I had been attending SA for two months when I ventured out to Nashville for the January 1990 International Convention. Seeing that sea of people in that ballroom, I was sold on the SA fellowship. But not on what it stood for.

I had entered the gay lifestyle four years earlier, in an attempt to fit in somewhere where my same-sex attractions would be understood and welcomed and not scorned or judged. I joined gay organizations and a church, and tried to integrate my interior feelings with an external life I wouldn’t have to hide. I “came out of the closet” to some of my family members. But the part I couldn’t tell anyone was the desperate and dangerous anonymous sexual behavior I was engaging in.

Then I hit an emotional bottom and crawled into my first SA meeting. I intuitively knew that those people had what I wanted. For a while I also tried another S-fellowship that on paper seemed more tolerant and enlightened, but I didn’t sense that same peace there.

So now in Nashville, I tried to figure out how I could educate others about the need to be more inclusive and to amend the sobriety definition to include “spouse as you understand spouse.” I found out that there was a hard and mean contingent—headed by someone named Roy—who wouldn’t budge on this and just didn’t get it. I felt immediately rejected and judged and I copped a walloping resentment.

At that convention, I met some folks from New York City who also felt that things in SA needed to change. Over the next year I cooperated with them and helped edit appeals to the fellowship. I went to conventions and talked of the injustice of being discriminated against. I was angry, and I was sure that Roy and his group were wrong. But underneath it, a part of me craved acceptance by him and the others. I stayed sober—obstinately—and knew they couldn’t throw me out. I cringed that the program was about God and thought that those believing people were weak and needed to buck up and get a life. I couldn’t see that I was judging the very people whose judgment I dreaded.

But in year two of sobriety, something happened. I began to listen to the people who were talking about God and sensed that they had a real relationship with Him—whoever He was. It struck me that maybe I was missing something. I read in Alcoholics Anonymous that “many spiritually minded persons of all races, colors, and creeds were demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness, and usefulness which we should have sought ourselves” (AA 49). I saw that although I had some honesty and willingness, the open-mindedness was missing.

I began to seek God in earnest. I could sense that others in the fellowship were praying for me. I got to that place where I could finally see that “either God is everything or else He is nothing” (AA 53). Maybe I was the one who wasn’t getting it. I had to surrender everything—my lifestyle and all my notions of who I was and what I needed and how SA needed to change. And when I did that, I met God as I came to understand Him. Everything changed. God began to show me who He was, and who I was in His eyes.

Now, at conventions, I could see that Roy had a deep friendship with God and had been given a vision from which he knew he couldn’t waver. Roy knew I had been against him but he never shunned or disrespected me as I had done to him. My anger melted away and I apologized to him for the way I had rejected him and had worked to tear down what God had given him to build up. It was a transforming moment. I apologized to others in the group as well. Only God could bring about such a change of heart.

Roy received me with the same warmth that he had always wanted to show me, if only I had let him. Only someone who had experienced deep forgiveness and grace could extend the same to another who needed it so desperately. Over the years, he kept on giving in the spirit of loving friendship.

And Roy never stopped going deeper in surrender and honesty before God. As the vision God gave him became more refined, he would offer the same vision to us in SA. At the 2007 Maryland Convention, he challenged the fellowship to embrace lust sobriety beyond mere sexual sobriety.

We in SA will always be challenged by the courage of the one God chose to stand firm in that message before Him. It is now our turn to hold onto the vision, and stand firm in that message. I believe that Roy is up there preparing a way for us sexaholics—the ones he called “his people.”