Friday, March 29, 2024

Changing lanes

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Jackie Hill remembers the day she threw out all her “boy clothes” and went shopping for women’s underwear and other “girls’ clothes”.
Changing to women’s underwear represented a signal transformation in Hill’s life. 
She said it “began to change how I walked, just to have something feminine on”.
In a frank and candid interview, the spoken word artiste discussed her early life of lesbianism, pornography, drug use, stealing, and her transformation to the Christian messenger she has become for young people struggling with these issues.
Born June 21, 1989, in St Louis, Missouri, to a single parent household, Hill told of how she got into pornography and masturbation at age seven.
She said she had “too much access to too much stuff through cable”, finding herself free to go over to neighbours’ houses to view porn on television in the absence of any parental supervision.
At age seven as a kindergartener she was already doing “a lot of sexually explicit stuff”.
“I would do stuff with girls on the playground. It was funny how I had already taken the role of the domineering one, or the masculine one, early.”
A plastic log cabin on the school’s playground was where she lured other seven-year-old girls to explore her sexual fantasies, aroused by what she had been seeing on television, while teachers supervised play outside around her.
“I know from like four or five I already had homosexual desires in me,” Hill told EASY Magazine.
But even at this stage there was something telling her it was wrong and therefore she hid it, exploring secretly.
In middle school, trying to be popular, she spent her allowance on brand-name shoes “just trying to get affirmation from people in the way I dressed because I was never really the popular kid, just the weirdo.”
By high school, 14-year-old Hill was smoking weed, influenced by the music she was hearing. Advisedly she shunned harder drugs such as crack cocaine and ecstacy, somehow fearing that she could die from their use, deciding to be “foolish and wise at the same time”. It was then that she also started to steal.
Meanwhile her homosexual desires were burning. She had crushes on her female friends, but there was also the internal conflict, with her conscience telling her “no, that is wrong, I am not going to do that”.
Deep inside there was that nagging reminder of the virtues learnt in lessons during the first ten years of her life when she attended a Baptist Church every weekend.
At that time she was an avid reader, engrossed in the encyclopaedia her mother had bought her as a six-year-old. Her great passion however was for religious books in which she read about the Great Tribulation, the End Times, the Gospels, the Cross, sin.
“I had a lot of information about God in my mind so I knew [homosexuality] is wrong.”
Still, in her senior year she allowed herself to give in to the advances of a girl she had known from about seventh or eight grade in middle school.
“She had hit on me at this homecoming dance and initially I was like, ‘you, get out of my face, that’s gay’. But it really messed with me when I went home.
“I could not get her proposition out of my head, and I had this desire for all this time now and I thought ‘I can finally try it’. So I started with her.”
That first experience changed her whole perspective on relationships, opening her up to “a world that I wasn’t open to.”
“My whole world view and perception changed, where you go from just liking men to where you have experienced women sexually. I was attracted to women more, I wanted to be with women, it was just like ‘I feel gay’. It felt natural and I was like ‘man, I should be doing this more’.”
That first full-fledged lesbian relationship lasted for all of one week, and the questions raging in her mind after the experience drove Jackie back to men “to see if I still liked dudes”.
“I kissed a man and it was like gross to me and I was like ‘I don’t like men anymore so I am just going to be gay for real.”
And gay she became, almost on a rampage, seeking out partners on Internet sites.
“I started trying to talk to girls through the Internet and got into another relationship that lasted about a year and a half. Then I started dressing like a boy, wearing boxers and sport bras to flatten my chest out, [making] masculine movements, not sitting down like a girl anymore, just making sure I sat like a dude.”
The flood of attention she got from women was “addictive”.
Suddenly for Jackie it was “you are this girl that never got attention from men, didn’t get affirmation from your father, was never called beautiful or pretty by people. But now, in this world, everybody loves you and wants you”. 
Riding in the car with her mother one day, she cringed as they both listened to a radio talk show discussing the signs of lesbianism.
“All those signs were me,” Jackie confessed, and they led her suspicious mother to ask, ‘is that you?’
“I just started crying. She knew it . . . she came home and just gave me a bunch of rules, pretty much the rules she would give my brother.
“For about seven months she thought my girlfriends were just my friends, so she would get mad when she saw me sagging or high all the time, or finding porn on the computer.”
Yet Jackie continued to indulge in gay life.
That was until one day in October 2008 when “sitting on my bed chilling, minding my business, I felt God speak to my heart, saying that the girl I was with would be the death of me”.
She bounded up with the frightening self-admonition that her entire lifestyle “deserved death in God’s wrath”. She was in fact giving in to her conscience, pricked six months earlier by the realization that her lesbian relationships were wrong.
It was indeed the turning point in Jackie’s life. Two days later, she ended the one-year-old relationship with her girlfriend. “She cried, I cried, but I told her this is what I have to do for my soul; I can’t be with you.”
 With her next paycheck she bought a feminine wardrobe and declared to the world “Jackie is changing”.
She began associating with Christians, cutting off all the weed-smoking friends, deleting the Internet sites from which she had previously derived sexual excitement, changing her Facebook profile photograph to her prom picture, the only “girlie” one she possessed.
Today Jackie’s mission is to proclaim Jesus as she projects herself as an example that He can change people.
Her message to others struggling with homosexuality  – “Consider the truth of the Bible . . . We can have a lot of opinions – “I was born this way”;  “I should be able to love who I want to love”; “God should not care who I want to spend the rest of my life with” or “I cannot change .”
As she imparted to young people gathered for a Youth Leaders Conference organized by the Sanctuary Empowerment Centre in Barbados, “what it all boils down to is that we need to consider the Bible because it touches on all these topics, and if the Bible is true, we need to deal with it.
Now 24, Jackie is engaged to be married.

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