Notes: Stewarding Attraction

Panel Notes from Revoice23

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

A month and a half ago, I had the honor of sitting on a panel at the Revoice conference titled “Stewarding Attraction”; in it, panelists shared about our experiences managing our attraction in the context of our own LGBTQ+ Christian lives. The conversation was a pretty wild ride (who thought it was a good idea for me to sit next to Henry Abuto, anyway?), but I did prepare some notes to which I occasionally referred. What follows are those notes:

First, could you share your name, and any helpful identifiers?

Hello, my name is Grant Hartley, and my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a Catholic (a for a little over two years now) and have long known I was gay, but over the past few years I have also realized that sexual attraction and desire might play a less prominent role in my life than it does in others, so I have also begun to think of myself and describe myself as a little bit asexual.

We want to start with something lighter—can you share with us one of your earlier experiences of attraction? What was it like?

I think my earliest memory of feeling attracted to someone was probably when I was around eleven or twelve, and the object of attraction was Atreyu from The Never-Ending Story (and later on, several of the Power Rangers). At the beginning, I had no clue that this attraction might be an indication that I was gay; I just had this overwhelming feeling of wanting to be friends with Atreyu, to be close to him, to care for him. All very innocent, really. In the beginning, this was not even sexual at all. It was an emotional yearning, a longing, but not for sex. This experience has convinced me that there is a non-sexual core to my attraction to men, which I feel free to think about in terms other than brokenness or sin. A desire for same-sex sex may be a broken desire, but a longing for same-sex intimacy and same-sex love is not—it is good, and something I think the world needs.

What are some of the challenges you’ve had in navigating attraction?

While I have struggled with chastity and managing a libido (usually in the context of pornography, not in being tempted to cross sexual boundaries with another person), I think many of the challenges I have faced in regard to navigating attraction are non-sexual. Initially, coming to terms with my pattern of attraction and mourning a life I would never have was a struggle; I had to find a way to love the life I was actually living, rather than the life I had been subtly yet consistently told was the only one worth living (opposite-sex marriage and kids). Dealing with shame has also been a struggle, and not only the shame imposed on me by others, but also the shame that comes from being attracted to someone who does not reciprocate—and all the painful questions that brings up: am I good? am I attractive? can I win them over? am I destined for a sad, lonely life after all?

Second adolescence was also a big struggle for me. After I came out, I had to process through all the adolescent feelings I never really got to process through when I was a teenager, and for a few years I felt almost constantly desperate, clingy, and awkward; crushes shook me like earthquakes. Getting to a point where I felt comfortable in my own skin and company, where I was not constantly thinking about how to impress others and find someone to like me—it took a lot of effort, and a lot of sitting with discomfort without rushing to numb myself. I think of a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?”

How do you deal differently with romantic feelings versus sexual attraction?

There is an unfortunate tendency in conversations about faith and sexuality to collapse romance and sex into one category—by claiming romance is mere preparation for sex, or that romance and sex are always connected, or even speaking about romantic feelings as sexual desire. But in my own experience, romantic feelings and sexual feelings actually seem directed toward different ends. Romantic feelings for me generally find their end in non-sexual intimacy, whether physical or emotional; I usually do not have a desire to “go further” and actually have sex with someone, which seems almost mechanical to me. Sometimes I describe these romantic feelings, jokingly, as really wanting to bake someone a casserole—wanting to take care of them, enjoy their presence, share some kind of non-sexual intimacy.

For me, the major temptation is not to cross a sexual boundary with another person, but to become obsessed, to make my whole world revolve around another person, to become desperate for their attention. I don’t think this means that I am super holy or any less of a sinner: this obsession is another kind of lust, one that makes people into objects for my own pleasure. Lust dehumanizes, and the solution is not just to avoid people, which does not help us recognize their humanity. Rather, I think of managing attraction as sort of like…golf. Our goal in any relationship is to love, just as in golf our aim is to make it into the cup. But there are all sorts of conditions one has to take into account in order to reach that goal, and these conditions require us to adjust our approach. If I am attracted to someone, it is like there is a wind at my back, and I do not have to try as hard—in fact, it would be good to moderate myself, so that I don’t overshoot and miss the goal.

Are there any boundaries you feel are helpful when you’re attracted to someone?

I’m probably not the best person to discuss boundaries that are helpful in avoiding sexual behavior. But as for emotional boundaries, I have found that giving myself adequate space has been really important to help prevent obsession or objectification. I don’t necessarily have a formula, or a hard-and-fast line, but I strive for regulation and balance. Generally, while I think certain explicit boundaries can be helpful and even necessary, what is just as important (or sometimes more practically important) is intention and direction; good questions to ask myself are, what will doing or saying this thing do to my own heart? to their heart? Moments or days after, will this contribute to my emotional and spiritual health, or be harmful? Where might this lead? Thinking of setting boundaries in terms of being kind to myself, rather than merely restricting myself, has been a helpful re-framing.

What does it mean to have integrity/honor each other in the process?

I suspect the other panelists will have more insightful things to share in answering this question than I do, so I defer to them!

How honest should you be in a relationship with someone you’re attracted to? When it is mutual? When it is not?

I am very much a verbal processor, and so when I am attracted to someone, I generally find it helpful to discuss it with somebody, usually with myself through writing in a journal, with friends, and on my good days, with God in prayer. The person to whom I am attracted is virtually never the first person I tell, because I need some time to understand how I am feeling. Sometimes I never end up telling them—because there does not seem to be a way forward, because telling them would impact the relationship negatively, etc. If I sense that feelings are not mutual, it just doesn’t strike me as helpful to express my feelings. If feelings are mutual, I think it generally becomes a bit more necessary—or rather, it just sort of inevitably happens. Depending on where I see the relationship going, I can share with them more intentionally and have a conversation about where to go from there. 

How do you grieve the relationships you find yourself desiring but unable to pursue?

I would probably push back against the phrasing of the question; it is not necessarily that I am unable to pursue relationships, that I am unable to pursue a particular relationship in the particular way that I want—an important distinction. If I find myself desiring a particular kind of relationship with a person that does not seem possible, I can mourn the idea that I will be unable to pursue the relationship that particular way, but the person is still there for me to relate to; I can still pursue some kind of relationship with them, one that looks different from how I imagined it, but a relationship nonetheless. Sure, there might be some instances in which it would be wiser to avoid a relationship entirely, and it’s important to use discernment in those cases. But generally, I find that with enough time, I can adjust to having a healthy relationship with someone to whom I have found myself attracted. I hope that doesn’t come off as cold!

Are there any ways in which you’ve seen, or see, your attraction be used by God for good?

One of the ways I have thought about my attraction over the last few years is under a three-fold heading of the desire to belong, the desire to behold, and the desire to become. We typically think about attraction along the lines of the first and second categories: wanting to belong to someone else and have them belong to oneself, romantically or sexually, or wanting to enjoy their beauty, either by healthy appreciation or unhealthy objectification.

But the third category—the desire to become—has been an especially rich source of self-reflection for me. Speaking for myself, I think that part of my attraction, especially as someone virtually exclusively attracted to people of the same sex or gender, entails a desire to become like them. I definitely think that this can be used in a toxic, creepy, ex-gay sort of way (like, the “father wound” and sports camps), but I think there is some truth in it. It is that age-old gay question, do I want him or do I want to be like him? Being attracted to someone therefore presents me with an opportunity to reflect on who I want to become, who God is calling me to be, how I may be feeling insecure, and how God meets me in that insecurity.

I also think, returning to the desire to behold, that my attraction to men involves an attraction to and appreciation for a certain kind of masculine beauty in the world. It is difficult to sketch out the specifics, because so many of the dynamics of attraction are difficult to describe, but others have described this as a part of a “gay sensibility,” a way of looking at the world that is necessarily shaped by my attraction to men. I wonder if the kind of beauty I see in the world as a gay person is necessarily different from the kind of beauty, say, straight men see in the world. If this is true, it might be a great gift God has given me and the Church, not just brokenness.