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their speech, arguing that the church should come to an understanding and acceptance of gay people. Not surprisingly, this proclamation shocked the members of the staid congregation, who were expecting reformed homosexual men. Later that night, Bussee and Cooper checked into their hotel. Bussee recalls in the documentary One Nation under God that they interpreted the fact that they were booked in a room with only a single bed as a sign from God.²⁰

      Bussee had been married for several years and was a founding member of Exodus, so his defection was hard on other members like Frank. The extremely public disclosure of the failure of ex-gay identity, and Bussee's subsequent avowals to the media that rampant sex between men transpired at ex-gay conferences, instigated mayhem within the leadership of Exodus. Neither Bussee nor Cooper ever returned to the movement or repented. They exchanged rings in 1982 through a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) and continued to criticize the ex-gay movement until Cooper's death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1991, calling Exodus “homophobia with a happy face.”²¹ In an A4CC publication, Bussee wrote, “After dealing with hundreds of gay people, I never met one who went from gay to straight. Even if you manage to alter someone's sexual behavior, you cannot change his or her true sexual orientation. If you got them away from the Christian limelight and asked them, ‘Honestly now, are you saying that you are no longer homosexual and you are now heterosexually oriented?' Not one person said, ‘Yes, I am actually now heterosexual.’”²² Frank was vague and uncomfortable talking about this period in Exodus's history. “We had a terrible time the first few years. One of the reasons I wanted Exodus to become an organization was because I wanted to set a standard of ethics for that kind of ministry. Most of the people were in it for their own needs. They were lonely, they felt guilty and stayed on the fence and started ministries that should never have been started. We had a terrible time—a terrible time, initially.”

      The problem of Exodus in the seventies was that many ex-gay leaders had been Christians only for several months, and having a testimony was the only qualification for ministry work. Contrary to Frank's hopes and experience, a testimony was not insurance against temptation. Another contentious issue was the clash between various religious belief systems and approaches, as members came from Baptist, Pentecostal, nondenominational, and other churches. Some delegates believed in demonic deliverance rather than therapy for homosexuals, and others advocated treatments for instant change rather than long-term healing and participation in ministries. Most of the early ex-gay ministries had no ties to a denomination or an advisory board to provide oversight. It was perhaps predictable that many “flamed out,” in Frank's words. When Frank became president in 1979, the organization was in chaos from within and without. There were protests by gay-liberation groups and internal defections and rivalries. The sexual scandals in particular were salacious fodder for newspaper reports and ex-gay critics, and they highlighted the lack of any regulatory mechanism for the organization. The scandals also raised the recurrent question of how the movement would distinguish between behavior and identity when it came to sexuality. Frank and other ex-gay leaders began to assert that change was a long and difficult process, emphasizing the parallel to the exodus out of Egypt. “There is a desert to be crossed between our old homosexual lifestyle and our new life in Christ. Many have perished in that desert. The world sees the bodies in the desert. It doesn't see those who have successfully made it across.”

      Although Frank briefly considered abandoning Exodus to focus on Love in Action, he felt compelled by an almost messianic impulse to build a global movement. Scandals still occurred, but by 1982 Exodus had established guidelines for people forming a ministry, which included some oversight by a national board of ministry leaders. Exodus belatedly admitted that many people attending conferences should not have been involved in an ex-gay ministry, and a purge of leaders ensued. The main spokespeople of the movement emerged in the 1980s: Bob Davies, the original “Brother Bob,” who acted as Exodus's president until 2001; Joe Dallas, a Christian counselor and ex-gay speaker; Andy Comiskey, director of Desert Stream Ministries in Southern California; Alan Medinger, head of Regeneration in Maryland; and of course Frank Worthen, who continued to lead LIA. These men became the real founding fathers of Exodus. There were still few visible female ex-gay leaders in the organization, and again, by virtue of their own experiences and biases, these men helped further determine that the organization would primarily characterize homosexuality as a male problem through its ministries, theories, and materials. At the Exodus 2000 conference in San Diego, there was a table with pictures from the early conferences in the 1980s. The photographs revealed Frank and Alan, now in their seventies, looking young, hopeful, and spry. One of the pictures was of Sy Rogers, a former transvestite who appeared on numerous talk shows, moved to Singapore to start an ex-gay ministry, and is now a highly respected Exodus speaker. Rogers is legendary within the ex-gay movement for his response to a viewer on the Donahue show in 1983. When the person said Rogers did not look heterosexual, Rogers proclaimed, “I may not be Burt Reynolds, but I'm light years from pantyhose.” In the photograph from the early 1980s, a man is presenting Rogers with a T-shirt that reads, “Welcome to the Hetero World.” Frank said, “What we saw only in faith in the seventies, we saw in reality in the 1980s.”²³

      Even by the 1980s, the infrastructure of the residential programs was underdeveloped, and the organization relied on an ad hoc method of counseling people, based loosely on the structure of recovery groups like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Although Exodus incorporates elements of the “one step at a time” approach to this day, ex-gays who disagreed with psychological explanations and wanted to focus entirely on the twelve-step method established Homosexuals Anonymous, which declared itself a separate organization from Exodus. (Colin Cook, one of the founders of the Quest Learning Center/Homosexuals Anonymous and a visible ex-gay ministry leader, resigned in the mid-eighties because of accusations that he was having sex with male counselees.) For the time being, Exodus ministries used an amalgam of biblical passages and twelve-step rhetoric in their materials and classes, combining what Frank characterized as “the best of the religious and psychological.” Michael Bussee criticized the changes in Exodus models this way: “At first they said prayer would lead you to change, then they changed it and said only a long struggle would lead to change, and then therapy and residential programs became the only way to change.”²⁴ Today, New Hope utilizes a model of residential living and relationships with God and other ex-gay men to promote healing from homosexuality. Other ex-gay ministries base their programs on an AA model and extensive psychological testing and counseling with trained therapists and psychologists.

      NEW HOPE IN MANILA

      Frank continued to oversee Love in Action throughout the 1980s, as he completed and refined the “Steps Out Residential Program” fourpart workbook and his guide for pastors and counselors, “Helping People Step Out of Homosexuality.” Sometime in the late eighties, Frank explained that he sensed a calling from God to begin ex-gay missionary work abroad. At first he ignored these calls, but God's voice was insistent, and he became sure that the place he needed to go was Manila, Philippines. “Sometime around 1984, God gave me the word that Anita and I would be ministering in the Philippines. At the time, it wasn't exactly a welcomed word. I pondered this for about two years, then in talking with Sy Rogers I found that God had told him that he and his family would be going to Singapore, too. It was at this time that I shared this word with Anita.”²⁵ The calling coincided with efforts by Exodus to expand the organization internationally through ministry church plants in countries without an ex-gay presence. “Planting” ex-gay ministries abroad was necessary for the creation of an international network that would counteract the emergence of pro-gay movements in parts of Asia and Europe. Despite some foot-dragging and a lack of initial enthusiasm from Anita, the Worthens moved to the Philippines to initiate an ex-gay ministry called Bagong Pag-Asa that would be the sister ministry to Love in Action. Anita and Frank went to Manila as Exodus North American missionaries, and Exodus gave them an official send-off at the annual conference in San Antonio in 1990. They had made a three-year commitment.

      Manila was disconcertingly unfamiliar and a far cry from the suburban streets of San Rafael. Frank, who was then in his sixties, suffered various illnesses during the first year, including a bout of Bell's palsy, a nerve condition that paralyzes one side of the face. Although their “calling” was ex-gay ministry, Frank and Anita tried to integrate into the local community through service projects, and one of their first

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