Love in Action International stands on a bluff in north Memphis, the steep roof of the ministry’s angular modernist church offering itself as a beacon of hope for the world’s reluctant homosexuals.
That should include every gay man and lesbian on the planet, according to the Reverend John Smid, the head of this evangelical group, whose mission is to take gays and straighten them out.
”I hope we can help men and women overcome … mindsets counterproductive to their walk in Christ,” Smid said on a sweltering Tennessee afternoon as he showed Love in Action supporters around the new mission headquarters.
About two dozen mostly elderly wellwishers went on a tour of the compound, the size of a small school. One, Anne Layne, confided that her financial support for the group arose from bitter experience. ”My first husband just left me with two children. I didn’t even know he was gay.”
Smid left his wife and two daughters in 1980 in similar circumstances — he had decided he was gay. The potted autobiography he hands out is unusually graphic for a church document, revealing his former ”addictive habit of masturbation” and his homosexual experiences.
But after four years, Smid had a religious epiphany and he was led back to heterosexuality and marriage.
He attributes all of this confusion to his family life, his parents’ decision to park him with a relative amid their marital problems, and a sexual advance from a ”significant adult in my life” when he was 10. Love in Action is built around bringing to light such childhood traumas.
”Homosexuality always comes out of a distorted view of oneself,” he said. So his mission in life is to uncross these wires with group therapy and strict behaviour rules aimed at driving out the ”false images” homosexuals have of themselves. The rules run to 13 pages. They call for ”any temptations, fantasies, or dreams to be presented to one’s staff worker”, and stipulate that ”facial hair is banned on men while women must shave their underarms at least twice weekly”. Clothes are even controlled (there’s a ban on Abercrombie and Fitch, and Calvin Klein brands).
The conversion style is widely known as ”reparative therapy”, and is spreading around this increasingly evangelical country. While there is one Anglican organisation for ”ex-gays” in Britain, there are at least 120 in the US, says Exodus International, an ”ex-gay” network.
Outside Washington, billboards show handsome, smiling men announcing ”Ex-gays prove that change is possible”. The booming business reflects a constant supply of unhappy people from strict Christian households, whose sexual feelings clash with their beliefs. Adult clients pay thousands of dollars in the hope of a ”cure”.
However, Smid has provoked controversy by starting a programme for teenagers who have been sent by parents to Love in Action — mostly against their wishes.
One, Zach Stark, a disgruntled 16-year-old, went online with a cry for help and ignited a national row. ”It’s like boot camp,” he wrote in his blog in May. ”If I do come out straight, I’ll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won’t matter.”
His plight drew protests from gay activist groups, who demonstrated outside Love in Action calling for his release, and inspired national media stories. Zach’s father, Joe, went on the Christian Broadcasting Network to defend his decision to send his son there.
Smid is unapologetic. ”We believe it’s the parent’s responsibility to intervene,” he said, and claimed that only one of the 27 teenagers who had taken part in the youth programme, Refuge, failed to finish the course. Earlier this month, Zach posted another blog saying that he ”wasn’t pressured into doing anything that would hurt me”. Nothing was heard from him again.
But now Tennessee state authorities are pursuing an inquiry into whether Love in Action is selling therapy without properly licensed therapists. Smid has removed references to ”therapy” and ”treatment plan” from his website but critics maintain his programme could be psychologically damaging.
Jeff Harwood, a gay Christian who spent three years in Love in Action in the 90s, said: ”It was very emotional, digging up things you’d done … the more you [could] dig up, the more credit you [got].”
Harwood came out of the programme believing himself ”cured”. He dated a woman but the relationship fell apart and former impulses returned. He reached a crisis. ”I just said ‘this is it’. God is nothing but a cosmic sadist. I sat in my bathroom with a carving knife, wondering whether it would be better to slit my wrists or cut off my genitals.”
A friend talked him out of suicide and now, aged 41, he is reconciled both to his homosexuality and Christianity. Of almost 40 ”graduates” of the Love in Action programme that he knows of, more than half are still openly gay, and only 12% consider themselves ex-gay, he said.
Love in Action’s figures differ. Gerard Wellman (24) the ministry’s business administrator — and a ”successful graduate” of the programme — said that 70% of graduates say ”it works for them”. He added: ”Homosexual describes behaviour, not people.”
Others, however, claim they have been left unchanged or traumatised. One, John, said he hated every moment of the programme. ”You get emotional in front of people you don’t know. It was very Orwellian, upsetting. They wanted to know all about my sexual incidents. They make you go over an incident again and again. You obsess about things that happened in your past. I don’t know how anyone can do that to another person.” – Guardian Unlimited Â