The Cross in the Closet

Timothy Kurek spent a year of his life trying to understand what it’s like to be a gay man in America. The author of The Cross in the Closet was raised as a conservative Christian in Nashville’s Bible Belt. “I became afraid of the word homosexual,” he admits. “Gays were the enemy.”

But after meeting a friend who recently came out and was disowned by her family because of it, Kurek says he had a revelation, and decided that the best way to empathize and understand what gay people experience was to come out as a gay man to everyone in his life.

For the first time, Kurek says he felt the need to question the religious persecution of gay people. “I knew that I was facing something entirely different,” he says. “How could I understand remotely what was truth and stereotype?”

His book is the story of his year living as a gay man and the people he met that affirmed a new feeling about his own Christian faith – one that doesn’t discriminate or judge people, but one that seeks to understand and apply the teachings he grew up with in a new, enlightened way.

Check it out: