Rob Sandlin

I think that I have always known I was gay. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself because if I did, it’s like I let the bullies in grade school win. Even after I experimented with guys, I still didn’t want to admit it. It wasn’t until I watched LOVE, SIMON and LOVE, VICTOR and fell in love for the first time that I was like, “Okay. This is me. This is who I am. I’m still me. And that me is pretty fantastic.”

Growing up in the Bible Belt of the south, Mississippi, I was raised and taught that being LGBTQ+ and a Christian isn’t possible. Maybe at a younger age, I once believed that, but it wasn’t until I got older and became a member of the most amazing community that I realized you can be both.

My beliefs involving several different aspects of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle have definitely changed. When I was younger, I was taught that being a part of the LGBTQ+ community was a sin. That’s one of the biggest lies I’ve ever heard of. Why would we choose ridicule and torment? We didn’t. We were born this way.

To quote a line from one of my all-time favorite films, “I deserve my own love story.” We all do. It doesn’t matter what ethnicity you are in the LGBTQ+ community. It doesn’t matter what you identify as in the LGBTQ+ community. Straight people aren’t the only ones who deserve love. We deserve love, too. We deserve to be with the person who makes us the happiest. As a child, I was taught that LGBTQ+ people aren’t deserving of love and that they’re—myself included—all going to hell. I’m not going to hell. I will find love. We all will.

If I’m being 100% honest, my “resources”, unlike most of them for other people, were my friends. After I came out as bisexual in 2018, because I thought I was still attracted to women as well, I lost friends and gained friends. Once I came out as gay this past summer, I lost even more people from my life. The few people in my life that I trust with my life are LGBTQ+ members and fellow believers. The two biggest and best resources for me in helping me discover that I can still be gay and keep my faith are my two best friends in Atlanta, Alejandro Ugarte and Matthew Neylon. From discussions about the Bible to actually taking me to their affirming church, I felt accepted and loved and can finally and truthfully say that I am a gay Christian.

My life right now? I think that due to the COVID-19 outbreak this year, all of our lives were negatively impacted in some way. I lost a job and was forced to take a job with a huge pay cut. However, outside of that horrible situation that so many of us are going through, I found love. For the first time ever, I found my special person that I thought I was going to marry someday. Sadly, it didn’t work out. It was a mutual decision, but for a while, it did hurt because I’ve never experienced that before. I’ve never been in love because I always felt like I didn’t deserve it.

I then started a new job with Walmart and now, the opportunity to move to Atlanta, Georgia, from New Albany, Mississippi, to continue my career with Walmart next Spring has presented itself.

I’ve met someone else, and through everything, I’ve learned in the past, taking it at a snail’s pace is what’s best for right now. Life is slowly but surely getting better. That’s not to say that at times I don’t break down and cry or that I don’t catch myself missing my first love and that I don’t periodically think that I never will find love.

Things are looking up. They really are. I’m alive. I’m breathing. Every day. I and so many others wake up on this side of the dirt is a huge blessing. One of the songs that has made the most impact on my coming out as gay experience comes from a recently released studio album by a very widely known and quite popular pop superstar. If you don’t mind, I’d like to include some of the lyrics below and hope that they help anyone else reading that is struggling with trying to make their sexuality and religion co-exist:

Let me leave this world with the hate behind me and take the love instead. Give me only love, only love. Give me only love, only love.
“Only Love” by the great Katy Perry.