He Was Gay, Then Everything Changed | The Christopher Yuan Story

"I took my dad's Bible and I threw it in the trash can." That is how Christopher Yuan describes his life before everything fell apart. He was three months from becoming a dentist, living as a gay man, selling drugs to one of his professors, and high on crystal methamphetamine almost constantly. Then twelve federal drug enforcement agents showed up at his door. What followed was a six-year prison sentence, an HIV diagnosis, and a slow, reluctant encounter with a God he had spent years despising. But the story does not end with him suddenly becoming straight. In fact, Yuan argues that the opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality at all.

From Dental School to Federal Prison

Yuan grew up in a Chinese American family in Chicago. His parents were Christians, but he was not. He wrestled with same-sex attraction from a young age, and when he came out to his mother, she gave him an ultimatum: choose the family or choose that lifestyle. He chose to leave. His mother, devastated, nearly ended her own life. Instead, that crisis drove her to faith in Christ — a radical conversion she had resisted for years because she associated Christianity with hypocritical people.