LITMIR.BIZ

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own activism around abortion and to challenge the expected outcomes of their lives. Ex-gay men and women also express their life stories through the form of the testimony, even if their actual experiences do not fit neatly into the testimonial structure. As they hear other testimonies through day-to-day interactions in the program, they learn to strategically position and locate their own lives into a similar framework of sinner and saved. Testimonies circulate in published materials as pamphlets and cassettes sent throughout the world, and men and women perform them in front of churches and large audiences.

      There is also a social and collective aspect to testimony, and giving one becomes a rite of initiation into the religious world of a ministry. These stories of trauma and healing are central to the culture of therapy that predominates at New Hope and other ex-gay ministries. Testifying as therapy keeps the focus on the individual's experience of pain and trauma but permits each person to relive it within the safety net of a wider religious narrative and community. Religious transformation is deeply connected to a therapeutic process that allows men and women to renarrate their pasts as part of being born again. Through subsequent retellings, the trauma lessens and a person heals. The object of testifying is forgiveness and redemption from other Christians and from God, and the personal relationship a person has with Jesus is an extension of this focus on healing the self. As a narrative strategy, these confessions are proof of religious and sexual conversion and grant the testifier power as a witness to non-Christians or those living in sin. Testimonies become a form of evangelism that is necessary to self-healing and to the wider dissemination of the ex-gay movement. The testimonies of hundreds of conservative Christian men and women who have felt compelled to participate in ex-gay ministries function as evidence that change is possible through a relationship with Jesus. Everything in a person's preconversion life becomes a story that illustrates how a relationship with Jesus transforms people. The mission statement on the ex-gay movement's Web site claims to offer “Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.” The testimonial narratives attest that freedom and redemption can only be obtained by dedicating one's life and sexuality to Jesus.

      In the ex-gay movement, change is a complex process that incorporates developmental theories of sexual identity, religious proscriptions against homosexuality, biblical prayer, therapeutic group activities, counseling, and self-help steps. The idea of change is the financial, political, religious, and personal basis of the ex-gay movement, and it continues to be the fulcrum on which the debate over the fixity or fluidity of sexual identity turns. Change is a conversion process that incorporates religious and sexual identity, desire, and behavior. Sexual identity is malleable and changeable because it is completely entwined with religious conversion. A person becomes ex-gay as he accepts Jesus into his life and commits to him. Much has been written about the widely publicized sexual scandals of prominent ex-gays, but in the ex-gay movement, it is far more scandalous to abandon Jesus than to yield to same-sex desire. It is commonly accepted that a person will continue to experience desire and even occasionally lapse into same-sex behavior as part of the overall conversion process. Recovery and relapse are built into the creation of an ex-gay identity, and sexual falls are expected. Rather than becoming heterosexual, men and women become part of a new identity group in which it is the norm to submit to temptation and return to ex-gay ministry over and over again. As long as the offender publicly repents and reaffirms her commitment to Jesus, all is forgiven.

      I call this process of religious and sexual conversion, sexual falls, and public redemption through testimony “queer conversion.” The word “queer” literally means “odd,” “peculiar,” or “out of the ordinary,” but I use “queer” in the context of the academic discipline of queer theory and its indebtedness to queer activism, which has reappropriated the word “queer” from its history as a negative or derogatory term. In queer theory and activism, “queer” means to challenge the very concept of the normal, and it can encompass a range of sexual acts and identities historically considered deviant that the words “gay” and “lesbian” sometimes exclude. Queer theorists refute the idea that sexuality is an essentialist category determined by biology or judged by eternal standards of morality and truth.¹² Instead, queer theory argues for the idea that identities are culturally and historically determined rather than fixed; sexual practices and desires change over time and do not consistently line up with masculine or feminine gender expectations. The idea of queerness accounts for the possibility that a person's sexual orientation, behaviors, and desires can fluctuate, moving between different identities, political affiliations, and sexual arrangements.

      Although the political goals of the ex-gay movement and queer activists are radically distinct, by accepting that a person's behavior and desire will not necessarily correspond with their new ex-gay identity or religious identity, ex-gay men and women enact a queer concept of sexuality when they undergo queer conversions. Although men and women in ex-gay ministries do not and cannot envision homosexuality as a positive way to be, their lives also exemplify the instability of the religious and sexual conversion process. Their narratives of testimonial sexuality are performances that, while sincere, point to the instability and changeability of their own identities rather than serve as a testament to heterosexuality. The ex-gay notion of sexuality as a religious process of transformation may be fraught with sexual falls, indiscretions, and moments of doubt, and ex-gays' notions of change are fluid even if their eventual goal is heterosexuality or celibacy. In its insistence on the influence of cultural, familial, and religious factors on sexuality, the ex-gay mode of religious and sexual conversion unwittingly presents a challenge to a conservative Christian construction that a person can and must move from homosexuality to heterosexuality.

      The ex-gay position complicates debates between those queer activists who, on the one hand, argue for a politics of civil rights for gays and lesbians based on biology, and those who, on the other, envision sexual practices, desires, identities, and affiliations as variable over a lifetime. Proponents of queer theory are wary of the strategy of predicating civil rights on anatomy or genetics because of the history of eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving the human race by selective breeding. They fear that this strategy could easily be used against marginalized people to justify sexual, racial, and gender inequalities as it was in the past. The well-documented history of medical interventions imposed on lesbians and gay men also makes them cautious of theories of a gay gene. The ex-gay movement shares the queer mistrust of biological explanations for a different reason: the immutability of sexuality would signify that conversion is irrelevant or impossible. However, the ex-gay position goes beyond this to argue that even if science were to prove that homosexuality was biological, Jesus can effect miracles, and it is ultimately with Jesus that ex-gays place their faith in change. Members of the ex-gay movement believe that heterosexuality is God's intent, regardless of behavior; queer theorists and activists posit that heterosexuality itself is neither natural nor stable. Further, the ex-gay movement is wedded to the idea of a binary system of gender roles in which heterosexuality connotes masculinity for men and femininity for women.

      The liberal rights position, the foundation of organizations like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign, both of which vehemently oppose the ex-gay movement, is another important voice in the debate over sexuality and change. Politically, these organizations are invested in the idea that sexual identity is fixed, unchangeable, and possibly even biological. Many other gay activists and writers espouse the view that sexual orientation is innate, or that people are born that way.¹³ Studies such as those of Simon LeVay and Dean Hamer, which argue that a gay brain or gay genes exist, are revered as the basis for a minority identity and entrance into U.S. civil rights discourse.¹⁴ The Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force position considers a biological rationale for homosexuality as strategically advantageous in the political realm, despite the problems associated with providing biological explanations for social inequalities. This position contends that if sexuality has the same immutable status as race, the law must grant gay men and lesbians the rights of full citizenship. Their stance is in opposition to the way ex-gay literature differentiates between being “gay” and being “homosexual,” describing the former as a misguided choice or false lifestyle in order to repudiate gay identity and any accompanying political rights. In the wake of the 2004 presidential elections, when eleven states passed anti-gay-marriage referenda, some conservative Christian organizations are using the idea that homosexuality is changeable to continue

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