I remember being really discouraged and just kind of hopeless, because, again, we went to church, so I had an understanding that what was happening, what I was feeling, was not okay. But I’m like, this is just who I am. If people are saying, This is me, and this has been me since I was a kid. How can I change from this? So I became pretty suicidal, and sadly, my family had to witness that.

But even then, in my darkness, not even knowing the Lord, he was always there, like the ways that I tried to take my life…I should have taken my life, but the Lord’s hand was there, and he didn’t allow it to happen.

He’s so kind.

He is so kind.

So my freshman year of high school, I ended up checking myself into a mental institution, I was struggling with suicide and all these thoughts and the demonic. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I didn’t see myself. I’ve always been a big boy, a big Husky boy, but when I looked in the mirror, I saw this thing that was neither male nor female. It was like this beautiful thing. I really believe it was just the enemy, just deceiving me even more and had me believing that maybe, I shouldn’t have been a boy.

So in and out of the mental institution, and that’s where I met my first gay friend, He’s the one who introduced me to drag. So throughout high school, instead of being bullied and made fun of, I’m like, I’m gonna embrace what this has been spoken over me all these feelings that I’ve ever felt. And so I came out on my freshman year of high school, I came out to my parents in the mental institution, and I know that was really hard for them.

What I really wanted was just affection from my dad and to kind of understand, like, why is this happening? Why do I have these thoughts? There was just no language for it.

I remember encountering Christians at an early age and I was extremely flamboyant. I had makeup and my purse, I had purses, and I would have acrylics and stuff like that. I remember people telling me that I was going to go to hell. I had someone telling me that I was going to die of a disease.

Fast forward, I’m in my late teens and adult life and young adult life, and I’m living with this girl from high school and her boyfriend, who happened to be one of the worst bullies in my grammar school years. He was a drug dealer, and he opened the world of drugs to me.

With the demonic and all the darkness in my life, I had a lot of unforgiveness, and one of the people that I struggled with forgiving, was

the bully who was now the drug dealer.

In my heart, I planned on seducing him and sleeping with him and pretty much just saying, “Look who’s gay now.” I remember that I would ask the devil to give me power over men. And the men that I targeted specifically were straight men because those were the ones that made fun of me the most. I remember it happening. I was a homewrecker, you know, just being with men that had girlfriends, I think one guy was possibly married.

The way that I carried myself and how I lived my life, I just didn’t care anymore about myself. I didn’t care about who I hurt. I had hurt a lot of people along the way. My relationship with my family was just in shambles, and again, this was coming from a broken little boy just saying, “Who’s gonna love me? Who’s gonna help me understand what I’m feeling?”

How the Lord enters into the scene, was the girl that I was living with, her mom was this fireball of a woman. She was living in Florida, and the Lord told her to leave Florida and move to Chicago. She moves in with us. Remember this is a house of darkness, like how she described this was she remembers walking up to the house, and she saw the house covered in demons. And she’s like, What am I getting myself into?

She gets into the house, and this is her telling me all of this. She heard the Lord, and the Lord said, “There’s someone in this house you need to help save.”

I’m so grateful that she was so open to hearing the Lord, and that she was obedient. She thought it was her daughter, and then the Lord highlighted me, and she told me, she kind of chuckled, and she’s like, “Lord, there is no way.” She said, “Okay, Lord, if You want me to speak to that boy, you need to make a way.” Well, when you put a bunch of Puerto Ricans under one household, we’re gonna step on each other’s toes and there’s gonna be arguments and one night a big fight broke out in the house.

I didn’t want her to get hurt, so I pulled her into my bedroom and closed the door, she knew that was her opportunity to share the gospel with me and that’s when love entered The Room. The way that she looked at me was so different from how I’ve been looked at by many people. There was just love in her eyes and kindness and safety. She just looked with boldness, and she said, “This is not the life that God has for you. God has something else for you.”

I wish I would have said it. And that’s the moment when all the Shekinah glory broke loose and I got saved. But I was stubborn, and I was just like, oh, okay, but I knew there was something different about her.

So fast forward, we all move out. We get a place together. Me, I’ll give her her name. Her name’s Sandra. She’s my spiritual mama, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were living in this house, and the boyfriend told her, if you’re gonna live with us, you cannot pray.

So she was like, “Well, I’m leaving.” And she asked me, she’s like, “Come with me. If you stay with them, it’s gonna get bad.”

But I wasn’t ready to let go of the drugs and the secret hooking up that I was having with the boyfriend and I didn’t move with her. I regret that decision. I feel like that’s when it just got, like she said it got really bad, depression was very real. At that point, whenever I would look in the mirror, I saw that thing more and more. So I was embracing that identity more. And, you know, I had thoughts of like, maybe I should get like, breast implants and hip implants and just embrace this identity. I just spiraled out into even more darkness and hooking up even more and more drugs and more drinking.

I remember finally, reaching out to Sandra. And I was like, “Okay, I might try this Jesus thing out. I need help. I want to do this thing.” And she’s like, “Well, why don’t you start coming to church with me?” So I started going to church.

That was interesting, because, again, how I carried myself, like pencil-thin eyebrows and just my my demeanor was just a hot mess. I was extremely flamboyant, and I didn’t want anything to do with Christians because of

what had been told to me that I was going to die of a disease or go to hell.

I remember crying out to him for help, and that’s all he needed. He just needed me to finally surrender and invite him in.

For some reason, homosexuality and the Hispanic culture don’t blend well together. It’s almost as if it’s a cold somebody can catch so there were a lot of walls with people in that church. So the pastor gave me a book to read, and it’s called At the Altar of Sexual Idolatry.

The way that I lived my life, I would be walking home from work, and men would follow me home, and I’m like, Okay, I guess we’re gonna go do this thing. So I would just invite them in. I just got tired of that, and I called one of the one of the guys from the church, and I said, “I want to give in to porn. And there’s a guy outside my door that I want to let in. What do I do?” And there was, like, this awkward pause, and he was like, “I don’t know how to help you.” And that lie of, you don’t belong, or you’re not really one of the guys started taking root.

I would call Sandra, and Sandra would just pray. She would just pray on the phone with me until that desire went away, or until that guy left. Then the pastor’s like, “We think you need a little more help.” So they sent me to this ministry in Kentucky called Pure Life Ministries. The author of that book started the ministry. It was a live-in facility for men who struggled with sexual addiction of all forms. It wasn’t just homosexuality, from the guy who struggled with pornography to the guy who picked up prostitutes.

I had a counselor named Brother Brad, who loved me really well, and that was his testimony, that he came out of homosexuality. I remember one day at the ministry, I was shaving, and it was as if the Lord just pulled back the veil, and I saw me for the first time, and I started crying, and I saw that I’m a big dude. I can defend myself and protect myself. I think because my first abuse was somebody physically smaller than me, younger than me, I just had this understanding, that I was weak and that I was frail, like I could never really see the full me. When I saw Miguel that day, I saw a man, looking back at me in the mirror. I started crying.

I ran frantically to my counselor, brother Brad, and I was like, “I’m a man! I’m a man! I’m a man!” And he’s just like, “Yeah, you are.” But, I don’t think he understood when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see this man. I didn’t see this strong, masculine-looking man. That was the beginning of the Lord, healing my masculinity.

I had a buddy that I met at that ministry that moved to Texas. And he said, “Why don’t you come up to Texas and check it out?” And I was still pretty young in my faith, and I was like, Okay, well, I’m a Christian, so I need to do Christian work. I should go to seminary. I toured Criswell College in Dallas, but I’ve always had this passion for cooking, and I toured the Cordon Bleu, and I felt like the Lord was saying, “You should come here.” So I went to culinary school.

I knew that one day I wanted a family as well. But I didn’t find women attractive at all. I was the best friend. You know, I would tell them what makeup to wear and how to walk in heels like, how am I gonna be attracted toward a woman? But my life scripture that I still hold on to is Jeremiah 32:26 Behold, I am the Lord. I am the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for me?

There isn’t.

To take an extremely flamboyant man and start healing him, then little by little, I started finding women attractive. It was something simple like, Oh, I like her purse. Then I started looking at the woman holding the purse to like, wow, she’s really pretty. More and more this attraction started building toward women.

I remember I would start asking girls out at my church, and they were kind, but I was never shy about my testimony, and they would always say, “You’re a nice guy, but I don’t know if I can be with a guy with your kind of story.”

I kept praying and asking the Lord to help me to be the man that he’s designed me to be. One day, I was living in Dallas, and I felt like everything was going really well for me, but I felt like I needed more of the Lord. And I said, “Lord, I’ll go wherever you want me to go. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, just give me more of you.”

The next day, I got an email from a girl that I flirted with a year prior. We met at a party, and she was really fun, and we talked and I asked for her phone number. She’s like, “I’m moving to England, so you do whatever with that.” So I was like, okay, whatever. So getting that email the next day, she was like, “Hey, I remember you said you were a chef, and we need a chef at our missions organization. Would you be interested?”

I prayed on it, and the Lord, I believe, gave me a desire for England since I was a kid. I don’t know why, but I think it was for that time. I remember telling my mom as a child that I was going to go to England one day. So I went to England, and I met this amazing woman.

Her name is Linda Lisa. I remember her just inviting me out. It was like day three for me at this ministry. And she said, “Hey, a couple of us are going to the pub. Do you want to come with us?” One of Lisa’s ways of getting to know people, she’s like, “Tell me your story.” So here I am at a pub with three other girls. And I was like, I already know where this is gonna go. These girls are gonna shut me down or whatever. So I’m like, I don’t care. So I gave them all the details and all the raunchy bits. And all three of them are weeping as I’m telling my story. Lisa goes home and journals that night. She said, Lord, I don’t know what it is about this guy, but there’s something special about him.

Through my time at this missions organization, we became really close. We became really good friends. Fast forward, the Lord had used her to heal me, to bring healing into my life, because I never saw myself correctly. I saw myself as a less-than man and a less-than Christian because of my struggle with homosexuality. The lie was, you struggle with this, it’s worse than all this other stuff. I didn’t know that was a lie. I just bought into that.

But every time I believed that lie, she would always encourage me. She’d say, “I don’t know who this man is that you keep talking about, because I don’t see that man. This is the man that I see.” She was calling forth my identity that I was not seeing, as a son, as a whole man.

I remember the first time I felt love for her, that I loved her. I’m like, here I am. I love a woman, and I’m drawn to her, she is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.

I remember how the Lord was healing those things that…Those prayers that I used to cry myself to sleep with, to help me to find women attractive, and all this stuff. So we dated, and then from dating, I decided to propose, and now we’ve been married, this December will make nine years, and we have an incredible son named Ezra.

He’s also a miracle. When we decided to start a family, I wanted a girl, because I felt like it would be easy to raise a girl. I know girls, but the Lord, in his kindness, decided to give me a son because he knew that I would have to rely on him to raise a son. It’s my prayer that the Lord will continue to Father me and teach me how to raise a godly man.

And now I love our life. Whenever you catch me at church, in worship, sometimes the only thing I can say is thank you.

I would have never dreamed this life for me, that I would be married to a woman who loves me and has always seen me the right way. I have a son who loves me, and I get to love him and teach him about the Lord, and I can embrace him and hug him and kiss him all the time.  

Now I’m worshiping. I’m in a church worshiping. You know, I’m not strung out on drugs. I’m not in a bed with a stranger. Here I am just lifting my hands up, saying, “Jesus, you are worthy. Jesus, you are faithful.” It blows my mind that this is my life.

I’m very involved in my church, my wife and I lead a small group. I’m a part of the prophetic team. And again, I’m grateful for the heart that he’s given me because I am sensitive to his voice. My heart is to encourage people who are struggling with same-sex attraction or are in the LGBTQ lifestyle, that this God of the universe, can change any heart.

It may seem impossible. It may even seem like there’s no way this is just who I am, but let the One who created you, the one that knows you, that has spoken your identity into existence, let him be the one to tell you who you are.

My journey with him has always been just about embracing being a son. I follow the Lord, and I love the Lord, not because of all the blessings he’s given me, if he never brought me a wife and never brought me a son, I would still say, “Jesus, you are worthy, and thank you for this life.”

I’m sitting here in my right mind. Depression is not, it’s not a master over me anymore. Sexual addiction is not a master over me. Drugs and alcohol do not own me. I’m sitting in an identity that I would never have dreamed of, that I am whole, that I am seen and known by the living God.

I want that for anybody, not just those who struggle with same-sex attraction, but for unbelievers who don’t know him, that the living Almighty God has a plan and a purpose, and his desire is to reveal His love and affection for his children and draw them in and be in unity with them.

And now I have a place at his table, and I didn’t think I would.

I love him.

I love him so much. And I always tell people this is the man that I’ve longed for, that I looked for, the man who has no bad intentions and who doesn’t have secret motives. When he comes near me, it’s not because he’s trying to fool me into anything, but He just wants to reveal more of himself.

He is my lover, he is my husband, he is my king. He’s everything to me. And I wouldn’t be here if he didn’t come in like a flood when I cried out that one time, when I just eked out this little, “Help.” He came in. And I’ve been following and loving him since.