The LOGO cable television program Be Real will feature ex-gay survivors and their family members, including Christine Bakke, Scott Tucker, John Holm, and the father of former ex-gay Peterson Toscano.

(Update: See video clip of the program.)

Episode 2 - New Beginnings

Peterson Toscano spent the better part of 17 years in the “ex gay” movement struggling to change his sexuality. Now, after 5 years of performing his one person show, aimed at inspiring other ex-gay survivors to come out and tell their stories, he is ready to pass the torch and move on. Stephen, a 45-year-old former Mormon, decides to attend an all men’s workshop in central Utah to learn how to confront his past and heal painful family memories.

LOGO TV Schedule:

Saturday, May 10, 10 p.m. EDT
Monday, May 12, 7:30 p.m. EDT

Hat tip: Peterson Toscano

The parents of PFOX wrote to me yesterday to alert me to the “Political and Social Oppression of the Ex-Gay Community.” How horrible, I thought, that the sprawling Ex-Gay Community is treated that way!

I feared for the lives and the rights of my “no - longer - identified - as - anything, free-from-freedom, no - news - here, move - along” friends in the teeming ex-gay ghettoes of Colorado Springs and Orlando. So I tore open the PFOX e-mail envelope and read the following dispatch from suburban Washington, D.C. …

As you can see from the below local ABC news video, many ex-gays are afraid to come out of the closet because of the harassment they will receive — their names, phone numbers and personal information posted on gay websites; attacked at ex-gay exhibit booths; press releases issued against them, etc. The tactics of gay activists are to go after anyone who comes out publicly as ex-gay, force them back into the closet, and then claim that ex-gays don’t exist because there aren’t any out in public:

http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0508/517023_video.html

PFOX radiates fear and paranoia — blaming critics of the ex-gay industry for ex-gay homophobia, prejudice, and fear of legitimate mental-health professionals. These fears result in ex-gays, and the antigay families of gay people, living in fear of their own shadows.

Thankfully, open-minded parents and school officials in Maryland were also watching WJLA-TV on May 5.

David Fishback, for example, is a former chair of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Citizens Advisory Committee for Family Health and Human Development. He also is on the board of Metro-DC PFLAG.

The full text of WJLA’s video report is here; Fishback’s full analysis is here. (Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, is featured in the WJLA report.)

Here are some brief bullet points that I culled from Fishback’s analysis: (Read More)

An antigay outfit called Life Productions aired a Canadian TV ex-gay ad featuring a man with no name, no history, no evidence of a sexual orientation, and no explanation of how he “changed.”

In the ad, the mystery man claims that his (somewhat dubious) existence is proof that people can “change,” but he offers viewers no guidance on how or where to change. Instead, he implies that the recognition of gay persons’ equality under the law somehow threatens the public’s ability to learn about no-name people like him.

Since no guidance is offered in the ad, nor on Life Productions’ web site, the ad appears to be a ploy by Life Productions to collect personal information from troubled individuals without guarantees of privacy nor promises that the information won’t be shared with antigay political organizations. Worse, presumably troubled individuals are told by the web site’s contact form that “due to high volumes of mail we regret we cannot answer everyone.”

After an initial airing on CTV, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, a Facebook campaign last week persuaded the network to revisit the ad. Its issue advocacy and implicit approval of discrimination were found to violate the network’s ethical standards, and CTV withdrew the ad.

Critics of the ex-gay political movement sometimes observe that successful ex-gays rarely seem to exist as real people with real names — except when they are paid political hacks of the religious right. Critics also observe that the movement commits more resources to politics than to helping people with specific paths to “change.”

This ad unwittingly fuels critics’ arguments.

Hat tip: XGW