Gay, godly and guilty

The thoughtful new book "Straight to Jesus" reveals the torment suffered by gay Christians who entered a residential program to battle their sexual desires.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Homosexuality, Christian Right, Laura Miller, Gay Rights, Reviews, Book reviews

July 11, 2006 | If you were looking for evidence of how hard it is to change our fundamental sexual proclivities -- not minor aspects, like a taste for black lingerie, but the deep stuff, like whom we're attracted to -- you'd find plenty of it in Tanya Erzen's thoughtful new book, "Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement." Erzen spent 18 months hanging out with and interviewing the members and administrators of New Hope Ministry, which runs a residential program for evangelical Christian men who are "struggling with homosexuality" in the San Francisco Bay Area. She even volunteered in the ministry's office, revamping its Web site, all as fieldwork for her dissertation. (She's now assistant professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.)

Erzen wasn't interested in collecting fodder for political battles, though, and that's what makes "Straight to Jesus" so enlightening. As an ethnographer, she made every effort to listen to and understand everyone at New Hope Ministry, whether or not she agreed with their beliefs (and it's fairly clear that most of the time she didn't). That's practically unheard of in most popular discussions of charged issues like homosexuality -- and rare in scholarly discussions, either. Nowadays, everyone's convinced that they already know everything the other side has to say and that actually having to listen to it would constitute an insupportable demand on their own patience. Everyone thinks their side of the argument never gets any exposure, yet rabid, ranting opinion of all varieties howls at us everywhere we turn.

What emerges from "Straight to Jesus" is a far more nuanced and moving picture of the "ex-gay" movement than most readers will expect. If you're like me, you probably view outfits like Love in Action and the other "reparative therapy" operations collected under the umbrella organization Exodus International as propaganda wings of the Christian right, populated by small coteries of delusional closet cases like the highly visible John Paulk. Paulk is an "ex-gay" man, married to the equally publicity-loving "ex-lesbian" Annie Paulk, but he's perhaps even better known for being photographed in a Washington, D.C., gay bar in 2001, while ostensibly living a life of irreproachable heterosexuality.

In fact, scandals involving the sex lives of ex-gay movement leaders are so common (even one of the straight leaders, Kent Philpott, got busted for fooling around with his adopted daughter), that it's hard for anyone outside the evangelical right to take them seriously. Add that to several prominent cases of parents forcing their gay teenage children into scary camps like Love in Action's Refuge, an "intensive discipleship program" -- and the fact that no reputable professional psychological organization endorses the idea that homosexuality is a mental "disorder" that can be "cured" -- and the image of a pack of dangerous cultists is cemented.

Granted, Erzen didn't study LIA -- a richer, glossier operation than New Hope. She characterizes LIA as "extremely secretive," which suggests that she might have approached them for her research and been turned down. New Hope has a funkier, shoestring quality. Its director, Frank Worthen, was one of the original founders of LIA, but he split with the organization in the 1990s. Worthen claims to have abandoned his early homosexual behavior for heterosexual marriage, and his wife, Anita, helps run New Hope. The house leader, a guy Erzen calls Hank (many names in her account have been changed to protect her subjects' privacy), wears his hair long and walks around barefoot, unconventional touches that would surely be verboten at LIA.

But perhaps the most interesting thing that Erzen reveals about New Hope is how alienated many of the people there feel from the mainstream Christian right. "Initially," she writes, "conservative churches rather than gay organizations opposed the establishment of an ex-gay movement," when it emerged as a branch of the countercultural Jesus Movement of the 1970s. For Worthen, she reports, the fraught relationship between the ex-gay movement and conservative churches is "a central preoccupation." Despite the Christian right's insistence that they "love the sinner, hate the sin," it seems that the homophobic faithful just don't want to share their chapels with people whose past sex lives gross them out. The ex-gay movement, Erzen writes "envisions itself as a pocket of resistance and tolerance" by comparison, a view that would surely startle the gay protesters who picketed the ministry in its early years.

The friction between ex-gays who sought "legitimacy" from the Christian right and those who objected to its political agenda came to a head during a 1998 ad campaign sponsored by a coalition of conservative religious groups called the Center for Reclaiming America. In a bid for greater respectability and clout with fundamentalist organizations, Exodus allowed CRA to use testimonies -- personal confessional narratives -- by ex-gays in ads claiming that homosexuals could become straight with the help of Jesus and reparative therapy.

Next page: It's not, "Ta da, just walk through our program and it will all be changed"