Ex-Gay Watch

At the morning plenary session of the Ex-Gay Survivor Conference, former ex-gays and people with similar past experiences were presented with a blank white wall of paper.

On one side of the wall, participants were invited to share their ex-gay experiences.

On the other side of the wall, they were invited to share what good or harm came from their experiences.

I’ll post more details about this wall later, but for now I open these questions up to comment from Ex-Gay Watch readers:

What are your past and present experiences with the ex-gay movement? What good or harm have you encountered?

Peterson Toscano opened the Ex-Gay Survivor Conference tonight (June 29) in Irvine, Calif., with a performance of Toscano’s one-man play, “Doin’ Time in the HomoNomo Halfway House.”

The conference was co-organized by BeyondExGay.com, Soulforce, and the LGBT Resource Center at the University of California-Irvine.

Among the audience, Ex-Gay Watch sighted a mix of former and current Exodus group leaders, former ex-gays, and others concerned about the potential harm caused to people by ex-gay politics and ex-gay misunderstandings of gender, sexuality, and faith.

Coverage of the conference will continue this weekend.

Focus on the Family has apparently gained the ability to travel into the future and, once there, report on events which have not happened yet for the rest of us. Early yesterday they reported the following via their political mouthpiece CitizenLink:

The meeting, which began Tuesday and wraps up Sunday, has drawn close to 1,000 people — and no protesters so far. Across town, a counter-conference drew about 100 people.

The meeting referred to is the (32nd) Exodus Freedom Conference and the “counter-conference” is the (1st) Ex-Gay Survivor Conference, which starts today but does not end until tomorrow night (the bulk of that conference is actually scheduled for Saturday). Between walk-ins and on-site registrations, even Soulforce doesn’t know how many will end up attending.

None of this stopped Focus from speaking about the Survivor’s Conference in the past tense, supplying attendance figures seemingly out of thin air. One wonders how long ago this “news” item was actually written.

Soulforce notified Focus earlier about the error, but so far it remains unchanged. No reply yet on my request for lottery numbers either.

Hat Tip: Daniel

Update: Official response from BeyondExGay.com

The incomparable Box Turtle Bulletin has recorded exclusive video interviews with the three former ex-gay Exodus leaders who apologized for their past ex-gay/antigay advocacy at a press conference yesterday. The apologies were aired at a press conference and reported by the Los Angeles Times.

The interviews include:

Michael Bussee, co-founder of Exodus International

Darlene Bogle, Paraklete Ministries, Hayward, California

Jeremy Marks, former president, Exodus International Europe

In further video recorded last September by filmmaker Esteban Rael (Me and God) and aired this week by Box Turtle Bulletin, Bussee explains why he co-founded Exodus, how he and his future partner came to understand that Exodus’ philosophy was fundamentally flawed, and what he thinks of Exodus’ recruitment of youths.

Video source: Box Turtle Bulletin

Source: BeyondExGay.com

Leaders from Soulforce and BeyondExGay.com just completed a press conference at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center. Three former ex-gay leaders issued public apologies for the roles they played in ex-gay ministries affiliated with Exodus International. They also shared portions of their personal stories. The event was covered by members of local and national news media including CNN and Azteca America .More information about the apologies, the leaders, and their statements will be released later today.

I would think it likely that CNN will add this to Paula Zahn Now tonight.

Update: BeyondExGay.com has posted the full text of apologies by the three former ex-gay leaders Darlene Bogle, Michael Bussee, and Jeremy Marks. Peterson Toscano has posted photos of the press conference.Transcripts of Paula Zahn Now will be available here.

On CNN this week, Tulsa Pentecostal pastor Carlton Pearson described how he had a change of heart about fundamentalism after his best friend came out gay. Bishop Pearson graduated from ORU, and was well-known for his association with such charismatic superstars as Carman and Oral Roberts.

At one time he headed up a 5,000-strong megachurch in Tulsa, OK, but was denounced as a heretic by fellow charismatics when he began embracing the “Gospel of Inclusion” in 2003. The one-time fundamentalist now preaches that God accepts everyone – including gays and lesbians – a message that has cost him the best part of his congregation and his career. He says he looked around the Bible Belt and saw that fundamentalism “probably wasn’t working”.

He also talks about his former support for ex-gay ministry, which he now rejects:

The people who were gay were disfigured and dysfunctional and confused. I mean, those were the only explanations we had. And God would not be pleased with that; it’s not natural. … This is of the Devil. We need to rebuke this thing and bind it. I had all my gay friends fasting and praying and seeking God; we were anointing them with oil and encouraging them to go further into counseling.

Pearson appears to have put his money where his mouth is: He is now a firm supporter of gay rights, and earlier this year joined gays and lesbians for a Washington rally in support of hates crimes legislation.

He is on target with his final observation:

I think we have idolized the Bible and used it (and I call them “Bible bullets”) to denounce anything we don’t like or don’t understand or anything we fear. And I would like for that to be corrected in the Christian consciousness.

Watch the video here.

CNN will be airing various segments today concerning GLBT issues, including the ex-gay angle. If you can only watch one thing, try to catch Paula Zahn Now at 8pm ET.

Paula Zahn Now examining the complexities of gay and straight lifestyles, and whether a gay person can be “turned straight.” As part of her nightly feature segment Out in the Open, anchor Paula Zahn speaks with several members of the “ex-gay movement,” which consists of gay individuals who say they became straight. Paula Zahn Now airs weekdays from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Those interviewed for this segment include Exodus president Alan Chambers and Dr. Warren Throckmorton, both of whom occasionally comment at XGW.

Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays has joined forces yet again with Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and Family Leader Network in opposition to the Montgomery County School Board in Maryland. PFOX and its allies were unsuccessful in their efforts to stop the piloting of what they deem a “controversial” sex and health curriculum last fall, and they’ve recently petitioned the Maryland State School Board to block the full implementation of the lessons in all Rockville, Md.-area middle and high schools for the coming school year. The coalition threatens to sue the county school system if they don’t get their way, claiming that the school system released factually inaccurate information, did not put out material for public review before approval, and violated students’ constitutional rights including freedom of speech and the right to freely exercise religion.

A federal judge ruled in May 2005 that the curriculum’s teacher resource materials singled out specific religions for condemnation of homosexuality. The curriculum has been completely overhauled since that time.

The entire health unit is written to be delivered over a 12-day continuum in 45-minute sessions. However, it is the two-session piece of the whole titled “Respect for Differences in Human Sexuality Lesson” that is the focus of the coalition’s efforts. I took the time to print out and read through the Grade 8, Lesson One and Lesson Two portions of the curriculum and, surprise, surprise, I’m just not finding the “controversy”. The coalition’s concerns are detailed at the CRC website and one of their biggest problems with the eighth-grade lessons is a supposed inconsistency. The curriculum states:

“Sexual orientation is innate and a complex part of one’s personality.”

and then in a later paragraph,

“What causes sexual orientation? Almost certainly there is no single reason why some people are homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. According to the American Psychological Association, sexual orientation results from an interaction of cognitive, environmental, and biological factors.”

The coalition says that these two statements are inconsistent and a significant portion of their threatened lawsuit is based on these grounds. I don’t agree. We are, after all, innately sexually oriented, and the causes of which orientation we become are many and varied. What’s inconsistent about that? The curriculum could possibly do a better job at segueing those concepts, but I don’t find them difficult to reconcile. It’s not lawsuit difficult.

Read more…

In a June 21 press release, ex-gay network Exodus International claimed that it “welcomes dialogue on homosexuality” when Exodus and a new network of former ex-gays hold rival conferences later this month in southern California.

Exodus president Alan Chambers said:

Dialogue on this issue only benefits the community and the culture at large. It is a topic worth discussing and I am happy to share my experience as a part of a much-needed exchange of thoughts on this issue.

But just a day later, in a June 22 statement for Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink partisan political newsletter, Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas belittled the former ex-gays’ invitation to dialogue:

Thomas said the message of that counter-conference denies people hope.”We live in a great country where people can have freedom of assembly,” he said. Unfortunately, the organizers of the counter-conference will “try to project their experience onto all of us, when in fact thousands of people, myself included, have overcome homosexuality.”

Each year, Exodus’ annual conference features keynote speakers and lectures denouncing equality and tolerance for same-sex-attracted persons; generalizing from their own sexually and spiritually irresponsible pasts to the same-sex-attracted population as a whole; and demanding that Exodus’ discredited cookie-cutter approach to sexual struggle be forced upon youths in public schools.

Read more…

Charlene Cothran, the editor-in-chief of Venus Magazine who came out as an ex-gay earlier this year and proceeded to alienate her readers by turning her magazine into an ex-gay promotion piece and aligning herself with DL Foster and Peter LaBarbera, is back in the spotlight after an appearance on Pat Robertson’s CBN Network Thursday.

Some quotes of particular interest:

She’d grown up in a Christian home, and had come into the lesbian lifestyle at 19, after several bad relationships with boys.

“I didn’t want anything to do with men anymore,” she said. “I was away at college and that was a whole new world, and in that world there were many, many women who were attracted to me, and, of course, I was attracted to them. And these women were nurturing, wanted to get to know me intellectually — they were organizers whom I found a lot of comfort in. It felt good, it felt right.”

In other words, Cothran was originally heterosexual – or at least bisexual – before joining the lesbian community. No wonder, then, that she seems to regard same-sex attractions as a choice that one can walk away from, as she strongly implies in a recent article in Venus Magazine.

Regarding her current attractions, Cothran merely says “I’m living a celibate life. I’m so focused on the spirit right now, that I have no urges for anyone — man or woman.” It may have been more honest if she had announced her intentions to become celibate in the first place, but then would she be telling her story on the 700 Club?

Regarding the community she’s left behind:

“In order to fill up this empty space, they pretend to put on this wonderful face, ‘how gay and happy I am,’ when in fact — there’s a lot of loneliness in the gay community that’s not talked about, and it’s real.”

Apparently Cothran has not yet spent enough time in the evangelical community to realize that one could say the exact same thing about a large percentage of the people who sit in the pews of any given church on Sunday, simply by substituting “Christian” for “gay.” Nobody – gay or straight, married or single, Christian or otherwise – is immune from experiencing feelings of loneliness from time to time. The fast pace of modern American society may exacerbate the problem, but it’s still one that transcends all other social boundaries, and “finding Jesus” doesn’t by any means make one exempt.

Hopefully, once Cothran comes out of the honeymoon period of her conversion experience, she will learn to temper her claims and to develop a degree of respect for those whose experiences differ from hers.

Jeremy from GoodAsYou.org provides the entire interview here.