CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2025 / 07:00 am (CNA).
During her senior year of high school, Catholic speaker and author Kim Zember realized she had a sexual attraction to women. She went on to live a hidden life for years — dating men publicly but dating women secretly. Eventually, she ended up solely in relationships with women.
A decade later, she found herself increasingly unhappy,y and one day she threw up her hands and asked God to enter her life. Now, 11 years after experiencing transformation, she’s sharing her conversations with other people who have dealt with sexual identity and gender confusion in a new podcast on EWTN called “Here I AM Stories.”
“In the tenderness of God, I just felt like he said, ‘I want you to share other people’s stories. You’re not the only one,’” Zember told CNA.
According to EWTN, the podcast “highlights raw voices, radical lives, and real stories of those who left LGBT identities for a greater eternal purpose.” It airs weekly on Mondays during the month of June, and then beginning in July, two episodes will be aired every month.
“These are people who have been walking it out,” Zember said. “This is not stories of perfection.”
Four episodes of the podcast have already been released. One particularly powerful episode was a conversation with Jessica Rose, who identified as a male for seven years, battled depression, and attempted suicide until she gave her life to Christ.
Another episode features the story of Angel Colon, who survived the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, where 49 lives were lost. Despite being shot multiple times, he survived and credits the miracle to God, changing his way of life.
Zember’s own story follows a similar pattern as the guests she speaks with in her podcast. She grew up in what she says was a “normal” Catholic household with two older brothers and parents who were high school sweethearts. She received all her sacraments but admitted that she grew up without having a relationship with Jesus.
She shared that she saw God like a “cop that kind of just kept tally of all the things I was doing, good or bad, and was kind of calculating everything. So that was kind of challenging because I heard all the time like, ‘God loves you,’ ‘God’s for you,’ but I didn’t experience that.”
Despite having a decent childhood, Zember said she did not have a “good, tender father” and did not trust men. As a senior in high school, she longed for a relationship and acted upon her attraction to women.
“My senior year in high school I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t feel safe with men, but I feel safe with women and I’m attracted and I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to take a step,’” she recalled. “And [in] my senior year in high school I acted on these desires towards women with one of my best friends and that changed everything for me.”
From there she began dating women in private. Believing that what she was doing was wrong, she sought a Catholic counselor at age 18 and was affirmed in her homosexual identity. From there, she came out publicly and no longer hid the fact that she was dating women. It wasn’t until Oct. 17, 2014 — after a decade of living a gay lifestyle — that she “cried out to the Lord and said, ‘I can’t do this.’”
She recalled telling God: “‘I’ve heard about you my whole life. I’ve read about you my whole life but I need to experience you now. And so I need you to show up.’ And it might sound horrible but I was like, ‘I need you to show up and I need you to show up now because if you don’t show up and show me that you’re good, I will go to someone or something else, like I have my entire life. So, I’m giving you your one shot, God.’”
“And I’m telling you, he showed up. He showed up that evening in a way that I will never forget,” Zember shared. “Oct. 17 feels sometimes like my birthday — though I was born on Dec. 22 — that encounter I had with God marked me in a way … that I’ve never been the same.”
In that moment, Zember said she experienced the “tangible love of God” and “he has been faithful every day since then.”
“Also in revealing his character and nature, he has shown me that he’s the one my heart has been searching for. He has shown me that he is the one, that God himself, that made man in Jesus Christ, that he is the love of my life that I’ve desired.”
Zember now lives in freedom from her struggle with same-sex attraction and helps others who face similar battles to find their true identity in Christ.
When asked what the Church can do to better minister to those struggling with gender and sexual identity issues, she said: “I think as a Church, we need to recognize again our own unworthiness; no matter what Jesus has already saved us from, we still need him.”
“If we’d recognize our own brokenness and our own need for Jesus, I think we’d be able to receive other people in their need for him, too. We’d stop trying to fix people, and we’d actually try to walk with one another,” she added. “We’d try to walk with one another in our brokenness to Christ, the only one who can heal, deliver, make whole, and set free.”
As for her hopes for the new podcast, she said she hopes it would show people “that we have a good Father” and “that people would give Jesus a try — a real one.”
“My hope is that people will say, ‘Wait a minute, if Jesus was that good in their life, maybe he wants to be that good in mine too’ — in whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be homosexuality or identity confusion. It could be you holding on too tightly to something. It could be you needing a career and if you don’t get it, you don’t know who you are. It’s all the longings of our heart to be seen, known, loved, chosen, and desired, and how we try to go to the things of this world to fill those when it’s actually the very one who created us that wants to fill those.”
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I give much praise to the brave mission and recovery to having “lost” contact with a loving Christ. However, our experience with homosexuals has shown a different side.
The potential damage of the attempts to convert may cause one to pause. Gays have committed suicide after failing conversion. Case law must be addressed by the Church.
My friend’s strict Catholic mother disowned her son when he “came out” at age 18. She died recently, having never seen him again. He wept at her funeral.
Similar to Ms Zember, our niece tried dating and for years after college, and could not “fall in love” with a male partner. Today, she is happy and engaged to a woman she had been dating for months. Her Catholic parents seem relieved.
Former Evangelical US Rep. Michelle Bachmann opened a Minnesota “clinic” named “Pray the Gay Away”. Her “Counselors” did not seem to know much about the controversial practice called conversion or reparative therapy. It typically employs a combination of pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis and lots and lots of prayer in an effort to make gays straight.
Mainstream medicine has pretty much universally rejected the notion that homosexuality is a treatable neurosis – though that theory is the underpinning of Michele Bachmann’s opposition to gay rights.
The Church has homosexual priests. How do we proceed?
I can definitely see despair following an attempt to have conversion solve one’s problems – especially if the person spends some time thinking they have succeeded. I would recommend Courage International over conversion therapy. I’ve heard of LGBT people ceasing to be LGBT, but I haven’t heard of that coming from conversion therapy.
Prayer alone does not heal the kinds of wounds that tend to result in homosexuality, although it certainly contributes heavily. Therapy, as far as I can tell, is geared more toward stabilization, maintenance, and pain relief than toward healing – the only thing I’ve even heard claims of them curing is depression, and I don’t believe those claims.
I suspect that the people who have been healed, actually did some very key things that are not being done in therapy or in rosaries (rather than that they are super-special exceptions to the laws of human nature). I hope that this podcast goes beyond celebrating how Jesus saved them, and gets into those things.
The Church needs to stop ordaining homosexuals, and start removing priests and bishops who practice homosexuality. Preferably without any sort of publicity. But we also need to provide more support for homosexuals, and we need to do it without pressure to stop being SSA ASAP, without pressure to get into a religious or marital vocation. Motivation is probably not the key thing that they’re lacking, and they are actually beloved children of God, called to a relationship with Him, even if they remain single and SSA their entire lives.
Hopefully those “homosexual priests” you are referring too are living chaste lives according to their promises.
We proceed in the same way believers have responded for the past 2000 years. Maintain the Bible’s clear teaching about homosexuality and call people to repentance. It’s not difficult or complicated.
“Mainstream medicine” has also supported the mutilation and castration of vulnerable young people Mr Morgan. And feticide on demand. Not that long ago mainstream medical professionals believed in eugenic sterilizations.
There’s a long list of things counter to Catholic teaching that mainstream health providers have promoted.
We have got to start teaching mental prayer to children. Growing up without a relationship with Jesus is like growing up on a liquid diet.
Mr Morgan:
You write “Similar to Ms Zember, our niece tried dating and for years after college, and could not “fall in love” with a male partner. Today, she is happy and engaged to a woman she had been dating for months. Her Catholic parents seem relieved.”
3 things: First, if your niece couldn’t find and date a good man for marital purposes, it could indicate that marriage isn’t God’s plan for her (at least not yet).
Second, you, along with your niece’s parents, know as well as anyone else that gay or lesbian “engagements” and “marriages” aren’t actual engagements or marriages at all, but a grave sin to be in. The Catholic Church has made that teaching very clear, and that will not change, no matter what the tide brings.
Third, if your niece’s parents seem relieved that their daughter is entering a sinful and homosexual relationship, that is a slap in the face to their own covenant of marriage. I hope that your niece finds her way out onto the true path of marriage.
Thank you for the summary.
There are successful cases of “conversion” from SSA to heterosexual, but they are the exception. It might be better to encourage celibacy for SSA people. A SSA man who is celibate can be just as good of a Catholic as anyone.
“My hope is that people will say, ‘Wait a minute, if Jesus was that good in their life, maybe he wants to be that good in mine too’ — in whatever it is.
Bullseye
We are all called to “eat with tax collectors and sinners”