally realizing my sexuality. Now I am fourteen but I still hold true to the things I expressed because it is the most I can do at the moment. I want this poem to help people to realize that no one at such a young age should experience such awful things.
Through the eyes of a child
I am sore.
I am done.
The hours I’ve wasted on this. The countless times I’ve prayed and pleaded for everything to go right.
The energy that crawled away from my body and leaving me in a helpless heap.
God doesn’t love me. He never did.
He doesn’t care. He didn’t make me this way, I chose this, but for some reason, I can’t reverse it.
He doesn’t care because he won’t answer my prayers of pleading.
God didn’t do this to me, he created man to be normal, and I’m not. I’m disappointing him.
He doesn’t care because of that disappointment.
He doesn’t care because I’m evil. I’m going straight to hell once I die, and no one will care because they will know what I was.
A blasphemer.
A liar.
No one will see me as that depressed dead kid; they’ll see me as that dead kid who fell into Satan’s grip through the power of lust.
No one will care because they’ll think I’m weak because I didn’t overcome it.
My church will still teach the same principles.
Brainwashing children like me who have no way out.
Children who think the same things I do, because they’re different, and for some reason, that’s wrong.
My church is a lie.
They said that God loves all of his children that he is loving and accepting.
They said that Jesus is our lord and that he’ll save us, but why can’t he save me?
They say to fear god.
But why fear God, if we truly believe that he understands everything?
He understands adulterers.
He made us to have that lust, knowing we’d act upon it someday.
If I can change it, if it’s just a phase, then why hasn’t it gone away?
I’ve done nothing towards it, I’ve never kissed or hugged, only my mom.
All I’ve done is pray, but God never delivers.
He won’t ever deliver.
If God really loved me…
If God really believed that my thoughts could turn into sin…
If my church really believes that it can be reversed, and that everything is solved with prayer and fast, then why haven’t I changed?
Why haven’t the millions of us changed?
We’ve all prayed.
All of us.
But God keeps letting us down, giving us no help.
Was I damned from the beginning?
All I see in old photos is myself before the pain.
When I was normal.
I am gay.
I hate it.
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