Blue Babies Pink

Epilogue • My Little Speaking Up Mar 02, 2017

Brett's final thoughts on the journey of Blue Babies Pink...

Episode 44 • Love Storms Mar 02, 2017

NOTE: This is the finale of Blue Babies Pink. If you haven't read the previous 43 episodes, please do that before listening to Episode 44. Also, after listening to this one, be sure to check out the Epilogue for the final wrap-up.

Episode 43 • Tears on a Boat Dock Mar 02, 2017

"I sprinted down that path, through the trees, all the way out to the boat dock—heaving, shaking, and sobbing as I ran. I felt like I might choke, fighting for breath. My face poured wet salt onto the summer grass below..."

Episode 42 • Someone to Run Home To Mar 02, 2017

"I began to think a lot then about the role of a spouse, of a companion. I'd never been in anything close to a meaningful relationship, and I'd slammed the door on love years before, so I was clueless about it all."

Episode 41 • Questions for God Mar 02, 2017

"My whole life, I'd been taught that God's design for the world was men and women getting married and making babies. This formed family units which were the building blocks of society. So it made sense that the institution of marriage would lead to great human flourishing."

Episode 40 • Brain Blanks Mar 02, 2017

Brett appears on a Christian TV show and disaster strikes...

Episode 39 • Decade-Long Battles Mar 02, 2017

"March 14 was the day I thought God cursed my testicles..."

Episode 38 • Elvis and Larry Mar 02, 2017

"And while death is inevitable, we still have to live. We still have to do our best to use our lives well. This is one of the great paradoxes of life: That our time on earth is both utterly precious and completely insignificant."

Episode 37 • Growing Old, But Not Quite Growing Up Mar 02, 2017

"Every wedding was a little funeral for me. I held a little sad ceremony in my heart...a ceremony for one..."

Episode 36 • Anxiety Mar 02, 2017

Trip(s) to the ER...

Episode 35 • Becoming Minority Mar 02, 2017

"For the first time I began to wonder if this—all of this—was about more than sexuality. I began to wonder that maybe I'd been focused on the wrong thing all along. I began to wonder if this was more about the junk I'd been ignoring, than the one glaring thing that had consumed me for so long. And maybe—just maybe—if I could find some peace there, I could find peace everywhere..."

Episode 34 • Warm Hands on Cold Shoulders Mar 02, 2017

Thoughts on singleness and paying people to touch you...

Episode 33 • Not Perfect, But Extremely Rare Mar 02, 2017

"When I understood that, I realized most of my stresses in life came from this subterranean sense of self-hate that I carried around with me each day. Being unaware of the self-hatred inside of you is like walking through life with a backpack full of dead skunks. The stink is coming from you, but you're convinced it's everyone else's problem."

Episode 32 • Community Mar 02, 2017

"And I believed that, if God wanted to love me—to hug me—He'd do it through my community. His people would surround me. They'd carry me. They'd love and encourage me on hard days. They'd push me forward when I couldn't walk anymore. God uses community to sustain us when we can't sustain ourselves. I learned that then."

Episode 31 • Adventuring Mar 02, 2017

Brett devises a two-part plan to survive as a gay Christian...

Episode 30 • Who Needs Love? Mar 02, 2017

"And so sometime around 30, I slammed the door. I slammed the door on love..."

Episode 29 • Lifeboats Mar 02, 2017

Brett has the hardest coming out conversation of his life + a lesson on how to respond when your child comes out to you...

Episode 28 • Chocolate Gravy Mar 02, 2017

"Jesus was so kind to me that day. He was so kind to send me a friend like Kelly. He was so kind to prepare that moment and those biscuits and that gravy. It's easy to get caught up in the ways God has let us down. And then, His grace comes crashing down—kamikaze-style—right into our lives when we least expect it. It is a glorious explosion."

Episode 27 • Getting Real in London Mar 02, 2017

Brett travels to Europe with a friend + an unforgettable night in London's oldest pub (NOTE: This episode is highly visual, and audio listeners are highly encouraged to visit the Episode 27 link on bluebabiespink.com to see the photos.)

Episode 26 • Waiting on Oranges Mar 02, 2017

Can God make a gay person straight?

Episode 25 • Finding a New Track Mar 02, 2017

"I would have done anything to just not be alone, to have at least 1% of hope that I wouldn't feel like this forever. And people who have felt hopeless before know that 1% of hope is a whole lot of hope. That's all I needed, but the Bible was clear. I had to figure out life without it."

Episode 24 • Lonely Practice Mar 02, 2017

Brett practices for a lifetime of loneliness—at an isolated cabin in the mountains and at a football stadium surrounded by 100k people...

Episode 23 • Unlearning How to Throw a Football Mar 02, 2017

"And still other failures feel like brands seared deep into the soft flesh of our souls. After the initial pain, they scab over, then scar over. And looking at it each day, we get used to it. It begins to look more like a birthmark than a brand. And we may even forget that it was put on us. We may forget life before it. We may forget that failed moments aren't supposed to stay with us forever. After all, it was just a moment. And moments never last."

Episode 22 • Secret Sadness Feb 03, 2017

"Closets are dark, and when the gay child—or in my case, young professional—decides to stuff his soul in there, it has a warping effect.

It forces you deeper inside yourself. You become a mapless soul in a haunted maze, and you lose your bearings on who you really are. You begin to furiously reshuffle your inner life to present to the world the parts they want to see..."

Episode 21 • An Alien in Nashville Feb 03, 2017

Brett hears a friend say something about gay people he will never forget...

Episode 20 • Work, Work, Work, Work, Work Feb 03, 2017

"Deep inside every workaholic man is a little boy who never felt big enough, strong enough, worthy enough. And that little boy can be very loud. He reminds the man of his lacking, of his lessness. Work is very noisy in the soul, so the workaholic uses that noise to drown out the little boy. Obsessive work can't deliver peace, but that's not the point. The point is that it's louder than the pain. This was me..."

Episode 19 • Social Media is Born Feb 03, 2017

"A lot of my friends got married in their mid-20s.

And I began to notice a trend: When friends would get married, you wouldn't hear from them much anymore.

This was new to me, because, before that, friends had always been portable. I could collect friends in elementary school and take them with me to middle school. I could collect a few more in middle and take them with me to high school. And then a lot of those stuck with me through college. Life before 22 was just moving from one single enclave to another. But not this time. This was different..."

Episode 18 • On the Counselor's Couch Feb 03, 2017

"Yet while I was praying against it, I was simultaneously denying that same-sex attraction was a thing in my life.

Back then, I denied that same-sex attraction was an intrinsic part of me.

If anything, it was a clinger, a hanger-on, an invader, a tumor, a trespasser, a most unwelcome guest.

It's like the 1986 movie Aliens, where Sigourney Weaver fights off a horde of alien invaders inside her spaceship. Same-sex attraction was like one of those aliens—not part of the ship—just freeloading, wreaking havoc, and ripping people apart. So it was simply a matter of beating it back into outer space.

The problem with fighting same-sex attraction is that, unlike a 12-foot tall alien, it's invisible.

You know it's there. You see its effects. But you can't touch it, can't punch it, can't roast it with your flame-thrower.

You feel like a shirtless old man in whitey-tighties swinging wildly in the night at a ghost he swears he's heard a thousand times. And fighting an invisible enemy is something crazy people do. Being gay can make you feel crazy sometimes."

Episode 17 • On Choosing to Be Gay Feb 03, 2017

"I think I was like a lot of people in that I WANTED it to be a choice. If gay is a choice, I thought, then it makes the Christian theology of it so much simpler. Religion is hard, because it requires faith. It's mysterious and, at times, inscrutable. Faith is the bridge that gets us through the uncertainty, but it's tough to hang with faith sometimes. Because of this, people of faith love the parts of it that are certain and agreed upon by everyone. I know I do..."

Episode 16 • Leaving Home, Coming Out Feb 03, 2017

"But those who have kept pet secrets know they are hard to keep caged. They thrash and bite and wiggle around inside of you. They aren't well behaved, and they have a life of their own. All that inner chaos had become too much for me. I couldn't keep hiding it, but I needed someone who I could trust 100 percent. I needed ironclad, lockdown, never-tell-a-soul, government-grade confidentiality. I'm talking Area 51 style secrecy. People with big secrets know there's a giant difference between someone you can 99% trust and someone you can 100% trust..."

Episode 15 • The Art of Distraction Feb 03, 2017

Everyone deals with their pain somehow. Brett discloses his coping mechanism of choice...

Episode 14 • How Did I Become Gay? Feb 03, 2017

"Maybe it was because that cat slept in my bed every night. I mean . . . my brothers aren't gay, and they DEFINITELY DIDN'T have a cat sleeping with them every night. Maybe it's because our family had small dogs. Maybe we should have had bigger, manlier dogs. idk. Maybe it was because dad never took me hunting when I was a kid . . . shooting wild animals might have made me straight."

Episode 13 • On Broken Machines Feb 03, 2017

"Because of its near universality, heterosexuality is one of the most unifying forces in all of humanity...Imagine missing that one key piece of your humanity and what that would feel like. It's a slow terror. And once you are gripped by that fear, a glowing red-hot brand ascends from the depths of the earth, up through rock and soil, and bursts forth to sear three black words right onto your heart . . . You. Are. Broken Part of being young and gay is the feeling of being broken, of being trapped inside a fleshy machine that is inexplicably flawed. And you have no idea why."

Episode 12 • Girls Girls Girls Feb 03, 2017

"Boobs have always kinda freaked me out. They're very scary to me, and the thought of touching one is like the thought of touching a wet bag of earthworms..."

Episode 11 • A Good Good Father Feb 03, 2017

The most emotional episode from the series....

Episode 10 • Get Thee Behind Me Ooltewah Feb 02, 2017

"One of the lesser known burdens of being gay is that you live a lot of your life in your head. At a young age, you start having little conversations with yourself. And you keep having them—over and over and over again. And the conversations evolve . . . they intensify. They're all about how you got this way, and what went wrong, and what if so-and-so finds out, and what if _________ or _________ or _________ happens. These conversations are led by fear, fueled by self-doubt, and they all end with the same urgent warning echoing around in my skull: "TELL NO ONE." A beautiful world spins around us—wild with life—pulsating with the beats of festival-joy, and here we are, staring at a cracked mirror hung crooked on the concrete walls of our minds. And this constant internal chatter, this constantly bubbling brain babble is never-ending . . .It's time-consuming, stressful, exhausting. It's a unique prison. It's an on-ramp to narcissism. It's like a starving man diving into a feast and then discovering it's his own soul he's eating..."

Episode 9 • Earning my Man Badge Feb 02, 2017

"Part of me wonders if I was running back then, running from the very faint idea that just maybe this badness was inside of me, like a crocodile—waiting—nestled deep in cold mud at the bottom of a lake. Maybe sports was my attempt at misdirection—a front, a mask, a smokescreen. I don't know, really. I know I genuinely liked sports, and they were fun for me. I always felt very manly in high school, at least in the Southern traditional sense of the word. I didn't mind sweating or getting dirty. I've always liked being a man..."

Episode 8 • Learning About the H-Word Feb 02, 2017

"A few years earlier, in junior high, I first noticed that I looked at the boys more. It was very subtle and innocent. It was like I envied them...I wanted them to like me. It didn't feel like a sexual attraction back then, but they definitely caught my eye. It never crossed my mind that this could be ho-mo-sex-u-a-li-ty. But I knew what the "h" word was by then because the Christian culture had already schooled me in it. I knew allll about it..."

Episode 7 • Life as a Youth Feb 02, 2017

Brett is crushed by the worst news of his life...

Episode 6 • What Happened on the Carpet Feb 02, 2017

Brett has a bizarre spiritual encounter on the floor of a church in Pensacola, Florida.

Episode 5 • There's Something Happening in Pensacola Feb 02, 2017

"For me church had always just been a very ho-hum thing. Pastor's kids can get jaded to it all because we're around church stuff so much. It's just another part of your life like school or sports or video games. That's how Christianity was to me. If Christianity was a football game, I'd just casually glance at it on the TV on Sunday afternoons. But I certainly wasn't on the field..."

Episode 4 • Bye Bye Love Feb 02, 2017

A dark movie theater and a first kiss...

Episode 3 • Home and School Feb 02, 2017

"I was small and gangly—like a little spider monkey amongst gorillas—so I couldn't do much damage. But I knew one surefire way to get the big guys' attention: pinching. I'd hang on the fringes and then swoop in like a tiny crab from hell..."

Episode 2 • The Christ-Haunted South Feb 02, 2017

"Being a preacher's kid in a small town is a low form of southern royalty, and I was aware of this at an early age. As a kid I could basically wander the halls of our big old church at will, anytime, without interference. No one questioned a Trapp boy—not the organ player, or my Sunday School teachers, or the janitor...especially not the janitor."

Episode 1 • Shofars in the Suburbs Feb 01, 2017

The story begins on a rainy night in Alabama as a group of Baptists march through the night with rams' horns in hands, praying for the miracle of a lifetime.

Prologue • The Mud on our Shoes Feb 01, 2017

"In the American South, homosexuality is often viewed as a spiritual issue. But for me, it's always just been a physiological one—like sneezing or sweating or laughing."

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