Partners in prayer

ON A NEW YEAR'S EVE a few years ago, men between the ages of 20 and 45 arrived from all over the country to begin a residential program at New Hope Ministry in San Rafael, Calif. 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 what they'd come to New Hope to reform was their sexuality. These men hoped that a year in New Hope's ``ex-gay" program would diminish their sexual attraction to members of the same sex.

Kyle, who asked that his last name not be used in order to preserve his anonymity, was 21 years old with streaks of blond in his hair when he arrived from a small town in Canada. Raised in a family of Christian missionaries, he had grown up believing homosexual attraction and behavior are sins and that life as a gay person meant being separated from Jesus. At age 16, he came out to his family as ``someone with gay feelings who wants to change."

In order to conquer his same-sex attractions, Kyle 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 50 years old, sitting in a gay bar because I just got dumped and have no kids, no family-and be lonelier than heck."

Kyle and others end up at New Hope 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, Kyle 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. The movement is dominated by Exodus International, an umbrella organization that oversees hundreds of conservative Christian-based ministries all over world, and also includes non-Christian organizations like Parents of Ex-gay People and Jonah, a program for Jewish ex-gays. There are now over 200 ex-gay ministries worldwide, and the movement is expanding.

Ex-gay leaders like Frank Worthen, a founder of New Hope and 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 conferences at which ex-gays speak to religious groups about ``coming out of homosexuality."

On Monday, when the Senate debated the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would make marriage for same-sex couples illegal everywhere in the US, Alan Chambers, the current president of Exodus and an ex-gay, joined a group of conservative Christian leaders in Washington to support the amendment. ``Here's the truth," Chambers explained in a press release. ``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 local, state, and national 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 rather than awarded political rights.

The debate surrounding the movement, then, is about more than just gay marriage, 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 indeed 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 Kyle, who are neither at home in their churches or 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.

I came to know Kyle when I went to New Hope to write about the perspectives of men and women in an ex-gay ministry through fieldwork and interviews. I chose New Hope because of Frank Worthen's position as a founder of the ex-gay movement. Exodus emerged in the early 1970s, when Worthen became a born-again Christian at age 44 after living his entire adult life as a gay man. He soon began counseling people who were ``homosexual strugglers" at his church. According to one of its early leaders, Exodus chose its name because, ``homosexuals finding freedom reminds me of the children of Israel leaving the bondage of Egypt and moving towards the Promised Land." (The original name, ``Free All Gays" was eliminated after the organizers realized the potential contradictions of its acronym.)

At first, Worthen was skeptical about my research, but after a few weeks of group prayer and consultation, he and the other ministry leaders determined that it was part of God's wider plan for me to come to New Hope. Implicit within my acceptance by the New Hope leadership team was their belief that I, too, had the potential for conversion to a Christian life. In the course of my research, I interviewed men and women in ex-gay programs, attended classes, dinners, conferences, and parties; and I maintained relationships with men and women affiliated with the ex-gay movement over a span of several years, and remain in contact with some of them. I never converted to Christianity, but my relationships with people at New Hope altered how I understood their faith and their desire to change their sexualities.

In 2000 and 2001, 15 men participated in the New Hope program. One of the new arrivals was a heavyset man in his late 30s 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 16-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."

New Hope is a haven for men banned from conservative churches, estranged from family members, and alienated from gay organizations or social networks. During my time there, 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 wasn't 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 program of ``rehabilitation." Worthen teaches the men at New Hope that the gay community is a monolithic place where promiscuity, drug use, and general hedonism are rampant, and he 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 ``offering their problems up to Jesus." Through subsequent retellings, they believe, the trauma lessens and a person heals.

Every week, the men at New Hope fill out an elaborate two-page accountability questionnaire that they submit to their house leader, and they bring up any improprieties for group discussion. The questions ask about phone sex, entering public bathrooms without an ``accountability partner," going to the beach alone, listening to music that reminds them of the past, leaving work early, using the Internet, and contact with friends in what the movement calls ``the gay lifestyle." Lest something slip through, the last question on the sheet asks, ``Is there anything else that has happened since your last accountability sheet that you should confess?"

This approach of course presumes that homosexuality is something which you can, and should, heal. Ex-gay literature sees homosexuality as a developmental disorder that results from not bonding properly with the parent of the same sex as a child. So in addition to encouraging men to repent, residential ex-gay programs like New Hope are also designed to allow men to build same-sex friendships in order to repair their sense of masculinity and by extension, their heterosexuality.

To foster this rediscovery of masculinity-and to head off potential sexual attraction in such a close-knit setting-the program has a series of rules and regulations governing behavior. Men must not wear inappropriate clothing, which includes ``short shorts or tight pants, tank tops, spandex or biker pants, and cut-off or half-shirts." No one can join a health club or gym. Smoking was banned after two men were caught sharing a cigarette and kissing.

Since the program emphasizes masculinity as a cure for homosexuality, what it means to be a man is a constant topic of earnest discussion. New Hope's program literature extols the value of sports as a means toward becoming manly and assertive. Kyle, however, complained that he was never going to enjoy the weekly basketball games. The only thing he ever felt accomplished doing was styling and cutting hair, and he dreamed of becoming a hairdresser. Despite a ministry rule against hair coloring, Kyle kept his hair meticulously bleached and dyed throughout most of the year. He also provided free weekly haircuts.

At ``Straight Man Night," men from an affiliated church visit New Hope and answer questions about what it means to be heterosexual and masculine. Ex-gay men pose a series of questions to the visitors and write down their responses: ``Were you ever afraid that you might have homosexual tendencies? Did you and any of your friends experiment with homosexual sex? As a Christian, how do you deal with lust? Do you compare your body with other men?" The idea is that ex-gay men will find points of identification with the straight men. At the end of the night, they fill out evaluations of the visitors, and whether they learned anything significant. ``There are a lot of things I could teach straight men," Kyle griped, ``like how to dress."

To someone like Kyle, 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.

Kyle's experience at New Hope was typical in many ways. He experienced moments of elation, severe depression, crushes on other men, homesickness, and boredom. He eventually returned home with the expectation that he would apply everything he had learned to his old life. Instead, during the next several years he experienced only more uncertainty regarding his sexuality. He began occasionally dating men at the same time he volunteered at a local ex-gay ministry. Later, he embarked upon a chaste relationship with a woman he hoped to marry, but he broke it off after realizing he would never feel sexual attraction for her. Finally, he became a stylist and moved from his rural hometown to a large city where he began to identify as a gay man.

But like many ex-gays, Kyle still has not reconciled his sexuality and religious beliefs. He recently e-mailed to say he had begun attending church again after three years. ``I really have no idea what is going on at the moment, but I know that things are changing again. God and I have been chatting a lot over the last few months. I honestly don't know what this all means yet, but I will be sure to keep you updated on the crazy Gay-God ambivalent life I lead."

Tanya Erzen is an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Her book, ``Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement," from which this article is adapted, will be published this month by University of California Press.