The Lady Doth Protest...

Dennis Jurnigan's "ministry" has included opposition to the Hate Crimes Bill.  His preaching and singing, he says, are inspired by his experience of being "delivered".


From what, exactly, was he "delivered"?  Homosexuality.

Really...



If he's an "ex-gay", then I'm the King of Prussia.

Worse Than Their Homo- (and Trans-) Phobia

I like to remain optimistic.  Really, I do.  I don't like what I see in the mirror when I become a cynical bitch.

Still, I can't help but to think that there's no idea that's too farfetched, too illogical, too counterintuitive or too just plain wrongheaded to rear its ugly head from time to time.

One of those ideas is the ones that non-heterosexual, non-gender-conforming people can have their "deviance" beaten, shocked, prayed, hugged, drugged, jailed or talked out of them.  It seems that every few years, there's a spate of reports about "reparative" "therapies (something supported by US Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and practiced by her husband Marcus) ," "healing" "ministries" or some program concocted by the law enforcement/military/government complex in some country or another, that aims to change of us who love whom we're not supposed to love or don't live according to the "M" or "F" on our birth certificates. 

Almost none of those programs or ministries has been started, or is administered or practiced by, anyone with any sort of scientific or clinical background in anything having to do with the study of human behavior.  Such programs are routinely dismissed as "junk science" even by those whose religious or cultural beliefs might be in agreement with those who believe they are, in essence, performing or facilitating exorcisms. 

So why do they proliferate?  I don't think they get their impetus only from those who believe that they can "love the sinner but hate the sin" or from those, like Fred Phelps and his followers, who are pure and simple haters.  Instead, I think that the therapies, ministries and other programs continue, in large part, because of the anxieties too many of us in the LGBT community still have.

Thankfully, for more and more people today, "coming out" is a joyous occasion, or at least a relief.   However, in my youth, realizing that one was not attracted to members of the opposite sex (Yes, that's how we phrased it in those days.), let alone not the person idenitified by the name and sex on the birth certificate, was a cause for anxiety, at best, and more often, pain, loneliness, isolation and depression--which, of course, led too many of us to the bars, the bottle or a bridge.   So many of us didn't "come out"--or did so, and "recanted" later on.  Some of us entered marriages that fooled no one.  Or we pursued careers in the military or law enforcement and engaged in, or became fans of, the most "macho" sports and other endeavors we could find, while others paid extra attention to their hair, makeup and dresses.  

In other words, even if we didn't seek those "reparative" "therapies" or "healing" "ministries", or weren't forced into programs that would punish, if not change, us, many of us did those things to ourselves.  I think of the days when I trained athletically: I pedalled fifty miles a day, every day, lifted weights and did all sorts of other exercises; I pushed my body beyond its seeming limits in an attempt to pound it into submission.  All I managed to do was pull myself further and further away from any chance of meaningful community with anyone else, or myself.

These days, most rational people and those with any sort of empathy recoil at the thought of trying to "cure" homosexuality through electroshock, or even behavior modification or prayer and sermons.  So I don't think the Bachmanns and their ilk are nearly as much a threat to us as the fear and isolation that comes with trying to be "normal" and knowing that one can't.  As long as it's still possible to lose one's job, one's friends, family and community--in short, one's life as he or she knows it--too many of us will remain, and die, in the closet. 

I Was An Ex-Gay (Well, Almost...)

Is it me, or has the media been paying a lot of attention to so-called "ex-gays" lately?

Now, I've known of them, and the ministries that purport to make them so, for more than thirty years, since I was an undergraduate at Rutgers. In fact, you might say that I was trying to be one of them: I knew that I wasn't a straight guy so, by default, I must have been gay or bisexual. Or so I reasoned, with my admittedly-limited skills in that endeavor.

At that point, the only thing I knew about transsexual people is that they were named Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards and I was not like them, so I could not be one of them. I had to be a man, I thought, because I had the body of one and did not see it in the same way as I imagined they saw theirs. I hated mine; I despised even more the thought of having to share it, as a male, with someone in order to love or be loved.

The thought of living as a gay man appalled me --some might say because of my residual homophobia and the fact that, with a couple of exceptions, I despised men. But the thought of changing genders seemed unfathomable or, at least, terrifying. So, the only way I could envision, at that time in my life and for many years afterward, having a union with either a man or woman was doing so as a man--which disgusted me even more than the prospect of the sexual relationship itself.

So why did I align myself, however tenuously, with gay men during that time? Well, in my very primitive understanding of sexuality and gender (The only times I'd even heard the latter term were during grammar lessons.), I came to the conclusion that I could come closest to living like a woman by being a gay man. The only gay men I knew (or knew that I knew) at that time were the "flaming queens": You couldn't not know about them. I couldn't particularly identify with them--one of whom was Robert, my first roommate in college--but at least they seemed to be living something that might be more or less plausible and doable, if not easy, for me.

So....Almost as soon as I "came out," I was looking for a way to be protected from what I thought I was going into. (I had "come out" to my mother during that time. I wonder whether she recalled it many years later, when I would reveal to her the life I'd just begun to lead as Justine and all of the feelings and some of the episodes that led up to it.) Perhaps if I believed in the redemptive powers of the Holy Spirit, I thought, I could be "freed" from my "sinful" desires.

That led me to join a fellowship of born-again Christians on campus. In some ways, I wished to be like them: They all seemed content, or at least free of the existential guilt and shame that I felt. And they all seemed so certain of their futures: God would reveal His plan for them, which would invariably consist of stable careers, if not a ministries, of some sort, and heterosexual partners who would gladly sire or bear their children, all according to the Lord's plan. That, by the way, is something I understand about all sorts of young religious zealots, from the Orthodox Jewish kids I once taught to today's suicide bombers: They are all completely certain, in ways that most mainstream religious or secular people aren't, about their futures in ways they could not be if they did not have their fanatical belief in God or Allah or whichever deity.

Even more than their certainty about their futures, in this life and after it, I wanted two other things that their faith and fellowship seemed to offer: the hope of redemption, and safety. I really wanted to believe that maybe, just maybe, I could be "delivered" from the certain death that would follow a life lived by my "sinful" nature. I knew that life as a gay man or woman, let alone a transsexual, could be a lonely one subject to sudden death at any given moment at the hands of someone who hated me simply for being. (Of course I would know about that danger: I once committed a gay-bashing myself.) Even though I was thinking about suicide all the time, I didn't want to a horribly violent death at someone else's hand, much less to find that whatever comes after this life is even worse.

Going to a baptismal service at a Pentecostal church with members of that fellowship, and "accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour" (Yes, I actually told them I did!), offered me the chance to "redeem" myself--which, truth be told, meant, at least to me--a kind of escape from my dilemma. The minister who "baptised" me very firmly stated, "There's no such thing as a born-again homosexual;" therefore, in order to give the Lord the chance to "wash away" my sins, I had to renounce myself. In a way, I was only too eager to do that: It would preclude my "solving" my gender-identity dilemma by living as a gay man.

Being known as an ex-gay (or, more accurately, a never-was gay) had an effect I hadn't anticipated in that fellowship: I gained immediate respect, and was even seen as a sort of "guiding light" by many in that fellowship--including its leader, who became almost paternalistically protective of me. Almost immediately, I was asked to lead prayer meetings and healing circles, and was taken up on my offer to start a newsletter.

And, if I recall correctly, I actually wrote an article about "hating the sin but loving the sinner." That, of course, is exactly how many evangelical Christians claim to feel about homosexuality and those who are inclined toward it. I even adopted that as a credo for myself, as it allowed me, however unconsciously, to hate myself and gay people even more than I already did. Today, I cannot see how it's possible to claim to "hate the sin but love the sinner" without seeing the sinner as someone less than one's self, or whatever one perceives one's self to be.

Now, I know of people who don't approve of what I've done, and many others who hope their kids don't "turn out" gay or trans, but who relate to me as the human being I am. I have learned not to hope that everyone will approve of what I've done because that requires that they understand why (and I'm not just talking about knowing that "you have to do what you need to do") I or anyone else would undergo the treatments, surgery or other aspects of changing from a life lived by expectations to one lived by our need to love, and be loved by, ourselves and others. I can't expect anyone else to understand that; if anyone does, or even begins to, I consider that a victory and a gift. So, for that matter, is finding someone who accepts you for what you are.

Anyway...I know I can't offer any explanations as to why someone would go through "de-programming" or any other aspect of a "ministry" that's intended to "cure" someone of homosexuality or identifying one's gender in a way that was not proscribed at one's birth or approved of by the culture in which he or she lives. And I don't claim to know whether those who claim to be "ex-gays" really were gay, or even bisexual, in the first place, much less whether they were "cured." All I know is that the notion that we can become "ex-gays" (or former trans people), if believed by those with enough hate or simply a lust for power, can be dangerous and even deadly because it is not based on any sort of understanding of what we actually experience. That, of course, is something for which a zealot of any sort has absolutely no use.