FREE ALL GAYS
Throughout the 1970s, Frank had searched eagerly for other people who were involved in ex-gay ministry, even though he believed that LIA was unique. Frank had been ministering at Love in Action for three years when he received a phone call in 1975 from a distraught woman named Barbara Johnson, whose son had recently revealed that he was gay and fled her house. Johnson contacted Frank after listening to The Third Sex? cassette that summer at her church. She explained that she had sought help from Melodyland Hotline, a program of Melodyland Christian Center, a large evangelical church based in Anaheim, California. The hotline was designed to deal with homosexuality, but the counselors there did not work with grieving parents of gay children like Barbara, and she was begging Frank for help. Astounded and thrilled that there were other ex-gay counselors in California, Frank flew to Anaheim the next morning to meet at Melodyland with EXIT (Ex-Gay Intervention Team), a group directed by two men in their early twenties, Michael Bussee and Jim Kaspar. Their meeting became the basis for Exodus, a national organization to address how men and women could become heterosexuals after living as gay men and lesbians.
Melodyland emerged out of the Pentecostal movement, which emphasized speaking in tongues and healing, but the church was less concerned with doctrine or formality than with validating personal experiences and emotionalism. Formed by Ralph Wilkerson, Melodyland became the center of the concept of charismatic renewal during the 1970s.14 Wilkerson was a former Assemblies of God preacher who had departed to found an independent congregation that would be receptive to a more charismatic form of worship. An independent and interdenominational Christian Center, Melodyland outgrew its suburban church in Orange County and bought the Melodyland Theater from Disney in 1969, from which it derived its name. Spurred on by the Jesus movement, Melodyland initiated a telephone hotline to counsel drug addicts and “alienated youth” that eventually grew into EXIT.
Michael Bussee and Jim Kaspar, the heads of EXIT, had become fervent Christians in 1971 after feeling troubled by their own homosexual feelings. They started working for the center's hotline service because they sensed the current volunteers were not properly trained or knowledgeable enough to handle homosexual issues. According to Bussee, “I grew worried when I heard operators of the center's hotline tell gay and lesbian callers that they were possessed by demons. I told them [the church members] I was a Christian homosexual, and they replied that ‘there's no such thing. If you trust God, all your homosexual desires will be replaced by heterosexual ones.’”15 Both men began counseling people who called the center with concerns about their homosexuality, claiming they received up to two hundred and fifty calls and letters per month.16 Through their hotline, they located twelve other ministries counseling homosexuals in the following year. With a staff of eight, an office, and the support of the church, Kaspar and Bussee also participated in speaking engagements and worked on publications that would frame the problem of homosexuality within a psychological or psychoanalytic framework, an approach which differed from Frank's spiritual methods. Frank recollects that his work was “all spiritual because I didn't have any background in psychology so we were miles apart.” When he arrived in Anaheim, Frank was impressed by EXIT's efficiency and organization. The ministry had color-coded handouts on every aspect of homosexuality, and Frank immediately borrowed these materials, which he used exclusively for the next five years.
Frank, Barbara Johnson, Michael Bussee, and Jim Kaspar decided to organize a weekend seminar for anyone involved in “helping homosexuals find freedom,” which became the first annual ex-gay conference. LIA sent out requests for donations in its newsletter, and eventually it gathered the funds to hold a conference over the weekend of September 10–12, 1976, at Melodyland. In addition to the LIA and EXIT staff, the organizers flew in Dr. Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of Cults, and Greg Reid, who was leading an ex-gay ministry called EAGLE (Ex-Active-Gay-Liberated-Eternally). It was at this first conference that the organizers, emboldened by the presence of sixty other men and five women, officially founded Exodus International. Roberta Laurila, a participant and former lesbian, coined the name Exodus because “homosexuals finding freedom reminds me of the children of Israel leaving the bondage of Egypt and moving towards the Promised Land.”17(The original name, Free All Gays, was quickly scrapped after the organizers realized the potential contradictions of its acronym.) The delegates adopted a statement of intent, which remained in place until 2001, when a new president took over Exodus: “EXODUS is an international Christian effort to reach homosexuals and lesbians, EXODUS upholds God's standard of righteousness and holiness, which declares that homosexuality is sin and affirms HIS love and redemptive power to recreate the individual. It is the goal of EXODUS International to communicate this message to the Church, to the gay community, and to society.”18 Frank recalls having a sense that the movement would eventually become something much grander. “That Sunday we knew that it was bigger than we had planned. We all felt that God was laying the foundation for something far bigger than we expected. You might say we felt a sense of destiny.” The delegates elected Bussee and Kaspar the first presidents of the organization, and the participants agreed to meet again the following year. “We were high on God,” Frank remembers. “We truly believed that God could do anything. He could change homosexuals to heterosexuals.” Despite the heady atmosphere of the conference, Exodus operated on a principle of blind faith in the efficacy of being born again as Christians to heal homosexuality. They had no structure for determining what constituted a ministry and no clear explanation of what change entailed. Frank refers to their situation at the time as the “stray condition.” “We had left the gay lifestyle, we had hope for full change to heterosexuality, but at that point, we were neither gay nor straight. We were merely hopeful.”
By the next conference in 1977, at a church called Shiloh Temple in Oakland, California, there were pastors in attendance, but there were also gay protesters. One newspaper reported, “The tone of the conference was paranoia, the delegates did not want to be photographed and acted for the most part, like a bunch of closet cases. Many of the people present were pathetic messes.”19 Gay activists picketed Frank's weekly drop-in group for months afterward. The lack of a clear idea about the meaning of change became a liability during the third Exodus conference, held in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1978. One guest speaker contradicted the Exodus founding statement, telling the attendees that change was not possible for most gay people, but God gave people the power to remain celibate. He informed participants that there wasn't a next level of change and that they should make the best of their situation. To Frank and other leaders' dismay, the beleaguered men and women at the conference found this message depressingly accurate. Frank recalls that “they were on the ex-gay plateau,” a state of not being homosexually identified but not feeling heterosexual either. They did not accept that celibate homosexuality could lead to heterosexuality. Despite this, Frank and the other leaders clung to their belief that people could become heterosexual even though they had yet to see it happen in practice. It was simply a matter of faith. However, none of the members had heterosexual relationships, and many were repulsed by the idea. Toward the end of the conference, Frank grabbed the microphone and presented the official Exodus viewpoint that “God will not take a person half-way and then abandon them. God would do a complete work.” Yet the controversy that began in 1978 continued to fester.
The divisions and contradictions within Exodus were exacerbated as the ex-gay movement experienced upheaval and scandal in the early 1980s. Some leaders, like Greg Reid, defected from Exodus when they realized they could not handle the sacrifices required to live as an ex-gay. The most infamous Exodus scandal occurred in 1979 and has become legendary within the ex-gay movement and its opposition. On a plane en route to speak at a church in Virginia, Michael Bussee and Gary Cooper, a volunteer with Exodus,