by Benjamin Law
‘WHOO!’ someone said.
In the end, we sang for forty-five minutes straight. It was intense. It was a hot day and I supported myself by holding on to the plastic chair in front of me. Edmund showed no signs of slowing down. His energy was relentless, his dance moves hypnotic. During one song, he placed an open palm over his heart and balled his other hand into a fist, pumping violently as if he were angrily milking an uncooperative cow. In the upbeat songs, he thrust his flattened palms in unison to the rhythm, doing swift push-ups against an invisible wall. His face, sweating madly, swung violently from left to right as though he was being slapped.
‘WHOO!’ someone said again.
When the songs finally ended, we stood there panting and exhausted. Smiling blissfully, Amanda told us to sit down.
‘Shalom!’ she said.
‘Shalom!’
‘I’d like to welcome our visitors here,’ she said. ‘Firstly, I’d like to welcome Ben from Australia.’
People turned to me and clapped. I smiled back at them and waved.
‘I hope you have a blessed time in Malaysia,’ Amanda said, smiling.
‘Thanks!’ I said brightly.
Edmund turned around, a big welcoming grin on his face. His features were broad, elegant and vaguely feline. Today he was wearing a purple vest with matching purple trousers, and his white leather belt matched his lightly embroidered white shirt. On one of his immaculately manicured fingers was his wedding ring.
Now it was time for the sermon. On stage, Pastor Edmund spoke with an intense theatrical cadence, moving from soft whispers to intense bark-like yelling without warning, which kept everyone on their toes. His preaching voice lay on the spectrum between the American comedian Gilbert Gottfried – the guy who voiced the parrot in Disney’s Aladdin – and a Brooklyn drag queen with hearing damage.
‘We want to hear from you, O God!’ he said. ‘You and you alone! For you can transform our hearts,’ he said, whispering. ‘FOR YOU CAN SET US FREE!’ he said, screaming. ‘Only you can heal our SEX-U-A-LI-teee, O God!’
He gestured to us.
‘Every one of you,’ he said, ‘whether you’re sexually broken or not, you are sexual beings! So this service today is for everybody. Look at your friends and say, “You are a sexual being.” Go on!’
I turned to the man next to me. Lionel was a tall, handsome guy with a Sri Lankan background who wore glasses. I had watched him during the hymns, dancing awkwardly in the way tall men dance, keeping their hands close to their body as if they’re worried their limbs might cause a scene.
‘You are a sexual being,’ I said to Lionel, laughing awkwardly.
‘You are a sexual being,’ he said back, in a deep, British-inflected voice.
Two frail white-haired ladies behind us turned to each other.
‘You are a sexual being,’ they said sombrely.
‘Some of you used to be sexually regular,’ Edmund said. ‘But then things began to happen and you became sexually different.’
Being ‘sexually different’ was bad. ‘Sexually regular’ was the ideal, and there were only two ways to achieve it: hetero sexual marriage or celibacy. Everything else was ‘sexually different’, a sin in the eyes of the Lord. ‘Sexually different’ behaviour included – it was a long list – sex before marriage, homosexuality, bisexuality, adultery, bestiality, paedophilia, promiscuity and polygamy. If you masturbated, you were sexually different. (‘If you are a man having sex with yourself, it means you are mas-turba-ting,’ Edmund explained. ‘YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE SEX WITH YOURSELF!’) Watching pornography was also sexually different. (‘WHEN YOU WATCH PORN, it means you are HAVING SEX WITH THOSE IMAGES. Then when you MASTURBATE, you are HAVING SEX WITH YOURSELF.’)
There was another category of people who were ‘sexually broken’. These were sexually different people who wanted to change. This was better than being sexually different, because God could only put you back together once you admitted you were truly broken.
Edmund pointed out it wasn’t our place to judge sexually different people. He had dealt with homosexuals, people who masturbated and people who frequently watched porn. He didn’t judge any of them. He even had friends who, to this day, remained gay.
‘I even have friends who are paedophiles,’ he told us. ‘REAL PAEDOPHILES! I’m not like, “Ew, ew, ew. Don’t do that.”’
Jesus, I thought.
‘Because we should be sexually-different-people friendly,’ he said. ‘We should be able to stand with them, pray for them’ – his voice descended into a whisper – ‘and guide them.’
There were murmurs of approval and agreement.
Edmund leaned forward, gazing into our eyes.
‘Now, I have no right to judge you,’ he said. ‘But I’m also supposed to tell you the truth: that based on God’s standard, you are sexually different. Don’t tell me, “Oh, it’s okay for women to be with women, for men to be with men, for adults to be with children sexually.” It’s NOT OKAY. It’s in the SCRIPTURES. It’s against nature,’ he whispered. ‘ARE YOU LISTENING?’ he hollered. ‘MAN marries WOMAN. Period! There’s no other way! Can you say Am-eh-en?’
Edmund pronounced Amen in the same three-syllabled way Californian girls said ‘Heh-loooo-oooh?’
‘Amen,’ we said.
‘Men has sex with men, it is shameful,’ Edmund said. ‘SAY “SHAMEFUL”.’
‘Shameful,’ we said.
‘Now most of you know my story,’ he said. ‘I never thought I would get a CHANCE to get married. I never thought I’d get a CHANCE to become a father! I thought I’d always be gay and look for Mr Right. I tried that for eleven years. It never worked. I was so BROKEN! If I imagined myself being with a woman, sexually’ – here he started to dry-retch – ‘I started to get nausea! Oooooh, I feel like vomiting. Disgusted, you know?’
Some of the congregation laughed, maybe in recognition.
‘So I could not imagine that today, I would be enjoying what God gave Adam and Eve.’
Amanda looked at him with devoted, helpless love.
‘It’s a wonderful thing,’ he whispered. ‘IT’S A WONDERFUL THING, I SAID. SAY “AMEN!”’ he screamed.
‘Amen.’
‘Now, I’ve had all kinds of excitement!’ he said. ‘I’ve had orgies; I’ve had sex for money. I’ve had sex with teenagers; I’ve had sex with seventy-year-old GRANDPA!’ He grinned. ‘Yes! I’ve had sex with all kinds of people and I’m not proud of all this. I had all kinds of excitement! I tell you: before becoming ex-gay, I slept with a man every night.’
I was impressed, then remembered children were in the audience.
‘But when you open the word of God, our hearts begin to beat faster. There will be a su-per-nat-u-ral experience for each and every one of us. Let’s get excited! Not just in church but in your own homes. When you open the word of God, GET EXCITED. Some of you have not ARRIVED THERE YET, so start asking: “GOD GIVE ME AN EXCITED HEART!”’
‘God, give me an excited heart,’ we said.
‘Say it! “I WANT THAT EXCITEMENT, JESUS!”’
‘I want that excitement, Jesus.’
‘“MAKE ME EXCITED, JESUS!”’
‘Make me excited, Jesus.’
‘Some of you know, your favourite movie is coming out soon,’ he said. ‘Glee 3D. Glee movie! In 3D! In the cinema, wah! You know, I get so excited about the Glee movie! I love Glee! I’m excited about that. But trust me-lah: I’m not more excited about that than the word of God. Who can say Ah-meh-en?’
He winked and waved a cheeky finger at us.
‘Amen,’ we said.
After the service, Edmund came over to me, with Amanda and the kids in tow, giving me a big hug and kiss on the cheek.
‘Shalom, Benjamin! You made it.’
Angel, Edmund’s daughter, squealed excitedly.
‘Why are you so excited, Angel?’ I said.
‘Because you’re here, you’re here, you’re really HERE,’ she said, then re
leased a groan. ‘This is the first time in my LIFE we’re meeting! You’re here and I’m meeting you and I’M SO EXCITED! Argh!’
I laughed. ‘Argh!’ I said.
‘Argh!’ she said again.
Edmund then invited me to join them for lunch. Amanda, Angel, Ethan, Angel’s best friend Isabelle and Edmund’s mother – a regal woman who wore her grey hair in an elegant perm – were already in the family’s eight-seat car.
When I opened the door, Angel started squealing again, jamming her fists into her mouth. She had not expected me to ride with them.
‘Argh!’ she squealed.
‘Argh!’ I said.
Smiling, Edmund started the engine. I asked Angel, Isabelle and Ethan what they wanted to be when they grew up. Ethan wanted to be a professional football player; Angel and Isabelle wanted to be fashion designers. I stuck my head between the front seats to speak to Edmund and Amanda.
‘Your kids are pretty adorable,’ I said.
Amanda and Edmund smiled, proud parents who’d scored good kids.
‘Praise Jesus,’ Edmund said.
At the eatery, other members of the congregation joined us, including the singer Judith, Sri Lankan Lionel and a butch-looking girl, Ally, whom I’d mistaken for a teenage boy at the service based on her thick eyebrows and short hair gelled into a mohawk.
Over lunch, Edmund passed over his business card that said he was part of something called Rafohs Creative Entertainment. It was a company he ran with Jerry, who was both his assistant pastor and professional manager. When he wasn’t preaching, Edmund worked as an MC, actor and singer, and had recently been in a Singaporean feature film. (‘You must look it up on YouTube!’ he told me.)
There had been a small glass case back at RLM headquarters that displayed Edmund’s merchandise. CDs for sale included his debut album, Wake Up – a collection of self-penned Christian songs – and the limited edition EP, Perfect. There was also a VCD of one of Edmund’s cable television appearances called It’s a New Day: Homosexuals Can Change … If They Want To.
Later that afternoon, I met Edmund and Jerry again in a canal-side café. They came wearing outfits very different from those they’d worn at church. Jerry was now dressed in a muscle top paired with above-the-knee denim cut-offs. Edmund was a vision in white: low-cut white V-neck shirt; white beach trousers; white Kangol-style cap; giant white vinyl carry bag large enough to fit a small child. He was dressed like a fabulous retired gentleman on a tropical holiday, the kind who drinks chilled white wine served by handsome waitstaff.
‘So, how exactly do you stop being gay?’ I asked.
Edmund sighed, and Jerry started taking photos with a digital camera. When I gave him a puzzled look, he explained they were going up on RLM’s Facebook page.
‘It’s a journey,’ Edmund said. ‘It begins with a decision. I mean, if you come from a gay background, you might know what I’m talking about …’
‘Okay,’ I said, playing dumb.
‘Because if you come from that background, you can empathise better. You can be a better shoulder to cry on.’
I asked Edmund whether he felt he’d been born gay and he shook his head emphatically. ‘I felt,’ he said, emphasising the past tense. ‘I don’t feel that anymore. I don’t believe that anymore.’
Edmund recalled those heady gay days between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four with a smile. He brought friends along to cruising spots and hooked them on the thrill of anonymous sex. Edmund didn’t speak of anything with disgust or shame – the group sex, the late nights, the anonymous fucking. Instead, he was smiling, even laughing, reminiscing as if those were the good old days.
‘Well, in a way, it was the good old days!’ he said, laughing. ‘Of course, I’ve done certain things I shouldn’t have done, definitely. But I don’t believe in regretting. I’ve repented for the things I believe are sins today, but those are things that have happened already. You can’t do anything about it.’
In the last three years of his gay ‘phase’, Edmund pursued three year-long relationships with three different guys. He was looking for long-term monogamy by then, but each relationship ended badly. Incidentally, his last boyfriend’s name – the one, he said, who really broke his heart – was Benjamin.
‘Oh!’ I said.
Edmund laughed, but said he was shattered at the time.
‘I gave him my most. But it’s the same old story you hear: gays cannot be trusted. At the end of the day, they can be your friends, but they cannot live with you happily ever after.’ He then added quietly: ‘I think I loved him more than he loved me.’
But there were gay couples I knew who had been together for years, even decades, I said, conveniently failing to mention that I belonged to one of those couples.
‘There are people who’ve been together for twenty years,’ he said. ‘Yes! They claim they’re like married couples, blah-blah-blah. They have a house, three dogs – and then, when their partner’s not around, they flirt with me! So what does that say? To me, it’s scary!’
‘Heterosexual people do that too,’ I said.
‘I know thaa-aat,’ he said, singsong. He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ve not seen enough gay people? I don’t know.’
Heartbroken after his bust-up with Benjamin, Edmund decided he’d had enough. It seemed logical that his gayness was holding him back from happiness. He found Choices in Singapore, which promised to help rid him of homosexual desires once and for all. Edmund travelled to Singapore with Amanda, his best friend from the age of twenty-one, when he was still living as a gay man. For Amanda, it had been love at first sight.
‘And for you?’ I asked.
‘No, I was gay!’ he said, laughing.
After Choices, Edmund felt a change. He still looked at men – ‘Of course I did’ – but said that they ceased being important to him. Instead of pursuing men, he started pursuing Jesus. And that’s when he and Amanda decided to get married.
Edmund conceded he wouldn’t encourage other people to do what they did, but said it made sense at the time. Amanda, Edmund told me, was ‘sexually broken’ too. She wasn’t a lesbian, no-no-no, but had experienced sexual abuse from a young age and as a result wasn’t comfortable having sex. Edmund didn’t want to have sex with Amanda either, so the whole arrangement seemed perfect.
Right, I thought. I tried to phrase what I wanted to say delicately.
‘I’ve got female friends I’m very close to,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want to have sex with them. I see them as friends. And that seems like a reason why I wouldn’t marry them.’
Edmund stared. ‘The theme for our marriage was, “Today I Married My Best Friend.” Does that tell you anything?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘We didn’t marry for sex, obviously. We married because we realised we were each other’s soul mates. We wanted to grow old together. We got married as best friends, not as husband and wife. At that time it was such a win-win situation for both of us. Today she’s my wife, in every respect’ – Edmund gave me a look that clearly implied marital sex – ‘but back then, it was a mistake –’
Edmund stopped and backtracked, putting up his hands.
‘– no, not a mistake. But I would not encourage people to do that.’
This was disingenous: Edmund’s entire life was encouraging people to do that. Week after week, Edmund used his marriage to Amanda as an example of what you could achieve if you committed to the journey, and now he was telling me he regretted the decision? It was kind of creepy. But not as creepy as something he’d said at the sermon.
‘I was sort of shocked when you said that you were friends with someone who was a paedophile …’
‘Why are you shocked?’ Edmund said evenly. He sucked his drink through a straw silently, not breaking eye contact.
‘If you’re saying all these things – homosexuality, having sex outside of marriage, masturbation – are perversions, then surely paedophilia is worse.’
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because,’ I said slowly, ‘you’re talking about the abuse of a child.’
‘Hold on,’ he said, smiling. ‘When you talk about paedophiles, you’re talking about a sexually different paedophile. A sexually broken paedophile? That’s a different story altogether.’
‘Okay.’
‘A sexually broken paedophile is someone who wants to change; someone who seriously wants out. So yeah, they still can be dangerous, but they are crying out for help! And if we don’t help them, who’s going to help them?’
One man, Edmund explained, had come to RLM with uncontrollable sexual desires for young boys. He had already molested some, Edmund said, but it hadn’t gone ‘too far’. (When I asked him to define ‘too far’, Edmund said, ‘No penetration.’) The man had become part of the RLM community, but didn’t finish the RLM ‘journey’ to heal himself.
‘He started the journey, but didn’t go far,’ Edmund said. ‘Because of his sexual brokenness, he was emotionally very unstable. He was struggling with depression. It affected his career; it affected his journey of recovery, which we call JOR.’
‘JOR,’ Jerry echoed, nodding and taking another photo.
Edmund didn’t know what had happened to this man. He had disappeared from RLM.
‘You never thought to report him to the police?’ I said.
Edmund gave me a look. It said: And why would I do something like that?
On Tuesday evening, RLM held its monthly V-Meet for sexually broken members. The ‘V’ stood for victory. It wasn’t just the sexually broken who turned up, though. Others were there for moral support or because they’d signed up to be a ‘befriender’ to the ‘befriendees’ (similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor system).
Edmund addressed us from the podium, reading from notes on his Toshiba laptop. I was sitting next to Sri Lankan Lionel again. Edmund told all the befriendees – the sexually broken among us – to stand up. Five men stood up, including Lionel. At well over six feet, he loomed over everybody else.
‘Let me speak to the befriendees,’ Edmund said, peering over his laptop. ‘If what I say applies to you, say, “That’s me.” The more “that’s me” you’re saying, the better it is. It shows how serious you are as a struggler.’
