by Joel Derfner
He cannot have understood the excitatory effect these words would have on me, but they pushed me over the edge. I figured that sound effects would be welcome, so I groaned loudly as I reached the climax of the evening. I am compelled to admit that it was a spectacular example of its species, the kind that leaves one’s sides aching as one gasps for air. It took me a minute or two to recover my composure, during which time I saw that the fruits of my labor had landed in a pretty even split between the hands of my assistants and the floor. I am never going to eat at this restaurant, I thought as I collected my fee from Daniel. My underwear was nowhere to be found—why I had considered any other possibility I cannot say—so I just put my jeans on, waved goodbye to Go-Go Boy, and left.
Standing outside Thai One On, finding my bearings as the door swung shut, I waited for the familiar feelings of inadequacy, hunger, and need to overwhelm me, waited both to loathe myself until I danced again and to fear that I would never be able to do so no matter how much torture I went through. Putting on clothes at the end of the night had stripped me of any armor against the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and I braced myself.
For something that did not come.
Instead what arrived, unbidden, was the thought I’ve gotten what I need to get out of this. Accompanied by a sense of ease I hadn’t felt in years.
As I waited for a taxi amid the noise and bustle of the drunken West Village revels going on around me, I tried to figure out exactly what it was that I’d gotten. Why should tonight have been any different from a night spent dancing at Splash or Eastern Bloc or an afternoon at Scores? Why should I be thinking of Go-Go Boy with equanimity? Why should I picture Samara Zinn and feel the urge to whistle?
I could not find the answer.
I also could not find a cab. At four or so, therefore, I gave up and figured I might as well catch the 3 train. I turned north and, stepping languidly from foot to foot, gyrating at the hip, and sometimes running one hand or the other over my pectoral muscles, headed up Seventh Avenue toward Fourteenth Street.
ON EXODUS
“You’re not the Wicked Witch of the West!” called out the cute, bubbly twink. “You’re not going to melt!” I glared at him and stuck my tongue out. “You have until the count of ten and then I’m pushing you. Ten! Nine! Eight!…” When Bill got to four I jumped; the log, annoyingly asymmetrical, swung me out over the river, and then I let go and flew through the air, suddenly careless. After I landed I had to swim hard against the current to get to where we had left our things, but when I reached the shore I pulled myself out of the river, climbed back up onto the rock, and did the whole thing again.
I was in North Carolina on the bank of the Asheville River, having accepted Rob’s invitation to go swimming. With Rob and me were Louis, Bill, and Greg, all of whom Rob had met that afternoon and all of whom I loathed as soon as they introduced themselves, because Rob might pay more attention to them than to me. Louis, in his forties, was a hairdresser with bad hair; he had checked his voice mail continually during the drive to the river, annoying me more each time. I loathed Bill extra because he was twenty-nine but looked twenty. Greg spoke only in American Sign Language but managed all the same to communicate with supreme hauteur his resentment of me, Louis, and Bill for not letting him have Rob to himself. I had doubtless alienated him further when I introduced myself and misfingerspelled my name as Jopl. I worried about this until “I Will Survive” came on the car radio, at which point I started worrying about the fact that nobody but me could sing along past the first three lines.
I am rarely aware of my physical surroundings. It’s an effort for me to walk a city block without bumping into a telephone pole or poking myself in the eye. When we parked by the river and stepped out of the car into the wet air, however, I actually looked through the lenses of my glasses and saw things: the tiny mountains in the distance, the crooked trees across the river, the dark water reflecting the sunlight, the sharp rocks in the dirt under my feet. Then I went to put my contacts in and realized I had forgotten to pour any solution into the case before I left and in the time it had taken us to get here they had become desiccated husks. Since I couldn’t very well swim in my glasses, I resigned myself to hoping that I would at least be able to tell the humans from the rocks.
We were obviously not the first people to think of swimming at this spot: a log hung by a rope from a tree on the shore, clearly intended as an aid to swinging out over the river. I scampered after Bill onto the big, flat rock next to the tree; even with my heavily impaired vision I was mesmerized to see that he was wearing what looked like a Victorian bathing costume, one that covered his chest as well as his upper thighs. He chivalrously offered me the log but there was no fucking way I was going first, because what if the river was actually full of piranhas or sulfuric acid?
When Bill dropped into the water, however, he was neither eaten nor dissolved, so I grabbed the log as it swung back—note, please, that this put me in physical contact with nature—and watched as Bill climbed out of the river, shaking water from his head like a good-natured dog after a bath.
I couldn’t move. I can tread water fine, and I have a passable breaststroke, so it wasn’t that I thought I might drown. I was just scared of letting go. And then Bill told me I wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West and started counting.
But I am the Wicked Witch of the West, I thought. When I was five, for my first Hallowe’en trick-or-treating, I had prevailed upon my mother to make me a witch costume, complete with pointy black hat and broomstick; I had run from house to house, swathed in billowing midnight, terrifying all the neighbors with my deep and abiding wickedness and feeling more myself than I ever had before (and, in many ways, than I ever have since).
But this was no time for reverie, as Bill’s count was rapidly approaching zero. After my exhilarating jump on “four!” and the subsequent splash I turned around in the water and looked at the Bill-shaped blur on the rock—and the Rob- and Greg-shaped blurs coming toward us, and the Louis-shaped blur sitting on the bank—and realized that I thought of myself in that moment not as a spy and a liar but as a swimmer, and that I thought of the men around me not as ex-gays but as my friends.
In 1976, during a decade that saw any number of wondrous events, a group of sixty-two people gathered in Anaheim, California, to discuss their desire not to be gay anymore. Many of them had already decided to leave what they referred to as “the lifestyle” but were frustrated by the lack of any community or support network. Others had already left the lifestyle and wanted to share with others the truth that such a departure was possible. Still others came simply to meet people like themselves. Evangelical Christians all, they adopted the slogan “Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ,” and since then Exodus, International has grown, according to its literature, to include thousands of people on six continents: men and women who, tormented by their homosexual attractions, have joined with God in a struggle to purify themselves by means of something that has become known as “transformational ministry.” Though many are still struggling, others have triumphed over what they think of as their sexual brokenness and are now married with children, living lives devoted to the Lord Who has saved them.
Yeah, right.
There’s no conclusive proof of this, but I think—as does everybody I know—that homosexuality is an inherent trait, like height. If you’re short you can wear platform shoes (if you insist), but once you’re done growing, that’s that. Alter your behavior however you like but you cannot alter your biological makeup. If you are attracted only to people with Adam’s apples, nothing is ever going to make your heart leap at the sight of a pair of breasts. Even the comportment of some of Exodus’s leaders raises questions about the organization’s claims: after a few years, Mike Bussee and Gary Cooper, two of the original sixty-two, left Exodus and their wives for each other. In 2000, John Paulk was removed as board chairman after being photographed leaving a gay bar where he ha
d apparently spent forty minutes trying to pick up another man.
So when my editor suggested that part of my book be about something unexpected and subversive, going undercover among the ex-gays seemed the obvious choice. (What he actually said was “something unexpected and subversive, like you could become a fireman,” but unbeknownst to him I had already looked into becoming a fireman, after my boyfriend Mike was late to lunch on the day of the Gay Pride Parade because he had been watching the gay firemen march by, and according to the fire department’s website I was too old to join the force. I did not share any of this information with my editor because I want him to think of me as vital and young.) When I went to the Exodus, International website I saw an announcement about the thirtieth annual Freedom Conference, to be held in a few months at the LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina, so I signed up, sent my check in, and started trying to figure out what to wear.
I had spent my youth in South Carolina, a place teeming with evangelical Christians, so there would be no surprises coming from that direction. But I had never met an ex-gay before. I had never even seen the Will & Grace episode in which Neil Patrick Harris tries to get Jack to become an ex-gay. There was an ex-gay who used to hang around at the BGLSA meetings in college, but the only things I can remember about him are that nobody talked to him and that he had really unattractive hair.
As the day of my departure drew near, I wondered more and more what kind of people I would meet at the conference. I couldn’t expect them all to be hypocrites. Yes, the examples of Mike Bussee and Gary Cooper and John Paulk led me to suspect that the men and women running the show might not all be exactly what they seemed. But this was a conference for the rank and file; why would hundreds of people gather for a week to lie to no one but one another? It also seemed unlikely that they would all be idiots; the Exodus website was full of eloquent testimonies written by people all over the world. And I doubted they would be simple lunatics; I know mental illness when I see it—I have been dating a psychiatrist for four years—and the registration materials I got in the mail were obviously written by and addressed to individuals in relative control of their mental faculties.
So I woke up the morning of my flight with no inkling of what I was getting myself into. By the time I had to leave for the airport I still hadn’t figured out how to dress like an ex-gay, so I just hurled clothing into my suitcase willy-nilly, though thankfully I did have the presence of mind to remove the T-shirt that said I’M NOT POPE BENEDICT XVI BUT MY BOYFRIEND IS before I zipped the bag shut.
“Blessing,” said Anne Heche’s mother, “is asking God to interfere and bring somebody into the proper relationship with Him.”
Nancy Heche was speaking at the opening session of the Freedom Conference as a representative of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), a group started in 1998 that apparently modeled its title on that of another organization, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Her point seemed to be that it was a direct result of her prayers that her daughter Anne had dumped Ellen DeGeneres and become heterosexual (though Nancy did not touch on the causal relationship between her prayers and Anne’s claim that as Jesus’ half sister Celestia she enjoyed communicating with extraterrestrials). I opened the notebook I had bought to record my impressions of the ex-gays. “LOVE her skirt/blouse combo!!” I scribbled. “So sparkly, looks great w/ green curtain.”
Nancy told us that when her husband and her daughter had come out to her she had hardened her heart against them both. “But God spoke to me,” she continued. “He said, Nancy, you have to let your heart soften.”
There are people in New York to whom God speaks. You meet them on the subway. God tells them all sorts of things, like that the Jews have hidden cameras behind all their mirrors and that the CIA is stealing their thoughts. Often it is a matter of great urgency that they explain these things to you; a matter of far greater urgency in fact than, say, bathing. This happens with enough regularity that New York City has established something called the Homeless Emergency Liaison Project (HELP), which empowers roving teams of psychiatrists to comb the subway for the craziest of the crazies and take them to the hospital and give them large doses of Clozaril.
But as I looked around the nearly full auditorium in North Carolina it was clear that, whatever problems the people in this room had, their solutions did not lie in antipsychotic medication. I learned later that almost a thousand delegates had come to the conference. During the opening session I estimated that three-quarters of the people I saw were men; of these, fully two-thirds were men I would have expected to see at Sunday brunch in Chelsea, waving mimosas and flirting with the waiter. Almost everyone in the room was white, and I saw more moustaches that night than I had encountered in New York in eight years. There seemed to be people of all ages in attendance: A couple of pews to my left sat a man who looked to be in his eighties. Five rows in front of me was a stunning blond in his midtwenties with tantalizingly low-rise jeans and a YMCA T-shirt worn, I presumed, without irony. But my favorite person so far was the teenager with his hands in his pockets at the end of my row, because his Harry Potter bag had a Slytherin crest on it. “Slytherin kid,” I wrote. “May not want be gay, but other priorities = in right place.”
Onstage the emcee had taken over for Nancy and was introducing the evening’s “worship leader and song receiver,” Dennis Jernigan. “Dennis and his wife have been very fruitful and multiplied,” she said, “and now they have nine children.” This struck me as excessive but then I remembered that I had four cast albums of The Mystery of Edwin Drood so I figured I could cut him some slack.
A moustachioed man in his forties walked onstage, sat down at the piano, and began playing soft, inspirational music. “I walked out of homosexuality on November seventh, 1981, at a Christian rock concert,” he told us. “The singer said, ‘There’s someone here hiding something. But God sees it, and He loves you.’ I looked around and I thought, well, you didn’t die for me.” Dennis pointed at an invisible person who had neglected to die for him. “And you didn’t. And you didn’t. But”—he looked up meaningfully—“He did.” As he said this the music he was playing changed from meandering underscoring to what was obviously the introduction to a song. It didn’t sound half bad. Then he started singing, in a slightly gruff but pleasant voice.
And it wasn’t just a handful of people who stood up and sang with him, not just pockets of Dennis Jernigan enthusiasts scattered throughout the hall. They all knew the song, and they all loved the song. “Taking my sin, my cross, my shame,” Dennis and the standing audience sang, “rising again, I bless Your name.” Around me, people lifted their hands in the air, and I saw that people all over the auditorium were doing the same thing, their faces breaking into wide grins. There were a few holdouts—the Slytherin kid was standing but did not smile and kept his hands in his pockets—but before long almost a thousand waving pairs of hands attached to a thousand rapturous open faces reached toward the heavens. I felt as if I were at a Madonna concert in an alternate universe, with an audience full of unstylish people who were not on drugs.
The lyrics to the song Dennis was singing were being projected onto large screens at either side of the stage, against background images of rushing waves and mighty forests and windblown fields of wheat. The words to a verse consistently appeared a line or two after the verse had started. Sometimes they were the words to the wrong verse. At one point the screens read “Rising again, I bless Your nam,” which pissed me off. “Spell-check that difficult?” I scratched angrily.
But as the song continued I realized that something deeper than bad spelling was at work here. What I saw on the upturned beaming faces around me was more than just the joy that subsumes people when they get lost in music they love. Yes, that joy was there; but underneath it was a sense of community, of belonging, of acceptance. A man across the aisle from me was sobbing, great, racking gasps of relief, and even the Slytherin kid had started singing along quietly. These people, I thought
, spend fifty-one weeks of the year battling homosexual inclinations in isolation. Being here, they must feel like the cavalry has arrived to fight for them and to tell them God is on their side.
Very few Jews I know believe in God as anything but a metaphor. I might not have been able to say this before documents and photographs and film came flooding out of Germany and Poland in 1945, but since then, for many Jews, the only satisfactory answer to the question “What kind of God would allow the slaughter of thirteen million people?” has been “One who doesn’t exist.”
This perspective had its origins not in the Holocaust, however, but in the nineteenth-century repeal of anti-Jewish laws all over Europe. For millennia, God had been at the center of Jewish life, but as Jews began to mingle in gentile society they felt both less need for the attitudes that marked them as alien and greater hunger for a world beyond the study of Torah. Mainstream Judaism’s relationship with God became less intimate, more formal, and many strains of it have stayed that way. For a great number of Jews today, God is Up There somewhere, and the last time He bothered intervening directly on behalf of anybody down here was in Babylon, when He stopped the lions’ mouths and delivered His prophet Daniel living from their den. In the Book of Esther, chronologically the next book of Hebrew scripture after Daniel, the name of God never appears. Ever since the eponymous queen saved the Jews from extinction, we may have asked God for any number of things, but a lot of us have seen the requests as purely rhetorical.
Of course this is only one of many Jewish perspectives. There are all sorts of Jews around the world: devout Jews, fundamentalist Jews, mystic Jews, even charismatic Jews. But in America, even if you add them all together, evidently they’re still far outnumbered by the Jewish atheists.