How an 'Ex-Gay' Minister Saw the Light

Scott Harrison desperately tried to change his sexual orientation in various "ex-gay" ministries for eight years, three of them as a ministry leader in Southern California. Most of his experience with ex-gay groups -- Christian organizations that see homosexuality as a choice that can be changed with proper therapy -- was with Living Waters and Desert Stream, two curricula of a national ex-gay network that has more than 80 branches today. When Harrison joined in 1982, he felt ex-gay ministers were then a band of compassionate outsiders attending to the first AIDS victims. But by the end of that decade, Harrison had taken note of the movement's increasing radicalism, symbolized for him by the minister at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in San Pedro, Calif., who performed an exorcism on him in an attempt to cast out the "demons" said to be the cause of his homosexuality. Harrison finally quit the movement in 1990 after deciding he could, after all, reconcile his sexuality with his Christian faith. Today, he speaks to parents of gay and lesbian children about the dangers he sees in the ex-gay movement. Harrison says the relatively recent alignment of Exodus International, one of the largest ex-gay groups with some 120 ministries in North America alone, with anti-gay Christian "dominionists" -- people who want to impose Christian rules on the secular institutions of society -- has led to ex-gay ministers pursuing a hard-line message with young people that can only end in mental anguish and failure.

Casey Sanchez: Scott, how did you first get involved with the ex-gay movement?

Scott Harrison: I grew up in the '60s in a conservative evangelical home, in a Baptist environment. From a young age, I learned homosexuality was not only bad but was the worst sin a person could do. It was worse than murder. For me, the two options I saw, once I realized I was gay, were to commit suicide and go to heaven or to come out as gay and go to hell. [The ex-gay movement] offered a third option.

Sanchez: You started attending ex-gay ministries in 1982. Those were the early days of the movement. What was a typical meeting like?

Harrison: They would open with a prayer. Andy Comiskey [founder of Living Waters/Desert Stream, a neo-Pentecostal ex-gay ministry], or whoever the particular person leading the session was, would present the teaching. These teachings later became the chapters in Comiskey's book, Pursuing Sexual Wholeness.

We were separated into small groups that would stay together for the entire duration of the class. It was a three-and-a-half-hour segment every Saturday. We would break up into our small groups, and we would do a discussion.

There would be praying to break "one-flesh unions." That was the language they used to describe anything that involved having sex that they considered sinful, whether it was premarital sex or homosexual behavior or someone having sex with someone who was in the occult.

The small groups were meant to create Platonic, healthy, same-sex relationships with other Christians. And so you got really close to these people who were in the group. You'd call them every day just to see how they were doing. It was really similar to a recovery group. Homosexuality was viewed as a temptation, not as an orientation.

Sanchez: Back in the 1980s, many Christian churches wanted nothing to do with ex-gay ministries. They saw them as shameful. What was your experience?

Harrison: [The Vineyard Christian Fellowship in San Pedro, Calif.] was completely different from any evangelical church you've ever been to. There was a strong emphasis on social justice issues -- feeding the homeless and doing whatever you could to help people. There was a strong emphasis on doing the things Jesus did and walking the talk.