On God and Getting Off: A Confession
- J.R. Whittington
- Dec 17, 2025
- 7 min read
Authenticity is hard when shame lives deep in your gut—so deep you can't remember when it moved in, can't recall the day it signed the lease and started rearranging furniture in rooms you didn't know you had.
Yes, therapy helps. But digging deep and getting real? That's the work that never ends, the excavation that keeps revealing new layers of sediment, new fossils of who you were taught to be versus who you actually are.
The way I look at sex is rooted in trauma. But is that an excuse for being a sexual being? Or is it just origin story—the wound that became the entry point, the scar tissue that became the map?
I want to live authentically. I want to be free. So this essay is a truth bomb—one that needs to explode, not stay trapped in my mind where it calcifies into silence, where it hardens into the kind of shame that kills slowly, the kind that makes you mistake suffocation for breathing.
The Architecture of Control
I believe in monogamy.
I also believe it's a construct—architected by men who needed systems of control, who built empires on obedience, who understood that if you can regulate what happens in the bedroom, you can regulate what happens everywhere else. Control the body, control the soul. Make people ashamed of their flesh, and they'll police themselves without you ever having to lift a finger.
The Bible, that text we've been taught to revere as divine law, was written by brown hands in desert sand—hands that knew heat and hunger, that knew survival looked like poetry, that understood God as vast and unknowable. Then it was translated and mistranslated by whoever held power, each version sanding off complexity, each interpretation narrowing the aperture until the infinite became manageable, until mystery became mandate.
Were the people who first put these words to papyrus white? No.
But whiteness claimed the text anyway—wrapped itself around scripture like kudzu on stone, like a parasite that looks like adornment, choking out complexity until all that remained was commandment stripped of context, until love became law and law became weapon.
Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not.
And somehow, that voice colonized my body before I even knew what my body could do. Before I understood that skin could sing, that pleasure wasn't sin but proof of aliveness. The prohibition arrived before the desire, the shame before the act, the verdict before the crime.
Between Me and God
"Sodomy is between God and me."
Jonathan Larson's line from Rent—a prayer I never stop whispering, a negotiation I wage in the dark when the shame gets loud and the want gets louder. A reminder that some conversations don't need translators, don't need intermediaries with degrees in divinity telling me what God meant when God made me this way.
I was the boy who would masturbate and then drop to his knees, begging forgiveness from a God I wasn't sure was listening. The pleasure and the apology in the same breath. The relief and the shame holding hands. Religious guilt clung to me like a birthmark, stitched on by Sunday school teachers and youth pastors who meant well but taught me to fear my own skin, who said my desires were dirty before I even knew what desire felt like.
They said my flesh was fallen.
They said desire was the devil's whisper.
They said I needed saving from myself.
They never said who I needed saving for.
The Hunger That Doesn't Fade
As I get older, I tell myself the hunger fades. It should, shouldn't it? That's what they promise—that time will cool you down, that age will make you reasonable, that eventually you'll settle into the kind of desire that's polite, manageable, appropriate for someone your age.
But then there are nights when I'm still burning like I'm twenty-three—no, like I'm seventeen and just discovering that my body can feel like this, that skin on skin can be prayer without words. And I have to remember: desire doesn't die on a timeline. It doesn't respect your attempts to outgrow it.
It shifts—like light through water, bending but never breaking, refracting into colors you didn't know existed until you saw them.
Baldwin knew this when he wrote Giovanni's Room—knew that desire doesn't ask permission, doesn't wait for you to be ready, doesn't care about your carefully constructed life. Morrison knew this when she gave us Beloved's ghost, hungry and relentless, refusing to stay buried just because burial is more convenient for the living.
They understood that the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. That you can pray away the act but not the wanting. That shame is the wound but desire is the pulse—and as long as you're alive, your pulse keeps beating.
What Turns Me On
Sex in public turns me on.
Not because I'm an exhibitionist—or maybe I am, maybe that's part of it—but because there's something about the edge of danger that makes me feel alive in ways safety never does. The thrill of being caught. The refusal to be invisible. The radical act of saying my desire exists in spaces that were never designed to hold it.
Sex with a man is beautiful—there is nothing as sacred to me as two men intertwined, defying every sermon that said this was abomination, every verse weaponized against our bodies, every interpretation that tried to make us ghosts. Two men holding each other is resurrection. Two men fucking is riot. Two men tender with each other is revolution disguised as intimacy.
Sex is holy. Spiritual. When done right, it is resurrection—the body rising from the shame they tried to bury it under, saying I am here, I am alive, I am unashamed.
The Rules I Keep
I've experienced it in all its forms, and I'm still learning the vocabulary for what I am, what I want, what I will and won't do.
I'm what they call a side—not much for penetration unless I'm in love, and even then it feels like ceremony, like something that requires more than want, something that needs commitment to hold its weight. I have rules. So many rules. Invisible contracts signed in blood I can't wash off, negotiated with a God I'm still trying to understand—or maybe negotiated with the version of God they installed in me before I could consent, the version that watches and judges and keeps score.
Rules about who and when and where and why.
Rules about what counts as too much and what counts as not enough.
Rules that sound like protection but sometimes feel like prison.
Rules I didn't write but somehow agreed to, the fine print signed in childhood ink that won't erase no matter how old I get.
The Bible Was Never White
The Bible was never white.
Let me say that again, louder for the people in the back who've been told otherwise: The Bible was never white.
It was Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek—languages that moved like water, that refused singular meanings, that understood context as sacred as text. It was bodies in motion, survival and poetry and law all knotted together like the phylacteries worn on foreheads during prayer. It was desert heat and olive groves and fishing boats and tax collectors and women who weren't supposed to speak but did anyway.
It was queer before we had language for queer—Ruth and Naomi making covenants that sound suspiciously like marriage vows, David and Jonathan whose love the text calls "wonderful, passing the love of women," beloved disciples who laid their heads on chests, who touched and held and loved in ways that make straight people nervous when you point them out.
Whiteness took that sprawling, contradictory text—that mess of poetry and history and law and prophecy and love letters and lamentations—and made it a scalpel. Made it clean. Made it rigid. Made it something that could cut me open for wanting, that could dissect my desire and find it guilty before the trial even started.
They took a text about liberation from slavery and used it to enslave.
They took a God who freed people and used it to imprison.
They took love and made it law.
And the law, as it turns out, was always designed to break people like me.
The Body as Crime Scene
And still, I wanted.
Still want.
My body a crime scene they keep reopening, looking for evidence of sin, dusting for fingerprints of shame, taking photographs for files that will be used against me in courts I never agreed to attend.
But here's what they don't understand: you can't make a crime scene out of something that was never a crime. You can call it sin, but that doesn't make it so. You can write it in stone, but stone erodes. You can preach it from pulpits, but pulpits burn.
Baldwin said love takes off masks—that real love, the kind that changes you, requires you to stand naked in front of someone and let them see all of you, including the parts you've been taught to hide.
I'm standing here without mine, sweat-slicked and trembling, wondering if God ever wanted me covered in the first place. Wondering if the real sin wasn't the wanting but the shame that came after—not the apple, but the hiding. Not the knowledge, but the cover-up.
Wondering if God looked at Adam and Eve scrambling for fig leaves and thought, I never asked you to do that. I never said you needed hiding. That was your idea, not mine.
The Real Enemy
Sex is not the enemy.
Shame is.
The kind that makes you wash your hands three times after touching yourself.
The kind that makes you delete your browser history like you're destroying evidence.
The kind that makes you apologize for wanting what you want.
The kind that whispers you're too much and not enough all at once, that impossible contradiction that keeps you frozen between desire and denial, never quite arriving at either.
The kind that makes you think your body is the problem when the problem was always the people who taught you to hate it.
The Declaration
I'm done negotiating with ghosts.
Done making deals with a version of God that was installed by men who needed me small, who needed me ashamed, who needed me on my knees asking forgiveness for the crime of being alive in a body that knows what it wants.
Done pretending that desire is something to overcome instead of something to honor.
Done apologizing for the miracle of skin that can feel, of nerve endings that can translate touch into transcendence, of a body that refuses to die even when shame keeps trying to bury it.
This is me, naked in the dark.
Unrepentant.
Unreformed.
This is me, free.
Or trying to be.
Or learning what freedom even means when you've spent your whole life in a cage you didn't know you were building.
This is me, saying: I am here. I am queer. I am sexual. I am spiritual. I contain multitudes. And I am done pretending those multitudes need to ask permission to exist.
This is me, between God and me.
And boo, it's nobody else's business.
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