Hello, dear readers. If you are reading this post when I first scheduled it to appear, I just finished taking part in a Clubhouse room where we discussed the documentary “Pray Away,” which was directed and produced by Kristine Stolakis. I watched the documentary for the first time earlier this year and then re-watched it to take notes and prepare for the Clubhouse room.

As I was preparing for the Clubhouse room, I realized that there was no way that I could possibly talk about everything I wanted to. The room was scheduled to last for only one hour and other people needed a chance to talk. And this room was sponsored by a club where a lot of people want and need to talk. So I had to pick out a few important points to make and make space for the other participants.

So I decided to dust things off here at the ol’ blog and write this post. After all, I can take all the time I need to share all of my thoughts. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. (And if anyone from Clubhouse followed me over here to hear the rest of my thoughts, hi!)

Note from editing: I still didn’t get everything in. Some things had to go for the sake of structure. I’m pleased with the final outcome though.

Let me go into my own ex-gay background.

I never attended an Exodus conference. I never saw a therapist while trying to change my sexual orientation. Instead, I was the kind of ex-gay that read a book (this one, if you really want to know), confessed my “struggles” to my Christian friends and church family, and prayed like hell at home asking God to please make me attracted to women rather than other guys.

You see, there are all kinds of ex-gays. This is something that did not come across at all in the documentary. In fact, there was a time when I wasn’t sure I actually qualified as an ex-gay survivor. I expressed this to Peterson Toscano back when he and Christine Bakke-O’Neil (just Bakke back then) first founded the now inactive Beyond Ex-Gay (bXg). He assured me that I definitely qualified as an ex-gay survivor. In fact the bXg FAQ page has a few questions that cover the broad range of “ex-gay experiences.”

I think it’s also important to note that even those of us who did not attend formal ministries or events like Exodus International and its conferences were influenced by them. These ministries and events put out reading materials (a.k.a. propaganda) that influenced the general conservative Christian view of LGBTQIA+ people. So despite my self-driven attempts to pray away the gay, Exodus and the other organizations still had an impact on me.

Some things in the documentary were relatable.

I think the most powerful part of the documentary was the part that I related to most. That’s the part where John Paulk talked about feeling alone even though he was surrounded by his wife (at the time) and kids. Just before my fifteenth coming out anniversary, I offered the following reflection:

The thing is, dealing with one’s feelings is ultimately something one has to do alone. No one can feel those feelings for you. No one can take them away from you. No one can do anything other than support you through it all, and no one can give that support 24/7. I found that late at night, laying in my bed, I was left all alone to either face my desire for love and intimacy with another man alone or repress it alone. It was my burden to carry, and the more I fought it, the heavier that burden got.

— Jarred. “The Path Left Behind.” This blog.

Paulk went on to talk about the fact that it was during this time of loneliness that he finally realized he had to figure out who he really was or it was going to destroy him. I had a similar experience in my own coming out process, which I wrote about elsewhere.

Many parts of Julie Rodgers’s story were moving.

I had never heard of Julie before this documentary. That’s probably a huge reason why her story was one of the stories in the documentary that touched me most. When she read a section she had written about how her struggles reconciling her faith with her sexuality led her to injure herself, it moved me deeply. it (along with the part of John’s story that I discussed above) is one of the few parts of the documentary that I felt actually gave a glimpse into the kind of pain and suffering that the ex-gay movement has caused. (I’ll come back to this statement later.)

I wish the documentary would have talked more about the politicization of the ex-gay movement.

The documentary talked about how Exodus got involved in advocating for the passage of Proposition 8. Yvette Cantu Schneider talked about going to work for the Family Research Counsel. So the documentary covered that the ex-gay movement got in bed with the opponents of LGBTQIA+ rights. But the way it was presented made it feel like this was a “later development.” And perhaps as an explicit decision, it was. But the idea of political neutrality is often a fiction, and that certainly applies to the ex-gay movement. The ex-gay movement and its purveyors were useful tools to the opponents of LGBTQIA+ rights from the beginning. This is evidenced by the fact that Anita Bryant tried to form a coalition with Exodus back in the eighties. Exodus declined the invitation (for which I will give them some credit).

Yet, anyone familiar with the anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric will remember well the common defense: “Gay people don’t need rights. They can simply change.” Whether knowingly or not, the ex-gay leaders at the very least allowed themselves to be weaponized against the rest of us. Silence is complicity.

I wish the documentary had talked more about the ties between the ex-gay movement and the Pentecostal movement.

You get a glimpse of how Pentecostalism is heavily tied to the ex-gay movement in the scene from the documentary when everyone is laying hands on someone to pray for them. It was a scene from Jeremy McCall’s story. It didn’t come up in the documentary, but during an interview shortly before Exodus closed its doors, Alan Chambers talked about how his Pentecostalism influenced his claims to have changed his orientation. According to Alan, claiming to have already changed was supposed to be a statement of faith in the hopes that God would eventually make it a true statement. This is actually a common practice in Pentecostal practice and more specifically a common practice in the Prosperity Gospel movement, often referred to by the phrase “name it and claim it.” At the time of the interview, Alan expressed remorse that people mistook this practice for a factual claim representing the present reality.

It’s interesting to me that other former Exodus leaders talked about their claims to have changed differently in the documentary. Michael Bussee said he had been “pretending.” John Paulk outright said that he had been lying. I’m curious if that’s how both men would have interpreted their actions at the time they were still involved in Exodus or if it’s a description of their behavior after the fact. If the latter, I wonder if they, like Alan, approached their statements in a “say it as if it’s true so that it will become true” manner at the time they were still a part of Exodus.

I wish the documentary had talked about the shift in promised results by Exodus.

Everyone involved in the documentary was very honest in admitting that Exodus originally promised a change in sexual orientation. John Paulk said he joined with the expectation of getting married and becoming a father, thereby fulfilling his “proper role as a Christian man.” One of the earlier promotions for Exodus International — shown early in the documentary — practically equated turning straight with “being saved.” Paulk and Michael Bussee both admitted to presenting themselves as formerly gay men who had experienced a change in orientation in the past.

What the documentary did not cover was the eventual shift from “change is possible” to “the goal is holiness, not heterosexuality.” Exodus spokespeople started admitting that a change in sexual attraction may not actually be possible — at least not for everyone — and started promoting lifelong celibacy as an acceptable alternative instead. I suspect a lot of this had to do with the work of Justin Lee, who was critical of the ex-gay industry and formed the Gay Christian Network (which has since been renamed the Queer Christian Fellowship and continues on without Justin’s involvement), where the Side A/Side B terminology was first coined. (In that paradigm, I have seen people who promote actual change in sexual orientation referred to as “Side X” and deemed a completely different thing in its own right.)

I feel this change from promising “change” to offering “God-pleasing holiness” through celibacy is important. I feel it was one of the first signs that Exodus was failing.

I wish the documentary would have talked more about the tailoring of the ex-gay narratives.

In the documentary, Julie Rodgers talks about how Ricky Chalette pushed her to include a personal experience of sexual assault into her testimony — a terrible act on Chelette’s part. When she initially refused, she noted that he expressed disappointment because he felt the story would add so much power to her testimony.

One of the things I talked about when reviewing Randy Thomas’s own apology at the time Exodus closed its doors was how he noted that Exodus regularly encouraged ex-gay speakers to “tailor their testimony to fit a certain narrative” at the time he joined. Randy did not go into detail, but I have a bit of a hypothesis about what he’s talking about, and I feel Julie’s story about Ricky pushing her to include her assault in her testimony tends to back it up.

One of the things that I and others have long noted about many ex-gay testimonies is how they all talk about addictive and self-destructive behavior. They weren’t just gay. They were drinking way too much. They were abusing other drugs. They were engaging in risky sexual behaviors and/or “being promiscuous.” You can even see this in Jeremy McCall’s testimony in the documentary. It seems to me that this is probably a direct result of the “tailoring process.”

Now, I’m not saying anyone made up a drug addiction or drinking problem. (Though I’ll note that conservative Christians are notorious for overstating problems, to the point of sometimes painting having a beer or two with dinner as “a drinking problem.”) But I do think that there was a concerted effort to paint these problems as both inherent to the “gay lifestyle” (as opposed to a coping mechanism for dealing with the stigmatization and oppression of LGBTQIA+ people) and universal to all LGBTQIA+ people. And again, this is something that the opponents of LGBTQIA+ rights reveled in.

I wish the documentary had interviewed some ex-gay survivors who were never professionally ex-gay.

Hopefully up to this point, this analysis has been mostly positive and constructive. Overall, I think this is a great documentary, even if I think it could have been better. But now I have to talk about the one thing that drives me to absolute distraction.

In some ways, this documentary feels more like a part of the participants’ redemption story rather than an incisive analysis or exposé of the ex-gay movement. And that’s largely a result of who was interviewed. Every single person interviewed for this documentary is a former — or in one case, current — leader in the ex-gay movement. I call them “professional ex-gays.”

Now my feelings about each of them as individuals varies widely, based on when they left the ex-gay ministry, the circumstances surrounding their exodus (from Exodus! Ha!), and what they’ve done since then. Michael Bussee left Exodus back in 1979, has lived as an openly gay man with his partner ever since, and has done much to elevate the voices of former ex-gays. Compare this to Alan Chambers, who stuck it out until Exodus closed its doors, but has agreed to talk about his marriage to Leslie — a marriage he weaponized or at least allowed others to weaponize against the rest of us for years — as a difficult, but acceptable “alternative” for LGBTQIA+ Christians as recently as a couple years ago. (Fortunately, the expressions of outrage over the invitation caused QCF to quietly withdraw it, but it was done very quietly.)

I would have liked to see at least one person who had not been platformed by Exodus or some other organization — Jeremy McCall has his own ministry and accepts speaking engagements which I suspect he gets paid for, but have no proof — at any point. Someone who paid to attend conferences where they were told “pray harder” and were fed pseudoscience without a single bit of compensation. I mean, surely Michael Bussee could have arranged a few introductions between Kristina Stolakis and such people.

This meant that even when the documentary talked about the meeting Michael did set up between ex-gay survivors and Exodus leadership around the time of its closing, that narrative was filtered through those leaders. What we saw was not so much the stories of those survivors, but the reactions of the leaders to those stories. To me, that was a huge injustice on the part of this documentary. It may be an unforgivable injustice.

Let’s tl;dr this thing.

As I said earlier. I think it was a good documentary overall and worth watching. i especially think it’s worth watching if you’ve never had to struggle with your sexuality or never experienced what conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries are like. However, I would just suggest that you also seek out other sources of information and stories about the movement. Some such stories are still visible on the bXg site. I’d also recommend checking out sites like Ex-Gay Watch and the now inactive Box Turtle Bulletin which have tracked and reported on the activities of ex-gay ministries and the greater anti-LGBTQIA+ movement for years. Because if you only watch this documentary, you’re not getting the full story.

Getting the full story is important to me. The ex-gay industry did not die off when Exodus closed its doors like many people had hoped it would. If anything, It’s had a distressing resurgence in recent years. Many within the current industry are even back to promising “change” rather than offering lifelong celibacy as LGBTQIA+ people’s best hope. We need to remember — and remind people — that we have already been down this road and the costs that were extracted while traveling it. We must learn from history so we can stop repeating it.