“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”

By Ed Vieira

Going back as far as I can to my childhood years, I remember being five and being afraid of getting into rough play with boys, such as soccer games and all the other stuff normal for boys. My parents were in the bakery business down in Brazil for as long as I can remember; therefore, they were always too busy to dedicate very much time and attention to my two sisters and me. I felt lonely and did not have any friends. It felt like a vacuum inside. My two older brothers were ten and eleven years older than me and had moved away to live with our older sister who had just married. They would have nothing to do with my parents’ new faith. The Sabbath thing did not sit well with them. My parents had accepted Adventism when I was three and had become very strict with my brothers. They had converted from the Congregational Church. Initially, we belonged to a split group called “SDA Reform Movement,” but later on the family left that group and were accepted by the Adventist church.

At age seven, I had my first crush on a boy during second grade in grammar school. Then I fell in love with one of my friends in church at about the age of ten. I was never really in love with any women growing up. During the teen years, all my friends were talking about girls, but in my mind it was always a mystery trying to understand and see things as they saw them.

By the time I was a teenager, my attraction to men was very strong, and I dreamed about what an older guy would look like naked. From the very beginning I was attracted to masculine-looking men, preferably well-built, muscular, hairy men. We lived conservatively and had a very religious Adventist upbringing, and all of those thoughts and feelings made me feel very guilty and ashamed of myself.

Not having a neighborhood high school in Brazil, I had to take a commuter train to travel to my school near downtown Rio every day. Being about fifteen then, my gay feelings were burgeoning, and I always checked out the men in the train and on the way to school. One guy in his mid-thirties would always find his way to be close to me on that packed train trip, almost daily; and as soon as he got near me, he would start fondling me in different ways. I felt uncomfortable yet enjoyed it somehow.

After high school, and at eighteen, I attended a newly opened Reformed Church school, three hundred miles away from Rio, in Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. I felt that if I could get to know more of the Adventist message and be involved more closely with it, God would help me overcome this strong, so-called “perverted” sexual drive. It was not long after making that decision that I found out things would not change.

While at the school, I was much closer to other young guys my age; and it was easy to see they were having their own problems dealing with their sexuality. I could almost identify the ones who, like me, could also be gay and confused and not know how to act. Even though this Reformed Church was a very strict sect, while we were living in rooms that were more like barracks, I realized some guys were being sexually active.

I grew up very shy and could not open up to anyone. Being there away from my family increased my awareness of my sexuality. Once in a while some of us would go to a sauna run by the church; and that presented me with a chance, for the first time, to be naked with other men in a private environment. These were guys were a little older than me, and at the sauna there was a lot of teasing going on among them. The church, being very strict, would not allow intimacy between guys and girls; and the guys tried to follow closely whatever Ellen G. White had to say about that. One could see those guys had a lot of sexual frustration inside.

At the school one Sunday morning, a very prominent minister came up and asked every one of the male students if anyone in the school staff had offered any of us sexual favors. I immediately knew who the person was he was looking for. This custodian guy of about forty, and very friendly toward all the male students, had been getting into sexual relations with some guys, one of them a close friend of mine. I remember him trying to get very close to me, but something in me always made me refuse his advances.

As I got older, at about twenty-two, my gay feelings were so strong I started becoming nightmarish about finding a man to have sex with at least once. I was losing weight, had little appetite, and developed migraines. Then I got involved with church music, playing the organ and directing the local choir, to forget about that “monster” inside me.

A year later I became part of the main Adventist church and was given a job at the Brazilian SDA publishing house as a printer, since that’s what I learned in high school. After trying to date two girls, I met a third girl who was also very shy and reserved, having also belonged to the Reform Movement herself; and six months later we got married. The strangest thing is that during our dating we never kissed even once and were never intimate.

A week before my wedding day I became so desperate, I went to a cruising place in the city and tried to find a man to have sex with. An older guy of about thirty invited me over to his high-rise apartment, but after one hour of trying hard to do something together, I could not do it and left. My guilty feelings took over, and I felt incapacitated at that moment. In the elevator on the way down from his place, I looked at the people around me and felt they all knew what I had just done. (The Adventist Church can really teach us how to feel guilty about many things.)

The day of my wedding could well have been the day of my funeral. I felt trapped and unhappy like never before.

After four years working at the publishing house, playing the organ for the local church and directing the choir there, I had made a few friends singing in a quartet. One by one those friends were immigrating to the U.S. The last one to leave told me a few days before taking the trip, that if I desired, he would find a way of getting me to immigrate here. I told him that if he were really serious, I would take his offer of help. Sure enough, less than six months later, we were all gathered together as a quartet in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the end of June 1965. Except for the bass of our former quartet (who later came also), we sang together that first Sabbath in Worcester, Massachusetts, using Doctor Puyanna as the bass. The doctor had sponsored me as an immigrant just because of his love for quartet music.

Three months later our former quartet bass arrived. He lived with us in our large three-bedroom apartment. This was a handsome Brazilian guy of Italian-Portuguese background. I had been in love with his looks and personality for the last four years, and now having him under the same roof was an unbearable situation for me. He was also a friend of the other guys who had immigrated before us. Our friends called on weekends, inviting him to go to a park to play basketball and to be part of other activities. Since I had never been sports-minded, this started to cause a conflict among us. I developed jealousy toward them because of their invitations to him and I could not hide those feelings very well. Soon my wife started to notice it. I always felt my friend could be also gay, since at twenty-eight, he was not dating girls but hung out with a lot of men all the time. At that point my life had become a daily nightmare, and I didn’t know what to do. I thought I would just go crazy.

In the middle of all that turmoil, being under a lot of stress and having lost my friend’s confidence, one night I noticed he did not come home until late at night. I could not sleep thinking about him. At about 2:00 a.m. I went to his room to see if he was there. Sure enough, he was in bed but not asleep, with open eyes just as if wondering. As I approached his bed, he grabbed my legs and pulled me closer and grabbed my crotch area. That caught me by surprise even though I felt it to be an opening to talk about our feelings. But as I started talking, telling him how much I loved him, he stopped me dead by reminding me I was a married man. I left his room and went back to lie by my wife.

The next morning, Sunday, my friend left for work very early since his boss had asked him to work that day. I was worried about what could happen next. I drove to his workplace to have a talk. By the time I got there he wasn’t showing any interest in having a conversation with me, but I noticed by the reaction of some of his co-workers—some mutual friends of ours—that he had told them about what had happened the night before. I had never felt so scared and lonely in my entire life before that day. I went back home from that place crying all the way, asking God why he had allowed me to be born gay to suffer such embarrassing moments in my life. That same evening my friend moved out of my house, and a few days later went to live in the D.C. area.

A month had gone by when the pastor of the local church called a meeting for all of us to clarify what had happened. Among our friends, stories of all kinds were being told of what had happened, most of them to our embarrassment. The truth was apparently not being told. My friend came up from D.C., and in the meeting there were a lot of denials and different versions of what had happened. It was also announced that my friend would marry one of our other friends’ sister-in-law, a single woman who had had a crush on him from before. All this was being done by our group of friends to clear my friend’s name, while letting my name go down. They did not want people to think he was gay, and he fell for their demands, marrying the girl later on. These supposed friends used the opportunity to get this guy to marry their sister. Had nothing happened I’m sure my friend would not have married under such pressure.

The trauma we got into was so heavy, three months later I moved my family to California. Then, fifteen years later, while I was living in Redlands, California, I received a call from that same friend asking me to forgive him for all the damage he had caused in my life. He said he had lied about us, and that he had lived a terrible life and needed to be forgiven. Also, in 1981, some of those mutual friends of ours came to visit us and we took them into our home and treated them well. And even though not a word was said about the past, we could tell they also wanted our forgiveness.

By 1975, I was taking some classes at a college in downtown L.A.; and when the classes dismissed early, I would stop in Hollywood to see what I could find out about gay life. It started to dawn on me I could not live in denial all my life. I still had not had sex with men during all those years.

Then my in-laws came to visit us from Brazil. My wife’s sister’s husband, Tony, a light-skinned Italian hunk thirty years old, asked me if I could take him to see Hollywood Blvd., while the girls went shopping in Glendale with the kids. Once there, looking at the stars on the walk, we stopped at a large newspaper stand that offered everything, including gay magazines. I noticed pictures of men and advertisements of bathhouses in them. My brother-in-law actually pointed them out to me, which made me wonder about him. To make the story short, I went back one day and looked up one of those places and went to see what it would be like. It was there I had my first encounter and knew that that was what I had needed all my life. I had finally come home. Sex with a man fulfilled all of my internal needs.

In 1984, after not having had any sex with my wife for six months, she confronted me one day, asking me if I was gay. At first I denied it; then, after a couple of hours of reflection and having realized that that was my opportunity to be truthful once and for all, I asked her for a conversation and told her the whole truth about my homosexuality.

The next day my wife came home with an address and date for us to have an appointment with an Adventist therapist, a doctor in La Sierra, who would try to help me overcome my homosexuality. When we left his office, we came home with a list of things we were supposed to do as soon as we got home. It had to do with getting intimate with one another as we had never been before. The thought of it made me sick inside. If, during our twenty years of marriage that had not happened, how could it happen then? We had two kids during our marriage, but our sex had been very businesslike. There was never a genuine enjoyment of being together as it is with heterosexuals. Even before we got home from the doctor, I told my wife that I would try to do all those things, but that I was sure it would not work. Sure enough, after trying to follow the doctor’s program for fifteen minutes, I got up and told my wife I could no longer force myself to do things that seemed so odd and abnormal in my state of mind. At the end of that month we separated, and I went to live with my first roommate.

Days later my daughter found out from her mom why we had separated. She wrote me a letter assuring me she would always love me as her dad no matter what. My daughter had many gay friends in high school and has always been open-minded about things. It took a few years for me to tell my son about my sexuality. When I told him he said he already knew it, and that his mom had told him about what made us get separated. Even though he’s been good to me, as a devout Adventist he thinks it’s wrong to be homosexual.

One day after work I was visiting with my wife (we never ceased being friends), and she said to me she had had a conversation with a woman pastor at the University church in Loma Linda, and that she had told her about our situation. The woman pastor gave her a phone number of a Kinship organization and a local contact (Bernie Ochoa) I should call. The pastor had said to her that the organization could be what I needed and that they would probably help me and cure me from my deviation. (I don’t know to this day where that pastor got such a misinformation.) I told my wife I was going to call the number, adding that something made me feel inside that these people would not try to cure me if anything was to happen. A few days later, I went to my first Kinship meeting in Glendale at the home of Dr. John Weiland. I took a gay friend along for backup, since I was very apprehensive about meeting a bunch of Adventist gays. When we arrived there and were parking the car, I saw a young man carrying what looked like a potluck dish, going in the direction of the house (Jeff Lombardo, my first crush in Kinship). Then I thought in my mind, “Hmm, if the guys in Kinship look like this one I think I’m going to enjoy being here.” My next reaction was… Wow! Gay Adventists like me, and they do not intend to change me at all! It was heaven on earth!

The next day I told my wife about my visit with Kinship. When I told her what I learned while there, she could not hide her disappointment. My wife really loved me, and I just wished I had been heterosexual to return such sincere love coming from a wonderful lady. I’ve always believed in my heart that if I had been heterosexual, I would have had one of the most wonderful wives in the world. My ex-wife was neat, responsible, smart, and a perfect mother. She was also very good-looking, being of European heritage. Her Hungarian grandparents had come to Brazil in the early 1900s.

Now I was free to be myself. Yet something was missing. I became very promiscuous for the next four years, frequenting bathhouses with friends for sex, trying to get as much sex as I had always wanted through the years. For a while that was what I did on weekends. One day in the middle of one of those places, I was so tired of all the cruising and afraid of catching AIDS. I stood in a corner there, and in a fervent prayer to God I asked Him if He could pick among all those beautiful men there present, one to send him my way, one I could keep. I even asked in my prayer that this person need not to be someone that lived in the gay community, since I had had unpleasant experiences with guys from the community. I was tired of all of what I saw happening in the clubs, and I wanted to stop going to the baths.

It was not even a half an hour before this well-tanned man with an athletic body stopped next to me and invited me to follow him. After our first encounter, I asked him if he wanted to stay in touch. He said yes to that, and the rest is history. We have never missed a weekend away from each other since unless he or I had to go on a trip. We will commemorate our 14th-year anniversary this September 2, 2002.

Ed Vieira was born in Brazil at the end of 1939. At age 18 he left his home in Rio, Brazil, to attend college classes in Sao Paulo, the largest city in that country. At 25, by the invitation of friends, he immigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizenin 1980. Ed has worked as a classified employee for San Bernardino Community College District for the last 24 years. He has lived in Colton, California, near Loma Linda, with his partner Clark since 1988.