Lies with a Straight Face: Exposing the Cranks and Cons Inside the 'Ex-Gay' Industry

By Wayne R. Besen

Lies with a Straight Face tells the fascinating story of the precipitous rise and fall of the "ex-gay" conversion industry in a manner that is both enlightening and entertaining. This fast-moving, fact-based book is perfect for those who enjoy the marriage of politics, history and current events.

The book features the riveting story of the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Truth Wins Out
• Release date: Oct 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781087980126

Wayne R. Besen

Wayne Besen is an author and LGBTQ Rights Advocate. He spent almost three decades researching, monitoring and debunking the "ex-gay" myth. He exposed their key leaders as frauds, helped shut down leading conversion groups and created a robust record documenting how the "ex-gay" industry is toxic and harms the very people it claims to help.In 2006, Besen founded Truth Wins Out to help put "ex-gay" programs out of business. He is a former spokesperson for The Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBTQ political organization. Besen has appeared on leading news and political talk shows: NBC Nightly News, ABC World News Tonight, MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, CNN's AC360, Fox's O'Reilly Factor and The Sean Hannity Show, and Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.He has been quoted in The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Advocate, Newsweek, The Washington Blade, TIME, The Nation, and Mother Jones. Besen graduated from University of Florida in 1993.

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Lies with a Straight Face

Exposing the Cranks and Cons Inside the Ex-Gay Industry

WAYNE BESEN

Lies with a Straight Face:

Exposing the Cranks and Cons Inside the Ex-Gay Industry

Copyright © 2023 by Wayne R. Besen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or news article. To request permissions, contact the publisher at [e-mail]

Cover Illustration Copyright © 2023 by Kevin Marín

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Delray Beach, FL.

www.waynebesen.com

www.truthwinsout.org

Foreword

In reading the soulful opening of this beautifully written, well-researched and up-to-the moment science-based volume, I wish I could reach back in time and comfort the confused thirteen-year-old Wayne. He was confronting almost life-defying odds as a young gay man as he reveals himself to have been. He was trying so hard to fit in with his unforgiving heterosexual peers.

The emotion I experienced for this one lonely struggling gay child was the same as I’d have these days for any of my grandchildren confronting tough times of any kind: love from my heart and a desire to protect from my gut. I wanted to get between Wayne and the bullies (as it were) and stand up for him.

Why?

Because, as Wayne writes in one of the best sentences I’ve encountered as crafted in the English language, I was forced to construct a cognitive dissonance that divided my soul from my physical being.

That dissonance is hell on earth. And that hell is entirely manmade and entirely unnecessary. This book outlines the way out of that hell for us all. None of us need to live in a medieval theocracy in the twenty-first century. But we had better wake up to what Wayne is telling us or we will soon be experiencing the sort of horrors inflicted on the unwary by those who think freedom does not need defenders.

As Wayne puts this truth in describing the wickedness of the pray away the gay industry (constructed by far-right religious and medical quacks) globally, The ‘ex-gay’ industry doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Their success is predicated on religious fundamentalism having cultural currency. But, in recent years, the Religious Right has surrendered their moral authority on every imaginable level. They are no longer widely viewed as beacons of decency and upright behavior.

And why are the forces of the repressive right no longer widely viewed as beacons of decency and upright behavior, or what used to be called family values? Because they abandoned even the pretense of fact-based acceptance of others and came to view all humans through the unforgiving lens of winner-take-all brute force that today passes for morality.

Wayne writes: When a young boy, however, de facto declares he’s straight by announcing his interest in girls, no one asks, ‘Are you sure? Maybe you should swap oral sex with a few of your male friends before you ‘decide’? What about seeing a therapist before you declare this to the world?’

Just so. Wayne has a way of making us confront the idiocy of the anti-gay agenda root and branch. Wayne’s argument against the social, cultural and religious lies upon which today’s global theocratic homophobic movement is rooted confronts their theological terms reprocessed as pseudo-science. These theological dictates are twisted into quack science in order to persecute gay men and women into the surrender of their most basic humanity.

The case against this systemic persecution has never been made more strongly or convincingly than in this highly personal narrative. Wayne offers the baseline of truth when he notes, Homosexuality is clearly as much a part of nature as air and water, and those who don’t accept this are the ones who suffer from delusion and confusion. LGBTQ people should be left alone to be who they are, not molded into who others want them to be, often with calamitous costs to mental health and well-being.

Wayne writes with the passion and skill of a novelist as he tells this story of so-called ex-gay therapy as used to force gay women and men to discover they are actually somehow heterosexual beings in need of healing from the gay illness, either by prayer, bullying, intimidation or law.

As Wayne so rightly puts it: Whether it’s murder, verbal or physical abuse or using economic leverage over a child, all these examples have one thing in common: Parents [or governments] demanding that an LGBTQ [adult or child] must modify who they are.

For those like me—I am one who grew up in the right-wing evangelical world of homophobic fables—this book strikes home on a deep level. As a heterosexual white male one-time poster child for powerful big-time religion raised in an evangelical environment, it’s taken me a lifetime to come to terms with the damage that my own family’s lie-built beliefs did to me as a survivor of an evangelical childhood. I get this book on so many levels!

Looking back as a seventy-one-year-old grandfather these days, Wayne’s book resonates so deeply with me I can barely contain my glee at its publishing! Bravo! And THANK YOU!

There have always been gay men and women and heterosexuals and every point between the two. To be normal is to be kind. Really! If this was not evolutions’ primary directive—kindness and cooperation—no one would be reading these lines. The only abnormal is to be mean. Period. And mean is always, but always, so stupid.

Good and smart humans share (and always have shared) evolution’s most successful selection strategy: the survival of the friendliest. Before the era of language, writing, and—last of all—religion, we learned to survive by cooperating. All that the moral teachings of all the religions of the world represent at their best is simply the codification of what we humans already knew about survival—for instance, that loving care of children works best, that doing unto others as we would be done by isn’t some nice spiritual statement but the baseline of ALL of our survival.

As Wayne writes: If millions of people are willing to overlook the latest science and literally place their lives in jeopardy because they think that God will protect them, believing in the efficacy of ‘praying away the gay’ is hardly a stretch. The human mind has a great capacity for optimism and the imagination can be boundless. Still, fiction cannot replace fact, any more than reality TV can be a substitute for reality.

I hope more people who are not gay read this book than those in the gay community. It is time we all restore fact to the most central position in our thinking. It is time that every gay human is told what every heterosexual human must be told: gay is normal, gay is good, gay is as old as biological carbon-based life forms. You got a problem with that?

It’s time everyone reasonable, rational, caring and compassionate (let alone seeking facts rather than dogma) signs on to the cause Wayne presents here with such luminous passion and skill. Wayne’s cause is no less than the cause of all human justice itself. And the root of all justice is fact-based truth. Wayne has told the truth.

Frank Schaeffer, author of CRAZY FOR GOD: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.

Preface

The Definitive Story of the ‘Ex-Gay’ Industry’s Implosion

In 1998, the Religious Right’s most prominent organizations joined together. They set out to prove that LGBTQ people could be converted to heterosexuality through prayer and therapy. The centerpiece of this aggressive, unprecedented effort was the Truth in Love campaign. So-called ex-gays, who had allegedly changed sexual orientation or gender identity, were featured in slick newspaper advertisements and in television commercials.

Truth in Love was a national media sensation. The riveting campaign graced the cover of magazines, such as Newsweek, and led to countless newspaper features and TV interviews. The provocative ads turned ex-gay into a household term and sparked innumerable water cooler conversations. By the time the campaign ended, virtually every American had heard the message that it was possible to pray away the gay.

Unfortunately, for the Religious Right the Truth in Love campaign curdled into, perhaps, the most spectacular public relations disaster of the century. One-by-one, their leading ex-gay spokespeople were ensnared in tawdry gay sex scandals or came out of the closet to denounce conversion programs. The organizations they touted, led by former homosexuals, shut down after admitting that no one had transformed. Rarely in American history has a PR effort crashed and burned in such a spectacular, humiliating fashion. The right-wing organizations behind the campaign squandered their credibility and lost face.

For several years after the collapse of Truth in Love, ex-gay programs receded, and social conservatives shied away from their ex-gay conversion message. With the passage of time, however, these nefarious groups are beginning to cynically rebrand and reboot. They are presenting the disastrous ex-gay industry as new and innovative, instead of the same old snake oil dressed in a different package.

I wrote Lies with a Straight Face: Exposing the Cranks and Cons Inside the Ex-Gay Industry, to ensure that future generations know the truth. Once upon a time, The Religious Right campaigned vigorously in support of the ex-gay industry. They instead proved the opposite of what they had intended. Efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity are ineffective and harmful. Real people are hurt, families torn apart, and lives destroyed.

Tragically, we live in an age of great historical revisionism. Books are censored, curriculums carefully crafted to omit inconvenient truths and facts are routinely confused with fiction. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even recast slavery, in the state’s middle school history classes, as a jobs program that provided slaves with skills. Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction, believes that schools should teach students about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre without acknowledging that race was the impetus for the murderous rampage against black people.

When cunning politicians are audacious and pernicious enough to spin slavery and race massacres, nothing of historical import is safe or off the table. Efforts to erase the past or render minorities invisible are rapidly accelerating. PEN America reports that 1,477 instances of book bans were tracked during the first half of the 2022-2023 school year and affected 874 unique titles. They found, Book bans continue to target books featuring LGBTQ+ themes or LGBTQ+ characters, characters of color, and books on race and racism.

Lies with a Straight Face is a vital follow-up to my widely acclaimed book published in 2003, Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth. Nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, my original book documents the history of conversion cure programs from the early 20th Century to 2002. My new book discusses what happened from 2003, up to the present day. Lies with a Straight Face tells the fascinating story of the precipitous rise and fall of the ex-gay industry in a manner that is both enlightening and entertaining.

The Religious Right is praying that people have amnesia and forget the implosion of the ex-gay industry, so they can stealthily reintroduce these toxic programs. When they do, my new book will exist to vividly set the record straight, in the service of keeping painful past events from repeating. It is imperative that we own the truth, disseminate facts and refuse to let prevaricators rewrite history in the service of wicked intent.

Dedication

Lies with a Straight Face is dedicated to the late Dan Hall, Rev. Jerry Stephenson and Henry vanAmeringen. These were personal friends, as well as heroes who unwaveringly supported my work fighting for LGBTQ equality. Key to my advocacy success, over many decades, was the love, commitment and dedication of these extraordinary leaders. They are greatly missed but never forgotten.

Additionally, I dedicate this book to my family: My partner Andres Echavarria and my mother and father, Sydney and Neil Besen. Also, my best friends Keith Blackburn and Steve Wilkins. I am eternally grateful for their unconditional love and unwavering support in my personal and professional life. If I roared THANK YOU from the highest mountaintop, it wouldn’t begin to express my gratitude for having these special people in my life.

Acknowledgements

The indispensable, life-saving work of Truth Wins Out and the research for Lies with a Straight Face was only made possible by generous philanthropists and supporters in the LGBTQ Community. I want to thank the following people and foundations for their benevolence, over the course of my career, which allowed my vision to come to fruition. You afforded me the greatest gift imaginable: Waking up each morning to fight for LGBTQ equality.

The Arcus Foundation and Urvashi Vaid, The Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund and Matt Foreman, The Ted Snowdon Foundation, David Hochberg Foundation, The Gill Foundation, The Henry Van Ameringen Foundation, The William A. Kerr Foundation and John Sweet, The B.W. Bastian Foundation and Michael Marriott, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Tom Viola, Andrew Tobias, The David Bohnett Foundation, The Gamma Mu Foundation and Cliff Pettit and Peter Harvey, Replacements LTD and Bob Page, Mitchell Gold, Colgate Darden, Bruce Gressin, Sean Strub, T.M. Jud Gray, John McDonald and Rob Wright, Weston Milliken, James Hormel, Norman Blachford, Dan Hall, William Cohen, Jonathan D. Lewis and Gene Stone.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface – The Definitive Story of the ‘Ex-Gay’ Industry’s Implosion

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Act I – The Underlying Motivation to ‘Change’

Chapter 1 – Why People Try to ‘Change’

Chapter 2 – What is ‘Ex-Gay’?

Act II – The Truth in Love Campaign

Chapter 3 – The Normandy Landing

Chapter 4 – The 1998 Puppy Panic

Chapter 5 – The Launch

Act III – Collapse and Revival

Chapter 6 – The Unraveling

Chapter 7 – The ‘Ex-Gay’ Heyday

Act IV – The Grand Implosion

Chapter 8 – Ungodly in Uganda

Chapter 9 – The Beginning of the End

Chapter 10 – The End of Exodus

Act V – The Conversion Quack Machine

Chapter 11 – The Conversion Inversion

Chapter 12 – Abba Dabba Doo

Chapter 13 – Snake Oil Doyle

Chapter 14 – Weird Weekend: Journey into Manhood

Act VI – Today and Tomorrow

Chapter 15 – The Contemporary Cons: Reboot and Rebrand

Chapter 16 – The Future

Epilogue: A Broad Historical Perspective

About The Author

Wayne Besen: A Life Dedicated to Fighting the ‘Ex-Gay’ Myth

The Story of Truth Wins Out and How You Can Help

Notes

Act I

The Underlying Motivation to ‘Change’

Chapter 1

Why People Try to ‘Change’

Religion-based bigotry has to come to an end in this country and we can’t be afraid to use those words. That’s how we educate people, because you can’t talk about the disease if you don’t know what it’s called.¹

-- Mitchell Gold, Activist and Author, Youth in Crisis: What Everyone Should Know About Growing Up Gay

Joan was the prettiest girl at the Jewish Community Center’s Summer Camp. Week-after-week, she straggled into the gymnasium, smiling and flirting with me between my basketball games. We were barely thirteen and Joan had patiently waited for me to make a move. Instead, I often deflected by making jokes. She would laugh at my offbeat humor, but the flirtation would end there.

One afternoon, Joan sat in the splintered wooden bleachers that rose above the basketball court. After the game, I made my usual jokes, but this time she didn’t laugh. Instead, Joan peered into my eyes and asked if I wanted to go upstairs into the private gymnastics room to practice kissing. My friends overheard and cheered me on. The peer pressure was overwhelming, leaving me with no choice, lest they think I was gay.

We ambled through a series of winding, musty staircases that smelled like an old library, until we reached a creaky door to an empty chamber. It was so quiet that one could practically hear an ant crawl. The floor of the rectangular room was covered in blue tumbling pads. The walls were fully mirrored and gymnastics equipment stood intermittently about the room. It felt surreal, like a cross between an Olympic training facility and a funhouse.

Joan gently took my hand and guided us to a spot in a corner of the room. We reclined on the mat without speaking. My heart raced, and in the quiescence, I could hear each beat. My breathing labored as I haltingly reached for Joan’s breasts. I looked into her brown eyes and moved in slowly for a kiss.

As I inched closer, petrifying thoughts ricocheted through my head. What if I failed to get an erection and Joan told my friends? What if I simply told the truth that I was gay and had no interest? Wasn’t I taught that honesty was the best policy?

Who was I kidding with such a silly, irrational thought? The truth wasn’t an option, it was a social death sentence. It was 1983 and the idea of coming out at age thirteen was preposterous. I’d be better off announcing that I was an alien who had just arrived from Venus. If people learned of my sexual orientation, I would likely face ridicule from my friends, possible rejection from my parents, immediate dismissal from my basketball team, daily fistfights in school and the possibility of endless, expensive sessions with quack therapists who would try to cure me.

I was young, but rapidly awakening to my harsh reality. Society had cruelly conspired to incarcerate my emotions, violently denigrate my sexual feelings and blithely lock my heart inside an impenetrable box. What should have been the discovery of humanity’s most magnificent and inspiring feelings – sexual pleasure and love – were disfigured into something vile and hideous beyond words.

Well, there actually were words for what I was feeling, and they were usually spewed on the playground: Homo, faggot, fudge packer and sissy. I was fortunate to avoid bullying because I was athletic, but the words that causally littered the football field, the basketball court or the bowling alley left lasting scars.

The anti-gay insult was widely recognized as the worst epithet anyone could hurl, and the idea of openly embracing such an identity in Texas was unthinkable. These homophobic slights were not relegated to students, but also casually slung by coaches and teachers. The thought that they could be harming their gay or transgender pupils, or that they might face consequences for their monstrous slurs, never seemed to enter their minds.

My favorite, and widely admired, sixth grade social studies teacher, once told his students that he and his wife had driven that weekend through the gay Montrose section of Houston and saw all these disgusting homosexuals and faggots fondling each other’s butts, while pantomiming the act with a sickened expression on his face. This teacher climbed the career ladder to later win Houston Area Principal of the Year. I can only imagine how many LGBTQ students he wounded over time with his careless – or maybe intentional – words. I was only eleven years old when he spewed his vitriol, yet I remember it almost forty years later, as if it happened yesterday.

In 1984, as a high school freshman, I was attending a Houston Rockets NBA basketball game at the Summit, when the public address announcer declared that a gay rights referendum to outlaw job discrimination had been crushed by a 4-to-1 margin. The crowd wildly cheered in support of the anti-gay outcome, as I sat fearfully suffering in pained silence. I had to push down my emotions, sitting poker faced, lest I give a hint of my sexual orientation.

In high school, I had a basketball coach who, after a particularly bad loss, barreled into the locker room, slammed the chalk board and screamed, Everybody on this team played like a bunch of faggots, except for Wayne. After scoring 25-points and grabbing 15-rebounds, I wanted to scream, Coach, had we played like faggots we would have won the damn game.

At an early age, society sent an unmistakable message that made my erotic feelings neurotic and my pleasurable thoughts a cause for panic. My friends and classmates were able to openly flirt and date care-free. They experienced excitement and possibility, and people like me, endured unrelenting angst.

There was an escape hatch from this crushing reality: Lying.

The world essentially trained us to become professional liars. Society’s moral and political leaders demanded, for no rational reason, that I construct a fake me to avoid the dire consequences perpetrated by government, family, media and religion.

* * *

Into this cauldron of personal calamity, my lips tentatively touched Joan’s and my shaking hand nervously touched her breasts. The closer we were physically, the more I became spiritually detached. With every fiber of being I wanted to run, but instead I smiled and moaned, going through the motions, because that’s what the world demanded. That’s what my friends on the JCC basketball court and my family at home expected. I was forced to construct a cognitive dissonance that divided my soul from my physical being.

While the situation felt unnatural and forced, there was another part of me that desperately hoped that I would discover sexual stirrings when I touched Joan. Sure, I was fantasizing about boys the entire time, but maybe, just maybe, caressing her would magically flip a switch and unlock the secret that was keeping me from a normal adolescence.

Unfortunately, it was not the case. This moment with a lovely girl only confirmed that I was gay. Nobody talks about this, but I consider such experiences a damaging form of sexual abuse. In a normal, healthy society, I would have been able to say, Sorry, we can be friends, Joan, but I’m only interested in guys. Instead, to avoid suspicion for being gay, I was forced into a sexual situation that was not of my own volition. Not only did I endure this psychological torment, but I had to enthusiastically pretend that I enjoyed it. My friends and I high fived and they expressed jealousy of my exploits. I smiled and played along with their celebratory pats on the back, but I later went home and cried myself to sleep.

No doubt, many heterosexuals, particularly men, would mock my story. They would say lighten up and casually dismiss the situation as teenage experimentation. They would accuse me of overreacting and say, what’s the big deal?

When a young boy, however, de facto declares he’s straight by announcing his interest in girls, no one asks, Are you sure? Maybe you should swap oral sex with a few of your male friends before you ‘decide?’ What about seeing a therapist before you declare this to the world?

The very thought of this scenario is so preposterous that it enters the realm of the absurd. But if it’s unthinkable to ask this of heterosexual youth, why is this sexual obstacle course of idiocy expected for LGBTQ adolescents? If it would be seen as traumatizing for straight youth, how could it be considered less psychologically scarring for LGBTQ teenagers?

That people can’t inherently see this glaring double standard, is an indictment of an arrogant and ignorant culture and society. One steeped in subconscious heterosexual supremacy and inequality, that has no qualms about asking young LGBTQ people to subject themselves to unnecessary, unpleasant sexual experiences that they would never submit themselves to or their own straight children.

Oddly, the ex-gay industry would have celebrated my forced heterosexual behavior with Joan as a success story. They superficially consider activity with the opposite sex a triumph, even if the participant is anguished by the experience or must fantasize about the same sex to perform. Only in a twisted world that thrives on shame and deceit would such a shallow definition of heterosexuality be tolerated.

These phony ex-gay programs teach self-loathing and insecurity over genuine masculinity. For example, Greg Quinlan, President of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays, showed a high degree of internalized homophobia during a speech at anti-gay activist Peter LaBarbera’s Truth Academy in the Chicago suburbs.

I wasn’t your flaming faggot, you know, Quinlan told the crowd. I can say that because I’ve been there and done that. You know, the one’s whose wrists are so limp that when the wind blows, they slap themselves in the face. I wasn’t one of them, Quinlan continued as the audience chuckled.²

I share my story about my experience with Joan, not to elicit sympathy. Truth be told, the level of anguish that I endured was quite minor in the grand scheme of things. Countless people have withstood significantly worse experiences, particularly women who are sexually abused, children who are molested by trusted authorities, those from religious families who were told they are going to Hell, along with survivors who were psychologically and physically tortured by conversion psychiatrists or ministers.

What I do want to impart with my personal story, is the emptiness of cynical ex-gay rhetoric that says their programs exist only for those who want them. The Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg frames it as a choice that some people make to seek therapy to help them overcome unwanted same sex attractions.³ Christopher Doyle, a notorious ex-gay therapist, writes, "..if homosexual-oriented persons experience distress because of their own unwanted attractions or feelings (or the consequences that result from such actions), is it a bad thing for them to seek assistance from those who provide counseling or ministry…?"⁴

It’s a neat bit of sophistry. Doyle and other conversion therapists try to entice clients through scaremongering, disingenuously associating gay and transgender identities with alleged consequences. Doyle writes, The results are devastating: Record levels of substance abuse; disproportionately high rates of sexually transmitted infections (especially among men) higher-than average proportions of intimate partner abuse; and continuing escalating suicide rates, especially among post-operative transgender persons.

What Doyle and others conveniently fail to mention, is that the rhetoric they spew into society is a primary risk factor for the very behaviors they claim to be concerned about diminishing. Dr. Caitlin Ryan, director of the Family Acceptance Project and a professor at San Francisco State University discovered, LGBT teens who were highly rejected by their families were 8 times more likely to have attempted suicide, 6 times as vulnerable to severe depression, and 3 times more likely to use drugs.⁵

A key form of rejection is the demand that a child change their sexual orientation or gender identity by enrolling in an ex-gay program. Another study by Dr. Ryan reports: Parent-initiated attempts to change participant’s sexual orientation during adolescence were associated with more negative mental health problems for young adults.⁶

Clearly, Doyle and his ilk are the problem dressing up in solution drag. They are the ones causing much of the distress, and related consequences, by denigrating and demeaning LGBTQ people. In a sense, they are double dealing by nursing negative attitudes, then offering to help those – for a fee --harmed by the effects of their nefarious rhetoric.

While we are on the topic of consequences, there is mounting evidence of the effects of ex-gay programs. Former ex-gay leader McKrae Game, who was once on the Board of Exodus International and wrote Hope for Wholeness, a widely used ex-gay curriculum, now says that conversion efforts can literally drive a person insane:

I was in a constant state of anxiety. I had four nervous breakdowns while I was in ‘ex-gay’ ministry trying to be something different than I was and trying to help other people do the same thing. It really created a form of mental illness in my life. And I have to say, since I have put aside that struggle of trying to live for everyone else and trying to deny my sexuality and who I am and really just saying, ‘I don’t care who and what other people think,’ I have more peace now than I have ever had in my entire life.⁷

In terms of the rhetoric of wanting to change, why would any healthy person of sound mind and judgement want to alter intense feelings of love and pleasure unless these extraordinary longings and emotions were attached to powerful and debilitating stigmas? When I was a teenager and thought being gay was the end of the world, I wanted to change. When I learned that the homophobic messages imparted to me were a lie, I no longer had any desire to be anything but my authentic self.

One can’t logically separate the desire to change from the toxic messages disseminated. Ex-gay programs feed on stigma, they are coercive by definition, and exploit fears of isolation and rejection. Ex-gay survivor, Jordan Kramer, captures the feelings of dread and desperation that cause people to enter conversion therapy. I was told that because being gay is a mental illness, I will be sick for the rest of my life. I really thought becoming straight was a matter of life or death.⁸

In a world where LGBTQ people aren’t derided as perverts, criminals and sinners, there are going to be very few, if any, ex-gay programs. It is only in cultures that supply hateful, intolerant rhetoric and laws, that a demand exists for LGBTQ people to try to change who they are. That’s why you don’t see reverse programs, where heterosexual men and women try to become gay or lesbian. Without the stigma and shame, what incentive is there to change?

Former ex-lesbian activist, Yvette Cantu Schneider, says that these programs use coercion to recruit LGBTQ youth. I know a lot of people think, ‘Well, I’m choosing this for myself. Most of those people are young. They’re impressionable. They’re listening to people in their worlds, which I understand. They’re listening to pastors. They’re listening to parents, but they’re not able to actually embrace who they are, how they feel, who they’re attracted to and live an open, free life.⁹

Thankfully, times have changed, and fewer LGBTQ youth must pretend to be heterosexual and date the opposite sex to survive adolescence. By eschewing such unnecessary trauma, today’s generation is psychologically healthier and enter same-sex relationships with less emotional baggage. Favorable laws and a positive media environment make this a Golden Age for many LGBTQ youth, who often come out at younger ages and encounter less resistance, compared to their elders. Although, the climate is becoming more intolerant, of late, as bigots like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis spew epithets like groomer and pass anti-LGBTQ laws.

Still, the work of eradicating ex-gay conversion programs is more important than ever. For LGBTQ youth growing up in conservative households or in religious sects, the world is still remarkably similar to the one I experienced. There are also millions of LGBTQ youth coming of age in countries where homosexuality is criminalized, and LGBTQ people ostracized.

It is really, really hard for a gay person in Uganda, said Moses Mworeko, who left Uganda for the United States of America. All the time, gay people are being arrested. Their homes are being raided by the police. So, it’s really, really very hard for gay people in Uganda to live there.¹⁰

These unenlightened corners of our universe provide fertile territory for ex-gay programs that flourish on fear. Uganda, for example, is where the American ex-gay industry and evangelical groups had previously meddled and were responsible for lawmakers in Kampala introducing the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which included the death penalty, in some cases, for LGBTQ people.

Finally, it’s critical to understand that ex-gay programs negatively affect all LGBTQ people. Those who endure quack therapists, and ex-gay ministries, are known as survivors. However, every LGBTQ person is harmed by ex-gay ideology. The false notion that change is possible is often invoked as a cruel pretext for rejection and a license to discriminate or violate.

In my case, I pretended to be heterosexual, as if I were confused and needed clarification through opposite sex experimentation. No, I knew exactly who I was every bit as much as my heterosexual peers knew what they liked. The confusion came from those who were too narrow minded to accept the wide diversity in human sexuality.

Indeed, Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl observed in his book, Biological Exuberance, that at least 450 animal species exhibit same-sex sexual behavior. Homosexuality is clearly as much a part of nature as air and water, and those who don’t accept this are the ones who suffer from delusion and confusion. LGBTQ people should be left alone to be who they are, not molded into who others want them to be, often with calamitous costs to mental health and well-being.

People try to change because they want to be loved and accepted. As long as prejudice and discrimination exist in society, charlatans will step into the lucrative void to create a supply of ex-gay conversion programs. Love and acceptance are the antidotes to ex-gay poison.

Chapter 2

What is ‘Ex-Gay’?

This above all: to thine own self be true.

-- William Shakespeare