And this little lesbian has never participated in an ex-gay program. Never registered for one of their conferences. Never looked through the yellow pages for a counselor in reparitive therapy. Never worshiped in a church with an outreach ministry committed to “providing healing and restoration for the homosexual.” The closest I ever came to any type of ex-gay anything was in reading a handful of ex-gay stories back in the days when God and I first started talking seriously about my own sexual orientation and even back then when I was raw and hurting and struggling internally I couldn’t find any connection between my life experience and those detailed by individuals who had left the homosexual lifestyle. I no more related to their lives than had I been reading about the life of the Japanese Fire Belly Newt and I say this with no disrespect intended to the Japanese Fire Belly Newt or to anyone who self-identifies as ex-gay.

Seriously. If you were sexually traumatized as a child, neglected by your dad, lacked nurturing from your emotionally unavailable mom, acting out sexually with multiple women throughout your twenties, abusing drugs or alcohol or yourself in your thirties, and had turned your back on a relationship with God, and then going through an ex-gay program brought you to a place of healing and wholeness then I’ll accept what you tell me as your story. I won’t pretend to understand what you’ve been through at any point in your life but I respect that this is your story of what happened to you and if that’s the path that led you to a fulfilling relationship with God, got you out of yourself, and restored you to the world then I’m not about to question you here or to deny that what you’re saying is true for you. But here’s the deal and we both know what it is. You believe homosexuality is a sin. I do not. And so we either agree to disagree and stay with what we have in common or we wish each other well and return to our respective corners. For my part I choose to hope that the grace of God could allow us to navigate our way toward a cordial way of relating with one another being that in the end we all eat from the same bread and drink from the same cup.

Just as I’ve never been involved in the ex-gay movement, I’ve never been around any  formerly gay people, but I have been around a number of GLBTQ Christians who spent years of their life in ex-gay programs and lived to tell the tale. I know men and women who were so emotionally and spiritually beaten down by one ex-gay program or another that they ended up spending years in therapy healing from the mess of their experience. I know knew one  gay man who after years of going in and out of the doors of a particular ex-gay program at the insistence of his religious parents ended up committing suicide when the thought of living only to try and fail again became too painful to bear.

While I never went through the doors of an ex-gay program the voices of the ex-gay movement came through my families door, imparting their outrageous theories of homosexuality and its causes, their lies about the homosexual lifestyle, and their theology of deliverance and change. My annoyance isn’t because of what they put me through their teaching because I never took anything they said seriously. I heard what they were putting out there and it was so far from the truth of my life as a Christian, a woman, and a lesbian that all they said would have been laughable were it not so pathetically tragic. No. My issue with the ex-gay movement is what they put my mom and dad through in those first days and months following my coming out, since as evangelical Christians my parents turned to Christian leaders among them like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and then read literature and watched videos from groups these men recommended like Love Won Out and Exodus International.

These ex-gay groups preceded to tell my parents I was broken, rebellious, and deceived. Their description of the homosexual lifestyle caused my parents to imagine the worst of what I might be doing at any moment and fueled their fear that the daughter they had joyfully watched grow up to embrace the Christian faith was now going to hell.These ex-gay organizations didn’t hesitate to tell my parents they knew more about me than my own parents did because they knew all all about homosexuals, but the lies they told my parents that continue to trouble me to this day, long after my parents and I found a way to navigate our love around our differences, long after my mom came to tell me she was happy for the love I shared with D, and long after both my parents have passed away, are the lies that burdened my mom and dad unnecessarily. Lies that caused them to believe in some way they had failed as parents and to feel guilty they had done something to contribute to my “broken, sinful condition.” Did something happen to me as a child on their watch? Did they neglect me in some way? Should they have disciplined me more? Should they have talked with me more? Did they fail to affirm or encourage my femininity when I was young? Was Mom nurturing enough? Was Dad involved enough?

My parents and I had a number of painful conversations in those early days but the one I most remember is when my mom in a voice weighted down with dread at what my answer might be asked, “Did Daddy and I do something that made you this way?” All I could say to her at the time was that she and dad had been wonderful parents and just as they never did anything to make me gay there wasn’t anything they could have ever done to make me not gay.

I’m not saying that any particular ex-gay organization or even James Dobson in all his self-appointed expert wisdom caused my parents to go to a place they wouldn’t have gone to on their own. As I said, my folks were raised within the conservative Christian church and so their theology and worldview was formed and grounded there. No, their struggle to reconcile having a gay daughter would have already been difficult enough for them but what the ex-gay movement did through their broad brush strokes of the “gay lifestyle” and their dishonest general characterizations of gay people only deepened their worst fears. These were Christian professionals after all, experienced and trained in dealing with homosexual people, Christian therapists and pastors who regularly ministered to gay people and through prayer and counseling had witnessed countless people healed and delivered from the bondage of homosexuality and sexual brokenness. The words of these trained professionals, medical experts and Christian therapists was salt in the open wounds my parents already carried and I continue to hold them to account for adding so much as one needless moment of fear or guilt or shame to my parents lives.

Again, if you’re someone who in your own words, “has left the ‘gay lifestyle’ through the grace of God” then all I can say is good for you and I say that sincerely. In at least the grace of God we can agree if in nothing else. But to those ex-gay organizations and leaders who continue to perpetuate dishonest characterizations and lies about GLBTQ people or make claims of change that are disingenuous at best, then shame on you. Really. Shame on you.

*I primarily refer to what are commonly called “ex-gay ministries” as ex-gay groups, organizations or programs throughout this post. I have chosen to do so intentionally as I simply can’t attach the word “ministry” to anything that in my view has caused so much spiritual harm to so many lives.

In my childhood home there was a strictly-enforced no swearing policy. Swearing and name-calling were so off-limits I was afraid of them; afraid that if one of those dreaded nuggets of blasphemy passed over my lips, it might void my ticket on the glory train. I’m not even talking the big swear words known, loved, and excessively used even at this moment by the trio of teenage testosterone at the table next to me at Starbucks. No, the prohibition against swear words and name-calling under my parent’s roof extended to any words that sounded even remotely like the first-string players. Crap, shoot, dang, doggone it, sheesh, shucks, jeeze, jerk, jeepers, creep, and butt all could find me going to my room for a little time to reflect and repent.

For the record, never once did I heard my parents violate their own code. The worse thing I ever heard my father call anyone was a flake and only because he was seething mad and momentarily lost control of himself and flake fell out of his mouth. Even as I write this I can’t help but wonder if somewhere in heaven my dad isn’t reading this post (wouldn’t you think they have awesome wireless up there?) and muttering “Young lady, enough with the potty mouth!” If my dad could even bring himself to say potty mouth, which I doubt he ever could. And yes, he really was that pure and irreproachable and I adored him for it and everything else that made him the most decent man I’ve ever known.

But the thing is, as a young girl, there were times when I really wanted to say a swear word, not because I was driven by moral outrage to use one. I simply wanted to see what it would feel like on my tongue and how it would sound in my ears with my voice. I didn’t want to say the big one, that über-profanity at the top of the list, but one of the minor ones, one of those weak bottom-feeders in the pool of profanity. And then one day I learned how. To say a swear word free of consequences, all I had to do was repeat what someone else said and right before the swear word say “quote-unquote.” It would look something like this:

The adolescent Anita would enter the house through the kitchen door where her mom would be enjoying her last minutes of peaceful calm in the day before she’d begin, “Mom! Mom! Okay, okay, listen to this! Today on the playground we were playing kickball during recess. I’m good at kickball Mom. I’m like the best girl at kickball really I am. I once kicked it over the roof by the third grade classes and no body could believe it and it was so neat, but anyway, so we were playing kickball and Fargo, you know Fargo Mom. He’s the boy who had a girl-boy birthday party last year where there was dancing and everything and so anyway, Fargo was up for his turn to kick but when he went to kick the ball he completely missed it and Mom, Mom, you’re not going to believe it but he said quote-unquote damn it really loud, right there in front of the teacher and everyone.” And then with an appalled yet guileless expression continue,“I’m just saying what Fargo said Mom, I didn’t say it.” I don’t know where I learned this trick, though I imagine my Sunday School peer group would be a likely suspect but regardless of its origin it worked worked every time and by it’s utilization I was able to take a couple second-string swear words out for a test run, absolved of all responsibility for their utterance. I did this quote-unquote thing so frequently for a few years there that had air quotes been in vogue in the early seventies I would have had carpal tunnel by sixth grade.

So what does this recollection have to do with anything? Not much other than I was reminded of it the other day while reading a post that included the following excerpt from Peter LaBarbera from American’s for Truth.

Let’s pretend that homosexual “families” are like other families. Let’s pretend that having a “dad” and another “dad” – and one is more effeminate, one’s more like the mom – is something like a mother and a father.

Did you know there’s actually a new name for quotations used in this way? Hey, I read it on Wikipedia so it must be “true.” They go by the names scare, irony, and distance quotes, quotation marks that enclose a word or phrase that’s meant to provoke a negative reaction, to cast suspicion on the appropriateness or truth of what’s being quoted, and there’s no question it causes a negative reaction, especially for those whose identity, values, or life experience are held within the quotation marks. To those people the quotation marks feel like a dismissive wave of the hand, a tongue in the cheek, and a roll of the eyes. Such is the power of the “   “.

We all use them. They do. We do. And I suppose on some issues we have to if we want to speak directly and honestly. For example it would be difficult for me to address the topic of “ex-gay” without quotation marks since I don’t believe that being “ex-gay” is possible or even a necessity. At the same time I realize that those who claim to be ex-gay do so with the sincere conviction of their beliefs and life experience behind it just as I speak unapologetically of being a gay Christian. It’s dicey. How do we talk our way around challenging and oppositional topics without relying on words or punctuation that undermine another person’s reality or truth? How do we speak with integrity to our truth without tromping over the values and beliefs of someone else? How do we avoid the appearance of being judgmental and disparaging?

The answer? I don’t know. I only know that in a world, church, and blogosphere where a flood of coded quotation marks and sarastic barbs litter the landscape I want to be among those who seek reconcilation and healing as much as justice and equality. There’s got to be a way to do that, don’t you think?

And it was Fargo who said the bad word and not me. Honest!

On my desk is a stack of papers, about a hundred and fifty sheets thick, containing the personal stories of more than 35 ‘ex-lesbians’ which I gathered from ‘ex-gay’ ministries such as Stonewall Revisited. The first time I read them was more than three years ago when I was struggling with my own sexuality. Because I knew homosexuality was sin I devoured each testimony, hoping they would provide me with the strength to flee, resist, or at the very least suppress my sexual orientation.

I’ve heard some in the gay community reject these testimonies by saying they’re written simply by those who are reacting to their own internalized homophobia by denying their sexuality. There are a few who discredit these stories so completely as to say there’s nothing of truth to them, as though there’s some bleary-eyed heterosexual fundamentalist hiding in a darkened room punching out story after story of homosexual deliverance at his computer keyboard, with only an occasional break to send off another check to Exodus International.

As a Christian I’m both moved and called to rejoice with those who have experienced the tranforming power of Christ, however God has sovereignly chosen to work that out in their individual lives. By their own words the women in these stories became involved in same-sex relationships, consciously or unconsciously, to meet some insatible longing and emptiness in their lives as a response to painful and dysfunctional life experiences. The very titles of their testimonies reflect this longing…The Search for Father’s Love, Crying Behind the Mask, My Search for Affirmation, and Yearning to be Loved. It’s important to realize that there are many lesbians, as there are straight women, who have experienced some of the same life circumstances as these women but have found healing in Christ while still remaining gay. Yet for these women same-sex relationships were a temporary and hollow solution to a deeper problem that needed God’s healing touch.

I believe it’s important that none of us, whether lesbian or ‘ex-lesbian’ discredit the work of God in someone else’s life simply because it seems to conflict with our own experience. There’s room for all of us to testify to God’s goodness in our lives without needing to nullify the miraculous working of God in another person’s life just because it’s different from our own. I have great peace in my life as a lesbian and know without question that my sexuality comes as no surprise to the One who created me. I absolutely believe I can honor and glorify God in my sexuality just as I am to do in all other aspects of my life that go into making me uniquely me and which I have submitted to God’s control. I would want others to rejoice along with me in what God has done and is doing in my life. At the same time I will stand and celebrate with these women who have experienced Christ in a deeper way through their journey and ‘exodus’ from same-sex relationships. How can I not give God praise for words such as these:

“God has done such a marvelous work in my life. As He released me from hatred, unforgiveness, and bitterness, my bondage to homosexuality was broken. He has given me true love and forgiveness toward my precious parents. How I thank Him for now I love them the way He always intended.”

“I took a big step and wrote my mother, explaining my painful memories, my anger and hurt feelings toward her, and my desire to become close as a mother and a daughter. The Lord is healing the breech and this is something for which I’m very grateful.”

“I continue to follow Jesus wholeheartedly and with great delight.”

“Through counseling, God began digging up the deeper roots of my lesbianism. I had to face the rejection, loneliness, self-hatred, and other hurts from my childhood. Sometimes I wondered if the pain would ever end But God was faithful, and my relationship with Him began to change. I became totally dependent on Him for my every need. Instead of seeing Him as an unfair and condemning God, I began to
experience Him as a loving Father who wants wholeness for me.”

“The smile on my face is genuine, reflecting the inner joy that God has given me.”

“I came to a greater awareness of how much God loves me and the mighty power that is available through Him.”

To me, the miracle in each of these stories isn’t that a woman no longer has same-sex affections and relationships but that each was healed from unforgiveness, bitterness, painful memories, anger, and self-hatred. They’ve grown in their understanding that God loves them, in the knowledge of their total dependence on God in all things, and in their desire to submit all of their life to God’s control. These are the same things I celebrate in the lives of many Christian lesbians. We might possibly have more in common than we dare to imagine.

Along with acknowledging the experiences of those who speak of receiving their healing through the help of ex-gay ministries I would dishonor the lives of thousands of gays and lesbians who became involved in these organizations in their attempt to change only to leave more damaged and shattered than when they had arrived were I to not acknowledge their experiences. While the statistics remain vague and virtually no reliable follow-up data is available, the recovery rate for those who participate in these ex-gay ministries seems by all accounts minimal at best. It remains my belief that while support should be given to those within the faith community who are suffering from deep spiritual and psychological wounds inflicted upon them in life, there’s no need for a ministry that’s primary objective is to change gays and lesbians into becoming heterosexual, were that even possible, because the simple reality is there is nothing to change but everything to celebrate!

For other thoughts on the topic of ‘ex-gays’ check out these articles in Whosoever.

Common Life Experiences as Provided in “Ex-Lesbian” Testimonies

• Gender rejection: expressed disappointed by parents over the desire for a son rather than a daughter, desire by child to be a boy rather than girl, ridiculed by peers for tomboy appearance

• Traumatic childhood events: terminal illness, accidental death or suicide of parent or sibling, long physical separations from parents

• Inappropriate family relationships: daughter fulfills the role of second wife to father, care giver to mother, etc.

• Sexual abuse or rape by male family member, acquaintance, or stranger

• Parental alcoholism and drug abuse

• Exposure to extensive pornography in the home

• Early and inappropriate sexual experimentation in adolescence

• Parental abuse: neglect, physical, verbal or sexual abuse

• Lack of physical and emotional boundaries within the birth family

• Witness to spousal abuse between father and mother

• Little or no expression of emotions allowed in family and limited expressions of physical affection from parents

• Constantly seeking approval of father through perceived ‘male-oriented’ activities

Reported Condition of Gay Life as Provided in “Ex-Lesbian” Testimonies

• Lack of any spirituality or personal faith

• Emotional dependency or co-dependency

• Alcoholism and/or drug abuse

• Fear, hatred, or jealousy of men

• Promiscous sexual activity

• Overwhelming need for sexual intimacy

• Unhealthy relationships

• Thoughts of suicide

• Abusive lesbian relationships

• Self-hatred

• General unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life

• Extreme loneliness and feelings of rejection