Gay Sex Scandal Rocks Christian Right ... Again

The Miami New Times recently broke the story about George Allen Rekers’ 10-day Europe vacation with a male escort, identified only as 20-year-old Lucian. The story has been picked up by the national media and turned this aging puffer into the butt of popular ridicule by Steve Colbert and Jay Leno. One can only shout: Come out George, come out of your closet!

Rekers is an upstanding, 61-year-old white Christian homophobic and has all the credentials of a great deceiver. He is a Baptist minister, was a member of the founding board of the reactionary Family Research Council and is on the board of National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).

According to various reports, he has been a research fellow at Harvard University, taught at the University of South Carolina, is editor of “Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems” and author of “Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality,” books that seek to ensure that children grow up straight, and has repeatedly testified against gay adoptions. He prides himself for his moderate stand on homosexuality, insisting on “the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care."

Rekers initially claimed that he retained Lucian’s services because he "can't lift luggage" and needed an assistant and companion for his European vacation. He insisted that he never had sex with his youthful escort and, after discovering that Lucian was a male prostitute, preached redemption to the wayward lad: “I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail."

The godly minister never denies that he located Lucian through the gay website, Rentboy.com. On his posting, Lucien is shirtless, identifies himself “HIV and Disease FREE" and solicits interested parties with the come on that he will "do anything you say as long as you ask." Lucian proudly acknowledged his "smooth, sweet, tight ass" and "perfectly built 8 inch cock." In all likelihood, Rekers will insist that he discovered Rentboy surfing the web in pursuit of his scholarly research.

Young Lucian has a different story to tell. He acknowledges that he was paid to provide daily nude body rubs. He admits that Rekers named his favorite body rub the "long stroke," an artful caress "across his penis, thigh ... and his anus over the butt cheeks." Lucian reports, "Rekers liked to be rubbed down there.” Surely, no better way to experience the religious pleasure of orgasm.

Faced with the mounting publicity and ridicule and by Lucian’s further revelations, Rekers only digs himself deeper in the hole of incredulity by repeated denials and obfuscations. For explanation, he offers the following as a guiding principle: "My hero is Jesus Christ who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them." One can only wonder whether this same Jesus loves the pathetic closeted homophobic hypocrite?

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As a comic once famously joked, de-nial is more than a river in Egypt. Over the last half-dozen years, the repeated outings of white, Christian men, often Republican elected officials or prominent religious leaders and all assertively homophobic, for their homosexual indiscretions have moved from scandal to entertainment sport to pathetic joke. The latest casualty of this syndrome, George Rekers, only makes clear that sexual scandal is about more then sex and scandal and hypocrisy, but also about denial, shame and pathology.