Decisions, decisions…

We return to our regularly scheduled programming today with the final installment of notes from the Soulforce Anti-Heterosexism Conference, which took place Nov. 20-22 in West Palm Beach. Previous entries are available here, here, and here.

Rev. Deborah’s main message was that our civil rights struggle is never just for ourselves alone. Members of the dominant group also suffer when their identity is built on lies and constricting stereotypes. To succeed, we must articulate a positive vision that shows how life will be better for all people when GLBT people have full equality. She also called for the GLBT rights movement to put the spirituality back into their dialogue. Dignity comes from God, not the state. “You’re not equal when you get the civil rights. You get the civil rights because you declare your equality beforehand…because you are equal under the eyes of God!”

She felt that the GLBT community gets sidetracked by infighting or reaction against oppressive measures, because people in oppressed groups will take out their internalized pain on one another. Instead, they need to spend more time creating a picture of their ideal world. The burden of proof is on the people who want change. Right-wingers are very good at painting a picture of the so-called horrors that would ensue if gays were equal.

No movement for minority rights can prevail without allies from the majority group. The majority has built its identity on a hierarchy that we’re trying to overturn. We have to understand their fear that there’s no good place for them in our new world. “Equality displaces the oppressor.” In Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the revolutionary part was his positive vision of what black equality would mean for white people–a little white child and a little black child walking hand in hand. Feminism had to help men understand how they could continue to play a valuable role in the family and society without being patriarchal.

Every “-ism” (racism, sexism, heterosexism) is rooted in the idea of an immutable, unequal binary. Example: look how many people still see Obama as a “black man” first, and only secondarily as a brilliant lawyer, politician, president, etc. A prejudice doesn’t become a full-blown “-ism” till it’s institutionalized. It becomes constantly interwoven into social institutions and attitudes till it’s invisible to members of the dominant group. The world is so much designed for them that they don’t even notice their privileges. Straights don’t feel defined by straightness whereas gays have to think about their sexual orientation all the time. White people don’t think they have a race.

The beginning of liberation is to show that these organizing binaries are fake and based on political inequalities, not immutable natural laws. How did Obama get to be a “black man” when he’s half white? It’s because of how race was constructed in the 1600’s to justify slavery. Any time something is mixed in, you stop being white. Similarly, heterosexuality becomes the “pure” category and then “queer” becomes like “black”, a catch-all of anything tainted by less than pure straightness. Like race, sexual orientation and gender are really a spectrum, not a binary.

When Genesis says humanity was “created male and female”, we can read this to mean that each person contains both genders. The characteristics that make up racial differences represent less than 1/1000 of 1% of our DNA. Gender differences are just as tiny. Our job is to redefine what it means to be man or woman so we are not two halves looking for the whole, but can be balanced within ourselves and draw on the best of each gender within ourselves instead of looking for the other to complete us.

Homophobia is so powerful because people are heavily invested in traditional gender roles and women’s inferiority. The one thing GLBT people have in common is their challenge to gender nonconformity. Rev. Deborah won’t settle for gay marriage–she wants “gender revolution!”

Watch a video of Rev. Deborah speaking out against California’s Proposition 8 last year:

During our last round of workshops, I attended Candace Chellew-Hodge’s discussion based on her book Bulletproof Faith, while my husband sat in on Timothy Palmer’s workshop on integrating sexuality and spirituality. Candace’s session ended earlier, so I dropped in at the end of this workshop, just in time to hear a few of the men debating whether sex in a committed relationship should be considered a higher spiritual path than casual sex. The group didn’t have the time, nor perhaps the willpower, to pursue this controversial issue further.

I’m currently reading Candace’s book, which I’ll be reviewing here at greater length, so these notes on her workshop will be brief. With modesty and wit, she shared ways to develop spiritual centeredness so that we don’t become wounded or provoked into unloving behavior by religion-based attacks. I appreciated her remarks on “the gift of the enemy”. Our opponents reveal the weak spots in our psychic armor. Responding to their attacks can hone our own arguments for our position. When we can be grateful for what they’ve taught us, we can begin to feel compassion for them. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that we them get away with abuse–only that we respect their dignity and don’t fight dirty. We should also give ourselves permission to retreat from pointless conflicts where the other person isn’t going to give our views a good-faith hearing. We don’t need to justify ourselves because we are justified by God’s infinite and universal love.

Thanks to all of you for a loving, inspiring, and spiritually nurturing weekend!

Dr. Rhue was one of several speakers to connect heterosexism to racism. The misinterpretation of the Sodom story is like the “curse of Ham” formerly used to justify slavery. (She mentioned a parody of an ex-gay ad at the Landover Baptist humor website: “We stand for the truth that Negroes can change: Example, Clarence Thomas!”) African-Americans have also tried to “change” in a racist society by passing for white.

Dr. Rhue called the ex-gay movement blasphemy because it makes people doubt that they are God’s children. “The ex-gay movement is the cult of the annihilation of the authentic self.” She would not let people hide their lack of empathy behind so-called Biblical dictates: “The Bible can justify whatever kindness or cruelty you already have in your heart.”

After the keynote speech, we broke up into smaller groups for different workshops. I attended Dr. Dominic Carbone’s presentation on the effects of childhood homophobic stress on adult gay men, because it was useful research for my novel. Dr. Carbone is a secular psychologist in New York City. He became interested in the topic because his patients often spoke about formative childhood experiences of peer ridicule, which caused them to experience depression, anxiety, and problems with intimacy as adults.

Being closeted prevents boys from developing a support network to explore new social skills and roles. Internalized homophobia is carried forward into adulthood because identity was formed from a powerless and stealth position, so the person feels defeated before he even begins. Dr. Carbone uses cognitive therapy to help such men replace their internalized unfriendly audience with awareness of their sources of support in the present. Interestingly, he mentioned one patient who was not gay but suffered the same after-effects from homophobic teasing because he wasn’t stereotypically masculine as a child. I think more stories like this could help us make the case that a world free of gender bias benefits people of all sexual orientations.

Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin gave a sardonic and informative presentation titled “Heterosexual Interrupted: What the Ex-Gay Movement Really Means by ‘Change'”. Jim is an engineer who works for defense contractors. He analyzed the junk science in papers by ex-gay advocates like Paul Cameron and was able to figure out that they were misrepresenting the studies they cited.

Jim gave us a detailed breakdown of the manipulative psychology behind ex-gay outreach. For the struggling  closeted person who just wants to feel normal, ex-gay ministries offer an explanation of their feelings of alienation and suffering, and a promise of liberation. Unfortunately, once you’re inside the movement, you find out that there really is no way to become straight. The most you can hope for is a lifetime of self-denial, rewarded with salvation at the end.

Their so-called explanations of homosexuality–such as NARTH founder Joseph Nicolosi’s theory that gay men are looking to fill an unmet need for closeness with their father–are insidiously believable because they do reflect gay youths’ experience of personal shame, insecure identity, and troubled relationships with parents. However, in reality, these problems spring from bias, not from the same-sex attraction as such. The “therapy” compounds the shame and rejection.

Jim played sound clips from ex-gay ads and conferences. “We advise fathers, if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will,” Nicolosi says ominously. This scaremongering drives a wedge between gay sons and their embarrassed fathers, and also feeds the stereotype of gays as pedophiles. Similarly, Melissa Fryrear of Exodus and Focus on the Family argues that all lesbians are sexual abuse victims. Well, said Jim, the sad truth is that a large number of all women have been sexually abused. This theory causes grief to parents who had no reason to believe their daughters were molested. Existing tensions about homosexuality are exploited to control and divide families, and incidentally, take their money.

Jim got some laughs out of Love In Action director John Smid’s assertion that “My wife’s vagina is enough for me–God created it for my fit.” (No word on whether the feeling is reciprocal…paging Eve Ensler…) Jim’s serious point was that ex-gay ideology not only severs body from spirit in gay men, but also reduces women to sexual parts and objectifies them. It’s no coincidence that “heterosexism” contains the word “sexism”.

Next, Prof. Christine Robinson, a sociology professor at James Madison University in Virginia, presented an excellent paper on “Genocidal Intentions: Public Policy and the Ex-Gay Movement”. She convinced me that the word “genocide” was not hyperbole. According to the UN Convention on Genocide, the term applies to a variety of strategies intended to wipe out an identifiable social subgroup. In addition to outright killing, genocide includes:

*Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
*Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
*Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
*Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

It’s clear from conservative religious rhetoric that they do want to make gays disappear. Exodus board member Don Schmierer, one of the forces behind Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, has written a book on “preventing the homosexual condition” in youth. In 2007, Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler said he would support treatment to eliminate homosexual orientation prenatally if a mechanism were found. (Apparently anti-gay trumps pro-life.) Ex-gay ministries provide legal aid and supportive research in custody cases to take children away from gay parents. (Prof. Robinson cited the Lisa Miller case.) These religious groups have also worked to pass state laws that ban gay adoption and IVF. They filed amicus briefs opposing the decriminalization of sodomy by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Exodus Global Alliance recently sponsored a conference in Barbados, where gay sex is illegal, with the advertisement “Some say decriminalize homosexuality–we say let’s offer solutions.” Would those be…final solutions?

Prof. Robinson applied social psychologist James Waller’s framework for understanding how ordinary people become capable of genocide. Through propaganda, they learn to recharacterize members of the targeted group as inferior, and to redefine acts of cruelty as something less heinous. The target becomes constructed as “other” through us-them thinking, moral disengagement, and blaming the victim. Perpetrators engage in social distancing from the other group to define them as non-persons.

How do anti-gay religious leaders accomplish this? They divide the world into Christians and non-Christians, and gays can’t be Christian. It’s God who makes these distinctions, not us, they say. (Just following orders…) Social distancing occurs by redefining the object of their hostility. There are no gay people so there are no victims. We are only wiping out this thing called “homosexuality”, not homosexuals themselves. In fact, we’re offering them freedom from their sin! Exodus leader Alan Chambers likes to say “the opposite of homosexuality is holiness”. This is a euphemistic way of saying that homosexuality is evil, which he will say outright to more insider Christian audiences.

Victim-blaming kicks in when ex-gay ministries point to self-harming behavior in the gay community, such as unsafe sex, instead of acknowledging the traumatic effects of social stigma on this population. They even say that hate crimes are provoked by predatory sexual advances. When the federal hate crimes bill was being debated this spring, conservative opponents blamed Mathew Shepard for his own murder.

Prof. Robinson is currently researching how conservative Christian organizations export homophobia to the developing world. This issue has gotten more press lately with the release of Jeff Sharlet’s book on The Family, a conservative theocratic cabal that claims some top US politicians as members. Read more on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.

Saturday’s last presentation was given by Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist and widely published author, who surveyed the history of psychological theories on homosexuality and how it was finally removed from the DSM-IV’s list of mental disorders in 1973. NARTH was formed as a protest against that decision. Like “creation science” versus Darwinism, anti-gay ministries use junk science to create a false appearance of disagreement among scientific experts so they can demand equal time. But there are no accredited psychiatric programs where students are being taught how to change their patients’ sexual orientation. All the leading professional groups have rejected this therapy as ineffective at best, harmful at worst.

Drescher suggested that ex-gay therapy may violate the ethical directive to put patients’ best interests ahead of the counselor’s agenda. There is a conflict of interest because the counselor is an agent of a conservative political or religious organization. It’s a common practice for ex-gay therapists to coerce their clients to stay in the program, by threatening to “out” them to their family, school or church. If they give up on the goal of sexual orientation change, they are kicked out of therapy with no referral.

While ex-gay groups claim they are defending the patient’s right to choose reparative therapy, a doctor is not obliged to provide something harmful just because a patient requests it. Doctors are not allowed to prescribe snake oil. Plastic surgeons treat conditions that are not illnesses, but there’s a very complex scientific review process; patients can’t simply choose any surgery they want.

However, Drescher noted that former ex-gay patients rarely file ethics complaints. They blame themselves, believing that the therapist genuinely wanted to help them, or they are reluctant to relive the trauma. One resource he recommended was the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists.

After the dinner break, we were treated to “M.U.D. (Men Under Dirt)”, a memorable and heart-stirring multimedia performance by John Ollom and the members of Ollom Movement Art. Through interpretive dance, a short film, and poetry by Walt Whitman, the troupe told the story of a gay man’s struggle to love his true self and make peace with the masculine and feminine energies within him. Find out more, and see a trailer for the film, at their Prismatic Productions website. John will be leading a workshop on self-expression through poetry, drawing, film, and dance at Easton Mountain in upstate New York this coming June.

Coming in my next post: Sunday’s presentations by Rev. Deborah Johnson and Candace Chellew-Hodge, and thoughts for the future.

Now, continuing my report from last week’s conference on gay rights and spirituality, here are some notes on the presentations I attended. Soulforce also plans to make the keynote speeches available on their website in the next couple of weeks.

The conference began Friday night with a series of testimonies from “ex-gay survivors” — people who had gone through traumatic and ineffective programs to change their sexual orientation, and were now on a mission to raise awareness about this form of spiritual and psychological abuse. The program was presented by Jeff Lutes, outgoing executive director of Soulforce, and Christine Bakke, who blogs at Beyond Ex-Gay.

Jacob Wilson, a student at Iowa State, described his experience at Love In Action. When he was 19, his pastor found out he was dating another boy from church, and threatened him that he would no longer be welcome in his church or his hometown unless he went to LIA. The program promised him freedom from the pain of his “deviant choice”, but later they told him that the best he could hope for was a life of celibacy and self-control. (As we heard often throughout the weekend, this kind of bait-and-switch is common in ex-gay ministries.) Jacob wasn’t allowed to talk to his family and friends till he made a list of every sin he’d ever committed and shared it with them. At the “Friends and Family” weekend, LIA counselors blamed their clients’ parents for making them gay. Then, all the clients had to march in silence into the auditorium and one by one share the thing they were most ashamed of, to an audience of 100+ people. Jacob quit Bible college after one semester and has started surrounding himself with more affirming friends who support him in being both gay and Christian. As I watched his poised and matter-of-fact presentation, I also grieved for all the other kids like him who couldn’t face losing their entire community, and who might still be trapped in the closet.

Daniel Gonzales was another survivor in his 20s. His story, video and collage are posted at Beyond Ex-Gay. He also used to blog at Ex-Gay Watch. Unlike Jacob, he lost his faith when he saw through the lies of NARTH’s reparative therapy. As a Baptist, he was taught that the Bible is “all or nothing”, so when he found that Christians were wrong about homosexuality, he couldn’t compartmentalize and preserve anything of his faith. It’s sad, he said, because ex-gay ministries think they’re bringing people closer to Jesus.

Darlene Bogle was formerly the director of Paraclete Ministries, an ex-gay referral ministry affiliated with the Foursquare (Pentecostal) church. All the while, she had to admit to herself that her feelings for women hadn’t changed, but she believed she was not a lesbian if she wasn’t acting out — until she fell in love with someone at an Exodus conference “and Exodus gave me the left foot of fellowship.” She later went to an Evangelicals Concerned conference and realized that her former teachings had harmed people. This prompted her historic 2007 apology to the gay community. She told us that the forgiveness she’s received has been spiritually transformative.

Darlene’s cheerful, humble and humorous spirit contributed to the warm and positive atmosphere of the Soulforce conference. By contrast with other political conferences I’ve attended, overall there was a surprising lack of bitterness and negativity, which I attribute to the fact that many of these folks still have a spiritual practice and have done the inner work of self-acceptance instead of looking to politics for salvation.

Australian life coach Anthony Venn-Brown, also a former Pentecostal preacher, tried the ex-gay path for 22 years before coming out and losing his ministry. His story is documented at A Life of Unlearning. He shared positive developments in gay rights in Australia. Ex-gay ministries, he said, are a symptom of evangelical and Pentecostal ignorance about why they get hundreds of thousands of phone calls from self-hating gays — it’s because of heterosexism, not something inherently damaging about same-sex orientation. Thanks to activism, these ministries no longer say that all gays go to hell, and are more honest that self-control rather than straightness is the best-case scenario. After meeting with Anthony, the Assemblies of God rewrote their doctrinal statement to say that the orientation itself isn’t sinful. A Melbourne megachurch pastor preached a sermon called “Real Christianity: The Accepting Church” and the congregation gave him a standing ovation; they are now officially an affirming church. Anthony was optimistic that we’re on the winning side.

Joining us from Barcelona, Marc Orozco talked about putting together the first ex-gay survivors’ conference there. They began a sociological study based on the participants’ experiences, which became the basis of their lobbying efforts to outlaw ex-gay therapy in Catalonia.

Closing the presentation, Dr. Jallen Rix read a summons to self-acceptance and wholeness, from the ending of his forthcoming book Ex-Gay No Way.