Since the 1970s, there have been Christian groups,
often called “ex-gay ministries,” trying to help gay people become
straight, through prayer, exorcisms, faith healings, conversion therapy, or other means.
But as you already know if you’ve read my book Torn, ex-gay programs just didn’t work.
Evidence has overwhelmingly shown that you can’t “pray away the gay.” And many, many
public leaders of the movement have now admitted that the whole thing was a well-intentioned fraud.
But suppose you’re talking to a friend who claims that the ex-gay thing wasn’t
a fraud. They insist that any gay person could become straight if they wanted to.
And they say they can prove this, because they know a story of someone who’s done it.
Okay first of all, does it even matter if someone out there says God made them straight?
Well, in some ways, it really doesn’t. If someone I’ve never met says they prayed for
God to turn their dog into a cat and that the next morning they woke up and their dog was a cat,
I would say, “That doesn’t sound right to me; I don’t think that’s something God is in the
habit of doing,” but it doesn’t really affect me one way or the other. It’s their dog. Or cat.
The difference here, of course, is that I don’t know anyone who thinks having a dog is a sin,
but there are a lot of Christians who believe that being gay is a sin. So when they hear a
story of someone who supposedly became straight through prayer or therapy, they assume that means
any gay person could become straight if they chose to. And then when their child or friend
or member of their congregation says, “I’ve been trying, I’ve been praying, I have faith, I’ve done
everything I’m supposed to do, but my attractions aren’t changing,” they don’t believe them.
They just keep telling them to try harder, that they must not have enough faith.
They pressure them into the same ex-gay programs that we’ve known for years don’t work—programs
that have destroyed lives and caused terrible psychological and spiritual damage.
So when you hear someone cite one of these stories as proof that anyone can become straight,
it’s important to challenge that assumption if you can.
And one way to do that is simple: Just ask to define some terms.
There’s an old urban legend about a meat supplier with the brand name
“100% Beef.” According to legend, since “100% Beef” was the name of the brand,
restaurants could buy cheap meat from them and then advertise burgers made
with “100% Beef” even though they actually contained something else.
It’s just an urban legend. But suppose that was real, and your favorite restaurant was
advertising “100% Beef” burgers. You would ask to define that term, right?
“Wait, when you say ‘100% Beef,’ do you mean
the brand name or do you mean it’s made entirely from cows?”
If someone uses a term to mean something different from what it usually means,
they might be technically telling the truth, but they’re still deceiving people.
And that’s how it is with these supposed “ex-gay” success stories and the term “gay.”
When most of us say “gay” or “straight,” we’re referring to a person’s attractions. That’s what
these words usually mean. So if a man says, “I used to be gay but now I’m straight,” we assume
he means, “I used to be attracted to men, but now I’m not anymore; now I’m attracted to women.”
If that happened, that would be an orientation change.
But notice the difference between that and a man with a story like this:
“I used to be gay. Growing up, I was always attracted to men instead of
women. But today I know my identity is in Christ, so I don’t identify myself as gay.”
A lot of people hear that and go, “He found his identity in Christ, and now he’s not gay anymore.”
But that’s not what he said. He didn’t say, “I’m not attracted to men anymore.” He said, “I stopped
identifying myself as gay.” If you could ask him directly, you’d find he’s still attracted to men.
He didn’t go from this to this. He went from this to…still this but using different terminology.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with someone deciding what labels they want to use for themselves...
…unless they do it in a way—like with the label “100% Beef”—that causes confusion
and leads people to believe something that isn’t true. And that’s the pattern
you’ll see over and over again with these “ex-gay” stories. They’ll claim to not be
“gay” anymore, but they don’t mean their orientation changed. Instead, they’ve
redefined the word “gay” to mean something different from what most people mean.
For example, you might hear a woman give a testimony like this:
“I used to be gay. I was in a relationship with a woman and I marched in pride parades,
but now I’m out of that lifestyle and in a relationship with a man.”
Did you catch it? In this case, she’s redefined “gay” to refer to her past behavior—pride parades
and a relationship with a woman—instead of her orientation, which she didn’t mention at all.
And that word “lifestyle” should be a big red flag to you.
It’s a subtle misdirection, a way to suggest that being gay isn’t really an orientation;
it’s a way of living. If I can make you believe that all gay people live the same
“lifestyle,” then if I stop living that lifestyle, I must not be gay anymore! Right?
But of course that’s not how it works. I know lots of gay people
who have never been to a pride parade and never had a same-sex relationship.
There are plenty of gay people who have never had sex, gay people who
commit themselves to lifelong celibacy, and lots and lots of gay people, unfortunately,
who married somebody of the opposite sex because they wanted so desperately to be straight.
But being heterosexually married didn’t make them straight. It just made them gay people
in straight marriages. Because orientation isn’t defined by your behavior or your politics or your
“lifestyle” or your relationship status. It’s defined by who you’re attracted to.
So when someone cites a story like this as proof that gay people can become straight,
instead of arguing with them, I just gently ask to define our terms.
“When you say ‘gay’ and ‘straight,’ what do you mean by those words? Because this is what
I mean. Are you saying they went from this to this, or are you talking about something else?”
The reality is, a lot of people have just never thought about it that carefully. They have this
vague sense of “homosexuality” that they lump everything into, and they’ve never thought
to distinguish between someone choosing to change their behavior or language, which of course is
possible for anybody, and someone choosing to change their orientation, which isn’t.
In almost every case, simply defining your terms will make it clear that this person
isn’t really claiming to have changed their orientation.
But suppose you do find a story of someone who actually claims
they went from gay to straight the way most people would use those terms.
First of all, that kind of story is actually super super rare. When you read the supposed
success stories of the movement, almost nobody even claims that that is what happened. Sometimes
you’ll hear people say they’re “in progress” toward becoming straight, but they never
actually get there. And when you follow up with those folks years later, it turns out that whatever
shift they’d thought they were feeling was a bit of placebo effect and wishful thinking.
But let’s say somebody does make that claim: “It’s not just my behavior or identity that changed;
my actual orientation went from gay to straight.”
Well, let me tell you a story.
I came out in the late 90s. The ex-gay movement was at its peak,
and a bunch of people were claiming to be “no longer gay.” Like many Christians,
I thought that meant they’d become straight, and I wanted that too.
I’d spent years trying to become straight,
but with all my effort and faith, it hadn’t worked, and eventually I started to notice
that none of the success stories out there actually dealt with orientation
change. They were all just behavior change, and I didn’t have any gay behavior to change.
After a lot of prayer and reflection, I started wondering if God might have plans for me that
didn’t involve making me straight. But my Christian friends refused to accept
this. They insisted that anyone with faith could become straight if they wanted to be.
And as proof, they kept pointing to the same story. Because there was one famous
story of a guy who said he really did go from this to this. His name was John Paulk.
John was a Christian celebrity. His story was in
magazines and on talk shows, you heard about it in church and on Christian radio,
he wrote a book about how he became straight, and he was cited over and over by influential pastors
as proof that anyone could become straight if they just believed.
He was the exception to the rule. The one guy who actually changed his orientation.
Except that he wasn’t. It wasn’t until many years later that John
admitted that he didn’t become straight. He was still gay. He had changed how he identified,
he had changed his behavior, he had married a woman, and he had told everyone he was straight,
because it’s what he wanted to believe. And he got famous for it. But it wasn’t true.
And now we know that it wasn’t true, because he's admitted it. But here's the problem.
Even if I could go back in time with that knowledge, I couldn’t prove it to anyone at the time.
At the time, he said he was straight and people believed him.
If I had accused him of lying, I would've just looked like a jerk.
And over the years, a handful of other prominent folks have followed that same pattern—claiming
to become straight, getting famous for it, and then having to admit it wasn’t true.
And maybe you’ll encounter the most recent iteration of this story.
But even if you’re pretty sure the person making this claim isn’t telling the whole truth,
I don’t think it’s helpful to accuse them of lying. It just makes you look bad.
Instead, I think the best response is to point out something that is
too often overlooked: People are different.
If you and I both get headaches, and I try an experimental new headache drug
and it works wonders for me, but you try it, and it does nothing for you,
I’m not going to keep insisting that it MUST work for you since it worked for me, and you
just need to keep taking it, no matter what the side effects are, because it worked for me!
No, we’re different people, and just because I had a particular
experience doesn’t mean your experience will be the same.
And that’s even assuming it did work for me and isn’t just the placebo effect or something else.
And if my experience is in the minority, that still leaves the majority needing another option.
As long as there are Christians who don’t want to be gay, there’s probably
always going to be someone out there claiming God made them straight. And frankly, there are a lot
of incentives to be dishonest about it. You can get attention, adoration, money, even an entire
career out of one little white lie. Honestly, I’m surprised there aren’t more people claiming it.
But there aren’t. Even if everyone out there who ever claims to have become straight is
telling the truth, it would still be such a rare occurrence that it would be a tiny
fraction of a percent of all the people who have tried.
Because despite what some people seem to think, there aren’t hundreds of
thousands of orientation change success stories. There aren’t even hundreds.
Out of the millions of gay people worldwide who grew up not wanting to be gay,
there are, at most, a few people who even claim publicly to have become straight.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone’s ever gone from gay to straight. But even if someone has,
it’s abundantly clear that it doesn’t work for everyone. So what about all those other people?
That’s the question we should be asking.
So when I encounter stories using deceptive language,
I’ll take the time to define our terms, to clear up any confusion. And after we do that,
if someone out there still wants to claim God actually changed their orientation, fine. I’m not
going to waste my time trying to disprove their claim, because there’s no way I could anyway.
But even if that headache drug worked for me, you still need another option,
because you’ve got to move forward with your life, too. And even if God turned somebody’s dog
out there into a cat, that sure wasn’t my experience, so I’ve still got to go buy dog food.
No matter what some speaker or author says,
there are gay folks in your church or family who are going to wake up still gay tomorrow,
whether they’re happy about that or not. And they could use your love and support as they
determine how to live the best way they can with the only life they’ve got—as a gay person.
Because at the end of the day, stories like John Paulk’s are one in a million.
And it turns out even John Paulk is still gay.
P.S. I didn’t discuss bisexuality, so check the description for more on that. And if you
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