Timothy Kurek, a young man from Nashville, Tennessee for whom "being an evangelical Christian was his identity" has sparked controversy with a new book called The Cross in the Closet about his experience pretending to be gay for a year. As an attempt at radical empathy (and because he had a hard time fighting his urge to convert a lesbian friend who had been tossed out by her Christian family) Kurek decided to be gay, came out to his parents and lived the life of a gay barista.

Kurek was homeschooled until seventh grade, grew up going to his Christian Cub Scout troop and was apparently fed a steady diet of toxic anti-gay rhetoric. “I had been taught to be wary of gays,” Kurek wrote. “They were all HIV positive, perverts and liberal pedophiles.” Kurek says he started to change his ways after discovering Soulforce, an LGBT equal rights group in 2004. After a lesbian friend confided in him that she had been disowned after coming out to her family, that's when he knew he had to be fake-gay. It was then, Kurek wrote, that he decided, "I needed to come out of the closet as a gay man.”

Kurek conscripted a friend to be his fake gay boyfriend, got a job slinging macchiatos at a gay cafe and he came out to his mother, the same woman who once wrote in her journal that she would rather have terminal cancer and three months to live than to find out her womb had produced a gay son. Like a gay Serpico, Kurek was deep undercover for an entire year. Appropriately enough, he came out a second time (as straight, that is) on National Coming Out Day. Although it wasn't part of his gay disguise, Kurek later went on The View to talk about the whole thing:

In the end, Kurek says he learned that, "homosexuality and Christianity are not mutually exclusive terms. Christians like to think they are... but not all." Now, instead of just being pleased that there is apparently a cure for homophobia, members of the LGBT community have reacted with conflicted ambivalence.

As Amy Lieberman reacted on Feministing.com, the story reeks of privilege. "I feel for the gay community of Nashville," Liberman wrote, "and for every person who trusted Kurek enough to flirt with him, hang out with him, and confide in him about their lives. If I were in that community, I would feel so betrayed right now." But it is the boyfriend-for-hire that really rubs her the wrong way: "The most fucked up part of this story to me is that he recruited a gay friend of his to play his boyfriend so he would have an excuse not to hook up with guys... As a straight man, does Kurek feel that he needs to have a girlfriend in order to fend off all the crazy women hitting on him all the time?"

Meanwhile, on the Huffington Post: straight lady Emily Timbol also struggled with her own Christian upbringing, but she says she learned about LGBT issues the same way thousands of people do every year: by attending her first Pride parade. "I'm glad his year made him an ally," Timbol wrote. "But I can't help wishing that what Timothy had done, instead of spending his time learning through pretending, was spend a year using his privilege to fight for the people around him." In other words: Kurek got a book deal, while his new gay friends in Nashville still deal with the discrimination he wrote about on a daily basis.

As for his family, Kurek told CNN they are "happy to know that he his not gay." After his eye-opening experience, Kurek has left his beloved Bible Belt and moved to Portland, Oregon. As he told Barbara Walters, "It's much less conservative there."