Swish (20 page)

Halfway through the presentation, a man resembling a pudgy Dustin Hoffman entered the room; there being no other open seats, I caught his eye and nodded to the chair on my right. Upon sitting down, he immediately began grunting in affirmation of everything Roy Blankenship said.

“When I have a really difficult case in my office,” said Roy, “when the person is going on and on about how hard his life is, I reach in and start fiddling in my desk drawer while he’s whining, and eventually I say, drat, it’s not here. The patient will come out of his self-involvement enough to say something like, what? And I’ll say, my magic wand. I can’t find it.”

“Yes,”
grunted not-Dustin-Hoffman.

I feel that I would fire Roy Blankenship as my therapist no more than ten minutes into our first session. My problem would be not so much that he believed you can change from gay to straight as that, if you can’t be self-involved around your therapist, then what the hell are you paying him for?

But the others in the workshop seemed not to share my concern, and when Roy drew to a close they applauded enthusiastically. As people started to leave the room for lunch, Rob and Jon stayed where they were, deep in conversation with each other. I wanted desperately to join in and make Jon forget that Rob existed and fall in love with me, but if I did so then the grunting man might feel left out, so I started talking to him instead, grinding my teeth whenever Rob laughed at something Jon had said that was obviously funny but that I hadn’t quite been able to make out because I had been talking to the grunting man, whose name, he informed me, was Vito.

Vito had been in the lifestyle for twenty-five years and with a man for fifteen of them. When I asked what had led to his change of heart after so long an entrenchment, he said, “I didn’t want to die. Eve ate the fruit once. If I go back just once, I could get AIDS. If I die tomorrow I don’t want to go to hell—and now I know I’m not going to.” I was very brave, he told me; he remembered how difficult it had been for him to take the first step out of the lifestyle. “I railed at God,” he said. “Why? Why? I like vanilla, you want me to eat chocolate. Other people have their cake and eat it too. I don’t even get to eat the cake. I don’t get any cake.”

“That’s horrible,” I said. “I love cake.” Vito started honking like a foghorn, in what I had to assume was an expression of enthusiastic concurrence. I wondered whether he was actually mentally ill and then I decided he just had what my psychiatrist boyfriend Mike calls “personality.”

“I was at Dennis Jernigan’s house,” Vito said—
you were
where?
I thought—“and I was trying to poke holes in his testimony, and God spoke aloud to me.” By this time the idea of a chattering Deity didn’t discompose me in the least. “He said,
I told you I’d never leave you, Vito. I didn’t tell you it would be easy. Even if no one has ever come out of this lifestyle, I’m calling you out.
I said, Why? Why, God? And He said,
Because I want you to be a light to others. Because of Joel from New York City
.”

I couldn’t take this, not even for Rob and hot Jon. I gave Vito a queasy smile and excused myself. When I was on the threshold of the room, he waved at me and shouted, “You’re blessed!”

I pointed at him and shouted back, “YOU!”

He pointed at me and shouted, “YOU!”

I shouted, “YOU!,” slipped out the door, and went to lunch. There was chocolate cake for dessert but I didn’t have any.

I am, under most circumstances, a terrible liar. I’ve gotten very adept at things like “Yes, honey, I made sure to turn the lights off before we left” and “Of course I paid the cable bill,” but when the stakes are any higher than momentary domestic tranquillity I am so overcome with anxiety and guilt that, even if whoever I’m lying to believes me, for hours afterward I am incapable of any activity that doesn’t involve thinking obsessively about what a horrible person I am and wondering whether I will get caught.

One would think, then, that attending the Exodus conference undercover might not be the most soothing way for me to spend my time, and Mike suggested as much to me before I left. “By the time you’re done you won’t be able to sleep anymore,” he said. “Ever.”

What he failed to understand, however, no matter how hard I tried to explain, was that this would be different. Assuming a persona for a week would be like nothing so much as acting; furthermore, the character I would be playing was virtually identical to the real me, the only difference being that I would pretend an interest in becoming ex-gay. None of these people had ever met me, and it was unlikely I would ever see any of them again. How could I feel guilty about wearing a mask in front of people I would know for less than a week? Furthermore, I had no intention of harming those I met or of exposing them in any way—I would be writing about them, certainly, but I wasn’t interested in
taking them down
—so what was there to feel guilty about? I was simply doing research, and easy research at that. My plan presented no especial difficulties.

Shockingly, my analysis proved not to have been completely correct. Standing in the auditorium with the Slytherin kid and the YMCA guy and the racking-sobs-of-relief man the night before, what I had felt was not ease but something more akin to nausea. Here was a room full of people reaching with all their might for salvation, and here was me, taking surreptitious notes about their ill-advised tonsorial choices, their bad spelling, and the absurdity of their belief. At the end of the session—as would happen, it turned out, at the end of every session—the worship leader had instructed anybody who wanted to receive a blessing to come up to the front of the room, where a row of well-dressed men and women of varying ages stood at the ready as prayer volunteers. Wanting desperately to receive a blessing, I left my pew and walked twenty feet up the aisle, at which point I turned around and went right back to my seat. I didn’t deserve a blessing. Besides, what I really wanted wasn’t to be blessed; it was to be forgiven. And such a task was, I suspected, far beyond the powers of a grandfather in a seersucker suit.

So the next day, after Roy Blankenship’s presentation, sitting in front of Vito and hearing him say, “Because of Joel from New York City,” I felt that nausea even more strongly. One of those absurd people had given me his time, his energy, his attention, because he thought that I was in pain and that he might be able to soothe that pain. How on earth was I to respond to his compassion when my need for it was a lie? I was a two-bit cheat, compelling him to feel honest emotion for me so I could use it in a book about what a fool he was.

After the Exodus conference, when I got back to New York, I figured, okay, if I think this three-main-causes-of-homosexuality-and-fifteen-other-associated-factors stuff is hogwash, why don’t I try to find out what’s really going on? I had a vague understanding that homosexuality might be genetic—that, for example, male homosexuality could be passed along from mother to son on the X chromosome—but beyond that I knew nothing. When I asked Mike during dinner he said, “Well, we don’t really know,” so I gave him an extra-tiny scoop of ice cream for dessert and then turned on
Grey’s Anatomy,
which he hates, and hid the remote so he couldn’t change the channel.

With the help of the Internet, however, I discovered over the ensuing weeks that, though genes certainly play a part in forming future fags, the full picture might be a little more complex than that; the abstract of an analysis of the Australian twin registry by Michael Bailey, Michael Dunne, and Nicholas Martin, for example, suggested an environmental component as well. However, in order to figure out whether “environmental” meant the fetus’s environment in the womb—whether different levels of different hormones, for example, could lead to different orientations—or the environment in which the child was raised, I had to read the paper they wrote, and I couldn’t understand a goddamn word other than “and” and “the,” and I realized that though I had once been smart I was now stupid.

So I gave up and e-mailed Michael Bailey to ask him. He wrote back and said that, though he was certain the environment in question was prenatal, it was at least theoretically possible that the child’s social environment in the first year or two of life was involved. The strongest evidence against the latter, he said, comes from the thankfully rare cases in which male babies whose genitalia are either malformed at birth or damaged in accidents are treated by reassignment as females, both socially and surgically. These babies, genetically male, seem overwhelmingly to grow up to be attracted to women. “How likely is any social explanation of homosexuality,” Dr. Bailey wrote, “if you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis and rearing him as a girl?”

(He also forwarded my e-mail to a friend of his, who took a look at my website, and then Dr. Bailey forwarded me the e-mail his friend sent him back that said I was cute and funny, so I now have a crush on both Dr. Bailey and Galen Bodenhausen. I have practiced my schoolgirl giggle in case either of them calls me.)

It’s always mystified me that the question of whether or not we’re born gay winds up at the center of most conflicts about gay rights. If we are, contend gay-rights activists, then we have no control over whom we fall in love with or lust after or blush in the presence of, and it’s unfair to punish us for something over which we have no control. If gay people
turn
gay, argue their opponents, then we can just as easily turn straight, and there’s no reason to indulge us just because we enjoy being libertines.

The trouble I have with these arguments—aside from their approach to homosexuality as a
problem
that is either
somebody’s fault
or
not somebody’s fault
—is that whether one has chosen a trait and whether one can change it are two different issues. After talking to Dr. Bailey I tried to think of other human attributes that might illustrate this point, and came up with a grand total of two, food preferences and handedness; I have to congratulate myself, because it turns out that we are born with our taste preferences and yet they can change over time—most people are born hating cilantro, for example, but many grow to enjoy it over time—and that handedness, though usually partially determined by early social environment, is subsequently immutable—the only thing tying a lefty’s dominant hand behind his back accomplishes is to traumatize him and give him a stutter. (None of the experts I talked to about these things called me cute or funny, so I don’t remember their names.)

Who’s to say, then, that if we’re born gay we can’t change, or that if we become gay after birth we can? (The question usually left unasked is: if gay people can become straight,
so fucking what
? Quakers can become Methodists too, but you don’t see anybody rushing to pass laws to prevent members of the insidious Society of Friends from marrying one another.)

So I don’t think the question of whether we’re born gay is all that compelling. To me, the more interesting question is: how effective are attempts to change sexual orientation?

In recent years, I discovered after exhaustive research involving Google and a pint of Häagen-Dazs chocolate peanut butter ice cream, there have been only two relevant studies, and though they were held up in the media as yielding conflicting results, as far as I can tell they fit together pretty well. Robert Spitzer, who spearheaded the successful effort in the 1970s to remove homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses, interviewed 200 people recommended to him by ex-gay ministries and concluded that “some highly motivated individuals” can change their orientation, but that such instances are “rare” and that “the vast majority of gay people would be unable to alter by much a firmly established homosexual orientation.” Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder, after talking to 202 people who had undergone therapy to try to become straight, determined that 4 percent of them had successfully changed their sexual orientation but that 77 percent of them had suffered “significant harm” as a result of the therapy.