Re: Curing Homosexuality, "My Ex-Gay Friend."

[Spam-Busters, BITCH!]

On 22-Jun-2011, "Bill Shultz" <bsh...@googlegroups.com> doesn't have a
life, so he spammed several legit newsgroups with this tripe:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/magazine/my-ex-gay-friend.html
>
> One Saturday afternoon last winter, I drove north on Route 85
> through the rolling rangeland of southeastern Wyoming. I was
> headed to a small town north of Cheyenne to see an old friend
> and colleague named Michael Glatze. We worked together 12 years
> ago at XY, a San Francisco-based national magazine for young gay
> men, back when we were young gay men ourselves.
>
> Though only a year removed from Dartmouth when he arrived at XY,
> Michael had seemingly read every gay book ever written. While I
> was busy trying to secure a boyfriend, he was busy contemplating
> queer theory, marching in gay rights rallies and urging young
> people to celebrate (not just accept) their same-sex
> attractions. Michael was devoted to helping gay youth, and he
> was particularly affected by the letters the magazine received
> regularly from teenagers who were rejected by their religious
> families. �Christian fundamentalists should burn in hell!� he
> told me once, slamming his fist on his desk. I had never met
> anyone so sure of himself.
>
> Many young gay men looked up to him. He and his boyfriend at the
> time, Ben, who also worked at the magazine, made a handsome pair
> � but their appeal went deeper. On weekends we would go to raves
> together, and I would watch as gay boys gravitated toward the
> couple. Michael and Ben seemed unburdened (by shame, by self-
> doubt) and unapologetically pursued what the writer Paul Monette
> called the uniquely gay experience of �flagrant joy.� But unlike
> some of our friends who rode the flagrant joy train all the way
> to rehab, Michael and Ben rarely seemed out of control. There
> was a balance � a wisdom � to their quest for intense, authentic
> experience. Together they seemed to have figured out how to be
> young, gay and happy.
>
> I thought about those times as I pulled my rental car into the
> Wyoming town where Michael now lives. A lot had happened in the
> decade since we last saw each other: he and Ben started a new
> gay magazine (Young Gay America, or Y.G.A.); they traveled the
> country for a documentary about gay teenagers; and Michael was
> fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in
> July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.
>
> �Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,� he
> wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web
> site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY
> and Y.G.A. �Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its
> very nature pornographic,� he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily
> article a week later, he said that he was �repulsed to think
> about homosexuality� and that he was �going to do what I can to
> fight it.�
>
> At our appointed meeting time in Wyoming, I parked my rental car
> in front of a red, saloon-style grocery store and cafe that sits
> across the street from the Bible school where Michael was in his
> first year. A minute later I spotted him in my rearview mirror.
> He was walking toward the cafe, holding something that I
> couldn�t make out. I stepped out of my car and waved to him. He
> looked the same as I remembered � tall, lean, blond, boyish and
> handsome in a Nordic ski instructor kind of way. I was nervous,
> but as he approached I decided to lean in for a hug. Michael,
> though, pre-emptively stuck out his right hand. �Hello, Benoit,�
> he said, standing stiff and upright, clutching what I could now
> see was a Bible.
>
> Though Michael had agreed to let me visit and write about him,
> he was skeptical about my motivations. �Why are you here?� he
> asked minutes after we sat down in the cafe, which was decorated
> with Christmas lights and staffed by a young waiter attending
> the Bible school.
>
> It was a good question. Had part of me come to �save� my old
> friend from the clutches of the Christian right? Though I don�t
> doubt that sexual attraction can evolve, I was skeptical of
> Michael�s claim of heterosexuality � and I rejected his argument
> that �homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self
> within.� Besides, I had a hard time believing that Michael�s
> �true self� was a fundamentalist Christian who writes
> derogatorily about being gay. But whatever aspirations I had
> about persuading Michael to join the ranks of ex-ex-gays, they
> were no match for his eagerness to save me.
>
> �God loves you more than any dude will ever love you,� he told
> me at the cafe. �Don�t put your faith in some man, some flesh.
> That�s what we do when we�re stuck in the gay identity, when
> we�re stuck in that cave. We go from guy to guy, looking for
> someone to love us and make us feel O.K., but God is so much
> better than all the other masters out there.�
>
> Michael, who is 36, now often refers to gay life as a kind of
> cave � or cage. In an open letter to Ricky Martin, published on
> WorldNetDaily after Martin came out, he wrote, �Homosexuality is
> a cage in which you are trapped in an endless cycle of
> constantly wanting more � sexually � that you can never actually
> receive, constantly full of emptiness, trying to justify your
> twisted actions by politics and �feel good� language.�
>
> Had Michael been secretly unhappy as a gay man, and was he now
> projecting that onto all gay-identified people? I broached the
> question later that night at his small off-campus apartment,
> where we sat in his barren kitchen eating Oreo cookies. �Well,
> you can�t see how dark it is in a cave when you�re in it,� he
> said. �But, no, at the time I didn�t consider myself unhappy.�
>
> Michael didn�t begin to question his life path, he told me,
> until a health scare in 2004 that led to what he calls his
> �spiritual awakening.� That year, when Michael was 29, he
> experienced a series of heart palpitations and became convinced
> that he suffered from the same congenital heart defect that
> killed his father when Michael was 13. (Michael lost both his
> parents young; his mother died of breast cancer when he was 19.)
> After tests eventually ruled out his father�s illness, Michael
> felt that he had escaped death and found himself staring �into
> the face of God.� In a published interview with Joseph Nicolosi,
> a leader in the controversial field of reparative therapy, which
> seeks to help people overcome unwanted homosexual attractions,
> Michael said that he became �born again� in that moment and that
> �every concept that my mind had ever entertained � my whole
> existence � was completely re-evaluated.�
>
> Michael was as surprised as anyone by his sudden faith. Though
> his mother was Christian, his parents rarely took him and his
> younger sister to church and didn�t try to suppress his
> skepticism of organized religion, which grew into outright
> disdain during his years at Dartmouth. But by the end of 2004,
> after his health scare, Michael was devouring books by openly
> gay theologians like Mel White and Peter Gomes and trying to
> integrate his sexuality and spirituality. He was initially drawn
> to a liberal interpretation of the Bible and argued against a
> fundamentalist approach to Christianity. �People have been
> raised incorrectly to believe that the prejudices they�ve been
> taught by their pastors are God�s word,� he wrote in a 2005
> Y.G.A. issue devoted to spiritual questions. �The only Truth is
> Love.�
>
> But even as he rejected anti-gay theology, Michael�s political
> views began shifting rightward: he spoke glowingly about Ann
> Coulter, and in a Time cover article in 2005 about gay teenagers
> he said: �I don�t think the gay movement understands the extent
> to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The
> people who are getting that are the Christian right.�
>
> Michael�s friends and co-workers didn�t know what to make of his
> religious fervor or his shifting politics. Neither did his
> boyfriend, Ben, but Ben was more concerned with saving their
> floundering relationship. They had been together nearly a
> decade, though for the last few years the relationship had a
> third member � a young man they met in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
> where they moved in 2001 after leaving XY. (Ben had family
> there.) The three lived together, and Michael had at first so
> loved the arrangement that he started to write a book about it.
>
> But by the end of 2005, Michael told me, everything about his
> life was starting to feel wrong � his unconventional
> relationship, his gay friendships, even his magazine devoted to
> lifting up gay youth. �For a year I struggled to think of every
> other reason except for the obvious one,� he said. �Then it just
> came up, clear as day. The problem was my sexual identity. But
> that was really scary. I thought to myself, Seriously? That�s
> ridiculous. I�m a homosexual. I struggled trying to understand
> what was happening to me. I�d always been told that if you had
> doubts about the rightness of your homosexuality, which I had
> been having for a while but was trying to silence, that it was
> because you just hadn�t worked through all your internalized
> homophobia. But that didn�t feel true now.�
>
> Sitting in his Y.G.A. office toward the end of that year,
> Michael wrote three words on his computer screen: I am straight.
> They felt true, so he typed a few more: Homosexuality = Death. I
> choose Life.
>
> Then he stood up and left the building.
>
> Michael soon moved out of the Halifax house he shared with his
> boyfriends and sequestered himself in an apartment across town.
> He said he then briefly joined the Mormon Church, heartened by
> promises from several Mormon men he befriended that they would
> help him �find a wife.� (Michael left the church a short time
> later after deciding that Mormons �didn�t agree with the Bible.�)
>
> Alone and needing a job, Michael made a counterintuitive choice
> for a newly minted ex-gay: He took an editing job in San
> Francisco. His sister lived there, and he hoped to find and
> immerse himself in a Christian church community. But soon after
> arriving, Michael decided to visit the Castro � San Francisco�s
> gay neighborhood, where XY had been headquartered � to see �what
> I would feel.� Would he experience desire? Revulsion? Anger? �I
> ended up not feeling any of those things,� Michael told me, �but
> I did feel the humanity of the people in the Castro. I started
> to doubt what I�d written in those articles. I thought, Well,
> maybe none of this is true. Maybe I�m wrong.�
>
> Unsure of what to do, a tearful Michael called Ben. �He said
> that he was sorry, and that he wanted to take it all back,� Ben
> recalls. �I said, �O.K., I�ll help you draft a statement.� He
> said he would call me back the next day, but I never heard from
> him.�
>
> Michael chalked up that call to a moment of weakness. �I wasn�t
> reading my Bible, and I was in a very lonely place, but it�s not
> like my same-sex attractions had returned,� he explained on the
> morning of my second day in Wyoming, as we sat in a padded
> wooden pew in a small church near the Bible School. There were
> about two dozen of his fellow Bible-school students in
> attendance, and before and after the service I watched Michael�s
> friendly, easygoing rapport with them.
>
> As we drove back to his apartment, Michael told me that his
> desire for men had lessened in frequency and intensity almost
> immediately after writing the words �I Am Straight� on his
> computer screen at Y.G.A. When he did feel an erotic pull toward
> another man, he said he tried to �sit with it and unpack it,� a
> technique he learned during a stint at a Buddhist retreat, where
> he went after leaving San Francisco. (Michael, who meditated
> regularly for a couple of years, said he was asked to leave the
> community for �talking too much about the Bible.�) �I observed
> it instead of just acting on it, and I began to see it as an
> aspect of my own brokenness, not as my identity,� he said. �The
> more I did that, the less I felt the desire,� he went on, adding
> that he has never undergone reparative therapy or attended an ex-
> gay ministry.
>
> In a WorldNetDaily article, Michael wrote about why he believes
> he mistakenly took on a gay identity: �When I was about 13 I
> decided I must be gay because I was unable to handle my own
> masculinity.� He went on to blame his father for that, which is
> consistent with the ex-gay narrative that same-sex attraction
> among boys is often a result of a deficit of masculinity,
> usually caused by a fissure in the father-son bond.
>
> Michael told me that he has no same-sex sexual desires today, a
> claim that I found hard to believe. Many ex-gays admit to
> struggling with same-sex attraction years after they�ve rejected
> a gay identity, and a handful of high-profile leaders in the
> movement have been humbled by public slips or �relapses,� a word
> borrowed from the language of addiction recovery. (Many ex-gays
> see same-sex attractions as a kind of addiction, one with no
> �cure� but with the possibility of freedom with God�s help.) In
> our XY days, Michael told me that he had no sexual attraction to
> women. Had he learned heterosexuality?
>
> Yes, he insisted, adding that he has dated two women since
> coming out as ex-gay (both before enrolling in Bible school).
> Michael didn�t want to divulge much about the sexual nature of
> those relationships, saying only that neither had been
> �particularly godly.� �There was a part of me that was like an
> excited teenager,� he told me. �Whatever God has in store for me
> next will hopefully involve courtship and getting married.�
>
> I asked Michael if he�d heard the news that Ben had recently
> married in Canada. He blinked twice, and his body tensed
> slightly. �No, I didn�t,� he said. �To a man, or to a woman?�
>
> �To a man. Were you holding out hope that he would marry a
> woman?�
>
> �You have to understand something,� he said, leaning forward in
> his chair. �I don�t see people as gay anymore. I don�t see you
> as gay. I don�t see him as gay. God creates us heterosexual. We
> may get other ideas in our head about what we are, and I
> certainly did, but that doesn�t mean they�re the truth.�
>
> A week before my trip to Wyoming, I traveled to Halifax to spend
> a weekend with Ben. I was hoping he could help me fill in the
> puzzle of Michael Glatze.
>
> �You have to see his poetry,� Ben told me, searching through a
> bookshelf in his home office. He eventually found what he was
> looking for � a small bound yellow portfolio titled �Shelves,�
> which contained the poems for Michael�s senior thesis at
> Dartmouth. Sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor, with old
> issues of XY and Y.G.A. strewn around us, Ben read aloud from
> several of Michael�s poems exploring sexual identity. In one
> Michael wrote of �people scrambling for a home amidst the
> labels,� and in another he hoped for the day when �men who love
> women wave flags for identification.�
>
> It all sounded very much like the Michael I knew at XY, a young
> man who was fascinated by queer theory � namely, the idea that
> sexual and gender identities are culturally constructed rather
> than biologically fixed � and who dreamed of a world without
> labels like �straight� and �gay,� which he deemed restrictive
> and designed to �segment and persecute,� as he argued in a 1998
> issue of XY. Though he conceded back then that it was important
> �to stay unified under a �Gay� political umbrella� until
> equality for gays and lesbians had been achieved, Michael
> preferred to label himself queer.
>
> As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn�t help wondering if Michael�s
> new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension
> of what he believed back then � that �gay� is a limiting
> category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. �A
> radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren�t
> always as different as they might seem,� he said, adding that
> they�re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a
> monopoly on the truth.
>
> Ben went on. �To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society
> we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages
> and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide
> into these camps where we�re always right and the other side is
> always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that,
> and I think Michael is one of them.�
>
> Though Ben acknowledged that Michael�s anti-gay writing is a
> slap in the face to all the gay teenagers who looked up to him,
> he preferred to remember the 21-year-old version of Michael he
> met in a San Francisco coffee shop. �He devoted a decade of his
> life to helping gay youth, and the work he did saved lives,� he
> told me. �What he claims to believe now doesn�t take that away.�
> Like most of Michael�s former gay friends, Ben insists he isn�t
> angry with him. �I�m worried about him,� he said.
>
> Before I left Halifax, Ben showed me one last poem, titled �The
> Boy Scout Pledge.� �The Michael who wrote this is the Michael I
> fell in love with,� he said.
>
> I Solemnly Swear,/Never to tell the Scoutmaster./Never to tell
> the others. Never to let such/Knowledge leave this tent, Never
> to acknowledge you/Again, Never to tighten your handkerchief
> again, Never to/Look in your eyes again, Never to race soapbox
> derby in/The sand with you again, Never to read Whitman as
> you/Cuddle till you sleep, Never to creep, carefully to the
> lake/With you again, Never to take wildflowers/To your tent
> again, Never to cry for you again, Never to tie/Knots in each
> other�s hair,/Never to breathe your air,/Never to touch your
> inner thigh,/Never to catch your stare./Never to be two boys
> together, clinging./Never to dare.
>
> At the end of my Wyoming visit, I drove Michael from his
> apartment to the Bible school. He had finals the next day and
> was running late to a study group. At an intersection I asked
> him if I should turn left or go straight. �Straight,� he said,
> pointing the way.
>
> �It�s funny to hear you say that, because in our XY days you
> used to always insist that I say �forward� when we drove,� I
> reminded him. �You corrected any gay person who said �straight�
> in a car.�
>
> �I said a lot of silly things back then,� Michael said with
> chuckle.
>
> �Do you regret that time?� I asked him.
>
> �I think God had to take me to a lot of different places, and
> let me study many different perspectives and religions, for me
> to finally know the truth,� he said. �XY was just a part of that
> journey.�
>
> I told Michael about a recent conversation I had with our former
> boss at XY, Peter Ian Cummings, who surprised me by wondering
> aloud if Michael was ever truly gay. �In retrospect, more than
> you or me or anyone else who worked at the magazine, his
> sexuality almost felt more theoretical than real to me,� Peter
> told me. �At a very young age, he had all these very well
> thought out theories about identity and sexuality. Maybe this
> gay or queer identity that fascinated him, and that he had taken
> on, wasn�t really true for him. It doesn�t explain why he says
> such ridiculous things about gay people now, but maybe, just
> maybe, he�s not in denial about his own sexuality.�
>
> Michael looked at me. �Do you think I�m in denial?�
>
> �I don�t know for sure what you are,� I said. �I just wish you
> wouldn�t write such inaccurate things about gay people.�
>
> �They aren�t inaccurate,� he said, sounding annoyed.
>
> As we approached the school, I asked him what he thought about
> last year�s highly publicized gay teenage suicides and the
> ensuing It Gets Better campaign, in which gay people from across
> the country � and high-profile political leaders, including
> President Obama � recorded encouraging video messages aimed at
> gay youth. He didn�t hesitate. �I think it�s stupid,� Michael
> said. �It doesn�t get better if you�re gay.�
>
> It doesn�t get better if you�re gay? Michael would have punched
> me in the mouth if I said that back when we worked together. I
> never would have, of course, because it�s a lie. But also
> dishonest, in retrospect, was our claim in a 1999 issue of XY
> that �everyone is happier� after coming out. Michael insisted
> that we include that line, but it was wishful thinking, and ex-
> gays are living proof of it.
>
> As I drove back to my hotel that night, I wondered if I would
> ever hear from Michael again. Might he call me someday to say
> that he was gay after all, and that his years as an ex-gay were
> just another pit stop in his lifelong pursuit of truth? It�s
> possible, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon. For an ex-gay
> intent on staying that way, there are few safer places in the
> world than a Bible school in Wyoming. The country�s least-
> populous state � where Matthew Shepard was murdered and left to
> die on a rural fence post, and where two fictional cowboys fell
> in love on Brokeback Mountain but never allowed themselves a
> life together � is also a state without a gay bar. My old
> friend, it seems, has picked the perfect place to go straight.