I read an article recently that I sent to David Roberts regarding how people’s behavior changes when they are wearing counterfeit designer wear as opposed to the behavior of those wearing the real thing.
And I was struck by how much their results could describe and ex gay.
What they found is that those who wore the knockoffs, engaged in more distrustful behavior and lying.
It’s part of that kind of attitude of people who want to be a part of the social elite who will inflate their own accomplishments, their material wealth or wear the clothes and try to drive the car to appear more successful than they really are.

In short: ex gays are trying to keep up with the hetero Jones’s.
And in their minds they are taught that their goals are for a higher calling and nobler reason, their path to doing so is at the expense of something much more important.
But they are taught and told that being hetero is so imperially important, the other things can and rightly be abandoned.

But as we know, there is little integrity in passing for something you are not as long as there ARE serious consequences to those who share your background. Ex gays know the consequences, and have suffered those consequences before the attempt to change.
But one will do anything if someone invokes God as a reasonable means to attain what you want.
And the ex gay is told it’s what THEY want and of course, all the straight people forcing this don’t have to care about what’s lost in the process. THEY lose nothing. They aren’t affected one way or the other.

As I’ve said before, ex gays lose their individuality after a fashion. They are no longer themselves, so much as what the ex gay industry has molded them into. They are factory born and say the same things, do the same things and eventually aren’t too discernible from each other in thought and sometimes appearance.
The comfort zone is complete. But it’s a tiny place. So tiny, there is little room for that person’s individuality, let alone people who are different from themselves.

I suppose because of the extent and power of the Christian culture it feels like there is a wealth of difference and so on.
But not in the ex gay world. They are on a tight leash. They have handlers and people who don’t want them to reveal the fraud that such an industry really is.

It is tiresome beyond belief that so many Christians have an unrelenting and indefatigable agenda. It’s like the bombardment won’t allow you to be yourself, think for yourself or have a life other than what the church tells you to have.
And when they complain about being silenced, or restricted in anyway as an affront to their freedom, it IS laughable and so incredibly inconsiderate and selfish.

That’s what I mean by why don’t some of them shut the fuck up once in a while and let someone breathe their own air?
That’s what I mean by them not having the grace to leave it for five minutes for someone else to have a chance to NOT be under so much onslaught.

And their focus is so laser intense on ONLY gay people at this time. I don’t see any of them taking bullhorns to Wall St. and protesting the sin of usury. Even though it HAS put our nation in serious economic straits.
I don’t see the family orgs putting focus on the economic downturn that’s destroyed so many families AND created a social situation that makes it harder for people to marry and have kids.

And I don’t see them publicly, and loudly doing their utmost to prevent domestic violence and making people aware of just how widespread it is.
If they did for domestic violence, what they’ve been doing to prevent gay couples from marrying, I wonder what our society would look like.

So yes, as a black woman, a minority in America: I find this attack on an already maligned minority essentially appalling. Just like the Jews of the world, there is an insult in the constant assumption that Jews or gay people are undeserving of existence. The assumption that there is morality in tyranny of any kind is more than misguided.
It’s evil.
And if Hitler had been successful in his plan to rid the world of Jews, then how would anyone know who they have been and who they really are?

And with hetero agendas to do the same with gay people, how will anyone really know or understand gay people if they are not here to speak for themselves?
The ex gay industry is an evil enterprise on it’s face because it exploits fear and ignorance and employs profound separation.
Just like all the other hierarchies that have done so against others. Using also, religious motives as noble to their cause.

I don’t want to live in a world with everyone walking and talking alike, especially knowing how they got that way. I don’t want to live in a world where gay people become even more rare than they already are.
Or a world with all Christians, all the time. And any Christian that thinks that I’m slamming them by saying that. Are only feeding the arrogant fiction that others are not meant to be.

As I said, vanity was the keyword that was missing for me.You hit it here:

So the ex gay meme takes on a sameness, less of the character of the real person, leaving a mask that’s like all the rest.

Ben, I’m glad you hit on the vanity part. I think that’s what’s bothered me too, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.
When I mention those people who seek plastic surgery or starve themselves to reach a physically aesthetic ideal, it has to be vanity that drives them. However normal and healthy their features are.
But they are the features of the rejected.

So, regardless of how normal homosexuality is, it is rejected. So therefore, someone gay would go through all the pain, expense and so on of ridding themselves of what’s generally rejected.
And even though sexuality is less superficial than physical appearance, ex gays are taught to AFFECT what’s superficial about heterosexuality.
Butching up for guys, being more fem for lesbians.
Stupid really, but we’ve seen the training videos and seminars.

But that’s still appearances and passing WITH one’s appearance. Leaving out of course, all those special and good things that make a person unique.
And we are all first and foremost, unique.

So the ex gay meme takes on a sameness, less of the character of the real person, leaving a mask that’s like all the rest.
What an ex gay eventually becomes is less authentic and more of what’s expected of him. Which explains why they all say the same things, sound alike, preach alike and have little if any variance in how they defend themselves.
Might as well all be the same person, however much one might protest they are different.

At any rate, thank you so much for your complete analysis there Ben.

Regan, you asked a question “Doesn’t Thom strike you as making this too much about him? ”

I’ve been wanting to write on this issue, and this conversation with Thom really got me thinking about what I might call the “ex-gay narrative.” Full disclosure: I’ve never actually talked to an ex-gay person, so I could be totally wrong. But I have been reading a great deal of their commentary in the past four years, and I’m a firm believer in “In Verbus Veritas”. By their literary fruits shall you know them. And though I have been out of the mental health field for over 25 years, I think I am a fairly good observer of people, and I think I see things reasonably clearly.

On the other hand, this may be a work of fiction. I’m hoping it will spark some discussion. As Agathon said, “What matters is not so much that which is true, but that which is entertaining.” Doing both would be preferable.

I was trying to put all of these things together that Thom and other wanna-be-ex-gays seem to be saying all of the time, put them into something coherent. I had my first clue in my first posting, where I challenged Thom on his statement: “Your claim that our country’s restrictions on those who claim a homosexual orientation does not rise to any level of comparison to the racial discrimination that haunts our past. You cheapen the battle of those who came before you when you compare it.” I assume that he was unable to refute it, and so he chose not to answer that challenge. That statement just reeks of condescension. What I would term a “restriction” is a law against getting a blow job in a men’s room. I suppose you can call the murders of Lawrence King and Matthew Shepherd, the suicides and homelessness of so many gay youth, sodomy laws, the political campaigns that demonize gay people as enemies of faith, family, and children, the destroyed careers and families, DADT, AIDS as the physical manifestation of homophobia, as rather extreme forms of “our country’s restrictions on those who claim a homosexual orientation keeps them from realizing their full potential.” Being murdered will certainly keep you from doing that. As would having your soul, your spirit, your ability to love and be loved murdered.

And as far as I am concerned, what cheapens the battle is to play “My oppression is worse, and thus better, than your oppression.” “You didn’t suffer enough like we did. Yours doesn’t count.” It’s not a race, and there are no winners. Only losers. Unlikely any black person alive in the past 70 years was a slave. I would bet that a majority of the black Americans alive today did not experience segregation personally. You didn’t suffer, though your ancestors may have. And as I said, no black person ever got kicked out of his family and church for being black. They even let them be president now.

Full disclosure: like many of the black people who want to claim the superior oppression, I have not suffered much for my being gay. I am after all, recognizably a white male, long before anyone finds out that I like men. But I certainly recognize oppression, whether directed at me, or at other people who have the misfortune of being the object of the attention of people who truly are broken– not just pretend broken, or broken as a way to score theological brownie points.

How much more can be gained by not issuing such statements of blanket condescension and dismissal, and instead be willing to listen, perhaps to learn that other people have suffered, too, and that perhaps, you may be contributing to the suffering of those people. And that the suffering doesn’t make anything better for anybody, least of all for our country.

So this suggested at least one of the threads of the narrative: superiority. And that is not actually a surprise to me, because a belief in the superiority of man over woman, white over black, hetero over homo, is as much a part of bigotry and prejudice as out-and-out hatred. I prefer to think of it as soft bigotry, the soft bigotry of a (wholly imaginary) superiority. (Thank you, Regan).

I asked Thom a question that he never answered himself, although David and Grantdale did in absentia: WHY ALL THE DRAMA? If you want to be straight, and god wants you to be straight, and you’re praying away the gay day by day in a most evangelical way, then WHY? ALL? THE? DRAMA? Be straight and be happy. If sexuality is a choice, just choose to be straight. It seems to work for Alan Chambers, who is clearly as straight as a $3 bill. If temptation is just something that happens to you, like experiencing (not even something so personal as having) same sex attractions then, as Nancy Reagan said, just say no. I can go to my gym, see all kinds of cute boys, some of whom make it clear that they could be had, right then and there, and I just say no thanks. I’ve got a husband, don’t need a boy. I wouldn’t mind, but I respect my marriage vows more than so many bible-believing Christians seem capable of.

And perhaps I just like myself a lot better, and value my marriage a lot better because I really want that marriage and not something else. What is that prompts a heterosexually married man with a family to endanger his marriage and his family by having anonymous sex in a men’s room? You have what you allegedly want– the appearance, if not the fact, of heterosexuality. Could it just be a fondness for drama? Transactional analysis would think so.

On Wednesday night, in the midst of pondering this thread, I had dinner with my friend Bob, a very perceptive man. We were discussing our friends Tom, who lost his partner of 20 years just 8 years ago, and has been bereft ever since. Tom can’t seem to find a boyfriend, and insists that the only thing that will make him happy in is an under-30 Asian boy with a great body, and that he will not compromise. Tom is 60, and he isn’t rich, and he doesn’t look like Anderson Cooper. so he is alone. Bob’s comment: it’s all vanity. “I’m better than that,” “that” being the idea that it is a compromise to find a man who is much closer to Tom’s age and demographic. But it is also a defense mechanism. He doesn’t really have to try to find a suitable partner because it is so unlikely that Tom will find the physical ideal he craves, and thus he protects himself from being hurt.

Bingo! Vanity was the word and concept I was looking for.

This seems to me to be the nature of the ex-gay experience, as it appears in Thom’s story, in A.C., and in so many others’. It’s an infinite loop, a never-ending daisy chain of vanity feeding drama feeding superiority feeding vanity, and the whole self-destructive orgy just keeps going and going like an ideological energizer bunny.

It starts with vanity. The ideological seed gets planted very early. Gay is bad, sick, depraved, degenerate, unwholesome, unhappy, hated by God. Grantdale: “Perhaps the saddest part of all your nonsense is your complete failure to understand how much damage has been done to you in the name of the anti-gay attitudes that you continue to promote.” I am now 60. I knew I was gay when I was 6, though I didn’t know the name for it until I was 10. Fortunately, no one talked about it when I was growing up in the ’50′s, else I might have had that same seed planted in me. The tree that grows from that seed is self-hatred. The fruit falls not far from the tree, and when it hits the ground, is now “sexually broken”.

Here’s where vanity comes in. The child learns that he is gay, has already learned to hate himself. The natural response is: “I’m better than that.” I’m not that way. I couldn’t be that way. And thus shame is born, the twin sister of vanity. “You’re OK, I’m not so hot” in transactional analysis terms. So the child rejects who he is. As with all “not OK’s”, one does what is necessary to confirm the position of not being OK.

And thus the ex-gay industry is born.

Unfortunately– and here is the energy of the struggle– the average ex-gay is not “better than that”, except in a way that Jones and Yarhouse have described as “difficult, complicated, equivocal, ambiguous.” We need look no further than the Her Majesty Nomohomo, Empress of the Magic Kingdom of Exgaynia, where fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, especially if you are already a fairy, but clap your hands loud enough to drown out the obvious if don’t believe in them. This queen, gayer than a goose, will freely admit that the empress has no clothes, and that it is a “struggle” to maintain the facade.

Let’s look at the empress for half a double mo. He has access to all of the ex-gay “therapies” there are, probably free of charge. None of them seem to have taken, despite their “proven” efficacy. He’s a show-dog Christian, proudly praying publicly to Jesus on a daily basis, yet somehow, all that prayer has not resulted in anything but small change: he’s heterosexually married, with children, and still “struggles” on a daily basis. I submit that all of that could have been accomplished without all of the prayer, without all the therapy, without all of the political posturing– though earning a living at the expense of others would probably not have happened. Basically gay people do it all of the time. 30 years ago, my foster father, who would be in his 90′s now, married with three children, told me that he always thought of himself as bisexual. But he wanted a family, and apparently, had no need of ex-gay therapy, prayer, or any of it. He just got married, had his kids, and lived a decent life. There was no struggle, I believe, because he wasn’t shocked and horrified by the gay part. He didn’t hate himself for who he was.

How willfully self-delusional do you have to be to believe that ex-gay therapy is valid, when the queen of Exgaynia tells you emphatically, wrist flappingly, that it is not? As I wrote to J&Y: “Why, when it was clear from the results of your study that actual, “uncomplicated” change from hetero to homo does not occur, at least by your methods, why do you advocate change, especially by your methods? My homosexuality, like the heterosexuality of my many straight friends, is very unequivocal and very uncomplicated. If the best that you can come up with are celibates and the “complicateds”, then I put it to you that you are leaving something not changed.”

Exodus promises “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.” Except that the queen isn’t free. Thom isn’t free. And given how much time, energy, and money can be wasted in Exodus approved activities, freedom isn’t free either. It isn’t even freedom.

You may believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that God has grace to give in this matter. You must, because what is the alternative? To believe that he has it to give, but he only gives it capriciously or, even worse, plays favorites? Some places of desolation become fertile oases, places of verdure and growth become sere deserts beyond a hope of lushness, and it all just depends on whether he had his coffee that morning? If so, I would rather live in a universe that has no such rules, one lucky enough to have escaped his particular attention. As the old Jewish joke goes: if we are the chosen people, would you mind choosing someone else for a change?

So in fact, your vanity is lying to you. You’re not better than that. You’re just “that”.

But if you must maintain the facade, if you must be straight even when it is obvious that you are not, then Vanity sets it up for step 2– drama. All lies create drama the more firmly they are believed. Look at what one of the Really big Lies (The Jews killed Jesus AND rejected salvation both) accomplished. The murder of 6 million Jews, and the murder of 250,000 gay people, almost as an afterthought.

I have not yet read an ex-gay story that doesn’t seem to involve drama. It could be the tiny drama of young Jacob going to give ex-gay therapy a try for just one year. (But what if it takes just one more month, and then one more after that? can you EVER stop?) Eventually, it becomes Peterson Toscano, a man I certainly respect, but who gave 18 years of his life to trying to become straight. A far more serious drama, giving up 18 years of your life, countless thousands of dollars, endless struggle, only to decide in the end that God loves you just the same.

But then we get to the REAL drama queens. Lonnie Latham, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, Larry Craig, and a good portion of the Roman clergy. And my all around favorite– Theodore Haggard, quite an ironic name for a fallen god lover with evangelical hair. Did he really drag his family through it, or what? Daddy likes boys. Daddy’s a drug addict. Daddy likes prostitutes. Daddy is an adulterer. Daddy lies. Daddy is a hypocrite.

But Daddy’s new church won’t perform same sex marriages because Daddy still has issues, despite how many times he has been “cured”. Didn’t learn a thing, did you, Ted?

I felt badly– for a while until I remembered that she must know him better than anyone– for Susan Craig as she stood in sunglasses behind the Minnesota ToeTapper, listening to him explain that he wasn’t really gay at all, he just got arrested for attempting to have sex in a public place with a stranger. What is funny is their attempt to explain it. Falling into temptation. It must be the gay that made me do it. It’s funny how so many exgay men have just that sort of experience, and so few actual gay men seem to have the slightest interest in it.

I know that some men who identify as gay are into cottaging, but I’ve known only two in my life, of all of the people I have known well enough to know that. Even struggling to come out in 1971, I could see that I was much better than that. ah, vanity!

And so the drama cycle begins. I can rise above this. With god’s help I can rise above this. Whoops, temptation happened to me. I fell just a little bit. Now I’m strong again. Whoops, a little meth. Now a $100 massage that somehow turns into a $5 blow job. Oooh, I’m strugglin’ mightily with the devil. Ooops, I’ve dragged my family and my name through the mud of the sewer of my mind. I’ve struggled for one year. I’ve struggled my whole life. Sorry I gave you VD, honey, sorry about destroying our marriage, but you just never know where a back-alley tryst is going to lead, do you?

If there isn’t any trauma drama present, they’ll go looking for it. I was abused as a child. My daddy didn’t love me. I was weak. I was effeminate. I was a tomboy. My daddy molested me and it turned me queer. My priest molested me, and that turned me queer. (More likely just the opposite, but never mind). All of the so-called reasons for one to be gay, without noticing that other people have the same experiences and don’t turn queer because of it, though they may still be messed up. But it’s just so much easier to blame the gay or to blame the gay on your parents.

Sexually broken? Even more drama. but it’s attractive drama– very romantic, very tragic, calling to mind as it does Our Savior broken on the cross. Drama queens, tragedy queens, it’s all the same. Funny. I have never met a self accepting gay man or woman how would describe themselves that way. I myself, one of the biggest queers I know, feel just fine. I have a wonderful husband, a great family and friends, a good career. And of course, it justifies all of that bad behavior. If you weren’t sexually broken, why would you be down on your knees in the men’s room at the quickymart? Are you broken sexually because you want a blow job in a men’s room, or do you want the blow job because you are sexually broken? Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s just self hatred doing to you transactional analysis teaches that it will do: encourage you to make the worst choice possible for yourself, and then despise yourself for being such a perv. You can’t win– and you don’t want to. You’d have to give up all of that drama.

Here’s a bit of a twist– that famous passage in Romans means just what it says it means: these people were so sinful that god made them queer– he broke them sexually, because they weren’t queer. Maybe the right definition of sexually broken is trying to be other than as God made you. It would certainly explain the apparent failure of prayer to turn anyone straight.

No responsibility, no correct behavior, just a Big Gay Drama. And it never occurs to them that lots of healthy gay people just don’t seem to have those issues, just lives full of peace and happiness. Maybe the real issue is self-hatred, destructive personality traits, the strain of living lies to please other people, respectability at any price, even if the price is respectability itself.

And after you go through all of the drama, you arrive at your final destination: the land of (wholly imagined) superiority. Looky me, I overcame sin. I overcame the gay. I got a special friend in Jesus, who helped me spray away the gay. Jesus loves me so much that look what he does for me. I’m not gay. I’m not I’m not I’m not. I’m special. I’ve overcome having same-sex attractions happen to me.

But it never seems to end, does it? no one is ever permanently “cured”, even if Jesus is running right along with you. The empress of Exgaynia isn’t cured for sure.

But the allure of the temporary cure? Beautiful. It solves no problem, but allows one to keep acting out because of sexual brokenness. And it allows you to be superior. It allows you to characterize the struggle for freedom for gay people as something the cheapens the battle for civil rights. It allows the FRC to ruminate endlessly on anal sex while endlessly condemning it. (Note to Tony Perkins; if it bothers you so much, why do you spend so much time thinking about it?) It allows you to be George Rekers proclaiming the immorality of homosexuality on weekdays while lifting his leggage on the weekends. It allows you to be Alan chambers and tell everyone that yes, change is possible, in a vague, general sort of a way. It all depends on what the definition of “is” is, to quote another man who acts out.

And finally, it allows you to say “I’m better than that.” Except that it doesn’t and you aren’t, because you are right back where you started, telling the same lies to yourself in defense of the same Big Lie.

And Thom, because I have been talking to you a great deal in this post, you are free to believe that Exodus will deliver on its promise of “freedom form homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ” But it hasn’t happened, and it most likely won’t. You’re asking the wrong questions, getting the wrong answers, and interpreting them in the wrong way. It’s not freedom, but as I said, it’s just a different kind of slavery, where not merely your body, but your heart, your soul, your will, your faith, and your life are subject to the questionable religious interpretations of people whose motives have very little to do with the truth of scripture, and just about everything to do with their own dark hearts and secrets.

And earning a living, don’t forget that.

If you want to believe that exodus is basically harmless, just ask anyone living in Uganda. just ask the kid who kills himself because Exodus didn’t “ex” anything except his soul. Just ask the people whose marriages will never happen, while any ex-gay adulterer can get married as often as he likes.

I find the basic character of ex gays VERY weak. And especially disingenuous of the simple question: how do you defend what you can’t accept for yourself?

At least when it comes to those ex gays who say they harbor no ill will, no hostility or require that gays be discriminated against.
That’s when it comes to the reality and truth, that regardless of having those feelings, their example contradicts all that.

The point is, one CAN’T defend what they won’t accept in themselves. Like someone who has huge breast implants, defending the flat chested.
It’s a contradiction in terms that makes a person look ridiculous, incapable of being trusted with their own decisions. Let alone what they think is a decision someone else makes.

And why an ex gay, considering the factors of a world that teaches gay people and straight people to hate gays, that they say they came to their decision freely and without coercion ALSO contradicts the reality of their lives AS gay people.

A whole stream of contradiction and cross purpose renders an ex gay essentially a zero.
When you give with one, and take it away with the other, that’s the result. Nothing. Zero. Worthlessness.
Especially to the most NEEDFUL purpose of the world understanding and knowing gay people for who they truly are.
Which won’t happen as long as ex gay confound and contradict that purpose. It must SUCK to be such a weak person.

So weak in character and purpose. So insecure that the need for validation from those that would and do oppress you is sick unto itself.

And you might note, that even knowing I’m not gay, he NEVER asked me why I accept gay people and support them.
More intellectually truthful people will ask and I’m well prepared to answer.
It’s the ones who never do that interest me. There is a quality there that I find important.

Of course, there are those who see me as some kind of traitor to my ‘race’ of heterosexuals. I can understand to a point how a white person who supported integration might have been treated. The only equivalent name to say, ‘nigger lover’, is ‘homosexualist’ to describe ‘my kind’.
No less of trying to have the same intent, but interesting nonetheless.
Supremacists are all of a piece, regardless of the difference in their targets.

I think I mentioned here that black children could see clearly that regardless of CLAIMS of moral, intellectual and mental superiority by whites, experience and evidence wouldn’t bear that out. The same is true for gay kids. They see no difference in themselves than their hetero peers that makes them deserving of being treated like an inferior.

And of course, profound separation would make it harder for that evidence to reveal itself.
Color made it easier to artificially create that separation. But marital status as a separation of gay people works much the same way.
It creates a serious powerlessness and dependency on straight people. There is the ability to demean the gay person in times of crisis, and it’s a way of using unmarried status to take away the very things that PROVE just how compassionate and responsible a gay person is. Profession, property…children.

I have wondered if I had more power to defend a gay person because I’m not gay. I have one close gay relative. Therefore no dog in the fight, no need to concern myself, no rights or freedom that will be taken away.
I’m more threatened by other straight people than gay people for being this way.
But I will hang in there as I have for most of my life.

Perhaps ex gays know they are weak and need the failure of gay people to validate themselves. Envy, does some interesting things to people. The strong gay person could show up an ex gay easily because the character building process is more mature and well advanced.

Just as a Jew or black who doesn’t capitulate to bigoted forces, but can beat them at their own game, shows another level of character alien to ex gays.

There is a saying among black folks, that we know more about white folks than they know about us.
This is also VERY true of the gay/het issue.
Gay people know a hell of a lot more about hetero people than the other way around. And I will admit, there is something perverse about how the anti gay couldn’t admit it to literally save lives. And Thom is another example of letting hets off the hook for being so insufferably ignorant and fearful, no matter who and what it hurts.