Christian 'Ex-Gays' Brainwash Thousands

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Christian 'Ex-Gays' Brainwash Thousands

Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit

sent by Tim Murphy - activ-l

Alternet - Dec 15, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/70491/

Christian 'Ex-Gays' Brainwash Thousands

By Casey Sanchez

Intelligence Report

John Smid has a high school diploma, a minister's license and five

acres of land outside Memphis, Tenn., where he "cures" homosexuals. For

most of the past two decades, Smid's residential "ex-gay" program was

known as Love in Action. The majority of the young men who entered the

program came from the kind of conservative religious upbringing where

being gay is a sin that will cast a person out of church, family and

home. To rid themselves of "unwanted same-sex attractions" they paid

$1,000 a month, with some staying at the facility for years.

At LIA, as it was known, staff would lead clients in group sessions to

trace out childhood trauma alongside lessons in throwing footballs,

changing motor oil and learning how to cross their legs in a manly

fashion. In much of the world of ex-gay ministries, same-sex

attractions are thought to result from childhood sexual abuse or

parents who failed to instill masculinity in their sons. Since the goal

is to rewire parent-child dynamics, LIA clients were forbidden to call

their families. Those who worked in Memphis while living on the LIA

compound had to navigate around a "forbidden zone" that covered nearly

half the city, keeping them miles away from its handful of adult book

stores. They were ordered to drive straight to and from work without

speaking to strangers.

"On our way to work, we saw two cars get into an accident. We actually

debated over whether we should stop," said Peterson Toscano, who lived

at LIA for two years in the early 1990s and now helms an ex-gay

survivors' movement. They didn't stop. "Looking back, I see how

brainwashed we were. We were sick the whole day. We could have helped

the people."

Toscano still has the 374-page LIA handbook that governed every day he

spent trying to become heterosexual. Tom Otteson, another former client

of Smid's, said he was told that "it would be better if I were to

commit suicide than go back into the world and become a homosexual

again." In 2005, Smid tried to clarify those comments to a reporter

from the pro-gay Memphis magazine Family & Friends: "I said [to

Otteson], 'It would almost be better if you weren't alive than to

return back to the life that you have struggled so much to leave.'"

Unlike his clients, Smid was not isolated from the world. In 2005, when

Tennessee officials investigated LIA for dispensing psychotropic

medicine and treating minors without a license, it seemed certain the

place would be shut down. But Smid kept his operation alive by

countersuing the state of Tennessee with the help of senior counsel

from the Alliance Defense Fund, the powerhouse legal arm of the

Christian Right.

Today, Love in Action is part of a booming phenomenon that is also

known as the "sexual reorientation therapy" movement, an effort that is

reflected in the hundreds of programs attached to religious

organizations across the United States. Although the stated aim of the

movement is to turn gays straight and bring them to God, it actually

now has as much to do with battling the gay rights movement by trying

to prove that sexuality is not an immutable characteristic like race or

gender. Ex-gay ministries began as redoubts for men and women trying to

reconcile their faith and sexuality. But in the hands of the anti-gay

Christian Right, they have become full-fledged propaganda machines

depicting gays as sex-addicted, mentally ill, and stunted heterosexuals.

A Flourishing Movement

Love In Action no longer describes itself as therapy but as a

"ministry." It ditched its residential program in favor of a $2,000,

four-day "intensive" encounter for families and teens called Refuge.

Focus on the Family, the largest and wealthiest Christian Right

organization in the country, now hires Smid to appear several times a

year on an ex-gay lecture circuit called Love Won Out, where he speaks

on masturbation and "healing homosexuality."

Residential ex-gay treatment centers like LIA was in the 1990s are still

rare. There are currently just three in America -- one in northern

California, one in Kansas and one in Kentucky. But ex-gay "ministries"

like Refuge are numerous. There are at least 200 such programs among the

country's churches, religious counseling centers and religious college

campuses. Smid serves on the board of Exodus International, an umbrella

group representing 150 ex-gay ministries in 17 different countries.

Most of the people who run ex-gay ministries are not hatemongers and see

their activities as a labor of love and compassion. "[They're] sincere,

well-meaning people who are not in it for the money," says Toscano. But

in recent years, the ex-gay movement has been co-opted by virulently

anti-gay groups who routinely refer to homosexuality as an evil force

that threatens to destroy America. These groups increasingly are hiring

ex-gay activists as spokesmen, funding ex-gay research and establishing

ex-gay ministries.

Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., now runs its own

traveling ex-gay ministry, Love Won Out, which has drawn crowds of

several hundred in more than 50 cities since 2001. Christian Coalition

founder Pat Robertson finances studies on ex-gay "conversion

therapies," and the late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, who once

infamously claimed that gays, lesbians and other agents of liberalism

spurred the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was a keynote speaker at a 2006

ex-gay conference. In Lynchburg, Va., both the church and the

university Falwell founded have ex-gay ministries.

The American Family Association, another Christian Right group,

distributes "It's Not Gay," a video that uses ex-gay testimonies --

including that of a man who has since admitted to holding gay sex

parties -- to claim that 95% of gay couples are not monogamous.

Separately, the AFA employs anti-gay junk science to claim that gays

die very early and are far more likely to molest children than

heterosexuals. (These claims, made by propagandist hatemongers like

Paul Cameron of the Family Values Institute, are completely false and

have been discredited numerous times by legitimate scientists.)

Leaders of Watchmen on the Walls, an international anti-gay group that

blames the Nazi Holocaust on homosexuals, tell audiences that "one of

the most important things you can do is start an ex-gay movement here."

One of the Watchmen's members serves on the board of the Exodus

International and was a keynote speaker at its recent conference. The

Traditional Values Coalition, a major California-based organization

listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group for its

virulent anti-gay activities, and Florida-based Coral Ridge Ministries

have even created their own ex-gay holiday, National Coming Out of

Homosexuality Day, falling one day after National Coming Out Day.

"Indifference or neutrality toward the homosexual rights movement will

result in society's destruction," the American Family Association

declared in a press release. "A national 'Coming out of homosexuality

day' provides us a means whereby to dispel the lies of the homosexual

rights crowd who say they are born that way and cannot change."

'New Creations'?

Reparative or sexual reorientation therapy, the pseudo-scientific

foundation of the ex-gay movement, has been discredited by virtually

all major American medical, psychiatric, psychological and professional

counseling organizations. The American Psychological Association, for

instance, declared in 2006: "There is simply no sufficiently

scientifically sound evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.

Our further concern is that the positions espoused by NARTH [the

National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality] and Focus

on the Family create an environment in which prejudice and

discrimination can flourish." The powerful American Medical

Association, for its part, officially "opposes the use of 'reparative'

or 'conversion' therapy that is based on the assumption that

homosexuality per se is a mental disorder or based upon the a priori

assumption that the patient should change his/her homosexual

orientation."

Jim Burroway, who runs Box Turtle Bulletin, a website that tracks the

ex-gay movement, says a key theme in ex-gay ideology is the idea that

"there's no such thing as gay." Instead, gays and lesbians are

described as "sexually broken" or heterosexuals who suffer from

"same-sex attractions."

Sexual brokenness, according to ex-gay doctrine, usually occurs early in

childhood, the result of an overbearing mother, an emotionally distant

father, or sexual abuse. Focus on the Family ex-gay lecturers routinely

and flatly declare that all gays and lesbians are victims of childhood

sexual abuse.

About the only time the word "gay" appears in the ex-gay lexicon is in

the phrase "gay lifestyle," which is largely seen as describing a

hedonistic mix of one-night stands and sexually transmitted diseases

that culminates in early death or abandonment when youthful beauty

fades. The ex-gay movement has little language to describe the real

world in which lesbians and gays hold elected office, appear on TV

shows and raise families. At best, people like U.S. Rep. Barney Frank

(D-Mass.) and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres are labeled as

"gay-identified." Exodus President Alan Chambers and other, harsher

ex-gay leaders call them "militant gays," simply because they are not

actively working to renounce their same-sex attractions. Churches that

accept gays are branded "false churches."

Still, even many ex-gay proponents admit that total conversion to

heterosexuality is at best an elusive goal. Frank Worthen, who runs the

ex-gay residential program New Hope out of an apartment complex in San

Rafael, Calif., writes in his curriculum workbook Steps Out: "Our

primary goal is not to make heterosexuals out of homosexual people. God

alone determines whether a former homosexual person is to marry and

rear a family, or if he (or she) is to remain celibate, serving the

Lord with his whole heart."

'Ancestor Sin' and 40-Day Fasts

Exodus, which has a $1 million budget, and NARTH both provide referrals

to ex-gay programs and therapists that offer a bewildering array of

techniques and philosophies.

Exodus has over 150 evangelical ministries throughout the U.S. and in

Australia, Canada, China, Europe, Japan, Latin America, the Philippines

and Singapore. Most of the ministries are locally run but remain under

the Exodus umbrella. A few of them target Latinos and African

Americans, as well as the deaf. In the U.S., coordinators for 14

different geographic regions make sure that local ministries have

Exodus accreditation and trained staff. Despite that, Exodus ministries

seem to have as many approaches to ex-gay work as they do regions.

Exodus makes referrals to ministries like Living Waters, a popular

neo-Pentecostal ex-gay program that treats homosexuality as a spirit

that can be induced by "ancestor sin" and pushed out through exorcism.

"We had pretty much a whole day dedicated to going through our entire

genealogy and asking for forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors,"

said Eric Leocadio, who went through the 30-week program in his early

20s. He says he was also told to keep "certain boundaries in your

friendship, never connecting with someone emotionally because you might

fall in love with them."

During his time with Living Waters, Toscano said a pastor had him fast

for a week at a time. "He said it was a matter of breaking through

physical appetites related to lust. There were others who fasted,

sometimes for up to 40 days."

Secular ex-gay therapies, even if less physically demanding, are no less

bizarre. On Ex-Gay Watch, a watchdog website, a woman named Pamela

Ferguson describes the reparative therapy her ex-husband underwent as a

last-ditch attempt to save their marriage. "I was once told to hold [my

ex-husband's] penis in my hand as we fell asleep. After a week or two

of this, [he supposedly] would be suddenly and inexplicably inflamed

with desire for me." The couple declined the suggestion.

At "ex-gay barbecues" held at her house, Ferguson says she met several

men who said they were asked to measure their penises and report the

results to their group. All of them refused.

The longtime president of NARTH is Joseph Nicolosi, a licensed

psychotherapist who teaches that any man who thinks he's gay simply "has

failed to enact his masculinity." NARTH, based in Encino, Calif., is a

referral service for its more than 1,000 members, who are both

religious and secular ex-gay counselors (NARTH does not require members

to be licensed or accredited). NARTH was founded by Charles Socarides,

whose openly gay son later served in the Clinton administration as the

first-ever liaison to the gay community.

One of Nicolosi's own former ex-gay patients, Daniel Gonzales, said

most of his therapy sessions took place over the telephone. "Whenever I

found myself attracted to a guy, I was supposed to befriend him and

demystify him," said Gonzales. "It never occurred to [Nicolosi] that

some of the guys I'm attracted to weren't straight." After spending a

year in the $250-an-hour sessions, Gonzales didn't feel any less gay.

He says he quit the therapy after realizing that "I would have to do

these mental gymnastics for the rest of my life."

Wayne Besen, a former researcher for the pro-gay Human Rights Campaign,

spent four years looking into ex-gay therapies for his 2003 book

Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the

Ex-Gay Myth. At one ministry that he attended undercover, gay men were

instructed to keep rubber bands on their wrist and snap them any time

they felt themselves "watching someone erotically or engaging in

fantasy." In another ministry, he held hands with other "strugglers" as

they read an anti-masturbation prayer: "I build high dikes on the right

hand and on the left hand and in Jesus' name I command that it shall

not overflow to the left hand or the right hand, but it shall flow

quietly in its normal channel."

Emphasis on the alleged link between masturbation and homosexuality is

widespread in ex-gay therapy. Exodus board member and family therapist

Jayson Graves, for instance, teaches on his call-in radio show that

masturbation is a gateway to "same-sex attraction" because "it is a

form of sex with yourself."

When Moms Go Bad

One of the most controversial ex-gay therapy techniques is "healing

touch," which involves men striving to become ex-gay cradling and

rocking other men in their arms. Last January, Richard Cohen, a

licensed psychotherapist who claims to be personally ex-gay,

demonstrated healing touch on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" and Comedy

Central's "The Daily Show." Cohen also demonstrated "bioenergetics,"

which involves beating on chairs with tennis rackets and screaming,

"Mom, Mom, why did you do this to me?" When Cohen appeared on ABC's

"Jimmy Kimmel Live!" one month later seated next to George Foreman, he

demonstrated healing touch therapy by putting his arms around the

former heavyweight boxing champion and explaining, "You comfort him and

love him like he's your own boy."

After his disastrous TV appearances, both Exodus and NARTH scrubbed any

mention of Cohen from their websites and released statements publicly

disavowing healing touch therapy. Yet both organizations continue to

promote healing touch through a program called Journey Into Manhood,

whose leaders are featured at Exodus conferences and highlighted on

NARTH's website. Journey Into Manhood is a nominally secular program

founded by Catholic, Jewish and Mormon counselors. The counselors

operate weekend outdoors retreats throughout the country that require

men to bond with one another through wilderness adventures and holding

each other in "non-sexual healing touch."

Alex Liberato went through 10 weeks of the Journey Into Manhood

curriculum after he was outed as a gay man while a student at highly

conservative Brigham Young University in Utah. Much of the curriculum

centered on recovering early child-parent memories. But men were also

required to hold one another. "It just seemed like it allowed guys to

touch each other without there being sex," said Liberato. The thought

of spending a concluding weekend in the Utah wilderness, having to

uncomfortably touch and be touched by male strangers repulsed him. He

says he was made to understand that nudity might also be involved. "I

was in the parking lot. I just [back] got in my car and drove off,"

said Liberato.

Just this September, Texas ex-gay therapist Chris Austin was convicted

of two counts of felony sexual assault on a patient and sentenced to 10

years in prison. (A judge later reduced that sentence to seven years of

probation but fined Austin $2,500 and stripped him of his counseling

license.) The charges were based on a complaint filed by Mark Hufford,

a client of Austin's for over a year. Hufford testified that Austin

held healing touch sessions that progressed to include nude massage and

oral sex. Hufford originally sought treatment while married to a woman

but has since accepted his gay identity, divorced and begun dating a

man. In addition to his own counseling practice, Austin also operated

the Renew homosexual recovery program at South MacArthur Church of

Christ in Irving, Texas.

Austin was a member of NARTH and had written a treatment curriculum

called "Cleaning Out the Closet." His wife ran a program for the

spouses of "husbands who struggle with homosexuality." Austin's

criminal conviction is the first widely known case of a therapist being

convicted of sexual assault in conjunction with ex-gay therapy.

Arousing the Extremists

In the late 1990s, the most powerful anti-gay groups of the evangelical

right underwent their own version of ex-gay therapy. It was an unlikely

conversion -- most churches at the time held ex-gay ministries at arm's

length, with their noses pinched. While many preached that

homosexuality was a sinful choice, few wanted the stigma or controversy

of hosting an ex-gay ministry.

Ethnographer Tanya Erzen spent a year observing New Hope Ministry, an

ex-gay residential program in operation since the late 1970s, for her

2006 book, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the

Ex-Gay Movement. The program's director told Erzen: "Initially, all our

opposition came from the Christian community, rather than the gay

community. It will take the church about one hundred years to really

understand what we're doing."

Actually, it only took about 20 years. In 1998, two dozen of the

country's leading Christian Right groups convened in Colorado Springs,

Colo., at Focus on the Family's sprawling headquarters complex. Led by

Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ, the

coalition of anti-gay groups called themselves "Truth in Love." They

decided to spend $600,000 on advertisements in the New York Times and

USA Today to try to make "ex-gay" a household word.

Folger spelled out the new strategy in an NPR interview, saying, "That

ex-gays exist shatters the foundation of the homosexual movement." On

ABC's "Nightline," she admitted to wanting to imprison gays through

enforcing anti-sodomy laws that were later thrown out by the Supreme

Court as unconstitutional. Regardless, Truth in Love officials

maintained that their message was one of hope and compassion.

Initially, ex-gay therapists and ministers were elated at the money and

attention from the wealthy and powerful Christ Right groups that had

shunned them for decades. In 1999, the Family Research Council, created

as a political arm of James Dobson's Focus on the Family, gave $80,000

to fund PFOX, or Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays. In return, PFOX

president Anthony Falzarano -- a former male prostitute and confidante

of closeted prosecutor Roy M. Cohn, the rabid anti-communist who

persecuted homosexuals before dying in 1986 from complications of AIDS

- -- lobbied to keep anti-sodomy laws from being repealed in Louisiana.

But Falzarano quickly realized that the new money infusion was really

for lobbying against gay rights rather than expanding ex-gay

ministries. Before the year was out, he had called a press conference

to denounce anti-gay leaders. "Many of us in the ex-gay movement," he

said at the event, "feel we're being used."

A Reach for Power

Today, PFOX is headed by Regina Griggs, the mother of an openly gay

son. The group's goals have as much to do with transforming public

schools as they do with changing people's sexual identities. In a move

its officials aim to replicate nationally, PFOX, with the help of

Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center ("Christianity's

answer to the ACLU"), sued the Montgomery County School District in

Maryland for the right to operate a high school ex-gay club. PFOX lost

the suit but continues to distribute ex-gay literature in Maryland

schools.

Exodus, which for decades had been an apolitical ministry, has

transformed itself into a lobbying apparatus seemingly at odds with its

nonprofit status as a ministry. This August, Exodus hired Amanda Banks,

a lobbyist with Focus on the Family, to direct lobbying in the Congress

and the U.S. Senate. Since her hire, Exodus says it has met with 55

national lawmakers. Banks claims that one unnamed U.S. senator

regularly consults with Exodus to learn "how to talk about gay issues

without sounding like a bigot."

A new spin-off organization called ExodusRoots sends out daily alerts to

readers, telling them how to contact their local congressmen to testify

against hate crime laws that would protect gays and lesbians.

Incredibly, Exodus Vice President Randy Thomas uses his own experience

being assaulted and gay-bashed at a Thanksgiving party in 1988 to argue

against legislation that he calls "thought crimes laws." Thomas says he

was rescued from the attack by a "pair of angry lesbians" but

nonetheless insists that hate crime laws would make his life "as a

former homosexual less valuable now than when we were living as

homosexuals."

Other heavy hitters on the Exodus board include Phil Burress, a star

organizer for the Christian Right who tapped into a personal database

of 1.5 million voters and raised more than $3 million in a few weeks to

support Ohio's 2004 anti-gay marriage initiative. Exodus Chairman

Melissa Coffey headed the ex-gay Regeneration Ministries while working

as an aide to U.S. Rep. Rich Boucher (R-Va.) and a staff assistant to

the government's 9-11 Commission. She now travels as a guest lecturer

and speaks on "The Journey Through Lesbianism."

Both Chambers and Thomas, the president and vice president of Exodus,

met with President George Bush in the summer of 2006 as part of a

delegation to lobby for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex

marriage. And James Holsinger, Bush's current nominee for U.S. surgeon

general, founded a church in Kentucky that operates an ex-gay ministry.

In 1991, Holsinger submitted a white paper to his church --

"Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality" -- that argued that gays and

lesbians can alter their sexuality through prayer and willpower.

Holsinger has since changed his views and now runs workshops on lesbian

health issues.

But enthusiasts and ideologues of the ex-gay movement haven't given up

hope that science will confirm their view.

Playing With Numbers

To back up their claims that homosexuality is purely a deviant lifestyle

choice, ex-gay leaders frequently cite the Thomas Project, a four-year

study of ex-gay programs, paid for by Exodus, that recruited subjects

exclusively from Exodus ministries. It was conducted by Mark Yarhouse,

a psychology professor at Pat Robertson's Regents University, and

Stanton Jones, provost of Wheaton College, an evangelical institution

in Illinois. Both are members of NARTH. The study was conducted

entirely via 45-minute telephone interviews conducted annually over the

course of four years. Results were published this September.

Of nearly 100 people surveyed, only 11% reported a move towards

heterosexuality. But no one in the study reports becoming fully

heterosexual; according to the study's authors, even the 11% group "did

not report themselves to be without experience of homosexual arousal,

and did not report heterosexual orientation to be unequivocal and

uncomplicated."

The researchers had originally hoped for 300 subjects but, according to

an article in Christianity Today, "found many Exodus ministries

mysteriously uncooperative." Over the course of the four-year study, a

quarter of the participants dropped out. Their reasons for quitting

were not tracked.

Nevertheless, the study was hailed by Exodus, Focus on the Family and

the Southern Baptist Convention as "scientific evidence to prove what

we as former homosexuals have known all along -- that those who

struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction can experience freedom from

it."

Even more remarkably, Focus on the Family cites a 67% success rate. It

came up with that number by counting as "successes" subjects who

practice chastity or were still engaged in homosexual acts or thoughts

"but expressed commitment to continue" the therapy.

Despite its rhetoric that "freedom from unwanted homosexuality is

possible," Exodus officials seem quietly aware that few, if any, of the

thousands of people who participate in their ministries actually change

their sexual orientation. Exodus pamphlets with titles like "My

Fianci(e) is Ex-Gay: Are We Ready for Marriage?" and "Women & Ex-Gay

Men: Establishing Healthy Boundaries" present ex-gay status as

essentially an act of faith.

"Why do ex-gay men pursue women?" one pamphlets asks. The answers

offered describe the ex-gay movement itself: "Social Expectation

Self-Reassurance Blind Faith."

Wink and Nod

One of the first things to strike a newcomer to any Exodus conference

is how much it seems to play to stereotypes of gay men. At Revolution,

the name Exodus gave to its conference this June at Concordia

University in Irvine, Calif., the young men attending wore designer

jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts. They had pierced ears and expensive

haircuts. Burroway, the gay man who tracks the ex-gay movement for Box

Turtle Bulletin, describes Exodus conferences he's attended as "one of

the gayest things I have ever been to."

At the June conference in Irvine, which promised "complete, sudden,

radical change," Exodus Vice President Randy Thomas, the master of

ceremonies, dangled his wrists as he made self-conscious jokes about

how much he likes the Seattle Seahawks since Tiger Woods took them to

the Stanley Cup. Announcing a free Friday afternoon for conference

attendees, his voice grew high-pitched when he told the audience,

"There's plenty of shopping."

In short, Exodus attendees were free to nod and wink at their gay pasts.

After all, as many ex-gay leaders say, "No one chooses to struggle with

same-sex attraction." But a glance at Exodus seminars reveals that the

road to "healing" is paved with plenty of self-hatred.

Seminars at the Irvine conference boasted militant-sounding titles such

as "A Hero's Journey: Fighting the Battle of Your Life." One of the

featured speakers was Michael L. Brown, author of Revolution: The Call

to Holy War and a millennial Jew who once described the red T-shirts

worn by his ministry students at a gay rights march

counter-demonstration as "the shed blood of Christ flowing toward the

gates of hell."

On Exodus' opening day, Brown's comments were no more reserved. To

stand-up applause, he quoted from the Black Panthers and told the

thousand members of his audience that the fight against gay civil

rights is a "cause worth dying for."

Before the four-day Exodus conference came to an end, Focus on the

Family and Exodus spokesman Mike Haley showed a final video clip on the

gargantuan multimedia screen. By that time, the audience was in a

weakened emotional state. Over the past four days, they'd been

repeatedly told they had failed as parents, failed as boys and girls,

failed as husbands and wives, and that their failure to change may lead

them to fail God as well.

The video showed a local evening news segment from a town in the

Midwest. A soldier is granted an unexpected furlough from Iraq. He

makes a surprise visit to his son's first-grade classroom. The boy

curls up in his father's arms, crying uncontrollably. Most of the

audience was soon doing the same.

"I want you all to have the strength of that little boy," said Haley.

Harm? What Harm?

The same weekend as the Exodus Revolution conference, just a mile down

the road at the campus of University of California-Irvine, 100 men and

women gathered for the first-ever Ex-Gay Survivor's conference,

subtitled "Undoing the Damage, Affirming Our Lives Together." For some,

it was a space to heal. Scott Tucker, another alumnus of LIA who is now

openly gay, said that for years he faulted himself for failing to turn

straight until he realized the programs had the opposite effect,

isolating him in a "ghetto" of gay men trying to become straight.

For others, it was a place to challenge Exodus and turn its message of

"change is possible" upside down. "Yes you can pursue change. But at

what cost?" said Toscano. He and other ex-gay survivors invited Exodus

President Alan Chambers and other ex-gay leaders to an off-the-record

dinner. "From knowing quite a few of you personally, we know that you

have a heart to help people and to serve God. You meant to bless us,"

read the invitation. "Too often once we leave your programs, you never

hear about our lives and what happens to us."

Exodus officials declined the invitation.

Shawn O'Donnell, who spent a decade in ex-gay ministries beginning when

he was 15, chalked up his experiences on a blackboard at the Ex-Gay

Survivor's conference. "I see now that going through these ex-gay

experiences caused harm in my life. I heard the message loud and clear

that I was a horrible person. I began cutting on myself at such an

early age because I just couldn't deal with the fact that I was gay,"

wrote O'Donnell. "I grew to hate myself and tried to take my life a few

times."

O'Donnell later posted the same comments on his blog, receiving a

stream of supportive comments. Exodus' Chambers, who frequently

challenges the posts on ex-gay survivors' sites, wrote back: "Harm?

Come on, Shawn. No one is being harmed by Exodus offering people a

choice. You KNOW better."

Behind closed doors, though, Exodus' president admits to struggling with

homosexuality every day of his life. "Every day, I wake up and deny what

comes naturally to me," Chambers told a private audience of about 75

"strugglers" at an ex-gay conference held in Phoenix last February.

If there's any doubt where the ex-gay leaders are taking the movement,

Chambers clarified it this September, speaking to a Who's Who of the

anti-gay Christian Right at the Family Impact Summit in Brandon, Fla.

"We have to stand up against an evil agenda," Chambers told his fellow

hard-liners. "It is an evil agenda and it will take anyone captive that

is willing, or that is standing idly by."

[Emily Brown and Janet Smith contributed to this report. ]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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