Chad Thompson says he overcame his same-sex attractions, but is his "ex-gay" message a slap in the face to the LGBT community?

By Carolyn Szczepanski

The day before he blew out 10 candles on his birthday cake, Chad Thompson came to the terrifying realization that he was going to burn for all eternity.

He remembers the scene as idyllic - a soft breeze gliding through his open window, the reassuring sounds of his mother making cupcakes downstairs, the childlike excitement of a next-day birthday celebration. But laying in bed that night even the comforting sounds of baking pans clattering onto kitchen counters couldn't penetrate a sudden, deafening silence.

For some time, Thompson's mind offered a steady reassurance: "I'm not gay, I'm not gay, I'm not gay." But that night in fourth grade the mantra stopped. His internal campaign to convince himself that his same-sex attractions were all a big mistake suddenly went silent. He was gay. And he was terrified.

Growing up in a religious household headed by a Christian filmmaker, the Des Moines native knew homosexuality was an unconscionable sin before he even knew what those seven deadly syllables meant. He remembers laughing naively at jokes his cousins cracked at the boathouse about such sexual deviants. He recalls the menacing predictions for such sinners at his Baptist church; the pastor intoning that "no homosexual shall enter the kingdom of God."

Then he realized he was attracted to other boys and those confidence-crushing jokes and dire pronouncements of damnation were directed squarely at him. And while his body told him he wanted sex from men, his mind told him he wanted to rid himself of such inclinations. The confusion and helplessness, he explains, felt like a tornado in his soul.

"There was the voice of society trying to tell me, 'You're gay, you should embrace it,'" he says. "Some voices were saying, 'You're a fag, you should die.' Some voices told me, 'You'll never know who you are.' But there was another voice. That was the voice of my creator, and he was telling me who I was, who he created me to be. I listened to that, and that's where I am today."

Today, a dozen years after he unwrapped his unwelcome sexuality the night before his birthday, Thompson professes to have struggled through and "overcome" his homosexuality. Openly discussing his sexual evolution between sips of Starbucks coffee and brief checks of his cell phone, the 26-year-old has a breezy confidence in his unexpected role as a sought-after speaker in the evangelical world. Last year, he caught a cold, spent 10 days jotting down his thoughts about the church's treatment of homosexuals and his Jesus-led sexual liberation, and now, six months after his book's publication, he's so in demand that he quit his job.

While hundreds of local residents gathered last weekend for Gay Pride events, Thompson has become a self-appointed advocate of "ex-gay" pride. To his evangelical peers he's the poster child for Christian claims that "change is possible." But to secular society and the LGBT community the curly-haired kid in a Gap shirt and DC shoes is a dangerous slap in the face to sexual parity, an anomaly within the body of accepted science and a representative of a religious movement that, even Thompson acknowledges, has a "sordid history."

Adjustment disorder.

That would be the likely diagnosis, the receptionist at Family Legacy Christian Counseling in Johnston tells the young woman. We have three counselors who could meet with you to help you deal with your same-sex attractions, the secretary assures her; counselors who have been helping people with these issues for more than 15 years. The first available appointment would be June 17 and it's $100 per session. Of course, if you have Wellmark or United, you could probably get it covered by insurance.

According to the greater clinical community, however, the "problem" for which the young woman seeks help is not considered a cause for counseling at all. In 1973 the characterization of homosexuality as a disease was abolished by professional organizations like the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatry Association. But, for some, institutional reference texts like the APA's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) pale in comparison to sacred books like the Bible.

While offering conversion or "reparative" therapy for homosexuals became professionally taboo three decades ago, a religious movement rose up to fill the secular vacuum for those "struggling" with same-sex attractions. In 1976, Exodus International, the largest ministry dedicated to the conversion of homosexuals, was established in California. Now, nearly 30 years after its inception, Exodus received 400,000 requests at its member offices last year, says spokesperson Julie Neils, which is a dramatic increase from 160,000 in just 2002. In the past two years, the organization has also added 14 new ministries, growing their ex-gay activities to 129 locations (including Coralville and Quad Cities), she adds.

And Exodus isn't the only religious front in what has become a national ex-gay movement. There's Courage for Catholics and Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality. There's One to One for Presbyterians, Evergreen for Mormons and Transforming Congregations for Methodists. Over the past decade, the movement has also grown to include purportedly secular groups, like Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), which advocate for "equal access" for the ex-gay message. It's expanded to include a "psychoanalytic, educational association," the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, which professes to document the science behind sexual reorientation, albeit mixing academics and religious leaders on its board of directors.

But while ex-gay groups say science is emerging that backs the legitimacy of sexual conversion, their views remain markedly outside the scientific mainstream. Since the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the DSM, the overwhelming majority of professional associations, from the American Psychoanalytic Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics, have penned strong position statements emphasizing that "reparative" therapies lack scientific basis and risk psychological trauma. The American Psychiatry Association scolds such conversion practitioners for "openly integrat[ing] older psychoanalytic theories that pathologize homosexuality with traditional religious beliefs," and Rhea Farberman, spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, says her organization also has grave concerns about claims of homosexual cures.

"The APA has raised red flags," Farberman explains. "We're concerned that there's no good science that they work, that it's based on discriminatory views that fly in the face of the mental health community that, for more than 30 years, has said that homosexuality is not an illness, that it's not something that needs to be cured. Our concern is that we haven't seen any strong evidence that it helps people, but a lot of concern that it could hurt people."

Chad Thompson is pretty sure he could have had sex with other guys in high school. Lord knows, the attraction to the male physique was difficult to stifle.

He never came out as gay, he says, but everyone knew. His only friends were girls. He had "very distinct crushes on specific people in school," and, despite critics' attempts to label him bisexual, he knows for a fact he was interested in only one gender.

"I had exclusively homosexual attractions until I decided to pursue change," he says. "I was not attracted to women in high school. I was repulsed by women."

But he was also repulsed by the fact that his infatuations were not in line with his faith, and never actually indulged in intimacy with someone of the same sex. He knew "homosexuality was not God's best in me," but, for years, didn't know where to turn to have his "unwanted" attractions straightened out. Church wasn't an option - religion had already condemned him. And telling his parents was so out of the question he couldn't even bring himself to buy books about the subject for fear of being discovered.

Instead, his first inspiration came in the form of an Oprah Winfrey show about the ex-gay movement. The audience was skeptical. Thompson was skeptical, too. But, emboldened by the possibility, he stole a book - "Desires in Conflict" by evangelical author Joe Dallas - from the Christian radio station where he worked and began investigating the spiritual and psychological prospects for transformation. Already in counseling for depression, his therapist gave credence to the possibility, and from there a higher power took hold.

"It was the Holy Spirit that led me supernaturally through a psychotherapeutic process," Thompson says. "I got on my knees before God many times, saying 'I want to be in your will; I want to do what you want me to do,' and He put relationships and experiences in my life that reconditioned my way of thinking."

In reading widely, he came to believe that his unwanted attractions were the product of tangible psychological deficiencies in his childhood. Drawing on a select group of scientists - most notably Joseph Nicolosi, a California psychologist affiliated with the pro-conversion National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality - Thompson came to believe that divine intervention could help repair an emotionally compromised past.

Like his relationship with his father, who he describes as physically present but emotionally distant. Instead of bonding with his same-sex parent growing up, he says he identified with his mother and thus failed to affirm his masculine identity. He also remembers being ordered out of the room whenever a male undressed, leaving him feeling "disenfranchised" from his own body. Such conditioning, he says, made the physical and behavioral characteristics of masculinity an enticing mystery.

"What's exotic becomes erotic," he says. "One of the reasons I was physically aroused by the male physique was that I had never been in a normal, natural situation where guys didn't have their clothes on. There was a mystery that shouldn't have been. I didn't have any solid friendships with males, so it was almost like masculinity was a secret I wasn't allowed to know and that's what became attractive to me sexually."

So Thompson became convinced that if he could correct the core psychological failings he could redirect his attractions. That's where Lenny came in. An ex-gay man in Seattle, Lenny's self-reported transformation - from a practicing homosexual for 26 years to a married man with the classic picket-fence life - inspired Thompson. So when Lenny invited him for lunch halfway across the country, Thompson hopped a flight to the West Coast.

"He gave me a very warm, solid, lengthy embrace, which was something I had longed for," he says of their meeting. "It was indicative of the emotional need driving my homosexual attraction. Behind every homoerotic desire is an emotional need, and during puberty, emotional need turns sexual. I was able to meet that emotional need, and there was nothing sexual about it. I mean, he was 48 and I was 19."

Thus began Thompson's self-described second puberty. Accepting hugs and hand-holding from other males, he says, met his need for tangible affirmation and nonsexual touch from members of the same sex. He cultivated friendships with other guys -guys who don't "struggle" like he does.
"That's what I needed," he says. "It's almost like they taught me about heterosexuality. I don't want to imply that gay people have a completely different way of doing everything, but there's a way that straight people relate to each other that, in some ways, is different than the way they'd relate if they were gay."

And the more he became one of the guys, he says, the less alluring and more mundane masculinity became. The mystery began to wane, he says, and the prospect of being intimate with a same-sex partner made him think, "what would I want to do that for?" One notable a-ha moment came two summers ago at a Christian camp in Estes Park, where he befriended a group of guys with whom he became extremely close, but even the four of them packed giddily into a three-person tent didn't produce a single sexual inclination. Quite the contrary.

"All I could think about was this girl, a particular girl," he says of that summer. "She didn't like me, but I was experiencing things towards her that I didn't think I would ever feel toward a girl. She was all I thought about, just like guys who don't struggle [with homosexuality]. I wanted to hang out with her instead of the guys - and these were very attractive guys. But all I could think about was that girl, and that's happened more than once."

He acknowledges that his attraction to women now is still not as strong as it was to men when he was in high school, but he has had girlfriends. Although he's single at the moment, he has aspirations of marriage, and, although he's still "struggling," he says he has no fear of feeling again like he did that night before his 10th birthday.

"I'm not suppressing homosexual desires; I'm being transformed," he says. "That's important. It's not about seeing a guy and thinking, 'I'm going to discipline myself to think differently about him.' That's how it is at first, but you find the core issues driving your attractions and deal with those issues, and those attractions will disappear."

And Thompson doesn't think he's unique. Whether devout or doubtful, he thinks anyone can follow in his footsteps.

"I believe every person has a latent heterosexuality that they can build on if they want to," he says. "But it's been a process. I had conditioned myself for 21 years to think a certain way about men before I started to change. You don't overcome 21 years in five minutes. But my relationship with Jesus was leading me through a psychotherapeutic process, and who knows the brain better than the one who created it?"

Sandy buried herself so deep in deception, that, after years of self-imposed repression, she came to feel that life itself held no meaning.

Intent to please her family and her conception of God, the area resident convinced herself that the girlfriend she'd had such a crush on in high school meant nothing. She swallowed her same-sex attractions and, at age 21, got married to "a really sweet guy." Even after she came out to herself, she made a vow to uphold her wedding covenant and never let others know that she was homosexual. But abiding by Christian ideals to avoid eternal damnation proved counter-productive: she had already condemned herself to a living hell.

"I finally reached my breaking point and came out to him and my family," she says. "It was the most difficult thing I've ever done because I loved him and I enjoyed spending time with him. If anyone could have 'changed' my orientation, it would have been him. It would have been much easier to stay in that marriage, to have a comfortable life, to be accepted in my church unquestionably, to let everyone in both of our families believe that life was happy and complete for both of us. But it wasn't complete for me. It wasn't true."

For many in the LGBT community, such stories of years sacrificed to deception and repression are not uncommon. Many note that, while sexuality may be fluid, implying that those on one side of the spectrum are able to change while those on the other side are the infallible design of God, is not only demeaning, it's downright false.

"Those of us who fall more squarely on one end of the continuum or the other can not change our affectional orientation just by trying or by praying about it," Sandy says. "I prayed for years. The message I got from God was to stop hiding and live an authentic life, even though that was the more difficult path."

Ed Fouts, of Capitol City Pride, says his best friend sought help from an ex-gay ministry, but it didn't work. Rich Eychaner, a leader in the local LGBT community, says he gets plenty of calls from local residents who've spent decades suffering in silence, like a Catholic gentleman who recently contacted him after more than 15 years of trying to will himself straight.

"It's like a diet drug," Eychaner says of the ex-gay concept. "You take a pill, eat all you want and never gain weight. It's terrible dealing with society's sanctions against gay people, so some think 'Hey, I don't have to be the victim anymore.' It sounds very appealing on the surface, but it's like these diet cures. It doesn't work."

In fact, advocates point out, a striking number of ex-gay leaders have themselves returned to same-sex partnerships after their professed transformation. Most notably, the two male founders of Exodus International divorced themselves from the movement three years after its establishment and had a marriage ceremony to each other in 1982. Jennifer Harvey, assistant professor of Religion and Ethics at Drake University, says that's not the only chink in the ex-gay movement's armor.

"I can just speak anecdotally, but there are repeated stories of ex-gay leaders cruising gay bars, incredibly high suicide rates among those who go through these kinds of programs, and also increasing numbers - still small and under the radar - of Christian communities that are refusing to say being lesbian and gay is inherently sinful," she says.

A lesbian and ordained minister herself, Harvey says she's reluctant to "stampede on someone else's experience," but, for the most part, the ex-gay movement is dubious theology, not a benevolent science.

"What really frightens me is they prey on young gay and lesbian people" she says. "In this society, to become aware that you're gay or lesbian, for almost anyone, is a terrifying experience. Gays and lesbians are not well loved and well embraced, and these groups prey on struggling, younger people who haven't found affirmation or acceptance, who are led to believe they can find a way out of something there's not a way out of. Those who get caught in groups like those are only being even further enculturated in hating selves."

Sandy, having prayed for conversion herself, can hardly imagine the damage an organized effort could have on someone struggling to accept their own identity.

"The amount of self-loathing one must feel to hate who you are is mind-boggling," she says. "And it's a terrible sin for these 'ministries' to so injure a person by making them hate who they are. These 'ministries' are no different from any other hate group - they use fear and self-loathing to advance their agenda."

Even before her son's first experience with oral sex landed him in the hospital with a swollen throat and the worst case of gonorrhea the county health department had ever seen, Bridget Night was "freaking out."

The Quad Cities mom (who uses the pseudonym Bridget Night for her work in the ex-gay movement) just thought her son needed to work through some "social problems" when they sent him to a mental health counselor as a teen. It wasn't until he was 16 years old that they discovered his e-mail correspondences with a gay 20-year-old in Denmark who was helping their son understand his sexual orientation.

"Of course, we're freaking out," Night recalls. "We're a Christian family that believes in the Bible and we just didn't understand the issue at all basically. I'd been a hairdresser for 30 years and worked with a lot of homosexuals, but I never thought about it too much."

But when her son's sexual orientation conflicted with their religious convictions, she remembered seeing a spot on the 700 Club that gave her hope; a segment about Exodus International. Still terrified, she went to an Exodus support group in Coralville, where she would sing, pray, share her trials with other concerned parents and "have a lesson from the manual on educating people to know where same sex attraction comes from."

Now she's the leader of one of two Iowa chapters of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, which has grown to more than 30 cities since its inception in 1999. The purpose of the group, she says, is not to advocate for gay conversion necessarily, but to let "strugglers" know that help is available and, as a recent billboard campaign professed, "Ex-Gays Prove That Change is Possible."

Currently, Night has eight members in her Quad Cities chapter, which she keeps listed under "mental health" in the local phone book, albeit with a special number that is not her home line. She holds monthly educational meetings, and has sent Exodus and Evergreen pamphlets to the local LGBT center, literature to every local junior high and high school principal and flyers to area hospitals. And, of course, she's encouraged her son to attend ex-gay conferences and meetings.

"We're not anti-gay," she says of PFOX. "Anyone who wants to be gay, that's fine. But for many Christian families and young people it's unwanted."

Still, to many, that's circular logic. What pushes someone to seek conversion in the first place is often the stated or subtle condemnation from both the religious and secular community. As Sandy points out: "The attraction is only unwanted because someone told them they could only be attracted to opposites." And the presence of organizations like PFOX peddling the possibility of conversion only further heaps guilt and condemnation on those who would otherwise be content with their identity, Eychaner says, essentially "projecting expectations on people that they can't meet and putting the power of God behind it."

In fact, even Night acknowledges that despite her stated desire that he seek change, her son has chosen to embrace "the gay lifestyle" instead. She emphasizes she will love him either way and she's met with area churches to scale back the negative stigma and "freakish" stereotypes many Christians project on those with same-sex attractions.

But, even more than "unconditional love," PFOX's buzz phrase is "equal access." Just last month, a federal judge ruled in favor of PFOX in a Maryland lawsuit, issuing a restraining order against a local school board because its health curriculum only considers "the moral rightness of homosexuality" and does not include information on the prospect of change. Thompson thinks groups like PFOX have the right idea in giving students both sides of the story and recently created his own organization - Inqueery - to address alleged school bias. In that effort, he's created prototype literature that, he believes, could provide balance to the gay/straight alliance organizations that, "sometimes encourage kids to identify as gay, or, at the very least, are not educating them that change is possible."

Although supporters highlight a small handful of published studies about successful sexual conversions - most notably a 2001 study by Robert Spitzer, who figured prominently in the 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM - to claim their argument is backed by science and can be presented without the mention of religion, Harvey says there's "essentially no argument that doesn't boil down to religion" and thus "equal access" could be considered a blurring of the line between church and state. Sara Graham, president of Drake University's Rainbow Union last year, says she too is an advocate of the free flow of ideas, but, in the case of ex-gay access, such questionable information could hinder the emotional development of LGBT students.

"It confuses not only gay kids who grew up very religious and are very unsure of coming out even though they can't deny their homosexuality any longer to themselves, but it hurts their families and friends, too, making it seem like their friend or child is purposely doing something hurtful," Graham says. "I worry about people who grow up learning that sexuality can be changed - one way, but, of course, not the other - because they could end up scared, hurt, confused, or even a bigot towards themselves and others."

A man with a megaphone tried his Bible-beating best to undermine Sara Graham and Emily Renaud's wedding day.

Last year, the then-Drake students flew to San Francisco, becoming one of the first couples to tie the knot when thousands of same sex couples traveled from across the country to have their unions finally recognized by the state. But, even outside the secular courthouse, Graham and Renaud were bombarded with the preaching of overzealous religious activists.

"There was an 'ex-gay' there with a bullhorn, talking about how many men he'd slept with and other lewd things, and talking about how Jesus helped him to be straight and all that jazz," Graham recalls. "And they kept telling us how bad we were for our children, and there were plenty of people in line with kids, and this guy's talking about oral sex. I just thought that he was doing exactly what he was accusing us of."

Thompson says he sympathizes. He knows his "ex-gay" message has to haul the baggage of a Christian tradition that, he says, has a well-deserved bad rap. For two years he worked for the Iowa Family Policy Center but ultimately left because the repent-or-perish politics of the radical right concerned him. He's careful to point out that those folks remain his close friends, but, just like Christians often describe their stance on homosexuality as "love the sinner, hate the sin," Thompson's take on the conservative movement could be described as "love the people, hate the politics."

He acknowledges that there is still a tremendous amount of entrenched hostility and hollow stereotypes harbored by both the gay and ex-gay community and, when it comes to conversation "intellect often takes a back seat." He thinks there needs to be more dialogue and less debate. But although he says he's been able to convert wary LGBT student groups, like the one last month in Wisconsin, from snickering at him at the start of his speech to engaging in mutually respecting conversation over lunch, he clearly harbors views that are hard for those in the LGBT community to swallow.

"I believe that heterosexuality is God's design," he says. "I know that's controversial and it gets me in a lot of trouble, but I think gay and lesbian people need to be able to know what my religious convictions are without insisting that I'm a homophobe or bigot. I don't make those assumptions about them; I don't think they're any less in God's eyes because they embrace their homosexuality."

But even with his professions of acceptance, many can't help but bristle at claims of sexual reorientation.

"Most straights are horrified to think they could be taught to be gay," Sandy says. "But somehow it's okay for them to expect us to change who we are. It's crazy." CV

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