Desires in Conflict: I highly recommend the book

"Desires in Conflict..." by Joe Dallas, is a manual for Christian men striving to be Godly while dealing with their homosexual temptations. The book deals with the topic honestly and sympathetically but remains grounded in scripture. I highly recommend the book to any man struggling with homosexuality, and to any minister who may be counseling such men.


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This book is not about who can and can't be a Christian!

This is an excellent book and a great help for anyone who is struggling with or trying to leave the homosexual lifestyle. This book is loving in tone and not hateful at all. It is full of encouragement and will be a real asset to anyone wanting to leave that life behind. This book is not about trying as hard as you can to suppress your desires and behavior. It is about dealing with and allowing God to bring healing to the root causes which will bring about change.
The review titled "you cannot be homosexual and be a Christian" (or something to that effect) sort of misses the point of the book. That's like saying "you cannot be greedy and be a Christian!" Both are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 6 as those who will not inherit the kingdom of God. It isn't God's plan for Christians to be greedy, but they are sometimes. Hopefully, they deal with it and move on. But while they are dealing with it, they may still be Christians. Christ's sacrifice is sufficient. His blood is enough. The requirement for being right with God is accepting and putting your faith in what Jesus did and that alone. It isn't Jesus plus not sinning ever again. It's Jesus PERIOD. This book is for those who want to live more in line with the teachings of the Bible. Wanting to save oneself by being good or remaining sinless is off the mark. If, however, you want to live in a more mature way as a Christian, this book can help. I highly recommend it.

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Joe Dallas's long, sad journey

I am a 23-year old gay man, and this book was given to me by a probably well-meaning relative. Joe Dallas falls into the same trap of attempted extrapolation that most exgay testimony books do: "My homosexuality makes me miserable and self-loathing, and your homosexuality should make you miserable too." He also blames his problems on homosexuality where the actual issues probably lay elsewhere. He admits in the later edition of his book that his sexual partners numbered in the hundreds(!) prior to 1984 (another common extrapolation in exgay testimonies - "I had hundreds of anonymous sex partners, so all gay men must.") and details his considerations and plans for suicide in the mid 80's. This sounds like a maladjusted or profoundly disturbed individual, perhaps sexually-addicted person who happens to be gay, not an accurate profile of how a gay man is. Many exgay books seem to fall into this unfortunate trap of trying denigrate all gay men to make their point.

He spends chapters on the idea of bad male-male non-sexual relationships (primarily those involving the father) as the primary driver of homosexuality, although he reluctantly admits at a few points that many heterosexual men seem to have the same deficits yet, strangely, aren't gay! His own assessment of father-son relationships is grim, calling them inevitably "doomed" to rages and hatred, more or less, including his own relationship with an adoptive son in the "raging" yet "re-bonded" category. These parts of the book is basically useless if your relationship with your father was not somehow estranged and you turned out to be gay anyway. (I even got the benefit of baseball-in-the-backyard with my dad on a regular basis growing up - sorry Joe, I got all that healthy male socialization and I still prefer men.)

I perhaps had one real argument with my father ever, nearly all my best friends in school were male, and even now I consider my relationship with my father considerably more genial and bearable than the one with my mother, and yet I am still gay. Also, since I am not plagued with guilt and self-loathing about my sexuality, I find little common ground to share with Joe Dallas. Perhaps if you're an evangelical Christian male miserable about your sexuality, you might feel less alone reading this ('uplifting' is not the word I'd use for this book, though), but it's virtually without value for people who don't fall into that narrow category. Two stars.

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