Pastor Paul Gualtieri with his wife Lupe
Molested a few times when he was a child, Paul Gualtieri dabbled with homosexuality as a largely unsupervised 13-year-old in Palm Springs.
It wasn’t long before he found himself in his bedroom proclaiming his destiny: “I’m gay. I’m a homosexual,” he said out loud with no one around. It was a pivotal moment of his life. “There’s power in confessing both good and bad things. When I declared I was gay, I gave a right to a spiritual force in my life.”
When he was 13, he ran away to Hollywood and threw himself headlong into the partying and gay lifestyle. “I just got sucked right into it,” he recalls. “I thought it was great.”
He was too young to be admitted to the gay bars but prostituted himself to support a lifestyle that included drugs like Quaaludes, coke and meth.
“I just ran rampant,” he says. “I had different boyfriends. We would panhandle every day to buy drugs and pay our hotel.”
He slept at anybody’s house who’d have him, in Plummer Park and in the “Hotel Hell,” once posh lodgings for movie luminaries that became decrepit and abandoned on Hollywood Boulevard.
When he was 16, he checked the change return slot of a pay phone, as was his custom. Instead of coins, he found a Christian tract sitting there. “The tract was called ‘Wounded Children.’ It was about a boy who was rejected and abused,” he says.
The truth contained in that little tract had a powerful affect on his heart. “I started to cry. I read out loud the prayer at the end.”
There was a Christian home for street kids nearby. But when he inquired, a friend warned him: “You don’t wanna go there. You have to give up all your jewelry and clothes.”
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SOURCE: God Reports
Michael Ashcraft and Mark Ellis
