Back in 2012, we told you about Timothy Kurek, the straight Christian man from the Bible Belt who pretended to be gay for a year in order to examine his own views on homosexuality. Kurek is back with a Tedx Talk posted earlier this month in which he opens up about his childhood, homosexuality and his year of living as a gay man.

Kurek's decision to live for a year identifying as gay was precipitated by an emotional encounter with a young lesbian who had just come out and been disowned by her family. Listening to her story, Kurek says he had a little voice in his head telling him,

“It was my job to straighten her out, to fix her, it was my job to share those six passages in the Bible I'd always been taught condemn homosexuality.”

But then, he had an epiphany:

“Maybe that voice inside my head telling me to do anything other than be there for her in her pain…maybe that voice wasn't God. Maybe that voice was the result of two decades spent in a hyper conservative religious bubble…I needed to understand what she was going through.”

After that moment, he decided, as a straight man, to come out as gay in order to ‘walk in the shoes of the other.' The reaction from his religious community was deafening silence:

“Overnight I ceased to exist. The vast majority of my community closed their doors on me that day, and it felt as though I had died.”

Kurek also spoke about having his own preconceptions about the LGBT confronted by reality, telling of how he wandered into a gay karaoke bar to find not Britney, Cher or Madonna being belted out, but a praise song he knew from Church:

“Never in a million years did I think, as a straight Christian under cover in the gay community of Nashville, that I would hear that song, because I was taught to believe that gay people were Godless.”

Watch Kurek's Tedx Talk, below: