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?
I’ve been through two Exodus programs and went to two “therapists” recommended by Exodus. One of those therapists turned out to be Mormon, which really upset my evangelical apple cart at the time.
I want to pre-qualify that I take the blame for my my choice to trust the people at Exodus. Really, they came from a similar background, fundamental Christian, that I did. I trusted them because they claimed to be doing Gods work and we had our belief in that God in common. While both me and the people at Exodus were sincere in our beliefs, we were sincerely wrong.
The one good thing that came out of my experience with Exodus is they helped me along the road to deconversion. They helped me see that not only did I not know “God,” but neither did they.
Other than the above, I can identify no good that came of my experiences with Exodus. They gave me and my wife false hope and helped perpetuate a lie (i.e., that they know God and know what God wants from me, that if I just did what they said, I would experience freedom from ssa). If they had just been honest and told me that they didn’t really know what they were doing, that I was a guinea pig, I could have made an informed decision. But then, faith in the unsubstantiated seems to make liars out of all the “faithful.” Instead, I trusted Exodus and their “ministries,” was completely vulnerable and took their medicine…which turned out to be poison. I’m not sure I or my family will ever completely recover.
I come from a fundamental church and I swollowed the ex-gay idea entirelly. I believed that it is a psycological sickness and a sin. I tried to change but was never succesfull. That caused me a bad conscience and is one of the reasons to my further psychic symptoms. I got through many pill-over-dose and survided. Step by step with support of my friends and doctors I have began to accept myself as a homosexual person.