Capitol Ideas: The Ex-Gay Movement
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell The Ex-Gay Movement In July, full-page ads were taken out in national newspapers, proclaiming that homosexuals can change. The San Francisco Chronicle, alone among...
...His new book, The Noblest Triumph, was recently published by St...
...But I believe it is what spared me from death...
...And I had to get some healing...
...He showed me first Corinthians chapter 6, verses 9-11...
...So we drove uptown to this mansion at 68th near Madison...
...If you can do this, so can I. Have you been monogamous...
...I remember pinching myself...
...I've been married for almost fifteen years...
...My brother is a construction worker today...
...My father was a tool and die maker, paid a meager salary...
...He'd come home, we'd all have dinner in the kitchen, and then he would fall asleep in the den...
...And it scared me...
...You look about the same size as me...
...So he was psychologically absent for me...
...In the recent Newsweek cover story, "Gay for Life?," Falzarano referred to himselfas "one ofthe top five ex-gays...
...When I took the subway home I felt sick to my stomach...
...The next thing you know the virgin becomes a bloodsucker herself and goes after new virgins...
...I had an acne problem, and he sent me to the best dermatologist on Park Avenue...
...Do you want me to show it to you...
...He represented the Gambinos, the big Mafia family in NewYork, the Nederlander Theater family, Studio 54...
...So I left him after two years, thinking that I would settle down with Mister Right and live happily ever after...
...Would you like to join me...
...Yes, I made decisions as an adult, but I wasn't really culpable because I didn't know the truth...
...I was always taught to hold the door for people...
...But this man had had this clandestine rendezvous with me, had remorse overwhat he had done, and wanted to help me to leave the lifestyle...
...You either leave this lifestyle now, or you will die of AIDS...
...Happy with your life...
...He was more like my older, more Italian, macho siblings and he bonded well with them...
...Eventually I had over 400 sexual partners...
...But he was too late...
...It was the kind ofthing that may happen to anyone...
...Prayer is key, especially the prayers of the parents interceding in the spirit world for the soul of the child who may be entering the homosexual lifestyle...
...The Holy Spirit was telling me this was wrong, but I refused to listen to the voice of reason...
...So I hung out with my mother more...
...My father came here from Italy in 1923...
...I went to her in pain...
...Verse ri says, "And such were some of you once, but now you are washed...
...A man was behind me, so I held the door...
...But I believe the problem of Courage is that some remain on the ex-gay plateau all their lives...
...Then one evening at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Newark she and I were sitting in the front pew, and God spoke to me, and said that I would marry Dianne...
...When I was z6, I met this man through a personal ad...
...So here was this impressionable young man, 19 years old, very naive, uneducated, coming from this working class Italian family in northern New Jersey, becoming Roy Cohn's boyfriend...
...We also let them know that it is going to be hard for them to recover, but that there is great hope for them, especially if they let others know about their struggle and get plugged into an ex-gay support group...
...20 October 1998 • The American Spectator only one half of his "double lifestyle...
...She said that if that was what I wanted, it was okay for me...
...I said of course...
...Sure," I said, thinking "this man likes me, he wants to be my friend...
...So I met her one weekend, and I wasn't overly impressed...
...This very attractive young man drove by in a car and stopped...
...They were the same size...
...We were driving out to Connecticut...
...Anthony did not return to the Catholic Church...
...by the power of the Holy Spirit...
...I'm not dressed appropriately," I said...
...They become too comfortable just being abstinent...
...that if they continue in this lifestyle, they will not see heaven...
...They are out there...
...No one had ever cared, or dared to intervene in my life...
...My father was intimidated by that and sort of pushed me back towards mom...
...He is a fraternal twin, not identical...
...Oh my goodness, did he do coke...
...Yes...
...I ran out of the theater mortified, with great guilt and shame...
...Laura, help me...
...Once you come into the truth of the word of God, however, and get into psychological healing—seeing a therapist or going to a support group—God will hold you responsible...
...I hope that is the message you bring out...
...I thought it was about what Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians believe...
...I felt embarrassed to discuss this with you because I really thought you were a satisfied homosexual...
...I was raised in New Jersey, in a blue collar family—the sixth of seven children...
...I can't believe that this is happening...
...So I went to visit them...
...Iwas the son he never had...
...My brother married a very good woman and they've had a successful marriage for sixteen years and they have three children This does raise a question about the "absent father" explanation...
...I slipped on a pair of his penny loafers...
...From 1983 on, I lost 35 of my friends to AIDS, most of them under 45...
...Suits down one side...
...It was that clear...
...Afterward, he got out of bed and said, "Anthony, I have sinned tonight...
...I was more the bookish type...
...I am going to be paying for young boys in 3o years...
...He thanked me, told me that I was very kind, asked me what I was doing...
...That sounds like fun...
...One day, when he was a sophomore, he was walking along in Greenwich Village...
...One group wanted to continue going to gay bars but to abstain...
...That's how homosexuality works...
...You wanted a monogamous relationship...
...That doesn't necessarily mean marriage with children...
...Do I want to sleep with him...
...I had to get rid of my pornography, stop masturbating, stop going to gay bars, get rid of unsupportive gay friends who did not affirm my choice, go through scrapbooks and photo albums and literally tear pictures out, ditch the disco music, because all that stuff reminded me of my former lifestyle...
...The Catholic ex-gay organization, Courage, emphasizes abstinence, the Protestant Exodus International emphasizes sexual reorientation...
...He was not the only way to God...
...Anthony was still a practicing homosexual during his engagement...
...We have had orgies at our home...
...Many of my gay friends got into wild scenes because they were drunk...
...Some say that the Catholic approach does not set people up for disappointment, if they find that they cannot change...
...he said...
...Well, I have a Bible," he said...
...I think they took advantage of him, as an immigrant...
...And I went back to look for it...
...Could he come along with me...
...It gave you a false pride...
...I was going to a department store in downtown Newark in 1972, two weeks before my 16th birthday...
...No one had ever said that to me before...
...Don't worry about it...
...I've now gone on to marriage...
...I was in Cohn's dining room the morning that Aristotle Onassis called him to let him know that he was going to divorce Jackie Kennedy...
...to elementary school, I didn't know how to play baseball, football, or how to do any of these things...
...That's what most homosexuals really want, a monogamous relationship...
...I thought we were walking into the lobby of a building, but it was the house of Roy Cohn, the lawyer who represented Joe McCarthy in the Communist trials of the 1950's...
...He bought me something...
...The San Francisco Examiner called the ads "anti-gay...
...And I did all of this sober...
...The Protestant minister who married them, he found out years later, was also a practicing homosexual...
...They were painfully honest with me...
...I recently interviewed him in Washington...
...I was in shock that he carried a Bible to this sexual encounter...
...He was getting sodomized five times a week by all these guys—paid prostitutes...
...My father would accompany me to [Catholic] church until I was about nine years old, then he stopped going...
...She replied that a voice had already told her in her head that we would be married...
...forty pairs of shoes...
...Today, he is married with two children...
...So brilliant...
...But they are few and far between...
...That evening he asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner...
...It was taught by a Buddhist, and he challenged our Christianity...
...He is heterosexual...
...In the last nine years we have helped probably 500 people who have come through the doors of P-FOX and Transformation Ministries here in Washington...
...that it is dangerous and that there is nothing gay in it...
...I'm going to a dinner party on the upper East Side...
...So I became jaded...
...But I could not deal with the conflict...
...People talked about his questionable sexuality, but no one dared confront him...
...I had met the "sloppy agape" therapists, like the Masters in Social Work I saw after I had 12 sexual encounters in one night in a New York bathhouse...
...That's number one...
...Then he looked at me and said: "And God doesn't want you to be gay either...
...We would go to the finest restaurants...
...I'd really like to get together with you," he said...
...And so on...
...When he found out that Roy Cohn was dying, he "had a desire to try to administer Christ to him on his deathbed...
...The following was more serious...
...He and Skeet had been together 26 years...
...So we went up into the balcony of this big old grand Loew's movie theater, and that's where...I had no idea what oral sex was but he began to perform it on me...
...He let me know that God loved me, but that I had to stop my behavior...
...But he did, he had a Bible in his pocket...
...With my older siblings, when he was younger, my father was able to be there for them...
...But in the 196o's no-one in church was talking about sex, still less about homosexuality...
...Oh, he was such a sad man...
...She was working at Citibank in New York...
...In college, meanwhile, I took a course in Comparative Religion...
...Tell me about your religious background...
...I took half a tablet of acid at a gay discotheque on Fire Island once, and I went into the bar that night with my low self-esteem masked...
...No, because I now have my own masculinity intact and I don't want to go looking for another man to get a jolt of masculinity from him...
...Russell was his name...
...The Lord's Prayer says clearly: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive...
...He was more attracted to nonhierarchical, Bible-based, evangelical forms of Christianity...
...Russell introduced me to Roy...
...The last two were twins...
...0* The American Spectator • October 1998...
...But he was taking me to Long Island Sound for a surprise birthday party on a yacht he had rented for the night...
...In the early days I would go to confession and confess my homosexuality...
...The third, which became the dominant group, said that God is calling us toward healing...
...Anthony says that as many as 70 percent of homosexuals are molested as children...
...He gave me money, whatever I needed...
...Go back to the beginning...
...What about your twin brother...
...What a dichotomy...
...Once, his chauffeur put my beat-up car in the garage, and put me in the Bentley...
...A final word...
...So I walk out in his clothes, we go out the front door of this magnificent Beaux Arts house, and this Rolls Royce drives up...
...We would go to the homosexual resorts in southern New Jersey...
...Some day I'll get into the details of the things that I witnessed in the gay world...
...Scripture is clear that the highest way to serve God is to remain single...
...We have had threesomes...
...It was so incredible that I knew I would soon be addicted...
...At Studio 54, the crowds would part when Roy's Bentley or Rolls would drive up...
...I was so involved with what I was doing that I allowed it to happen...
...He had a house in Palm Beach and a house in Greenwich, Connecticut...
...The darkness of the gay lifestyle is not discussed: the bathhouse scene, the drugs and alcohol, the betrayals, the rejections, the emotional dependencies, the financial using, with people spending way beyond their financial means to continue this bubble of nirvana...
...Most of the time he was extremely kind...
...In God's eyes abstinence is acceptable...
...Gosh, I'd really like to see that," I said...
...It polished me socially...
...His intentions were good...
...So your father was psychologically present to him...
...But what is so amazing is that a month later I was back, because he told me of a bar where homosexuals went...
...Shortly thereafter I stopped going to church...
...Martin's Press...
...My mother would not go...
...I believe God wants them to go further...
...So I looked at Roy Cohn and his rich cronies, these famous, closeted gay people, and I would say, this is going to be me...
...Regeneration was my ministry of choice, in suburban Maryland...
...Dianne was not a homosexual, but she was hanging out at gay bars, and she knew my former boyfriend...
...Oh my goodness, I thought, they're going to kill me...
...In the early days of Exodus there was a big fight within the ranks...
...He enrolled at Kean College, N. J. He was still living with his parents, who knew Homosexuals can change, Anthony Falzarano says...
...Look," I said...
...One of my dear friends was an older gentleman named Lou...
...Yes...
...But of course the feeling took over quickly...
...Was he still tempted by men...
...I had an addiction to pornography, an addiction to masturbation, all the secondary addictions related to a homosexual disorientation...
...My father was the working-class, macho, Italian-type man and my brother wound up being very similar to him and they bonded well...
...and the total orientation toward youth, physicality and sex...
...They had more of a rough and tumble relationship—and he was the apple of my father's eye...
...Then off they would go in the morning...
...Third, I had to associate with an ex-gay ministry...
...And he showed me other scriptures...
...The San Francisco Chronicle, alone among major dailies, refused to run an advertisement...
...I knew the teachings of the Church, that it was wrong...
...My former boyfriend introduced us...
...We have seen people go on to be Catholic priests and ministers...
...How did you meet your wife...
...We have seduced plumbers, electricians that have come to our house...
...My mother and father were faithful to each other, I'm convinced of that...
...But an older brother in the family was also homosexual...
...I was totally naive to what he was intending to do...
...No, where does it say that...
...Some had been molested by their music teacher, their pastor, their priest...
...But I never saw him drunk...
...I walked into this dressing room that was almost as big as this room...
...I remember afterwards he said: "Do you want some candy...
...Eventually I was rejected by my same-sex peer group...
...Later, I kept hearing this voice...
...like eating pasta every night...
...probably ioo shirts...
...So I did it only once...
...If they have a family member they'd like to minister to, they should call P-FOX, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays...
...It was a subtle falling away...
...Some children are "molested with candy or gifts," he says...
...But she was a kind soul and we became friends...
...Then go into your early life, find out how you were psychologically wounded by the things that you had no control over: the sexual molestation, the absent father, the over-dominant mother...
...Do you know that the Bible says if you continue in homosexuality you will not go to heaven...
...He defines molestation broadly, however, to include "inappropriate touching...
...In the darkened theater he asked: "Would you like to sit up in the balcony...
...I didn't realize it was a course in world religions...
...Then we passed by a theater where The Yellow Submarine was playing...
...If someone who wants to escape the homosexual lifestyle reads this, what would you say...
...I can notice a very attractive man...
...One of the leaders ofthe ex-gay movement is Anthony Falzarano, .42, who is executive director of Transformation Ministries, a branch of Exodus International, the non-denominational Christian fellowship dedicated to helping homosexuals change...
...He scared me a bit, with his Mafia connections...
...He was doing coke...
...One guy set him up as a male prostitute, $50 a trick...
...God can heal the homosexual...
...And all the people on this yacht knew my name...
...I had to read the ex-gay books—Jeff Konrad's You Don't Have to Be Gay was a turning point in my life...
...You know, "Did Jesus really rise from the dead...
...First, you have to clean up the physical aspects of sin in your life...
...Which of course led me deeper into the homosexual lifestyle...
...another urged avoidance of the gay scene totally...
...I was petrified, at first...
...He destroyed our faith...
...No, because basically, the way it works—in fact when I disclosed my homosexuality with my brother, we had a frank discussion about it—he bonded quite well with my father and I did not...
...Tell me something about Transformation Ministries...
...He said, "Anthony, I have been patient with you long enough...
...At that point I was addicted to men...
...Not only have I sinned, but I have caused you to sin...
...I am going to go down and get some snacks...
...I was on my way to a pornographic bookstore one day in 1982, and God spoke to me...
...The devil wanted me so badly that he offered me an incredible benefits package...
...He would get them from Studio 54 or fly them in from all over the country for a night of sex...
...They looked at each other, and smiled...
...How about Roy Cohn...
...What does that mean, get some healing...
...A simple statement from the Bible is "the truth shall set you free...
...An early homosexual experience with a family member turned out to be "really just groping, acting out...
...I have to be absolutely truthful...
...He was totally out of control toward the end...
...So there were ex-gays in the early church...
...It was like the male version of Cinderella, because everything that I put on fit me...
...So I sent her a note: "This is really funny, but I think we're going to be married...
...But I'm going to have to go home to New Jersey to get some suitable clothing...
...I can't say it was all terrible...
...I was never super-effeminate, but I picked up some feminine mannerisms...
...There are at least eight in the Bible that condemn homosexual behavior...
...Later he died of AIDS...
...With a sober mind, it was quite disconcerting...
...No," they said, "we haven't...
...It was like the vampire biting the virgin...
...The Christian Church must realize that this problem is not just confined to the non-believing community...
...Secondly I had to get involved with a good church where I could become a student of the Bible...
...How can he eat after doing such a thing...
...Go into that dressing room over there;' he said...
...See if there's anything that fits you...
...They should call Exodus International...
...We let them know that God loves them, that God doesn't want them to be homosexual...
...But after you have been to "21" ten times, Southampton and East Hampton and fancy parties on Fire Island, it becomes old hat...
...With seven children, she The American Spectator • October 1 9 9 8 21 would prepare the Sunday meal while we were at church...
...You guys have to give it to me straight...
...The way they worked their scam was that this attractive man and I went into a bedroom to have sex, and in the midst of it all Roy Cohn jumps into the middle of this thing...
...We didn't swear, we went to bed at eight o'clock at night...
...He attends a Presbyterian service on Sunday and a charismatic Catholic Bible group on Wednesday...
...How did you react...
...They had respect for God and never talked against God, but they weren't on-fire Christians...
...What I am saying is that there is a big difference between being healed, and not dealing with your issues, pushing them below the surface...
...The New York gay scene, especially pre-AIDS, would eat you up and spit you out...
...When I went TOM BETHELL is TAS's Washington correspondent...
...The "chicken hawks" in the bar told him about Greenwich Village, and he checked out the Village Voice ads...
...He told me he was a struggling homosexual, that he didn't want to be that way...
...And I said "to be honest with you, I am not...
...He was a sexaholic...
...I began to realize that what had happened to me had happened against my will, in the naiveté of my childhood...
...Ha ha ha...
...Any particular religious experiences that you recall...
...When we forgive 22 October 1998 • The American Spectator our trespassers, God will release us from our bondages...
...I began to experience healing...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
