Caution: Contents Toxic, Under High Pressure

Lilith, checked in her monotonous gabble by the radiant vision who let in the sun’s new light, stared at it with old and blinking eyes. She saw the shape of the woman; and did not know beatitude, however young. She supposed this also to be in need of something other than the Omnipotence. She said, separating with difficulty words hardly distinguishable from gabble: ‘I can help you.’

‘That’s kind of you,’ Pauline answered, ‘but I haven’t come to you for myself.’

‘I can help anyone,’ the old woman said, carefully enunciating the lie.

Pauline answered again: ‘Adela Hunt wants you.’ She could and would say no more …

The other said, in a little shriek of alarm, such as an old woman pretending youth might have used for girlish fun, ‘I won’t go out, you know. She must come here.’

—Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell

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After my last, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t make a note of some Christian individuals and organizations that I would warn fellow LGBTQ people against. Not all of them profess the ex-gay label; it has lost a great deal of its selling power. But this does not mean that their practices have changed or that their goals are different.

The ex-gay movement has certainly changed since it began the 1970s; by the mid-2000s, it was increasingly clear that those who had left were not just quitters, but had recognized that orientation change was not a realistic goal and that attempts to effect it were doing at least as much harm as good; but this led largely, not to a frank admission of failure and apology for hurts caused, but to a quiet decision to redefine what the goal was. Heterosexual attraction, which could not be achieved, was shelved, in favor of heterosexual self-concept, which could. It couldn’t be honestly achieved, but it could be achieved, and it still can: the substitution of what straight, American evangelicals find normal and comfortable for the natural outlook and self-expression of people outside that category, this was the new and improved goal. And while there are some die-hard proponents of SOCE even today, the heteronormative identity redefinition folks (I shall call them HIRs) are the present face of the ex-gay movement that persists. Many of those on the non-exhaustive list below are HIRs rather than self-professed ex-gay groups; this does not greatly move me.

In fairness—yes, even to destructive ex-gay drivel—I am not saying that every person involved in these movements is individually a bad person, or that nobody gets anything out of these programs. I’ve said more than once that I got a great deal from my first therapist despite the fact that he was a pretty bad therapist. But that is not a defense of bad therapy. The good aspects of these groups can be gotten better, and more safely, elsewhere; and they help give a veneer of plausibility to practices that are deeply toxic and harmful.

The American College of Pediatricians—what a reassuring, professional-sounding name. Too bad they only have one employee, inflate their membership numbers by more than double, aren’t the peer-accepted American Academy of Pediatrics, and have been accused of misrepresenting scientific research by the National Institute of Health and of being a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their principal work is in promoting conversion therapy and opposing gay couples’ legal right to adopt; neither of which sounds to me the layman like they constitute pediatrics per se, and both of which are opposed right back by the AAP.

Brothers On a Road Less Traveled is how People Can Change decided to rebrand themselves when it turned out people could not change. PCC [1] is a relative newcomer to the ex-gay scene, founded in 2000; its best-known thing is Journey Into Manhood (boy they did not think that name through), which claims to provide the groundwork for men to become heterosexual ‘over time.’ One of the group’s co-founders, David Matheson, an early protégé of Joseph Nicolosi (see NARTH below), left PCC early this year, stating that he now identifies as gay.

Courage International does not technically promote orientation change, but they promote the hell out of other groups that do, like NARTH (see below), so yeah, they get a spot on the list. The group was founded in 1980 by Fr John Harvey, and operates on a twelve-step model derived from Alcoholics Anonymous. Fr Harvey has been quoted as saying that there are no homosexually oriented people, only heterosexuals with a homosexual tendency (because that’s a useful and necessary distinction in any way at all). The leadership remains more than a little yikes-y, to my mind; Courage helped organize a conference before the synod in Rome in 2015, for which one of the speakers was Cardinal Sarah—as in, the same Cardinal Sarah who compared gay people to Nazis and called trans people Satanic.

Desert Stream Ministries, also known as Living Waters, was founded by Andrew Comiskey, some time before he became a Vineyard pastor in 1981. He has authored multiple books, in which he says that homosexual relationships are demonic and that homosexuality ‘defiles God’s very image’. The organization has remained in operation to this day, surviving not only Comiskey’s controversial decision to embrace Catholicism in 2011, but a blog post from the previous year, in which he rejoiced that there had been no media coverage of the revelation that a member of their staff had abused a teenage boy who came to DSM for help. This was not quite true; a family had sued DSM in 1998 for a similar case of child abuse, and the LA Times had covered that.

Equipped to Love is the organization behind the self-styled CHANGED Movement—it’s not an acronym as far as I can tell, and no, I don’t know why they’re yelling—associated with Bethel Church in Redding, California. Bethel’s worship band has apparently drawn a great deal of notice nationwide, kind of like Hillsong, and their ex-gay drivel has come along for the ride. They offer #OnceGay stories, links to groups like DSM (above) and RHN (below), and of course, merch! Mostly books, but they’ve got some tees as well, including one trendy one in that gotta-have-it sans-serif font. This seems to be the newest group of the bunch, so I’m guessing we’ll start seeing the fallout from ETL and CHANGED begin in earnest in ten or fifteen years.

Although Exodus International was shuttered in 2013 by its president Alan Chambers, Exodus Global Alliance, the worldwide network supporting ex-gay organizations around the world, continues to operate. Not every group in this list is affiliation with EGA, but any group that is linked with EGA can be relied upon to be an ex-gay organization.

Genesis Counseling is headed by the notorious Joe Dallas, who not only practices and promotes conversion therapy, but has been an energetic contributor to the kulturkampf against ‘the homosexual agenda,’ [2] authoring three books (two family-centered and one apologetics-oriented) on that subject. He is a featured speaker at Focus on the Family’s ex-gay conference ‘Love Won Out.’

Homosexuals Anonymous is just what it sounds like, another twelve-step group. Also begun in 1980, one of its founding leaders, Colin Cook, stepped down only six years later due to having been found to have had sex with at least a dozen of his male patients—this, after having been defrocked in the Seventh-day Adventist Church for having had relations with another man in his church in 1974. Nonetheless, HA continues to operate to this day, including the active involvement of Cook, and it held an ex-gay conference in Kenya in 2009, just five years before Uganda tried to pass a bill instituting the death penalty for homosexual behavior.

JIFGA, the Jewish Institute for Global Awareness, was a clumsy attempt to evade the 2015 court order closing JONAH, Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing—clumsy enough that JIFGA too was ordered to shut down this very month, and its founders, Arthur Goldberg and Elaine Berk, forbidden by the court to serve in the leadership of any non-profit in the future. JONAH was specifically ordered to close on grounds of violating the state of New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act, for claiming to be able to change sexual orientation. The group’s practices were considered bizarre even in the ex-gay world, including counselors ordering patients to strip naked and touch their genitals during counseling sessions, or having them beat up effigies of their mothers, who were blamed for their sons’ homosexual feelings. Jewish organizations such as the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America had already publicly repudiated JONAH as early as 2012. Whether this, too, will reëmerge in yet another shape remains to be seen.

Joel 2:25 comes to us from Texas, and aims for ‘far more than sexual sobriety and abstinence’ (these being, for the record, what Scripture actually enjoins upon us); rather, it seeks ‘healing of emotional wounds and relational brokenness,’ standard evangelical coding for heterosexuality, heteronormative identity and behavior, and marriage. The group states that a life of unrepentant sexual sin—a term which appears to include disagreements about what sexual sin consists in, though I admit I’m not sure—inevitably results in damnation.

NARTH. Oh, NARTH. The National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, now calling itself the ‘Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity’ (uh huh) or ATCSI, was the 1992 love-child of Joseph Nicolosi and Charles Socarides. Nicolosi, until his death in 2017, was the figurehead of the organization. They’ve been peddling the farther-and-smother theory of homosexuality for close to thirty years now, and getting less credible as they do it. Their status providing continuing education credits for therapists in California was revoked in 2011 for non-payment of dues to the California Board of Behavioral Scientists, and their non-profit status was revoked by the IRS in 2012 for non-filement of the required paperwork for several years.

North Star, a Mormon group, is a little ambiguous. They certainly were involved in promoting conversion therapy, via links to PCC and JONAH (see above), but they seem to have stepped back from this; one of the group’s leaders renounced ties to PCC in 2015. They haven’t earned their way off the watch list, in my judgment, but perhaps they could.

PATH, or Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality, is a worldwide network of groups supporting ex-gay programs and conversion therapy, with a frightening number of affiliates. Many of the groups on this list are members of PATH (or were before being shut down for fraud). It was founded by one Richard Cohen, who also founded the International Healing Foundation (which closed in 2015), got expelled from the American Counselors Association for promoting conversion therapy, and is not a licensed therapist in the first place.

Restoration Path is the rebranded name of the infamous ex-gay group Love In Action. LIA was one of the first ex-gay organizations; one of its founders, John Evans, abandoned the organization and the ex-gay movement after a close friend of his committed suicide over his sexuality. John Smid was a member of the group’s leadership for over twenty years, finally leaving in 2008 and stating publicly that he didn’t think he had ever encountered a single genuine instance of orientation change. LIA was also embroiled in a legal battle with the state of Tennessee in 2005, due to one of their ‘Refuge’ camps there operating unlicensed mental health living facilities, including dispensing medications without qualifications to do so. The suit was settled the next year, and the Refuge program closed down the year after that. The renaming took place in 2012.

The Restored Hope Network took on the mantle of Exodus International, beginning shortly before the latter closed its doors; RHN’s founders felt that Exodus was not sufficiently opposed to homosexuality. James Dobson, Albert Mohler, and (a little odd in such company, but only a little) Christopher West are on their Board of References, whatever the hell that is. RHN promotes the same theories and techniques that Exodus did, though with a definite air of doubling down; they feature Anne Paulk, for example, the ex-wife of John Paulk, who left Exodus and returned to ‘the lifestyle’ in 2013, making a formal apology to the gay community at large for having ever been involved in promoting ex-gay therapy.

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[1] As funny as it looks, I’m not going to take the time to write out BORLT instead of PCC, even as an acronym.

[2] Why do so many people hate Taco Tuesday?