During the course of his year in the program, Curtis would experience moments of elation, severe depression, crushes on other men, homesickness, and boredom. He eventually would return home with the expectation that he would apply everything he had learned at New Hope to his old life in Canada. Instead, during the next several years he experienced only more uncertainty regarding his sexual struggles. He began occasionally dating men at the same time that he volunteered at a local ex-gay ministry. Later, he embarked upon a chaste relationship with a woman he hoped to marry, but he broke it off when he realized he could never be attracted to her sexually. Finally, he resumed his career as a hairdresser and moved from his rural hometown to Montreal, the first city he had ever lived in.
Curtis's story represents a familiar pattern for many ex-gay men and women who come to New Hope with the objective of healing their homosexuality, controlling sexual compulsions, becoming heterosexual, or even marrying someone of the opposite sex. Curtis arrived with the idea that, after a year, his homosexual struggle would subside. He left feeling stronger in his Christian identity, but not necessarily with diminished homosexual urges. It was through religious growth that he believed he would eventually conquer his attractions to men. Struggling with these attractions his entire life was acceptable to him. He reasoned that his faith in God would sustain him and provide him with hope that change was possible.
The controversy around the ex-gay movement has tended to fixate on whether people can change their sexuality. In their testimonies, Hank and Curtis both swore they were altered people, but their assertions encompass a range of possibilities for change that do not necessarily include sexual orientation, behaviors, or desires. When they spoke of personal transformation, they were more likely to refer to their religious identities and sense of masculinity. Christian Right groups claim that men and women can become heterosexuals, and they present men like Hank as confirmation. Opponents of the ex-gay movement argue, based on their evidence of the men and women who have left ex-gay ministries to live as gay-or lesbian-identified, that ex-gay men and women are simply controlling their behavior and repressing their desires. Both sides neglect the centrality of the religious belief system and personal experiences that impel men and women to spend years in ex-gay ministries. Rather than definitive change, ex-gays undergo a conversion process that has no endpoint, and they acknowledge that change encompasses desires, behavior, and identities that do not always align neatly or remain fixed. Even the label “ex-gay” represents their sense of being in flux between identities.
While many conservative Christian churches and organizations condemn homosexuality, New Hope Ministry represents a unique form of nondenominational Christian practice focused specifically on sexuality. New Hope combines psychological, therapeutic, and biblical approaches in an effort to change and convert gay men and lesbians to nonhomosexual Christian lives. Unlike previous Christian movements in the United States, the ex-gay movement, of which New Hope Ministry is a part, explicitly connects sexual and religious conversion, placing sexuality at the core of religious identity. By becoming a born-again Christian and maintaining a personal relationship with Jesus, ex-gay men and women are born again religiously, and as part of that process they consider themselves reconstituted sexually. They grapple with a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between their conservative Christian beliefs and their own same-sex desires. In their worldview, an ex-gay ministry becomes a place where these dual identities are rendered temporarily compatible. Their literal belief that the Bible condemns homosexual practices and identity leads them to measure their success in negotiating their new identities through submission and surrender to Jesus in all things. Even if desires and attractions remain after they have attended an ex-gay ministry like New Hope, their relationship with God and Jesus continues intact. That relationship supersedes any sexual changes, minimizing their frustration and disillusionment when the longed for sexual changes do not occur. In the words of Curtis, “Heterosexuality isn't the goal; giving our hearts and being obedient to God is the goal.”
New Hope Ministry is the oldest of five residential ex-gay programs in the United States. Frank Worthen formed New Hope in 1973 after a revelation in which God exhorted him to abandon homosexuality.2 With the help of a board of directors and house leaders who have successfully completed the program, Frank, a spry man in his mid-seventies who still jets around in a cherry-red convertible, oversees New Hope, teaches classes to the men in the program, and serves as an assistant pastor in an ex-gay-affiliated church called Church of the Open Door. His wife of over twenty years, Anita, spearheads a ministry for parents of gay children from the same office. She is not an ex-gay but the mother of a gay son. Frank and Anita live a few minutes away from the residential program in a tiny but immaculate studio apartment. After two decades of marriage, they are paragons for other Christian men and women who pray that they will also get married. New Hope is now one of hundreds of evangelical Christian ministries in the United States and abroad where men and women attend therapy sessions, Bible studies, twelve-step-style meetings, and regular church services as part of their “journey out of homosexuality.”
In 2000 and 2001, fifteen men participated in the New Hope program. A similar program for women existed throughout the 1980s, but New Hope eliminated it in the early 1990s because of a lack of space. Instead, New Hope sponsors Grace, a weekly ex-gay women's support group led by Suzanne, an energetic woman in her late thirties, now with three children, who spent years in the New Hope program and eventually married a man from Open Door. Participants in Grace and New Hope attended the events at Friends and Family Weekend in 2000, listening as Hank gave his testimony. During the conference, ex-gays and their families enthusiastically participated in small encounter-group discussions for women struggling with lesbianism, parents and spouses of ex-gays, pastors, and church leaders.
After the activities for the Friends and Family Weekend conference concluded, men and women returned to the New Hope residence, Emmanuel House, a two-story stucco apartment complex on a suburban cul-de-sac. Unlike Curtis, most of the men in New Hope's program tended to be in their late thirties and forties. They were predominantly white, from working-class and middle-class families, and raised primarily in rural areas or small towns of the United States. There also were a few men from Europe who, like Curtis, had obtained religious worker visas, which enabled them to be employees of New Hope. They worked in the New Hope offices, located directly across the street from the ex-gay residential apartments. The number of international participants was low, since many now have the option of joining ministries in their home countries as the ex-gay movement expands throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. Most of the men in the New Hope program grew up with conservative Christian backgrounds and fervently believed not only that homosexual attraction and behavior are sins according to the Bible but also that life as a gay person means being separated from Jesus. This had created a wrenching conflict, causing estrangement from their families and churches. In some cases, it had led to drug and alcohol abuse, isolation, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and depression.
Although there were a few men from mainline Protestant denominations and one Catholic in the program, at some point most had become involved in an evangelical form of Christianity and undergone a bornagain experience. All of the New Hope participants maintained a personal relationship with Jesus and believed to differing degrees in the infallibility and literal truth of biblical scripture. With few exceptions, the informal, experiential religious style of New Hope and Church of the Open Door was familiar to them. All those in attendance believed that through Christian faith, religious conversion, and a daily accountable relationship with one another and with God they could heal their homosexuality. Desires or attractions might linger for years, but they would emerge with new religious identities and the promise that faith and their relationships with one another and God would eventually transform them.
A week before the Friends and Family conference, I ventured up to New Hope for an initial meeting with the intention of making it my fieldwork site. I had interviewed Frank, the New Hope director, on the phone a year before about the early history of the movement, but we had never met. As I approached, it was hard to distinguish the ministry from other nondescript buildings lining the placid, tree-lined street. However, when I peered closely, I could discern signs for Alanon, psychotherapy practices, and various drug rehabilitation centers scattered among the two-story houses. There was nothing