It was one of those beautiful winter nights, cold enough to be bracing but not bitter -- crystalline stars glittering in a sky of midnight blue and a wind blowing in the treetops. The prayer room was lit with a warm incandescent glow, contemporary christian worship music was playing and my best friends in the world were in that room. the pastor, an elder who was observing and two “deliverance ministers” the men who would cast out the demons, break curses and pray for my healing. I was nearly fourty years old, married for over a dozen years and desperate to finally be free from my homosexuality. I had tried everything over the years and nothing helped. Most recently christian psychotherapy and massive doses of four antidepressants designed to eliminate my sex drive and get me to a place where I was “functional” albeit miserable. Lately I had taken to praying that God would kill me. My most recent fantasy was a terrible car wreck. I would come over a hill doing 55 and directly in front of me would be a farmer in a pickup truck with one of those giant hay bale forks on the back. It would be too late to stop. Then it would all be over, my wife and son could mourn my death and everyone would say what a good person I was and I would have died nobly. My family and friends would come to my funeral and mourn my passing, it would be an honorable death. Or I could die of cancer, or a heart attack. anything really, or god could just smite me with lightening some day out in the field. I didn’t care I just knew something had to change or I could not go on.
That night was a pretty brief session as deliverance ministry goes, probably only an hour. I had been in sessions that lasted 12 hours with counseling, prayer, exorcism and pottty breaks. It is very difficult to describe how it feels to have someone standing over you and screaming with a face disfigured for the demon of so and so to COME OUT of you. After about a half hour of deliverance ministry I crumpled to the floor and was lying in the fetal position. My best friend was standing over me like he was field dressing a deer and screaming at the top of his lungs for the gay demon to come out of me. I was crying. Just crying -- the most deep, primal, scream of pain and anguish I have ever heard. I have only cried like that a few times in my life, the first time I cried so hard I burst the blood vessles in my eye. This was a deep baritone wail that sounded like a person being flayed alive in slow motion. “COME OUT OF HIM...COME OUT OF HIM...IN THE NAME OF JESUS.... COME OUT OF HIM.” There was nothing in me to come out. I looked at the wreckage of my heart and soul. There was no horrid demon with its talons around my heart, no evil spirit blinding me or gay demon lodged in my soul. I looked deep inside and all I saw was me. That terrified little boy cowering in a corner with a lifetime of shame and abuse and shunning and hate, a lifetime supply of guilt, cruel words, prophecies of doom and fear. Then it hit me:
There was no demon on the inside of me, it was just ME.
This was the last "exorcism" or "deliverance session" I submitted myself to. I left realizing -- in the metaphor of the child's fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes -- that the Emperor was truly nude, and that the faith experience I so desperately tried to make real for nearly two decades was just a mental exercise in futility. It was a sham akin to group hysteria or hypnosis in which everyone had to pretend to see the emperor's beautiful new clothes. If we admitted: "the dude is NAKED!" we would be politely-- and with great christian love -- excreted from the body. Frankly, I am very happy on the outside looking in.
References/Resources:
Reparative Therapy: A Pseudo Science
Jeffry G. Ford, MA, Licensed Psychologist, former leader in ex-gay ministries
Anything But Straight - Unmasking the scandals and lies behind the ex-gay myth.
Truth Wins Out
The truth about ex-gay ministries
Gay Christian Survivor Group
American Psychological Association’s primer
Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation & Youth
Religious Tolerance.Org
National Mental Health Association re: bullying of gay youth.