GCN Radio - February 12, 2004
Transcribed by Vombatus

To listen to this episode, visit http://www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio

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BRIAN: Hello, and welcome to another edition of GCN Radio. In Muncie, Indiana this is Brian…

JUSTIN: …and I’m Justin in Raleigh, North Carolina.

BRIAN: Thanks everyone for listening. It’s been a couple of weeks since we’ve had a new show but I’ve had a little bit of vacation and lots and lots of things going on, but now we’re back in the studio. I’m back in my normal studio, yay! And I’m so happy about that, but I’m especially happy to welcome from Austin, Texas, our very own Danny. Welcome Danny!

DANNY: Hello!

BRIAN: Glad to have you.

DANNY: Thank you thank you.

BRIAN: So, I’m just going to start off right from the very, very beginning with one of your very, very profound posts. I found lots of deep meaning in this. It reads in part: “Well last Sunday I bought the computer from the church and I just had my internet hooked up today. And I’m so happy, so very happy. I’ve got a computer in my house, yes, in my house. And I’m so happy, so very happy. I’ve got a computer in my house. Anyway, the end. Danny.”

DANNY: Yes, it was very profound.

BRIAN: I just don’t detect any emotion there.

DANNY: I was actually going for “I’ve got the joy joy” thing… it didn’t come across very well I guess.

BRIAN: Okay.

DANNY: If you sing it to the theme, it sounds a little bit better.

JUSTIN: I got that!

BRIAN: [sings the post] Okay! There we go!

DANNY: Yes, I’m a dork, I can’t help it.

BRIAN: No, I like it, it works. So before we get into the real nuts and bolts of our conversation, I ‘m supposed to ask you about fish sticks and Cheez Wiz™.

DANNY: Oh no.

BRIAN: This is from a recent Monday night chat. What’s the story on this here? Recount for us the tale.

DANNY: Well, the way this story goes is: So the other day I went to my cupboard and I didn’t have hardly anything to eat in there, so I was looking to see what I could scrounge up or what have you and I saw that I had some fish sticks and also some macaroni and cheese. But, I did not have any milk or butter, so I thought that maybe I could use Cheez Wiz™ instead of the little packages that come with the macaroni.

JUSTIN: Oh no…

DANNY: … well, it was a total disaster. A total, 100% disaster. It looked so good.

BRIAN: What did it smell like?

DANNY: It smelled like macaroni and cheese!

BRIAN: with fish sticks! It smelled a little fishy.

DANNY: well the whole thing was a little bit fishy. Anyway, I ended up ordering a pizza.

BRIAN: Oh my. We’re happy that you didn’t get any food poisoning and we’re glad that you’re here on GCN Radio.

DANNY: Why, thank you!

JUSTIN: Well, Danny, I’m so excited that you’re around. You and I have been talking a bunch and you haven’t been as active on the message boards. I think I’ve had a chance to get to know you better than almost anybody else. But do you want to tell everybody about how you found GCN in the first place? What brought you here?

DANNY: Well, I found GCN while surfing the internet and looking for message board software to put on our church website, and I happened to come across GCN. I didn’t pay too much attention to it at first because at first I didn’t realize that it was a message board, I just thought it was another gay Christian site that was out there. But, I guess by divine inspiration, I actually found it again a couple of weeks later and that’s when I actually signed on and took a better look at it. Um… yeah.

JUSTIN: Danny likes to tell stories that end with kind of “Uh…. The end.”

DANNY: I say ‘the end’ a lot! Sometimes my little rabbit trails have little rabbit trails that have little rabbit trails. And so sometimes instead of trying to backtrack it’s better just to say, ‘the end.’ And start over. So… The end!

JUSTIN: So you actually attend a church which you do the website for this church which is a gay-affirming church, right?

BRIAN: The Kingdom Seekers, is that the name of it?

DANNY: It’s actually called The Kingdom Seekers in Christ Jesus. We’re known throughout town as the Kingdom Seekers, though. We are a church for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and straight community. It’s a really, really awesome church.

JUSTIN: You were telling me actually that you have an interesting story about how you came to that church in the first place and things that were going on in your life prior to that. Did you want to talk about that at all?

DANNY: Yeah, I first heard about the church through my pastor in Fort Worth. Now bear in mind that I hadn’t talked to my pastor in over a year in Forth Worth. I actually called him when I was, like, cracked out on drugs and totally not doing well. I called him because I was fearing I’d commit suicide or hurt myself. I’d already called my parents and they were on their way to pick me up from here in Austin, and I called my pastor who, at the drop of a hat, came and sat with me until my parents got there. He gave me the name of the church here in Austin. Now when I got to Austin, I didn’t look for the church; I wasn’t looking for God, I wasn’t looking for anything. And I did everything that I could to get out of the house as quickly as possible. I actually signed up for a drug rehab center and they weren’t able to take me until Monday, and this was on a Friday night. I ended up calling the pastor of the church because I found his number while I was packing my bags on that Sunday afternoon. He set up an appointment to meet me on Monday, and I guess that God was really directing my steps.

BRIAN: I wanted to ask you Danny—you mentioned that you had used drugs. What was happening in your life at the time that led you to drugs? And then, at what point did you realize, “Oh man, I’ve got to get some help of some kind”?

DANNY: It’s kind of interesting, because I’ve never really been one that liked drugs and in fact all through my life I did not like people that did drugs or talked about drugs or wanted anything to do with drugs. But I grew up in the church and when I started having to think about the issues of my sexuality and my Christianity, the true answers that I really needed that are most relevant to my situation weren’t there. So I just believed what everybody told me, that because I was gay and because I wasn’t able to change, that I was going to go to hell. That caused me to kind of move away from the church, and I think that the longer I was away from the church the more I got desensitized to the things that were around me. The whole drug thing was a very slow process. The first time that I tried drugs, I tried ecstasy. One of my friends had offered my ecstasy and I had turned him down for months and months and months. And one day he asked me while I was having a particularly bad day, and, you know, “Why not?” And from there it was a very slow progression into the whole drug scene. It started out with me doing ecstasy; I did it once and then I didn’t do it again for another three months. I think the time after that was even longer. But it ended with me doing drugs everyday, all day. I think the last binge that I was on was probably a three month binge where my friends and I, we ate and slept every couple of days. The rest of our time was just doing drugs, going to the clubs, and being stupid.

JUSTIN: And then ultimately it was a pastor that kind of brought you back to God?

DANNY: When I was in this three month long binge, or what have you, I had witnessed my best friend almost die of an overdose. The whole time I was sitting there, I was like, “This is so stupid, what am I doing here?” And then he finally made it through okay and everything and that night, actually, I was just totally done with drugs. I had decided for myself that I was not going to do this anymore, this is not me, this is going to ruin… this is killing people. And shortly after that, in fact, the very next day, my friend that had almost died, along with all of my other friends, were talking about going to the club again. The sad thing is, I was still very desensitized and I ended up going. I ended up going to the club with them and just getting back into the whole thing. Bear in mind that it was all engraved into my mind. So now I wasn’t doing it out of ignorance, I was doing it knowingly and having seen what would happen. The moment that I realized that this was not what I needed to be doing, one of my friends who hadn’t slept for four days, he started really freaking out… I mean, totally, totally freaking out. You know, like the crack scenes you see on TV on COPS. And when I was sitting there watching him from across the room, watching him doing his shaking and freaking out and all that stuff, I just really felt the Holy Spirit said to me, “You know what, you should really be able to do something with this. You know, you should be in a position where you could pray for this person, or should be able to take authority of this situation, and because of the position that you’ve allowed yourself to get into, you can’t do anything.” And so I sat there and I cried. I didn’t know whether my friend was dying, whether the drugs had just finally caught up with him, but the whole time I knew that I was in the wrong place.

JUSTIN: I know that one thing that’s so amazing to me about your story is that God is able to bring us from all kinds of things… As Christians we don’t all have this sort of happy, perfect little stories of growing up in the church and serving God all of our lives. By the same token, we don’t all have testimonies like that either, because I really did grow up in this little Christian home… but I think that it’s amazing that God brings us from all over and that no matter where you are and no matter what’s going on in your life, God’s able to bring you back to Him and take your life, whatever it is, and make something out of it to server God. You were telling me that God’s really given you a heart for witnessing to those folks who are in the gay club scene, the drugs, the promiscuous sex, all that kind of stuff that’s going on there.

DANNY: After church one day my Mom asked me, “Why would God make you gay? Why would God let you be born gay?” And without thinking, or without pondering or anything, I just said, “For the power of my testimony.” And after I said it I realized how true that was. That each of us are created and are predestined to go through a certain set of events. Obviously our choices impact how long we stay in those events or in some cases what the outcomes are, or I guess in all cases what the outcome is. The things that I have been through, you know, I could look at them and say I’ve had a rotten life… I’ve been homeless, I’ve been in the bars, I’ve been doing drugs, I’ve had promiscuous sex, I’ve done all this stuff that I look back on and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh!” Or I can just look at it like the Bible says, that God takes the things that the enemy means for harm and he turns them to our good. And not only has it made me a stronger person, but it’s also given me something that I can share with other people. And what better place to share that with those people than in the bars, in the places that they are. I can meet them where they’re at because I’ve been there.

BRIAN: So do you go out and do a lot of ministering in those places, then?

DANNY: You know, the first time that my pastor told me that they went to bars and talked to people about Jesus, I got this picture of standing on the street corner, someone standing there with a guitar, singing Kum-by-yah and handing out tracts. And let me tell you it was nothing like that at all. I think that that stuff has a place—not necessarily Kum-by-yah—but the tracts have a place.

JUSTIN: Kum-by-yah never has a place! [laughter]

DANNY: Okay, okay! Sadly to say, but our community is in the bars. They’re in the clubs and I think if Jesus were around right now that’s where he’d be.

BRIAN: It’s a shame that so much of our culture—and by ‘our culture’ I mean gay culture—feels that that’s the only avenue that they have to go. And it’s great that you’re someone that’s promoting another way, a better way to live your life.

DANNY: The first time I ever heard about a church was in a bar. And that was an MCC church. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have any desire to go to it or find it or anything else, but it was in a bar that that seed was planted, because that’s where I heard about it. And when I fell on one of the roughest times of my life I had heard about the MCC church so I knew where to look.

BRIAN: So before we go, Danny, I wanted to just ask, “What’s next for you as you go about your own journey?

DANNY: I think what’s next for me is to continue to learn everything that I possibly can, to read the Bible as much as I can, to try to be faithful… it’s so easy to get distracted by the things that happen in the world, to get bogged down by this or that, and I think that it’s important for everyone to stay connected to God in some way. I had that connection when I was a kid and I lost it and I found it again and I don’t ever want to lose that again.

JUSTIN: You know, one thing that strikes me about you, Danny, from knowing you personally and the conversations we’ve had, is I think you are one of the most committed Christians that I know. I’m impressed by that.

DANNY: I grew up being fake. Being gay, I always lied about who I was, I never had to be honest with anything. I guess I’m tired of that; I’m so tired of being fake, of being unreal. I have no problem telling people that I have issues. I’ve been through stuff and I’m going through stuff, and I think we always will but I think if you stick close to God, then he’ll be close to you. And if you call on Jesus, he’ll always be there for you.

BRIAN: Danny, thanks so much for being on GCN Radio today.

DANNY: It was a pleasure to be here.

JUSTIN: Well, I guess that about wraps it up for this edition of GCN Radio. As always, you can catch us on the web at www.gaychristian.net/gcnradio/ and until next time…

BRIAN: but don’t slash GCN Radio from your internet searches.

JUSTIN: And so until next time, I’m Justin in Raleigh…

BRIAN: …and I’m Brian in Muncie. Have a great day, guys…

DANNY: The End!

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