Ex-Gay Book.

I've pointed out numerous times to my students, friends, and colleagues that what the "ex-gay movement" does for conservative Christians is allow them a place where they can be open about their gayness within the Church. Of course, it's not exactly "open" if the reason they are open about it is to denounce it, but anyway - the point is, elsewhere within conservative Christianity, there is deep and widespread revulsion for the gay person, despite all the rhetoric about loving the sinner and hating the sin. In "ex-gay" communities, there is a belief that gay people are simply people who are struggling with this particular sort of "sin." This is, of course, one of the main things that draws people to the movement - it resists the mean-spirited homophobia that exists elsewhere in conservative Christianity, offering instead a sort of "homophobia lite" that grants personhood and salvation to the struggling Christian: "Their sense of relief, of belonging, of finally discovering an authentic self, springs from their sudden experience of mutual recognition. They can be Christian in a place where they won’t 'hear any of the stuff about you’re scum, you’re going to hell,' and where no one will try to exorcise or ostracize them."

The above quote comes from an interesting book review in the Women's Review of Books about this very topic. Tanya Erzen's Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement appears to get at this important component of the movement that many outsiders to conservative Christianity do not understand. She also explores the ways in which gay culture, while expressly discouraged, continues to flourish within the movement - though it is, to be sure, a sort of a sad echo (in college, I attended one meeting of an ex-gay group in Hartford to support a friend of mine who wanted to go, and that's what I remember most about it - the pervasive sense of sadness that dogged the people there, the palpable feeling of loss).

Interestingly, Erzen points to ways in which ex-gay people are manipulated and used by the Religious Right; reviewer Esther Kaplan notes that "At one point, a few New Hope participants contribute their testimonies to an ex-gay ad campaign and become furious when their stories are manipulated to oppose AIDS research and gay civil rights."

I am already trying to dream up courses in which I can use this book.