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SIMKIN: The buff and the beautiful have come out to play. New York City is celebrating its gay pride week and more than seven thousand men are swaying and sweating to the beat. Some conservative Christians think this is a sea of sin. They reject the theory that people are born gay, believing instead that homosexuality is unnatural, preventable and curable.Cohen: I believe that
men and women fit together. This and this – it works. These two things and these two things, they just don’t fit. So natural law shows us that men and women work and fit together naturally and beautifully and two men or two women, it’s just incomplete.

SIMKIN: Richard Cohen is one of America’s leading conversion therapists. Inside his small suburban office, a transformation is underway.

Cohen: I’ve asked you to do the inner child workbook in order to get in touch with the little boy inside that you used to be.

SIMKIN: Lee Brundidge is gay but he’s having his sexuality reoriented.

Cohen: This is to help you externalise, express feelings that are trapped in your body to make you a more powerful man.

SIMKIN: There are more than one hundred conversion clinics in the United States. Richard Cohen uses a variety of techniques to knock the homosexuality out of his clients.

Cohen: Lee.. Lee, why don’t you take care of things tidily – like that.

SIMKIN: Smashing a tennis racquet apparently helps people dredge up repressed memories – from as far back as the womb.

Lee: Lee, Lee why did you do that?

SIMKIN: The therapist says he’s helped hundreds of clients overcome their homosexuality, and Lee Brundidge says he’s one of them.

Lee: I’m confident I found it, man. I’m at peace. I’m happy. I’m enjoying life – successful.

Cohen: Heavenly father thank you for this…

SIMKIN: Richard Cohen believes anyone can be ‘straightened out’ if they try hard enough. His evidence? Himself. He was once gay but says he’s now happily heterosexual, married with children. Cohen calls himself ‘ex gay’.

Cohen: Can you imagine a thousand, million pound weight being lifted off one’s shoulders and that gnawing at my gut that was there my whole life, felt like my whole life, craving a guy, was gone. It was like a bird getting out of a cage. It was like a prisoner being released. Now I’m exclusively heterosexual . I’m, not interested in guys.
I feel my ‘guy-ness.’ I’m attracted to my wife.

SIMKIN: Reorientation therapy isn’t just the realm of independent counsellors. We travel west, to Colorado Springs.
This is the headquarters of Focus on the Family, the country’s most powerful Christian lobby group. It’s so big, it has its own postcode – and an annual operating budget of $200 million.

Radio host: Tell me about these horrible children’s books that we really need to be aware of?”

SIMKIN: Tens of millions of Americans listen to its top radio program each week, and it wields enormous political influence.

Radio host: And yet here we have something that could actually be very destructive to them, both emotionally and spiritually.

Haley: I never want another 16 year old boy that struggles with same sex attractions to not to know that walking away from homosexuality is possible for him and that’s my life calling, that’s what I’m committed to.

SIMKIN: Mike Haley runs Focus on the Family’s homosexuality division. He’s ex-gay himself.

Are you still attracted to men in any way then or are you completely changed?

Haley: I might see a man at the gym that has big muscular, masculine legs. Well, 20 years ago I would have wanted to sleep with that man.

Now what I do is I look at that man with envy – I wish I had his legs. I no longer sexualise that unmet need in my own life.

SIMKIN: Miami – vice city.

SIMKIN: This is the latest stop for Mike Haley’s ex-gay road show – the conversion conference he’s taking around the country.Haley: So for the very first time, at the age of 16, I walked into a gay bar and let me tell you I thought I’d come home.

SIMKIN: The congregation’s told thirty percent of gays who try to change fail, thirty percent have partial success and thirty percent are completely reoriented.

Haley: And like I said, I began to notice things that I’d never noticed about women before. I guess the easiest way to help you to understand this is if you think puberty is hard enough once, you ought to try it twice.

SIMKIN: Seven hundred people have turned up – the curious, the concerned and the confused.

Haley: For instance, if you have a daughter that struggles with homosexuality we have put a packet together. It talks about female homosexuality. We have a male packet, we have a packet for pastors, we have a packet for youth pastors - and these come at a discount if you end up buying the whole set. So I just wanted to make sure you were aware of those over in the bookstore…

SIMKIN: The reorientation business is big business. At the back of the church, a shop is selling books, videos and audiotapes with titles like ‘You Don’t Have to Be Gay’.

Haley: One of the myths that we really want to clear up, especially from those that are from the gay community is that you know this is not something that you pray away or that if you read the bible enough, poof, your homosexuality takes care of itself.

MAN ON MEGAPHONE: Let’s show Coral Ridge Presbyterian church what real religion looks like.

SIMKIN: Many homosexuals believe the ex-gay movement is about hate, not love.

MAN: Faggots!

MAN IN MARCH: That’s right!

SIMKIN: Outside the church, a small group of protestors is condemning the conference, saying change is neither possible nor necessary.

MAN ON MEGAPHONE: God loves unconditionally.

Besen: It’s a fraud. They’re misleading people for political gain and to make money. They’re hurting people, they’re destroying families.And it’s really just a high-financed campaign of misinformation – it’s an absolute tragedy for everybody involved.

SIMKIN: Wayne Besen is conversion therapy’s fiercest critic. He describes the reorientation techniques as dangerous and laughable.Besen: They tell you to become more masculine as a guy by drinking Gatorade, the sports drink, and calling your friends dude. And they even tell you to wear a rubber band on your wrist and when you see someone you’re attracted to, you snap it and it’s supposed to snap you back into reality.

SIMKIN: Besen was exposed to conversion therapy soon after he told his parents he was gay.CD: Whenever you want to relax…. Whenever you need to relax, just take a deep breath.

SIMKIN: They gave him a CD that claimed to cure homosexuality by self-hypnosis. It’s still being sold.

Besen: Completely humiliating for a 18 year old.

CD: You have permission to change. You are changing, You are changing now. You enjoy a woman’s body in the nude.
Having sex with a woman is wonderful for you. You are truly happy with your new sexuality. You enjoy having sex with women. Your past sexuality is a closed issue. It is over . It has served its purpose.

Besen: The ex-gays say they’re about compassion but they’re really not. They say they’re about conversion but it’s really about coercion. They say they’re about persuasion but it’s really persecution.

SIMKIN: But there are people who say they were gay and now say they are straight. Does it work for at least a small group of committed people?

Besen: Reparative therapy works for nobody. What it does is it shames people and creates a stigma so they want to say they’ve changed.

SIMKIN: Many American gays are proud of their sexuality, proud to strut their stuff on the streets. For others, though, it’s a torment.

SIMKIN: Mel White was once a trusted advisor to the religious right’s leadership. Christian himself, he married and had children, but was suppressing a secret. He was gay. He spent decades desperately trying to change his sexuality, even enduring exorcisms and electroshock treatment.

White: They had me bring pictures of men, including myself, that I found attractive and then they’d put in pictures of women and mix them up. And they gave me the control so they wouldn’t see themselves as abusers, and they said when you see an attractive man, you turn up the power. And then we’ll change it, and when you see an attractive woman we’ll turn down the power. It was jus that simplistic.

SIMKIN: So it’s almost Pavlovian?

White: Yes. See a man, zap.

SIMKIN: None of it worked. Eventually, Reverend White embraced his homosexuality, reconciling it with his Christianity. He now lives with another man and calls it a happy ending, but it only came after decades of confusion, shame and suffering. At one point, he slashed his wrists in front of his wife.

White: I was bleeding, she was crying. We went to the hospital and after that she said, “You know you’ve been a good husband and a good father, but there’s no reason for you to struggle like this. This isn’t right I love gay people but didn’t want you to be one and you are one. So let’s separate.”

White: God loves him and it breaks God’s heart to see him so fouled up on this issue and other issues . I mean. the bumper sticker “Jesus is coming again and boy is he pissed”, that bumper sticker applied here…

SIMKIN: Mel White’s experiences have turned him into a vocal critic of the conversion ministries and a campaigner for gay rights. He’s training young people in the art of peaceful protest, warning them what they could face if they confront the religious right.

-You’re obviously a faggot. You’ve got big white earrings. -You’re dressed so gay. - Do you like to rape little boys? It’s not godly – it’s ungodly You are going to hell. You know that, you know you’re going to hell. -I’m telling, you are really sad. But I love you anyway.

White: Gays are killing themselves as much as being killed and much of that is because they fail at the ex-gay movement. They feel like such a failure when God doesn’t change them, then they feel like, OK, ‘I’m a failure and I should die.’

We have all kinds of people that I have buried who have left suicide notes that say I didn’t know how else to settle this. I couldn’t make it right with God and I couldn’t make it right with myself. And so I accuse the ex-gay movement of being complicit with murder all over this country and now around the world.

SIMKIN: The ex-gay movement now has a new focus, a new target – young people. Memphis, Tennessee is the home of the blues and the oldest reorientation ministry.
It’s called Love in Action and offers live-in therapy.
Smid: We could have anywhere from 15 and 20 people here at a time…

SIMKIN: We were shown around the campus, but forbidden from filming the clients. A 2 week course here costs $2500. A 6-week program is $6000.

SIMKIN: So how does something like that help change someone’s sexuality?

Smid: When you’re looking at the spider web – when you’re picking up someone and putting them through the spider web it can bring up insecurities. Are they going to hold me? Are they going to drop me? What’s going to happen?…

SIMKIN: John Smid is Love in Action’s director. He’s been on a sexual roller coaster.

He married a woman, had a gay affair, got divorced, lived as a homosexual, became a Christian, changed his sexuality and is now married again.

Smid: It’s costly to leave homosexuality. It’s difficult. It’s painful at times to deal with the stuff inside honestly, but I’d much rather put my energy in this direction – and it has very much paid off, I’ve never regretted leaving homosexuality, not for one moment have I ever regretted it.

SIMKIN: At Love in Action, the therapy is intense, the rules incredibly strict. Clients must report all their fantasies to counsellors. For the first few days of the program, the clients aren’t allowed to speak, make eye contact or even gesture to anybody.

Lance: Basically it’s very ‘cultish’, like a cult. It’s just like being incarcerated, being trapped. It’s a constant
barrage of this is wrong, this is not right, something is wrong with you, we need to fix you. Their whole therapy is based on the conditioning of shame and that’s what every day is centred around.

SIMKIN: Lance Carroll spent two months at Love in Action. He’s still gay, despite being subjected to the extraordinary restrictions listed in Love in Action’s rulebook.
Lance: Men must remove all facial hair seven days weekly and sideburns must not fall below the top of the ear. Women must shave legs and underarms at least twice weekly. Clients may not wear Abercrombie and Fitch or Calvin Klein brand clothing, undergarments or accessories.

No television viewing, going to movies or reading, watching or listening to secular media of any kind. So even Beethoven and Bach aren’t allowed because they aren’t expressly Christian.

SIMKIN: What makes Love in Action really controversial is the focus on children. People as young as fifteen are brought here – some against their will.

Lance Carroll was just eighteen when his mother and father forced him into conversion therapy. He’s no longer living with his parents. His mother in particular, can’t handle having a gay son.Lance: My mum went crazy.

She was beating me and hitting me and yelling hateful things like ‘queer’ and ‘faggot’ and ‘pussy’. All these terrible things. She basically beat me into a corner in my room while I tried to get my last few possessions and my dad had to physically pull her off me out of the room and basically I had to run to my car and locked my self in because she was running right behind me, pounding on the door to get in.
Smid: We believe as Christians that Christian parents have not only the right but they have the obligation to raise their children in the way that they feel is appropriate, right, morally, ethically, and spirituality.

SIMKIN: Gay identity has always been complex and controversial. The cowboy is America’s epitome of masculinity and they breed them particularly tough down in Texas.

SIMKIN: The men who ride bulls and broncos say these are the longest seconds on earth. And yet all of these men are homosexual – gay cowboys.

SIMKIN: Tim Kernan and Rich Parker have been together for three years. Tim: I’m not here to make a statement to anybody.

I’m here because it’s what I like to do and who I am. That’s the only reason I’m here.

SIMKIN: The medical mainstream once classed homosexuals as mentally ill. These days, though, all the major psychiatric and psychological associations reject the idea that homosexuality is a disorder, and some even believe conversion therapy is downright dangerous.

Tim: Well first I’m not sick, so there’s nothing to cure. I do not feel sick. I live a good life. I’m nice to people. I take care of my family, I take care of my mother. I mean I don’t see what’s wrong with anything.

Rich: To say that it’s a choice – it isn’t a choice. Because if I had a choice – who’d pick this? Why would you want a life with AIDS? Why would you want to be discriminated against? If I could choose, I’d be living in a house with a wife and two kids and a white picket fence.

SIMKIN: Homosexuality is a hot political issue. The ex-gay movement is getting bigger, more powerful and more ambitious.
Richard Cohen is one of the leaders of the new campaign – and he wants his message heard around the world.

Cohen: Everywhere homosexuality is taught we want to teach healing out of unwanted homosexuality or same sex attraction. That’s our goal.

Here, in Australia, in England, in Europe, all over the world, we want kids to know you can choose to live a gay life or you can choose to change and come out straight.
Besen: The ex gay ministries offer promises they can’t deliver, and offer disasters they never promise – they destroy families.

And it’s also wrong for them to say they are just trying to help people when what they are really doing is pass anti gay laws to discriminate – and that’s my problem with them.

SIMKIN: Even as the debate turns political, its implications are still intensely personal. Tim Kernan and Rich Parker, the gay cowboys, have finished at the rodeo and are home on the range.

Rich: I don’t want any right someone else doesn’t have. I don’t want to be treated differently than anybody else, I just want to be accepted. I am who I am. I want to be accepted, I want to be able to go to a rodeo and not be second guessed. Or I want to be able to walk into a restaurant and sit across from him and not have someone ask me if he’s my brother.

SIMKIN: The ex gay debate is becoming a key battleground in the culture wars, a clash between biology and morality. It’s not just a fight for hearts and minds but for sexuality and souls as well.

Reporter: Mark Simkin
Camera: Tim Bates, Dan Sweetapple
Research: Janet Silver
Editor: Stuart Miller