I’m sure that most people who go to an ex-gay ministry do so either because their sexual orientation is in conflict with their religious beliefs or because they just don’t like being different from the majority. They want to be straight, and by that they mean straight just like their dad, their mum, their brother, their sister or their friends.

The adverts for ex-gay ministries and the titles of ex-gay books seem to promise them precisely that. You only have to look at the language used on the web-site of Exodus International:

“Freedom is possible through Jesus Christ!”

“What you are really asking is whether there is realistic hope for change for men and women who do not want their sexual orientation to be homosexual. And the answer to that is yes!”

The titles of ex-gay books seem to make similar promises:

Homosexual No More – Practical Strategies for Christians Overcoming Homosexuality (William Consiglio)

Coming Out of Homosexuality: New Freedom for Men & Women (Bob Davies)

You Don’t Have to Be Gay: Hope and Freedom for Males Struggling With Homosexuality or for Those Who Know of Someone Who Is (Jeff Konrad)

Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out (Alan Chambers)

It’s when you dig deeper that you find the language becoming more slippery and you realise that you’ve been bamboozled. The upshot is:

No, we didn’t really promise that you’d become heterosexual “like everyone else”. That’s not what we really meant, and we’re sorry if you misunderstood us. Freedom from homosexuality only means that you’ll learn to “overcome” the “problem” of same-sex attractions; it doesn’t mean that you won’t still have them. The opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality; it’s holiness. We help you to stop embracing a gay identity. You may not become heterosexual, and we never promised that you would, but you’ll become post-gay. And so forth and so on.

Anything to avoid saying “We deliberately misled you. We have no means of turning you from a gay person into a straight person.”

The crux here is that post-gay baits and switches the word “gay.” You come in thinking it means “someone attracted to the same gender” but Exodus teaches gay means “someone defining themselves by their attraction to the same gender.” Yet the majority do not define themselves by their orientation and those who do are both gay and straight. That switch is deceptive, and as long as it remains assumed, “post-gay” will also be deceptive. Not just incorrect of confusing, deceptive.

Similarly, is every white person who is not a supremicist ex-white? Is every fat person not obsessed with food ex-fat? If I move to Canada, will I be ex-American? These are equally ridiculous as ex-gay.

With that now behind you… (if you haven’t fallen asleep!)… re-read Peter O’s missive. He actually trying to claim there is no A nor no B in this case. ie there is no gay and no straight, and we can just discard them as undescriptive (ie having no ontological purpose).

Apparently one can have a vector going from, urm, a place-that-doesn’t-exist toward another place-that-doesn’t-exist. Try doing that sort of thing with Adobe Illustrator and let us know how you get on

It’s certainly a brave stance to take: rejecting 2,500 years of geometry while at the same time hijacking the terminology.

Personally — given we already understand what a vector is — I’d rather prefer he explain his “Cat On The Mat” theory of homosexuality; if he’s at all in the mood for elucidation.

ps: Can we invent another term, since everyone seems to be doing it?

How about “past-gay”. (c) and (r) to us, permission granted in perpetuity to XGW. Has rather a novel ring to it although it does rather sound like something a gastroenterologist should possibly take an interest in.

cheers!

But the point you make about A and B existing as defined points in space (somewhere in space, but in space nonetheless) illustrates the flaw behind the ex-gay attempted usurpation of “post-gay.”

Well…urgh, no. Poor old Euclid must be turning in his grave.

Implicit to any vector is position A and position B. The distance from A to B is that ‘magnitude’. The spatial position of B to A is that ‘direction’. Even presented in differential form… you’re left with an A and a B. I’m not even going to try and contort non-Euclidean mathematics into a catch-all statement about sexuality…

(Thankfully neither Peter O nor Randy T work for NASA or we would have had a rocket remaining static at Cape Canaveral and a bunch of people nevertheless congratulating themselves on a successful moon landing!)

To borrow gordo… it’s just gobbledygook. Intended to sound intellectual but eventually bereft of substance and indicating a mere desire to avoid the obvious: there is indeed an A and a B and the poor souls who hate being at A and want to be at B are still, alas, at A.

Ex-gay newspeak for post-gay: still needing gay and straight, ultimately, and still desperately hoping to go from the former to the latter. Distance and direction.

Speaking of which… the two of us spent an entire night in a pub on the weekend after a wedding, chatting to all and sundry. Despite ontologically being an openly gay couple in a pub full of strangers… the word “gay” didn’t get a mention all night. At least, not that we said or heard. Such occasions are commonplace.

I guess that makes us, and them, post-gay. The real type of post-gay, I mean.

That aside, we’re both (still) at A and not at B. Euclidean or otherwise.

Our relational paradigm exists (and always has) outside of the alphabet soup of labels commonly attached to same sex attracted individuals who might identify with some aspect of gay culture.

Brother can you paradigm? That’s gooblygook. Meaningless.

And at 40something, there is no way Randy can be a twink. Queerty had an old picture.

There is a lot there that neither XGW or you have highlighted by Peter. He does a marvelous job of explaining post-gay from a Christian perspective.

I did a workshop on it at the last Exodus conference but basically we don’t deny that “post-gay” is a secular term and describes a much larger cultural phenomenon. I always try to qualify that I am on a Christian post-gay journey. Our relational paradigm exists (and always has) outside of the alphabet soup of labels commonly attached to same sex attracted individuals who might identify with some aspect of gay culture.

So, we aren’t trying to define it beyond what post-gay already includes. People who are Christian who are not defined by sexual orientation (regardless of whether that one aspect of their lives change or not) fit into the post-gay reality.

We may come at it from a Christian perspective but we are just as “post-gay” as anyone who holds to an ideology not confined by the very limiting gay vs. straight paradigm.

Post-modernism is a good example. We live in a post-modern world but what that actually means from person to person, community to community is very different except for the basis of living in a world that is no longer modernist. Post-gay is where Europe and America both are headed and it will mean very different things to the people in the culture except for the basis … we all are moving past a world limited by the gay/straight dichotomy.

It’s my genuine hope this will generate more civil and honest dialog across the board.

It might help to start things off by not calling me a twink ::: grin :::

Lordy, he writes like a 14-year old girl in a Jonas Brothers forum. “:::grin:::” ?? lordy!

And although some might object to use of the term “twink,” I have to say that by the term’s definitions, Randy fits the bill. He will never be able to “pass” as a straight man.

Now I thought I remember Randy describing Queerty as a pornography site in the past. I wonder how much time our post gay (but more appropriately labeled ex-gay/anti-gay) Randy spend perusing the Queerty’s Morning Goods and Gratuititous Skin posts after depositing his comment.

Also, if he does want to call himself post-gay, why isn’t he referring to himself as post-gay identified?

Randy never tells heterosexuals that they should identify as “Christians on a post-straight journey.”

The reason for that is that Randy knows perfectly well that there’s no need for a post-straight journey. What he hasn’t, for some reason, yet grasped is that there’s no need for a post-gay journey either.

Apparently it’s ok to identify yourself by your sexual orientation as long as that orientation is the “correct” one.