Thousands of people have left the gay lifestyle.  Who says?  Why, as it turns out, the very same people who want to sell you ex-gay therapy…

But back to the video [It’s Not Gay]… Nine exgays appear in it. How many make/made their living exgays? You guessed it, every single one of them.

Ex-Gay for pay, as Wayne Besen calls it.  And the sad thing is, as Daniel Gonzales at Ex-Gay Watch points out, most of these folks aren’t making a lot of money.  But just look at the roll call Gonzales lists in his post.  Founder of Kerusso Ministries…Former counseling Assistant at Love In Action…Social Research Analyst at Focus on the Family…Director of LIFE Coaching International…Counselor at Quest Ministries…Director of Quest Ministries…  On and on it goes.  And they’re seldom if ever up front about their connections to the ex-gay movement.  But that’s not the basic dishonesty here.  The basic dishonesty is when they say that change is possible they’re not really addressing that to a gay audience, but to a straight one.

As Ex-Gay watch is now documenting, the movement is starting to focus its efforts on heterosexuals.  Counter-intuitive?  Not when you realize that they were actually the target audience all along. The point was never to offer change to homosexuals, but to give heterosexuals an excuse not to care what happens to their homosexual neighbors.  They can always change if they want too…Their blood is upon them…

After decades of trying, and failing to produce any objectively measurable change in sexual orientation, the people actually running these ministries, and dealing with the human wreckage they’re piling up firsthand, cannot possibly Not Know that they’re selling people snake oil.  They keep right on selling it, but as the ex-gay movement finds itself under heightened scrutiny now after the Love In Action protests last year, they’re getting fewer takers.  John Smid, who has had to sell two of the houses where he kept his adult residential clients, is now turning his focus onto exploiting the fears and loathings of parents toward their gay teens, who cannot legally refuse to be put into Refuge.  Easy pickings for the moment, that might let him at least keep his hollow church.  But even that market has no real growth potential and they know it.  What’s left?  The base, of course.  As the ex-gay myth comes crashing down around them, there is still the base.  The base will always be there to listen, and believe.

Exodus and PFOX are now focusing attention on heterosexual youth, creating youth groups with the specific intent of disrupting gay-straight alliances in schools.  It may seem a shift in focus, but it’s more a lifting of the mask.  The Ex-gay movement was never about creating ex-gays.  It was always about giving bigots an excuse to hate, and to act on that hate.  Next comes the name change, to probably something like, Parents of Bullies Alliance in Support of Hate.  PBASH.