...Soon I heard about the ex-gay movement. More specifically, I heard about a group in Los Angeles affiliated with my church who were “recovering homosexuals.” This sounded perfect. Not only would these people know what I was going through, but it was far enough away that the chance of meeting up with familiar faces was pretty slim. I was able to keep it far removed from school and therefore keep it all a secret. So I drove for two hours down to LA to experience a real ex-gay ministry. I seem to remember that my therapist had doubts whether ministries like this worked, but he was very careful to allow me to explore and make my own decisions.

Off to LA I went to attend a group called Desert Streams. There must have been 10 to 15 people when I walked in for the first time and a couple of men welcomed me with eager handshakes. I saw mostly men, a woman or two, and they did not seem straight. I was so nervous I was shaking. I relaxed a bit when they began to worship just like in my church. However, they seemed to be more earnest -- standing, raising their arms into the air as they sang. I thought, “Wow. These folks are hard core.” I also thought, “Well, God, whatever it takes.” At one point I got choked up by the whole scene. These were people who had the same sexual feelings I had. I could tell they really were sincere and that had to count for something. Could it be that I had found what I had been looking for? It certainly looked that way -- at least initially.

After about 30 minutes of singing, a guy who appeared to be in charge gave a kind of sermon -- a pep-talk, really. Although he did not seem straight, he proclaimed that we were “new creatures in Christ, washed clean, putting off the old and putting on the new, and without Christ we are nothing.” He also contrasted our Christian status with those homosexuals “out there” who had not found Jesus yet. He would smirk and offer sarcastic commentary on “those homosexuals,” like, “Of course, they can have all the short-lived relationships they want. It’s their choice. I can’t judge them.” Looking back, I now can see that, plainly, he was judging. Just because he said, “I can’t judge them” here and there didn’t automatically mean he was judgment free, even though he seemed to think so.

Just when I thought we were done, I realized that everyone was going to sub-divide into small groups. I got nervous again. I wanted to cut and run for the door, but they had already accounted for me and cheerfully directed me into a small group of five guys, with one man leading the group. This prayer group was similar to groups in my church, as well. We went around the group and shared our concerns, specifically in terms of our “skewed straight identity,” and prayed for each other. One man was married and “just needed to deal with his thoughts.” Another man had “fallen” in the past week, which was an unusually arousing realization -- this cute guy had actually had sex in the past week. I remember that the group leader, an older, somewhat emotionless gentleman, requested continued prayer for his friend who had disappeared from the group in recent weeks. The words coming out of his mouth sounded distraught, yet his face actually looked as if he was uninterested in what he was saying. I was able to piece together that this leader was a kind of mentor to the missing man. He ended the prayer request by saying something about his fear of his friend falling back into the “lifestyle,” and then he said something about how easy it was to get AIDS. This sent a visual chill around our little circle, and it somehow motivated an anxious resolve of devotion in us -- at least in me.

The biggest difference between the prayer groups I grew up with and this Vineyard-style group was that each person was put on the “hot seat.” This sounds at first scary but it was quite the opposite. Each person when they shared would sit in the middle and we would lay our hands on them -- on their shoulders, their forearm or knees -- and pray directly to their concerns. Although this might seem odd for a bunch of guys who are attracted to the same gender, it really emphasized to me their “hands-on” approach to participate in each person’s healing -- just as Christ had done. These people were downright serious about being healed by God and I was ready to find out how to do it. When it came my turn, I didn’t have to say anything (thank goodness!) since it was my first time attending. Nonetheless, I sat in the middle while gentle hands touched me and sincere voices articulated my concerns. A wave of acceptance washed over me. At last, I was with a group of people who could understand what I had been going through and could help me with it -- or so it felt in that moment.
Over the next six to eight months I made the four-hour round trip to LA every week, up until the summer months. I read everything they gave me. I got more involved with the Vineyard. I became a regular at one of their Bible Studies just off campus, and I had a small prayer/support group with two “ex-lesbians” (whew, that was safe) on campus. I began to exercise spiritual gifts -- speaking in tongues, laying hands on people wanting healing, and speaking words of discernment. I submitted myself to any and all the prayer I could receive. It was the height of the 1980’s and healing the inner child was all the rage. So the ministry had their own religious twist on pop-psychology trends. We dug in my history for clues about what may have “triggered” my homosexuality. In the process, along with my continued therapy, I learned a lot about myself and dealt with and created closure for some key unresolved past experiences. This part of the experience was helpful to me.

Like any community, as I got to know them, I began to see the dirt on the sole of their “best foot forward.” I started to notice the differences between their beliefs and their behavior. What I knew of communities in general told me that no group was perfect, so I was willing to overlook a certain amount. After a while, though, the more I learned, the more disappointed I became.

The group believed, as I later found out most ex-gay groups believed, that homosexuality originates at an early age when a child has an improper relationship with a parent. Maybe the parent is overbearing, passive, or missing. Maybe the child has been molested. I was told that these inappropriate relationships to parents and adults in the past could be counteracted with proper relationships in the present. This relationship would then enable the jump to heterosexuality, or at the very least, allow gays and lesbians to live happily celibate. It sounded perfectly logical, but this is where I observed that the reality hardly conformed to their theory.

For one thing, their methods of countering the missing parental relationship did not seem to bring about heterosexuality. An eager new male recruit would be paired with an older man who, theoretically, replaced the younger man's dysfunctional father-image, filling the void and bringing "healing” for the younger man. I believe some great connections and healing came out of those relationships, but no one ever said they felt heterosexual as a result. I look back now and remember one bonding which was so strong and the "friendship” so close (they were even living together) that in almost every way the two men maintained a gay relationship except for sexual activity -- supposedly. I remember another situation when the role model was a straight man, and the recruit dealt with an agonizing crush on the man who could never return the love the recruit desired. This did not seem to bring healing.

There were other ways this theory did not pan out. I knew members whose personal histories simply did not fit the ministry’s model for the development of homosexuality. Like me, they had never been molested and they came from healthy, two-parent families. This confounded the leadership. They prayed extensively over us to find the hidden “flaw” that made us gay. I remember a look in one such man’s eyes that I now recognize as hopelessness. How would he ever be able to change if he didn’t even fit the profile? So they would keep digging.

What really brought the ministry’s whole theory into doubt for me came actually from the very source of their theories. Psychologists originally explored the missing parent/mentoring approach in the 1960’s,3 but over time, the results were found to be biased and ineffective. Even some of the psychologists that designed these studies admitted to this. Further research clearly showed these theories were not true (I’ll go into detail about this in the next couple of chapters).4 Yet the ex-gay leadership had no problem presenting the theories as gospel truth. They simply picked out the sentences and paragraphs that supported their views. Under the auspices of religion, they manipulated information to their own purposes -- and they did this often. Even after I knew the details of the study, I too disregarded its results and its ramifications about my sexuality. After all, I told myself as they would tell me, the study was “secular” psychology and I had God. I ignored the unpleasant parts of what I was learning because God could do anything, right? God was the eternal trump card. I had to believe God would change me because it was drilled into me that my sexuality was sinful and unacceptable to God.

Those who worked hard enough rose in the ranks as examples of “the healed.” One or two were lightly paid as leaders. It was sobering when I realized what kind of bind that put the paid ex-gays in. Could they really be honest about themselves? How could I trust what they say is true when their job depended on it?

Yet, their personalities, sincerity and speaking abilities were so captivating and strong that if we disagreed with them, it felt as if I would be disagreeing with God. Some leaders seemed to earnestly believe that their authority actually was God’s authority within the sphere of the group. It felt to me that to question their ministry meant to be unfaithful to God. I felt, and sometimes I was made to feel, that our innocent questions and desires about sexuality were signs of doubt and disloyalty. Faithfulness meant that it did not matter what we thought inside, so long as we conformed to what the leadership believed God wanted.

The more time went by and the longer I attempted to make ex-gay techniques my own, the less they seemed to really work. The focus on “who we were in Christ” began to sound familiar. A great amount of energy was devoted to imagining how I would really be straight one day. The diligence to be “that person for Christ” would often be equated with modifying our appearance, “taking on a masculine nature,” even if I still was attracted to the same gender on the inside. Faithfulness to God was in direct proportion to whether members had abstained from sex and masturbation the previous week. We tried to stay busy with church activities (and I with school) to distract us from looking at our sexuality, which was a kind of success -- a mastery over lust by distraction.

I began to grasp why this all felt familiar. Although I had come to the ex-gay ministry to find that special spiritual “something” that would miraculously change my sexuality, their strategy (although hard to pin down) seemed to basically be the same tactics I had learned growing up in church. All those years of indoctrination of “All options except God are evil” set me up to accept the ex-gay propaganda as “the only godly option” -- hook, line, and sinker. Although I was always told I was free to choose, I felt at the mercy of those I looked up to, because I wasn’t really finding the answers I needed from the scripture. I felt flawed and powerless to do anything about it, except maybe to continue to ignore it. I constantly lived with a sense of “damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,” although I could barely recognize it at the time. These approaches did not make me straight, and they did not seem to be working for other participants, either.

Still, this was the only thing I knew that might change me. I was not going to be a failure. I was not going to let God down. I overlooked more and more nonsense to be the person I thought God wanted me to be. I began to notice a cyclical pattern to my behavior. I would go to the LA meeting, share my past week’s “temptations,” and get prayer for strength and healing. Then I would drive home feeling motivated: “Yes, I’m perfect and clean in God’s eyes. I’m God’s child and I want to please him in everything I do.” I’d get up the next morning and read my Bible. On the way to class, though, I’d see a cute guy in shorts and I would get angry at myself for allowing my eyes to wander down his hairy legs. I’d ask God’s forgiveness, quote a scripture, and refocus again. Sometimes I could focus for a day or two, kind of like keeping a lid firmly on a boiling pot, but eventually that seemed to burn my hands and make the “fall” all the more disappointing. I would think I would be gaining ground, but I would get horny, masturbate, and feel like a tremendous failure. Instead of questioning the routine, I assumed that I must not be trying hard enough, and I’d start the whole “workaholic” treadmill over again, and again, and again.