Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 31 March, 1997

A "ministry-to-convert homosexuals to heterosexuality" particularly those gays persuaded by evangelical or fundamentalist preachings, has been launched with "Ex-Gay" recruitment operations coast to coast. At the same time the strange gay "cure" odyssey of Marshall Herff Applewhite (a Presbyterian minister's son and the self-castrating, suicidal senior guru of Heaven's Gate) has captured headlines coast to coast. (See GayToday coverage.)

A coalition meeting of Ex-Gay groups in Washington D.C., as reported in the Washington Blade, the capital city's lesbian and gay newspaper of record, took place at Gallaudet University, drawing members from such groups as PFOX, Exodus, Transformation, and Regeneration. The sponsoring group, PFOX, Parents of EX-Gays, was holding its first national convention. Dr. Franklin Kameny, an acclaimed pioneer of the gay movement, has recommended a strategy of "tit" for "tat" to respond to PFOX's-straight-status-quo "recruitment" tactics.

Members of the Christian Right, ever eager to capitalize on the social anxieties often felt by gay-identified teenagers, are introducing new anti-gay "prevention" and "straight recruitment" groups into their volatile publicity mixes, groups like PFOX meant to oppose the many chapters of the gay-friendly PFLAG--founded in 1972.

PFLAG, or Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, is now honored nationally, having many chapters whose earnest marchers--heterosexual men and women who obviously love their gay children as they are-- always get roaring appreciation from sidewalk crowds during any Gay Pride Day parade.

"PFOX folks wouldn't be caught dead celebrating during a gay and lesbian parade, but if they did march," says Steve Yates, a long-time critic of gay-oriented events, "the boos and hisses would then be the loudest they'd ever hear. Why? They'd signal, these PFOX parents, that they have no love or respect for the deepest feelings of their own children as they truly are. They'd be just making it much harder for their own kids to feel affirmative about their own realities."

Religion-supported recruiting organizations now pay for major television commercials meant to lure young people away from homosexuality. Since the 1973 demise of pathology-theories among psychiatrists, it is fundamentalists, evangelicals and other religious orthodoxies who, to uphold their unscientific dogmas, must enforce those dogmas with church-sponsored brain-washings, a behavior the American Psychiatric Association, over two decades ago, renounced. Many APA members admitted, finally, that a "therapist" (whom gay critics once called "the--rapist") who treats a patient's homosexuality as an illness indulges in useless, harmful speculations.

The Blade published excerpts from Dr. Franklin Kameny's response to PFOX and its Ex-Gay "recruitment" groups suggesting strategies to meet "nutty fundamentalist" assaults on gay and lesbian psyches. Kameny has given GayToday his statement, one which cites "nutty fundamentlist" recruiting centers. He has asked that the entire statement be printed. It appears in full, therefore, in Viewpoints. (Click "Viewpoints" on Contents page, top).