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.
It was about a year ago that I first read these words…
I pray this blows over. I can’t take this… noone can… not really, this kind of thing tears you apart emotionally…It’s so horrible. This is what it’s doing to me… I have this horrible feeling all of the time… I wish this on no person…
A 16 year old gay teenager had been outed to his parents. It happens probably every day in this country, and all too often with brutal results for the kid. Parents, who should love their children unconditionally, are taught by this nation’s men of god to hate them instead if they are homosexual, the better to make gay teens hate themselves, and thereby produce self destructive, self hating adults: convenient scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals would rather not deal with in themselves.
Zach’s misfortune was not only to have parents who could not see the child for the homosexual, but also to be living just a few miles from the first ever ex-gay program, Love In Action, which had relocated from its San Fransisco birthplace to the friendlier climes of the bible belt, and its current leader John Smid had only recently decided to create a program, ostensibly for teens, but actually for frantic fundamentalist parents who were easy pickings for his ex-gay snake oil. Smid was able to talk Zach’s parents into his little two-week teaser program, which of course led to the full eight week course.
It’s a brutal, sexually abusive program where a teen’s deepest feelings about themselves, their bodies, their sexuality, their relationships to their parents, peers and god are systematically ripped out of them using the same mind control techniques that cults throughout the world use to alienate people from the world, the better to imprison them within themselves. And make no mistake, Love In Action is a cult. You want proof, read the rule book that Zach found on his parent’s computer, and posted on his blog for the world to see. A teen who is forced into the "program" finds their life utterly controlled, who they can talk to, what they can read, what they can wear, even down to the kind of underwear they’re allowed to put on, when they can eat, and even – I am not kidding – how many minutes a day total they can spend in the bathroom. There are actually timers placed in or near the bathrooms to insure compliance.
It has one purpose and one purpose only: to break a kid’s spirit. Not to make them a better person. Not even, really, to make them heterosexual. As with any cult, the purpose is to erase the soul within, so the cult leaders can put their will in its place. And in June of 2005, a 16 year old gay teen was thrown into that cult, that ex-gay soul grinder so laughingly misnamed Love In Action. But before he vanished into it completely, he was able to get a cry for help out to the world. You can pretty much bet that John’s advice to parents nowadays is Take The Fucking Computer Away Before You Tell The Kid Where They’re Going!!!
When I read Zach’s words, and the LIA rule book, I literally could not sleep for about a week after, so sick with worry was I for him, and for other gay teens who I believed were almost certainly being forced into that "program" too. I was later to learn that it was not an uncommon reaction. People from all over the world have since told me the same thing: I couldn’t sleep for days after reading that… But for Zach’s amazing, loving, devoted friends, worry and stress turned into activism. They could not stand silently by, they did not stand silently by, while their friend was being abused behind closed doors. They took to the street, and stood side by side in front of the door to a gay teen’s nightmare, and with their simple presence sent a message of support of their friend, and all the other teens inside, and they took to the Internet, to shout out to the world what was being done to helpless kids in Memphis, and to spread the word about LIA and programs like it, so other teens wouldn’t have to suffer the same silent abuse.
Now, on the one year anniversary of that moment, the Queer Action Coalition is calling for a protest at LIA’s hollow church in Memphis. And the need is as urgent as ever, because even having suffered setbacks and losses, John Smid is as determined as ever to expand his "program" directed at gay teens. Child abusers are like that…they never stop with just one:
From LIA’s document: REFUGE International BOOK/Summer 2006:
Although we have seen success in our ministry, we see the culture relentlessly fighting back. So, we are expanding our ammunition to battle for young people and their families. Our experienced counselors and staff will offer a whole new array of options starting during the summer of 2006:
• Residential recovery for young adults (ages 18-25)
• College campus outreach
• Revamped summer program for youth (ages 13-17)
• Seminars to equip church and community youth leaders
• Conferences to heal wounds within families
• Creative support for parents and families
It appears, in this 8 page document, that LIA will launch a 3-month pilot program this summer for youth ages 13-17, and have begun to request funds for its operation. They have also launched a MYSPACE.COM blog in an attempt to further target youth by adopting main-stream/pop-cultural avenues of communication/outreach….these tactics seem to be the stepping stones towards a much larger front in an attack on youth, and their vunerable parents…
The Queer Action Coalition is rather concerned about these actions on LIA’s behalf, simply because WE ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE WELL BEING OF OUR FELLOW CITIZENS.
The Lords Of The Ex-Gay Cults claim they act in love. During the first week of protests in Memphis last year, witnesses saw for themselves what had been largely hidden from the world up until that moment: their love, in action:
Whilst in this centre he [Zach] had to spend the first three days in total silence unable to talk while he was talked to by their counsellors. An eye witness has reported "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…"
You may have a different definition of love then beating shame into an innocent kid because you hate what they are. If so, then come to Memphis on June 5, and show your love in action.
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.
Even among those who claim to "love the sinner and hate the sin", this is bedrock. I’ve had bigots tell me to my face that gay lovers don’t love as wholly, or as purely, as heterosexual lovers do. When Senator Rick Santorum compared same sex marriage to a man wanting to marry his dog, he spoke for the many, who believe literally that same sex lovers exist on the same plain as fucking animals. We don’t love, we don’t honor, we don’t care. We don’t feel any higher human emotions, no great joy or awe in a lover’s embrace. All we feel is mindless senseless lust for something that only happens to be another human being. This is the passion behind the fight against same sex marriage rights of Any sort, civil unions or otherwise. To even suggest that gay couples be given any legal status other then perhaps a criminal one, is to literally place their own marriages on the same par as bestiality. They think homosexuals are less then human, and nothing shows it better then their contempt, their utter denial, that gay lovers actually love.
The current pope (the Cardinal formally known as Ratzinger), launched another broadside against homosexual people last week, by way of attacking Italy’s new left of center government. Calling same sex love "weak", Ratzinger warned that he would use all the power of the Vatican if Italy gave same sex couples any rights that heterosexuals are bound to respect.
It seems in the Catholic church lately, gays are the new Jews. Or at any rate, the hate that can dare speak it’s name sixty years after the Holocaust. And it’s having its effect. Attacks on homosexuals, particularly in non-industrial nations with a strong Catholic presence, are becoming more common, and much more violent. In the Caribbean, in central America, in Africa, and even in Brazil, violence against homosexuals is on the rise and it is killing people.
And yet in the face of all the hatred and violence organized religion can incite, gay people still take their lover’s hand in theirs and say "I love you". If they had clue one what it means to actually love someone, Ratzinger and his henchmen would get on their knees and beg God nonstop for the rest of their miserable lives to know a love that strong, even if only for a day.
(Click to see the larger version on the Cartoon Page)
Shallow understanding from people of good will, is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Jason Johnson, the gay college student expelled from The University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, has been allowed to return to class and finish the school year, under an agreement hammered out by his, and the school’s lawyers. I’m actually surprised. I’d thought the school would dig in its theological heels and insist on its absolute right to remove filthy sodomites from its sacred grounds. In exchange Jason agrees not to sue the school, but I’m puzzled as to how much leverage the threat of a lawsuit against a Southern Baptist school in the Bible Belt could have been. In any case, they’re not going to lie on his transcripts that he failed the semester anymore. Whether or not they treat him fairly in the classroom remains to be seen.
From the Lexington Herald-Leader comes this column from Paul Prather. I wish I could like it…he says a few things I completely agree with…
• I believe private religious schools should have the right to make whatever rules they want (short of mandates to torture or behead heathens), in keeping with the tenets of their faith…
• If you can’t obey a school’s code of conduct, common sense dictates that you might not want to enroll there.
• On the other hand, the same principle holds true for the school itself. If the University of the Cumberlands hopes to earn accreditation from a secular agency, it must be prepared to abide by that group’s secular standards. You can’t have it both ways.
That’s pretty much where I am generally, and I’d go on to add that if you want to discriminate against a portion of the citizenry at minimum you can’t expect them to support you with their tax dollars. Prather goes on to comment on the hypocrisy of singling out gay students for violations of sexual conduct rules, saying that in his own experience on Christian campuses, the straight kids could be just as sexually active as the kids on the secular campuses, if at least a tad more reserved about expressing it openly. But then he goes on to assert that Johnson’s problem was that he called attention to himself, and from there his column goes down a familiar path…
Thus, Johnson’s main mistake wasn’t simply being gay. It was calling undue attention to his orientation. Christian colleges might have been the originators of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy.
It is a fact that Johnson posted pictures of himself and his boyfriend on his MySpace profile, but nowhere have I seen it said that he was being open about his sexual orientation at school. What I’ve always heard to date is that someone informed on him to the school administration, and they went looking for his MySpace profile and then confronted him with it. In other words, Johnson didn’t tell the school, the school Asked. That’s not Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell…that’s stay in the closet if you know what’s good for you. If heterosexuals understand nothing else about their homosexual neighbors, they need to understand this: Those days are over.
There are a lot of us, far too many in my opinion, who are still perfectly willing to be closeted on a situational basis, but none of us but the desperate self loathing are willing to live our entire lives inside the closet anymore. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not turning your back on God or having a lack of moral values or defiant homosexual militancy. It’s something else, something that the Prather’s of the world just don’t seem to get. And yet it’s so simple, or would be, if only you can see the people for the homosexuals. Prather, in trying his best, and I don’t doubt for a minute that he’s actually trying, misses it completely.
If a straight student had, say, posted photos of himself and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto on the Internet, he also would have been expelled.
In flagrante delicto. It means "Caught in the act." Johnson didn’t post pictures of him and his boyfriend having sex on his MySpace profile. But you could tell at a glance those photos were of two teenagers in love. Look at that for a second. Prather is using a phrase that generally is taken to mean getting caught having sex (the act) to describe photos of two gay teenagers in love. And he goes on in that manner for the rest of the column, trying his best to be sensible and compassionate, and failing miserably because he cannot see the people for the homosexuals…
Homosexual activities and extramarital heterosexual sex indeed are contrary to biblical and historical Christian standards. Yet, they’re about equally as errant as pride, gluttony, stinginess, temper tantrums, disrespect for parents and lying.
One question raised by the Johnson case is this: How should Christian groups react to sexual misconduct? All religious organizations are made up of human beings who, in my observation, tend to fail miserably a fair amount of the time.
Sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct.
Maybe Christian administrators should consider reacting the way Jesus did. I never can think about an incident such as Johnson’s without remembering the time Jesus was confronted with a woman who had been caught "in the very act" of adultery and was about to be stoned for it…
Adultery. The Very Act.
Jesus said, "Let the one who is himself without sin throw the first rock." That ended the stoning. Then he addressed the woman. "Neither do I condemn you," he said. "Go your way. From now on, sin no more."
What a beautiful response…
Beautiful perhaps, when made to someone who had cheated on their spouse. But it is unmitigated ugliness to say this to a gay teenager about his first love. Johnson is not married (never mind for now, that homosexuals can only Be married in one state of the union). He is not having an affair with another married person. And considering Johnson’s religiosity, it would not surprise me in the least to hear they aren’t even having sex yet. We don’t all jump right into the sack on the first date. So at worst you can only call Johnson’s "sin" fornication, not adultery, and there is no evidence even for that. But notice the mental leap here, from images of two young men in love, to adultery, and even more grotesquely, to forgiveness for adultery. No. From Johnson’s MySpace profile, his sin can only be one thing: being a homosexual in love. And there’s what’s missing from all of Paul Prather’s compassion and understanding: any sense whatsoever that homosexuals love, and that they are punished simply for being in love.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… This is the bedrock of anti-gay prejudice, the one irreducible premise through which everything else about homosexuals is understood. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. Never mind the raving haters of the world like Fred Phelps…if you want to understand how otherwise decent people can casually rip the lives of their gay and lesbian neighbors apart with no thought or care for the human misery and wreckage they leave behind, there’s why. They can do it, confidant in the knowledge that our feelings for our mates are shallow imitations of the real feelings heterosexuals feel for theirs. Heterosexuals feel love and contentment and fulfillment in their spouses, but homosexuals can only feel a pale imitation of that. "Playing house" as the homophobic science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once put it. Heterosexuals feel deep and profound grief at the loss of a spouse, but homosexuals can only try to mimic grief at best. So we cannot rip apart everything in their lives they ever held dear, because they don’t really hold those things dear…not the way we do. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.
It’s how anti gay prejudice becomes it’s own unstoppable machine, grinding up the lives of innocent people while others who fancy themselves decent and compassionate and thoughtful citizens look sadly on, as though watching the fate of dogs that have to be put down because they’re so sick. Oh how…unfortunate…for them… If you think that the only wrong done to Jason Johnson was being expelled from his school, you’re missing the graver injury done to his person, and right at the very core of his being. To see it, all you have to do is be able to see the person for the homosexual. Let me try to explain to the Prathers of the world how horrible that "beautiful response" actually is.
Picture the first time you fell in love. Picture that amazed, wonderful feeling. One day, life just seemed more wonderful, more intense, more amazing then you’d ever dreamed it could be. The sun shone a little brighter on everything around you then it did before. The stars seemed to shine more intensely. Everything old seemed new again. Life was beautiful. It was worth living no matter how hard or desperate it got. Everything that ever happened to you was worth it, because it brought you to that moment, and that person. Everything that ever Could happen to you from then on was worth it, so long as a certain person was there, so long as you could see them smile. Because whenever they smiled, you smiled.
I remember it well. When I was a teenager I used to listen to all the pop culture love songs of the sixties and early seventies on my radio, and never really understood what they were about, until I fell in love myself, with a male classmate. I remember hearing this song on my radio one day, I’d heard it countless times before and I didn’t like it at all because it was it was slow, it had no beat, it was just some gooey sugary love song and whenever one of those came on I would reach for the tuning knob and try to find something else I could rock to, and this time when it came on I sat and listened, and began to cry…because I knew exactly how the person who wrote it felt…because it said it all about what I was feeling then…
Today I feel like pleasing you more than before
Today I know what I want to do but I don’t know what for
To be living for you is all I want to do
To be loving you it’ll all be there when my dreams come true
Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed
Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same
To be anymore than all I am would be a lie
I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry
Today everything you want, I swear it all will come true
Today I realize how much I’m in love with you
-Jefferson Airplane, Today
Homosexuals mate to their own sex. That we do doesn’t take from us any of the higher emotions heterosexuals are capable of expressing to their mates, or of their unions. We love. We honor. We cherish. Til death do us part. We are capable of great sacrifice for the honor of our love. We are capable of great joy in that love. Our unions are as life affirming to us as yours are to you. The only difference between us is that we mate to our own sex. You can’t take the homosexuality out of a homosexual, otherwise the snake oil salesmen of the ex-gay ministries would have thousands of happy heterosexuals to show as proof, instead of one paid staff member after another who proudly proclaims their heterosexuality only to get caught in a gay bar months or years later. We are what we are.
You can make us ashamed of ourselves. You can make us hate ourselves. You can make us terrified of the slightest shred of sexual arousal. But you can’t make us heterosexuals because we aren’t. What you Can do, is take all the higher aspects of love and devotion away from us. All the romance. All the poetry. All the honor and devotion. All the awe and all the joy and all the wonder. You can take that from us. You can drain our lives of every last drop of it. But when you do we are still homosexuals, and all you have done is leave us empty human shells with sexual needs that won’t go away.
And that’s exactly what you do, every time you tell a gay kid that his feelings for his first love are sin. You convince him of it, and you literally leave him with nothing left in his life but mindless loveless lust. That’s what you’re calling beautiful.
I’m not going to argue theology with anyone. If you’ve got yourself locked into a relentless fundamentalist religiosity that insists that every last comma and period in the King James bible Must be literally true or you’re not a faithful Christian, then I guess the universe really was created in six days and is about six thousand years old and women suffer the pains of childbirth for the sin of Eve. And if that’s what you believe then all I have to say to you is: Get the fuck off my back!
I’m not going to argue about whether or not we have a choice. That argument is over and done with for everyone except bigots and religious fanatics for whom no science could ever be enough to change their minds.
Here’s what I have to say about the case of Jason Johnson and forgiveness of sin: it doesn’t matter if you don’t mean to hurt anyone, if you won’t stop hurting them! And one other thing, which was said more eloquently by another man, dealing in his own blunt way with another mindless human prejudice that was, and still is, tearing away at innocent people’s lives…
If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches,
that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress.
Progress is healing the wound…
-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X)
Forgiveness. The biggest problem I have with Christianity, the reason I could never go back to it, is forgiveness. Christ would tell me I have to forgive. I know that. I just can’t. But maybe if I saw a serious start in this country at healing the wound I could try.
Homosexuality has been like a ghost, hiding in the shadows of my shame, telling me I can never reach my full potential as a Christian. As strange and contradictory as it may sound, seeing Brokeback Mountain helped me bury that ghost and begin moving forward.
What I saw in Brokeback Mountain tore my heart apart. I cried with Alma when she discovered the truth about Ennis and Jack. I also cried for the countless wives in real life who know that their husbands are leading a secret existence. I cried even harder for the men, more in number than we realize, who are trapped in sexual sin and don’t know how to escape it. And as I wept, I wondered if God could use me to help reach some of them with his grace and delivering power.
No scene touched me more than the one in which Ennis’s daughter pays him a visit after Jack dies, and tells him he needs to buy some furniture to liven up his cold and barren trailer. Ennis responds, "If you ain’t got nothin, you don’t need nothin." I made up my mind then and there that I would not let homosexuality rob me like it had robbed Ennis.
No you drooling moron…homosexuality didn’t rob Ennis, a goddamn tire iron swung by all the force hate could give it robbed him. Twice…
"You won’t catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it — "
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich — Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it…"
Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"
That’s what robbed Ennis. That’s what stole from him his capacity to love and accept love from another man. Nearly every review of the film I’ve seen has commented on how perfectly the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, captured the sense of a man completely uncomfortable inside his own skin, so completely inhibited he can barely talk. Shame. Guilt. Self loathing. It’s not enough for the hatemongers to make other people hate us. We have to hate ourselves too. We have to hate ourselves even more then they hate us. Because only by hating ourselves that much, will we keep punishing ourselves for simply existing, for just being alive and walking this good earth along with them and breathing their air, when they’re not able to punish us for it with their own two hands. And those of us who never fell into or who manage to escape that bottomless pit of shame and self loathing, still have to deal with the hate and all the myriad ways, large and small, that it cheats us out of one of this life’s most perfect joys.
That’s what robbed Ennis. And it robs all of us. Some of us more then others…horribly more. I’ve never hated myself and never tried to obliterate myself in reckless squalor, or an all controlling self-annihilating religious cult. I’ve never lost a lover to the tire iron. I’ve never been forced against my will into ex-gay therapy. But I can count in months the time in my life I’ve had someone to love, and that’s partly because I’ve fallen in love so many times with other guys, who could not love and desire whole heartedly, because they were so ashamed to love and desire at all.
Hate, and the tire iron. One way or another it robs us all. It robbed me…and it robbed you too. Mr. Belkofer.
Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?
More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here. I missed getting one in for 2005. The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons. They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist.
There is a power in sharing our stories and I hope we can learn more of J’s experience and others like J who have submitted to ex-gay treatment.
Peterson, himself a former Love In Action participant (like J, he voluntarily entered the program), knows whereof he speaks. Their stories are wrenchingly powerful. This passage from J’s blog struck me at a place too deep for words:
I just started a new job, and the first day was very interesting. I found out that my manager, who happens to be a pastor of some small Apostolic church, also "Hates Fags." Well, we are all familiar with Fred Phelps and "God hates fags." When I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 16, my father conveniently left pieces of paper around and the website(godhatesfags.com or something) as the homepage on my computer.
Some days I find myself trying to fathom the cruelty of some parents toward their children and I just can’t. Nor could I imagine what it must be like to walk through life with that memory.
One interesting tidbit I learned from J’s blog, and in the comments on Peterson’s, is that LIA is apparently not telling prospective entrants (the voluntary ones) that their program does not promise a cure for their homosexuality, until after they’ve signed on the dotted line and coughed up their dough. In comments on Peterson’s blog, one poster puts it this way:
I too went into LIA expecting to be cured–expecting to come out completely heterosexual. Imagine my disappointment when I learned during orientation that there was no promise of a cure. The disappointment that I felt learning that I would never be anything more than ex-gay was bitter. While some of us in that orientation class were disappointed, others were angry–even livid.
If you take someone’s money under false pretenses, isn’t that stealing? Isn’t there a commandment or something about that…?
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