by Joel Derfner
And so at the Exodus conference I was deeply unnerved by all the men and women with their hands in the air; they were reaching up, I realized, absolutely certain that God was reaching down to take their hands and lead them through the wilderness and that, no matter how many times they stumbled, He would keep them from falling. If I believed that, I thought, then I’d probably try to change too, because such wonderful certainty might just be worth it. Unfortunately, I’m pretty much out of luck, because I believe that the Messiah is never coming and that the God of the Jews doesn’t hold anybody’s hand.
But these people appeared to have come home, and the thought that I didn’t belong there was unbearable, because it meant that I had no share in the comfort they felt. So I figured, oh, why the hell not, and raised my hands tentatively, not above my head but to the level of my ears, and burst into tears.
What the fuck? I thought to myself as I sobbed. To this day I don’t know whether I was crying because I was feeling what they felt or because I wasn’t.
At the First-Timers’ Oasis immediately following the opening session I met Jon, who was totally hot and who did not have a moustache. “What brought you here?” he asked, his wife, Stacey, standing mute beside him. “What’s going on in your life?” (Stacey had never felt same-sex attractions and was known therefore in Exodus parlance as “everstraight.” It had not occurred to me that there would be heterosexual spouses in attendance.) Jon and Stacey, who lived in Los Angeles, had attended their first conference the year before but had come to the First-Timers’ Oasis tonight to lend their support to delegates who might be feeling overwhelmed.
“I’ve been gay for a really long time,” I said, beginning the cover story I had carefully prepared before leaving New York, “and there are things about my life I’m dissatisfied with, so I figured I’d come and check it out. I’m actually seeing a guy back in New York, and he knows I’m here, and he’s not happy about it. But I felt like I needed to come.”
The speech act as a whole was intended to deceive, but by saying only things that were true—there are things about my life I am dissatisfied with; for example, the fact that I am not the heir to an oil fortune—I would forestall any compunction.
Jon seemed to accept my explanation. “It’s important to realize,” he said, smiling broadly, “that change is different from cure.” A very very handsome man who could easily have appeared in the pages of a calendar a fifteen-year-old wouldn’t want his mother to find under his mattress walked by. He waved at Jon and grinned. “That’s Matt,” said Jon, waving back. “Whatever you’ve done in the lifestyle, he’s done more.” Bitch, I thought. “He’s a firefighter and an EMT. Now, a year ago,” said Jon, watching him, “I would have seen him and gone, whew!”—Jon lifted one eyebrow in a picture of lust—“but now I can look at him and think”—his facial expression changed to one of intense concentration, as if maintaining this thought required an Augean effort—“this attraction comes from the fact that I feel inadequate next to him, the fact that I feel less of a man, which I’m not.” Stacey’s expression did not change and she remained silent as the tomb. I wished for her to disappear so Jon and I could make out, but she did not comply. Very very handsome Matt walked past in the other direction, this time with a friend; both of them were laughing loudly.
I couldn’t believe how happy so many of these people seemed. I had expected them to be tortured, and instead they were far more at peace than I had ever been in my entire life. They needed but raise their hands in the air to access a comfort I would have sold my soul to feel for five minutes.
What if this was the right choice for them?
The next morning, when I found the site of the imminent “Process of Transformation” workshop, I was filled with dismay. Spending the day with evangelical Christians was one thing; spending the day with evangelical Christians in a low-rent conference room with a dingy carpet and painted cinderblock walls was more than I had signed on for. Unfortunately, however, since my other workshop options were “Understanding the Roots of Lesbianism” and “Parents in Pain: Waiting for the Prodigal,” I was pretty much stuck where I was.
On my left sat hot Jon, and on his left sat Rob, whom I had met at the morning session. (There were identically structured sessions every morning and evening, comprising music—Dennis Jernigan was gone, but his replacement for the rest of the week had poorly spelled projections too, so I felt a pleasing sense of continuity—a testimony by somebody who had grown out of homosexuality into the love of Christ, more music, and a sermon.) As I waited now for the Process of Transformation workshop to begin, I resented Rob for pulling hot Jon’s focus from me. Jon was a doctor. Rob, who taught high school in a suburb of Cádiz, Spain, was very tall and well built but had a taped-up Bible that had clearly seen a lot of use and was from my home state and dumb.
At the front of the room stood the workshop leader, a middle-aged man named Roy Blankenship who was shaped like a pear and wore the kind of spectacles my brother refers to as child-molester glasses. Roy Blankenship knew from personal experience, he confided to us during the introduction to his PowerPoint presentation, what it felt like to struggle against same-sex attractions. As he began the talk proper I found it difficult to pay close attention, partially because I was thinking about hot Jon but mostly because Roy Blankenship kept putting up slides that said things like “1. When Someone Has Not Yet Been Able To Forgive Either Their Self, Or Others” and it was all I could do not to leap up mid-presentation and copyedit his visual aids.
I persevered, however, and gained in the end at least a loose grasp of his point, which was, as far as I could tell, that homosexuality is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but the result of childhood trauma or deprivation. “There are three main causes of male homosexuality,” Roy said. “There are also fifteen other associated factors, but these three are central. The father wound”—I blinked at this locution but came to understand over the course of the presentation that it referred essentially to a dysfunctional relationship with one’s distant father—“rejection by the male peer group, and universal rejection of women because of an intolerable mother, though that last one is rare.” In order to start healing, Roy explained, you must first understand how you developed homosexual attractions, which leads in turn to a discovery of what emotional need was never met in your childhood. Once you know what trauma you’re compensating for, you can start addressing the real problem, which is not homosexuality but insecurity and self-loathing because your father never loved you or you didn’t fit in with other boys or your mother smothered you. Then, with continued hard work and a steadfast trust in Jesus, you can begin to heal.
I felt as if I were listening to a lecture by a member of the Flat Earth Society. I heard the phrases coming out of Roy Blankenship’s mouth, but my only response was wonderment that an otherwise reasonable-seeming person could string together these combinations of words. I kept thinking, Did he really just say that? and realizing that yes, he really had just said that. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to get angry, but it was impossible to do so, because I found what he was saying less abhorrent than simply nonsensical. I could as easily have taken offense at an argument that gravity is a fraud perpetrated by the Illuminati working in concert with the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.
Halfway through the presentation, a man resembling a pudgy Dustin Hoffman entered the room; there being no other open seats, I caught his eye and nodded to the chair on my right. Upon sitting down, he immediately began grunting in affirmation of everything Roy Blankenship said.
“When I have a really difficult case in my office,” said Roy, “when the person is going on and on about how hard his life is, I reach in and start fiddling in my desk drawer while he’s whining, and eventually I say, drat, it’s not here. The patient will come out of his self-involvement enough to say something like, what? And I’ll say, my magic wand. I can’t find it.”
“Yes,” grunted not-Dustin-Hoffman.
I feel that I would fir
e Roy Blankenship as my therapist no more than ten minutes into our first session. My problem would be not so much that he believed you can change from gay to straight as that, if you can’t be self-involved around your therapist, then what the hell are you paying him for?
But the others in the workshop seemed not to share my concern, and when Roy drew to a close they applauded enthusiastically. As people started to leave the room for lunch, Rob and Jon stayed where they were, deep in conversation with each other. I wanted desperately to join in and make Jon forget that Rob existed and fall in love with me, but if I did so then the grunting man might feel left out, so I started talking to him instead, grinding my teeth whenever Rob laughed at something Jon had said that was obviously funny but that I hadn’t quite been able to make out because I had been talking to the grunting man, whose name, he informed me, was Vito.
Vito had been in the lifestyle for twenty-five years and with a man for fifteen of them. When I asked what had led to his change of heart after so long an entrenchment, he said, “I didn’t want to die. Eve ate the fruit once. If I go back just once, I could get AIDS. If I die tomorrow I don’t want to go to hell—and now I know I’m not going to.” I was very brave, he told me; he remembered how difficult it had been for him to take the first step out of the lifestyle. “I railed at God,” he said. “Why? Why? I like vanilla, you want me to eat chocolate. Other people have their cake and eat it too. I don’t even get to eat the cake. I don’t get any cake.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “I love cake.” Vito started honking like a foghorn, in what I had to assume was an expression of enthusiastic concurrence. I wondered whether he was actually mentally ill and then I decided he just had what my psychiatrist boyfriend Mike calls “personality.”
“I was at Dennis Jernigan’s house,” Vito said—you were where? I thought—“and I was trying to poke holes in his testimony, and God spoke aloud to me.” By this time the idea of a chattering Deity didn’t discompose me in the least. “He said, I told you I’d never leave you, Vito. I didn’t tell you it would be easy. Even if no one has ever come out of this lifestyle, I’m calling you out. I said, Why? Why, God? And He said, Because I want you to be a light to others. Because of Joel from New York City.”
I couldn’t take this, not even for Rob and hot Jon. I gave Vito a queasy smile and excused myself. When I was on the threshold of the room, he waved at me and shouted, “You’re blessed!”
I pointed at him and shouted back, “YOU!”
He pointed at me and shouted, “YOU!”
I shouted, “YOU!,” slipped out the door, and went to lunch. There was chocolate cake for dessert but I didn’t have any.
I am, under most circumstances, a terrible liar. I’ve gotten very adept at things like “Yes, honey, I made sure to turn the lights off before we left” and “Of course I paid the cable bill,” but when the stakes are any higher than momentary domestic tranquillity I am so overcome with anxiety and guilt that, even if whoever I’m lying to believes me, for hours afterward I am incapable of any activity that doesn’t involve thinking obsessively about what a horrible person I am and wondering whether I will get caught.
One would think, then, that attending the Exodus conference undercover might not be the most soothing way for me to spend my time, and Mike suggested as much to me before I left. “By the time you’re done you won’t be able to sleep anymore,” he said. “Ever.”
What he failed to understand, however, no matter how hard I tried to explain, was that this would be different. Assuming a persona for a week would be like nothing so much as acting; furthermore, the character I would be playing was virtually identical to the real me, the only difference being that I would pretend an interest in becoming ex-gay. None of these people had ever met me, and it was unlikely I would ever see any of them again. How could I feel guilty about wearing a mask in front of people I would know for less than a week? Furthermore, I had no intention of harming those I met or of exposing them in any way—I would be writing about them, certainly, but I wasn’t interested in taking them down—so what was there to feel guilty about? I was simply doing research, and easy research at that. My plan presented no especial difficulties.
Shockingly, my analysis proved not to have been completely correct. Standing in the auditorium with the Slytherin kid and the YMCA guy and the racking-sobs-of-relief man the night before, what I had felt was not ease but something more akin to nausea. Here was a room full of people reaching with all their might for salvation, and here was me, taking surreptitious notes about their ill-advised tonsorial choices, their bad spelling, and the absurdity of their belief. At the end of the session—as would happen, it turned out, at the end of every session—the worship leader had instructed anybody who wanted to receive a blessing to come up to the front of the room, where a row of well-dressed men and women of varying ages stood at the ready as prayer volunteers. Wanting desperately to receive a blessing, I left my pew and walked twenty feet up the aisle, at which point I turned around and went right back to my seat. I didn’t deserve a blessing. Besides, what I really wanted wasn’t to be blessed; it was to be forgiven. And such a task was, I suspected, far beyond the powers of a grandfather in a seersucker suit.
So the next day, after Roy Blankenship’s presentation, sitting in front of Vito and hearing him say, “Because of Joel from New York City,” I felt that nausea even more strongly. One of those absurd people had given me his time, his energy, his attention, because he thought that I was in pain and that he might be able to soothe that pain. How on earth was I to respond to his compassion when my need for it was a lie? I was a two-bit cheat, compelling him to feel honest emotion for me so I could use it in a book about what a fool he was.
After the Exodus conference, when I got back to New York, I figured, okay, if I think this three-main-causes-of-homosexuality-and-fifteen-other-associated-factors stuff is hogwash, why don’t I try to find out what’s really going on? I had a vague understanding that homosexuality might be genetic—that, for example, male homosexuality could be passed along from mother to son on the X chromosome—but beyond that I knew nothing. When I asked Mike during dinner he said, “Well, we don’t really know,” so I gave him an extra-tiny scoop of ice cream for dessert and then turned on Grey’s Anatomy, which he hates, and hid the remote so he couldn’t change the channel.
With the help of the Internet, however, I discovered over the ensuing weeks that, though genes certainly play a part in forming future fags, the full picture might be a little more complex than that; the abstract of an analysis of the Australian twin registry by Michael Bailey, Michael Dunne, and Nicholas Martin, for example, suggested an environmental component as well. However, in order to figure out whether “environmental” meant the fetus’s environment in the womb—whether different levels of different hormones, for example, could lead to different orientations—or the environment in which the child was raised, I had to read the paper they wrote, and I couldn’t understand a goddamn word other than “and” and “the,” and I realized that though I had once been smart I was now stupid.
So I gave up and e-mailed Michael Bailey to ask him. He wrote back and said that, though he was certain the environment in question was prenatal, it was at least theoretically possible that the child’s social environment in the first year or two of life was involved. The strongest evidence against the latter, he said, comes from the thankfully rare cases in which male babies whose genitalia are either malformed at birth or damaged in accidents are treated by reassignment as females, both socially and surgically. These babies, genetically male, seem overwhelmingly to grow up to be attracted to women. “How likely is any social explanation of homosexuality,” Dr. Bailey wrote, “if you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis and rearing him as a girl?”
(He also forwarded my e-mail to a friend of his, who took a look at my website, and then Dr. Bailey forwarded me the e-mail his friend sent him back that said I was cute and funny, so I now have
a crush on both Dr. Bailey and Galen Bodenhausen. I have practiced my schoolgirl giggle in case either of them calls me.)
It’s always mystified me that the question of whether or not we’re born gay winds up at the center of most conflicts about gay rights. If we are, contend gay-rights activists, then we have no control over whom we fall in love with or lust after or blush in the presence of, and it’s unfair to punish us for something over which we have no control. If gay people turn gay, argue their opponents, then we can just as easily turn straight, and there’s no reason to indulge us just because we enjoy being libertines.
The trouble I have with these arguments—aside from their approach to homosexuality as a problem that is either somebody’s fault or not somebody’s fault—is that whether one has chosen a trait and whether one can change it are two different issues. After talking to Dr. Bailey I tried to think of other human attributes that might illustrate this point, and came up with a grand total of two, food preferences and handedness; I have to congratulate myself, because it turns out that we are born with our taste preferences and yet they can change over time—most people are born hating cilantro, for example, but many grow to enjoy it over time—and that handedness, though usually partially determined by early social environment, is subsequently immutable—the only thing tying a lefty’s dominant hand behind his back accomplishes is to traumatize him and give him a stutter. (None of the experts I talked to about these things called me cute or funny, so I don’t remember their names.)
Who’s to say, then, that if we’re born gay we can’t change, or that if we become gay after birth we can? (The question usually left unasked is: if gay people can become straight, so fucking what? Quakers can become Methodists too, but you don’t see anybody rushing to pass laws to prevent members of the insidious Society of Friends from marrying one another.)