Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a message in which I confessed to having a crush on a male classmate.
“Are you gay?” she asked. I blurted out that I was.
“I knew it, ever since you were a little boy.”
Her resignation didn’t last long. My mom is a problem solver, and the next day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or “ex-gay,” therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn’t see how talking about myself in a therapist’s office was going to make me stop liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: “If there were a pill you could take that would make you straight, would you take it?”
I admitted that life would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn’t thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of my life. In fact, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter—didn’t everyone want some version of that?
“The gay lifestyle is very lonely,” she said.
She told me about Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a clinical psychologist in California who was then president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), the country’s largest organization for practitioners of ex-gay therapy. She said Nicolosi had treated hundreds of people who were now able to live “normal” lives.
...
On July 13, 1998—the same year I started therapy—a full-page ad appeared in The New York Times featuring a beaming woman with a diamond engagement ring and wedding band. “I’m proof that the truth can set you free,” she proclaimed. The woman, Anne Paulk, said that molestation during adolescence led her to homosexuality, but that she had been healed through the power of Jesus Christ. The $600,000 ad campaign—sponsored by 15 religious-right organizations, including the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the American Family Association—ran for several weeks in such publications as The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. Robert Knight of the Family Research Council called it “the Normandy landing in the culture war.”
...
With few voices to challenge the testimonials, reporters transmitted them as revelation. Newsweek ran a sympathetic cover story on change therapy, and national and regional papers published ex-gays’ accounts. My mother might not have so easily found information about ex-gay therapy had the Christian right not planted this stake in the culture war.
in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ex-gay therapy enjoyed a legitimacy it hadn’t since the APA removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual. Exodus had 83 chapters in 34 states. Its president, Alan Chambers, claimed in 2004 that he knew “tens of thousands of people who have successfully changed their sexual orientation.” Nicolosi appeared often on programs like Oprah, 20/20, and Larry King Live. Whether or not the Christian right’s alliance with the ex-gay movement had constituted a D-Day in the culture wars, it had successfully challenged the prevailing idea that the best choice for gay people was to accept themselves.
