Video Transcript:

So this time I want to ask the question: ‘Is it wrong to be gay’, ‘is it wrong to be a gay man?’. We’ve just had 2,000 years of the Catholic Church telling us that being gay is wrong but I don’t need anybody else telling me that I’m wrong. I remember in my childhood, growing up I often thought that I was the only person that was gay – well, I didn’t even know that the word gay existed, I just felt that I was the only person growing up that had feelings towards men. I remember at night when I used to go to bed at about 15/16 praying to God, praying to Jesus to take it away because I really didn’t want it, I didn’t know how to deal with it and I really didn’t know how to be with it. Just praying at night, night after night over years asking for it to be taken away…and it wasn’t. In my 20s I kind of ‘came out’ when I was 19 and I was a brat of a gay man for about 4 years after that. A brat, just living out all of the repression, living out all of the things I never felt able to do before.

So I kind of come back all the way down to ‘is it wrong to be gay’. And in our childhoods and in our adult lives there are conscious and unconscious messages about whether it’s ok to be gay or not and some of those we are going to take on, some of those we are going to believe and some of those we are going to feel that we are not acceptable to other people. Like for example I’ve been in situations where I’ve not disclosed that I’m a gay man just because it just didn’t feel right and it didn’t feel comfortable and they kind of assumed I was straight or something else. So there’s many times I’ve denied myself and I’ve denied my sexuality and as I said in my childhood, I remember when adults around used to talk about gay men it was really really not ok to be a gay man and I remember feeling terrified when I was 15 that I would be found out and discovered. So we can grow up with this background around is it ok to be gay and what I do in my forties is I come back to moving all of those other people’s ideas out of the way, all of the conditioning that I’ve picked up and everything that’s other than my being. When I come back to my being I just sit with myself – I know that I am attracted to men, I feel aroused by men and I feel sexual and erotic with men and I am a gay man. And that’s the fact before anybody else has done anything.

If I hold the belief that God, or whatever I believe in created this world in the most perfect way then I have to believe that I too am perfect too. That created as a gay man, that I am perfect too and was created as perfect as everybody else on this planet. So for me when I come back to the question of ‘is it ok to be gay?’ that’s not really the question, for me it’s who is the truth of me, who am I really and it’s about sitting with that truth and making friends and loving yourself and loving the truth of who you are. In my 20s and 30s I don’t think I loved myself so much and I think that I used to just survive and exist and it’s taken me the last 15-20 years of personal development work on myself to really start to look at myself, to really start to accept myself and to really start to love myself. I would say that at my age of 44 I’m much much kinder to myself than I’ve ever been in my life and you know they say ‘an old head on young shoulders’ and I want to be able to share that I wish I’d been kinder to myself much much earlier.

The thing I love about Tantra is it helps you to come back to yourself and it helps you to confront all of those things I’ve talked about in this video. At its most essence it helps you to come back to yourself and to learn to love yourself. So that’s your task for this week, to spend some time loving yourself. Until next time, thank you and good bye.