The Way to Ex-Gay

By Michelle Goldberg, Metro Silicon Valley. Posted November 29, 2000.

Twenty-one-year-old Kyle Friesen is gay and doesn't want to be. A handsome former hairdresser from Winnipeg, Canada with a goatee, hipster sideburns and dark, gelled, tousled hair, he doesn't look much different than any of the insouciantly out-of-the-closet young men one sees strutting through San Francisco's Castro district or New York's Chelsea. He favors dark jeans or cargo pants with big, chunky boots, and he's adorned with five piercings -- a ring in his eyebrow and inner left ear, a hoop in each lobe and a stud in his upper right ear. He hates camping and loves fashion -- his favorite magazine is InStyle -- and dancing. But he's put all that aside this year, instead devoting his whole soul to one excruciatingly difficult goal. He's trying to become straight.

That's why in January, having made up his mind to change his sexual orientation, he moved into an apartment complex in San Rafael, California -- about 45 miles south of San Francisco -- along with twenty other men attempting to "walk out of" homosexuality. All were part of a one-year live-in program called New Hope run by Frank Worthen, one of the founders of the ex-gay movement, and his wife Anita. Among those who entered with Kyle were a singer who used to tour with Jerry Falwell's choir, a recent Yale theology graduate and an articulate 23-year-old former actor who had a full-scale Messiah-complex nervous breakdown while studying in Jerusalem. As of August, 18 of the original 21 who entered with Kyle remained.

Kyle had blamed much of his homosexuality on his desperation of acceptance. Now New Hope's residents and staff -- all of whom have been through the program -- have become like a family to him. As soon as he arrived, he said, "I felt good. It's been amazingly affirming from my peers as well as from the older men that are there. I'm a people person, so it's nice to be able to come home from work to a group of a people." He'd been isolated at home, insecure and miserable about his inability to relate to others boys. At New Hope, he got to feel like he was one of the guys. The men at New Hope eat dinner together every night -- they take turns cooking. They go on outings -- to baseball games, trips to San Francisco's Fisherman's Warf, retreats in Yosemite National Park. They take volleyball lessons from an ex-gay coach. They watch movies together and have long, intense talks. If nothing else, the program certainly seems like a temporary cure for loneliness.

Although the ex-gay movement -- a network of individuals and groups dedicated to overcoming homosexuality -- is dominated by men in their 30s and 40s, there are a significant number of people in their late teens and twenties joining it. Kyle is the youngest person at New Hope, but there are also two 23-year-olds and another 21-year-old moving in in September. At Exodus 2000, a conference all the New Hope men attended in August that brought over 1,000 ex-gays and their families to San Diego, kids with bleach jobs and baggy jeans who wouldn't have looked out of place at Limp Bizkit show milled about. Many wore T-shirts advertising Christian rock bands or proclaiming attitudinal slogans like "Satan is a Punk." It was hard to turn around without meeting someone like twenty-year-old Gary Fletcher, whose mother drove him to San Diego from the small town of Fontana, California. Gary recalled a night months ago when he was dismissively dropped off on a street in West Hollywood by a married man who he'd just slept with. He said he lied down on the pavement, sobbing and saying, "Jesus, either you take my homosexuality away from me or I'm going to take my life away from you." The conference, said Gary, was the happiest five days of his life, the first time he ever felt truly relaxed and at home.

For Kyle, the experience was similar. "The Exodus conference was, like, the first time in my life I've hung around guys my age who are dealing with this, 'cause all my friends back home are straight," he enthused. For young Christians struggling with their homosexuality, the ex-gay movement offers the same kind of instant community that homosocial centers like The Castro in San Francisco do for other gay kids. And because many of the problems that the ex-gay movement insists are endemic to gay life -- problems like loneliness, alienation and low-self esteem -- are also common to young people generally, the movement seems to offer its yearning believers a solution to all life's ills.

From the moment he became aware of his attractions to men, Kyle wished they would go away. When, at 16, he came out to his friends, it was not at all triumphal. "When I told my friends, I wasn't like, 'I'm here, I'm queer.' It was more, 'I'm having these feelings and I don't know what to do. I want to change. I don't want to be this way.'" Still, he had a secret boyfriend for five years, from 13 to 17 -- a boy who stayed in the closet and recently married. At 18, Kyle said he started going to gay clubs with his straight girlfriends and doing "all kinds" of drugs. But he felt guilty and sinful. "Do gay people go to hell? I don't know," he said. But that uncertainty is itself terrifying. Besides, he said, without God as he conceives him in his life, "I can't be fulfilled." He believes he can't be gay and whole.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »