First appeared in the Windy City Times July 30, 1998.
DURING THE MIDDLE OF JULY, a coalition of conservative religious and political organizations mounted an assault against gays by placing ads in national newspapers claiming that gays can change and be "healed."
The three ads featured a "former lesbian" prominently displaying a wedding ring, a crowd shot of "ex-gays" who have "changed," and a football player who says his free speech rights were violated when people criticized things he said about gays.
The ads claimed gays can change their sexual desires, can become heterosexual, and that they should do so because being gay is sinful, unhealthy and destructive.
So it seems. But do the ads actually say homosexuals can become heterosexuals?
No, they do not. Nowhere do the ads say gays can become heterosexual or develop heterosexual feelings. In fact, the words "heterosexual" and "heterosexuality" do not appear anywhere in any of the three ads.
On closer examination the ads seem very cagily written, as if they were drafted by a lawyer who was acutely aware of what he could and could not get away with.
Instead, the ads say gays can "leave homosexuality," leave "this lifestyle" and "leave their homosexual identities." They can "overcome homosexuality" and become "ex-gays."
What do gays leave homosexuality for? For "sexual celibacy and even marriage," say the ads. This claim is so central that it is repeated in two of the ads. Yet celibacy is the cessation of activity, not of feelings. And although the ads suggest "even" the possibility of marriage, they do not claim that ex-gays stop having gay feelings or are heterosexual.
Clearly what becoming "ex-gay" means is ceasing homosexual behavior (referred to as the "lifestyle") and ceasing to think of oneself as homosexual (the "homosexual identity"). By doing these things, gays can "overcome" their homosexuality and be, not heterosexual, but "ex-gay."
The key to reading this language is that the religious right uses "homosexuality" not to mean homosexual feelings, but to mean engaging in homosexual activity. Otherwise the religious right could not say gays can "walk out of homosexuality . . . into sexual celibacy." For them, if you are not doing it, you are not being it.
In a similar vein, psychologist C. A. Tripp reports in his book The Homosexual Matrix that one interview subject told sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey he had once been homosexual but he had been cured by therapy. The man explained, "I have now cut out all of that and I don't even think of men -- except when I masturbate."
The same emphasis on behavior enables the evangelicals to refer to "nurture, not nature," as "the real cause of homosexual behavior." This is true enough since any particular act is chosen rather than genetically determined.
But the ads also offer a theory of how homosexual feelings arise that suggests they are "non-genetic" and therefore pathological (ignoring the possibility that they are neither genetic nor pathological). The ads assert that gays are gay because they have a defective "gender-identity," that is, a defective sense of their own gender-their own maleness or femaleness.
Anne Paulk, the "former lesbian" in the first ad, recounts how she was molested as a child and as a result felt unlovable, "rejected my own femininity" and "became drawn to other women who had what I felt was missing in me."
In other words, gays are gay because they felt rejection in childhood, failed to bond with a same-sex parent or experienced sexual violence and psychological abuse in childhood. Any of these can give children a deficient sense of their own gender identity, which leads them to try to remedy that deficiency by seeking sexual partners of the same sex. And that's how gays are made.
There are a host of inadequacies in this wacky little theory, starting with the fact that many of us had a reasonably happy childhood, good parental relationships and were not abused; some heterosexuals had far less happy childhoods than many of us did. The ex-gays ignore these contradictions.
A more basic problem is that viewing same-sex attraction as trying to make up for a deficiency in one's maleness or femaleness misses the whole point. As psychologist Tripp pointed out, most gay men are sure of their maleness, "sometimes super-sure of it." Homosexual desire, he says, is fueled not by the height of a person's self-assessment, but by the distance he feels between that assessment and his aspiration above it.
(Interestingly, the ex-gay theory also fails to account for heterosexual desire, unless heterosexuals are trying to make up for a deficiency of opposite sex qualities. Don't try to think about this.)
In the venerable religious tradition of frightening sinners by describing the wages of sin, the ads also warn of the dangers of homosexuality. But they do so somewhat dishonestly.
The ads warn that homosexual behavior accounts for a disproportionate amount of sexually transmitted disease (STD) and that gays exhibit high levels of self-destructive behavior.
There is no question STDs are common among a certain subset of sexually active gay men in urban areas, but they are not the majority of gays, however conspicuous they may be. STDs are not a problem for homosexuality per se, but for sexually very active gay men. The ads dishonestly imply that the threat is to all gay men.
No doubt too some urban gay men engage in excessive alcohol and drug use and other potentially harmful activities, but the article cited in a footnote (Pediatrics, May 1998) refers only to a subset of self-identified gay youth, not to all gay men. And the article states: "It is important to realize that the majority of [gay] youth cope with a variety of stressors to become healthy and productive adults." The ads ignore that "important" statement.
Similarly deceptive is the ads' claim that a great deal of "emotional and physical violence" is found "among homosexuals." The Pediatrics article cited for this states: "gay youth face violence and victimization" including "being threatened/injured with a weapon" by others, presumably people who do not like gays. So the physical violence is actually found "among" heterosexuals rather than gays.
In the end, the religious right has finally taken off the gloves, asserting that the cure -- the only cure -- for homosexuality is Christianity, and even it will not stop homosexual feelings, nor do evangelicals care much about that. They took their best shots, only to reveal the weakness of their claims and their arguments.
It turned out that all they had were pop-guns.