Over time he grew to hate his romantic feelings toward other men, but the thought of never being loved terrified him. An urgency to save himself from a life of loneliness, so-called depravity, and eternal damnation put him on a desperate path to make himself straight. Michael was going to fight this “illness,” and he would spend the next five decades in a dogged attempt to do so.
As a freshman in college, he volunteered to man a crisis hotline at the Melodyland Christian Center megachurch. “Every once in a while people would call in and whisper, ‘I have something wrong with me that I can’t talk about,’ ” Michael recalls, “and I knew exactly what they were saying.” The way out seemed simple enough: If you were a Christian, you couldn’t be homosexual. If you thought otherwise, Satan had misled you. No one was truly homosexual, Michael told himself and his callers. With enough prayer and time, all those feelings would vanish.
Given his success as a hotline counselor, Melodyland Christian Center tasked Michael to help launch its first ministry for gays. He and his cofounders based their so-called “reorientation” or “reparative” therapy on a combination of twelve-step programs, psychotherapy, Bible study, and prayer. “Homosexuality, we felt, was a manifestation of unmet needs,” Michael recalls. “If people met these needs in a more spiritually healthy way, their impure feelings would diminish over time. If you had faith and you prayed hard enough, you’d succeed. If it didn’t happen, it was because you didn’t have enough faith, or you had a sin to confess that’s blocking you from God’s gift.” This is reminiscent of some of the circular logic of the positive thinking movement discussed in chapter 2. Like the paradox of positive thinking, Michael now recognizes that this idea often perpetuated guilt, depression, and self-hatred among the very people he was trying to help. “The implication,” he says, “is you might not be a real Christian.”
In September of 1976, the church hosted a symposium for ex-gay support groups, which led to the creation of an umbrella organization called Exodus International. This would have been a triumphant day for Michael if not for one very big problem. As a leader and founding member of Exodus, he found that the program he had helped develop to reorient others was not helping him. He was also seeing a disturbing trend among his clients. One man purposely veered his car into a tree. Another was so despondent over his failure to change that he took a razor blade to his genitals and doused his wounds with drain cleaner. Many others fell apart, collapsing under the weight of guilt and self-loathing, and Michael never saw them again. It’s what he calls “going underground.”
In the years after Michael observed these frightening outcomes, a debate would rage within the mental health field on the effectiveness of sexual reorientation therapy. Though the debate continues to this day, most research has not supported the effectiveness of the therapy, and the entire field is fraught with major methodological flaws. In 2008, Julianne M. Serovich, professor and chair of the Ohio State University’s Department of Human Development and Family Science, and a team of colleagues systematically examined twenty-eight research studies on sexual reorientation therapy. In the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, they write that the limitations of this research “include a lack of theory, inconsistent definition and measurement of sexual orientation, restricted samples, lack of longitudinal designs, and sex disparity.” Michael’s doubts in what he was doing with his clients would be further confirmed by organizations such as the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Counseling Association, the American School Counselor Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Social Workers, all of which have since enacted policies opposing sexual reorientation therapies on the basis that homosexuality is not a mental illness and thus is not something that needs to or can be “cured.”
The only thing that kept Michael Bussee going, it seemed, was his friend and Exodus cofounder, Gary Cooper. Wonderfully and disastrously, their close working relationship blossomed into romance.
Gary was a young man with a neat mustache, short hair that fell loosely over his brow, a square chin, and bright eyes. Despite Michael’s ever-deepening doubts about Exodus, the two men continued to travel to testify at churches across the country. On a fateful flight together to Indianapolis in 1979, Michael hit a breaking point.
He was reading Glendon Swarthout’s novel Bless the Beasts and Children, pausing every few pages to recite a passage to Gary, who was in the seat next to him. “It was about misfit boys who eventually break free and band together to find their dignity,” remembers Michael. “They grew tired of being thought of as something less. At the end they release a herd of buffalo and set themselves free at the same time. Gary said, ‘You know, this kind of relates to us, doesn’t it?’ I was crying. I told Gary I loved him. He told me he loved me.”
This was the first time Michael had ever truly felt love. It was the kind of love he had feared he would never experience, the kind of love he hadn’t thought possible for a gay man, the kind of love he had thought he would have to make himself straight in order to find.
But this love carried with it dire consequences. Michael was told by members of the organization that he was now beyond salvation. Some described in scathing detail the flames of hell that were going to consume him in the final days. In 1979, like many of their clients before them, Michael and Gary left Exodus and went underground. Although they were open about their sexuality and their relationship to a small group of friends, they kept their previous involvement in the organization a closely guarded secret.
Michael had become quite adept at concealing himself from others. He felt intensely guilty for his role in what Exodus had done and was continuing to do to gay men just like him, people who just wanted to find the love of God and the love of others. He was full of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Part of him wanted to put religion behind him. Who needs God, anyway? he often thought. But he couldn’t give up his faith; it wasn’t that easy. The truth was, Michael still wondered if being gay was a sin. According to many of his former friends in Exodus, he and Gary were destined for hell. Maybe, he thought, they were right.
Though that frightening thought haunted Michael, he didn’t see any alternative. “No matter what,” he recalls, “we had to be honest with ourselves, even if that meant an eternity in hell.”
It seems like a natural human tendency to approach religion as an all-or-nothing proposition. Many say that religion is all good; many claim it’s all bad. James Cameron’s life and the collective history of the School Sisters of Notre Dame may give the impression that the answer to such questions is simple and positive. But Michael’s story presents a very different picture. While his faith served as a kind of beacon throughout his life, guiding his choices just as James’s religious convictions had, Michael’s beliefs often haunted and disturbed him. For most gay men, the discovery of their sexuality, usually in childhood, is emotionally difficult. With a historical lack of positive role models and a culture often quick to judge, it takes some children years to reach a place of comfort with their sexuality. But Michael’s religious beliefs added to this already significant burden, transforming a difficult realization into a traumatic one.
Both James’s story of inspiration and Michael’s history of misgivings and uncertainty reflect the truth of many people’s experiences of faith. For some, religious beliefs and practices are comforting, buffer the damaging effects of trauma, and galvanize personal growth. For others, however, they can be a source of heartbreak.
An increasingly large number of research studies document connections between religious struggle and compromised mental and physical health. For instance, in 2004, chaplain and researcher George Fitchett and his team distributed questionnaires to patients at Rush University Medical Center. Participants with three serious illnesses—diabetes, congestive heart failure, and cancer—completed questionnaires asking about religion, emotional distress, and well-being. Slightly more than half the patients said
they experienced no religious conflict or struggle whatsoever, while the remainder indicated some degree of struggle. As expected, those who said they were experiencing religious struggle reported heightened emotional distress and depression. It’s important to note that studies like this one can’t tell us whether it was religious struggle that caused the emotional distress or the other way around. But it’s clear there’s a connection.
Struggle with, and even loss of, faith are common in the wake of trauma and adversity, though how common is not fully known. Some studies seem to show that trauma leads a large number of people to give up their faith, whereas other studies show just the opposite, that trauma tends to increase people’s faith. A team of researchers headed by Menachem Ben-Ezra of Ariel University Center of Samaria, Israel, surveyed 111 women about their religious beliefs. About half the women had been victims of sexual trauma and half had not. Nonetheless, these two groups were similar in other ways, including age, religion, and marital status. When asked whether they had changed their religious beliefs as a result of the trauma, 45 percent said they hadn’t, and a tiny 8 percent said they had become more religious. In contrast, a full 47 percent said they had become more secular since the trauma. By way of comparison, 25 percent of the nonvictimized women considered themselves nonreligious at the time of the study, compared to a whopping 47 percent of the sexually victimized women.
On the other hand, when Loyola University of Maryland researchers Kari O’Grady, Deborah Rollison, Timothy Hanna, Heidi Schreiber-Pan, and Manuel Ruiz interviewed survivors of 2010’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, they found very different results. A full 80 percent of these interviewees agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “My faith in a God/higher power has grown since the earthquake,” and 71 percent said they practiced their religion more regularly since the earthquake.
Whether religious faith is strengthened or weakened by trauma probably depends on a complex array of factors, possibly including the type of trauma, the age at which it occurs, and the degree of distress it causes, not to mention possible cultural, socioeconomic, and other demographic influences. It may also depend on the particular content of the person’s religious beliefs going into the trauma.
Though most religious Westerners purport to worship the same God, the specifics of their beliefs can differ dramatically. Some people, for instance, view God as merciful and forgiving, whereas others see God as judgmental, a deity who punishes those who do not obey his commandments. The important implications of this particular distinction for how people cope with adversity is dramatically illustrated by a 2011 study published in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine by University of Miami psychologist Gail Ironson and her research team. The researchers followed 101 HIV-positive men and women for four years, meeting with them every six months. Participants completed surveys, sat for detailed interviews, and had their blood checked for indicators that the virus might be progressing. They answered questions about everything from health maintenance behaviors to medication adherence, sexual habits, and mental health issues. Participants also told researchers about their personal views of God. The researchers were interested in whether participants’ images of God would predict CD4 count (an indication of immune health) and HIV viral load (a measure of the amount of the virus in the bloodstream).
The results were astounding. Those who held a view of God as harsh, judgmental, or punishing, much as Michael had, lost CD4 cells two and a half times faster over the four years of the study than those who didn’t share this belief; also, their viral load increased more than three times faster. Because belief that God can be punitive isn’t mutually exclusive with a belief that God can be benevolent, it’s worth looking at things from a different angle. Those who held a view of God as merciful, benevolent, and forgiving lost CD4 cells five times slower than those who didn’t share this belief, and their viral load increased eight and a half times slower.
Of course, it’s possible that viral load levels and immune functioning had nothing to do with participants’ belief in God. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, and people with more positive views of God also took better care of themselves or had more social support. Maybe believing that God is forgiving puts people in a better mood, inspiring them to live a healthier lifestyle or take their antiretroviral medication more reliably. So Ironson and her team used a sophisticated statistical technique called hierarchical linear modeling to test for these possibilities. The result was that participants’ views of God continued to predict both viral load and immune functioning even beyond these external trappings of religion. Beyond whether people are religious, it seems that the specifics of their beliefs really do matter.
Some forms of faith appear to be more comforting and help people to be more resilient than others. This isn’t to say that any beliefs are necessarily wrong or right; that’s a discussion better left to theologians and religious leaders. But some beliefs may buffer the savage insults of trauma more than others. Michael would need every ounce of that kind of faith he could get.
With Exodus ten years behind them, in 1989 Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper were living an ordinary life together in Anaheim, California. This would change, however, one morning when Gary found a spot under his tongue. Michael immediately recognized thrush, one of the early signs of a strange new illness that was traumatizing the gay community. So many people were dying of AIDS that activists were now calling its effects a gay holocaust. Michael and Gary’s lives were transformed from tranquil to chaotic as they began visiting doctors to search desperately for a treatment, trying to make the most of every day. Their life together lasted only four more years.
“We were on the way home from a camping trip along the Pacific Coast Highway. Gary was so frail. I looked, and he’d stopped breathing and had quietly passed. . . . Did I think this is God’s punishment? That this was my retribution for giving into the dark side?” Michael pauses, hesitant to answer. “For a while, I did.”
Gary’s death became the first in a succession of losses for Michael. The AIDS epidemic had decimated the gay community, and like many others, Michael lost numerous friends and loved ones.
He thought of the lessons he had learned about God’s wrath when he was younger. He couldn’t shake the thought that perhaps God really did have it in for gay people. Maybe God was punishing him for his sins, for leaving Exodus, for giving in to his homosexual nature. Maybe this was the hell he had been warned about when he was a child. These thoughts plunged Michael into despair and depression.
Then, at a moment when things could scarcely get worse, he became the victim of an antigay hate crime. He was leaving a theater with a couple of friends in 2002 when a group of men shouting gay epithets jumped them. Believing they’d gotten away from the attack with only scrapes and bruises, Michael saw on his way home that he and one of his best friends had suffered multiple stab wounds. Michael survived; his friend, Jeffery, bled to death on the operating table.
A decade of violence, illness, death, and self-hate had finally reached its peak for Michael. At first the assault added to his belief that God was punishing him. But something about this newest tragedy was different. He found himself wondering if any god, even the stern deity of his childhood, could be this cruel. In that moment, something changed for him. In the face of everything he’d endured, he found it impossible to believe that God could operate this way.
Michael’s faith shifted away from one “that only reinforces guilt and shame and depression,” he remembers. “That kind of toxic faith—that bad things happen to you because you’re being punished by God and good things happen to you because you’re doing the right things—that kind of fundamentalism is just dangerous.”
Michael didn’t give up his belief in God, but he found that it had changed. “Yes, I was still Christian,” he says with conviction, “but I had to ask myself, ‘What is this religion I believe in?’ ” His faith was still intact, was in some ways as strong as it had ever been; but it was time for a reorientation of an altoge
ther different kind.
The plane landed at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport on a bright spring day in 1979. The church group, originating from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, boarded a tour bus and headed southeast along Route 1 to the city of Jerusalem. The weeklong guided tour walked the steps of Jesus along the Via Dolorosa within the walled Old City to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It stopped at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and the slopes of the Mount of Olives. Among biblical landmarks, the group sampled falafel and purchased souvenirs from the souks.
One morning, two members left the group and took their own trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.
James Cameron and his wife, Virginia, had talked a lot about traveling the world together. He’d done so much traveling on his own: to schools in the Midwest and the South, to lecture halls across the East and West Coasts. Not many people had escaped being lynched, so people were fascinated by his story. He and Virginia met not long after he was released from prison, and when he told her his story, he worried that the fact that he was an ex-con would drive her away. She told him it didn’t matter to her how he was in the past; it was who he was now that mattered. James figured that if Virginia could see him for who he was now, maybe he could forgive himself after all these years.
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