Vigil Against Love Won Out Tomorrow In Silver Spring Maryland
I should have posted this earlier in the week after I got back from Memphis…but anyway…
Montgomery County Maryland is my growing up place. I’ve been waiting for these rats to stick there noses there. I’ll be at the vigil in the morning, or if not the morning one, the afternoon one. If you expect to be there please email me.
This has been one ex-gay protesting week for me…
Join Us at a "Love Won Out" Vigil
June 10, 2006
Focus on the Family is coming to Montgomery County Saturday June 10. They are presenting their "Love WonOut" conference at Immanuel’s Church in Silver Spring. We know from other similar events around the country that these conferences propagate the view that LGBT people must choose between their Christian faith and their own God given sexuality; that homosexuality is a mental disorder and that this"disorder" can and must be cured.
In other communities, citizens of all walks of life have joined together to bear witness that these statements are not true. We hope to do the same. A vigil is being held in front of Immanuel’s Church the day ofthe conference. We desire to let people know that being faithful to God and being a healthy, LGBT person are not inconsistent; and to counter the conversion therapy notions set forth by Focus on the Family, which are dangerous to the well being of those to whom it is directed. We further want to provide a friendly face of support for any individuals attending the conference due to coercion.
The morning vigil is between 7:30 – 9:30 AM in a lot across from the church. The press conference will take place at 9:00 AM. The afternoon vigil is 4:00 – 6:00 PM. Our vigil will be silent and peaceful. Respectful placards are welcome.
Immanuel’s Church is located at 16819 New Hampshire Ave. Silver Spring, MD. It is just north of Spencerville Road, 6.8 miles north of Colesville Road.
For further information about the Love Won Out conference: www.lovewonout.com
For further information about the vigil, email Rev. Sandy Dodson, Christ Congregational Church, UCC: sandy@christ-ucc.org
The Sunday before the protests, the protesters organized a wee poster making party at Peabody Park in the Forbidden Zone (the forbidden Zone being being those regions of Memphis that Love In Action inmates are not allowed to enter while in the program). It was an affair that might have stuck you as a tad carefree, given the brutal nature of Love In Action’s Refuge program. But these folks, nearly all of them teens themselves (Morgan told me to go to Peabody Park and look for a bunch of crazy teens), had a message of genuine love and courage to be oneself, to speak to the people trapped inside LIA, and there were times when the atmosphere got a little giddy with it. But I could not emphasize this enough: the message they were determined to bring to the doorstep of LIA was not one of anger and fear and hurt, but of courage and love.
I can think of no quicker, surer solvent of the hatred and fear inside of John Smid’s hollow church, then the spirit these determined teens brought to the protests. They are an amazing group.
In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds…I was sent to several different counselors, the last of which worked for a fundamentalist Christian church. This “counselor” informed me that I was not Gay, in fact, he said no one was really Gay…and anyone who claimed to be gay was living a lie. This pastor recommended to my parents that I be sent to Love In Action’s REFUGE program for teens.
On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. I spent the entire summer between my junior and senior year of highschool in Memphis, against my will, at Refuge, where I underwent many forms of “therapy” that were supposed to turn me away from being gay. These so-called “therapies” included group activities where one person was singled out and made to be ashamed of very personal occurrences in their lives. I had to participate in this activity many times. Other “therapies” included isolation, where you wouldn’t be allowed to communicate—we were not even allowed to make eye contact, with any of the other participants; making the women wear skirts and makeup to help them become more feminine; and making the men play sports in an attempt to help them become more masculine.
These are just a couple of examples of the type of “program” they use to turn people straight. Though while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods. After enduring this time in Memphis I returned home, unchanged.
My parents were very disappointed and didn’t know what to do next, feeling that they had tried everything. My mom took it upon herself to somehow change me. This began with daily bouts of verbal abuse, her telling me how ashamed she was of me. After a few months of this, the verbal abuse escalated into small episodes of physical abuse, with her cornering me and slapping me, while telling me what an abomination I was.This type of behavior continued until I could no longer stand to live at home. One day I packed up all of my belongings into my car, and told my parents that I was moving out right that minute. My mother got so angry when I told her this that she exploded and beat me into a corner, ripping my shirt and giving me scratches and bruises in the process. My dad had to pull her off of me so that I could get to my car to leave.
Fortunately I am now living with a wonderful, and supportive family who are very empathetic toward my situation. They have taken me in, and made me their son-in-spirit. Now that I am in a much-improved situation, I feel that I need to speak-out against the things that I went through. Parents should not be able to force their children to attend any type of program like the one I went to. When a child comes out to their parents as gay, lesbian, or bisexual they need the love and support of their parents. They don’t need to be made to feel that there is something wrong with them, something that needs to be fixed.
That’s the gist of it, but Lance gave Morgan a more detailed account later, and as they allowed me to photograph the interview process, I was able to hear it and it just breaks your heart. Keep this kid’s experience in mind as you read this statement on LIA’s newly updated Refuge website:
God has admonished us to respect our parents. God has given them to us as vessels of His choosing to bring us into His world. Whether or not our parents are worthy of respect.
In other words, if your parents are beating the living crap out of you, then God must want them to do that. That is the kind of thing John Smid is pounding into the heads and hearts of gay teenagers at Love In Action, and time and again I have heard from survivors that the emotional effect of it is devistating. I was able to talk with Lance for a while after the interview and he’s a decent and thoughtful guy and there are parents all over this country who would gladly have given him all the love he’d ever want. But instead of healing the wounds in the families of gay teens, Smid is taking his several thousand dollar fee and making a toxic ruin of their emotional lives, and cutting scars in the hearts of teens they’ll be dealing with for years, if not for their entire lives.
I’m on the road back home today. I’ll post more photos from the protests when I get back, and settled in.
Those of us who were following the events in Memphis last year closely knew there were other teens imprisoned in Love In Action besides Zach…
"When we drove around to the front…we saw these men and trailing behind them–four young guys, all with their heads hung, staring at the ground as they walked. They are not allowed to make eyecontact with ANYONE for the first few days.so they are forced to fucking…i’m crying now…but…they have to look at the ground as they walk, for three days it’s a walk of shame, their heads hanging for being themselves, for having the courage to stand up and say "this is who i am"…and now all these people are saying ‘no you aren’t and we will change it. and you will be punished for thinking such things.’ I will NEVER get that picture out of my head. those four guys…"
Thus began the summer of shame for at least four gay youths. One of them will be back in Memphis a year later, 18 now and free to speak for himself, to bear witness to what John Smid is doing to innocent children, in the name of love. His name is Lance Carroll…
…and this is what happened to him last year:
In January of 2005, I came out to my parents as being gay. After an initial positive and supporting reaction they began to change their minds. They had me see three separate counselors, the last of which was a Christian counselor in St. Louis who worked for a fundamentalist, evangelical church. He told me that I wasn’t really gay, in fact no one was “really” gay. He tried to convince me that the whole idea of homosexual orientation is a lie, and that I felt the way I did because of some sort of early emotional/psychological deficiency. This counselor recommended Love in Action to my parents.
On June 6, 2005 I left Jackson, Missouri at five o’clock in the morning to make the long trip to Memphis, Tennessee. The first things I saw at the Love in Action campus were the protesters. That morning began my summer as a participant in the Love in Action Refuge program.
…
I am attending the protest in reaction to my own horrendous experience last summer, and as an opportunity to voice my personal opinions concerning the Love in Action Refuge program…while I was there, it just seemed to make people more depressed and self-loathing than they already were. I, myself, went through several of these depressive periods.
And in case you’re wondering how John Smid handles these sorts of depressive periods in his clients, here’s what he told Tom Ottosen, when he was on the verge of suicide:
"I would rather you commit suicide than have you leave Love In Action wanting to return to the gay lifestyle. In a physical death you could still have a spiritual resurrection; whereas, returning to homosexuality you are yielding yourself to a spiritual death from which there is no recovery."
"That’s exactly how he put it," states Tom Ottosen, 24, an expressive, articulate two year ex-LIA group member.
Ottosen says he clearly recalls that experience. He says it occurred in October of last year during his last one-on-one conference with John Smid, LIA’s Executive Director, who claims to be able to change gay men into straight men through a live-in rigidly controlled indoctrination program Smid calls "reparative therapy."
Ottosen says Smid clearly and emphatically warned him, "It would be better if I were to commit suicide than go back into the world and become a homosexual again. He felt that a physical death–with my soul intact–was much preferable to a spiritual death, which would happen if I were to leave the group and go back to being gay." claims Ottosen.
Ottosen further states that Smid said this at a time when Smid clearly was aware he had strong suicidal feelings and was going through periods of extreme depression, guilt and loneliness.
Ottosen recalls his depression had been building for several months during his second year at LIA, primarily because of a warm and emotional relationship he was experiencing with another group member. "It wasn’t sexual at all, but it was strictly forbidden and I was kept from even talking to him for several months."
Also, earlier in July, "Another house member, who was in his fourth year with the group and in a position of authority, became depressed and attempted suicide" and was sent away for observation. "He was taken from his position of leadership and then he just kind of disappeared." Ottosen admits that he too, within a few months was at point where he had never been before. "I couldn’t work. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t do anything."
It is bad enough that this man is counseling gay adults who go to him of their own free will. But John Smid is determined to expand his program for gay youth, dragging in more and more of them against their will, to be taught to hate themselves for what they are.
They will be kids who have already gone through one of life’s most traumatic moments – coming out to parents who have reacted in shame and anger. Smid will take these already wounded and bleeding kids, and in essence try his almighty best to rip their hearts out of them, tell them that its all their fault, make them believe that they are broken, make them ashamed and deeply afraid of their inner selves, in the hope, the earnest hope, that they will never know what it is to love another person whole heartedly. And I don’t think even the suicide of one of his teenaged clients will be enough to make him stop. Shame is for his clients. Smid is on a mission from god, and gods don’t feel shame.
We will be gathering Monday, June 5th at the Love In Action HQ on at 4780 Yale Road in Memphis, Tennessee. There will be two protests: one from 8:30am until 10:00am, and another from 4:00pm until 5:30pm. If you can be peaceful and respectful, please come. Come to support the young ones silently walking the walk of shame. Come to support the survivors bearing witness. Come in the name of love. Show the world what love in action looks like.
Imagine you’re a gay teenager, and you’ve either just come out to your parents, or been outed to them. Imagine they react with anger and shame and contempt. You’re a kid, going through adolescence, struggling with your emerging sexuality. It’s a confusing, embarrassing time when you begin to feel things, things about the attractive sex, that you’d never felt before. Thrilling, confusing, embarrassing things. You are a pervert, your parents tell you. You’re going to catch AIDS and die before you’re 40 they tell you. You’re a shame on your family name, and on them. You’re going to hell.
Imagine your parents force you into Love In Action to be cured. Imagine you find yourself one day, inside the Love In Action program. You are a young teenager, and you are in one of the group sessions, surrounded by older adults who have in their past engaged in sexual perversions and addictions the likes of which your teenage mind could never have conceived. Imagine being force into exposing yourself, your deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, to these men, and being forced to listen as they expose themselves to you. They are sexually broken, say the staff at Love In Action. You are sexually broken, they tell you. You, and the man next to you telling you how it is to fuck animals, are both sexually broken. You are the same as they. The sessions last for weeks. There is no place inside of yourself that is safe from the staff at Love In Action, and you must expose it all to the men who fuck animals, rape children, and have never known what it is to have a healthy adult sex life. You’re a young teenager. Throughout it all you are told in word and in deed that you are no different from them.
Eventually, you begin to believe it. You are finally dismissed from the Program, and perhaps you decide you are still gay and there is nothing wrong with that. Or perhaps you try, as so many do, to stop being gay, only to discover you can no more choose your sexual orientation then you can choose whether to be right or left handed. Perhaps some logical, rational part of your mind rejects what you were told about your sexuality at Love In Action. But deep down inside, the seed is planted. I’m a freak…There’s something wrong with me…with my sex…I’m a freak…I’m a freak… You try to go on with your life, find yourself failing utterly to find love, emotional intimacy, peace…
Surely, nobody would do this to a child, even if they think that homosexuality is sinful and wrong. Right? You don’t understand. Faith excuses everything. Faith, and hate. Peterson Toscano has an expanded post up now that you should read.
Back in January 2005, I met with the BBC crew that had just finished filming LIA/R. The presenter and the crew expressed shock at the treatment of the youth in the facility. They told me that adults and minors gathered together and talked about serious issues including prostitution, sexual abuse, and beastiality. They told me of a 16 year old lesbian placed in the program against her will. And the message that she received by being there is that her same-sex attractions are on the same level as a man having sex with animals.
I couldn’t believe it, so on June 1, 2005, when I bumped into John Smid at the Atlantia airport, I questioned him about this. (I had not yet heard of Zach’s story as it was just unfolding). He assured me that although the youth and the adults attended the some of the same sessions, they did not talk about their particular "issues", just their feelings.
Even if that were true, any 16 year old I know is smart enough to figure out within a half a day why everyone is in the program.
This fall, I spoke at length with a young man who was in the adult program this summer when Zach was also in attendance in Refuge, the youth program. I asked him to describe the sessions and he confirmed that adults and youth met together. When I asked, "But of course they don’t talk about issues, just emotions, right?" He replied that they talked about the issues often, in fact, each participant had to give an introduction which outlined the exact nature of their issues.
[Emphasis mine] Notice how John Smid was able to look Peterson right in the eye and tell him it wasn’t happening. And it was.
Today, pumped up on the war rhetoric of saving youth from a culture set out to destroy them, potentially thoughtful and kind human beings who run LIA/R end up employing harmful strategies designed to scare these kids straight by any means necessary. Even if it means exposing them to pedophiles and people with extreme sexual fetishes. (The language reminds me of the fear-fueled war talk of the US Christian fascist group BattleCry)
I know folks from my time at LIA who before they entered the program never had sex with another person and were quite naive sexually. By the time they left, often with the shame of failure, armed with loads of details about what we thought of as "the gay lifestyle", they ended up living self-destructive lives filled with anonymous sexual encounters and worse addictions than they ever experienced before.
Go read the whole thing. This is why I’m going to be in Memphis on June 5th. If doing this to kids in the name of love appalls you, and you can make it to Memphis, then be there too.
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.
I see John Smid finally covered up that bare sign in front of his hollow church…
This is perfect. Almost too good. If you can’t quite make it out, that’s the god-forsaken Love In Action logo under the LOVE IN ACTION verbiage. It’s a pink triangle with a heart superimposed on it. Here it is:
Now I’ve no idea what exactly was on Smid’s mind when he settled on this as his logo, I suspect he thinks he’s somehow slyly co-opting the pink triangle symbol, but whatever was in his foreground thoughts, this is the gutter of his subconscious speaking and it’s almost better then the vacant whitewash that was on the sign previously.
The pink triangle is not a symbol of gay liberation. That would be the Lambda if you’re my generation, or nowadays, the rainbow flag. When gay people display the pink triangle, we do it as an act of defiance against the hate that sent thousands of homosexuals to the death camps, or we do it as a remembrance of those who died, and those who survived. We are emphatically not embracing the status the Nazis imposed on homosexuals, that of a dangerous sub human perversion that it was better to exterminate for the good of society.
Recall that the triangle symbols the Nazis used in the concentration camps to identify classes of inmates, were derived from the shape of traffic hazard signs widely in use throughout Germany at the time. The colored triangles were put onto human beings to identify them, literally, as though they were some kind of hazardous biological waste. That is the meaning of the pink triangle. John Smid’s drawing a little heart over it is akin to putting a smiley face on a swastika.
Well…I couldn’t have said it better myself. The bedrock premise of homosexual conversion therapy is that homosexuals should not exist. Couched under layer after layer of "love the sinner, hate the sin" bullshit, the bottom line for them is that this world would be a much better place if there were no homosexuals. And here comes John Smid, to make it all plain as day that what they want to do to us, they mean in love. Honest…we don’t hate you…we love you… And to prove it, he’s taken the death camp symbol for homosexuality and put a fuzzy little heart over it.
If I Didn’t Love You I Wouldn’t Be Praying For God To Strike You Down
Some moments in your life, you just don’t know whether to put your face in your hands and cry, or put your fist through a wall.
So I’m following the links Mike Airhart put up on Ex-Gay Watch to a discussion about whether or not the term "ex-gay" is offensive (to other ex-gays apparently…) and I find myself scanning the posts on various blogs of gay people who just want to not be homosexual anymore if they only could, and it’s making me sad and then it starts making me angry, nail spitting angry once again, at the Dobsons, the Falwells, the Bauers, the Wildmons, all the pusillanimous bigots of this world who just can’t feel fulfilled in their own lives unless they’re sticking a knife in some homosexual’s heart and twisting it once in the name of Jesus Christ and once more in the name of love… And I’m following the discussions and the links on their blogs to various other blogs, those of other ex-gays and also those of out and proud ex-ex-gays, and I run across this post at Disputed Mutability:
In my last post I shared how I recently learned that several years ago my mother prayed for God to "take me" (i.e., kill me) if being gay was a sin. Many parents ask for similar or less drastic ills to befall their gay children. Sometimes they actively pray for misery that will drive the child in question back to the Lord and the straight and narrow.
HuH? So I follow the link…
Christine over at Rising Up Whole recently wrote about parents who hope or pray that their gay children’s lives are made difficult or cut short. The opening paragraph:
I just had a conversation with a friend who found out her mother had prayed that if being gay was a sin, that the Lord would take this daughter before she had drifted too far from God (yes, as in "take this daughter" out).
Yeah, so that’s yours truly. My mom dropped that bomb on me Saturday, telling me she prayed that prayer about nine years ago. I guess she thought it would be okay for me to hear about it now, because I’m evangelical and exgay and happily married and all that. Apparently she thought I would approve. But I must admit I still find it very, very disturbing.
I can’t imagine why. Just one of those little rites of growing up I reckon. You know…the day your parents tell you that they’ve been praying all along that God would kill you…
GCB at This Gay Christian’s Blog writes about his Beau and the phone call he recently received from his parents:
And among it all comes the proclamation that, among the church gossip and woe-is-me’s about their so-called wayward son, his mother is praying that the Beau and I would have unsettled lives.
This is in line, though more blunt, with my own mother’s proclamation that “God will never bless me.”
A commenter on the above entry related the following:
I know the feeling. My mother sent me a letter saying that she used to (before I came out) pray that I’d find the right woman to marry, but after I came out, she prayed that I would never fall in love (with another man)…So, I remember well the ‘punched in the guts’ feeling of knowing your mother is/was praying against you.
Well I’m sure as shit glad I don’t know that feeling. I had it rough in some sense growing up in the biological middle of two families who didn’t much like each other, and in particular the constant crap I got from people on my mother’s side for just being my father’s son. But I never doubted that my parents, both of them, loved me, and especially mom, the most gentle kind-hearted sunshine and light kinda person you ever met, until one of her relatives started bad mouthing me when they thought they were doing it behind her back and then you never saw her get so angry. Had she ever told me that she was praying for my life to be miserable I think that would have been the thing to make me just go stand in front of a train.
Good Friday. Work let out early, I got to get out of Dodge and come home while it was still light outside. Wonderful! So as I recline on the couch, soaking in some old Will and Grace episodes on DVD – a birthday present from The Beau – he goes off to answer a phone call from his mom. Usually innocuous except for the occasional sigh and hell-bound innuendo, we figured it would just be another dull parental chat.
Until about a half hour later I start to hear the just-this-side of yelling voice coming from the bedroom. Alarmed, I rush in to lend my boyfriend moral support for the rest of the fundamentalist bashing he was going through. And as I stood there, arms around him listening in, I hear the weepy voice of his mother claiming how much Beau hates them (he doesn’t), has said they abused him (he never said that), and refuses to call (who needs to when they call every third day?). And among it all comes the proclomation that, among the church gossip and woe-is-me’s about their so-called wayward son, his mother is praying that the Beau and I would have unsettled lives.
Wait – replay that back a bit – you read it right. Beau’s mother, is praying, against her own son.
This is in line, though more blunt, with my own mother’s proclomation that “God will never bless me.”
And it’s this sort of thing that makes me appreciate the mission of Soulforce all that much more. You can argue for or against the gay Christian activist group, but the fact is they are fighting against spiritual abuse that is laid on our people by our own mothers.
Interestingly, what hurts Beau the most is not the words themselves. Remarkably, he ignores the words themselves and can absorb the sting of their cruelty. None of the surface level attacks stuck to my beloved. No, what set him to tears in my arms that day was the fear his parents would never understand what it means to love unconditionally.
…and I’m reading this and for a second I think I’m going to start crying, and then I think I just want to get up and put my fist through a wall. Well…I didn’t take it out on my poor walls.
What the Fuck are these people doing to their children!? There are adults out there would would gladly raise those kids with all the love they’d ever want in their lives. My own mother had tons of love to spare for every other kid she ever met and every single one of my friends felt it and told me so. Children are precious. If you don’t feel that, even if like me you don’t have kids of your own, there’s something wrong with you. To wound one like that is a crime against all humanity. You’ve not only taken wholehearted love away from the kid, you’ve taken it away from everyone in their lives that they could have loved wholeheartedly. What the Fuck is wrong with some people.
My children had to die to be saved. They were not righteous.
-Andria Yates.
Yates merely drowned her children. So did Susan Smith, watching from the shore as they sank, terrified, strapped in their car seats, beneath the water. At least their pain ended. What do you say to someone who throws their kid into a pit of abandonment to drown in for the rest of their lives? What words could possibly be enough? Lady I don’t give a flying fuck what some babbling mental case with a bible told you about your kid…is there a fucking heart beating inside that miserable body of yours? Does it work? Did it ever? There are no words for it.
The real monsters here, of course, are the ones who encouraged these parents to withdraw their love from their children. James Dobson. Stephen Bennett. James Hartline. Jerry Falwell. Donald Wildmon. et. al. In the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of Love, they’ve made this world a smaller, lonelier, meaner place. So many people in this world, so many gay people, walking the streets of their hometowns, coping as best they can with a part of themselves inside that should have been filled with love, empty. Its unforgivable. Sometimes you just want to cry. Sometimes you just want to hit something. Hard.
You want to know what this does to people? Wandering around the blog links in this discussion of parents praying for their children’s misery or death, I finally found my way to the full text of Jack McIntyre’s suicide note. McIntyre was the friend of Love In Action co-founder John Evans back in the early 1970s. Wayne Besen documents the founding of Love In Action in his book, Anything But Straight, and writes of McIntyre:
Even’s best friend, Jack McIntyre, was also part of the ministry. He along with the rest of the participants, struggled mightily with temptations and did everything in his power to change his sexual orientation. As with nearly everyone else in the original ex-gay cast of characters, however, he could not change and remained as gay as the day he walked through the door. For McIntyre, the ministry led to feelings of inadiquacy and intensified his belief that he had failed God.
To save himself from his homosexuality, and keep himself from sinning in the eyes of God, McIntyre killed himself. I’d never seen the full text of his suicide note before, and there it was, staring me in the face like a sign at the end of a dead end street.
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
Love your children. Just. Fucking. Love your children! If you can’t love your children, don’t ask for forgiveness.
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