I have a morbid fascination with the "Ex-Gay" industry. It’s amazing to me that they can still get people to fork over money for their services, when their track record is worse than abstinence-only education. Over the past two decades, they’ve been a cash cow for the religious right, slapping a veneer of compassion onto homophobia.
They’ve hit hard times recently, with Ted Haggard just the latest of their very public failures. In the search for new markets, they’ve attached themselves to some ugly forces, most recently at an appalling conference in Uganda.
Wayne Besen’s book Anything But Straight gives a thorough debunking of the "ex-gay movement," including their bizarre methods and various scandals. Their treatments fail to change anyone, and in fact they’ll get very evasive when you try to pin down what they mean by change . Besen observes that since some GLBT people find their orientation at odds with their religion, it would probably be ethical for these organizations to market themselves as GLBT celibacy support groups – but how many paying customers would they get that way? Instead they promise miracles and tell touching tales of "ex-gay" people who are now heterosexually married with children. (As for the divorce that comes when "ex-gay" turns to ex-ex-gay, let’s just say it doesn’t show up in their literature.)
This brand of snake oil is particularly cruel. When GLBT people fail to find the promised miracle, it’s easy to fall into self-blame, thinking they didn’t try hard enough, didn’t want it badly enough. There are known cases of suicides triggered by "failure" to turn straight. Even when the damage isn’t fatal, it can cause a lifetime of agony and self-hate.
The collateral victims often go unnoticed: not just the straight spouses, but parents. When Box Turtle Bulletin’s Jim Burroway attended an "ex-gay" conference , he found relatively few GLBT people there. Most of the attendees were parents who wanted to know if they had somehow caused their child’s orientation, and if they could do anything about it. The answers they got were inaccurate and harmful. Joseph Nicolosi of NARTH insists that homosexuality is always caused by a bad relationship with the same-sex parent. Imagine the guilt that causes as parents scrutinize every possible imperfection in their parenting, convincing themselves that they’ve failed their children.
Nicolosi told Newsweek that he has worked his cure on patients as young as three years old. (Remember, the standard defense of "ex-gay" programs is that they’re helping people who requested it. At age three?) Leaving aside the gross lack of ethics, you have to admire the scam: convince gullible parents that their child is doomed to be gay or lesbian, then collect large amounts of money for curing them. There’s a 90% chance the kid will turn out straight no matter what – and if not, Nicolosi’s long gone by the time they hit adolescence. He likes to tell fathers that "If you don't hug your son, other men will," which makes gay men sound vaguely predatory - except for your own victimized Junior, of course.
At the conference Burroway attended, Melissa Fryrear went one better than Nicolosi, or rather, worse. She told parents that one hundred percent of GLBT people were molested as children. (This is not only false, it’s profoundly illogical: they also say that almost all molestation is done by men, so being molested makes girls not want sex with men, but makes boys want it? Huh?) Imagine being told that your child was sexually abused and you didn’t even know about it. This is sadistic.
The Christian far right loves "ex-gay" programs, which allow them to engage in anti-gay politics while claiming to "love" GLBT people. They insist they’re just trying to help people who want to change. But these same people support discrimination against those who don’t want to change. After all, they argue, those who want equal rights can just turn straight, right? (Of course, by that logic it would be OK to discriminate against right-wing Christians – after all, those who want equal rights could just turn Wiccan, right?)
"Ex-gays" hit the big time in 1998 with a series of ads and news stories featuring John Paulk , chair of Exodus International (an umbrella group for "ex-gay" organizations) and prominent voice at Focus on the Family. Paulk was featured with his wife on a number of news shows and the cover of Newsweek. Two years later, Wayne Besen photographed him in a gay bar. Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper (no, not the actor) were two of the founders of Exodus; they wound up falling in love and renouncing the "ex-gay" movement. Colin Cook was fired for giving nude, er, "massages" as part of his "ex-gay therapy" – and then hired by another "ex-gay" program. Noe Gutierrez was featured in the "ex-gay" promotional film "I Do Exist." Presumably he still exists, but he has renounced the movement. Jeremy Marks ran an Exodus-affiliated ministry, Courage UK,until 2000 when he showed real courage and changed its mission to a GLBT-affirming ministry. Ex-Gay Watch and Beyond Ex-Gay were founded by Ex-ex-gays. And then there was Ted Haggard’s famous three-week cure.
With their credibility lost and revenues down, Exodus has set out looking for new markets. Now one of their board members just took part in a conference in Uganda that proposes their brand of therapy, not just for GLBT people who want it, but forcibly inflicted on any GLBT person they can find. No doubt Exodus wants to rationalize that this would be an improvement over the current Uganda law, which can lead to life imprisonment for GLBT people. But the conference doesn’t stop there: it includes numerous false claims trying to link GLBT people to pedophilia. It even features Scott Lively , a Holocaust revisionist who claims that the Nazi Party was run by gay men, and that the Rwandan genocide was somehow the fault of GLBT people.
This is insane. And this is what groups like Exodus are willing to embrace rather than let GLBT people live in peace.
And because I don't want to leave you totally depressed, bear in mind that this guy is the cutting edge of "Ex-gay" therapy. That's not a spoof: it's Richard Cohen, "ex-gay life coach" because he's not allowed to call himself a counselor. Doesn't watching him make you feel just a little straighter?