“Curing Homosexuality” Really Freaks Us Out: Part 2

Got a surprising number of complaints about part one—good to know I’m making some readers uncomfortable.  Can’t we be weird and funny without mentioning queers? Deal with it.

Much respect due to all the Brainsturbator readers—the vast majority, for the record—who are grownup enough to handle the radical notion that homosexuals might be actual human beings. This series has already been a wake-up call for me—and now in Part 2, we take a survey of the “Ex-Gay” ministries and deeply creepy “Reparative Therapy” organizations who make up the landscape in 2006.

(In the course of researching this article, I came across an “article” that sums everything up pretty perfectly: this right here, from Positive Liberty, which juxtaposes a letter about the “evils and emptiness” of homosexuality with photos of the author’s life with his lover.  Speaks volumes.)

The Weird Non-Story of Zach Stark

Let’s start with a blog post by a young teenager named Zach Stark.  As far as he knew, he was just writing for a small circle of his friends:

Somewhat recently, as many of you know, I told my parents I was gay… Well today, my mother, father, and I had a very long “talk” in my room where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist christian program for gays. They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they “raised me wrong.” I’m a big screw up to them, who isn’t on the path God wants me to be on.

Word caught on fast and within a week, there were “FREE ZACH” website cropping up, and young Mr. Stark had become a cause for millions of people who didn’t know him.  Logically enough, this led to a short “media firestorm” with activists from across the country raising the alarm and claiming he was being abused at the “fundamentalist program for gays” that Stark mentioned.

The program in question was Love in Action, and Stark was at a facility in Tennessee, which Child Services promptly launched an investigation of, on ground of “child abuse”.  It looked for sure like some crazy fundamentalist Nazis had just gotten themselves busted, but it never came to a clean or clear conclusion.

The ending, like most of what Brainsturbator presents to you the reader, is an inkblot test.  Zach himself got sick of being the center of media attention—he is, after all, not a figurehead, a leader, or a marytr, merely a very confused sixteen year old boy.

The State of Tennessee dropped their criminal investigation into LIA, meaning either there was no grounds for prosecution, or LIA has some good connections in the Bible Belt.  (Which is a pretty absurd conspiracy theory to suggest, I know.) It’s worth noting that Tennessee did “informally inform” LIA that they “may have been operating illegaly”—and LIA voluntarily stopped dispensing prescriptions and accepting mentally ill clients.

After this exceptionally fortunate turn of events, LIA demonstrated some “do unto others” by filing a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee for discrimination.  They won, and so the taxpayers of Tennessee wound up footing all of Love in Action’s legal bills. 

Ah, History..You Traitorous Bitch...

Hilarious: what’s the single greatest argument that Reparative Therapy is not effective? 

The history of Reparative Therapy.

Let’s start with the folks at Love in Action.  From their official website, you can glean the following:

Love In Action International was started in 1973 by Frank Worthen. At 43, Frank rededicated his life to Jesus Christ after spending 20 years pursuing homosexual behavior. With a testimony tape and a newspaper ad, Frank gave a message seldom heard before, “There is a way out of homosexuality!”

What’s interesting about that is it’s sorta not-so-true. There were two other names invovled, both of whom would argue they actually founded the group, since Worthen didn’t enter the picture until years later.

So why cover up your two founding members?  Probably because one of them is homosexual.  (This is just a guess though, they might have reasons of their own.) The two names here are John Evans and Rev. Kent Philpott.  John Evans recently wrote an open letter to the current administration of Love in Action, saying that the group “shatters lives” and drives people to suicide.  (Evans left the program after his best friend, a fellow gay man seeking change, committed suicide.)

To the credit of the Ex-Gay movement, although they do exaggerate their figures, there is today an abundantly documented body of evidence that several thousand people at least have been “converted”.  Take a look through these testimonials, if you’re interested.

For anyone interested in digging deeper, the best place to start is John Evan’s account of how LIA was founded which is genuinely surprising and interesting stuff.

Exodus International was founded in 1976 after a Christian conference on how to deal with the Homo Problem.  Three years later, founding member Micheal Bussee, quit the group with a local Exodus volunteer named Gary Cooper.  Apparently, they’re still together today, having held a “life committment” ceremony in the 80s and by all accounts having a happy and meaningful life together—there are at least some silver linings in the mix today.

One of Exodus International’s biggest problems is one they share in common with Love in Action: Frank Worthen, again.  Micheal Bussee sums the situation up:

EXODUS Global Aliance also names Frank Worthen as the one who organized the first EXODUS conference in Anaheim CA in 1976—implying that he did it single-handedly. This is not true. Frank didn’t organize it. Jim Kaspar, Gary Cooper and I did. Frank attended as a delegate, along with about 60 others.

Frank’s ministry, Love In Action, was already underway when we hosted EXODUS in 1976. The EXODUS Global Alliance website also states it was called EXODUS International North America. Also not correct. It was simply called “EXODUS”. The “North America” came years later.

I have repeatedly asked Alan Chambers or EXODUS to correct the website, to no avail.

Exodus has had a lot of problems since then: famously, John Paulk from Focus on the Family was appointed to spearhead an aggressive new Public Relations push in 1998 for Exodus, to get their programs going across the country.  Paulk made a rather huge tactical error by going to a gay bar in Washington DC, and telling the patrons that he was a gay man named John Clint.  Someone in the bar recognized him and called up journalist Wayne Bensen, who showed up, confronted Paulk, and then photographed him. 

Love the Sinner, Hate the Effect on Local Property Values

“But as a property owner ... I wouldn’t rent to someone who is gay any more than I’d rent to someone who is a practicing witch.”

To be fair, there are a lot of ways that quote could be interpreted.  (Some of them are actually very funny, too.) But when you take the recorded statements of Alan Chambers at face value and sum total, a pretty clear picture emerges.  The dude has actual beef with gay people, which given his history is pretty unfunny and sad.  I have talked to people who feel strongly about what they percieve as the Homosexual agenda, and many of them have told me to bear in mind that it’s hard, draining work dealing with homosexuals when you have a strong moral and visceral aversion to them.  I certainly agree with Christians (and non-denominational bigots) who complain that “homophobia” is a misused phrase: it is.  (Although if you think it’s crazy to suggest a link between hatred and fear, you should start reading books again.)

But it’s hard to agree with the contention that “homophobia” is somehow over-used, when every single party I go to drunk dudes are calling each other fags.  If you think our culture isn’t a wee bit prejudiced against gay folks, I suggest you spend a day calling people “homo” and “queer” and merely observing reactions.

With that in mind here’s more gems from the men who lined their closets with booby traps and razor wire:

“Satan delights in homosexual perversion because it not only exists outside of marriage, but it also defiles God’s very image reflected as male and female. Another related source of demonization is the homosexual relationship itself. That attachment and communion are indeed inspired, but their source is demonic.”

That’s Andrew Comiskey from our friends at Desert Stream.  He actually scores Satanic Bonus Points for correctly identifying a major thread of homoeroticism and homosexual ritual in the past century, thanks to horny freak geniuses like Aliester Crowley, and less signifigantly, by the exquisitely weird Austin Osman Spare. 

Many of the more fundamentalist figures in the “Reparation Therapy” movement speak of their work in equally apocalyptic terms—it is not mental health outreach work, it’s more like spiritual warfare on a national scale.  Comiskey—who is a rather sad case himself—is not alone in using this kind of language.  Alan Chambers even made the following statement in a recent fundraising letter:

“At the core of it all, this isn’t a battle about whether homosexuality is right or wrong, it is a battle between good and evil. One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can. Our job is simple: wage war against the Kingdom of Darkness and save souls.”

Still More...

“The penis and the vagina fit together. Two penises and two vaginas don’t work.”

Richard “Never Seen a Porno” Cohen.  He’s dropped an abundance of “oh rrrreally” moments in his career, another favorite was: “A man with same-sex attractions may have a chameleon-like nature.”

Cohen works for the International Healing Foundation, where he claims “an 85% success rate” with curing people of homosexual desires.  He is, at least, one of the more sophisticated Reparative Therapists, using a battery of 22 different techniques and borrowing liberally from pretty much every form of therapy known to mankind.  Like most folks involved with this drama, Cohen is himself a “former” gay man, who after 10 years of “celibacy” got married to his wife back in 1982—today he’s got three kids.  Cohen himself is a testament to his own methods, and although there’s a lot of activists keeping their fingers crossed that he’ll turn up in leather chaps at some bar someday, it will probably never happen.  Cohen has successfully transformed himself, and like we mentioned in the last article, that’s disturbing to a great many people.

“AIDS comes from the devil, directly from Satan. He uses homosexuals as pawns and then he kills them.”

That haiku was by Anthony Falzarano.  One interesting factoid about Falzarano: for years, he was one of Roy Cohn’s lovers.  For readers unaware of Cohn, he was a very emblematic figure in gay history:  a Washington DC lawyer who worked for Reagan and Nixon and, by all accounts, bitterly hated himself for being a homosexual.  (Cohn was also immortalized in the uber-weird play Angels in America, in which he’s got some of the best monolouges on the planet.)

Falzarano is also well-known—more than he’d like, proably—for referring to Matthew Shepard, the young man who was beaten to death up in Wyoming for being a faggot, as a “predator to homosexual men”.  Yeah, nice one, jackass.

The Purple Menace

“Homosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.”

What makes all this monstrosity so much worse was that these men, these psychiatrists and scientists—who we look at today as cold and vicious—were actually working from good intentions. These men are absurd and terrible—they are True Believers, perhaps the most dangerous predator known to mankind.  This is equally true for Democrats, anarchists, Satanists and Taoists.

However, Brainsturbator is all about taking the absurd seriously, so in closing—really—I would urge the reader to consider, if only for 10 minutes, that the Bible is the inspired word of God, who really exists and sees everything we do.  He has used a flood to wipe humanity out almost completely, he has killed millions of Egyptian babies who were clearly innocent of anything except soiling their diapers, he has totally annhilated several cities, and yet he’s watched silently for centuries now as humans commit even worse crimes against each other.

Where I differ from fundamentalist Christians is not so much the belief, it’s the implications. Because if that God is real, we need to pool our resources and find a way to kill him before he does any more damage. Otherwise this species is going nowhere.

Up Next: Dear God, There’s More

After this comes the really juicy stuff—the methods and history of reparative therapy, also known as “aversion therapy”.  Some very strange and dark stuff on the way...maybe after this series is done we’ll just do gallery posts of cool fractals, and....puppies, I don’t know.  It’s a strang and dark time, I just try to keep things interesting.

Part 3: Final Chapter