Activist and Author Wayne Besen To Be Joined By Married Gay Couple Who Met at Notorious Memphis Ex-Gay Ministry
Patrick McAlvey, Survivor of Ex-Gay Ministers Bizarre Sexual Therapy to Speak
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen will end a twelve-city speaking tour in Memphis highlighting the harm caused by programs that claim to turn gay people straight through prayer and therapy. Besen chose Memphis as his final stop because Exodus International’s flagship ministry, Love In Action, is based here. The multi-media presentation will take place at 7PM at Rhodes College, Room FJ-B.
KC and Larry Jansson will join Besen to share how they met at Love in Action while trying to “pray away the gay”. The two men fell in love and are now legally married. The Jansson’s story was featured recently in the Dallas Voice’s Valentine’s Day issue.
Patrick McAlvey (video below)will also appear on-stage to discuss how his “ex-gay” counselor in Lansing, MI used inappropriate sexual techniques during his therapy. As a result, his counselor was expelled from a network of such programs.
“The message of this tour is that you can’t ‘pray away the gay’ and LGBT people are fine just the way they are,” said Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out. “In Memphis, we will spotlight the stories of brave individuals who are living proof that these groups are fraudulent and sometimes dangerous”
Truth Wins Out’s Winter Tour has included: Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Fargo, North Dakota; Moorhead, Minnesota; Des Moines, Iowa; Lincoln, Nebraska; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama; and Memphis, Tennessee
Besen’s multi-media presentation offers a unique, innovative and entertaining look behind the mask of so-called “ex-gay” programs. Besen is the author of two books including the critically acclaimed, “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth”. He is also noted for photographing “ex-gay” poster boy John Paulk in a gay bar in Washington, DC and helping expose the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s personal “ex-gay” activist Michael Johnston as a fraud.
“This tour hopes to educate people in an exciting and memorable way,” said Besen, who has spoken at more than 100 leading universities, community organizations, business groups and religious institutions.
During his hour and a half show, Besen takes the audience on a whirlwind tour of “ex-gay” programs. Audiences will learn the history of these groups, the bizarre techniques they use, and the political players that finance these ignoble efforts.
In 2009, Besen was noted in Instinct Magazine’s “Leading Men” issue. In 2006, he was recognized in the Advocate Magazine’s “People of the Year” issue. Besen has appeared as a guest on leading news and political talk shows including: The Rachel Maddow Show, NBC Nightly News, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He has been quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and the Advocate Magazine.
As a survivor of “ex-gay” therapy, I was mortified to learn that Exodus International is shifting its focus in 2011 to children and teens. These are the people most vulnerable and defenseless to Exodus’ attacks on healthy development and psychological well-being.
As I first became aware of my sexual orientation at the age of 12, I was drawn into the web of Mike Jones, one of Exodus International’s unlicensed, unqualified, untrained, unregulated, and unsupervised counselors. For the next 10 years, a man who had no business counseling anyone, and who certainly should not have had access to children, set the tone for how I viewed my orientation and myself as a person.
Jones passed on to me the “facts” that my attractions were sinful, that no gay person was happy, and that every gay person was addicted to drugs, alcohol and random sexual encounters. I lived in a homogeneous religious world, didn’t know any LGBT people and had no reason to believe otherwise. I fully believed Mike Jones for years. He assured me that my sexual orientation could and should change, leading me to suffer through years of shame and self-hatred when no such change occurred.
Later, when I was 19, he subjected me to prolonged hugs and even “holding therapy”, where I was instructed to lay in his arms for a solid hour to “feel the strength of another man”. He asked me inappropriate questions about my genitals and suggested I use handyman tools to become more masculine.
Last year, Jones was largely discredited – his board of directors dissolved, many local churches ceased supporting his work, and he was removed as an “approved outreach group” with the Michigan Department of Corrections. But the entire time he was victimizing me, Exodus International supported Jones’ work and continued to refer people to his “ex-gay” operation.
This week, Exodus International unveiled its plan to put targets on the backs of thousands of innocent children around the country, many who already sit in pews each Sunday feeling scared and alone. The “ex-gay” group plans to utilize social media, YouTube videos, booklets, an IPhone App, and a re-branding to make sure every one of these kids hates a part of themselves and believes their orientation is perverse and an abomination.
The reality is their orientation is a natural and beautiful part of who they are. Exodus International has proven they are content to sacrifice children’s identities, happiness, self-confidence and mental health, to further their lies and messages of intolerance.
What is particularly insidious about Exodus’ ministry is that it hides behind the fallacy that it desires helping only those who face what they cynically call “unwanted same-sex attraction”.
The reality is the “ex-gay” industry works day and night to create cultures in families, churches, communities and governments when possible, where folks who are not heterosexual are left ostracized, alone, judged and condemned. When the lies spread by Exodus International and the “ex-gay” industry lead people to believe change is possible and necessary for God, their church or their family to love them, naturally their attractions become “unwanted”.
Thankfully, there is a happy ending to my story. I escaped the destructive lies of the “ex-gay” industry and with time, good friends, and therapy, came to love and accept myself the way I am. I have been an out and proud gay man for almost 5 years and have found healing through sharing my story and connecting with other survivors of the “ex-gay” industry.
But my heart breaks imagining other children naively falling for the same lies that ruled my life all those years. Children deserve to be loved and supported for who they are. Their young, fragile self-esteems deserve to be protected and their identities nurtured.
It is my sincere hope that more and more families and churches will see the real danger Exodus International represents and choose to distance themselves and their children from Exodus’ materials, counselors and programs.
Before the organization does enormous harm, it should abandon its disturbing plan to target children and teenagers in 2011.
The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld an appellate court ruling that the Vatican can be sued for sexual cleared the way for St. Paul lawyer Jeff Anderson to sue Pope Benedict on behalf of sex-abuse victims when it refused Monday to hear the Vatican’s appeal of an Oregon lawsuit. …
In declining to hear the case, the court upheld an appeals court ruling that the Vatican can be sued for sexual abuse if church officials knowingly reassign priests who have been accused of such acts in their previous parishes. The Vatican appeal had argued that the U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction over the Rome-based church.
This is great news — but it comes too late for countless youths who have been sexually abused by the likes of ex-gay activist Mike Jones — whose Michigan-based Corduroy Stone ministry was a veteran member of Exodus International. Truth Wins Out exposed Jones’ wrongdoing last year — but Exodus did not sever ties with Jones until nine months later. Not only has Jones not faced justice; Jones’ abusive activities have been hosted for free on Michigan State University’s web site. Like other member abusers, Jones was sheltered by Exodus long after his abuses were publicly exposed.
And the Supreme Court decision also comes too late for countless youths who were detained by Exodus’ flagship Love In Action-Refuge boot camp in Tennessee. For years, LIA reportedly exposed youths to potential predators during counseling sessions and hired untrained amateurs to control youths’ access to vital medications. By 2005, Tennessee regulators became alarmed by these reports and sought to take action. But in 2007, state officials — who again are funded and kept in office by Christian Right lobbies — overruled the regulators, effectively determining that the “religious freedom” of Christian Rightists serves as an absolute defense against Christian Rightists’ felony abuse of youths and against the freedom of religious minorities. To this day, LIA’s “Families and Friends Weekends” train relatives and peers to stubbornly trust in defamations about their loved ones despite all factual evidence to the contrary.
In both situations, government officials — intimidated or funded by Christian Right lobbyists — failed to prosecute and convict sexual, physical, and religious abuse.
The latest Supreme Court ruling gives hope to hundreds of thousands of clergy sex abuse victims. But until state and federal officials shed their financial and political ties to the Christian Right, victims of “ex-gay” abusers will continue to watch Exodus shield its abusive counselors. These victims also will continue to be shunned by the public officials who were elected and employed to ensure freedom, safety, and justice for all — not just for the Christian Right.
“The department’ position is that when you are ministering to a group or even an individual that the content of that not be defamatory or derogatory,” said John Cordell, a department spokesman. “We have shut down ministries in the past for doing just that [being defamatory or derogatory].”
Corduroy Stone, and its founder Mike Jones, have been under national scrutiny for months after 24-year-old Lansing resident Patrick McAlvey told the national organization Truth Wins Out of his experience with the ministry.
“I think it’ terrific they are looking further into this mess,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “Corduroy Stone doesn’t have the credibility to continue and is a threat to public health if allowed to continue.”
In the past week, Truth Wins Out has been dealing with twin tragedies caused, in part, by Exodus International, the nation’s largest “pray away the gay” ministry.
The first train wreck is Uganda’s proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009″. This legislation would lead to the imprisonment and murder of LGBT Ugandans. It would jail anyone accused of “promoting” homosexuality and imprison friends and relatives of LGBT people who did not turn them into authorities.
This fascist bill came about after Exodus Board member, Don Schmierer, had gone to Uganda last spring to attend a conference on homosexuality. Schmierer was joined by Caleb Lee Brundidge of quack Richard Cohen’s International Healing Foundation and Scott Lively, the twisted author of The Pink Swastika, who believes gays are responsible for the holocaust. There were calls at the conference to “wipe out” homosexuality in Uganda. The current bill before the legislature would do just that.
The second disaster is Corduroy Stone, which was an Exodus ministry in Lansing, MI until this week. After six months of dithering and dawdling, Exodus finally parted ways with Corduroy Stone after a client accused Exodus counselor Mike Jones of engaging in bizarre and dangerous therapy. His sessions with Patrick McAlvey, who was 19 at the time, included “cuddle therapy” and odd questions.
“He asked how large my penis was,” McAlvey explained of Jones’ therapy. “He asked if I shave my pubic hair. He asked what type of underwear that I wore. He wanted me to describe my sexual fantasies to him and the type of men I’m attracted to. On one occasion, he asked me to take my shirt off and show him how many push-ups I could do, which I did not do.”
In August, Truth Wins Out released this information in a video. Yet, it took Exodus six months to act and cut its ties to Jones. Clearly, they were more interested in protecting their image than the young adults who may have been put in harms way.
Yet, despite such negligence and a trail of destruction, Exodus Vice President Randy Thomas is trying to play martyr. On Exodus’ blog, the solipsistic “ex-gay” political activist posted a letter by someone named Frank:
Randy, how do you wake up every morning, and go to work knowing that as much as you fight for truth, you are hated beyond understanding? that every word you speak will be twisted and you will be made a laughing stock? This Rachel Maddow thing (among others) has me down… truth is not acceptable anymore. no one cares. … I feel like I’ve talked and talked till im blue in the face yet no one listens… how do you do it?
You have fought longer and harder than I and have been villified more… how do you get up every morning and do it again? … I know I will never cease to proclaim the riches there are in Christ (not just talking bout ex-gay stuff) but I just get so tired of trying to make my little corner of the world a better place when it seems like “the establishment” (read: Rachel Maddow, Keith oberman, Wayne Besen…) is screaming louder telling me to shut up and sit down…
Randy Replied:
“I resisted posting this blog post because what I go through is nothing compared to some of my peers and especially other Christians around the world who are dying for their faith. I went ahead and posted this because I got this type of message from several people and thought the topic would be worth exploring in general (not just about me.)”
Mr. Thomas, you are the victimizer, not the victim. It is Exodus – not Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman or myself – that is tied to state sponsored persecution in Uganda. It is you who has repeatedly lied and deceived, not us.
It is Thomas, and his truth-challenged boss Alan Chambers, who have kept Schmierer on the Exodus board, despite the very good possibly of genocidal results because of Schmierer’s foray into Africa.
It is Exodus that allowed bizarre and dangerous therapy to continue for half of 2009 at Corduroy Stone before action was belatedly taken.
It is Exodus who in the past had allowed youths like Zach Stark and Lance Carroll to be forced into Exodus’ ex-gay boot camps against their will.
Thomas’ cynical defense for his role in such appalling actions is that he has a nice smile, doesn’t have fangs and is surprisingly friendly. The term “banality of evil” comes to mind when Thomas tries to make the case that his public demeanor does not match his dirty deeds.
Sorry, Mr. Thomas, but it is time to take personal responsibility for the egregious harm perpetrated by you and the staff at Exodus International. If the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009 comes to pass and LGBT people are hunted down, everyone associated with Exodus will be viewed as an accomplice to war crimes.
Please, Mr. Thomas, stop playing the victim card. If you want to be a real victim, enroll in Corduroy Stone for “therapy”. For any semblance of respectability, you need to go to Uganda and publicly rebuke this death bill.
But, let’s be clear: right now you are more mercenary than martyr.
Ex-gay organization had been source of contention locally
By Todd A. Heywood 12/16/09 9:57 AM
LANSING — Gay rights advocates are lauding a split between the controversial Lansing-based ex-gay ministry Corduroy Stone and prominent ex-gay ministry group Exodus International.
“Exodus has removed their affiliation and the board of directors has dissolved. Now he’ just some guy,” said Patrick McAlvey, 24, who earlier this year told his story of dealing with Mike Jones and Corduroy Stone Ministries to the national organization Truth Wins Out.
“He’s not a mental health professional. He’ not a pastor,” McAlvey said of Jones, a retired Michigan State University employee. “He’ just some guy with made-up theories and outlandish techniques claiming he can help people change their sexual orientation. He is dangerous and I hope people steer clear of this predator.”
Despite accusations that he sexually accosted a young male client and uses public property to promote sectarian religious bigotries, Mike Jones and his Corduroy Stone ex-gay ministry will continue to receive its web hosting from Michigan State University.
The Michigan Messenger reported Friday that David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology at MSU, said that the university’ hands are tied because Mike Jones is a retired university employee.
We have made systematic progress over the past year at removing public purchased web publishing and e-mail accounts that had been established at MSU. However, retirees have the benefit of continued use of their MSU web space and our existing policies for controlling their use of that space are quite limited and do not permit us to address this particular case. The owner of this site is a retiree, and after we closed his purchased account under our general change of business practices he set up shop in his retiree space. He apparently has arranged for a .com URL, but has that URL redirected to his MSU personal webspace.
Terry Denbow, vice president for university relations, further explained MSU’s policy:
The point is that we do allow retirees to have Web spaces that link to other organizations. The fact that this organization has material that is offensive does not, in and of itself, violate any University policies. We cannot, under the First Amendment, make content based distinctions on what sites we allow and which ones we do not. We are continuing to review and update our acceptable use policies and will take this under advisement as we do so. In the meantime, so long as Mr. Jones is in compliance with U policy, his web space will remain available to him.
Denbow said that while the university was blocked from further action under
current policies, it might be time to revisit those policies.
Truth Wins Out executive director Wayne Besen and Jones’s victimized client, who is no longer ex-gay, reacted here.
It is frankly alarming that MSU policy allows alleged predators to host websites on public property simply because they are retirees. MSU’s see-no-evil policy may serve as an open invitation for other retirees to launch sites inciting prejudice and sexual violence against ethnic and religious constituencies.
A true “conservative,” small-government, or libertarian policy would demand that no personal or private sectarian sites of any kind be hosted on taxpayer-supported government property. Instead, taxpayers are being forced to host the work of a predatory ex-gay who inflicts his failures upon students.
Truth Wins Out has sought comment from Corduroy Stone and from Exodus International regarding the accusation of sexual abuse; both have refused to comment.
After assuring LGBT activists and leaders for two years that a controversial website would be removed from its computer servers, Michigan State University said last week it will continue to host the website of the ex-gay ministry Corduroy Stone.
In an email, David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology at MSU, told Michigan Messenger that the university’ hands are tied because Mike Jones, who runs the site that promotes therapy as a way to convert gay individuals to a straight lifestyle, is a retired university employee.
Wayne Besen, executive director of the national organization Truth Wins Out, which opposes the ex-gay movement, also called on the university to remove the website:
“Michigan State should cancel Jones’ e-mail address and immediately stop hosting his site. It gives the false impression that the university endorses a dangerous form of therapy that was just condemned by the American Psychological Association.”
Besen is particularly familiar with Corduroy Stone because when he was in Grand Rapids earlier this year to speak at an event at Grand Valley State University aimed at countering the national ex-gay conference held locally. While there, he met Patrick McAlvey, 24, of Lansing, who says he was victimized by Jones and the Corduroy Stone programs. He even went so far as to do a video interview with Besen, which was posted last month on YouTube. And Besen features McAlvey’ story on his website.
“As both a graduate of Michigan State University and a recovering victim of Mr. Jones’ “ex-gay” therapy I find it sickening that the Corduroy Stone website continues to be supported by MSU. It is horrifying to think that taxpayer money, including my own, is supporting Mr. Jones and his strange and dangerous “work” with Corduroy Stone,” said McAlvey in an email to Michigan Messenger. “I am disturbed that this use of MSU server space could be be mistakenly interpreted as lending Corduroy Stone some sort of credibility it certainly doesn’t deserve and in reality does not enjoy.”
On August 5, Michigan resident Patrick McAlvey (left) revealed in a Truth Wins Out video the bizarre “therapy” he received from Exodus International counselor Mike Jones, who runs the group’ Lansing affiliate, Corduroy Stone. More than a month later, Exodus continues to shelter and support Jones, while offering silence in the face of scandal. The group has made no effort to investigate McAlvey’ charges, nor has it apologized for practicing touch therapy, a controversial practice it supposedly is against.
At the age of nineteen, McAlvey, who came from a religious background, was terrified that he might be gay. Feeling vulnerable and desperate to “change”, he placed his trust in Jones. Michigan’ GLBT newspaper, Between the Lines, interviewed McAlvey, now 24, where he elaborated on his therapy sessions with Jones in vivid detail.
“He asked how large my penis was,” McAlvey explained. “He asked if I shave my pubic hair. He asked what type of underwear that I wore. He wanted me to describe my sexual fantasies to him and the type of men I’m attracted to. On one occasion, he asked me to take my shirt off and show him how many push-ups I could do, which I did not do.”
Exodus may call this “therapy”, but where I come from (the real world) this is called foreplay. This is just not acceptable behavior and is predatory when it comes from an authority figure.
In sessions, Jones would also have McAlvey lie in his arms for hour-long intervals — a technique known as “touch therapy”. This method would be questionable in any circumstance, but even more so when the counselor who is caressing the client still admits to struggling with his homosexuality.
On his website, Jones acknowledges that he is still having “areas of sexual temptations”, is “sexually attracted to other men” and is “still not sexually attracted to women.” If this is the case, how is he qualified to help other people change their sexual orientation? And, if Exodus’ defines Jones as a success story, why would people waste their time and money on this failed program?
Most important, why is a sexually repressed gay man allowed to place young men in his lap under the auspices of therapy? Imagine the uproar if an older heterosexual therapist was “helping” straight teenagers or young women with such exploitative and quack-like techniques!
Interestingly, Exodus International has a policy statement saying it “is opposed to the therapeutic practice commonly referred to as “holding/touch therapy’” and that it “does not endorse any individual or organization that is known to use that method.”
If this is the case, then why has Exodus failed to launch a probe or discipline Jones, an actual Exodus counselor facing a direct charge that he flagrantly violated the organization’ policy? (Read More)
Confused. Isolated. Depressed. Angry. Lansing resident Patrick McAlvey was all of these things both before and during his stint in ex-gay therapy. Now, through a new video produced and released by Truth Wins Out, he’s just determined to make sure that no one else goes through what he did.
The 24-year-old McAlvey’s video was released last month just as the American Psychological Association announced that “mental health professionals should avoid telling clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or other treatments.”
It was too late for McAlvey, but he hopes that the APA findings – plus stories like his – will help other gay youth to love and accept themselves.
Like so many other gay youth, McAlvey was scared when he realized he was attracted to men in sixth grade. Raised in a conservative Christian home, “I didn’t think it was safe to tell anybody,” he said of his young adulthood.
But he did tell one person: Mike Jones, director of Lansing-based ex-gay organization Corduroy Stone.
“When I was 19, I was kicked out of a missionary training school and was forced to move back home with my family,” McAlvey recalled. “I was kicked out because of my attraction to men, so in that time I was sort of in a crisis mode and was very low, very depressed and just trying to make sense of my life and my attraction.”
He contacted Jones, whom he had spoken with before about his “problem,” and began several months of therapy with Jones that supposedly would cure him and make him straight.
Therapy consisted of embarrassing questions and uncomfortable situations. Jones would instruct McAlvey to lie in his arms for an hour at a time – known in the ex-gay circuit as holding therapy. He forced McAlvey to learn about tools and home repair, and to watch the play “Equus” with him, which features full male nudity. He would ask him to rate his attractiveness on a scale of one to 10.
Then there were the questions. “He asked how large my penis was. He asked if I shave my pubic hair. He asked what type of underwear that I wore,” McAlvey explained. “On one occasion, he asked me to take my shirt off and show him how many push-ups I could do, which I did not do.
“He wanted me to describe my sexual fantasies to him and the type of men I’m attracted to.”
But despite all his efforts, McAlvey never stopped being attracted to men. “I never felt like I was changing,” he said of the therapy.
Eventually, he told Jones he wasn’t going to come to therapy anymore. But the damage had been done.
“I just really came to hate myself; to loathe myself,” McAlvey said. “I didn’t trust anyone and I didn’t allow anyone to get close to me because I was terrified that they might find out my secret and that they would think less of me. I spent many years locked up in my room, crying by myself for no good reason.”
McAlvey hopes that telling his story will mean less LGBT teens face the same tough years he did. “I view it as a real assault on some of the more vulnerable members of the LGBT community,” he said. “I think it’s important to speak up to prevent other people from being harmed in the ways that I was.”
Now, less than five years out of his time in ex-gay therapy, he’s doing just that. And while McAlvey hopes that his video will help others, he also thinks it will help him to move on. “(It’s) a bit of a cathartic experience for me, saying publicly that this is not something anymore that I need to be embarrassed of or regret,” he explained. “Instead, I’m going to turn around and use it for good. … It’s turning a negative experience into something that can be used positively.”
The decision to take his story public took time, and a lot of personal healing for McAlvey. When he stopped seeing Jones, he was still grappling with his sexuality and acceptance of himself. Eventually, he was able to see that it’s OK to be gay. “I realized that I don’t think change is going to happen and I don’t think it needs to happen,” he said. “It was getting to the point where I really was comfortable with who I am, and that takes time, a lot of processing and figuring out how to undo some of the internalized homophobia that was the result of this therapy.”
The video, which has almost 6,000 views on YouTube, is the final step in that reparative process – and McAlvey wants to get his message out to LGBT youth. “I would communicate to them the freedom that I felt when I finally embraced my sexual orientation and accepted it as a beautiful and natural part of myself,” he said of speaking to another teen like himself. “I would certainly convey that it is my belief that their sexual orientation is a beautiful, natural part of them that they should feel no shame for and should not think needs to be changed.”
With a gift of $35 to Truth Wins Out, you can receive an autographed copy of "Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth."
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Truth Wins Out founder Wayne Besen will end a twelve-city speaking tour in Memphis highlighting the harm caused by programs that claim to turn gay people straight through prayer and therapy. Besen chose Memphis as his final stop because Exodus International’s flagship ministry, Love In Action, is based here. The multi-media presentation will take place at 7PM at Rhodes College, Room FJ-B.
