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This week in Irvine, California, Exodus International is hosting the Exodus Freedom Conference, where hundreds of ex-gays are gathering to see what new tricks executive vice president Randy Thomas has in store for them to trick their heads into staying on the straight and narrow. Randy went around the conference and interviewed a few of his guests, and, in the spirit of Gay Pride Month, I thought it would be lovely to meet them!
Some of these folks are first-timers, while others are veteran Exodus conference attendees, plying Alan Chambers & Co. with their cash in search of a reconciliation between faith and lusting after human beings with the same genitals. And then there are guys like Ethan, who’s “looking forward to just meeting a lot of new people.” Yes, that is what these conferences are about.
Now what hotel room is that Justin in?
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Now here’s a behind the scenes look at what goes into making this conference a success. Probably lots of Excel spreadsheets and gay porn.
M
They seem like a bunch of weirdos. Nothing ‘hot’ about them. Yuck
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Epic Fail! Sorry hatred, lies and pathetic self loathing are never ever hot………
Cam
So weird that these folks base their identiy upon what they aren’t. They are claiming to be ex gays, and instead of basing their identity on who they are, women, men, race, their jobs, they continue to define themselves by the sexuality they claim is no longer part of their lives. How pathetic.
BigGayAL
Anyone in SoCal want to take a shot at seducing an ex-gay?
Bill
While it is easy to make fun of these people, one can only imagine the self-hatred that they live with on a daily basis.
I actually feel sad for them. They believed about themselves exactly what heterosexuals have ‘rammed down OUR throats’ since childhood.
Very, very, very sad.
However, I imagine that there were lots of sore bum-bums and red willy’s after the conference.
Lanjier
They seem to be forming really solid friendships at the conference. But isn’t a true friend the one that tells you when you are full of baloney, that you run the risk of entering into a failed straight marriage, that you are depriving your opposite-sex partner of the straight person they should be with, that the George Rekers workshop is cancelled, that gay attractions are identical to opposite attractions in how natural and healthy they are? Oh wait! I just became more of a friend than their friends. How nice of me. 🙂
David in Houston
Every man interviewed was clearly 100% gay. But I think the winner for the Queen of the Gays goes to Randy Thomas, who sounds like he just flew in from the Castro.
I love how all of them say things like, “New members should just be open and honest about who they are…” I just want to grab them and say, “…if you were open and honest you wouldn’t be trying to delude yourself with the false hope of ex-gay therapy.” It really is sad watching this video of desperate people clinging to their religious beliefs so tightly. Do these people not know that gay-inclusive churches exist?
Adrian
In the book “Swish” Joel Derfner writes about the time he went to an Exodus conference. It’s a chapter worth reading. it helps you understand how some Exudos members “really” think.
swhall
Ethan said “…just be who you are…” and Justin said “..just be yourself…”. How SAD they can’t follow their own advice. As a former fundy myself, I know how hard it is to escape this crap and wipe it from your brain to live a life of my own design, truly “being myself”.
Jeremy
Aw, everybody seems so happy and smiley with that twinkle in their eyes full of self-delusion and lunacy.
jeffree
I can not for the life of me why a woman would marry a gay man — well unless she wanted *not* to be constantly pestered for sex.
[Or unless she wants some great fashion advice and a tastefully decorated home!] okey, ignore that last sentence !
nikko
Drop the “it’s so sad” bullshit when it comes to these people deluding themselves. All I have is an instinctual aversion for such offensive lies. Yuck. People are so stupid.
ChisP
Are they any more deluded than marriage equality gays who tell everyone that gay couples are no different than straight couples?
ChisP
M: “They seem like a bunch of weirdos.”
LOL. Because we all know how long “gay” has been “normal”.
Cam
@ChisP: said..
“No. 13 · ChisP
Are they any more deluded than marriage equality gays who tell everyone that gay couples are no different than straight couples?”
____________________________
Do they not teach critical thinking in schools anymore?
1. These people are denying an actual reality about themselves.
2. The “Marriage Equality Gays” are advocating a civil rights position that you disagree with.
Now, as to your dissagreement with it, nobody is saying that gay couples are exactly the same as straight couples….just like a young couple in their twenties getting married is not the same as a couple in their 60’s getting married, or a couple getting married after a divorce etc…
The situations are different, it’s the civil rights that should be the same. And as for you….you sure spend a lot of time thinking about “Gays” for somebody who is “Straight” don’t you?
Vman455
@David in Houston: What got me was the second woman, Sonia, who mentioned that one of the things she was looking forward to was “feeling God’s love.” If God loves you so much, why did he create you as something you believe he hates?
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Ethan, who’s “looking forward to just meeting a lot of new people.” ……
It would be so great for the Gay world to have an investigative team armed with hidden cameras attend one of these hatefests and record how many of these self hating lunatics suddenly seem to remember how to be Gay after a few cocktails in the hotel lounge, and their denial is exposed for the world to see……..
bbg372
Justin is adorable.
Jay
They’ll be appearing later on Craigslist.
“Straight WM looking for hung bud to ‘hang’ with, drink some beers, and jack off to Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council acting prayerful in his Sears BVDs.”
jeffree
I totally see a “reality show” in the works here: “12 straight women wanting to meet (and marry) a gay man”.
Title?
Bachelorettes, Exgay, Redux.
I am SO calling my agent right *now* !!
See you all on the Red Carpet!
nikko
CHISP, yes, they are. You cannot compare ex-gays with the similarity between gay and straight couples. Poor analogy. Ex-gays aere not straight, period. And yes, bisexuality and homosexuality is normal.
nikko
I just watched the full video. What shallow hogwash! Nobody really said anything substantial, just glib talk and one-liners that don’t mean anything…ugh. Vile. Randy is just a glowing christian queen for Jesus.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
@Jay: Ever watch Web Soup? They have a segment each week where they show a clip of something which is really, really, stomach turning. Its called “Things you can’t unsee”……..
“jack off to Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council acting prayerful in his Sears BVDs.” You just created a new Queerty segment:
“Things you can not unthink”…….. :-p
vivisima
Justin: Yes baby, we SHOULD “take it ALL in”. 😉
Jonathan
a freak show. None of these people are hot. They’re sadly misinformed and allow fear and shame to rule their lives. They deserve pity and scorn for letting themselves live for others instead of being true to themselves.
gilber
they deserve compassion after all, loneliness makes us do A LOT of things when we are not able to cope with it the right way.i’m sure they never met that special someone they always dreamed of that’s why they are so bitter against same-sex attraction,they could never experience the best of it,i hope they realize they are still able to find happiness.the day they find someone who loves them unconditionally and stand by them, they are going to leave that religious crap as soon as possible.loneliness hits many gay people hard and we need to know how to handle situations like this so that we don’t become victims of this sort of groups preying on us.i hope they will be able to distinguish the false light from the real one.Poor souls.
veg
God, I’ve got to hit the conference up next year. Seems like a PERFECT place to catch some [redacted]. I only fancy straight-acting and straight-appearing guys so this is PERFECT.
PERFECT
PERFECT
PERFECT
PERFECT
DENY
DENY
DENY
[img]http://farm1.static.flickr.com/132/350146739_bef4621203_o.jpg[/img]
Justin O.
I drove by this weekend when I was in Irvine and I was kind of sad to only see 2 pro-gay protestors outside. It makes me sad that we can get huge crowds to come out in support of gay marriage, but we can’t find more than a couple people to protest the ex-gay movement that causes so much harm to so many members of our community.
David
Bet there will be lots of “backsliding” there, eh?
David
Actually, having been a fundamentalist in my teens and 20’s, I can understand where these folks are coming from.
Getting out of this superstitious quagmire is very difficult. What it requires is basically a supportive social environment away from the cult, and some chunks of reality to get them to let go of their religious delusions. Sowing seeds of doubt on the doctrine of bible inerrancy is easy enough to do. Basically, fundamentalists are taught that the Bible is 100% perfect because it is the Word of God, and since it is His Word, it Must be 100% perfect and inerrant. What they don’t dwell on is that if the Bible is shown to have One Flaw, then it is no longer Perfect, which means that it cannot be Inerrant, and which means that it is not the Word of God, which means they’ve been wasting an awful lot of time and effort on a lot of pure crap. And that would be a very frightening thing to a lot of fundamentalists — sort of like one of us waking up in the morning and discovering that everything we thought we knew was wrong.
The big question then would be, “What now?” Not everybody has a ready answer to that question.
Personally, I found Madelyn Murray O’Hair to be extraordinaily helpful, but she’s dead and gone now. Nevertheless, her organization (American Atheists) lives on, as do a number of other helpful groups.
One of my favorite “seeds of doubt” to sow is the one challenging the story of Moses. In the Infallible Book of Exodus, it says that Moses led over half the population of Egypt out of the country, taking immense wealth with it, and leaving the Egyptian military destroyed. Well, it turns out that the only place that story appears is in the ancient Hebrew scriptures — nowhere else. One would think that if the neighboring (and hostile) empires caught wind of their crippled military, one of them would have swept in and conquered them. But of course, none of the archeologists digging around in the middle east for the past 200 years have turned up anything that indicates that such a thing actually happened. They’ve found lots of other things, and have a fairly complete history of everything going back umpteen thousand years. And no story of a major emigration leaving the military in shambles.
So, the challenge to a fundamentalist is to have them present evidence to support the notion that the story of Moses is accurate. It’s fun to argue ’em into a corner, but then they usually go into their “denial” and mumble something like, “Satan must have hidden the evidence.”
Yeah, it a a sad, sad thing . . . a form of mental illness, really. I’m glad I managed to pull myself away from it. Otherwise, I probably would have ended up as obnoxious as Jerry Falwell ever was . . . ugh . . .
jeffree
@Justin O.: Great idea. Since the ‘phobes feel the need to turn up at Pride, we shouild return the favor by showing up at their exgay conferences and NOM/NARTH etc meetings, peacefully of course, with picket signs, brochures, and a few “magazines” !