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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's scaled down 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 invites 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."
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.
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 was a featured 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."
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