Читать книгу Straight to Jesus - Tanya Erzen - Страница 8

CHAPTER 1

Steps Out of Homosexuality

In 1973 Frank Worthen heard from God for the first time in years. Frank, then a forty-four-year-old gay man, had spent twenty-five years living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a businessman and participating peripherally in early gay liberation struggles. According to Frank's recollections, on May 24 he locked his office door and headed for the back entrance of his import store, planning to check out a new gay bathhouse in San Francisco. Unbeknownst to Frank, one of his employees, a young Christian named Matt, had been secretly praying for him for months. Frank recalled: “I was leaving my office and the Lord just spoke to me and said, ‘I want you back.’ I generally don't share that with a lot of people because they don't understand that God can talk to you.” He laughed, “They think there's something wrong with you if God can talk to you. But he did. It scared the life out of me.”¹ Frank immediately contacted Matt, who met him at a chapel where he led Frank in the sinner's prayer, a prayer that many conservative evangelical Christians generally understand signifies the initiation of conversion or the promise that you will give your life to Jesus Christ. Frank prayed, “Lord Jesus, I need you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life and receive you as my Savior and Lord. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Take control of the throne of my life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.”²

Frank confessed the sins he had accumulated over many years, and as he did, he sensed a growing release from what he characterizes as twenty-five years of rebellion. He had been a devoted member of a Disciples of Christ Church in San Jose, California, as a child, where he had excelled at the organ. However, he was molested by a minister at the church and had avoided any religious affiliation since he had come out in the 1940s. In the intervening years, Frank had built a thriving import business and tentatively embraced a gay identity. He had recently been involved with a much younger man who was married but dependent on Frank for financial assistance. Right before his conversion experience, the relationship had turned sour and ended for good. May 1973 signified the closure of his old life and the beginning of his new one. Despite subsequent years of setbacks and doubts, he never returned to what he calls “the gay lifestyle.”

With Matt's urging, Frank began attending his charismatic Agape church in Marin County several times a week.³ Matt revealed that the church had been praying for “Matt's gay boss” and his deliverance from homosexuality for over a year. As Frank rededicated himself to God, the church sent other men struggling with same-sex feelings to talk to him, and he suddenly found himself counseling other gay men looking for a “way out” of homosexuality. After a short time, the minister at the Agape church challenged him to “reach back to his own people.” Six months later, Frank recorded his testimony about leaving behind homosexuality on a cassette tape and advertised it in the Berkeley Barb, a now-defunct underground newspaper. The ad read,“FIND Homosexuality & Christianity incompatible? Send 8.00 for a new Christ-centered tape: Steps Out of Homosexuality.” Initially, sixty people sent for the tape, and the “Brother Frank Tape Ministry” was born. The deluge of letters and responses Frank received provided the impetus for him to close his business and eventually form one of the first ex-gay ministries in the United States, New Hope Ministry—at the time called Love in Action.

JESUS, THE REVOLUTIONARY

When Frank first decided he could no longer live as a gay man, he turned for support to the pastors at the Agape church. The Agape church competed for members with another church called Open Door, led by Pastor Kent Philpott and Associate Pastor Mike Riley. Frank recalls that “One night the Lord woke me up and said, ‘I want you to talk to Kent at Open Door.' I thought, ‘No way, my pastor would have a fit if I went and talked to him.' God didn't let up. Finally I told God I'd do it.” Kent Philpott considered Frank the ánswer to his prayers because three gay people had come to his office that week seeking help. Kent urged Frank to join Open Door and help him counsel homosexuals. Frank resisted out of loyalty to Agape, but when Agape closed in 1977, he joined Open Door permanently. In 1979 Church of the Open Door ordained Frank as a pastor. Founded in 1972 by a pastor who had a vision that his mission was to start a church in Marin County, Open Door had opened new branches in Mexico City, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and London by 1976. Pastor Mike Riley, known as “Pastor Mike,” a lanky man in his midfifties with a boyish grin, still leads Church of the Open Door in downtown San Rafael, a charismatic nondenominational church and the only one of the four Open Door churches with a congregation primarily composed of ex-gays. New Hope is a “para-church ministry,” meaning that it exists outside an official religious denomination. Even though New Hope offers Bible studies, group prayer, and worship sessions, it is not a church itself and instead affiliates itself with Open Door. Open Door is perhaps the only church in the United States for men and women who are dealing with sexual addiction and homosexuality. While New Hope considers itself a ministry for men struggling with sexual issues, Open Door provides an institutional church structure where ex-gays can worship with other people as part of a wider religious community.

Open Door's roots lie in the era of beach baptisms and mass conversions known as the Jesus movement, a movement initiated in the early 1970s, when hippies and other members of the counterculture joined charismatic and spirit-filled churches en masse.⁴ Reacting to what many conservative Christians viewed as the excesses of feminism and the gay rights and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s, evangelicals began actively seeking to convert members of the counterculture. Jorstad Erling writes that conservative pastors viewed young men and women in the countercultural movements of that period as potential converts who would expand their churches and contribute to their evangelizing mission. Rather than condemn hippies or drug users, evangelical pastors opened their churches to the younger generation and even recruited hippie liaisons to their ministerial staff.

One of the leaders of this religious revival, Chuck Smith, was a charismatic preacher in Southern California who became disillusioned with institutional Christianity. Abandoning his larger church, he started ministering to a small congregation called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. Despite initial disdain and even revulsion for the hippies and surfers he noticed hanging around Venice Beach, near Los Angeles, he gradually began proselytizing to them. At first, Smith and his wife allowed early Christian converts to live in their home. When the initial group doubled from twenty-five people to fifty in six months, they could no longer accommodate everyone, and Smith rented a house where the young people could make a transition from drugs to Jesus. As the movement expanded, the number of Jesus houses increased, and the conversions skyrocketed. Mass baptismal services in the ocean, exuberant prayer meetings, long-haired evangelists, and Christian rock musicians contributed to the growth of the Jesus movement in other cities. Calvary Chapel relocated to larger and larger spaces until Smith began training the zealous young converts to plant their own Calvary Chapels in their local communities.

Today, Calvary Chapel has a reported membership of approximately fifteen thousand, with “church plants” of six hundred Calvary Chapels in the United States and a hundred in other parts of the globe. The first Vineyard Fellowship started in 1974 as a result of the Jesus movement, and it now has hundreds of churches in the United States and abroad.⁵ These nondenominational Christian churches emerged at a period when attendance in mainline Protestant churches was declining and fewer people under thirty were attending church services. Liberal Protestant denominations lost much of their membership as church movements like Calvary and Vineyard tapped into the inchoate energy of the youth movement, reinventing their services and using contemporary music to appeal to a generation seeking spiritual guidance. The Jesus movement reflected a significant shift in American Protestantism toward nondenominationalism, part of a wider shift in religious organization in which liberal and conservative Protestants, even within the same denomination, split into their own churches. Many churches with similar social agendas around issues like abortion, the family, and homosexuality began connecting across denominations, leading to the rise of parachurch organizations like that of the ex-gay movement. The churches like Open Door that emerged from the Jesus movement succeeded because they created associational networks and small groups geared toward all facets of a member's life.⁶ A member of a Calvary Chapel or Vineyard Fellowship church could and still can attend services every day of the week, multiple services on Sunday, Bible studies, and groups for men, women, singles, teens, addicts, or single parents. Most churches have ministries or outreach programs, which are both global and local. They might run a shelter for the homeless, a drug rehabilitation program, or a missionary program. Church members also gain the civic capital of learning communication and organizational skills through volunteering in one of the many church groups or ministries, which they can apply to their job or other aspects of their lives. Unlike many mainline churches, the laity or congregation of these churches drives the programs, and there are multiple venues for personal involvement beyond attending services.

New Hope and Open Door are part of the wider proliferation of independent churches in the United States, what some scholars have termed a postdenominational era or nondenominational movement in Christianity.⁷ In many parts of the country, the adjective “nondenominational” usually refers to a nonaffiliated community church of conservative evangelicals, depending on the background of the pastors and congregants. These churches may or may not be affiliated with an umbrella denomination such as the Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, or Assemblies of God. They call themselves nondenominational because they are not under the oversight of a denominational board and because the members of these churches often come from various Christian traditions and do not subscribe to a single creed. According to Don Miller, the United States is witnessing a second reformation in which new paradigm churches like Open Door are thriving.⁸ These new local congregations and churches began to set the agendas of larger denominations rather than be constrained by the institutional framework and theological dogma of their parent organization.

Miller writes that the characteristics of new paradigm churches like Open Door include the fact that most were started after the 1960s, seminary training of clergy is optional, worship is contemporary, and lay leadership is highly valued. Although Mike Riley is the pastor, Open Door has ordained other members of the church, like Frank Worthen, who don't have the educational or professional credentials to be considered a pastor or minister elsewhere. Members of the congregation are encouraged to participate in sermons and exercise their feelings at almost any time by giving testimony, shouting, participating in call and response, or raising their arms in the air. The ministry rejects the formalism and liturgy of traditional churches and urges people to act on their feelings. In churches like Open Door, personal experience validates religious belief and commitment, and experience and testimony supersede doctrine and scripture. Open Door and New Hope eschew many of the symbols of organized religion, and the emphasis in worship is on creating a church community that is loving and caring but also influenced by pop psychology, self-help principles, biblical counseling, and the importance of moral choices in one's everyday life.

Pastor Mike was caught up in the fervor of the Jesus youth movement, and Open Door was modeled on Vineyard and Calvary, even if it never achieved the same level of national prominence. “It was a time of revolution in our country—the late 1960s,” he recalled with a bit of nostalgia. “It was another revolution. In those days it went over well to go preach on the streets.” As a college student at Chico State University in California, Pastor Mike Riley wore blue work shirts with patches on the breast pocket and arm that read, “Jesus, the revolutionary.” It was in college that he began a ministry to reach hippies; later he joined Church of the Open Door. He oversaw twelve Christian houses full of drug addicts by the early 1970s. For Pastor Mike and others in the Jesus movement, even the most marginalized elements of society were potential Christian converts. Whereas other mainstream denominations may have been squeamish about ministering to drug addicts, homeless people, and hippies, Church of the Open Door embraced them. The idea that anyone could be a Christian enabled Open Door to promote the possibility of converting homosexuals.

LOVE IN ACTION

After Frank's arrival at Open Door, Kent Philpott and Pastor Mike, who was only an associate pastor at the time, decided that a ministry for homosexuals would correspond with Open Door's wider calling. Frank started meeting on a weekly basis for counseling and discussion at Open Door with six people, who contacted him because of the personal testimony he advertised in local newspapers. A woman in the group suggested the name Love in Action (LIA), and Philpott and Frank agreed. As we discussed the early history of New Hope and Open Door, Frank jokingly referred to LIA as “Lots of Action,” a reference to the unintended and unsanctioned dating that went on at the weekly support group. Although he appeared reserved and soft-spoken, Frank frequently surprised me with one of these trademark sardonic comments. He was not afraid to occasionally poke fun at the ministry or the ex-gay movement.

In the late 1970s, Kent Philpott became the director of Love in Action, with Frank acting as assistant director. With Frank's input, Philpott authored two books, The Third Sex? in 1975 and The Gay Theology in 1979, that presented the personal testimonies of the men and women who attended the support groups at LIA. The Third Sex? contained dialogues between Philpott and ex-gay men and women: Jim, Susan, Bob, Polly, Ted, and Eve. The stories of how these six individuals became homosexuals provided a model for how New Hope and the ex-gay movement would structure their testimonies of conversion for decades. The books also generated publicity and enabled Philpott and Frank to continue counseling. Philpott called the first book The Third Sex? to argue against the idea of the legitimacy of homosexuality as an identity: “There is no third sex! For many reasons—some known, some unknown—men and women have exchanged the truth about God for a lie and have become homosexual. Homosexuality is a choice, a choice to be and do what was not intended….The simple conclusion is that there is no such thing as a bisexual or homosexual according to God's established order. Both distortions of original sexuality exist for the same reason man hid from God in paradise—rebellion.”⁹ Philpott also established the religious basis for the LIA program: homosexuals could change not through counseling alone but through a relationship with God. It was the failure to achieve this relationship that triggered sexual falls. Philpott wrote about how at one of the first LIA meetings, a brazen man who had lived as a homosexual for six years claimed he had been converted. This man denied ever having temptations and argued that he had erased all traces of his former life. An enthusiastic Christian organization had already sponsored him, and he was counseling at prisons and rehabilitation centers. Philpott writes that less than a month after the LIA meeting, this man had “fled with a young boy from a rehabilitation house and had returned to homosexuality. The problem? This man simply wasn't honest.…God wants us to be honest with him, others and ourselves. It saves us from drastic mistakes.”¹⁰

Love in Action began with a regular group of ten to twelve people meeting at Open Door on alternate Thursday evenings. The men came from a wide range of church affiliations, but they quickly established a routine of sharing their stories and devotions, praying, and listening to Kent Philpott speak. Later, when too many men and women arrived unannounced at the door with suitcases, it became necessary to find a long-term solution. In 1979 Love in Action was inaugurated as the first residential ex-gay program, and it soon had ten to twenty men and women living in its houses. Many had already read The Third Sex? and they arrived with hopeful and somewhat unrealistic misconceptions about the process of change. Frank recalled, “We took people off the street. No screening, no nothing. They stole everything. It was really bad, but again, we didn't know what we were doing. So after a year or two we began to screen people.” Frank and Mike Riley integrated these “strugglers” into the church community houses despite ridicule from the heterosexual Christian men already living there and reluctance on the part of the church elders. Their idea was to foster interaction between “straight” men and LIA men to promote healing. Eventually, the number of LIA-affiliated people eclipsed the other Christians in the houses.

One of the men whose story Philpott chronicled in The Third Sex? joined LIA permanently and began writing a monthly newsletter for the ministry. Bob, a former schoolteacher, dedicated the first LIA newsletter in December 1975 by sharing the philosophy behind the group: “In making a positive commitment to Christ, we hold firm the belief that He will lead us through this valley, give us victory over homosexual desires and give us a new life and a new walk that is within His will. He will do this if it means our remaining single and celibate. This is a costly price for people so highly oriented towards sex, but worth it, if we are to hold our faith up in truth.”¹¹ LIA also created the “Brother Bob Tape Ministry,” with Bob's personal testimony on it to supplement that of “Brother Frank.” The newsletter advertised more tapes for purchase on topics such as sex and the Bible, biblical demonology, the normal Christian family, and the second coming. The local Christian general store, where Anita took me on one of my first visits to New Hope in 2000, agreed to sell these booklets and more cassette tapes with titles like Pitfalls, How to Counsel a Homosexual, and Examination of Gay Theology.

Many of the ministry's ideas about sin, forgiveness, and healing homosexuality emerged from these early meetings and newsletters. At one meeting, Philpott writes, Frank, Philpott, and the men were discussing forgiveness. One of the recent arrivals was fretting about his past sins and wondering if God could forgive him. They all encouraged him, reminding him of God's mercy, and Frank said, “If God can forget, so can I.” Frank rarely discusses his life before he began LIA, and Anita still knows very little about his first forty years. She told me that sometimes Frank would mention something about his past life during a speech or testimony that she had never heard before, but that she preferred it that way. Even from the beginning, LIA held to the idea of each participant becoming a “new creation” in which his or her previous life no longer mattered as long as he or she had a relationship with God. In the LIA newsletter, Bob stressed that homosexuality was forgiven by God through the process of being born again. “If we are truly a ‘born again' Christian and it is in fact a real experience, then we are called to claim our new lives and step out and be the new creatures that we are declared to be. God sees us as new creatures, not new homosexual creatures, however.” Bob wrote prolifically and earnestly about the idea of conversion as a God-induced process.

This very weekend one of our brothers said to me, how can I last through even one more year of this? I said in response, how can I last one more week? But I will last and so will he. We have each other, and the sharing and fellowship and caring are God's ingredients to healing, long-lasting healing that will impart strength as God does it in His time and not in ours. So we continue to hold together supporting one another in every way possible, bearing the hardships as Christ bore them. We stumble along, making mistake after mistake and He forgives and forgets and we pick ourselves up and start back up the mountain.¹²

He also coined the term “ex-gay” as a way to describe the conversion process. “But I am a homosexual, really, even though I lay claim to my new life. The old hasn't passed away. That's man's thinking, not God's. God sees us as ex-gay, but He also sees us as struggling and dealing with the old nature with its spiritual warfare.”¹³

The LIA residential program had its first house of women in the summer of 1986. Jeanette Howard, an Australian, wrote her book Out of Egypt: Leaving Lesbianism Behind during her time as the house leader. It was the first ex-gay book to focus on women's experiences, and it set the precedent for the ex-gay movement's ideas about lesbianism. Jeanette Howard revealed her own sexual abuse by a relative and the lack of attention she received from her father as the root causes of her homosexuality. The book was eventually distributed widely in the United States and translated into Spanish. There were four other women involved with the program who still remain affiliated with New Hope or live in the area, but the women's ministry ended in the early 1990s after no one proved willing to be the house leader. However, some members of the women's program are still active in the ex-gay movement, such as Anne Paulk, who has become a minor celebrity since marrying fellow LIA graduate John Paulk. Frank has never devoted much energy to ministry for women, and New Hope and other residential programs still continue to be geared toward men. Despite Jeanette's book and the years of a woman's program, Frank has always been the driving force behind the ministry, and his ideas about the root causes of homosexuality are central. He admits that he is less informed about women's issues around sexuality. This has contributed to inequity in the movement as a whole, which tends to be male dominated and focused on male homosexuality, a problem I discuss in chapter 4.

In 1981, after a major scandal that involved accusations of Kent Philpott's sexual impropriety with his own adopted daughter, the congregation and board ousted Philpott from Open Door, and Mike Riley became the head pastor. After a great deal of wrangling, Philpott reluctantly relinquished directorship of LIA to Frank a few months later. By 1989, with the combined men's and women's programs, Love in Action had three full houses running with over fifty people receiving ministry. In terms of numbers, the program was a success. However, LIA never established any consistent way to measure what happened to men and women after they left the program. It lost track of many people and relied on self-reporting from those who stayed in touch.

FREE ALL GAYS

Throughout the 1970s, Frank had searched eagerly for other people who were involved in ex-gay ministry, even though he believed that LIA was unique. Frank had been ministering at Love in Action for three years when he received a phone call in 1975 from a distraught woman named Barbara Johnson, whose son had recently revealed that he was gay and fled her house. Johnson contacted Frank after listening to The Third Sex? cassette that summer at her church. She explained that she had sought help from Melodyland Hotline, a program of Melodyland Christian Center, a large evangelical church based in Anaheim, California. The hotline was designed to deal with homosexuality, but the counselors there did not work with grieving parents of gay children like Barbara, and she was begging Frank for help. Astounded and thrilled that there were other ex-gay counselors in California, Frank flew to Anaheim the next morning to meet at Melodyland with EXIT (Ex-Gay Intervention Team), a group directed by two men in their early twenties, Michael Bussee and Jim Kaspar. Their meeting became the basis for Exodus, a national organization to address how men and women could become heterosexuals after living as gay men and lesbians.

Melodyland emerged out of the Pentecostal movement, which emphasized speaking in tongues and healing, but the church was less concerned with doctrine or formality than with validating personal experiences and emotionalism. Formed by Ralph Wilkerson, Melodyland became the center of the concept of charismatic renewal during the 1970s.¹⁴ Wilkerson was a former Assemblies of God preacher who had departed to found an independent congregation that would be receptive to a more charismatic form of worship. An independent and interdenominational Christian Center, Melodyland outgrew its suburban church in Orange County and bought the Melodyland Theater from Disney in 1969, from which it derived its name. Spurred on by the Jesus movement, Melodyland initiated a telephone hotline to counsel drug addicts and “alienated youth” that eventually grew into EXIT.

Michael Bussee and Jim Kaspar, the heads of EXIT, had become fervent Christians in 1971 after feeling troubled by their own homosexual feelings. They started working for the center's hotline service because they sensed the current volunteers were not properly trained or knowledgeable enough to handle homosexual issues. According to Bussee, “I grew worried when I heard operators of the center's hotline tell gay and lesbian callers that they were possessed by demons. I told them [the church members] I was a Christian homosexual, and they replied that ‘there's no such thing. If you trust God, all your homosexual desires will be replaced by heterosexual ones.’”¹⁵ Both men began counseling people who called the center with concerns about their homosexuality, claiming they received up to two hundred and fifty calls and letters per month.¹⁶ Through their hotline, they located twelve other ministries counseling homosexuals in the following year. With a staff of eight, an office, and the support of the church, Kaspar and Bussee also participated in speaking engagements and worked on publications that would frame the problem of homosexuality within a psychological or psychoanalytic framework, an approach which differed from Frank's spiritual methods. Frank recollects that his work was “all spiritual because I didn't have any background in psychology so we were miles apart.” When he arrived in Anaheim, Frank was impressed by EXIT's efficiency and organization. The ministry had color-coded handouts on every aspect of homosexuality, and Frank immediately borrowed these materials, which he used exclusively for the next five years.

Frank, Barbara Johnson, Michael Bussee, and Jim Kaspar decided to organize a weekend seminar for anyone involved in “helping homosexuals find freedom,” which became the first annual ex-gay conference. LIA sent out requests for donations in its newsletter, and eventually it gathered the funds to hold a conference over the weekend of September 10–12, 1976, at Melodyland. In addition to the LIA and EXIT staff, the organizers flew in Dr. Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of Cults, and Greg Reid, who was leading an ex-gay ministry called EAGLE (Ex-Active-Gay-Liberated-Eternally). It was at this first conference that the organizers, emboldened by the presence of sixty other men and five women, officially founded Exodus International. Roberta Laurila, a participant and former lesbian, coined the name Exodus because “homosexuals finding freedom reminds me of the children of Israel leaving the bondage of Egypt and moving towards the Promised Land.”¹⁷(The original name, Free All Gays, was quickly scrapped after the organizers realized the potential contradictions of its acronym.) The delegates adopted a statement of intent, which remained in place until 2001, when a new president took over Exodus: “EXODUS is an international Christian effort to reach homosexuals and lesbians, EXODUS upholds God's standard of righteousness and holiness, which declares that homosexuality is sin and affirms HIS love and redemptive power to recreate the individual. It is the goal of EXODUS International to communicate this message to the Church, to the gay community, and to society.”¹⁸ Frank recalls having a sense that the movement would eventually become something much grander. “That Sunday we knew that it was bigger than we had planned. We all felt that God was laying the foundation for something far bigger than we expected. You might say we felt a sense of destiny.” The delegates elected Bussee and Kaspar the first presidents of the organization, and the participants agreed to meet again the following year. “We were high on God,” Frank remembers. “We truly believed that God could do anything. He could change homosexuals to heterosexuals.” Despite the heady atmosphere of the conference, Exodus operated on a principle of blind faith in the efficacy of being born again as Christians to heal homosexuality. They had no structure for determining what constituted a ministry and no clear explanation of what change entailed. Frank refers to their situation at the time as the “stray condition.” “We had left the gay lifestyle, we had hope for full change to heterosexuality, but at that point, we were neither gay nor straight. We were merely hopeful.”

By the next conference in 1977, at a church called Shiloh Temple in Oakland, California, there were pastors in attendance, but there were also gay protesters. One newspaper reported, “The tone of the conference was paranoia, the delegates did not want to be photographed and acted for the most part, like a bunch of closet cases. Many of the people present were pathetic messes.”¹⁹ Gay activists picketed Frank's weekly drop-in group for months afterward. The lack of a clear idea about the meaning of change became a liability during the third Exodus conference, held in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1978. One guest speaker contradicted the Exodus founding statement, telling the attendees that change was not possible for most gay people, but God gave people the power to remain celibate. He informed participants that there wasn't a next level of change and that they should make the best of their situation. To Frank and other leaders' dismay, the beleaguered men and women at the conference found this message depressingly accurate. Frank recalls that “they were on the ex-gay plateau,” a state of not being homosexually identified but not feeling heterosexual either. They did not accept that celibate homosexuality could lead to heterosexuality. Despite this, Frank and the other leaders clung to their belief that people could become heterosexual even though they had yet to see it happen in practice. It was simply a matter of faith. However, none of the members had heterosexual relationships, and many were repulsed by the idea. Toward the end of the conference, Frank grabbed the microphone and presented the official Exodus viewpoint that “God will not take a person half-way and then abandon them. God would do a complete work.” Yet the controversy that began in 1978 continued to fester.

The divisions and contradictions within Exodus were exacerbated as the ex-gay movement experienced upheaval and scandal in the early 1980s. Some leaders, like Greg Reid, defected from Exodus when they realized they could not handle the sacrifices required to live as an ex-gay. The most infamous Exodus scandal occurred in 1979 and has become legendary within the ex-gay movement and its opposition. On a plane en route to speak at a church in Virginia, Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, a volunteer with Exodus, realized that after years of working together, they were in love. They rewrote their speech, arguing that the church should come to an understanding and acceptance of gay people. Not surprisingly, this proclamation shocked the members of the staid congregation, who were expecting reformed homosexual men. Later that night, Bussee and Cooper checked into their hotel. Bussee recalls in the documentary One Nation under God that they interpreted the fact that they were booked in a room with only a single bed as a sign from God.²⁰

Bussee had been married for several years and was a founding member of Exodus, so his defection was hard on other members like Frank. The extremely public disclosure of the failure of ex-gay identity, and Bussee's subsequent avowals to the media that rampant sex between men transpired at ex-gay conferences, instigated mayhem within the leadership of Exodus. Neither Bussee nor Cooper ever returned to the movement or repented. They exchanged rings in 1982 through a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and continued to criticize the ex-gay movement until Cooper's death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1991, calling Exodus “homophobia with a happy face.”²¹ In an A4CC publication, Bussee wrote, “After dealing with hundreds of gay people, I never met one who went from gay to straight. Even if you manage to alter someone's sexual behavior, you cannot change his or her true sexual orientation. If you got them away from the Christian limelight and asked them, ‘Honestly now, are you saying that you are no longer homosexual and you are now heterosexually oriented?' Not one person said, ‘Yes, I am actually now heterosexual.’”²² Frank was vague and uncomfortable talking about this period in Exodus's history. “We had a terrible time the first few years. One of the reasons I wanted Exodus to become an organization was because I wanted to set a standard of ethics for that kind of ministry. Most of the people were in it for their own needs. They were lonely, they felt guilty and stayed on the fence and started ministries that should never have been started. We had a terrible time—a terrible time, initially.”

The problem of Exodus in the seventies was that many ex-gay leaders had been Christians only for several months, and having a testimony was the only qualification for ministry work. Contrary to Frank's hopes and experience, a testimony was not insurance against temptation. Another contentious issue was the clash between various religious belief systems and approaches, as members came from Baptist, Pentecostal, nondenominational, and other churches. Some delegates believed in demonic deliverance rather than therapy for homosexuals, and others advocated treatments for instant change rather than long-term healing and participation in ministries. Most of the early ex-gay ministries had no ties to a denomination or an advisory board to provide oversight. It was perhaps predictable that many “flamed out,” in Frank's words. When Frank became president in 1979, the organization was in chaos from within and without. There were protests by gay-liberation groups and internal defections and rivalries. The sexual scandals in particular were salacious fodder for newspaper reports and ex-gay critics, and they highlighted the lack of any regulatory mechanism for the organization. The scandals also raised the recurrent question of how the movement would distinguish between behavior and identity when it came to sexuality. Frank and other ex-gay leaders began to assert that change was a long and difficult process, emphasizing the parallel to the exodus out of Egypt. “There is a desert to be crossed between our old homosexual lifestyle and our new life in Christ. Many have perished in that desert. The world sees the bodies in the desert. It doesn't see those who have successfully made it across.”

Although Frank briefly considered abandoning Exodus to focus on Love in Action, he felt compelled by an almost messianic impulse to build a global movement. Scandals still occurred, but by 1982 Exodus had established guidelines for people forming a ministry, which included some oversight by a national board of ministry leaders. Exodus belatedly admitted that many people attending conferences should not have been involved in an ex-gay ministry, and a purge of leaders ensued. The main spokespeople of the movement emerged in the 1980s: Bob Davies, the original “Brother Bob,” who acted as Exodus's president until 2001; Joe Dallas, a Christian counselor and ex-gay speaker; Andy Comiskey, director of Desert Stream Ministries in Southern California; Alan Medinger, head of Regeneration in Maryland; and of course Frank Worthen, who continued to lead LIA. These men became the real founding fathers of Exodus. There were still few visible female ex-gay leaders in the organization, and again, by virtue of their own experiences and biases, these men helped further determine that the organization would primarily characterize homosexuality as a male problem through its ministries, theories, and materials. At the Exodus 2000 conference in San Diego, there was a table with pictures from the early conferences in the 1980s. The photographs revealed Frank and Alan, now in their seventies, looking young, hopeful, and spry. One of the pictures was of Sy Rogers, a former transvestite who appeared on numerous talk shows, moved to Singapore to start an ex-gay ministry, and is now a highly respected Exodus speaker. Rogers is legendary within the ex-gay movement for his response to a viewer on the Donahue show in 1983. When the person said Rogers did not look heterosexual, Rogers proclaimed, “I may not be Burt Reynolds, but I'm light years from pantyhose.” In the photograph from the early 1980s, a man is presenting Rogers with a T-shirt that reads, “Welcome to the Hetero World.” Frank said, “What we saw only in faith in the seventies, we saw in reality in the 1980s.”²³

Even by the 1980s, the infrastructure of the residential programs was underdeveloped, and the organization relied on an ad hoc method of counseling people, based loosely on the structure of recovery groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Although Exodus incorporates elements of the “one step at a time” approach to this day, ex-gays who disagreed with psychological explanations and wanted to focus entirely on the twelve-step method established Homosexuals Anonymous, which declared itself a separate organization from Exodus. (Colin Cook, one of the founders of the Quest Learning Center/Homosexuals Anonymous and a visible ex-gay ministry leader, resigned in the mid-eighties because of accusations that he was having sex with male counselees.) For the time being, Exodus ministries used an amalgam of biblical passages and twelve-step rhetoric in their materials and classes, combining what Frank characterized as “the best of the religious and psychological.” Michael Bussee criticized the changes in Exodus models this way: “At first they said prayer would lead you to change, then they changed it and said only a long struggle would lead to change, and then therapy and residential programs became the only way to change.”²⁴ Today, New Hope utilizes a model of residential living and relationships with God and other ex-gay men to promote healing from homosexuality. Other ex-gay ministries base their programs on an AA model and extensive psychological testing and counseling with trained therapists and psychologists.

NEW HOPE IN MANILA

Frank continued to oversee Love in Action throughout the 1980s, as he completed and refined the “Steps Out Residential Program” fourpart workbook and his guide for pastors and counselors, “Helping People Step Out of Homosexuality.” Sometime in the late eighties, Frank explained that he sensed a calling from God to begin ex-gay missionary work abroad. At first he ignored these calls, but God's voice was insistent, and he became sure that the place he needed to go was Manila, Philippines. “Sometime around 1984, God gave me the word that Anita and I would be ministering in the Philippines. At the time, it wasn't exactly a welcomed word. I pondered this for about two years, then in talking with Sy Rogers I found that God had told him that he and his family would be going to Singapore, too. It was at this time that I shared this word with Anita.”²⁵ The calling coincided with efforts by Exodus to expand the organization internationally through ministry church plants in countries without an ex-gay presence. “Planting” ex-gay ministries abroad was necessary for the creation of an international network that would counteract the emergence of pro-gay movements in parts of Asia and Europe. Despite some foot-dragging and a lack of initial enthusiasm from Anita, the Worthens moved to the Philippines to initiate an ex-gay ministry called Bagong Pag-Asa that would be the sister ministry to Love in Action. Anita and Frank went to Manila as Exodus North American missionaries, and Exodus gave them an official send-off at the annual conference in San Antonio in 1990. They had made a three-year commitment.

Manila was disconcertingly unfamiliar and a far cry from the suburban streets of San Rafael. Frank, who was then in his sixties, suffered various illnesses during the first year, including a bout of Bell's palsy, a nerve condition that paralyzes one side of the face. Although their “calling” was ex-gay ministry, Frank and Anita tried to integrate into the local community through service projects, and one of their first was to set up a feeding program for infants. Through a Catholic church in the area that provided space and referrals, and with the help of an interpreter, Frank began a weekly meeting for men dealing with homosexuality. Unlike the LIA men, most Filipino men who came to Bagong Pag-Asa were married but engaging in homosexual behavior. In these sessions, Frank said he became aware that homosexuality was linked to deep cultural feelings of shame. He contended that the issues for men in Manila were similar to the men at LIA, but then conceded, “Certainly there's this different twist. The shame is greater. They don't even have words to talk about homosexuality. They have only dirty words, street words, because they don't talk about this.” The unremitting fear of divine retribution for participating in same-sex behavior rather than any hope for complete heterosexuality brought men to Frank's fledgling ministry. Frank also found that his ideas about the “gay lifestyle” were inapplicable in the context of Manila, where the men he encountered did not identify as gay. For many men who had never called themselves “gay” or attached an identity to their sexual behavior, Bagong Pag-Asa created an identity for them, giving the name “ex-gay” to what had only been a series of sexual practices.

At the end of the three years, Anita returned to California because her son's partner was dying of AIDS-related illnesses, and she wanted to help care for him. Although she was working to establish an ex-gay ministry abroad, this did not create an obstacle for her in terms of supporting her son, Randy, through the last years of his lover's life. Frank had planned to come home, but Exodus sent one of its board members over to request that he remain in Manila another two years because the board felt Bagong Pag-Asa could not yet stand on its own feet. He reluctantly reached a compromise with them and stayed an additional year. When Frank finally left Manila, the residential part of Bagong Pag-Asa ended due to a lack of funding, but the ministry still exists under the leadership of Rene Gomez, a Filipino man who now attends Exodus's annual conference and events in the United States. In 2001 Frank and Anita returned for a ten-year reunion to see whether the ministry they planted had been able to endure (see below).

Before leaving for Manila, Frank had officially turned Love in Action over to a former program member and house leader named John Smid.Smid, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the actor Jeff Goldblum, albeit with blond hair, had an air of severity, but LIA continued to thrive under his leadership. Frank had hoped to return to California for a year's sabbatical to rest and recuperate: “At that time I had had twenty-two years of ministry without a break and I was longing for some time off.” Then Frank planned to proceed to Hong Kong, where he had made some initial contacts through occasional visits to the Hong Kong branch of his Manila church. He was contemplating the establishment of another ministry there. His plans were foiled, however, when in mid-1994 an Open Door pastor phoned him with the news that John Smid had decided to relocate LIA to Memphis, Tennessee, where he had received a lucrative offer from a church to house the program. “At first I thought he was joking, so he had Mike Riley phone me to tell me it was really happening. It was quite a jolt.” Even though John Smid had the right to move the ministry because Frank had ceded control to him, Frank asked him to delay for one year so that the transition would be gradual and Frank could enjoy a year of sabbatical, but Smid felt he could not wait that long.

The LIA residential program operated out of Frank's two apartment complex properties, and Frank lived on that source of revenue. When LIA moved, Frank lost his income from the program, making a sabbatical and work in Hong Kong impossible. Frank recalled, “It was a very traumatic time for me.” He described himself as “depleted, emotionally, physically and especially financially.” Frank returned to California in time to see about thirty people affiliated with LIA and Open Door Church pack up and move to Memphis. He defined this period as one of the lowest points in his life because the ministry was stripped bare of people and resources. Smid had taken everything, including cabinets from the walls. Joined by several carpenters from Church of the Open Door who worked without compensation, Anita and Frank were able to rebuild the properties that had been modified for group living and rent them over a period of several months. Frank said that because he had always been very responsible financially, it pained him to run up his credit cards and his equity loan. Hank arrived at New Hope during this transition period and quickly became Frank and Anita's right-hand man. Some of the people who had followed Smid to Memphis returned, and Frank officially renamed the ministry New Hope on January 1, 1995. After several false starts, Frank and Smid achieved a rapprochement, and Frank participated in the twenty-fifth anniversary of LIA in Memphis in 1998, even though most of the twenty-five years occurred under Frank's leadership in California. However, their relationship appeared strained, judging from my encounters with both of them. At the annual Exodus conference in 2000, LIA and New Hope held separate information sessions for men and women interested in a residential program. At the LIA session, Smid was defensive when someone asked how his ministry differed from New Hope. “We're a professional therapeutic program with staff and clients,” he replied. The only time I ever saw Frank evince stress and frustration in the entire time I knew him was when he mentioned this period of LIA/New Hope's history. Still, Frank invited John to fly out and join New Hope in their thirty years of ministry celebration in May 2003.

Despite LIA's awkward move to Memphis, Open Door and New Hope have maintained a symbiotic relationship since the early 1970s due to Frank's long history with Pastor Mike. New Hope meant a steady stream of new congregants at Open Door, and the church provided spiritual support and refuge for the ex-gay men and women in the program. Beyond Open Door, New Hope's relationship with other churches has been tentative, and a central preoccupation of Frank's has always been the relationship of the ex-gay movement to conservative churches in general. After LIA moved to Memphis, Frank wanted to find another church to sponsor and build up the program, but he had difficulty locating one willing. Frank organized events in other churches, and he often brought in the men from the New Hope program to sing as a way to familiarize others with the ex-gay program. New Hope consistently had talented singers and musicians in the program—a former gospel singer, a concert violinist, a man who could play keyboards, drums, violin, and guitar, for example—and they were quite impressive as a musical group. However, some of the men privately griped about being on display at the church excursions. Curtis once commented after a church visit, “Hello. It's us, the ex-gay freaks, here for your entertainment.”

Initially, conservative churches rather than gay organizations opposed the establishment of an ex-gay movement. Frank and Pastor Mike contacted church leaders during the 1970s, and none of them would have anything to do with Love in Action or Open Door. Frank remembers, “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. I think we've made some inroads. But the gay community has made a lot more progress—in the past twenty years, they have almost captured the church.” Frank conveys a sense of feeling embattled, and he frequently complains about conservative churches' refusal to address homosexuality or sexual addiction. Frank worries that the “Open and Affirming” movement in liberal Protestant churches will make mainline churches gradually more sympathetic to gay and lesbian concerns. In the June 1976 LIA newsletter, Bob wrote about how the Santa Clara County council of churches was “institutionalizing sin” when it voted to admit the MCC of San Jose to membership. Frank and others at LIA feared that the culture at large would gradually accept MCCs, while the ex-gay movement would dwindle without institutional church support.

Today, Church of the Open Door is dependent on New Hope for a large percentage of its membership. However, it sponsors other ministries, like a Christian village in Tanzania, a pregnancy resource center with a pro-life agenda, an alcohol and drug recovery program, and Gilead House, a home for single mothers. Mike Riley is now middle aged, and his offices are cluttered and slightly run down. The church lacks its own building and meets weekly in a community center near the main supermarket downtown. Pastor Mike acknowledges that a church so closely linked to an ex-gay ministry is a difficult calling, but he maintains that this is what God meant for him to do. “We would ask God, ‘Can we do something else?' We'd see other churches that were prospering more and think that this isn't fair. But God always said, If you want to do something different, go ahead; I won't be there with you.” He continued, “I'm not sure we'd exist without the ex-gay part. It's part of our destiny. Sometimes I ask myself, Why do we exist? We're a small church; we could just disband and send people to all the other churches. But we're one of the few churches in the world to do this.” Even though ex-gay ministry has been his primary focus for over thirty years, Riley expressed some disillusionment. “It's a hard ministry. Everything about it is hard. People come in and see the church and get frustrated with the ex-gay guys and leave because they never want to get married. The gay guys can be somewhat fickle. The gay lifestyle is very self-focused, and they can take and take and take and let you down and leave. But some of our greatest leaders have come through the program. They are the backbone of the church, and God has given us tremendous men and women.” Part of the Church of the Open Door's statement of faith includes the idea that the church is the body of Christ on earth and that the church must welcome “all who place their hope of salvation and forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. We seek to identify with all believers in Christ.” Although Pastor Mike and members of Open Door have more contact with men and women struggling with homosexuality than most conservative Christians, they accept ex-gays on the basis of their willingness to change. Pastor Mike believes that being gay forecloses any relationship with Jesus.

THE EX-GAY MOVEMENT

There are now over two hundred evangelical ministries in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, China, and Mexico under the umbrella of Exodus International.²⁶ Ministries affiliated with Exodus such as Desert Stream, Breaking Free, and Whosoever Will are locally run but under the administrative control of Exodus. Exodus sponsors a national conference every year and an international conference once every two years. It has a board of directors with revolving membership as well as regional representatives who oversee ministries in fourteen regions within the United States. The board of directors includes Alan Chambers, the new president of Exodus, John Smid of Love in Action in Memphis, Tom Cole, the director of Bridges across the Divide, and Mike Haley, a graduate of the New Hope program who now works in the public policy division of Focus on the Family. Many of the regional directors are ministry leaders as well. For instance, Anita was coordinator for the Northern and Southern California regions, but there are coordinators for the northwest Pacific, middle Pacific, north-central tier, central Rockies, mid-central, south-central, western Great Lakes basin, eastern Great Lakes basin, southern Gulf, north Atlantic, mid-Atlantic, and south Atlantic. These coordinators are responsible for making sure the local ministries are run by trained staff and ministry leaders who have applied to Exodus to become accredited.

Bob Davies, the original newsletter author, was president of Exodus for over seventeen years. Bob was married, and with his bushy beard and spectacles, he imparted a serious and studied leadership to the organization. He decided to step down from the post to pursue a music career at his Presbyterian church in 2001. Alan Chambers, an ex-gay man who had worked with a ministry in Florida, took over and moved the central offices from a shabby strip mall outside Seattle to a modern executive suite in Orlando, Florida. The new Exodus is sleeker, media savvy, and more explicitly political. Chambers, who is bright and irrepressibly sunny, like Orlando, has revamped the Web site, logo, and publications and changed the organization's mission statement to “Proclaiming to, educating and impacting the world with the Biblical truth that freedom from homosexuality is possible when Jesus is Lord of one's life.” The logo on many of the materials reads, “Change Is Possible. Discover How.” Chambers has hired a media and ministry relations manager, Randy Thomas, who sends out regular Exodus Media Spotlights emails with news updates on social and political issues related to homosexuality. The emails have news information on youth, Christian matters, marriage, civil unions and partner benefits, activism, and legislation. The Web site includes a speaker bureau to provide organizations with an Exodus representative to discuss issues like same-sex marriage, one issue where it has become increasingly vocal. Exodus has links to the Florida Coalition to Protect Marriage and information about initiatives in other states. Under Chambers, the original Exodus newsletter has been updated from a basic black-and-white format, which featured a testimony on the front and local news inside, to a more professional color format with shiny paper, graphics, and photographs. New promotional materials feature on the cover a group of men and women of all races and nationalities wearing white shirts.

In addition to ministries geared toward women, the deaf, and multicultural outreach, Exodus has devoted considerable energy to promoting its youth ministry, Exodus Youth, an outreach to teens and other youth struggling with homosexual issues. It has developed a separate Exodus Youth Web site with music, CD-ROMs, and teaching materials as well as a program called Refuge, an outpatient program for teenagers between the ages of thirteen and eighteen who are struggling with “broken” behaviors like pornography, drugs and alcohol, sexual promiscuity, and homosexuality. The idea behind the Exodus Youth campaign, as I discuss in chapter 6, is to provide an alternative to chat rooms and online resources for gay youth, instead telling them that if they feel same-sex desire, they should attempt to transform themselves rather than take on a gay identity. The Exodus Web site was designed by Westar media group in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which has a mission “to glorify God through excellence by providing innovative radio products, creative marketing services, and unsurpassed client representation.” Westar, according to its Web site, serves as a liaison between Christian ministries and radio stations in order to enable those ministries to reach their audience with the message of Jesus Christ.

The ex-gay movement has been slow to include racial justice as part of its platform, but the Exodus leaders stress the idea of multiculturalism in speeches. The organization is primarily white, and each year there are very few African American, Latino, or Asian American men and women who apply to its programs. As Andrea Smith has argued in her work on the Christian Right and racial reconciliation, Exodus, like many conservative evangelical groups, views racism as an individual problem of prejudice that can be solved through evangelism and personal healing rather than attention to the structural or institutional practices that maintain racism.²⁷ The Exodus strategy of racial reconciliation is only applied to groups who are deemed sufficiently Christian, and Smith argues that outreach to people of color is a strategy to expand the organization rather than address a socioeconomic platform of racial justice. Instead, the movement pours resources into missionary efforts in places like the Philippines, Singapore, and South America, where movement leaders intend to replicate the structures and teachings of ex-gay ministries in the United States. In 2002 Alan Chambers made efforts to coordinate work with African American evangelical and Christian churches in the United States by meeting with prominent African American church leaders. Every year, in honor of Black History Month, the Exodus newsletter for February features an African American man who has come out of homosexuality. Exodus consistently showcases men and women of all races in its promotional materials, but those who attend the conference events and make up the program are still predominantly white.

Speaking engagements have become a crucial part of Exodus's work, and Chambers has also cultivated relationships with more prominent religious and political organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, Strang Communications, Teen Missions International, Cornerstone Music Festival, Promise Keepers, and Focus on the Family. In April 2004 Chambers took part in a debate on gay marriage at the University of California, Berkeley, and he travels constantly to speak at churches, policy seminars, and other events. In August 2005, Charisma magazine, an evangelical publication, named Chambers as one of the thirty top emerging leaders under the age of forty in the American church who will lead evangelicalism into the next decade. Focus on the Family now employs two graduates of the New Hope program in its gender and sexuality division to run ex-gay conferences and seminars, called Love Won Out, throughout the country. Exodus has established partnerships with prominent religious organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals. In the fall of 2003, Exodus had exhibits at the Southern Baptist Convention and the General Council of the Assemblies of God. Randy Thomas, the media manager, represented Exodus at former attorney general John Ashcroft's banquet in Washington, D.C., and Alan Chambers writes of having had the opportunity to meet President Bush at a Washington, D.C., churches' conference.²⁸

The upgrade of Exodus's public image has been expensive. The individual ex-gay ministries function mainly through the fees that program members pay each month, but Exodus relies on donations from individuals and organizations. It is recognized by the IRS as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, and it is a member in good standing with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), a Christian financial monitoring organization which has strict guidelines for membership, including undergoing an annual independent audit. Under Chambers, the fundraising aspect of the ministry is more evident, and there are now multiple ways to give money to the organization, including donating stock, supporting AmeriVision (a Christian phone company that donates 10 percent of an individual's long-distance bill to Exodus), making Exodus a beneficiary in a will, matching grants, and transferring frequent flyer miles to Exodus. Despite these new channels for potential financial support, Chambers has written as recently as 2003 that the organization owes 100,000 to vendors because fewer attendees than expected appeared at the 2003 annual conference.²⁹ According to the newsletter, operating expenses are 15,000 a month over revenues. In 2002 Exodus cut six full-time staff employees to half time and put all plans for Exodus Youth activities on hold.³⁰ Perhaps for this reason, Exodus also has a specific section on its Web site called “Prayer Requests” where it asks supporters to pray for the ministries and their work. “Your prayers are vital to the success of Exodus. We believe that there is great power in prayer.…Exodus ministries worldwide covet your prayers.” In the newsletter, writers continue to ask for money for computers, travel, brochures, Web site upgrades, conference displays, and the newsletter. “Twice a week when the staff processes donations, we pray over every check that comes in. We are [as] grateful for the female prisoner who faithfully sends us in her 1.00 every month as we are for the 5,000 check that came in from a man who tithed on the sale of his parents' farm.…Would you join us prayerfully, financially and purposefully?”³¹ In his personal appeal in the newsletter, called “From Alan's Desk,” Chambers writes, “I leave you much the same way I hope to always leave you: utterly desperate. I am desperate for the Lord to do exceedingly abundantly above what I can ask or imagine.” However, according to the ECFA, Exodus had a surplus of funds at the end of the 2004 fiscal year. The organization's total income was 925,315 in 2004, and it spent 658, 637 on administration, fund-raising, and program services.³²

Despite Exodus's financial issues, the ex-gay movement has continued to expand into a network of organizations with overlapping but not necessarily coordinated agendas, including Jewish and Catholic groups, psychoanalytic organizations, and independent therapists throughout the world. These include Homosexuals Anonymous; Sexaholics Anonymous; JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality) in Jersey City, NJ; Courage, a Catholic organization in New York City; Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays in Washington, D.C.; and the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH) in Encino, California. Non-Protestant and non-Christian ex-gay ministries like Courage and JONAH have aligned themselves with NARTH rather than Exodus because of radical differences in religious style, goals, and theology.

Courage is a Catholic organization, with chapters throughout the United States, which was founded and is run by Father John Harvey, a Catholic priest. I met with Father Harvey several times at the headquarters on 46th Street in Manhattan, a run-down church with frayed carpet on the stairs, an office overflowing with piles of paper, and one good-natured but harried assistant named Tracey. As we sat knee to knee in a cramped prayer room, Father Harvey, who is eighty-five and stooped but still lively, explained that while teaching theology in the 1950s, he began reading Freud and found that the priests in his class knew nothing about homosexuality. After publishing several articles, he began informally counseling priests, and in 1978 Cardinal Terrence Cook of New York invited him to establish a spiritual support system for men and women with homosexual inclinations in the New York archdiocese. Father Harvey began the first Courage meeting in 1980, and the archdiocese of New York continues to sponsor him. Initially, he organized five-day retreats in northern Virginia for priests, which he called Retreat, Renewal, and Recreation, to help them address their own homosexuality, and he recalled that from 1978 to 1990 he counseled over 250 priests who struggled with homosexuality. After 1990 he devoted himself to working solely with laity, although priests still lead Courage support groups all over the country. Father Harvey makes use of NARTH, which will refer people to a therapist and a priest, and the relationship is strong because Joseph Nicolosi, the director of NARTH, is Catholic and attends many Courage events.

Courage adheres to the Catholic idea that the solution to homosexuality is chastity and community. The Catholic ex-gay movement emphasizes celibacy over heterosexual marriage because celibacy signifies a spiritual and sacrificial path that is in line with Catholic theology. Courage's official goals are

To live chaste lives in accordance with the Roman Catholic Church's teaching on homosexuality.

To foster a spirit of fellowship in which all may share thoughts and experiences, and so ensure that no one will have to face the problems of homosexuality alone.

To be mindful of the truth that chaste friendships are not only possible but necessary in a celibate Christian life and in doing so provide encouragement to one another in forming and sustaining them.

To live lives that may serve as good examples to others.³³

Tracey, the office assistant, tried an Exodus ministry in Canada, but she thought the group focused too much on heterosexuality and marriage. The whole purpose of evangelical ex-gay ministries is to recover heterosexuality through a relationship with God, but Father Harvey believes that there is no way a person will ever eliminate temptations, and his or her goal should instead be to live a chaste Christian life. While Exodus's philosophy agrees with Father Harvey's ideas about celibacy as a necessity on the path to change, it places more faith in the possibility of total conversion and marriage. Father Harvey is skeptical and cautious about the idea of change and marriage, even as he believes in heterosexual marriage as the fullest expression of healthy sexuality, and he is opposed to the idea that if you pray enough, you will “come out” of homosexuality. “I'm not denying that God can work miracles, but many people may not ever come out of their condition. You can't tell someone that he has an obligation to come out of homosexuality—you just put it there as an option.” While he believes in the idea of a relationship with God to heal homosexuality, he ultimately does not think this is enough and believes that individuals must grapple with their sexuality by renouncing their sin and electing to lead celibate lives.

Courage is small, underfunded, and less organized than Exodus. Exodus members do not invite Father Harvey to speak at their meetings, even though he has inquired about the opportunity to talk about the Catholic version of celibacy. Although some Exodus speakers attend the annual Courage conferences, they will not collaborate directly, which has more to do with theological differences than their view on homosexuality. While Father Harvey explained that he had faith in ecumenism, he is certain that the Exodus board is unwilling to hear his message. Unlike the evangelical vision of a personal, unmediated relationship with God, Courage believes that priests have the power to eradicate sins, including sins of homosexuality, if a person is truly repentant. Frank Worthen, on the other hand, believes that priests and sacraments are unnecessary intermediaries between believers and God. He refers to the Catholic focus on the Virgin Mary as “the cult of Mary.” Despite these underlying theological differences, Father Harvey aligns himself with groups like Exodus rather than Dignity, a pro-gay Catholic group that he calls “Catholic dissidents,” because he lacks other options for allies.

In contrast to the theological suspicion of Catholics from people like Frank, Jewish people occupy a more exalted but ambiguous status in the ex-gay movement. Because of the long relationship between evangelicals and Israel, Frank and others consider them God's “chosen people.” Evangelical and conservative Christians believe Israel will figure prominently in the events of the apocalypse.³⁴ For this reason, Exodus has been eager to build alliances with conservative Jewish organizations. Just across the Hudson in Jersey City is the headquarters of JONAH, an organization run by Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk for Jewish men and women struggling with homosexuality. Their sons came out to them while students at New York University, and Arthur and Elaine felt they had to develop an ex-gay ministry specifically for Jewish people. Both Elaine and Arthur attended the 2000 annual Exodus conference at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego but avoided the charismatic style praise and worship sessions because of their discomfort with the Christian singing and praying. Exodus attendees paid JONAH a tribute at the closing conference ceremonies when an ex-gay man who was not Jewish but told me he identified with Jews appeared on the stage with a shofar. The evangelical praise and worship band switched gears from soft Christian rock and plunged into a lively rendition of “Hava Nagila.”

JONAH states that its purpose is to aid Jews of all backgrounds, ranging from Orthodox to Reform to unaffiliated. “For Jews who are unhappy with a homosexual identity or whose goal is to attain heterosexual marriage and start a family, JONAH provides support, counseling, referrals, and up-to-date information on the causes and treatment of the problem.”³⁵ Arthur Goldberg is a Reform Jew, but he sends Orthodox Jews who call his hotline to Orthodox psychiatrists. His goal is to find a synagogue to sponsor the organization and increase JONAH's network of psychological counseling. While JONAH members do not believe that being gay and Jewish is acceptable, they also “reject conversion therapies that frighten or shame the patient.”³⁶ Unlike Exodus's leaders, Goldberg is not interested in developing residential programs. The organization's counseling programs emphasize “self-acceptance and achievement of positive goals, involvement in the community, and Jewish religious identity. Our message is a life-affirming one that embraces traditional Torah views as a way of combating isolation and assimilation.”³⁷

Increasingly the issue of sexuality and Judaism is becoming more widely debated. In 2002 the movie Trembling before God received wide distribution and publicity throughout the United States. It sensitively portrayed Orthodox Jewish men and women coping with their homosexuality in the face of a religious tradition that condemns it. JONAH was not mentioned in the film. In anger and disappointment, Arthur wrote a letter to the Jerusalem Post that the film perpetuated a “biased and faulty assumption that same-sex attraction and behavior is irreversible.”³⁸ As a young man in the 1960s, Arthur traveled to the American South as part of the civil rights movement, and he employs the language of civil rights to argue that people should have the right to change their sexuality. Even though his ministry work is fueled largely out of personal pain with his son's homosexuality, he claims that he wants to “provide an option for those who want to change in this politically correct environment.” JONAH's affiliation with Exodus has created some problems for the group, including accusations from other Jewish people that it is part of the Christian Right. For now, it remains affiliated with NARTH and Exodus until it can form alliances with Jewish groups and psychiatrists.

The ex-gay movement is not only growing in various religious denominations, but Exodus has been expanding outside the United States since the late 1980s. Exodus International is now part of a global alliance that includes Exodus Asia-Pacific and Australia, Exodus Europe/Africa/ Middle East, Exodus Brazil, and Exodus Latinoamérica. Many of the international organizations consist of psychiatrists and therapists who use reparative therapy. Before Alan Chambers became Exodus president in 2001, Pat Allan Lawrence directed Exodus International out of Toronto, Canada, and she still coordinates ex-gay programs in the developing world. The international regions mentioned above are part of an Exodus network but function autonomously. Brazil was recently designated its own region because of its extensive network of ex-gay therapists who are not necessarily affiliated with Exodus. In 2001 Frank attended the international conference in Quito, Ecuador, and Exodus materials have been translated into multiple languages for use around the globe.

The ex-gay movement's ability to globalize its organization through the creation of locally run ministries depends upon the global marketing of the U.S.-specific discourses of family values and conversion to heterosexuality. Missionaries have long attempted to Christianize other parts of the globe, but the ex-gay movement is different in that it relies on the premise of sexual dysfunction to evangelize. Exodus representatives like Frank see themselves as sexual missionaries, emissaries fresh from experiences of living as gay men and women, ready to lead others out of what they call spiritual and sexual bondage. As a motivation to other ex-gays to open ministries abroad, Frank writes, “You are in the position of ministering life to a spiritually dead people. Let me challenge you to let your light shine so it can be seen across the channel.”³⁹

Although Frank and Anita spent four years establishing Bagong Pag-Asa, when they returned in 2001, they found that the residential portion of the ministry had ceased and that there was no real local leadership to run the organization. Exodus Asia-Pacific consists entirely of ex-gay organizations based in Australia, and Exodus has had less success planting ministries that last once the missionaries from North America have returned home. International ministries also flounder because Exodus assumes that men and women everywhere have the resources and ability to commit to leaving their homes and families for up to one year to attend a residential program. The belief that healing from homosexuality emerges from a relationship with Jesus Christ, a commitment to godly relationships with other men, an identification as ex-gay, and a recognition of familial dysfunction presumes that family structure and sexual identification are the same throughout the world. The lack of ex-gay literature produced by local ministries in South America, or anywhere in the Exodus Asia-Pacific region, means that Exodus materials apply a universal conception of sexuality despite very different national contexts.

Despite these limitations, Exodus continues to grow. Even its setbacks and scandals end up generating more publicity for the ex-gay movement. In July 2005, a sixteen-year-old named Zack Stark posted on his Web blog that his Christian parents were forcibly sending him to Refuge, Love in Action's outpatient program for youth, after he admitted he was gay.⁴⁰ Zack Stark's postings immediately instigated protests outside the LIA ministry, and the story was picked up by the mainstream press. The Tennessee Department of Children's Services investigated allegations of child abuse at LIA, but it found no misconduct on the part of the ministry. John Smid was interviewed by Paula Zahn on CNN in late July, and Alan Chambers appeared on ABC's The View to discuss Exodus's programs for youth. Although the negative publicity damaged LIA's credibility, the event propelled Exodus into the national media spotlight. Chambers and other Exodus leaders have realized that media attention provides an opportunity to promote Exodus's message and to expand the organization.