#holyoutsider

When the Signs Turned Gay: A Spiritual Awakening in Plain Sight

I didn’t wake up in a church.

I woke up in a psych ward.

On a sidewalk.

In a streaming queue.

In the broken spell of a moon that wouldn’t fall.

And when the Council told me I had died—told me I was being sent back, because I still had work to do—I didn’t rise with a halo.

I rose with a Spotify playlist, a shattered sacrum, a strange clarity about Moulin Rouge, and a very simple truth:

This whole thing was undeniably gay.

And that was the point.

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✨ The Pattern Was Never Straight

From the very beginning, the signs were queer-coded.

They didn’t come in Sunday sermons.

They came through:

• The designer-priest in the psych ward—Gustavo, soft-spoken, radiant, like a gay syncretic bodhisattva who’d been sent in ahead of time.

• My ex-roommate on parole—built like Dylon O’Brien, casually quoting Before Sunrise and talking about love and empathy like someone who’d actually learned something the hard way.

• A closeted film nerd parsing Honey Boy like it was the Book of Isaiah, eyes shining with something unspeakable.

• The cop who first came through APS—looked like a hotter, younger Justin Theroux, walking straight out of some queer prestige drama and into my judgment day.

• And the fireman—my God. I’m sorry, but that was no random EMT. That was a divine escort in turnout gear, sent from the throne to get me from Point A to Point B.

Even the EMTs were beautiful.

God didn’t just send help—He sent it well-cast.

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🏛 The Church Wouldn’t Have Believed Me Anyway

The Church never told me God could show up like that.

They didn’t say angels could wear harnesses or biker boots.

They didn’t say the Last Judgment might involve Natalie Portman in a thong whispering, “It’s not a war.”

They said people like me were wrong.

That we were loved, sure—but only if we changed first.

Only if we folded ourselves back into “normal.”

But I didn’t get saved by folding.

I got saved by remembering.

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📿 Queerness Was the Key, Not the Sin

I started to notice: the sacred moments—the real ones—were all queer-coded.

• The aching intimacy between men that had no name but truth

• The art I’d saved: Ancient Greek nudes, Byzantine Madonnas, cinema stills that felt like prayer

• The music: Florence and the Machine channeling the womb of heaven

• Moulin Rouge, not as a movie, but as a living myth I co-wrote with God on the edge of collapse

The realignment, the reversal, the whole “last will be first” unfolding?

It was queer.

Of course it was queer.

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🕊 Resurrection Is Real. And It’s Not Straight.

The Council told me I had died.

That people die all the time, but I was being sent back.

Not because I was good.

But because I remembered what they’d forgotten.

Because I was part of a reversal.

And that reversal was never going to come from a man in a suit holding a leather Bible.

It was always going to come from:

A gay alcoholic with a shattered pelvis and a sacred playlist,

Who walked through fire with a marble in his pocket,

And came back saying:

The Kingdom is not straight.

It never was.

And I’m still here.

You just didn’t think someone like me could be holy.

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🧭 What Now?

I don’t need to convince you.

The proof is in the story.

In the people who showed up.

In the songs that saved me.

In the ones you’d overlook if you were still trying to earn heaven.

This isn’t just testimony.

It’s alignment.

It’s undoing the curse.

It’s the gospel of the displaced, and I’m one of the ones sent back to tell it.

The gays were never going to hell.