> "Religiously we thought God had accepted homosexuality," > says Durost, "though it wasn't necessarily part of > His original plan."
> By James Bandler
>In the dying hours of an autumn night, Steven Durost and Mike Howatt sift
through the relics of a love affair abandoned. In a trunk, they find the love poems. They both giggle as Durost reads one aloud: ``While you were gone, I found myself sitting alone, daydreaming about you.'' Tucked away in the attic, they find the photographs. Here's a picture of Howatt on Christmas Day, clasping his hands with childish glee as he opens a present from Durost. And there's a photograph of the two of them kissing under the mistletoe. Reclining on his bed, Durost stares at the photograph and blushes. ``It's hard to imagine that it happened to us,'' he says quietly. ``I don't identify with it.'' Howatt concurs: ``I'm really not that person anymore.''
>Though they still share the same house, it's been five years since Durost
and Howatt have been intimate. In 1993, after three years together and decades of struggling with their sexual orientation, both men renounced their homosexuality and began new lives as ``ex-gays.'' ``We began to realize that maybe that lifestyle wasn't what God had planned for us,'' says Howatt, who is 33 and a nursing-home aide.
>Over the last five years, the two men have immersed themselves in the gay
conversion movement. They've participated in twice-a-month group counseling sessions and driven cross-country to attend conferences for ``recovering homosexuals.'' They've listened to ``reparative'' therapy tapes and studied books with titles like Homosexual No More: Practical Strategies for Christians Overcoming Homosexuality.
>Today, Durost and Howatt, who are deeply religious, share this house off a
busy street in Manchester, New Hampshire, with two other self-described ex-gays. The house rules are nonnegotiable: Everyone must attend weekly church services and meetings at the local ex-gay ministry. Once a month, the housemates gather for a prayer and accountability meeting. ``We wanted this to be a house of healing,'' says Durost, 34, a slight, soft-spoken man with a goatee. ``We didn't see how anyone could come out of the lifestyle without accountability.''
>In choosing to forswear ``the lifestyle,'' as they call homosexuality,
they've taken a road that is at odds with the recommendations of most mainstream mental health experts, who argue that sexual orientation is at the core of human identity - that is, although it may be repressed, it cannot, and should not, be changed. Even some of Durost and Howatt's closest Christian friends confess to being initially startled by their decision to ``come out'' of homosexuality. ``I once wrote in my journal that Mike and Steven had the kind of relationship I'd always dreamed of having,'' says Theresa Brooks, who has been friends with Durost and Howatt for nine years. ``They were very caring, very loving to each other.'' When she learned of their decision, she was puzzled that they would want to change.
>Their choice would not be considered quite as unusual today, however.
Ex-gays are very much in the news these days. You can find ex-gays' stories and pictures on the inside pages of supermarket tabloids - ``Gays Cured by Prayer'' - and on the covers of national news magazines such as Newsweek. The media frenzy was ignited by a series of full-page advertisements that ran last summer in leading newspapers, promoting gay conversions. Funded by conservative Christian groups on behalf of Exodus International, a Seattle-based referral network of ministries that counsel homosexuals seeking to change their sexual orientation, the ads featured sunny-faced men and women rejoicing in their newfound heterosexuality. In one ad, a self-described ``wife, mother, and former lesbian'' declared: ``I'm living proof that Truth can set you free.''
>The truth, however, proved difficult to discern in the political firefight
that followed. Gay-rights activists accused the sponsors of the ads of cloaking hatred in the mantles of pseudoscience and faith-based compassion. ``It's just a glossy, glitzy, glamorous attempt to show a kinder, gentler form of verbal gay-bashing,'' says Wayne Besen of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation's largest gay-rights organizations. The savage murder in October of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, intensified the battle. Besen and others accused conservative Christians of complicity in Shepard's death for creating a climate of intolerance. Gay and lesbian activists urged television stations around the country to boycott a new round of ``Truth in Love'' ads, one of which ends with the message: ``It's not about hate. It's about hope.''
>For Howatt and Durost, the Sturm und Drang surrounding the ad campaign seem
far away. Like most Americans, gay and straight, they're too preoccupied with the vicissitudes of daily life to worry much about politics. Durost, the assistant manager of a pet store, has immersed himself in ministry work and is now the assistant director at the local ex-gay ministry. Howatt juggles a full-time job as an assistant activities coordinator at a nursing home with a part-time business of taking animals to day care and senior centers to provide pet therapy for their clients.
>Both men say they've grown spiritually and emotionally since they walked
away from their homosexuality. ``I have become more confident about who I am,'' says Howatt. ``I've grown up tremendously.'' For Durost, the conversion counseling has nothing to do with politics. ``It's about quiet changes that are taking place in my heart,'' he says.
>But even after five years, their desire hasn't been doused. Durost still
fantasizes about men. ``If I'm really tired, that tends to be a trigger for me,'' he says. And three or four times a year, when he's lonely or depressed, Howatt finds himself alone in the car, driving to a gay cruising spot. He never does anything, he says, just parks his car and watches. ``I stay there a few minutes, and then I shake myself and say, `This is really stupid. This is so dumb,''' he says, his voice trailing off.
>When Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi likened homosexuals
to alcoholics and kleptomaniacs during an interview with a conservative cable-television host last June, he gave voice to a sentiment widely shared by his allies on the religious right. A month later, a coalition of conservative Christian groups launched their ``Truth in Love'' campaign, a sophisticated print-advertising blitz promoting gay conversion and arguing that homosexuality is immoral.
>``The ex-gays are living proof that you can change your behavior and that
you are not born gay, as people are born black and white,'' says Robert Knight, director of cultural studies for the Family Research Council, a group based in Washington, D.C., that has poured tens of thousands of dollars into ex-gay ministries over the last several years. ``The civil rights arguments for homosexuality that have been adopted from the traditional civil rights movement do not apply.'' The council, one of the sponsors of the ad campaign, also supports the preservation of state sodomy laws that criminalize homosexual behavior.
>The ad campaign came as a sobering reminder to gay activists of the
fragility of their hard-won gains. Polls suggest that Americans are deeply ambivalent about homosexuality. While 80 percent believe that gays should have equal job rights, 56 percent say that homosexuality is a sin.
>The emergence of ex-gays has reopened a genie's bottle that gay activists
thought had been closed a quarter-century ago. In 1973, after rancorous debate and heavy lobbying from gay activists, the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its Diagnostic Standards Manual, signaling that the psychiatric establishment no longer considered homosexuality a disease in need of cure. Last year, the American Psychological Association passed a resolution asserting that there was no sound scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of therapies that attempt to ``cure'' homosexuality.
>Nonetheless, small numbers of gays and lesbians have continued to seek help
to change their orientation. Some have consulted mental health practitioners affiliated with NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, which maintains that homosexuality is a disorder that should be cured. Others have turned to faith-based groups, including Homosexuals Anonymous and Courage, the Catholic Church's ministry to homosexuals. The largest of these Christian organizations is Exodus International.
>Founded in 1976 by members of nearly a dozen previously unaffiliated groups
that ministered to homosexuals, Exodus has adopted a dual mission: to educate churches about homosexuality and to support gays and lesbians who want to change. Bob Davies, Exodus's North American director, says he struggled with homosexual feelings for decades but now describes himself as a happily married heterosexual. ``There are hundreds of people like myself,'' he says. ``My whole world consists of people who have changed.''
>Publicly, Exodus eschews the harsh, homophobic rhetoric of many
fundamentalist groups, arguing that churches should open their doors to these men and women so that they may feel the ``transforming love of Christ and his church.'' But the group, which subscribes to a literal interpretation of
...
> http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2-7/featurestory3.shtml/ > > Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, 7 February, 1999 > > > > Struggling to be straight > > "Religiously we thought God had accepted homosexuality," > says Durost, "though it wasn't necessarily part of > His original plan." > > By James Bandler
Rick's Condensed Version of how ...
> ... Steven Durost and Mike Howatt ... renounced their homosexuality > and began new lives as ``ex-gays.'' ...
> ... they've taken a road that is at odds with the recommendations > of most mainstream mental health experts, who argue that sexual > orientation is at the core of human identity - that is, although > it may be repressed, it cannot...be changed ...
.. and have disproven the "mainstream mental-health experts" by having "changed their sexual orientation".
Straight from the horse's mouth:
> ... But even after five years, their desire hasn't been doused. > Durost still fantasizes about men. ...
> ... And three or four times a year ... Howatt finds himself alone > in the car, driving to a gay cruising spot. He never does anything, > he says, just parks his car and watches. ...
> Durost and Howatt [at] ... their biweekly meeting at ReCreation > Ministries ... A...man named Steven describes his struggle with > masturbation and gay pornography. Should he tell his girlfriend > that he's sneaking off to adult bookstores to look at porn? ... > A married man...speaks with anguish about a recent sexual encounter > in a park with another man ... Howatt ... confesses that he's in > ``emotional turmoil.'' ... he's worried about temptation ... > ``...my fantasy life is running wild,'' he says ...
> ... Today, the two men are no longer emotionally entwined, says... > their counselor. ... But in many ways, the two men are still very > much a couple. They still ... go camping together, ... they are > under the same roof ... still kiss on the lips when they greet > each other ...
> ... Howatt ... hasn't yet felt any attraction toward women ...
> ... When Howatt returned this fall from his business trip ... A few > nights later, the two men packed up for a spur-of-the-moment camping > trip ... in the tent, as they lay side by side in separate sleeping > bags, Durost says...he was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. ... > he was almost overcome by desire. ...
"Ex-gays".
(Stay tuned for the soon-to-be-released sequel, "Steven and Mike II: One Sleeping Bag Unto God".)
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