Straight to Jesus 

On a New Years Eve a few years ago, men between the ages of twenty and forty-five arrived from all over the country to begin a residential program at an ex-gay ministry in San Rafael, California called New Hope. Though the men were strangers, they spent the holiday cooking and praying together. In the past, these same men might have celebrated the New Year by drinking and using drugs, but this year was different. They had come to New Hope to reform their sexuality, and they hoped that a year in an ex-gay program would diminish their sexual attraction to members of the same sex.

In 2000 and 2001, fifteen men participated in the residential ex-gay program where I conducted research. One of the new arrivals was a heavyset man in his late thirties named Doug who had previously lived in a gay neighborhood in San Francisco. He recalled sitting next to his high school boyfriend listening to the pastor in the Pentecostal church where he was raised. “He got up on the pulpit and had this list in descending order of who was going to go to hell, and at the top of the list was the homosexuals,” he recalled. “Here I am, a sixteen-year-old boy, and this guy is telling me I’m going to go to hell. And so from that point on, there was no way I could live with the guilt of trying to be a church-going Christian and trying to be gay.”

In order to conquer his same-sex attractions, Doug decided to devote himself to an ex-gay program where he could overcome what he called his “homosexual problem” and eventually get married. “I don’t want to be fifty years old, sitting in a gay bar because I just got dumped and have no kids, no family and be lonelier than heck.” Doug and others end up at a ministry because they grapple with what to them is an irreconcilable conflict between the conservative Christian beliefs of their upbringing and their own same-sex desires. By becoming a born-again Christian and maintaining a personal relationship with Jesus, Doug felt he might become a “new creation.”

New Hope is part of a wider ex-gay movement, a collection of religious ministries that attempt to convert gay men and lesbians to nonhomosexual Christian lives.  Exodus International, an umbrella organization that oversees hundreds of conservative Christian-based ministries all over world, dominates the movement, but it also includes non-Christian organizations like Parents of Ex-gay People, Courage for Catholics, the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH), Evergreen for Mormons, and Jonah, a program for Jewish ex-gays. There are now over two hundred ex-gay ministries worldwide in Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia, and the movement is expanding.

Ex-gay leaders like Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus, believe that heterosexuality is God’s intent for men and women, and therefore sexual conversion from homosexuality is possible. To spread this message, Exodus holds an annual national conference and collaborates with organizations like Focus on the Family to sponsor “Love Won Out” conferences at which ex-gays speak to religious groups about “coming out of homosexuality.” In June 2006, when the Senate debated the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would make marriage for same-sex couples illegal everywhere in the United States, Alan Chambers joined a group of conservative Christian leaders in Washington to support the amendment. In an advertising campaign Exodus had released earlier that year, Chambers was pictured with his wife. The ad read: “Here’s the truth. If I had a gay marriage option 10 years ago, I’d never have dealt with the root issues of my homosexual behavior.”

The testimonies of ex-gays like Chambers are a key component of conservative Christian opposition to attempts to secure rights for gay people in the realms of marriage, partner benefits, and adoption policy. The ex-gay movement replaces explicit antigay rhetoric with claims that there is “hope for healing” from homosexuality, supporting the contention of many Christian conservatives that being gay is a misguided choice, and that gay identity should be repudiated. The visibility of people like Alan Chambers is central to how conservative Christian and Christian Right organizations like Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, American Family Association, frame policy discussions around marriage equality.

With Alan Chamber’s testimony as “living proof that change is possible,” antigay marriage initiatives can claim that they are not promoting bigotry or discrimination. How can they deprive someone of a right, they counter, when the very identity that right is protecting is something they believe does not exist?

In April, the Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal organization, and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX) launched a “Change Is Possible” campaign focused on GLBT youth in high schools around the country. Their goal is to promote the message that high school students can and should participate in ex-gay ministries to change their sexuality, and that schools with diversity programs discriminate against ex-gays and ex-gay supportive students.

The “Change is Possible” campaign utilizes the language of tolerance and rights for those students who want to support the idea that ex-gays exist. The campaign distributes a “Tolerance Test” for ex-gay and ex-gay supportive students who they claim have been “silenced” by pro-gay forces in their schools. Exodus has developed a separate Exodus Youth website with music, CDs, and teaching materials as well as Refuge, an outpatient ex-gay program for teenagers. They also recently created a curriculum guide on youth, sexuality, and the roots of homosexuality for Christian schools that they hope to expand elsewhere. The idea behind the Exodus Youth website and the PFOX campaign is to provide an alternative narrative to coming-out as gay. Instead, it tells questioning youth that their same-sex feelings are not an identity but a condition, and it directs them to ex-gay ministries and resources where they can attempt to transform themselves.

The debate surrounding the movement, then, is about more than just gay marriage and coming out as a gay youth, it is about the legitimacy of gay identity itself. Critics of the movement argue that ex-gay men and women are simply controlling their behavior and repressing their desires, and the movement has suffered some very public failures; the first president of Exodus fell in love with a man at his ministry and they defected from the movement. Yet often lost in the acrimonious exchanges between ex-gay leaders and their critics are men like Curtis, who are neither comfortable in their churches nor in the gay community. For these men, places like New Hope can offer the first experience they have ever had of belonging to a community and being open about their struggles.

New Hope is a haven for men banned from conservative churches, estranged from family members, and alienated from gay organizations or social networks. Many of the men arrived seeking camaraderie and a sense of community that had been absent from their lives. They decorated the meager space around their bunk beds with posters and photographs. The program found them jobs in local businesses, and each night they ate together communally. After dinner, there were Bible studies, classes, and praise and worship sessions. They met in small accountability groups each week where they confessed everything from same-sex fantasies to petty frustrations about who was not keeping their room tidy. They spoke of healing their “brokenness.” If they were depressed, there was always someone to confide in. It was, in the words of one man, a refuge from the world.

Yet it is a refuge with a strict emphasis on the transformation of a person’s identity. The ex-gay movement promotes the idea that the gay community is a monolithic place where promiscuity, drug use, and general hedonism are rampant, and it encourages the men to make repentant confessions about substance abuse and homosexuality alike. The ex-gay process of conversion is therapeutic as well as religious: The ministries assert that sexual healing occurs through these public confessions or by offering their problems up to Jesus. Through subsequent retellings, they believe, the trauma lessens and a person heals. These redemption narratives become the evidence that “change is possible” to counter claims for gay rights.

To someone like Doug, change, whether it involves his desires, behavior, or his identity, is a process that is uncertain, fraught with relapses and some temporary successes. Much more than immediate change, most ex-gay men and women describe their transformations as a process of developing a relationship with Jesus rather than one of sexual conversion. In the ex-gay movement, it is far more scandalous to abandon Jesus than yield to same-sex desire. Even the label “ex-gay,” which the men use to describe themselves, represents a sense of being in flux between identities. Their lives usually do not end in marriage but become a continual process of sexual falls, recommitting to Christ, celibacy, participating in ex-gay ministries, and relationships with men or women.

Although the political goals of the ex-gay movement and queer activism are radically distinct, by accepting that a person’s behavior and desires will not necessarily correspond with their new ex-gay identity or religious identity, ex-gay men and women enact a queer concept of sexuality, undergoing queer conversions.

While men and women in ex-gay ministries do not and cannot envision homosexuality as a positive moral choice, their lives exemplify the instability of the religious and sexual conversion process. Their narratives of testimonial sexuality are performances that while sincere, also point to the instability and changeability of their own identities rather than as a testament to heterosexuality. Participants in an ex-gay ministry experience and describe their transformations as a religious process rather than one of sexual conversion. Rather than concrete evidence that change happens, men like Doug retain the belief that change is possible. It is that possibility which keeps some of them stumbling forward despite their own sexual falls. It is also that idea which drives conservative Christian activism against the right to marriage for gay men and lesbians.

Tanya Erzen is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University where she teaches courses in religious studies and sexuality studies. Her book, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (University of California Press, 2006) received the 2006 Ruth Benedict Prize from the American Anthropological Association. She has done interviews about the book with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air, MSNBC and numerous radio stations.