The One Weird Gay Orgy That Will Make You Straight

Last updated on: August 30, 2016 at 1:01 pm by Melinda Selmys

The One Weird Gay Orgy That Will Make You Straight 2016-08-30T13:01:59-04:00 Melinda Selmys

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Yesterday, I got an e-mail containing a transcript of the testimony given by one of the facilitators of Journey Into Manhood. For those who don’t know all that much about the weird world of sexual orientation change therapies, JiM is a weekend retreat for gay men that is supposed to heal them of homosexuality. It’s been endorsed by prominent reparative therapists, including Joseph Nicolosi, and some Christians still recommend it as a resource for men with same-sex attractions.

The transcript is taken from the testimony of Jonathan Hoffman, a Journey into Manhood facilitator who testified at the trial of JONAH (a Jewish organization that promoted sexual orientation change efforts, including JiM.) Hoffman describes his experiences with Journey Beyond, which is the leader training conference for People Can Change. Among the experiences that he describes are a rebirthing ceremony:

Q. Is the subject naked when he is reborn?

A. Yes.

Q. Is there baby powder as part of that?

A. Yes.

Q. Each participant is born in succession?

A. All together in one room. It would take forever if it was one by one.

Q. So how was one reborn?

A. They are placed on a mattress, blindfolded, just so they don’t know where they are going and what’s about to happen, and before they are placed, they are told to undress, and then they are led to this mattress, their own specific one. It’s not a full mattress. There’s many different individual mattresses, and they are covered up very tightly in a blanket to simulate the womb.

And then there’s music and there’s a dialogue where men are kind of asked to go back, if they can, you know, to an era when they were born. It’s more of a visual imagination thing.

And then there’s music that talks about, and dialogue that explains there being a birth, and what it feels like to now be a baby and nurtured, and you feel like music accommodating that, and then men come and kind of nurture these new like babies in a very affirming and loving sort of way, you know, kind of wipe water on their face, and kind of clean them up, and it feels very real. I did it, and it can sound maybe odd from the outside, but when you’re in it, it’s as real as I think a process can be in order to kind of take you back to that place of feeling the nurturing energy and love.

After being “reborn,” participants are supposed to reenact the freedom of being a small boy. This involves dancing naked around a campfire with other men (“By the time the wild party comes along, everyone kind of joins the celebration unclothed,” Hoffman relates), and engaging in boyish carefreeness, like flinging cake and mud at one another. Afterwards, the guys all go for a shower together.

Okay, so why bring this up? I mean, what purpose does it serve apart from feeding people’s appetite for salacious gossip?

Generally, I don’t spend a lot of time writing about the more scandalous details of what actually goes on in “orientation change” circles. This particularly story is not the weirdest that I’ve heard. I chose it largely because it’s well documented, and the transcripts for the JONAH trial have been archived on-line. My usual approach is to let sleeping dogs lie. Orientation change efforts have been widely discredited already. Courage’s new web-site no longer has links to People Can Change (the organization responsible for Jouney into Manhood). Why bother bringing up these embarrassing excesses?

My reason for doing so now is straightforward: I’ve been thinking a lot about the New Atlantis study (which I am still in the process of critiquing), and there’s been a question that’s been really bothering me: what is the point? I mean, given that most major Christian organizations no longer claim that sexual orientation can be changed through deliberate efforts, why bother writing an extensive paper about how sexual orientation is not an innate or fixed trait? If everybody knows that there’s no credible way of causing an adult gay person to revert to heterosexuality, then why should it matter whether homosexuality is fixed at birth or fixed later, during the process of psychological development in childhood and adolescence? Either way, it’s an unchosen reality that people have to live with.

Last night, it clicked. The purpose of the paper isn’t to show that sexual orientation is changeable. The purpose of the paper doesn’t have anything to do with sexual orientation at all. It’s really about gender identity. Basically, conservative Christianity knows that the war against gay rights has been lost. Now they’re gearing up for the next phase of the Culture War: gender identity.

It seems that the game plan is to basically repeat exactly the same tactics that were used so ineffectually in the war against sexual minorities. First, talk about how depressed, anxious, suicidal and mentally ill these poor people are. Second, say that their condition is not fixed. Third, suggest that we to develop therapies to fix these folks – not only allowing them to function as normal members of society, but also delivering them from comorbid mental health problems. Fourth, argue that the evil forces of secularism, and especially the sinister gay agenda, are preventing people from getting the care that they really need and are thus dooming them to a life of misery. Fifth…

Well, fifth is to offer therapies that will supposedly help people change. This is where the process kind of goes underground. For decades, same-sex attracted Chrisitians, and parents with LGB kids, were fed the lie that therapy could change sexual orientation. Instead of providing adequate pastoral care for LGB people or providing actual help and guidance so that people could be supported in seeking to live out the teachings of the Church, LGB folks were marginalized, told to stay in the closet, and shuffled off to secret meetings in church basements where they were told that if they prayed hard enough and had enough faith, they could become straight. And if the prayer wasn’t working… well there were therapies for that.

Therapies like Journey into Manhood.

The problem is, while everybody in Christian media constantly repeated the refrain that we could “fix” homosexuality, almost nobody bothered to look into the supposed cures. Few bothered to find out what was actually happening when parents sent their gay kids to straight camp, or when SSA men went on retreats to reconnect with their supposedly fractured masculinity. When the facts started coming to light, mostly through the efforts of ex-ex-gay organizations, most Christian ministries quietly cut their ties to the suspect groups. Unfortunately, in many cases no direct apologies or repudiations were ever offered (the closure of Exodus is a notable exception to this rule.) This means that many of these dubious interventions are still lingering on the fringes of the Christian community, and every so often we still see articles in right-wing Christian publications lamenting the fact that we no longer offer therapies to help homosexuals get straight.

Now, we see the same tropes re-emerging with respect to gender dysphoria. “Science proves,” we’re told, “that gender identity isn’t an innate or fixed aspect of personality. It has a psychological genesis!” What is that genesis? Well, we’re not sure, but the theory seems to be that it’s more or less the same genesis that was proposed for homosexuality: a combination of improper gender socialization and broken relationships in the home, plus childhood sexual abuse. The unstated insinuation is that if only we could come up with an effective psychotherapy to treat these problems, then we would be able to make all of the trans people cis.

It’s only a matter of time before these therapies actually start to manifest. The first attempts have already been made, and some of the same characters who offered treatments for homosexuality are also offering treatments for gender identity disorder. Soon enough, I fear, we will have confident looking experts appearing on EWTN to reassure parents that their trans kids can be turned back into happy, cisgender children no problem – give us a few years, a big wad of cash, and occasionally send your child off to a weekend retreat where some old men can gawk at them and cuddle them naked and they’ll be fixed in no time.

Image credit: Piat Sauvage [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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