ALAN CHAMBERS, the President of Exodus International, a group claiming to change the sexual orientation of homosexuals, sunk in his chair and squirmed as the camera closed in on his crinkled face. There was a quick cutaway to the audience where his fidgety wife, Leslie, looked as if she wanted to run to the nearest fire exit. Sensing the kill, talk show host Montel Williams asked Chambers if his organization could “change” homosexuals into heterosexuals.
“We don’t have the ability to change anyone,” Chambers said, stumbling into the carefully set trap. Montel pounced, showing a policy statement on Chambers’ own website that claimed to “liberate” people from homosexuality. “If we liberate Iraq, we have changed Iraq,” Montel scornfully lectured Chambers, who wilted under the scrutiny. Realizing he had tripped over his web of deceit, the ex-gay leader muttered that if Exodus did say it liberated gay people, it was something that he believed should come off the group’s website.
It is important to note that Exodus not only promises liberation, it also offers desperate and vulnerable gay people the “freedom to grow into heterosexuality” and “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”
During the same show, a psychiatrist also pointed out that an important component of Exodus is essentially acting lessons to teach men how to become more masculine and women to be more feminine. Caught crossing his legs in an effete manner, an embarrassed Chambers said, “If it [Exodus] teaches you to cross your legs a different way, then I have failed and I am the President.” Chambers’ embarrassment was justified: a central part of his ministry is re-educating men and women on how to walk and talk, so they’ll shed all traces of gayness. Indeed, only weeks before, I attended an ex-gay retreat in Orlando where Focus on the Family’s ex-lesbian speaker Melissa Fryrear went into great detail about her transformation from tomboy lesbian to lipstick ex-lesbian.
A gigantic video screen showed “before” pictures of a masculine, shorthaired Fryrear in a trucker-like tee-shirt crushing a beer can and smoking a cigarette. To the applause of the doting audience, the next frame revealed a feminized Fryrear with a coiffed hairdo and thick make-up. Exodus International’s leaders sat in the auditorium, clapping their hands at her extreme makeover. Until she clumsily stumbled in her pumps, that is. Mortified, Fryrear joked about still having to practice walking in heels, underscoring the extent to which ex-gays are merely actors playing straight roles. Indeed, a PBS documentary, One Nation Under God, actually showed an Exodus lipstick-training seminar in progress. By denying to Montel Williams that these seminars take place, Chambers was pulling a Groucho Marx, as if to say: “Who are you gonna to believe, me or your own eyes?”
The most bizarre moment in the show came when it was pointed out that it took Chambers nine months to consummate his marriage. Implausibly, he denied it had anything to do with his homosexuality. “There was a learning curve, but it had nothing to do with attraction… it had everything to do with, I’m not sure how this all works.” Of course, sex is not rocket science and there are thirteen-year-olds—not to mention monkeys, rabbits, and flies—that have figured out how it works.
Welcome to the world of Alan Chambers, a man whose job it is to deny that he’s in denial by splitting more hairs than Vidal Sassoon. Ex-gay ministries are one of the most elaborate and well-funded hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people. Indeed, they are not even about changing people from gay to straight but rather about changing perceptions of homosexuality, ultimately paving the way for the passing of anti-gay legislation.
The Normandy Landing
In 1976, Exodus International was founded in Anaheim, California. Its spokespeople were Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, who traveled the nation proclaiming they had prayed away the gay. The two eventually fell in love, left their families, and even held a commitment ceremony. In the late 1970’s, Colin Cook founded Homosexuals Anonymous and appeared on various television shows, including Phil Donahue. But he had to step down for giving nude massages and having phone sex with his clients.
With such an ignominious record, both the gay community and social conservatives soundly rejected the ex-gay myth. But if the ex-gay concept never gained much traction in the 70’s, it was back in the early 80’s when AIDS hit the gay community. “The impact of AIDS on the work of Exodus has been profound,” former Exodus President Sy Rogers said in One Nation Under God. As the epidemic raged, some men were literally scared straight—or at least into making the futile attempt.
Still, while the numbers inside these ministries increased, the idea remained an obscure oddity of the religious fringes. Even by the mid-1990’s, the concept had not entered the consciousness of mainstream Americans and was certainly not part of national political debates on gay rights. This dynamic changed in the politically tumultuous summer of 1998, when ex-gay ministries were thrust out of nowhere onto the political stage. It started when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), on a conservative TV show, compared homosexuality to alcoholism and kleptomania and recommended that a gay person should try to “control that problem.”
Lott was blasted in the media and his remarks were even called “backward” by Clinton’s press secretary, Mike McCurry. Aside from Lott’s remarks, there was a flurry of anti-gay legislation winding its way through Congress. Conservatives had also placed a hold on the confirmation process of James Hormel, who’d been nominated by Clinton to be ambassador to Luxembourg. The power of conservatives had reached its pinnacle with Newt Gingrich (R-GA) as House Speaker and Lott in charge of the Senate. The conservative base expected to be rewarded for helping elect Republican majorities. With a midterm election only months away, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson threatened to pull his support unless the Republican Congress passed anti-gay legislation.
However, times had changed and outright gay-baiting no longer played well with the soccer moms and affluent suburbanites that Republicans needed to maintain their congressional majority. They needed to appease their base by passing anti-gay laws, but without alienating moderates by appearing gratuitously intolerant. The right wing’s answer was to jump on the ex-gay bandwagon, a strategy that allowed them to claim that they had compassion for homosexuals and wanted to help them, all the while systematically denying them equal rights.
On July 13, 1998, fifteen right-wing organizations, including the Christian Coalition, Coral Ridge Ministries, and the Family Research Council, launched a million-dollar advertising campaign featuring “former homosexuals.” They kicked off the blitz with a full-page ad in The New York Times featuring a “former lesbian” below the screaming headline, “I’m Living Proof That the Truth Can Set You Free.” This was followed by full-page ads in other major dailies, including The Washington Post and USA Today. There was also a TV campaign that featured Michael Johnston, an ex-gay who was HIV-positive, and his mother, who warned about the dangers of the “homosexual lifestyle.”
The ads were a media sensation that headlined news programs from the Today show to Nightline. At the campaign’s apex, ex-gay couple John and Anne Paulk graced the cover of Newsweek under the headline, “Gay for Life?” The effort was deemed so successful that Bob Knight, who then worked at the Family Research Council, called it the “Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars.”
Into the Wilderness and Back Again
In the end, this campaign looked more like Vietnam than World War II for social conservatives. They never took into account that ex-gay simply meant a change in gender-related behavior, not a shift in sexual orientation. On September 19, 2000, they learned this the hard way—after I photographed ex-gay poster boy and Exodus chairman John Paulk in a Washington, D.C., gay bar.
Even more devastating, it was alleged in August 2003 that the HIV-positive Michael Johnston had engaged in unsafe sex with men he had met on the Internet. As a result, he abandoned his ex-gay ministry and retreated to a sex addiction facility in Kentucky, with the American Family Association acknowledging that he’d had a “moral fall.”
If this wasn’t bad enough, another ex-gay spokesperson, Anthony Falzarano, held a media conference at the National Press Club to complain that the right-wing groups behind the campaign were only interested in passing anti-gay laws, not helping people go straight. “Many of us in the ex-gay movement feel we are being used,” said Falzarano at his press conference. “We did that very successful newspaper campaign last year. The Christian Coalition didn’t send us a dime. All we are asking for is possibly some money to pay for postage stamps.”
With the two biggest male stars of the 1998 effort revealed as frauds and the third loudly condemning the ad sponsors, the political Right tiptoed away from the ex-gay message for the next few years. But the re-election of George W. Bush greatly emboldened social conservatives, who received much of the credit for this outcome. They now expected Bush to use his political capital to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would rewrite the U.S. Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage.
Looking ahead to the impending marriage battle, the anti-gay organizations were confronted with a shifting public opinion. Polls showed that more and more Americans—by now a clear majority—believed that homosexuality was something one was born with. (A Gallup poll in 2001 set this figure at 56 percent, up from a mere thirteen percent in 1977.) More challenging still, polls were showing a clear association between the innateness of homosexuality and support for same-sex marriage, that ultimate bête noire of the anti-gay forces. (A 2004 poll by Lake, Snell, Perry and Associates showed that 79 percent of those in the “innate” camp supported same-sex marriage or civil unions.) Right-wing groups concluded that in order to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, they would need to convince (or re-convince) the mainstream public that homosexuality is a learned behavior that can be overcome through prayer and therapy. For this they turned again to the ex-gay ministries.
To insulate themselves from another potential meltdown, the Right adapted its argument. It may be true that people don’t choose their sexual attractions at the outset, but they can still choose to change their sexual orientation through prayer and therapy. The latter would now involve examining the “roots” of one’s homosexuality in the poor parenting one received as a child. If homosexuality had been something that could be miraculously cured in an earlier version of ex-gay theory, it was now cast as a chronic malady that could be treated through ongoing support.
Suddenly, ex-gays were back on the scene as a weapon in the fight against gay and lesbian equality. In one ad opposing federal hate crimes legislation, four ex-gay leaders stood, arms crossed, under the headline, “Hate Crime Laws Say We Were More Valuable As Homosexuals Than We Are Now As Former Homosexuals.” The ad urged readers to call a U.S. senator to demand he votes against the legislation. In another ad, Alan Chambers was pictured embracing his wife Leslie under the headline, “I Questioned Homosexuality.” The text explained: “By finding my way out of a gay identity, I found the love of my life in the process. Gay marriage would only have blinded me to such an incredible joy.”
What these individuals’ alleged conversions have to do with hate crimes legislation or same-sex marriage is unclear. However, Chambers best summed up why ex-gays are so crucial to efforts against GLBT equality: “Our existence as ex-gays is additional proof that homosexuality is not an immutable trait, and therefore marriage is not a civil right to be extended to any group of individuals who demand it.”
By June 2006, the ex-gay message had become so central to the anti-gay industry that President Bush invited Chambers and his deputy Randy Thomas to the White House to lobby in favor of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Thomas also posted pictures on his website where he is posing with both Newt Gingrich and Bush strategist Karl Rove. By now, however, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina had damaged Bush’s presidency, derailing the conservative juggernaut, including the president’s efforts to ban gay marriage.
Defeating the Ex-Gay Myth
With the support of Focus on the Family’s fundraising machine, Exodus has grown into a million-dollar-a-year operation and has a staff of twelve. It has also extended its operations across the globe and expanded Exodus Youth, its teen program. This summer, Exodus has teamed up with Ignite Student Outreach to launch camps that will impart the ex-gay message to Christian youth leaders.
In response to the mounting ex-gay threat, a vibrant new infrastructure has finally arisen to fight back. The day that Chambers appeared at the White House, I founded Truth Wins Out (www.TruthWinsOut.org), a nonprofit organization that debunks the ex-gay ministries and counters right-wing disinformation campaigns. A daily blog, Ex-Gay Watch, monitors these groups and serves as a daily news service. Another new website, www.BeyondExGay.com, tells the stories of former ex-gay victims and helps them to heal from the trauma. Battling the underlying misuse of science are groups such as the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists and The Rockway Institute, which brings together scientific and professional expertise to counter antigay prejudice. Finally, I started www.RespectMyresearch.org, where scientists can report right-wing distortions of their work.
Fortunately, our efforts are made easier by ex-gay organizations themselves, which often expose their true nature. For example, Chambers professes he loves homosexuals, then betrays his words in his newsletter, Exodus Impact. “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality,” writes Chambers. “Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.”
The main ex-gay therapy group, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (narth), virtually imploded in 2006 after two major controversies. In the first, psychiatrist Joseph Berger, MD, a member of their “Scientific Advisory Committee,” wrote a paper encouraging students to “ridicule” gender variant children. “I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish go to school in clothes of the opposite sex—but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings,” Dr. Berger wrote on narth’s website. “On the contrary, don’t interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world. Maybe, in this way, the child will re-establish that necessary boundary.”
In the second controversy, Gerald Schoenwolf, PhD, also a member of narth’s “Scientific Advisory Committee,” wrote a polemic on the group’s website that seemed to justify slavery: “With all due respect, there is another way, or other ways, to look at the race issue in America,” wrote Schoenwolf. “It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa. But if one even begins to say these things one is quickly shouted down as though one were a complete madman.” The fallout from this controversy helped cause narth’s co-founder and president, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, to be voted out of his job at the group’s annual meeting.
Perhaps the most potent way to highlight the inanity of the ex-gay myth is simply by putting their weird spokespeople on television. In March, the International Healing Foundation’s Richard Cohen appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. To prove he was heterosexual, Cohen belched and cursed loudly, and when he was feeling the heat, he got up in the middle of the interview to “shake it off.” He then proceeded to bang a pillow while yelling his mother’s name, supposedly to heal him of old wounds. The display looked so utterly ridiculous that even the other ex-gay organizations, such as Exodus, distanced themselves from Cohen. (This is the same outfit that instructs clients to wear a rubber band on their wrists and snap it when they see someone attractive.)
Nowhere was the underlying truth about these ministries revealed more clearly than by Love in Action’s leader John Smid (talking to a reporter for The Memphis Flyer). Pointing to a gold-colored wall, he said: “I’m looking at that wall and suddenly I say it’s blue. Someone else comes along and says, ‘No, it’s gold.’ But I want to believe that wall is blue. Then God comes along and He says, ‘You’re right, John, it’s blue.’ That’s the help I need. God can help me make that wall blue.”
The requirement of such denial is why every mainstream medical and mental health organization in America rejects attempts to change sexual orientation. Still, diagnosing these head cases will not stop the right wing from using ex-gays to make their political case against GLBT equality. This is why we must remain vigilant and expose these charlatans if we ever expect to be liberated and find freedom from the ex-gay myth.
Wayne Besen’s new book, Bashing Back: Wayne Besen on People, Politics, and Culture, has recently been published by Harrington.
