first of all, I'm glad you're coming back and am proud of you for doing so - I know it can be really tough after that sort of experience, and I'm so sorry you went through that. second of all, I personally have found a lot of peace through doing research on more of the academic side of things, like reading articles from religious scholars who study things like the context of certain passages in the Bible (specifically, there's a great article that I link below that analyzes the main verses that people use to condemn homosexuality and essentially debunks all of them and explains the real context and how it's not really fair to use them as anti-gay ammunition) - long story short, I've been able to really gain a lot of peace from academic resources like this that analyze the Bible without all the bias and deep-rooted prejudice that's (sadly) become so characteristic of Christianity, and I have finally come to a place in my faith where I truly believe that being gay is not a sin in God's eyes. It's a radical opinion that gets a lot of people angry at me, but so be it. (I feel more comfortable trusting objective scholars who have dedicated their lives to finding the truth behind how the Scripture was written rather than trusting people in church pews who only get their info from a biased preacher, yknow? but that's just me.) All that to say - in my personal experience, it took a secular/academic approach to help me strengthen my faith and spiritual walk with God bc I felt like I had actually found concrete evidence that God doesn't hate the LGBTQ+ community. It just gave me so much peace and made my devotional study of the Bible/my spirituality a lot easier once I was able to definitively say, "aha! so all the bigots and homophobes ARE wrong." And for translations, I'm still torn. There are so many that aren't accurate bc of all the early Christians who mistranslated things (whether intentional or not) to push their homophobic agenda, so I myself have been on a long hunt for English translations that are as close to the original Hebrew and Greek as possible. ESV is pretty good for an objective translation, but it's just hard to find a translation that hasn't been influenced by the fundamentalist jerks who decided to put their own words in God's mouth. It really makes me sick. But on a happier note - I'll be happy to share a version once I find one that does it justice. In the meantime, here are some links that I hope might bring you the same peace they've brought me - I got many of these from courses I've taken in my religious studies major, as well as my own research:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146107915577097?journalCode=btba
https://www.amazon.com/Bibles-Same-Sex-Marriage-Study-Guide/dp/066426218X/
https://www.hrc.org/resources/what-does-the-bible-say-about-homosexuality
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/bible/doesnotoppose.html
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/assault/interviews/helminiak.html
https://baptistnews.com/article/my-quest-to-find-the-word-homosexual-in-the-bible/#.YbaQZr3MI2x (this one is SO enlightening and answered a lot of my questions about the language used in the Bible and what the words in original Greek and Hebrew really meant when they were written)
I hope that some of this is helpful, if you want to take a look - it's not for everyone, I know, but these are just the approaches that have personally helped me so much in my comfort level with reading the Bible and getting back in touch with my faith and I always want to share in hopes it could bring that to someone else, too. If any of this is helpful to you, please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or wanna chat about it/would like more resources :) praying that you find endless peace <3
A lot of good books mentioned. One I'll add is The Bible's Yes to Same Sex Marriage
Mark who wrote it was fairly conservative and used to be a touring speaker at churches on the arguments against same sex relationships. Then he had a change of heart which caused him to reexamine his position. This may be helpful for that conservative against position.
Another one may be Struggling with Scripture it's a short book written by three excellent scholars that talk about some of the issues around interpreting scripture. They use sexuality as sort of the test case when talking about issues of interpretation, so it may be a less subtle way of starting the conversation that some of the other books.