I remember hearing stuff like that growing up and feeling a lot of shame.''Ĭhester tried to kill himself soon after, cutting his wrists in the high school bathroom. They would have seminars where people would come in and give lectures on what was going on in L.A. 'There were starting to be gay characters on television. 'I think my preacher or pastor was the first person I heard saying it,' says Chester, who grew up in a born-again Christian family.
It was the early 1980s-hardly a hopeful time for gay acceptance in the South-and Chester still remembers what his pastor told him when he found out about the doomed love: 'God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.' Then he quoted a verse from Leviticus. At 16, Craig Chester fell in love with a boy in his suburban Dallas church.
