Despite the ex-gay movement's antipathy to biological approaches, it conceives of homosexuality in multiple ways: as religious sin, sexual addiction, gender deficit, and psychological disorder. On the one hand, the movement utilizes developmental models and the diagnosis of gender identity disorders to explain the origins of homosexuality. These theories argue that men and women become homosexuals because of a gender deficit in masculinity or femininity as children, an overbearing mother, an absent father, or familial dysfunction. They also argue that a person may develop attractions to someone of the same sex because of trauma. For instance, the same literature often describes lesbianism as a result of sexual or physical abuse. To help recover lost masculinity and femininity, or repair “gender deficits,” the leaders of the ex-gay movement organize workshops and teachings where women learn to apply makeup to be feminine and men learn to play sports to be masculine. These performances also point to the idea that masculinity and femininity are constructed in the social world, not ingrained in the body. Other ex-gay literature discusses homosexuality as an addiction, and some ex-gay ministries model themselves on twelve-step recovery groups. The developmental and addiction explanations provide alternatives to the model that homosexuality is sin. These overlapping accounts about how a person's sexuality develops enable the movement to explain huge variations in the life stories and experiences of people who come to a ministry, oftentimes conflating morality, disease, and addiction.
The basis for the live-in program at New Hope stems directly from the developmental and addiction models of the ex-gay movement. At New Hope, men are urged to form same-sex friendships, which will rebuild their sense of masculinity and, by extension, their heterosexuality.The nonsexual relationships they forge through group living are the answer to reclaiming lost masculine potential. The structure of the program is also designed as a form of bodily discipline, monitoring the behavior and actions of participants so they are less likely to have a sexual fall or revert back to their prior addictions. The structure and constant surveillance require the men to be accountable for others' behavior and to report any deviations from the rules in weekly house meetings. Although they complain about the isolation and rigorous structure, for many it is the day-to-day interactions with roommates, God, and other people that make the program appealing. At New Hope, the men and women engage in forms of religious practice that occur in both secular spaces, such as playing sports, living communally, and cooking together, and religious spaces, such as attending church, bible studies, and praise and worship sessions.15 Through the practices and the rituals of everyday life in an ex-gay ministry, ex-gays are supposed to learn to reconcile their sexual and religious identities.
New Hope accepts what the ex-gay movement calls “broken” individuals as long as they are invested in the process of religious and sexual conversion. I argue that by combining biblical, developmental, and twelve-step principles, New Hope also creates new familial and kinship arrangements and networks of ex-gays. The ministry's close-knit, highly regulated programs foster a sense of religious belonging based on same-sex bonds rather than the conservative Christian ideal of heterosexual marriage. The ministries also function as unlikely havens for those banned from conservative churches and alienated from family members and even from gay organizations or social networks. Individuals remain affiliated with ex-gay ministries for years because they offer religious belonging, acceptance, and accountability. Ex-gay ministries flourish because the men and women grappling with same-sex behavior and attraction desperately want to locate themselves in a supportive cultural world. Places like New Hope provide the material conditions for community in addition to a more diffuse sense of religious and sexual belonging and kinship. In conversations, the men and women at New Hope invoked a Utopian aspect to their chosen families; some men even referred to finding a sense of belonging at New Hope as a coming-out process. In many ways, the community and religious aspects of the program became more important than any sexual changes they experienced.
While individuals at New Hope understand the transformation of their sexual identities as a choice and a right, organizations of the Christian Right have utilized their testimonies as living proof that homosexuality is merely a choice, a developmental disorder, or a lifestyle, promoting a wider anti-gay agenda cloaked in the rhetoric of choice, change, and compassion. Organizations of the Christian Right exploit the example of ex-gay conversion to counter legislative proposals that would grant workplace protection, partner benefits, adoption rights, and health care to gay men and lesbians. Rather than explicit anti-gay rhetoric, groups like Focus on the Family and the American Family Association frame the debate over change in terms of “hope for healing,” despite that fact that ex-gays' testimonies and queer conversions often contradict these politics. The ex-gay movement has internal fissures and disagreements, even as the national leadership attempts to maintain the pretense of unity. Concentrating on individual testimonies illuminated the disparities between ground-level participants, ministry leaders, and Christian Right organizations. It also exposed why some men and women become disillusioned with ministries. This cynicism was borne out in the ways ex-gay men and women I talked to disassociated themselves from the politics of the Christian Right and even the leadership of the ex-gay movement. Some men and women in ex-gay ministries resent that the wider ex-gay movement showcases and distorts their stories to promote an anti-gay political agenda. Many ex-gays admit that although some changes in behavior and identity take place, it is more probable that they will continue as “strugglers” their entire lives.
In chapter 1, I provide historical background for the emergence of New Hope, the ex-gay movement, and the Church of the Open Door in the 1970s. I focus on the differences among the evangelical, Jewish, and Catholic ex-gay ministry approaches to sexual conversion, and how these ideas translated to New Hope's sister ministry in Manila, Philippines, run by evangelicals under the auspices of the Catholic Church. The globalization of ex-gay ministries in the last decade provides the opportunity to trace how U.S. Christian notions of sexual identity shift in different national contexts. The context for the process of religious and sexual conversion is the subject of chapter 2, in which I examine the everyday understanding of theology and religious practice of the men and women at New Hope. Both their conservative religious beliefs, based on early experiences within their churches and families, and their theological interpretations of the Bible shape how they conceive of homosexuality as a sin and a moral issue. They speak of their lives in terms of conversions and turning points, like becoming born again, recognizing their sin, and having a personal relationship with Jesus. While their evangelical belief system condemns homosexuality, it also provides a way to bridge the divide between their sexual and religious identities, creating a theology of conversion that links religious and sexual identity formation.
Chapter 3 explores the concept of religious belonging through a close examination of the New Hope program structure. Despite the emphasis on marriage in the ex-gay movement, ex-gays create new forms of belonging in which same-sex friendship with other men and women becomes more important than eventual marriage or procreation. New Hope and other ex-gay ministries counter the model of the privatization of sexuality into nuclear family units through the creation of public communities of ex-gay men and women. While ex-gay men and women critique the gay community as an invalid identity group and the “lifestyle” as harmful and dangerous, New Hope has simultaneously created its own identity group. Fearful that men and women will permanently embrace the label “ex-gay” as their identity and concerned that men and women are not creating relationships outside ex-gay networks, the movement leaders warn members of ex-gay ministries not to get stuck in what they call an “ex-gay ghetto.”
Chapters 4 and 5 examine how the developmental, self-help, and recovery models conceptualize sexual identity, homosexual development, and same-sex attraction as gender deficits and addictions. The ex-gay movement has reconfigured psychological and psychiatric models and theories about the origins of homosexuality and lesbianism in the postwar period through its own medical institution, the National Association for the Research and Treatment of Homosexuality (NARTH). NARTH trains therapists, psychiatrists,