Straight to Jesus - Tanya Erzen

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to speak out on policy issues. Chapter 5 looks at how the rise of the self-help movement and addiction rhetoric of the 1970s intersected with the emergence of the ex-gay movement. The ex-gay appropriation of twelve-step recovery incorporates the idea that men and women will experience relapses or sexual falls as part of their healing. Rather than becoming heterosexual, ex-gay counselees and leaders become part of a new identity group in which it is part of the regulatory behavior and norms of their identity to fall (succumb to same-sex desire) and be saved (return to ex-gay counseling).

      Ex-gay movement members, like other conservative Christians, view themselves as part of a positive transformation of American culture and religious life, often describing themselves as embattled or besieged by secular culture or the gay rights movement. They present a cultural critique of conservative Christianity, which often ignores homosexuality, of a secular culture that denies them the right to attempt sexual conversion, and of the possibilities for living as gay men and women. While Christian Right organizations lobby against gay marriage and same-sex partner benefits by drawing on the ex-gay movement's testimonies as proof that sexuality is a choice, the ex-gay movement also envisions itself as a pocket of resistance and tolerance in contrast to conservative Christian homophobia. Chapter 6 traces how the politics of Christian Right groups have shifted as a result of the growing visibility of ex-gay testimonial narratives.

      The ex-gay movement has fused a culture of self-help, with its emphasis on personal transformation and self-betterment, to evangelical Christianity, with its precepts of conversion and personal testimony, to build a global para-church movement. Yet it is the stories of men and women that illuminate the ways that individuals grapple with the conflict between sexuality and religious belief, forge community and kinship, envision their own conversions, and conceive of politics. Just as the stories of ex-gay men and women have been appropriated in wider political debates, these men and women speak back. And just as some ex-gay men and women held the ex-gay movement accountable for the representation of their testimonies, they also held me accountable for my representation of them. In the spirit of reciprocity but with much apprehension, I sent the ministry a copy of my book while it was still a dissertation, where it circulated among the men and women.

      After he had read it and offered criticism and suggestions, Hank told me frankly that he felt I had downplayed why it was people wanted to change. He was adamant that I did not underscore what it is like for the men at New Hope to have their deepest moral beliefs clash with their sexuality. “The misery and pain…that motivated me to want to change,” Hank sighed wearily on the phone. “I worry that people will come away from reading this asking, ‘Why would people want to do that?' They don't realize the conflict we deal with.” I told him that many of the people who had read the book expressed feeling unexpectedly moved by the individual stories of pain and misery, despite their hostility toward the idea of changing one's sexuality. If anything, when I presented this work at conferences, I received some criticism that the project was too sympathetic to the plight of men and women at New Hope.

      This question of empathy has continued to pursue me whenever I discuss the ex-gay movement at conferences, where I am inevitably asked by someone in the audience if I am a Christian or born again or sympathetic to right-wing politics.16 As Faye Ginsburg writes of the pro-choice and pro-life women she studied in North Dakota, “I found that when I began to present my work and explain the way the world looked from the point of view of these ‘natives,' I was frequently asked if I had, indeed, become one of them.”17 Hank's comments highlighted how ethnography is an act of translation and negotiation between different worlds and constituencies, in which things are always lost and misunderstood. My conversations with Frank and others who read the early manuscript forced me to think carefully about Robert Orsi's warning to ethnographers, “What can you give them once you've translated what you understand of their experience into other academic idioms so that they will no longer be able to recognize it as their experience?”18 Hank's critique of the project as not sympathetic enough to his pain and misery is as valid as the critique that blames the ex-gay movement for adding to the pain and misery of gay men and women who have struggled to build lives despite homophobia, persecution, and discrimination. Somewhere in between those two places, I have sought to find a space for both the everyday lives of men like Hank and Curtis and the political implications of the ex-gay movement as a whole.

      CHAPTER 1

      Steps Out of Homosexuality

      In 1973 Frank Worthen heard from God for the first time in years. Frank, then a forty-four-year-old gay man, had spent twenty-five years living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a businessman and participating peripherally in early gay liberation struggles. According to Frank's recollections, on May 24 he locked his office door and headed for the back entrance of his import store, planning to check out a new gay bathhouse in San Francisco. Unbeknownst to Frank, one of his employees, a young Christian named Matt, had been secretly praying for him for months. Frank recalled: “I was leaving my office and the Lord just spoke to me and said, ‘I want you back.’ I generally don't share that with a lot of people because they don't understand that God can talk to you.” He laughed, “They think there's something wrong with you if God can talk to you. But he did. It scared the life out of me.”1 Frank immediately contacted Matt, who met him at a chapel where he led Frank in the sinner's prayer, a prayer that many conservative evangelical Christians generally understand signifies the initiation of conversion or the promise that you will give your life to Jesus Christ. Frank prayed, “Lord Jesus, I need you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life and receive you as my Savior and Lord. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Take control of the throne of my life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.”2

      Frank confessed the sins he had accumulated over many years, and as he did, he sensed a growing release from what he characterizes as twenty-five years of rebellion. He had been a devoted member of a Disciples of Christ Church in San Jose, California, as a child, where he had excelled at the organ. However, he was molested by a minister at the church and had avoided any religious affiliation since he had come out in the 1940s. In the intervening years, Frank had built a thriving import business and tentatively embraced a gay identity. He had recently been involved with a much younger man who was married but dependent on Frank for financial assistance. Right before his conversion experience, the relationship had turned sour and ended for good. May 1973 signified the closure of his old life and the beginning of his new one. Despite subsequent years of setbacks and doubts, he never returned to what he calls “the gay lifestyle.”

      With Matt's urging, Frank began attending his charismatic Agape church in Marin County several times a week.3 Matt revealed that the church had been praying for “Matt's gay boss” and his deliverance from homosexuality for over a year. As Frank rededicated himself to God, the church sent other men struggling with same-sex feelings to talk to him, and he suddenly found himself counseling other gay men looking for a “way out” of homosexuality. After a short time, the minister at the Agape church challenged him to “reach back to his own people.” Six months later, Frank recorded his testimony about leaving behind homosexuality on a cassette tape and advertised it in the Berkeley Barb, a now-defunct underground newspaper. The ad read,“FIND Homosexuality & Christianity incompatible? Send

8.00 for a new Christ-centered tape: Steps Out of Homosexuality.” Initially, sixty people sent for the tape, and the “Brother Frank Tape Ministry” was born. The deluge of letters and responses Frank received provided the impetus for him to close his business and eventually form one of the first ex-gay ministries in the United States, New Hope Ministry—at the time called Love in Action.

      JESUS, THE REVOLUTIONARY

      When Frank first decided he could no longer live as a gay man, he turned for support to the pastors at the Agape church. The Agape church competed for members with another church called Open Door, led by Pastor Kent Philpott and Associate Pastor Mike Riley. Frank recalls that “One night the Lord woke me up and said, ‘I want you to talk to Kent at Open Door.' I thought, ‘No way, my pastor would have a fit if I went and talked to him.' God didn't

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