Despite all the incredible people in our online community, I've recognized my need for more men in my city on whom I can depend. This has been a sobering searching process because YOB has become such a pillar of my identity. If I'm no longer close or as intentional with a large lot of our YOB community, who even am I?
We finish our SPANNING THE SPECTRUM sexuality series by learning more of Tom’s story as Erin returns to take over hosting duties! Tom shares a new term he’s still feeling out for himself: androsexual, or an attraction to masculinity. Tom and Erin look back on the previous 9 episodes of this series, giving love to all our wonderful contributors!
Erin returns to help us SPAN THE SPECTRUM of our community from a woman's perspective! Sexuality aside, Erin discusses a general resonance with queer culture and then explains how her sexuality most aligns with pansexuality: an attraction for people regardless of gender. She also discloses being somewhere on the asexual (ace) spectrum. Erin shares some of her journey of self-discovery with sexuality, growing up in purity culture as a woman, living in Cambodia doing missions work, eventually dating men, and getting back to America on the other side of a pandemic.
Perhaps it was the touch of melancholy in me that many other "Side B" Christians also feel, or simply being a disabled man, or maybe even a combination of the two – the fact that I have often felt both a physical and mental peace listening to classical music. Whatever it was, my soul felt ministered to in a previously unknown way.
You know, after fifteen years of blogging about gay things and masculine things and all the other intermingled, messy faith things, I often feel like I've run out of stories to tell here. Gay kisses, wet dreams, fetishes – what on earth is there left to say?? Ah, but then I wake up one day and suddenly remember that time another "Side B" guy from a Facebook group asked if he could do something to my genitals. Ah, yes – a new story to tell. Glory be.
I've thought a lot about writing a manifesto for Side B people. In fact, I've written multiple drafts of a manifesto for a few years now, but I've never been satisfied with the result. In the end, I figured I should get one of those drafts out there, so that people can imagine what Side B Gay people are advocating for. So, here it is...an incomplete rough draft of the Side B Manifesto.
YOB gave me hope, because even though I was 55 years old I had struggled accepting myself since my teen years. I had never seen myself as anything but subhuman, unworthy, and a complete reprobate because I had feelings and desires for other men.
We conclude our 7-values series by exploring our other "ship" of discipleship! How do we define this spiritual term? Is discipleship meant only for our own growth, or is our discipleship also for the people around us? How organized or structured must discipleship of believers look? And how have we felt disqualified from discipling others in their walks with Jesus because of our sexuality?
Once upon a time, Your Other Brothers held to the value of brotherhood! But we've since shifted this value to one of kinship. Why the change? What does kinship evoke, both for this life and the next, and how do we build or "practice" this value of kinship? When have we felt that sense of belonging outside our blood family, and when have we felt the opposite with our sexuality and masculinity, as strangers and aliens?
At first I thought the book would be an interesting "tell-all" about the making of the film, but what I got was a provoking, hilarious, disturbing, and twisted foray into the relationship between Greg and Tommy.