Author of the week: Jeff Chu

last updated 8 January 2015

Jeff Chu is caught between worlds, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. Raised in a church and by parents that held same-sex intimacy to be “against God’s wishes,” the 35-year-old Fast Company editor married a man last year and refuses to condemn his parents for refusing to attend the ceremony. The former Southern Baptist has known since his days in a Christian high school, when a teacher was banished for being gay, that he risked being “cast out,” as he puts it, if he ever revealed he own sexual orientation. “How many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I thought I would go to hell—for being gay, for being me?” Chu asks now.

In his new book, Does Jesus Really Love Me?, Chu admits that he’s still not certain of the answer. But he spent a year traveling the country to talk to various Christians about their attitudes toward homosexuality, and the experience taught him that families will be struggling with the issue long after the nation’s courts have their say. “Some friends have suggested that I simply walk away,” he wrote recently in The Washington Post. But he says he’d never turn away from parents who still pray for his salvation. “I’d no sooner leave my country because of a law I disagree with than I would abandon my family.” And there are signs of hope: His mother plans to visit Chu and his partner for the first time this summer. “I pull her along and she pulls me along and we grow,” Chu says. “That counts as a huge victory.”