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It's much easier to hold the line on the conservative position when nearly all gay people around you are closeted and pretending to be other than they are. Eventually for some, the pain of pretending will become greater than the pain of going public. Whenever a new son or daughter comes out of the closet, their friends and family will face a tough choice: will they "break ranks" with their family member or friend, or will they stay loyal to their family member or friend - which will require them to have others break ranks with them?
.... Over time, I could not square their stories and experiences with the theology I had inherited. So I re-opened the issue, read a lot of books, re-studied the Scriptures, and eventually came to believe that just as the Western church had been wrong on slavery, wrong on colonialism, wrong on environmental plunder, wrong on subordinating women, wrong on segregation and apartheid (all of which it justified biblically) ... we had been wrong on this issue. In this process, I did not reject the Bible. .... I was able to distinguish "what the Bible says" from "what this school of interpretation says the Bible says," and that helped me in many ways.
So - many years before I learned I had members of my own close family who were gay - my view changed. As you can imagine, when this issue suddenly became a live issue in my own family, I was relieved that I was already in a place where I would not harm them as (I'm ashamed to say this) I had harmed some gay people (other people's sons and daughters) earlier in my ministry.
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