Instead, all her energy went in to work: the grades took her to Oxford (where she lived in a Christian halls of residence) at 23, the songwriting took her to Nashville.įor the next six years, Beeching lived in the fire-and-brimstone heart of conservative America, recording albums and touring the country's vast churches. "I felt like there was something so wrong with me, according to the Church, that maybe I could make up for it by getting good grades." On several occasions, Beeching tried to force an attraction to boys, by letting those who asked her out walk her to school, but she felt nothing. "Very humiliating – it made me so embarrassed."Īnd when this too didn't change her orientation, Beeching turned inwards. I was already feeling so vulnerable, it was horrible to think, 'Am I controlled by demons?'" "I remember lots of people placing their hands on my shoulders and back and front, praying in tongues really loudly and then shouting things: 'We command Satan to let you go! Cast these devils out of you! We speak to you demon of homosexuality: let her go!' People around me were wailing and screaming. I'm so sad and depressed, I can't carry on.'"īeeching stood with her arms outstretched as the leaders brought in extra people to perform the deliverance. At the altar one of the prayer team said, 'What would you like us to pray for you about?' I said, 'It's really hard for me to say this but I am attracted to people of the same sex and I've been told God hates that and I'm so ashamed and I need Him to take it away because I can't keep living like this.
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Someone had preached about how God could set you free from anything, and I was desperate, I thought, 'I have to deal with this, it's breaking me.' They invited us to the front." The shy teenager got up. "I remember sitting in my seat at this big conference, with about 4,000 people. Instead, she takes herself back to that day. It feels a bit mean to pick one," she replies, chiming with an earlier comment: "I'm not angry with the Church." "Do I have to say?" she asks, with a half grimace. I ask her to name which camp it was, which organisation was responsible. That summer, at a Christian youth camp in the English countryside, Beeching became subject to an altogether more extreme way to make her sexuality "pure": an exorcism. "It was my one outlet." Her first song, called "Search Me O God", contains, tellingly, the line: "Find any way in me that does not reflect Your purity." Her mother, who is very musical, had taught her to play the piano and guitar, and Beeching was already writing worship songs and performing them at services in front of hundreds.
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I said to God, 'You have to either take my life or take this attraction away because I cannot do both.'" Her eyes glisten for the first time.īy 16, the isolation, fear and shame were escalating. "I remember kneeling down and absolutely sobbing into the carpet. I was trying to align the loving God I knew and believed in with this horrendous reality of what was going on inside me," she says.