Celibacy is, at times—though certainly not always—difficult and frustrating. This needs to be acknowledged.
So, when I feel frustrated, when obedience gets tough, when I feel abandoned and alone, how can I make sense of it? Where can I find God in the darkness?
One of my pet peeves involves Christian publishers who are allergic to presenting faces of lesbian or gay Christians.
There’s an old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. And for those who don’t know the publishing business, I should add that you can’t judge the author by the book cover, either. Authors usually have very little control over the cover design of their book. In most cases, the fault for the cover designs I critique below lies with the publisher rather than the author.
So here, presented with some comment, is a rogues’ gallery of homosexuals without faces.
A few weeks ago, a new acquaintance, who had read some of my essays about homosexuality, asked me what words I use to describe myself. Would I describe myself as gay? Homosexual? Same-sex attracted? When I tried to deflect the question with something about not being too concerned about what words to use, he responded with surprise: shouldn’t a philosopher be very concerned about using precisely the right word?
He’s right, of course. I certainly think a lot about how best to describe myself. As a celibate Christian, I think about my sexuality in the a way that is, at least in some important respects, very different from the way Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, or Lady Gaga think about theirs. So why would I call myself “gay”?
First, who am I?
I am a Catholic graduate student in Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Before grad school, from the end of my teens to my mid twenties, I worked as a programmer at Microsoft. Now, I teach medical ethics and philosophy of the human person, and am working on a dissertation looking at how recent discoveries in artificial intelligence and neuroscience should shape our understanding of the mind-body relation.
I’m also gay and celibate.
For the last decade and a half, I’ve been trying to articulate Christian teaching on human sexuality (particularly homosexuality) more clearly, and to bring a more respectful, Christ-like attitude to an often-hostile discussion. Along the way, I’ve asked myself a lot of questions about what it means to be gay and Christian. I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to gays and lesbians, to ex-gays, to confused college students, to concerned parents, and to anyone else who is interested in the issue and wants to learn more.
Spiritual Friendship 
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