By Israel Matthews —
For 30 years, Wanda Jo Taylor was gay, butch and a stud.
She grew up rough and tough like the boys — and attracted to girls from a very young age.
At first she thought she was just a tomboy, but she never grew out of it. “I felt like a boy trapped in a girl’s body,” she recounts on a CBN video. “I didn’t understand me.”
When she was caught in sexual contact with a neighbor girl at age 18, she “came out” to the world as gay and proud.
“I told the whole world,” she says. “I lived my life the way I wanted to live my life. I couldn’t live my life like my mother (wanted).”
After high school, she made big money in computer programming and used that money to satiate her desires in gay clubs, gay parades, gay parties. She cycled through relationships, some serious, some chaotic, and sometimes violent.
“You’re fighting and there’s the jealousy, the envy, the drama that’s in that lifestyle,” she says.
“I was searching for love in all the wrong places,” she adds.
She wisely avoided drugs for years.
But after one of her lovers stabbed and nearly killed her, she turned to crack cocaine to mitigate the physical and emotional pain.
“I was just tired,” she says. “I was so tired. I didn’t know what to do.”
The crack cocaine addiction lasted an agonizing two-and-a-half years. She whittled down to 98 pounds.
Finally she remembered the God of her childhood in Sunday School.
“Next thing you know I was so broken,” she says. “I was so tired. I went home and got on my knees and cried out to God and said, ‘Take this away from me. Jesus help me.’”
God freed her from crack cocaine addiction.
That deliverance gave her a desire to return to church. She found a congregation that accepted her as she was.
“They loved me (even) in my men’s suits,” she says. “They let me come to church broken, lost, as the sinner that I was. They treated me with so much love. The pastor talked the truth, the Word.”
She persisted in church attendance. She read the Word at home.
Eventually she stumbled on Isaiah 43:18-19: “Remember not the former things. Neither consider the things of old. Behold I do a new thing. I make a road in the wilderness and a river in the desert.”
God spoke to her heart, telling her the drugs and the gay lifestyle were all part of the “former things” that He was delivering her from.
Providentially, mom called at that moment of divine insight.
Wanda Jo told her what God was doing.
“The old Wanda Jo is gone,” she told mom. “The new Wanda Jo is here. ‘Whooo!’ I’m just like Jesus turning the water into wine. The old Wanda Jo was water. The new Wanda Jo is wine.
“I’m a miracle. He took the desire away. I don’t desire women any more.”
Today, Wanda Jo ministers in Dallas.
“I have a true and personal relationship with God,” she says. “I was searching for love in all the wrong places. All the time it was Jesus I was searching for.”
“When people see me now, they know they’re looking at a miracle.”
Israel Matthews studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica.
