The ‘Ex-Gay’ Agenda
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

With homosexuality and gay marriage at the vortex of the culture wars, religious conservatives say the victory in Montgomery County will be the shot heard around the world. “This has national significance because Montgomery County is a wealthy, influential school district and the lid has been ripped off an agenda that has crept into schools nationwide,” declared Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute at Concerned Women for America.

“We are going to march across the country and we are going to help parents organize in every county,” says Richard Cohen, president of PFOX. “We want parents to check out the curriculum in every place where sex ed is being taught, and if they are advocating homosexuality without any other diverse views being offered to the children, we will help them with a legal defense.” Cohen says he will press Montgomery County to teach that homosexuality is an unhealthy lifestyle that can be fixed. “With respect to the risks of homosexual behavior, that would be fair,” he says. A PFOX pamphlet states that homosexuality is a “developmental process not genetically determined” and can be treated with therapy. It notes that gay sex results in surging AIDS rates, drug abuse, “gay bowel syndrome,” psychological problems, and violence.

The pamphlet insinuates that men having sex with men is what causes AIDS. It fails to mention that HIV can be transmitted through either heterosexual or homosexual contact. It does not acknowledge that of the fifty million people currently living with HIV—three million of whom die annually—nearly half are women. Nor does it point out that officials worldwide are most alarmed by the rise in AIDS among girls and that AIDS rates among homosexual men in the United States have fallen 27 percent since 1990.

Despite the Maryland settlement, PFOX’s claims about homosexuality are, according to virtually all mental health professions, wrong, bizarre, and potentially dangerous. “I can give you a short answer of where reparative therapy fits in with the modern mental health profession: It does not,” says Dr. Douglas Haldeman, president of the Association of Practicing Psychologists, a group affiliated with the American Psychological Association. “These theories have been discredited for years.”

The Theory and the Therapy

For all their dubious scientific and therapeutic standing, reparative therapy ministries, some of which accept kids and operate like a cross between churches and boot camps, largely function without oversight and licenses. Not that science or psychiatry has ever been a roadblock to the religious right. In the nation’s divisive culture wars, gay issues have proved to be winners for Christian conservatives, who helped power right-wing Republicans into control of two branches of the federal government (the third may soon be in hand). In the last election, gay-marriage bans passed in all eleven states where they were on the ballot. Religious conservatives are on a mission to ban more than gay marriage. They want to outlaw civil unions giving same-sex partners some of the legal privileges of married heterosexuals, reinstate state sodomy bans, and defeat hate-crimes legislation that would increase penalties for violence against gays. They are also taking their battle to the states. This spring, the Texas House considered a measure that would have banned gays from becoming foster parents. Opponents argued the measure would uproot 3,000 foster kids. It didn’t pass.

The Christian right’s political agenda rests on its contention that sex is natural only among heterosexual couples. A sexual preference for partners of your own gender is therefore a psychological disorder and a sin. In the words of the Rev. John J. Smid, who left “homosexuality and its entanglements in February of 1984,” and is now the executive director of Love in Action International, a reparative therapy group in Memphis, people who identify themselves as gay or lesbian are in the hands of the devil: “Satan, working behind the scenes, has succeeded in redefining the meaning of key words, and therefore we only reinforce and strengthen a false identity by calling individuals by a name that does not apply.”

In the trenches to change gays is a loose network of organizations and individuals. Licensed counselors may charge 200 dollars an hour for treatment in an office, complete with a sofa; Bible study support groups may meet for free in a church basement; and Christian ministries will provide inpatient care that can last years and cost thousands of dollars. Exodus International is the umbrella group for reparative therapy ministries, a clearinghouse for information and a referral service for counseling. The group claims over 120 ministries in the United States and Canada with links to thirty more in seventeen countries.

“Reparative” or “conversion” therapy, as it’s called by its practitioners, resembles something like Freudian psychoanalysis mixed with a dose of Christian theology. The basic theory is that a young boy’s futile search for love and affection from an emotionally unavailable father gets contorted into sexual desire for men. “What we are seeing, almost without exception, is the classic triadic family pattern,” says Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of narth (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality). “That is, a distant, detached, critical father, an over-involved, intrusive, domineering mother, and a temperamentally sensitive, introverted artistic son.” As for women, “We see a breach between the mother and the daughter at an early age.”

This summer, the ministries’ controversial methods flared up in public. Gay rights protesters hounded Love in Action after the parents of a sixteen-year-old boy, “Zach,” sent their son to Refuge, an intensive Love in Action therapy program—apparently against his will—after he told them he was gay. Just before going into the eight-week program, Zach wrote in his blog, “I can’t help it, no, I’m not going to commit suicide, all I can think about is killing my mother and myself. It’s so horrible,” he wrote.

According to Love in Action’s rules, posted on Zach’s blog, clients must report sexual fantasies to the staff. The program specifies the exact length of haircuts and how many times men must shave each week (seven). Love in Action bars jewelry and clothing by Abercrombie and Fitch. The rules prohibit “campy gay/lesbian behavior and talk.” New clients are not allowed to talk to or make eye contact with anyone for the first three days. Clients have to wear pajamas to bed, and if they get too cozy they “must always have exactly one person between them.” Clients cannot keep a diary, and all their belongings are searched every morning by the “Chain of Command.” All secular media, including music and movies, are forbidden. Also, during counseling—no “disgusting” faces. The Refuge program is “like a boot camp, but worse,” Zach wrote. “What is it with these people? How could you support a program like this?”

The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services investigated the Love in Action facility for possible child abuse but discontinued it because of lack of evidence. The brouhaha exposed an oddity of the ex-gay ministries: they are largely unregulated. Ministries claim they are not hospitals or any other facility that would typically require regulatory oversight or licensing. Love in Action spokesman Tommy Corman says the facility does not need to be licensed by the state at all because it is not doing anything “therapeutic.” A bold declaration, considering the group promotes “the prevention or treatment of unhealthy and destructive behaviors facing families, adults, and adolescents,” according to its website.

But the ministries do fall into a regulatory blind spot. “There has been some question of who licenses that facility,” said K. Danielle Edwards, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. “This would not be under our jurisdiction. I have not been able to ascertain who licenses that facility.” On July 11, the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities sent a letter to Love in Action, warning the facility that it may be operating without a required license. Results of the investigation are pending.

James Dobson’s powerful lobby, Focus on the Family, claims that “thousands” of gays and lesbians have been changed. But statistics are hard to come by, and change is hard to measure. Many of those who have been enrolled in the ministries say conversion programs are emotionally destructive and destined to fail. Writer, actor, and comedian Peterson Toscano did a two-year stint at Love in Action in an effort to cure his homosexuality. “I felt like I was in a biblically induced coma,” he says. Toscano, a Christian, struggled with his homosexuality as a young man and even considered throwing himself in front of a train. It was only after leaving Love in Action that he gained peace of mind and accepted his sexuality. He says that even if the reparative programs do convince gays and lesbians that they are cured, “It is a ruse because they have to give up their sexuality.”

Wayne R. Besen, author of Anything but Straight (2003), which documents scandals inside conversion groups, says much of the close coordination between ex-gay groups and the religious right started in 1998, when a conglomeration of fifteen religious organizations sought new traction in the culture war, launching a $600,000 ad campaign in major U.S. newspapers, touting the achievements of the ex-gay ministries, complete with a photo of a crowd of beaming ex-gays. Besen quotes Robert Knight, then with the Family Research Council, who called the ad campaign the “Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars.”

During a flurry of media coverage that followed the ad blitz, Newsweek put the ex-gay issue on its cover, along with a picture of Exodus International chair John Paulk and his wife Anne, who had both allegedly left homosexuality behind. In his book, Besen photographed John Paulk cruising in a Washington, D.C., gay bar while he was still chair at Exodus and worked for Focus on the Family. Besen tracks down a dizzying array of former ex-gay leaders who later came out of the closet for good, including the two founders of Exodus.

Besen also nails current PFOX president Richard Cohen, who is leading the charge against liberal sex ed in Montgomery County. He writes that Cohen is a former Moonie and an acolyte of the Wesleyan Christian Community Church on Vashon Island near Seattle. According to Besen, citing a 1977 Associated Press report, the group was exiled from an Illinois church for allegedly practicing therapy sessions where men, women, and children breast-fed on women stripped to the waist. Cohen responds that he did get therapy from the Wesleyan church but witnessed no such activity. “I have no idea of such nonsense,” he says. “I have not a clue what [Besen] is talking about. I got counseling from a religious organization that he tried to call a cult. Wayne is a little boy whose main cult is character assassination.”

Besen argues that the religious right is pushing the ex-gay philosophy particularly hard right now to buttress its aggressive agenda on gay marriage: “They are really getting behind this.” Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas responds that his group aims to help people and not to serve as a political foil to advance the policy positions of the religious right. “I know a lot of people think that we are pawns of the religious right, but we are not,” Thomas says. (The Exodus website does include some reports on policy issues, like opposing hate-crimes legislation. “The hate experienced, in the majority of hate crimes, is not necessarily coming from those who disparage others as much as it is from the victim toward himself,” one report reads.)

The nation’s two mainstream psychiatric and psychological associations, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, deny reparative therapy’s very premise. Along with the National Association of Social Workers, these groups say homosexuality simply is not a mental disorder. Being gay by itself is not a problem, they point out; rather, the negative mental health consequences of discrimination have been well established and cited as a factor in higher suicide rates among gays. Therapy to change homosexuality may simply telegraph to patients they are sick when they are not, that they can fundamentally change their sexual orientation when they cannot. If so, failed efforts to change could prove disastrous, particularly for deeply religious gays.

“The mental health professions in this country do not value or credit conversion therapy at all. And we are increasingly aware of the potential harms of this misguided treatment,” says Haldeman, of the Association of Practicing Psychologists. “There are a substantial number of people who go through this who are harmed for some period. This is just a dressing up of old, old theories that have never been proven.”

The American Psychiatric Association has asked its members to avoid reparative therapy. “We are finding that the numbers of people claiming to be harmed by reparative therapy are increasing,” says Dr. Jack Drescher, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Issues. “I don’t know about the suicides because it is hard to determine why somebody killed themselves afterward. But the harm is increasing.” The legislative body of Drescher’s APA approved a statement this past spring that endorsed gay marriage to help reverse gay stigma. They also cite evidence that stable, monogamous relationships are beneficial for mental health, whether gay or straight.

It was the de-listing of homosexuality as a mental disorder that launched the “ex-gay” movement in the first place. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But a relatively small group of mental health professionals rejected that move, arguing that the APA caved in to aggressive political pressure from the gay rights movement, as opposed to science.

“That opinion is a political and not a scientific position,” says Nicolosi from narth. “These major mental health associations have been hijacked by small political interest groups.” That’s nonsense, says Drescher. However, Drescher says the mental health profession does agree with the reparative therapy crowd about one thing: No one knows for sure what guides sexual orientation, gay or straight, but mounting evidence suggests a biological component. “We do know there is a very good likelihood that [homosexuality]is biologically related. We do have some studies that indicate a biological component,” he says. That homosexuality may be innate, Drescher says, bolsters the argument for gay rights. “And that’s what the religious right is fighting against,” he says. But he adds that whether you take the nature or nurture side of the argument doesn’t matter when it comes to protecting the health and civil rights of gays and lesbians. “Even if homosexuality is not innate, you could still argue for civil rights.”

My Gay Therapy Session

Barry Levy, a Christian counselor and licensed clinical social worker, is explaining to me what causes homosexuality. “Take the young boy who is more sensitive, more delicate, who doesn’t like rough-and-tumble, who is artistic,” he says. “He can’t hit the ball, fire the gun or shoot an arrow. There is a high correlation between poor eye-hand coordination and same-sex attraction.”

I was referred to Levy by the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, which claims on its website that homosexuality can be treated and prevented. “While the Bible clearly states that homosexuality runs contrary to God’s plan for relationships, those who struggle with homosexual feelings are still God’s children, in need of His forgiveness and healing,” the group states. Conservative Christians say curing gays comes from loving them. “Compassion—not bigotry—compels us to support the healing of homosexuals,” says the Family Research Council. Levy practices what is called “reparative” or “conversion” therapy, which allegedly helps homosexuals become heterosexuals. The theory that homosexuality is a mental disorder that needs to be cured is the moral underpinning of the Christian right’s crusade against gay marriage, sodomy laws, gay adoption and sex ed curriculums in schools. While all major modern mental health professions say conversion therapy is baseless and potentially dangerous, I wanted to experience for myself what is going on behind counselors’ closed doors.

When I arrived in Levy’s office, I was asked to fill out roughly fifteen pages of questions about myself and my family. Mostly the questions centered on how I got along with my folks. In a section about my problems, I wrote “possible homosexuality.” The fact is, I’m straight, I’m married to a woman, and I have a three-year-old daughter and a son due in October. I wrote on the form that I was married with a kid. But I lied and said I was also living a secret life, that I harbored homosexual urges.

According to the Bible, Levy says, homosexuality “is not consistent with the manufacturer’s desire. It is not what the body is for. It is not what procreation is for. It is not what life energy is for. I am going to draw you out of that because the people around you are into that.” To receive God in his holiness, Levy tells me, to experience the ultimate happiness for which God created men and women, a person needs to overcome any homosexual feelings. Homosexuality, Levy asserts, is a mental disorder, a certifiable neurosis. “The psychoanalytic perspective has always considered homosexuality and same-sex attraction to be a neurosis. They still do and they still treat it.” (In fact, mental health associations do not consider homosexuality a neurosis and do not “treat” patients for it.)

Levy informs me that homosexuality is difficult to treat because it is about more than sexuality—it is about a way of life. “I want to make a distinction between same-sex attraction and being gay,” he says. “That is a whole ideology. It is a lifestyle. It becomes the locus, or organizing principle, of the identity of the human personality.” Reparative therapy focuses on getting gays and lesbians to stop talking or walking “gay.” Refuge, an “ex-gay” program in Memphis, bars men from wearing jewelry, donning Calvin Klein clothes, and listening to secular music. The causes of homosexuality, Levy explains, are many, but childhood loneliness figures prominently. “When a child is neglected—if not abused, then neglected or isolated—loneliness is often experienced as genital tension,” Levy says. “When kids are under-stimulated, they play with themselves, and the source of greatest stimulation is obviously your genitals or your mouth.” I tell Levy I did not think I was a lonely kid. “There are more reasons,” he responds. “I got more.”

He suggests that I may lack confidence and am turning my admiration for bold and masculine men into sexual desire for them. “I call it the Wizard of Oz principle,” he says. “The lion wants courage so he can be the most courageous one on the journey. Some people call it the ‘cannibal compulsion.’ Cannibals will eat people, but only the enemies they admire. If their enemies are courageous, cannibals will eat their heart. If they are strong, they’ll eat their muscles. There is a compulsion to take into yourself the qualities you feel you’re lacking and someone else has. Eroticization is one of the ways to do that.”

He turns to a central theory of reparative therapy, which is that a son’s unrequited love for an emotionally unavailable father gets transferred into sexual desire for men. Homosexual feelings can arise, Levy says, “when a boy is not affirmed in his gender by the father, who might be mean, who might be cruel, who might be absent. Often, there is a highly conflicted relationship where the mother disparages the father. She misidentifies with the marriage and might even start to identify with the son.” Under those circumstances, Dr. Joe Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, later tells me, “temperamentally sensitive” boys become vulnerable to homosexuality.

Levy says reparative therapy is effective but that a cure for homosexuality takes at least two years of weekly counseling. (My one hour cost Salon $140.) He says that if I stay in therapy, I will either turn straight or get “significant relief.” The success or failure rate for changing gays is difficult to quantify. One study, often cited by conservative groups like Focus on the Family, shows incremental success from reparative therapy. But critics point out that the study was based solely on interviews with subjects arranged by ex-gay ministries; in fact, many of them worked at the ministries.

Levy tells me that reparative therapy can be a lonely business. “There are not a lot of us who do this work,” he says. “It is politically incorrect. And it is difficult.” He also admits that “not everybody who starts down this road gets cured. This is not a sure-fire cure. I wish I could tell you that it is, but it is not.” But he remains committed. Homosexuality “is not just another flower in God’s garden,” Levy says. “This is something that happens to people that can be fixed. And if someone comes seeking relief from this suffering, we would be wrong not to offer them relief.”

True Confessions

On the front page of the Exodus International website is a photograph of several dozen men and women. The allegedly changed homosexuals, or newly minted ex-gays, are beaming at the camera, apparently celebrating their newfound freedom from homosexuality. Standing in the center of the photograph is 29-year-old Shawn O’Donnell, who was enrolled in Exodus programs on and off for ten years. Exodus is the umbrella organization, information clearinghouse and referral service for “ex-gay ministries.” These organizations claim they can help gays and lesbians become heterosexual. Exodus was founded in 1976 as part of a backlash against the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 determination that homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Exodus leaders are embraced by the religious right, including the politically influential Focus on the Family, which holds conferences touting the success of the “ex-gay movement.”

The only problem with the Exodus photo is that O’Donnell is still gay. In fact, he is out of the closet and says he is the happiest he has ever been in his life. The efforts to change him from gay to straight were what sank him into despair. At age 21, in his bedroom at his parents’ house, O’Donnell slashed his arms. “No one was home,” O’Donnell says. “I was in my room and just started cutting. I definitely did not want to live anymore. I bled through my clothes. I had pretty deep cuts.” O’Donnell’s parents rushed him to the hospital, and he spent a week in a psychiatric ward. At the time, he was getting counseling from a group called Overcomers Ministries.

O’Donnell grew up Elgin, Ill., about forty miles outside Chicago. He mostly attended Pentecostal churches as a kid. As for his sexuality, he says he knew something was up at age six. But he was told that being gay was a sin. At age eighteen, he began counseling to overcome homosexuality at Leanne Payne Ministries, which he visited once or twice a week for two years. In ten years of therapy, O’Donnell was told that a bad relationship with his father may have made him gay, that he may have been sexually abused, and that his mother was overbearing. He says none of those things are true. “At times I was told that I just wasn’t praying hard enough or reading the Bible enough,” he says. But O’Donnell says his sexual orientation did not change. Like a half-dozen gay Christian men I interviewed who participated in ex-gay programs, O’Donnell felt trapped between his faith and his sexuality. “At the time, I could not be gay and I could not be a Christian,” he says. “I could not stop being gay and I did not want to give up my faith.”

Even after his first suicide attempt, O’Donnell tried to change from gay to straight. For three years, he went through therapy with New Hope Ministries. This time, O’Donnell was an inpatient, so he could get round-the-clock help. And again, the therapy didn’t work. While he was there, he made a second suicide attempt, although this time the slashes to his wrists didn’t require him to be hospitalized. He eventually gave up trying to change. “After three years, I finally went AWOL,” O’Donnell says. He adds that he now happily attends a church that welcomes him and his sexuality.

Recently, O’Donnell asked Exodus president Alan Chambers to take his photo off the Exodus website. But Chambers, O’Donnell says, told him that Exodus owns the picture and it still signifies that people can change. “I said, ‘How can you say that is true when I know there are at least three people in that picture who have not changed?’” Exodus did not return my calls seeking comment about the photo.

Christian counselors who practice reparative therapy or other techniques to change gays say it is their clients’ unnatural homosexual behavior that causes them emotional pain, not guilt or stigma. Gays can change, they say. As counselors, they say they have a right and a duty to relieve the mental anguish inherent in homosexuality.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Treatment of Homosexuality, says that gays who are unhappy with efforts to change their sexual orientation are no different from patients who are disgruntled by some other medical treatment. “That can happen in any treatment,” Nicolosi says. “You name any kind of procedure or treatment, and you are going to find people that are really dissatisfied with it.” He dismisses any alleged harm caused by his methods. “They say we are doing harm,” Nicolosi says. “There is not one case against me. There is not one legal or ethical case against me. Where are all these people who have been harmed? There should be a small busload.” I tell Nicolosi I have spoken to a half-dozen people who have been through reparative therapy. All are still gay. All feel hurt by the therapy. None are gay rights’ advocates. Nicolosi’s group claims that 25 to fifty percent of those seeking treatment get “significant improvement.” So I ask him if he can introduce me to any men or women who have been converted from gay to straight who are not on the payroll of an ex-gay ministry. He responds that his patients will not talk to me because they don’t get a fair shake in the press. They are done with homosexuality and have moved on with their lives. They don’t want to talk about it now.

Exodus spokesman Randy Thomas also declines to help me meet ex-gays to interview. He says that I can read about the experiences of ex-gays on the Exodus website. The testimonials are written by those who say they’ve had troubled relationships with parents or gay and lesbian friends. Some say they were molested as kids, and as adults have had hundreds of sexual partners and used drugs. They describe significant improvements in their mental health when, through therapy, they were able to overcome their homosexuality.

In his testimonial, Tom Cole, the director of Reconciliation, an Exodus ministry in Detroit, says he was harassed, called a “fag,” and beaten up at school because of his femininity. He says he was sexually molested by an older boy in his neighborhood and soon started having sex with other boys. To ease his emotional pain, he says, he had “300 to 400 sexual partners,” hung out in gay bars, drank heavily, and used cocaine. A friend turned him on to a Christian church, and he soon met a “former lesbian” woman, Donna. “After two years of studying the Bible and praying together, I knew my feelings for her were more than friendship,” he writes. “One day Donna came to visit me at work. For the first time, I noticed her well-endowed figure and felt strongly attracted to her. I realized that, at age 26, I was experiencing something most boys go through at puberty. Soon Donna and I were dating. Three months later, we were married. Today, our vision is to help Christians who long for change in their homosexual desires.”

In his testimonial, Exodus president Alan Chambers says his “desires” have changed since he left homosexuality. However, he notes, “a struggle-free life is not what I have found. What I have found is freedom in the hope that after this short life, God will fulfill His promise of healing to completion.”

Damon Bishop, 35, was involved in Joshua Fellowship, a program under the Exodus umbrella, in 1994. He grew up in San Francisco and went to Bible school in Tulsa. He felt that he might be gay from a young age. At sixteen, he says, his dad found a men’s underwear catalog in his bathroom and threatened to kill him. “He was an ex-Marine and he was a lot bigger than me,” Bishop says. “He said, ‘I brought you into this world and I will bring you out of it. This will not be an issue.’ Talk about being scared straight.” Bishop willed himself into a marriage, but it soon fell apart. In a desperate act to save his marriage, he got involved in the Fellowship. “When Exodus came on the scene, it seemed like a godsend,” he says. “I thought, ‘This is a panacea. This is going to save my marriage.’ You are at this perfectly vulnerable place when you get to Exodus.” Bishop says he dropped out when he learned that his counselor was still tempted by gay sex ten years after claiming to be changed. Others in his therapy group had been trying to get “cured” for years, to no avail. Bishop never became suicidal, but he understands how reparative therapy can lead to despair. “There is something implied in all of it that you are not good enough, that you did not try hard enough,” he says. “That can lead to despair and suicide. I have friends who are living their whole lives feeling like shit.”

Many of the men I interviewed were profoundly dedicated to Christianity. What left them feeling so distraught, they said, was when people told them that, according to Christianity, they were sick. Peterson Toscano says that reparative therapy thrives, in part, because the gay community does a poor job of welcoming gay Christians. “If we took better care of our own, we would put these programs out of business,” he says.

Bob Gratcyk, a pastor at Chicago’s Open Door Community Church, is trying to do just that. As a teenager, he struggled with the guilt and shame of being gay. He grew up in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland. At age seventeen, he went to Bible college. There, he pulled the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the library shelves. It was 1973, the same year the APA determined that being gay was not a disorder at all. Gratcyk’s copy didn’t contain that key change. “All it said was that it was a mental health disease,” he says. “I decided I must be a horrible person. I decided to pursue the Christian side of my life.” At one point, Gratcyk underwent five weeks of intensive therapy that was supposed to cure him of his homosexuality. “You are put in a situation where you, by nature, are considered evil,” Gratcyk says. “The Christian version is that you are not evil, but your actions are evil. But you cannot separate the two.” Today, Gratcyk, 48, lives with his partner and has reconciled his sexuality with his faith. “I am a man who is loved by God and loves God,” he says.

Mark Benjamin, based in Washington, D.C., is a national correspondent for Salon.com.