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?

Are "Celibate Gays" Really Gay?

Dryden also ‘meant’ by wit the essential gift of the poet. He defined this gift as … ‘propriety of thoughts and words.’ … This definition would commit us to the consequence, ‘Euclid was the greatest wit that ever set pen to paper.’ It may also be asserted almost safely that no human being, when using the word wit to talk with and not talking about the word wit, has ever meant by it anything of the sort. Nor does Dryden himself anywhere make the slightest use of this definition …

We might tax our brains for a long time to explain how a man of Dryden’s stature could have said anything so false to all actual usage, so useless, and so unsupported, if we did not realize its tactical function. He is thinking neither about what the word actually meant nor about what it could, in the interests of clarity and precision and general utility, be made to mean. It is a valuable vogue-word. Therefore a strong point in the critical battle. He wants to deny the enemy the use of it.

—C. S. Lewis, Studies In Words

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Yes.

Freelance journalist Brandon Ambrosino tweeted up a storm about ex-gay organizations a day or two ago, and concluded with a shot at self-identified celibate gays, stating in no uncertain terms that anyone who abstains from gay sex due to traditionalist moral or religious beliefs doesn't even qualify as gay. As he put it, ‘Gayness is more than gay sex, but it can’t be less’ (I think I recall that correctly). I'm not at all sure why he came after me and my friends [1]. Perhaps he had us on the brain because Revoice just took place, I don't know. Regardless, he did it—and seemed more than a little thin-skinned about it: anyone who wishes can go to his Twitter feed and look it up, but I can’t, because he blocked me and several other people who, in his words, came for him and got bitchy.

Anyway. I actually don't want to just rag on Mr Ambrosino for a whole post: partly because I have no intention of obeying a guy who’s not my dom, partly because I've liked a lot of other things he's written, but chiefly because I do think I understand where he’s coming from. Ex-gay organizations have taken to rebranding and moving the goal-posts a hell of a lot in the last fifteen years or so, as it became irrevocably clear that orientation change does not work, but many of them remained unwilling to really face up to the facts. Some ex-gay people have even appropriated the Side B label, notwithstanding the fact that Side B’s salient characteristics are rejecting SOCE and embracing LGBTQ identity and culture. [2]

Further still, some people’s experience of Side B has been toxic for a variety of reasons. A lot of my own attempts at chastity as a Side B person were shot through with problems that could easily have wrecked my mind, if I hadn’t had the help of guides much wiser than myself. Defensiveness and suspicion toward celibate gay identity are perfectly understandable in these circumstances.

But that doesn’t make this gatekeeping definition of gayness a sound one. I believe it’s not only a poor use of language, but actually damaging to the community it’s ostensibly meant to serve, for a great many reasons. I will list just seven.

1. It’s not how anybody actually uses the word. Okay, ‘anybody’ is an overstatement. There is an ideologically driven minority among gay people who do insist that the word be used to indicate beliefs as well as orientation; and thirty or forty years ago, that meaning was much commoner currency. Nonetheless, it isn’t how the majority of people use the word now. It normally indicates orientation, experience, and self-identity, none of which depend on having sex to exist. That is how we know we’re gay before trying gay sex, after all.

There is one other group, however, who habitually use this definition. This leads me into a second and bigger issue …

2. It endorses a definition of gayness originally designed by homphobes to justify and maintain homophobic practices. Now, the origin of a term or definition is not the only thing that determines its value, but it is one of them. And, well, in this case, it's a doozy.

I mentioned ex-gay practices above, which I endured personally. The definition expressed by Ambrosino is the exact same one drafted and used by ex-gay organizations like the Restored Hope Network to this day, because it’s one of the things that helps them move the goalposts. You’re ‘not gay anymore’ because you stop having gay sex, which they can then sell with all the appeal of orientation change—a bait-and-switch change of identity. It downright encourages ambiguous, deceitful language and thought patterns, both with oneself and others. It’s arguably the most basic tool in the ex-gay box. Insisting on gay sex as a qualifier for gay identity gives ex-gay groups more room to maneuver and ammunition to do it with, not less.

3. It erases ace and demi identities. Asexual, aromantic, demisexual, and demiromantic identities all have queer expressions (indeed, insofar as they depart from the het norm, they’re queer by definition). An asexual but homoromantic woman is every bit as entitled to call herself a lesbian as a sexually active polyamorous lesbian is. [3] Under a you-must-be-open-to-gay-sex definition, grey identities are implicitly excluded.

4. It forces people who are still navigating their own feelings into a false dichotomy. This is especially true of teens, I think, who have the most navigating to do and the most at stake in doing it; but it’d certainly apply to, e.g., the heterosexually married Christian man in his thirties who’s finally facing up to the fact that his feelings about his best guy friend are erotic, not just affectionate. A person who’s told that they have to have gay sex (or at least be open to it) in order to ‘really’ be gay is being given an ultimatum about their feelings and identity, and maybe being asked to choose between deeply held religious convictions and powerful instinctive and emotional desires—being asked to call one of those things false and insignificant, when they aren’t ready to do that. What good does that do to anyone? Why is a choice like that necessary? They should not be compelled by others to choose what part of themselves to lie about.

This is normally what Side B is saying to fellow traditional Christians. In this case, we find ourselves saying it to fellow LGBTQ people. The dichotomy is artificial either way.

5. It erases Side B Christians who support gay civil rights, including those of us who’ve been traumatized by SOCE. Okay. In the name of not pulling a bait-and-switch myself, I’ll say frankly here that there are Side B people who don’t support complete political equality between, e.g., gay and straight marriages. [4] But a lot of us do support full political equality, and have paid for that belief among our families, friends, and churches. Furthermore, a lot of us are ex-ex-gays, survivors of conversion therapy. We rejected that stuff because it’s unnecessary, wrongheaded, and toxic. We learned that the hard way—which, if I may be a bit tart, is more than can be said of Mr Ambrosino. We paid for our identities. Having those identities invalidated again, by members of the very community we’ve been vilified for asserting, is a blow upon a bruise.

6. It adds an ideological modifier onto an identity more defined by experience than by behavior. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that every LGBTQ person’s experience is the same. But the shared thread among them is the experience of being othered, excluded, demeaned, treated as less than, on the basis of our attractions or gender expression. We all experience that, in our fears while we're closeted and in our lives when we leave it. That unites lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, trans people, and everyone else in the community, not sexual activity.

Really it couldn’t be sex that united the gay community, not just because (for a variety of reasons) some of us never have any, but because our sexual acts and experiences are so radically different. An act of gay sex usually contains none of the same ingredients as an act of lesbian sex; in that way, each resembles heterosexual sex more than the other. This is, of course, a ridiculous line of reasoning, but that’s kinda why I don’t take this view.

7. It drives an unnecessary wedge between LGBTQ people during a time when anti-gay sentiment appears to be rising rather than falling. Infighting is dull and wasteful at the best of times. When you have a homophobic administration elected by a right-wing portion of the populace, it’s dangerous. And sure, the media distorts things and my own consumption of media is kinda random; but I’ve been seeing a lot more stories about homophobic violence lately, including a couple of nasty scares even at Pride events. This is not a smart time to be fractious.

When Side B people speak up for ourselves and the LGBTQ community as a whole, that is precisely what we’re doing: speaking up for ourselves, and for the LGBTQ community as a whole. If you think we don't get targeted for harassment and hatred because our families or our churches know we're 'the good gays,' you're wrong. We are endangered when the gay community is endangered, and vice versa. Homophobes don’t generally care that (most) Side B people are attempting celibate lives; they care that we’re gay. That’s the thing they hate. That is why, for example, an institution like the Catholic Church can be at one and the same time welcoming on paper, full of homosexually active clergy, and riddled with homophobia in its attitudes, rhetoric, and policies. They’re targeting the identity, the rallying point for the community: often as not, they’re prepared to ignore the sex.

Want to deprive your enemies of a word? Fine. But know who they really are first. You might learn something.

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[1] At any rate, many of my friends can truthfully claim celibacy. I admire celibacy, and I consider celibacy and monogamous heterosexual marriage the only two intrinsically licit sexual states; but, phrased gently, it would be generous at the expense of accuracy to describe me as chaste, and I'm certainly not going to marry a woman. [5]

[2] With qualifications? Sure. But then again, St Augustine embraced Neo-Platonism with qualifications, St Thomas Aquinas embraced Aristotle with qualifications, St Edith Stein embraced Phenomenology with qualifications. That doesn’t make any of them not part of those traditions: it just means they’re a different part of the tradition.

[3] Yes, she might well add the qualifier ace lesbian at her discretion. But that’s exactly what it is: a qualifier, added at her discretion, not a contradiction.

[4] I’m not crazy about this fact. But I don’t want to be accused of pinkwashing a movement that is pretty diverse in certain ways, including some ways that a lot gay people would find objectionable. All the same, I don’t consider it a very damning criticism of the Side B community, since there are outliers in the gay community, like Milo Yiannopoulos or Jack Donovan, that most LGBTQ people find objectionable, too.

[5] Phrased less gently, I’m kind of a whorebag.

An Open Letter to Archbishop Aquila

Then Fear said: I am Pity that was dead.

And Shame said: I am Sorrow comforted.

And Lust said: I am Love.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Ballad of Life

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To the Most Reverend Samuel Aquila, Archbishop of Denver;

from Gabriel Blanchard, a layman of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Peter.

I trust Your Excellency will excuse my boldness in writing to you, despite the fact that we have no personal acquaintance, and that I am no one in particular ecclesiastically speaking. Yet I write nevertheless, hoping against hope that Your Excellency may read it and consider what I have to say; and, additionally, with the more ordinary hope that others may read it and get some good out of it.

Last month’s event ‘Gender Matters,’ as Your Excellency doubtless knows, drew criticism from gay activists and sympathizers, not least because of its prominent featuring of Andrew Comiskey and his ministry Desert Stream, generally classified as an ex-gay organization promoting reparative therapy. The opening remarks that ‘the power and authority of Jesus Christ can heal any wound, forgive any sin, heal any disorder, if we truly put our faith in him,’ especially taken together with the caution that ‘the healing may not be immediate,’ certainly suggest SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts) to anyone familiar with the literature of the ex-gay movement.

I am familiar, since I was involved in the ex-gay movement in my teens, trying to rid myself of a persistent and almost exclusive attraction to other men that (I was told and believed firmly) was inconsistent with a Christian life. Though they seemed productive at the time, and though I most certainly needed counseling for a host of reasons and profited by it accordingly, my attractions finally proved intractable. Nonetheless, this did not alter my beliefs about Scripture; and when I was received into the Catholic Church a few years later, I embraced the whole of her teaching, including her teachings about chastity and marriage and homosexual sex. Without feigning any degree of heterosexuality, I confessed, and confess, the Catholic belief that God made marriage for one man and one woman to unite as one flesh, and that no other kind of union can licitly include sexual intimacy.

I offer this apologia, because I want to establish my complete orthodoxy as the ground of the following. I affirm the whole of the Catholic faith, including §§2357-2359 of the Catechism. Speaking thus as a son of the Church, and as a sheep to a shepherd, I implore Your Excellency to reëxamine SOCE and to disassociate the Archdiocese of Denver from it.

There are many reasons to do so. My own fruitless experience of SOCE says something; given my familial relationships and some experiences of abuse (even though my same-sex feelings predated the abuse, not the other way around), I should have been an ideal candidate for change, since I fit their mold so perfectly, but no change was effected. Even so, the primary negative of my experience was that it wasted so much time. There are those who have been involved in ex-gay ministries for years, decades even, and come away with stories that alternate between the ludicrous and the nightmarish; there are deep scientific and theological flaws in the whole ex-gay substructure; and SOCE is, after all, entirely unnecessary for any person to lead a virtuous life animated by the Spirit of God.

Samuel Brinton, the son of Baptist missionaries, attempted SOCE for two years, beginning at ten years old when he realized he was attracted to other boys rather than to girls and confided in his parents. The counselor to whom he was taken tried such techniques as aversion therapy: specifically, freezing or burning the child’s hands while displaying pictures of men touching. Twenty years later, he remained sexually attracted to men, but so terrified of physical contact with them that he could barely contemplate a friendly hug. He was also plagued by ongoing psychological issues such as thoughts of suicide, which, according to a 2009 study released by the APA, is almost nine times more common among people who have been through conversion therapy.

Matthew Shurka and Michael Ferguson, two other men who went into SOCE programs, report other toxic techniques. Shurka was forbidden to interact or even speak with his mother and sister for three years, on the ground that they were ‘feminizing influences,’ and was prescribed Viagra at the age of 18 to facilitate sexual intercourse with women—which, far from diminishing his same-sex impulses and despite his achieved popularity with other men, left him depressed, gaining weight, reluctant to leave the house, and abusing drugs. Ferguson was encouraged to cultivate rage against his parents, whose flawed upbringing methods (he was told) were responsible for his homosexual attractions; the notion here was that a sufficient degree of anger would allow him to break his attachment to his parents, and realize the heterosexuality they had effectively suppressed in him. And these are normal practices and narratives in the ex-gay world—the late Dr Joseph Nicolosi, head of NARTH (which Desert Stream recommends), told his male patients that their sexual desires came from flawed family dynamics, and that healing involved socializing with other men and trying to cultivate interest in typically masculine pursuits like sports, and to avoid the interests and company of women except for intercourse.

Love In Action (a ministry which no longer exists—solely because it has adopted the name Restoration Path) was founded in 1973, three years before Exodus International. However, one of LIA’s founders, John Evans—who is conspicuous by his absence from the ‘History’ section of Restoration Path’s current website; such omissions will become a theme—dropped out of the organization after his close friend and fellow member, Jack McIntyre, committed suicide when he could not change his orientation. John Smid, who ran LIA from 1986 to 2008, eventually dropped out of the ministry as well; in 2011 he stated publicly that he did not know of a single case in which someone had experienced a change from homosexuality to heterosexuality. 

Similarly, Exodus, which had been the biggest ex-gay organization in the world (serving largely as an umbrella group), was shuttered in 2013 by its head, Alan Chambers, a self-professed ex-gay man. In the apology that he issued upon closing down the ministry, Chambers too stated that he did not know of any successful cases of SOCE. This was a man who left an active gay lifestyle behind for the sake of Christ, married a woman, and devoted his career and his whole reputation to Exodus. He was not a man uninformed, prejudiced against ex-gay efforts and groups, or merely flowing with the times. He was personally, professionally, and theologically invested in SOCE. He wrote:

Our ministry has been public and therefore any acknowledgment of wrong must also be public. … It is strange to be someone who has both been hurt by the church’s treatment of the LGBT community, and also to be someone who must apologize for being part of the very system of ignorance that perpetuated that hurt. … 

I have heard many firsthand stories from people called ex-gay survivors. Stories of people who went to Exodus affiliated ministries or ministers for help only to experience more trauma. I have heard stories of shame, sexual misconduct, and false hope. … And then there is the trauma that I have caused. There were several years that I conveniently omitted my ongoing same-sex attractions. I was afraid … They brought me tremendous shame and I hid them in the hopes that they would go away. … The good that we have done at Exodus is overshadowed by all of this. 

Friends and critics alike have said that it’s not enough to simply change our message or website. I agree. … I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite—or worse. … I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

More than anything, I am sorry that so many have interpreted this religious rejection by Christians as God’s rejection. I am profoundly sorry that many have walked away from their faith and that some have chosen to end their lives.

These examples are not exceptional, Your Excellency. They are not statements that no person experiences some fluidity in their attractions, nor that a same-sex attracted person could never sacramentally marry someone of the opposite sex and lead a happy, holy life. These things are rare, the latter particularly so, but they do happen. But the history of these groups—including Desert Stream specifically—is not one of changed sexual orientations. It is a history of fruitless efforts culminating in resentment and despair, of psychological and physical torments, of promises broken, of double lives and clandestine abuse, and of perhaps the second-grossest scandal to the world that Christianity has produced in our age.

Turning from the sorry long-term results of most ex-gay ministry to its theoretical basis in theology and medical science, we may look to NARTH, which as noted before is suggested on Desert Stream’s website as an additional, specifically psychotherapeutic, resource. In addition to criticisms from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Psychological Association, and the revocations in 2011 and 2012 of its right to provide continuing education credits to therapists and of its tax-exempt nonprofit status, NARTH’s theory of the development of sexuality is not accepted by the broader medical, psychological, or psychiatric communities (in this country or abroad). Furthermore, the APA has declared that the practice of SOCE—the entire purpose for which NARTH exists—has shown no sound experimental evidence of working, and notes that some patients have later claimed to have been harmed by NARTH and its therapies. According to this APA document, studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s (when SOCE were still fairly mainstream) showed a high correspondence between these efforts and such negative effects as anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide.

The theory that ex-gay organizations usually advance of the etiology of homosexual attractions is that young men, growing up with an emotionally distant father and an overbearing mother, form an unmet need for male-male intimacy and an unduly feminine self-concept, usually exacerbated by peer rejection over ostensibly un-masculine traits. In puberty, this need becomes sexualized—a development that may be accompanied by same-sex sexual abuse and concomitant confusion—and attraction to men rather than women develops accordingly.

Now, there is no doubt that family and peer dynamics, and even a history of abuse, can influence a person’s sexual experience. But as a general account of the origin of homosexuality, this theory is quite useless. To begin with, plenty of heterosexual men share many or all of these experiences without developing any sexual interest in other men; conversely, there are many homosexual men who lack one or more of these supposedly key elements in the development of homosexual interest. Nor, to my knowledge, is there an explanation provided by any prominent SOCE advocate of why an unmet need for male intimacy should consistently be transformed into sexual attraction at puberty. After all, everyone experiences unmet needs and grave wounds in childhood, without necessarily looking to sex as a solution once we discover it. (This relates to the fact that many claims of ‘father wounds’ and the like in SOCE literature are phrased so generally that they amount to being Barnum statements: assertions that most people, on a casual reading, would tend to say were true of themselves.)

When we turn to female homosexuality, the argument becomes even muddier. Explanations of lesbianism from SOCE proponents include: a distant mother and an over-identifying father, mirroring the explanation for males; an abusive father and/or a timid, complacent, or complicit mother, leading to a loathing of men and a longing for authentic female intimacy; an experience of sexual assault from a man, causing fear and hatred of men and a compensatory turning to women; or an experience of sexual assault from a woman, prompting self-blame, curiosity, and experimentation. The explanations of lesbianism multiply to the point that almost anything seems apt to cause it. One begins to think that the explanations do not explain!

The point here is not to discredit, still less to embarass, individuals who personally report a change in their attractions; some people do experience natural fluidity, or find a single person who does not match their normal pattern of attraction but with whom they find a deep and lasting connection. The point is, these things cannot be compelled, cannot be reduced to a psychological technique, cannot be ‘prayed away.’ And organizations or individuals that claim to be able to deliver people from homosexual attractions are, at best, making a claim that hasn’t been demonstrated, and at worst is flatly false.

These therapeutic approaches are not only based in a theory of the origin of homosexuality that the professional mental health community does not endorse; the rhetoric that accompanies them is profoundly misleading, and frequently very damaging to young people. Take the banner saying that Satan delights in homosexuality. How many adolescent Catholics, perhaps just discovering same-sex feelings, saw that banner and thought, I am so disgusting I make Satan happy, or The Church doesn’t want me because I feel like this, or If I ever fail I’ll go to hell, or I can never tell anybody what a monster I am? Did Your Excellency stop to consider this? The shame, terror, and hurt that phrases like this—phrases practically never used of other sins at least equally grave—cause in young people is neither healthy nor holy. How many parents, frightened by the prospect of the devil getting his claws into their children, have pursued this line of thinking to the extreme, resorting to transgressions of privacy, threats, rejection, physical abuse, even expelling their children from their homes, in a desperate attempt to get them to ‘repent’ of something they never chose? These concerns are not alarmism; these things happen. I know young men and women who have been disowned or beaten, who have attempted suicide or cut into their own flesh. Hatred and violence directed at gay-identified people are not rare phenomena, nor harmless ones, as we learned all too bitterly in Orlando in 2016, and language like the language on this banner emboldens them.

Furthermore, the language of ‘healing’ and ‘victory,’ though rarely spelled out in so many words, all but invariably means ‘becoming heterosexual’ in the ears of those listening to this rhetoric. The speakers do not spell it out, because they know very well that homosexual desires do not simply go away—but rather than honestly acknowledging this, they continue to imply a radical change in attractions and ‘leaving homosexuality behind.’ Yet if challenged, they admit that a change in self-concept is what they really meant all along, and that there will still be ‘residual’ interest in the same sex. Which prompts two questions: first, what this ‘healing’ is of, if it is not of homosexual desire; and second, why they did not make themselves clear in the first place.

The frank, sorrowful renunciations of men like John Smid and Alan Chambers show that ex-gay ministers did not make themselves plain at first, because they have quietly moved the goal-posts: forsaking an orientation change that they realized they could not alter by effort, in favor of a new frame of mind that could be accomplished in an afternoon. Not that it would make anybody’s life easier if it were so accomplished. Call same-sex attractions what you will, the difficulty of living chastely with them will be much the same; save that, if one has to be secretive and dissemble and evade authentic discussion of one’s real feelings, that added burden may well break the proverbial camel’s back.

I beg Your Excellency: reconsider, investigate, and break off the archdiocesan connection to these so-called ministries. They will hurt your flock. I am speaking from my own experience; I am speaking from the experience of friends; I am speaking from the bulk of the psychological and psychiatric professions, who have rejected SOCE. The deliverance promised by these groups is a lie. The grace of chastity is possible, and the hope of glory, and strength to carry the crosses God gives us all. But that is not what these organizations have to offer; they are concealing a history of tears and even of blood, shed over a sexual orientation our Lord neither commanded nor promised. Please, Your Excellency, seek the truth and find it. Many hearts are depending upon you.

Of your charity, pray for me; I have prayed for you, and shall. The Lord be with you.

Gabriel I. M. Blanchard

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Five Quick Takes

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It has been a bear of a week: five shifts at one job, two at another, plus ordinary housekeeping. In a way, though, the exhaustion was kind of a gift, because I also received some bitterly saddening news, and being tired helped keep my emotions from going totally haywire. (The physical medium of emotion is, mercifully, limited; bless the body.)

A dear friend of mine, who left the Catholic Church last year, has left the Side B community as well. I treasured (and treasure) her writing, which is brilliant and engaging and vulnerable, and I’m grieved that we’ve lost two of the things that brought us together as friends in the beginning. Of course, we wouldn’t have become friends if we had nothing else in common—vitally, we are the same type of weird. But it always hurts when somebody that you’ve been journeying with leaves the path you were sharing, whatever the reason.

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Work continues on my second novel, The Book of Salt, a sequel to Death’s Dream Kingdom. No spoilers, but I will share with fans that this second novel features Catholic vampire hunters, Francis Thompson, Enochian angelic magic, and just possibly Jack the Ripper.

FOR MINE IS AN EVIL LAUGH

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The Epiphany season is unusually long this year, since Easter is so late (21st April, which is nearly as late as it gets in the Gregorian computus). Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation, rounds out the Christmas cycle as oriented to the Nativity. The earliest part of the Paschal cycle begins on Septuagesima Sunday, about seventy days before Easter, which ushers in Shrovetide—a period of a bit less than three weeks during which people prepare for Lent, culminating in Mardi Gras, also known as Shrove Tuesday. (Shrove comes from the archaic word shrive meaning ‘to hear confession, absolve,’ or by extension ‘to receive absolution’; hence the expression short shrift, which originally referred to a rushed administering of sacramental forgiveness before a condemned man was executed). But, about as often as not, there is a gap between Candlemas and Shrovetide, during which the Epiphany season continues.

I’ve long been inclined to think that there are no accidents in the Church’s liturgical cycle. Especially in its older and more complicated forms, since they were crafted when there was less to do, and making something with many layers of meaning would have been the more appealing as a way to stave off boredom while waiting for YouTube to be invented. The fact that Shrovetide sometimes begins before Candlemas and sometimes after, leading to an overlap between the Nativity and Paschal cycles or a breach between them, seems to me to harmonize with a truth about the Incarnation itself—a truth that, appropriately, is expressed in Candlemas itself, which serves as a sort of hinge between the two seasons.

Christ is sometimes referred to as ‘the man born to die.’ This is, in one sense, perfectly true, and not just in the ordinary sense that everybody is born with the known fate of death ahead of them, but in the sense that he was born with a purpose that was wound up with death, as cords are wound up with each other to make rope. The overlap between Christmastide and Shrovetide thus makes sense, and we see it in Christmas imagery: the Baby laid in a trough like a lamb, the myrrh brought by the Magi, the tragedy of the Holy Innocents, the use of red in decorations both sacred and profane. Candlemas has this in spades in St Simeon’s prophecy to the Virgin: Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also).

Yet there is reason to believe (pace St Anselm and his variegated successors, from St Thomas Aquinas to Jack Chick) that the Incarnation was, so to speak, Plan A for humanity. On this view, redeeming man by means of the Incarnation was God’s response to sin, but, even if man had never sinned, God would still have chosen to glorify humanity by personally taking on a human nature born of a woman. The image of God in man was not accidental, nor final in itself, but a foreshadowing of what man was made for: to be the point at which deity united Itself with creation and with matter.

Whatever God’s original purposes, it is certainly the case that the Incarnation has done more than save us from sin; it deifies us. Epiphany, the disclosure of the glory, is thus a Christian mystery almost independently of the Passion, and so the separation makes as much æsthetic sense as the overlap.

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I recently read that the Archbishop of Denver, one Samuel Aquila, is supporting not only Courage (which after all is a pontifically sanctioned organization), but Desert Stream Ministries, an ex-gay group. Andy Comiskey, a self-professed ex-homosexual and a convert to Catholicism, founded Desert Stream in 1980 and still runs it; Archbishop Aquila has, I gather, begun sending the priests of his archdiocese to be trained by Desert Stream.

I’m livid. Or I would be if I weren't exhausted. I do not know what it is going to take to get Catholics to quit falling for this bullshit. There is no revealed teaching that we have any obligation to become straight if we aren’t. There is no scientific evidence and no theological support for the idea that sexual orientation can be changed by psychotherapeutic means. There is plenty of scientific and anecdotal evidence that ex-gay groups and therapies do substantial harm, and that alone is an adequate theological reason to be deeply suspicious of them.

Maybe I’ll write more about this later, but not right now. I am so sick of this needless, stupid pattern of homophobic abuse.

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On a lighter note, while I already knew about Lindsay Ellis thanks to her magical ‘Thanks, I Hate It!’ video about 2017’s live action Beauty and the Beast (yuck), I more recently discovered a whole world of clever, engaging literary criticism on YouTube. Ellis herself has done more than one series (‘Loose Canon,’ a series discussing different versions of characters through history, may be my favorite); in addition, there’s The Dom, Overly Sarcastic Productions (which does summaries on historical as well as artistic subjects), Earthling Cinema, and Hello Future Me. I’ve linked some fun, exemplary videos here. Enjoy!

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Gay and Catholic, Part I: Gaystation Two

MORE   What’s to be done then?

NORFOLK   (With deep appeal)  Give in.

MORE   (Gently)  I can’t give in, Howard—  (A smile)  You might as well advise a man to change the color of his eyes. I can’t. Our friendship’s more mutable than that.

NORFOLK   Oh, that’s immutable, is it? The one fixed point in a world of changing friendships is that Thomas More will not give in!

MORE   (Urgent to explain)  To me it has to be, for that’s myself! Affection goes as deep in me as you think, but only God is love right through, Howard; and that’s my self.

—Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, pp. 121-122

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I’ve written a good deal about how hard it can be to be a gay Catholic—more specifically, one that accepts the Church’s teaching about homosexuality. Why I accept that teaching is a question I usually waive, not because it isn’t important, but because (1) it isn’t usually my direct topic, (2) many of my readers are traditionalists themselves and don’t require any explanation, and (3) it’s painful for me to think about.

However, I’ve found I do my best work when I’m willing to be vulnerable. And plenty of my readers aren’t traditionalists; often enough, because the reasons they were given for the traditional belief were badly reasoned, or their treatment at the hands of traditional believers was horrible, or both.

I don’t know whether to hope to persuade any of my readers of the Catholic view. Anyhow there’s a considerable list of beliefs I’d sooner persuade them of than this one: being Side B isn’t the heart of my faith, and it shouldn’t be the heart of anybody else’s. But I do want to analyze what these beliefs about sexuality are, and why I believe them, hoping that others will find the analysis helpful. If this series does no more than clarify my own convictions to people who still disagree, I’ll be glad of that.

To put things in context, a quick run-down of the Christian views of homosexuality.1 The terminology of sides, though inexact and a bit silly, is nevertheless useful enough to serve as a rough outline, so I’m using it. Sorry about any nuances that get lost. The perspectives taken in our culture can be classified in four groups, which I’ll call Sides A, B, X, and Y.2 What follows are some gross oversimplifications of these views that’ll do to get us going.

Look, it was hard coming up with a title, okay?

Side A is sometimes called the progressivist or pro-gay interpretation of Scripture. Its essential stance is that being gay is a morally neutral part of who we are, just like being a heterosexual is, and that Christians can entirely embrace a gay identity. On this view, sexually active gay relationships are as open to God’s blessing as opposite-sex ones—generally with the same limitations that opposite-sex relationships are supposed to be under, like abstention before marriage, monogamy, &c. The passages of Scripture which seem inconsistent with this view—nicknamed the ‘clobber passages’—are regarded by most Side A theologians as having been misinterpreted, and as referring to something other than the kind of divinely-sanctioned gay relationships they affirm.3 Matthew Vines, Julie Rodgers, Justin Lee, James Brownson, and Rachel Held Evans are contemporary examples of Side A thought.

Side B is a more traditional view. It tends to agree with Side A that simply being gay (as distinct from having gay sex) is morally neutral, and most Side B people think that identifying as gay is perfectly fine: coming out, calling oneself gay, going to see Wicked, you get the idea. However, it doesn’t say this because it considers gay sex and straight sex morally equivalent; it takes the long-standing Christian view that marriage is, of itself, between one man and one woman, and that sexual intimacy is only for marriage. Since two women or two men are, by definition, not the kind of pairing a marriage can happen between in this view, sexual intimacy between them is wrong. Being only or mostly attracted to the same sex, on Side B premises, is therefore a misfortune; but it isn’t a sin and shouldn’t be treated like one, nor should gay people be treated like second-class citizens. Having gay sex, on these premises, would be a sin, but not necessarily a very serious one: it might be very serious indeed if, say, you’re cheating on your wife—but that’s primarily because you’re cheating on your wife, not because you’re doing it with a dude. Several Side B authors (notably Melinda Selmys) are specially concerned with the maltreatment of LGBTs internationally, e.g. in Russia and Uganda, and with widespread prejudice against trans individuals here in the US. Wesley Hill, Eve Tushnet, Anna Magdalena, Joseph Prever, and Ron Belgau are instances of Side B writers.

A popular4 oversimplification of Sides A and B is that Side A believes in gay marriage, while Side B believes gay people should be celibate. It’s quite true that most Side A people hope to marry, and most Side B people expect to be celibate, but it isn’t cut and dry. Side B Christians don’t automatically rule out the possibility of heterosexual marriage; we just don’t expect it, since, you know, we’re not really into that genre of genitals. If God did something weird with us, and/or introduced us to a very exceptional person, we might enter into a heterosexual marriage, and a few of us have done; but we don’t anticipate it the way straight people mostly anticipate getting married one day (and we certainly don’t want ourselves or others like us to be pushed into such marriages, a chronic failure of the ex-gay movement).

And conversely, being Side A doesn’t necessarily mean you plan to get married any more than being straight does. God can call people to celibacy apart from any question of sexual orientation, and believing gay marriage is a good thing isn’t the same as believing it’s what God has planned for you. For that matter, being at peace with your sexuality is just as important—maybe even more so—if you’re going to attempt a celibate life, and if a gay marriage would be equally innocent and good, it is by definition healthier to enter a celibate vocation with that knowledge.

Moving along, Side X. This is ex-gay thought, or SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts). The basic outlook is that same-sex attraction, far from being morally neutral, is a mental disease or even a sin, and that the Christian is responsible to try to change it. Any kind of gay identity, including using words like lesbian and gay and being public about one’s orientation (if it isn’t heterosexual), is typically rejected by Side X: regarding oneself in a different light is considered just as important as a change in attractions, if not more so. Ex-gay views are decidedly out of favor. They seemed fairly popular fifteen and twenty years ago, even in the press; but news of embarrassing lapses on the part of ministers, and of sickening, abusive disciplinary practices towards those who came (or were forcibly sent) to them for help, led to a justly soured image. Not many Side X figures remain in the public eye, although Anne Paulk, Joseph Nicolosi, Robert Gagnon, James Dobson, and Joe Dallas are associated with the movement.

Finally there is Side Y. This is a term I’ve coined, to denote those who consider homosexual attractions a bad thing, but at the same time don’t necessarily advocate orientation change. This may sound like a bizarre halfway house between Side X and Side B, and I’m a little wary of Side Y myself; the borders between X and Y can be porous. Some groups, like Courage,5 are formally Side Y while allowing space for Side X. Others, like Harvest USA, are Side Y and specifically disclaim orientation change. The essential character of Side Y, I think, is that it disclaims gay identity: insofar as one’s thoughts, feelings, or experiences deviate from the normal heterosexual pattern, they are to be simply opposed, and normally, shared with others only to gain the needed support for living with this—not disease, maybe, but certainly condition. Their accent tends to be on being a new person in Christ, without reference to sexual orientation as an element of identity. Daniel Mattson, Rosaria Butterfield, Fr Paul Check, Matt Moore, and Pope Benedict XVI probably all qualify as examples.6

And me? I’m Side B, and I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I’d far rather be Side A, only I can’t be. Not because the Catholic Church forbids it: she does, but that isn’t the decider for me. It’s because I’m convinced that Side B is the truth. Catholicism does come into that, but my assent to Catholicism is a reasoned assent (even if other people don’t agree with my reasons), not an arbitrary one; and it is my allegiance to the truth that is, to me, inviolably holy. Could I be persuaded something else were true? Sure. But as long as I’m convinced of this, I must be honest with myself and others about the fact; and if I’m right about matter of fact here, then people who don’t believe it, however sincerely, are in that respect not fully equipped to deal with spiritual reality.

William Blake, Jacob's Ladder, 1806

If you told me I could make Side A true by chopping off one of my fingers, my only question would be, ‘Which one?’ But reality doesn’t work that way. It’s just there. Believing this theology that I so hate is an inner conflict that costs me wrenching pain; but lying to myself about what I do and don’t think is true would be a violation of my whole being. I can live with suffering, but not with deliberate, self-willed corruption of my integrity. It’d be cutting off, not a finger, but my head.

But why?

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1For a variety of reasons, there’s no good phrase for this. Many gay-identifying Christians (I among them) don’t much like being called homosexuals, not because it isn’t true—it is so true, girl—but because the word has a vaguely clinical sound (while phrases like same-sex attracted have not only a clinical sound but a clinical history, and an ugly one); on the other hand, many Christians, especially Catholics, object on philosophical and cultural grounds to the word gay, and alternatives like queer are no better or even worse. The word Christian is also inevitably ambiguous: I use it in the sense of those who profess the faith of the Nicene Creed, as a decently historically grounded point of reference, but many Jesus-centered faith traditions that consider themselves Christian are not Nicene: the Mormon, Unitarian, Jehovah’s Witness, and Christian Science traditions (among many others) are all non-Nicene, and, whatever one’s view of the pale of orthodoxy, they are certainly explicable only in terms of Christianity.

2Side A and Side B, terms popularized by the Gay Christian Network, originated at the now-defunct site Bridges Across the Divide; they equated roughly with their current use. Side X for ex-gay views was formed on analogy with these—I think this took place on the discussion boards at GCN, but the history of such an intuitive phrase (given preëxisting side terms) is surely untraceable. Side Y is my own coinage, meant to fit with the other terms.

3There are Side A Christians who simply dismiss the Bible here. I’m not concerning myself with this perspective, because it is in my opinion a very weak version of Side A. I for one, if I’m going to bother with being a Christian at all, will do so only with an authority I can rely on, and I rather think a lot of other people feel the same. The strong version of Side A is that which takes the authority of Scripture seriously, as Matthew Vines does for example. Therefore, it’s the only kind I want to spend time discussing. There’s something faintly distasteful about attacking the weakness of an opponent’s argument; if you can’t take down the strong point, not much else matters, does it?

4Well, popular among the sort of people who like to talk about this stuff on the internet. Which is admittedly a larger number than I’d have anticipated.

5To date, Courage Apostolate is the only Church-sanctioned Catholic ministry to same-sex attracted people (their terminology). I’ve had a long and uneasy non-relationship with Courage: they’re perfectly orthodox, and they stop short of directly endorsing SOCE, but their online statements have tended to be extremely off-putting to me, even when they aren’t flat-out false in their depiction of the LGBT movement. While I was in college I wanted to find a chapter and couldn’t—or rather, the closest chapter was a state away—and my enthusiasm to spend time with the apostolate in person has only declined. Make of all this what you will.

6Note that saying somebody espouses a position doesn’t mean they’re gay (or whatever) themselves. In describing Fr Check and Pope Benedict as Side Y, I’m not speculating on their own sexual orientations, of which I know nothing; I’m just trying to illustrate what I mean by Side Y.