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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (June 20, 2003)
jura 20. 2003 ? [I’m] a Presbyterian clergy person, and we believe that God has formed, is forming and will continue to form and reform the church. Yes, we believe there is the authority of Scripture in all that we do, hut we also read it as a community. We d on’t how down to Scripture. We don’t wor ship Scripture. We worship G od in Christ. And we worship a Gixl who is continuing to create, to form, to do amazingly new and different things. Take women in leadership roles, for example. It was the surrounding society that was really more encouraging of women in roles of leader ship than it was the church. T he church was one of the last to come along and say women can he one of the elders in a church or one of the pas tors of a church. W hy do we make those changes? It goes hack to this. If you read the Bihle one way on these issues, then don’t you have to read it all this way? relationship for 12 years looking for Mr. Right, wanting to settle down, buy a home, have kids, adopt, do all that. But I was never enough for another person, and nobody else was ever enough for me. There was always somebody on the other side that was better than the person I was with. I had to look myself in the mirror and realize I’m going to he a 50-year-old troll. W hen you’re young and attractive and 26 and built like a brick house, you’re valuable to the community, but let’s turn the lights on at 2 in the morning and see who’s left sitting at JR.’s. It’s not the cute young 26-year-olds; it’s the 40-, 50-, 60-year-old men with guts and no hair. I got out of the now and looked at what my life would he when 1 was 40 if 1 continued in homosexuality. And I looked at what my life could possibly be at 40 if 1 left homosexuality. T he latter was much more inviting. BWM: His experience being a gay man is so different than my experience as a gay man. For me, there really was a sense that I had made my life extraordinarily cumbersome and complex by living “in the closet,” by hiding, living untruth fully and unfaithfully, failing to embrace the per son Gixl created me to be. Now that I’m more “out,” I don’t have to fight so many of the bat tles or use up so much of the energy I was using just to pretend that 1 wasn’t something when I really was. Like so many others, I kept on praying to God to change me. I grew up in a church in which being gay, lesbian, bi or trans was not appropriate. It was not allowed. But when you stop telling G od what God should do and start 27 listening to God, you hear God say, “I love you, and I made you who you are, and my love is always there, trust me.” I had bought into a lot of th e cultural co n struction of A m erican society up until the age of 40. I am a father of two amazing kids, I was married, I had a house, a mortgage, two cars, cats and on th e way for tenure at a modern major research university. I had it all, but 1 was so unhappy and knew deep inside I was living a lie, th a t I was not being truthful. W h en I read Psalm 139, I kept bumping into the passage “G od knew us as G od was k n ittin g us in our m other’s womb.” G od was there— there was no way to escape it. So the realization for me was, who was I fooling? If I Continued on Page 28 I will survive TK : O pponents of reparative or conversion therapy say that it hurts families and faith com m unities by causing unnecessary mis understanding, isolation and separation. M H : T his is a typical politically correct response th a t has been fed to th e masses by th e gay com m unity. T h e very m an, Dr. [Robert L ] Spitzer, th at was the hero o f the orman Birthmark, like most “ex gay com m unity in 1973 for fighting to get gay” ministry survivors, came away hom osexuality taken out of [standard diag from the experience without a cure nostic criteria for m ental disorders] has now com e hack and done a study showing that for his homosexuality. W hat he did find, however, was a remedy for his change is possible for those th a t seek it. W hy internal struggle with faith. are we not hearing about this? T h e gay co m m unity has now silenced him and marginal- ‘ A t age 19 he was referred to Portland Fel ized his view. W hy? Science or politics? lowship by a campus ministry at Oregon State Author's note: Jack Drescher, chairman of the University. He was led to believe it was a pro fessional counseling service for conservative American Psychiatric Assoaaticm's Committee on Christians conflicted about their sexuality. GLB Concerns, dismisses the study. He asserts Spitzer’s survey is flawed statistically and metfuxl- Two years and about $700 later, he escaped (¡logically. Only 200 respondents, referred by ex-gay and began to rebuild his spiritual identity. Now groups, were interviewed by teleplume without fol 27, h e’s accepted his sexual orientation and low-up and without addressing the harm such a con attends the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community C hurch of Portland. version might impose. Here is his story, in his own words: When contacted by Just O ut about his study, Spitzer offered the following statement: "As 1 have • • • indicated on several occasions, I personally support full civil rights for gays, gays in the military, gay was just a nervous wreck. I was so desperate to adoptum and the recognitum of gay civil unum. All meet anyone, especially a Christian, who I of these are antithetical to the approach taken by would be able to relate to. So it was a good expe Focus <m the Family. My study dealt with a very rience in terms of meeting other people who select sample of individuals who were not coerced into some kind of therapy to change their sexual ori- were in the same kind of situation. W hen we got to the “ 101 Counseling’’ ses entatum. Clearly the results of my study in no way sions, th a t’s where 1 started having a lot of ques justify pressuring gays to seek such therafry nor does tions and doubts about, “Is this really going to it assume that all gays would be better off if they work?” W hat made me feel worse was that it changed." involved going through and identifying all of BW M : T he greatest damage lies in trying to place the radical and wonderful varieties of the supposed “deficiencies” I had. T h a t’s w hen they started telling me: “You who we were created to he into a predefined cam e from a broken hom e; th a t’s som ething box. O ne of the most com m on sins to commit in your background th a t’s causing you not to is to try to box in G od by saying, “Well, you be healthy. You’re n o t developed fully into a have to love so-and-so, but you can ’t love such- and-such." W hen we make these kinds of m an.’’ T h at had never even come into my mind. moves, asserting our limited imagination and T h at wasn’t the identity I had for myself. creativity on G od the creator, isn’t that to get And yet after two years of going through all the relationship between G od and hum ankind that— after talking about all your “failings”— backward? you start taking on the identity: “Well, I’m just a guy from a broken home. I’m insecure with my TK : C an you describe your own experience masculinity. I don’t have strong enough faith to and how you’ve changed? succeed.” M H: I now understand that I had scxualized I was raised by my mom primarily. I was con my unmet homo-emotional needs that were not flicted because 1 didn’t feel like I had a bad met through a positive relationship with my father or other men as I grew up. Realizing this home. I was really proud of the way my mom has allowed me to understand where the sexual raised me, and I thought I was fine. drive found its genesis, and therefore it has now here were very strict rules—you couldn’t lost its power. meet anyone outside of the group. There I’d love to say that I came out of homosexu- were a lot of issues about boundaries. They didn’t ality because of some religious experience, but that wasn’t the case. I walked (Hit of homosexu want people to become dependent on each other, ality because I was sick and tired of what the gay so they really discouraged people from forming close friendships. community had to offer me. Relationship after Ex-ex-gay man keeps the faith while struggling with his spiritual identity by Jim Radosta PHOTO BY MARTY DAV* I T There were rules about hugging. You had to hug— they called it an A-frame hug— so your hips wouldn’t touch. O ne of the things they had you do was go through your home and clean out anything th a t was remotely gay. For me, 1 wasn’t out, so the only thing I had was a Melissa Etheridge CD . [Laughs] So I had to throw th at out. It was kind of bizarre. And, of course, you had to get rid of all the pom. T hat was kind of a no-brainer. My objective was to build a close relation ship to God and challenge myself to be a better Christian. But toward the end of the two years what I realized was that my entire spiritual life became entangled in trying not to be gay. My whole identity of who I was to God was depen dent on whether I was making progress toward “healing" my homosexuality and becoming more heterosexual. I scheduled an individual counseling session with one of the leaders there, and I told him that I was having doubts, that this wasn’t working, that l was becoming very disillusioned. He turned around and told me: “I really have doubts about your faith. You’re not very enthusiastic." Nobody had ever told me I lacked faith. It really him me that someone would say that. For like a year after that I took time off from church and stayed away. I read a lot of books and was rethinking what Christianity was to me and why it was important. oday I’m more skeptical. But at the same time, though, I think I do have an idea what is important to me about G od and Chris tianity and what Jesus' message really was about. So I’m more secure in my spiritual identity in terms of being able to say what things I do believe and what things I have doubts ab o u t T h a t’s a lot different from w hen I first start ed going to “ex-gay" ministries, w hen it was much more based in C hristian fundam ental ism: These are th e principles of the faith, and there’s n o discussion. Now I’m more willing to acknowledge th a t there are things I d on’t know and there are things I d o n ’t think the Bible knows. During the two years there, what I tended to notice was the people who were really the most outspoken in terms of how “well” it was going— those who were the people who, in the end, tended to have the biggest falls, who may not have been completely ho n est In the end, I don't know of anyone who’s been terribly suc cessful at the program. JT1 T
