Christian 'Ex-Gays' Brainwash Thousands

John Smid has a high school diploma, a minister's license and five acres of land outside Memphis, Tenn., where he "cures" homosexuals. For most of the past two decades, Smid's residential "ex-gay" program was known as Love in Action. The majority of the young men who entered the program came from the kind of conservative religious upbringing where being gay is a sin that will cast a person out of church, family and home. To rid themselves of "unwanted same-sex attractions" they paid $1,000 a month, with some staying at the facility for years.

At LIA, as it was known, staff would lead clients in group sessions to trace out childhood trauma alongside lessons in throwing footballs, changing motor oil and learning how to cross their legs in a manly fashion. In much of the world of ex-gay ministries, same-sex attractions are thought to result from childhood sexual abuse or parents who failed to instill masculinity in their sons. Since the goal is to rewire parent-child dynamics, LIA clients were forbidden to call their families. Those who worked in Memphis while living on the LIA compound had to navigate around a "forbidden zone" that covered nearly half the city, keeping them miles away from its handful of adult book stores. They were ordered to drive straight to and from work without speaking to strangers.

"On our way to work, we saw two cars get into an accident. We actually debated over whether we should stop," said Peterson Toscano, who lived at LIA for two years in the early 1990s and now helms an ex-gay survivors' movement. They didn't stop. "Looking back, I see how brainwashed we were. We were sick the whole day. We could have helped the people."

Toscano still has the 374-page LIA handbook that governed every day he spent trying to become heterosexual. Tom Otteson, another former client of Smid's, said he was told that "it would be better if I were to commit suicide than go back into the world and become a homosexual again." In 2005, Smid tried to clarify those comments to a reporter from the pro-gay Memphis magazine Family & Friends: "I said [to Otteson], 'It would almost be better if you weren't alive than to return back to the life that you have struggled so much to leave.'"

Unlike his clients, Smid was not isolated from the world. In 2005, when Tennessee officials investigated LIA for dispensing psychotropic medicine and treating minors without a license, it seemed certain the place would be shut down. But Smid kept his operation alive by countersuing the state of Tennessee with the help of senior counsel from the Alliance Defense Fund, the powerhouse legal arm of the Christian Right.

Today, Love in Action is part of a booming phenomenon that is also known as the "sexual reorientation therapy" movement, an effort that is reflected in the hundreds of programs attached to religious organizations across the United States. Although the stated aim of the movement is to turn gays straight and bring them to God, it actually now has as much to do with battling the gay rights movement by trying to prove that sexuality is not an immutable characteristic like race or gender. Ex-gay ministries began as redoubts for men and women trying to reconcile their faith and sexuality. But in the hands of the anti-gay Christian Right, they have become full-fledged propaganda machines depicting gays as sex-addicted, mentally ill, and stunted heterosexuals.

A Flourishing Movement

Love In Action no longer describes itself as therapy but as a "ministry." It ditched its residential program in favor of a $2,000, four-day "intensive" encounter for families and teens called Refuge. Focus on the Family, the largest and wealthiest Christian Right organization in the country, now hires Smid to appear several times a year on an ex-gay lecture circuit called Love Won Out, where he speaks on masturbation and "healing homosexuality."