Exodus International’s “Love In Action” residential ex-gay program in Memphis, Tenn. promises to free participants from shame, sexual temptation, and spiritual doubt.

But survivors of the program know that LIA often worsens participants’ shame, their feeling of separation from God, and their sexual temptations. For all that trouble, LIA fails to change most participants’ sexual orientation — and it subjects family and friends to weekend “retreats” that consist of verbal and emotional abuse against parents.

Survivor Peterson Toscano is thinking about LIA’s latest round of participants, as they begin a 28-day to three-month residency.

Although some people turn to programs like Love in Action for assistance dealing with compulsive sexual behavior, many of us actually learned more about where to find sex in unexpected public places after hearing other participants spill some of their own stories. In suppressing and demonizing our desires, many of us reinforced the  deep shame we felt, which caused some of us to do harm to ourselves.

The heart of LIA’s message is that it is wrong, abnormal, sinful to be gay. This is the message we heard loud and clear in so many ways from the many many stringent and invasive rules to the disturbing Family and Friends Weekend. (For over a year, senior leadership at Exodus, which oversees LIA, have been aware of the bizarre and unethical nature of the Family and Friends weekend yet have done nothing to address the situation.)

After spending a tremendous amount of time and money and energy while also leaving key relationships and careers and homes, most people who have attended the LIA program came to the conclusion that it is fine to be gay, a healthy expression of one’s self. Joy, self-control, love and peace came with understanding ourselves and accepting how we are wired. Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is simply a part of the wonderful design of what makes us who we are. Once we apprehended this truth, then were able to better assess how to live our lives from there with integrity and openness.

Toscano spotlights the narrative of Mark, one survivor whom LIA tried to transform with a lifestyle of loveless and sexless monotony.

In a new video, Peterson Toscano recalls his own journey, and that of friends, through Exodus International’s flagship ex-gay live-in program, Tennessee-based Love In Action.

In his introduction to the video, Toscano writes:

Some people come to ex-gay programs sexually naive. They never had sex in their lives and have little idea where they would even procure gay sex. That is until they walk into an ex-gay program where day after day they hear people talk about gay sex–what’s it like, where to get it, how good it felt during the act, how icky one might feel afterward (particularly if that one gets in trouble for it.)

I know of at least two guys from my Love in Action days who came into the program virgins and successfully graduated many months later armed with so much information about cruising spots and anonymous sex protocol that once they left off being ex-gay, they plunged into a gay sex fest that lasted months if not years.

They learned their lessons well. Sadly those lessons insisted that gay men were driven by dysfunctional, sinful, compulsive desires and lesbians had a penchant for unhealthy emotionally enmeshed relationships. It takes years to detox from that misinformation.

Contrary to their own advertising, ex-gay live-in programs do not free people from homosexuality — or sexuality. Often, unfortunately, these programs merely poison sexuality and interrelationship. They condition people to experience sex and relationship in ways that may be dangerously unhealthy.

Unlicensed “doctor” Daniel Serrano served 15 months in prison after he promised a youth-restoring treatment that would be superior to Botox to Hollywood celebrities such as Priscilla Presley — and injected them instead with low-grade industrial silicone.

It’s illegal to practice medicine without a license. Yet it is perfectly legal in the United States for unlicensed and uneducated “therapists” and self-appointed “counselors” to engage in the ex-gay industry’s own version of bait and switch: Promise false cures for sexual attraction, then inflict confirmed and long-lasting harm against counselees and their families — sometimes, even, against the will of youths who are involuntarily “treated.”

In 2005, the Exodus-affiliated, ex-gay, live-in treatment facility Love In Action drew national attention when it became known that the program was admitting teen-agers against their will.

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Focus on the Family denies the existence of former ex-gays — a growing movement of hundreds of people who have discovered through personal experience that ex-gay activists’ claims are not only false, but toxic to families and communities.

Former ex-gays gathered this weekend in Memphis, Tenn., at the same time as Focus’ ex-gay roadshow, Love Won Out, which appeals to antigay pastors and parents of gay persons with sales pitches for ex-gay propaganda and political appeals to deny equality to gay couples.

According to Peterson Toscano, a survivor of Exodus International’s flagship live-in program Love In Action: “They [Focus on the Family] basically tell parents of lesbian and gay kids that it’s bad to be gay, and they give testimonies about how awful people’s lives were while they were gay. They say they can change and save you.”

In promoting its roadshow, Focus on the Family on Feb. 20 described former ex-gays (who were to come from as far away as California and Connecticut) as “local activists” who advocate “a revisionist view of the Bible.” Focus concealed the central fact that the “activists” included former ex-gays.

Love In Action has similarly shielded its participants from survivors and allies who have held vigils nearby. Jacob Wilson, now 22, was an ex-gay participant in LIA in 2005. According to the Memphis Commercial-Appeal:

After Wilson left LIA, he found out what the protesters had wanted him to know.

“These people weren’t doing it to be activists, they were doing it to show that we weren’t alone, that we were loved … It crushes me that that message was cut from us.”

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