Posted on 06/15/2006 9:26:03 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Eve Tushnet
Although evangelical “ex-gay” ministries began in the 1970s, recently they’ve started to come under the public eye. Ex-gay groups have turned up on TV shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Veronica Mars (not to mention the painfully funny satire But I’m a Cheerleader!), and subway ads with cute young adults proclaiming that they “questioned homosexuality” or “chose to change” appear every couple of years in the D.C. area. Last summer, a Tennessee ex-gay program run by the group Love in Action gained (or suffered) national prominence when one 16-year-old posted on his MySpace blog about his unhappiness at his parents’ decision to send him to the camp.
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So what are these programs? Are they havens for wounded people exiting a self-destructive lifestyle? Cruising grounds for self-hating, hypocritical predators? Places to heal from past hurts, or places where teens are indoctrinated into shame and despair?
From what I can tell, ex-gay ministries can be all of the above, to different people in different situations.
What they aren’t is what many conservative evangelicals seem to want them to be: the ultimate answer to the gay-rights movement. The groups’ problems are deeply embedded in their self-understanding.
Even some who consider themselves “ex-ex-gays” acknowledge that the programs help some people. Joe Riddle, who spent five years in the Mormon ex-gay group Evergreen, told me, “I definitely think the ex-gay choice is valid, and for some people it truly [works].” But, he added, “I think those people tend to drop out of the ex-gay groups and fly solo. The people who make it work are the people who do it on their own and depoliticize it.” And in his experience, such people were few: “I only met two people who shared convincing stories of [change of sexual orientation].”
The ex-gay movement attempts to bring psychoanalytic techniques into the service of Christian ministry. Many of the conference speakers — Joseph Nicolosi of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality was the most insistent — proclaimed that there were several types of homosexuals, due to a small set of identifiable, fixable traumas. (I noted that I fit many of Nicolosi’s criteria for a “pre-homosexual” boy — imaginative, theatrical, lonely, quick to internalize criticism — but only a strained interpretation could fit me into any of his categories for lesbians.) This leads to easily-disproved statements like Nicolosi’s claim that gay men don’t remain friends after they stop being sexually interested in one another, because if they had strong, non-sexual male friendships it would “heal their homosexuality.” Some men with same-sex attractions find that Nicolosi’s categories and prescriptions fit them very well — I spoke with one man, who wished to be identified as “Frank,” who said he’d gained a lot of insight through work with a Nicolosi-inspired therapist. But he added that he had not yet experienced any change in his sexual orientation.
During the entire nine hours of the conference, none of the speakers I heard discussed how to live chastely while experiencing same-sex attractions. The focus was entirely on the goal of switching sexual orientations.
Mike Haley, the director of gender issues for Focus on the Family and probably the speaker at the conference with whom I disagreed least, told me afterward that one small-group session had discussed chastity. “We don’t want people to believe that change means you have to be married and have to have kids,” he said, and then added, “The opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, the opposite of homosexuality is holiness. We’re not trying to create people from homosexual to heterosexual.” These statements don’t line up with what I heard at the conference; but it’s much easier to be nuanced in one-on-one conversations than in lectures to big audiences.
Haley argued that the “origin stories” of homosexuality offered by Nicolosi and others “almost always ring true. With 12 years of involvement in the gay community I never met a homosexual man who had a positive relationship with his father at the ages of 8, 9, or 10 years old. All I can go by is my experience with the hundreds and hundreds of men I come in contact with who say, ‘Oh, you just told my story.’”
Lance Carroll, who spent eight weeks at a Love in Action program last year (when he was 17), strongly disagreed: “I don’t fit their stereotypical homosexual background. …I had a good relationship with my father.” He described his experience with Love in Action as “horrendous,” recalling “group activities where one person was singled out and made to associate shame with something homosexual that they had done. This was done many times for each person, in an attempt to condition you to believe that being homosexual was shameful. Other ‘therapies’ included isolation, where you wouldn’t be allowed to make eye contact, much less talk, with any of the other participants; making the women wear skirts and makeup to help them become more feminine; and making the men play sports in an attempt to help them become more masculine.”
Peterson Toscano, creator of a performance piece (“Doing Time at the Homo No Mo’ Halfway House”) based on his experiences as a self-described “ex-gay survivor,” spent 17 years seeking to change his sexual orientation. Toscano recalled that in the ex-gay programs, “I felt very much cared for and comforted in my struggles. In the midst of it, it didn’t feel like something horrible was happening.”
Nonetheless, he said, “The vast majority, and I am not exaggerating, of the scores and scores of people I know through these organizations, are out now, accept themselves as gay, and look back on that time as very traumatic and difficult. …Many of them have walked away from God and any sort of faith tradition because they were so disappointed — they’d been lied to over and over again by people speaking in Jesus’ name.”
At Love in Action’s residential program, Toscano said, “You could not spend more than 15 minutes a day in the bathroom with the door closed — you had to break that time up as best as you could. You were not allowed to wear Calvin Klein [underwear]; they didn’t want us to have facial hair; you couldn’t wear aftershave. It was very controlling. If you were in the early phase of the program you couldn’t be by yourself. You couldn’t watch television, listen to anything but Christian music; you had very limited access to people in the outside world. …The rules were inconvenient; but what makes it worse was the moral stigma: ‘You cannot be trusted.’ It eats away at a person, it’s very detrimental.”
While he was in the program, one of his friends attempted suicide. “Miraculously, he survived,” Toscano said, “but he was ready to put himself out — he was so tired of failing.”
—Eve Tushnet is a writer in Washington, D.C. She blogs here.
She makes a good point: it is not essential that everybody should "function" as heterosexual: get married, have kids, etc. It is not essential that everybody should "feel" heterosexual. It is very hard, for some people perhaps possible but for some people not possible, to have full control over spontaneous, unwilled feelings.
What IS essential for ALL of us, hetero or homo or whatever other categories there may be, is to live peacefully and chastely within our state of life.
There's something wrong with merely singling out gays as candidates for comprehensive head-bending "reparative" programs; because the sexual disorder in our society is broader than just "gays" with a "problem.".
We live in a lust-celebrating culture which makes it difficult for any of us to guard our eyes, our imaginations and our hearts, to think honorably and live purely.
I'm neither supporting the "gay agenda" here, not putting down Christian ministries. I'm just saying we're all in it together.
Oops. Sorry about that poorly-edited posting.
Thanks for posting this. This is the type of program that needs to be looked into. I started taking this with a grain of salt until I realized a truckload of it would be more appropriate.
Nailed it with this statement.
http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/
Martin Luthor said, "My sins are like little birds. I cannot prevent them from fluttring around me, but I can keep them from building a nest in my hat."
YES! Great Luther quote!
It's not a psychological problem in need of a cure. It's a sin problem in need of repentance. True transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit, and He only transforms persons with repentant faith. If you want to offer therapy based on psychological theories, then fine. Just don't call it Christian because it isn't.
The danger is that these therapists start creating a group of people who identify as Christians but are absolutely not. So you bring a grave sin problem into our churches. Read their testimonies. They see their therapists as more powerful than God. That's not a person who has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. Jesus isn't a name-brand label to just another sex therapy. These people need to address the sin of their heart, the bitterness, the lust, the depravity, the rebellion, the anger, and they need to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
I'll also add this: stop coddling them. The great effort to prove we love this particular type of sinner more than all other sinners is just ridiculous. The Christian psychologists need to psychoanalyze themselves and see that the bogus name-calling from gay activists has led them to over compensate. Ignore the charge of hate and address these issues with truth (but their schooling has beaten the truth out of them to a certain extent). The truth is the best way to show love, because without the truth we will all have hell to pay -- literally.
Notice how one-sided it is too. Why don't they feel compelled to repeatedly profess their great love for us? Love to the world means a warm, fuzzy emotion. They aren't interpreting it correctly anyway. We just look stupid and weak.
Imagine if Bush proclaimed his love for Osama every time he was mentioned. Osama is just another sinner and all sins are equal. If anyone could use their upbringing as an excuse he certainly could. It would be nice to cure his terrorist ways even if you never dealt with the hate in his heart. From a government standpoint that's fine. But his heart would have to change through repentance and faith before you could ever call him a Christian.
Even if you back away from crime, imagine, "I love liars." "I love jealous people." "I love angry people." On and on. When you say, "I love homosexuals" you are defining them by their sinful behavior and desires and nulifying your argument against the behavior before you ever make it.
We are losing on nearly all political fronts even though we have majoirites everywhere on our side because our self-appointed leaders are making dumb arguments.
When you "clean a house", you do it room by room. Otherwise you end up with confusion. No single organisation can do it all. Find one thing you can do and do it to the best of your ability.
"She makes a good point: it is not essential that everybody should "function" as heterosexual: get married, have kids, etc. It is not essential that everybody should "feel" heterosexual. It is very hard, for some people perhaps possible but for some people not possible, to have full control over spontaneous, unwilled feelings."
Absolutely correct but,
the reason the Gay Pride, Gay Power movement draws our attention is because it isn't about our fellow sinners struggling with individual sin.
The "Gay Power" movement is a collective movement to promote evil and sin, attacking decency and morality.
A movement fighting to promote evil needs a movement to fight it.
To me, this is the crux of the problem. I don't object to specialized ministries to gay people, or anybody else, including overweight post-menopausal ladies; but the emphasis should be on what Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery: "Go now, and sin no more."
Switching sexual orientations has little or nothing to do with that. A person who experiences only same-sex attraction can still be chaste; while a person who has only opposite-sex attractions can be a pathetic horndog.
The important thing isn't to be straight. The important thing is to be in God, to be free, and to sin no more.
But this article is speaking of ministry to gay people, not politics. And although I have tried to help people (even in my own family) strengthen a healthy gender orientation, the great desideratum isn't to be straight, but to be chaste.
Some people can fundamentally re-orient their feelings. Some can't. But in any case, they (we) can strive to live harmoniously within God's law.
But they are still sinning if they are still desiring homosexuality. It's a sin of the heart that manifests itself in action.
Switiching sexual orientation has nothing to do with it only if you mean they are switiching one sinful lust for another. The goal of holiness was a right way to word it. The problem I see is that they mix psychology with theology to the point that they are often weakening the biblical message.
Send these people a preacher rather than a bunch of psychologists.
We can ovecome any abnormal feelings [ same sex attraction, porn, gambling etc. etc.] through the grace of God. However, it takes giving it ALL over to Him then knowing it will be in His time, not ours when we overcome and are healed.
She needs to read and study Romans.
"Some people can fundamentally re-orient their feelings. Some can't. But in any case, they (we) can strive to live harmoniously within God's law"
As a single man, believe me I know that there is nothing unique in the homosexual individuals struggle, to deal with whatever sins call to him.
I also know that sex is not unique or first among the list of sins, as usual liberalism has distorted what should be be simply another case of good people helping each other to deal with their temptations and weaknesses.
I find it both bracing and consoling to think of that. He was tempted! But without sin!
The Lord knows exactly what's up with us. Wasn't He tempted even on the Cross? He doesn't promise that we'll be free of temptations. He offers strength and grace. He offers us the closest companionship at all times, even when we say "Why have you abandoned me?" He offers Himself. Amen.
Amen!
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