Book Review on “Gay Girl, Good God”
In her book, Gay Girl Good God, Jackie Hill Perry shares her experience of accepting Jesus as her Lord and Savior and how that affected her life as a person with same sex attraction. She has a few reasons for sharing her life including, making the LGBTQ life less of a mystery to Christians who have never struggled with (same sex attraction) SSA, and making God less of a mystery to the person who struggles with SSA.
She admits that what she shares might be unbelievable to some people. She says, “There are many who, while reading, won’t understand gayness as something possible of being in the past tense. It is either who you are, or what you have never been. To this, I disagree” (p.1). In other words, saying you used to be gay is not like saying, I used to be African American.
From here she sets out to share how she embraced the lesbian lifestyle and all that came along with assuming that lifestyle as her identity. She carefully positioned her sin, SSA desires, in her fallenness. She bases her SSA desires on sin being a part of human nature. She says, to summarize, she became her own god. She said, “All I had to do was trust myself more than God’s Word. I had to believe that my thoughts, my affections, my rights, my wishes, were worthy of absolute obedience” (p. 19).
When she enters a relationship with Jesus, she realized that homosexuality was not her only sin. Even if she didn’t have SSA, she would need salvation because of her sinful disposition, period. She says, “I know now what I didn’t know then. God was not calling me to be straight; He was calling me to Himself” (p. 69).
As a new Christian learning how to navigate her new life, she shares her struggle with temptation to go back to her lesbian lifestyle. Her struggle is a universal one exemplified in the account of the Israelites coming out of Egyptian slavery. Things get hard on the journey to freedom. God was leading them to freedom and the Promised Land, but since they had trouble trusting, in a moment of fear, they thought slavery was the better option.
She shares the amazing way God transforms her and introduces her to womanhood. The simple act of buying a bra serves as a milestone in her metamorphosis. She falls in love with a man, gets married and has a baby. She learns that the Christian life includes the pull of sin, and the denial of self. Jackie says, “Is this what it feels like to be a Christian? I thought to myself. Is it to have a quiet war inside of yourself at all times?” (p. 83). The struggle is real. Wrestling with the flesh is not easy and requires endurance.
While Jackie Hill Perry walks us through her experience of becoming a Christian, we can see our own struggle with our own particular sin throughout her story. She’s right. Sin, by any other name, should not seem like such a mystery.
