Dr. Andrea Macari

Scott Melendez

Brian Nesbitt

The Michael Johnston Story

Jaylen Braiden

Chris Camp

Victoria Lavin

(Read More)

• Writing for Focus on the Family, Exodus antigay youth activist Mike Ensley channels reparative therapist Joseph Nicolosi, whose mantra at Exodus/FOTF events has been, “We advise fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.” Like Nicolosi, Ensley equates youths’ gay family members and gay friends with sexual predators. Ensley says, “Our youth have hearts that need pursuing. If we [Christians] don’t go after them, there are other people out there [gay people] who will.”
• Corrected: An open lesbian becomes engaged to a man. Confession of an ex-gay, perhaps? No, just a woman who’s honest about her sexual flexibility, the inadequacy of labels, and possible bisexuality.
• Lost in her own strawman arguments, ex-gay activist Janet Boynes misses the point of her critics.
• Exodus International executive vice president Randy Thomas prays for a miracle for the presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, but hopes for a “truly viable third party” by 2012.
• Long-time ex-gay activist Bob Stith of Texas is now the Southern Baptist Convention’s national strategist for gender issues. He is interviewed this week by the Southern Baptist Texan. He acknowledges that antigay evangelicals are less well versed in the Bible than many gay Christians — but instead of learning from gay people of faith, Stith calls them a threat. Stith acknowledges a genetic predisposition to same-sex attraction, but then he rejects as failures all studies that attempt to find a “biological cause to homosexuality.”
• Former ex-gay Peterson Toscano reflects on his time in Exodus International’s flagship live-in program, Love In Action — and looks forward to Beyond Ex-Gay’s effort next week to deconstruct the ex-gay myth in LIA’s home city of Memphis, Tenn.
• A Tennessee bill filed by Rep. Stacey Campfield of Knoxville would ban “any instruction or materials discussing sexual orientation other than heterosexuality” in Tennessee’s public schools. On the surface, this legislation denies the existence of gay and bisexual students, suppresses these students’ free-speech rights, and promotes ignorance among these teenagers’ peers. But would the bill also lock Tennessee’s “former homosexuals” out of public-school instruction and materials?

Once again, a gay man trying to go from gay to straight was sexually abused under the auspices of “touch therapy.”  Such  therapy is not only ineffective, but a gateway for conflicted therapists to sexually victimize their clients. This latest example occurred in Winnipeg, where a minister and former Christian college instructor was found guilty of sexually assaulting a young man who sought ex-gay counseling. A jury returned with the guilty verdict early last night after only a few hours of deliberations. The therapist, Terrance Lewis, 60, will be sentenced at a later date.

Lewis’ erotic therapy sessions included kissing, fondling and engaging in sexual role-playing. Many of these touch therapy sessions took place inside the therapists car. “He said I was to tell no one about it because no one would understand,” the victim testified.

“The use of so-called ‘touch therapy’ creates an ideal situation for abuse to occur, because you have sexually repressed therapists who can take advantage of vulnerable clients,” said TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen. “We call on all ‘ex-gay’ therapists to repudiate and abandon this bizarre practice before more victims are damaged.”

Meet the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, a hero to ex-gays — and simultaneously, perhaps, one of ex-gays’ worst enemies.

Hutcherson is:

1. Featured speaker for the ex-gay network Exodus International
2. Leader of a racially charged boycott against Microsoft for its nondiscriminatory employment policies toward gay workers
3. Advocate of the belief that Christians should hate sinners as well as sins
4. A co-leader of the Slavic antigay organization Watchmen on the Walls. The Watchmen have been linked to violence against gays in eastern Europe and blamed, in part, for the Slavic skinhead killing of a Sacramento, Calif.-area man who was perceived to be gay. The Watchmen oppose a California mandate for anti-bullying programs in public schools. And Hutcherson has traveled to Riga, Latvia, to support antigay activists who threw feces at equality advocates in 2006.

Some faculty at Mount Si High School, in the Snoqualmie Valley Public School District in Washington state, sought to mask Hutcherson’s record of bigotry last month by inviting him to speak about being a victim of racism on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. When two gay-tolerant faculty sought to publicly criticize Hutcherson’s activities against civil rights and racial harmony, they were disciplined by the school administration — and Hutcherson sought to have at least one critic fired.

Now Hutcherson is boasting that he is a victim of those who called for an honest airing of 1) his opposition to civil rights, and 2) his leadership of an organization that allegedly incites violence.

Instead of officially repudiating Hutcherson’s paranoia, Exodus executive vice president Randy Thomas has used his personal blog to parrot Hutcherson’s fear and self-pity.

Some have wished that Exodus International would prove that “change is possible” by freeing itself from its self-destructive tendencies: its fear of criticism; its bitterness toward gay people; and its political efforts to suppress truth, distort sexuality, exploit religion, and promote inequality.

But it’s possible that Exodus does not desire true change. By continuing to choose friends like Hutcherson, Exodus demonstrates that the organization may be its own worst enemy.

Lawrence King, a 15-year-old student whom friends say had been frequently harassed on the basis of his perceived sexual orientation, is now brain-dead after he was allegedly shot in the head by one of the bullies on Tuesday.

[Update: An alleged assailant was charged with premeditated murder with a special allegation of using a firearm in the commission of a hate crime, the LA Times reported late today.]

The Los Angeles Times reported this morning:

Police have not determined a motive in the slaying but said it appeared to stem from a personal dispute between King and the suspect.

Keith and Totten declined to elaborate.

But several students at the south Oxnard campus said King and his alleged assailant had a falling out stemming from King’s sexual orientation.

The teenager sometimes wore feminine clothing and makeup, and proclaimed he was gay, students said.

“He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing,” said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. “That was freaking the guys out.”

(Read More)

Ex-gay activist Stephen Bennett has suffered from questionable finances for years — and 2007 was no exception.

The longtime professional ex-gay, who has yet to document his past gay life or alleged gay friends, says he needs $15,000 per month so that he may continue to parrot the American Family Association’s antigay paranoia in 2008.

If successful with his latest fund-raising pitch, Bennett and his wife, Irene, would collect $180,000 for the year — significantly more than Alan Chambers, president of the world’s largest ex-gay network Exodus International, who claims to earn less than half that amount.

In 2006, Bennett asked his rag-tag following of antigay parents for $100,000 up-front and $20,000 per month — apparently to pay off debts incurred from a trip to Jerusalem, a radio show, and a cyberchurch with no published street address.

Unlike some ex-gay activists, Bennett makes no effort to support would-be ex-gays. His activities include a 2004 antigay billboard campaign in downstate New York; agitation against Brokeback Mountain and Connecticut gay civil unions in 2005; and street-preaching gigs in Provincetown, Mass. Most recently, Bennett joined antigay activist Peter LaBarbera in Michigan to campaign against Mitt Romney.

Hat tip: Good As You

Nick Cavnar spent 30 years as an Ex-Gay. When he finally found the strength to come out, he discovered a warm and friendly community ready to accept him.

The ex-gay movement became politically well-known when it gained the support of the religious right and James Dobson’s Focus on the Family in the mid-1990s.

But the theory behind reparative therapy dates back as far as 1886 and the times of Sigmund Freud. By the 1950s, the ex-gay movement’s forefathers — and its empty promises of undefined “change,” its stereotypes, distortions of science, and condescension — were all too evident in popular media.

Case in point: An April 3, 1957, ad that ran in The Village Voice. The ad was recalled for posterity recently in the Voice’s “Runnin’ Scared” weblog. (Read More)

The ex-gay advocacy group People Can Change issued a press release Feb. 7 that distorted the organization’s own survey of a controversial men’s retreat and greatly exaggerated success rates of ex-gay programming by omitting failures from the data.

The press release promotes a retreat, Journey Into Manhood, whose methods and underlying philosophy — according to a prominent pro-exgay pundit — originated from a pro-gay men’s retreat. People Can Change charges $650 per person to attend a Journey Into Manhood weekend.

PCC claimed that:

• “four out of five men who participated in a personal-growth weekend called Journey Into Manhood reported a decrease in unwanted homosexual attractions when surveyed between six months and six years later.”
• “More than half reported an increase in heterosexual attractions since they participated in the weekend program”
• “73 percent reported a decrease in homosexual behaviors.”
• “93 percent reported that Journey Into Manhood had a positive impact on their efforts to diminish same-sex attractions”

But an examination of the actual survey uncovers deception by PCC. Of Journey Into Manhood’s 615 participants, only 224 responded to the survey, leaving most of the program’s likely failures — 63.6 percent of participants — on the sidelines.

PCC’s press release claimed that its success rates consisted of “men who participated in a personal-growth weekend” when in fact the claimed successes were a subset of a minority of men who were satisfied with the program and remained in contact. (Read More)

The founder and editor of GayChile.com, Victor Jorquera, recently aligned with an antigay church, renounced his sexual orientation, and asserted that gay people suffer from problems that cannot be solved through professional therapy or through religious paths other than conservative Christianity.

The Spanish-language AmbienteG.com of Spain quotes GayChile.com (rough translation):

Jorquera, who says things like, “From something as miserable and shameful for me as being ‘gay’ I became a child of God,” classifies homosexuals into three types:

The gay pagans who do not participate in religious institutions; those who are are fashionable; and those who recognize their sin. It is the latter for which GayChile works.

The English-language BGay.com further translates GayChile.com (Spanish version):

“Beginning in the first half of 2008, GayChile.com, with permission from the Church Missionary Biblica (Biblical Christian Church), will issue [...] a series of programs that will help [...] thousands of people in their encounters with Biblical truth. The idea of incorporating the programs comes from the need and interest of our users, many of them who are tired and troubled, and who over the 10 years of existence of GayChile.com have sought a solution to their personal problems, problems that are not resolved by meeting with psychologists, nor with Yoga, or transcendental meditation [...] or by visiting witches or warlocks. The programs are clearly Christian [...] and only rely on the resources that the Scriptures deliver [...]

Talk of “thousands” of ex-gays, half-truths about the Bible, fear of science and professional support, and association of gay persons with witches — where have we heard this rhetoric before?

Hat tip: Gay Religion weblog