During my eighteen months at New Hope, I conducted two-to-three hour interviews with forty-seven men and women, with nineteen followup interviews. I often talked and interacted informally with these same people in other contexts, like dinners, church, and the office. I formally interviewed Curtis, Brian, Hank, and Drew two or three times over the span of a year and a half. I chose New Hope as my research site because of Frank's position as the founder of the ex-gay movement and because, at the time, it was the oldest and most established residential program. Aside from men enrolled in the program, I interviewed ministry leaders and men and women living in the surrounding area who had completed the program. Four of these people were married but remained affiliated with New Hope in some way. One had married but sought out a church where he did not have to reveal his sexual struggles and history. I also interviewed seven men who had left the program to live as gay-identified. Later, I interviewed members and leaders of Jewish and Catholic ex-gay groups in New York City and at the annual Exodus conference. This broad focus was especially important given that a coalition of Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, Christian, African American, and therapeutic groups formed an organization called Positive Alternatives to Homosexuality in 2003 as a way to reach out to members of more religious denominations on a national and global scale.
My research received a huge boost when Drew mailed a letter I drafted to sixty ex-gay people in the immediate vicinity, asking them to complete interviews, and it was through these early contacts that I met others. After a few months, Frank granted me permission to peruse his carefully cataloged archive of articles, letters, and pictures related to homosexuality and the ex-gay movement from the early 1970s, and I spent part of my days reading and copying these files. Other times, I taught men how to use and edit the Web site, fixed computer problems, and engaged in long conversations with Anita, Frank, Drew, Curtis, and the various men who wandered through the offices during the day. Sometimes Brian and I would meet for dinner outside of the ministry since he was no longer in the program or working at New Hope. At night, before I drove back to San Francisco, I would often eat with the entire house of men and listen to their praise and worship sessions, and I met others through church on Sundays and group outings on weekends. In the course of the research, I volunteered in the ministry's offices; attended classes, dinners, conferences, and parties; and maintained over a span of several years relationships with men and women affiliated with the ex-gay movement, three of whom I am still in contact with. I viewed ethnography as an extended and sometimes never-ending conversation, and inevitably that conversation changed me just as my presence at New Hope changed the fabric of everyday life there. I never converted to Christianity, which was the change perhaps Anita and others desired, but my relationships with the people at New Hope radically altered how I understood their faith and their desire to change their sexualities.
Doing extended participant observation and interviews provided me with access to a perspective on the ex-gay movement and the Christian Right that journalists' undercover exposés of ministries or ex-gay testimonial accounts of change have tended to ignore. Similarly, although political science and sociological scholarship on the Christian Right and conservative political movements is rich and varied, it has tended to focus on leadership and political rhetoric rather than ground-level participation. This work often discounts the worldviews of participants in Christian Right organizations, issues of gender and sexuality, and, in some cases, religion.7 The majority of these studies have been concerned with measuring the Christian Right's success, in “re-Christianizing America,” in making legislative inroads, or in growing its numbers,8 and they draw upon social movement theory approaches to understand conservative social and cultural movements.9 Although I consider the ex-gay movement a political, cultural, and social movement, I did not situate New Hope within this body of theory, choosing instead to analyze daily life and interactions. Many of the studies of conservative groups have generally involved national surveys and interviews conducted by field researchers rather than prolonged fieldwork.10 Participants' observations and interviews revealed how religious and sexual conversion occur as a complicated process over time. They also demonstrated that the ex-gay movement is far from politically cohesive and that there is a wide gulf between leadership and laity.
Although my sample was not necessarily representative of the entire ex-gay movement, my focus on a concentrated group of individuals revealed why people joined, what they did while they were there, and what became of them after they left. I compiled basic statistics about age, race, class, gender, and religious background, but I was less interested in quantifiable conclusions proving or disproving change than in the worldviews of men and women. These worldviews became a window onto the larger ex-gay movement and the way Christian political organizations have appropriated ex-gay narratives of change. However, to understand the connection between the local experiences of ex-gay men and women and the wider political implications of the movement, I situate the ex-gay movement within the wider historical currents of twentieth-century evangelical religion; self-help culture; psychiatric and psychological theories on sexuality, gay and lesbian liberation, and feminism; and the history of the Christian Right.
Gaining information from men and women was greatly facilitated by the manner in which ex-gays are encouraged to confess and testify as part of their process of sexual transformation. With the exception of Brian, they were much more interested in talking about themselves than in questioning me. The testimony, with a sin and redemption narrative, has long been a hallmark of evangelical Christianity. Testifying for men and women at New Hope was central to their process of sexual and religious conversion, illustrating their stories before and after dedicating their lives to Jesus, from sinner to saved. The testimony is the narrative form into which all ex-gays eventually fit their lives before and after becoming Christians. It attests to their religious transformation and their hope that sexual transformation will follow. Ex-gays are accustomed to continually sharing testimony about the most private and harrowing aspects of their lives in public, group settings. Continuous testimony in small groups and at church is the centerpiece of the ex-gay residential program, and reluctance or refusal to give testimony is a liability.
Unlike many mainline Protestant denominations where personal problems are not aired publicly, the evangelical religious style of New Hope encourages and rewards public confessions of intimacy. Repentant narratives about homosexuality, drug abuse, sexual abuse, abortions, and promiscuity provide former sinners with unimpeachable authority in the ex-gay culture because expertise is predicated on experience. The emphasis on personal testimony is also emblematic of the therapeutic dimension of the ex-gay process of conversion. The ministries assert that sexual healing occurs through these public confessions, or “offering problems up to Jesus.” Talking in interviews was a natural extension of the wider public discourse of testimony and public emotionalism for most men and women. Hank, for example, would often break into tears as he spoke to me, and I found that in the course of conversations, ex-gay men and women would casually slip in intimate details about abuse or addiction as if they were everyday topics.
A person's testimonial narrative of conversion becomes more structured and even rigid the longer he or she has been involved in an ex-gay ministry. Although the religious and sexual testimony generates a life history, I found that it was crucial to talk to men and women before they placed their experiences within the frame of what they learned at the ministry, read in the ex-gay literature, and heard from others. These testimonial life stories were messier but more revealing than that of someone like Hank, who had spoken and written widely about his life for years. A common theme in ethnographies of conservative Christians has been a focus on the narrative strategies expressed through life stories.11 In her book on pro-choice and pro-life women, Faye Ginsburg uses the term “procreation stories” to analyze the formal strategies