Ex-Ex-Gay Minister Tells His Story: It's Not Pretty

If you know of anyone who is struggling with their sexual orientation and considering going the "ex-gay" route, forward this story to them. It should make their blood run cold.

Scott Harrison desperately tried to change his sexual orientation in
various "ex-gay" ministries for eight years, three of them as a ministry leader
in Southern California. Most of his experience with ex-gay groups — Christian
organizations that see homosexuality as a choice that can be changed with proper
therapy — was with Living Waters and Desert Stream, two curricula of a national
ex-gay network that has more than 80 branches today. When Harrison joined in
1982, he felt ex-gay ministers were then a band of compassionate outsiders
attending to the first AIDS victims. But by the end of that decade, Harrison had
taken note of the movement's increasing radicalism, symbolized for him by the
minister at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in San Pedro, Calif., who
performed an exorcism on him in an attempt to cast out the "demons" said to be
the cause of his homosexuality. Harrison finally quit the movement in 1990 after
deciding he could, after all, reconcile his sexuality with his Christian faith.
Today, he speaks to parents of gay and lesbian children about the dangers he
sees in the ex-gay movement. Harrison says the relatively recent alignment of
Exodus International, one of the largest ex-gay groups with some 120 ministries
in North America alone, with anti-gay Christian "dominionists" — people who want
to impose Christian rules on the secular institutions of society — has led to
ex-gay ministers pursuing a hard-line message with young people that can only
end in mental anguish and failure.

Read more of this story at the Southern Poverty Law Center's website.