Last Saturday, Banker’s Hill church St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral hosted a day-long conference on the ex-gay movement – a network of individuals and groups who believe that gay people can become straight and assists them to purportedly change their sexual orientation – to help educate the community about the harm it has caused to GLBT people. The conference, called Just Love, coincided with an anti-gay ex-gay conference hosted by Skyline Church in La Mesa, called Love Won Out.

“Their [Love Won Out’s] theology and beliefs dictate that LGBT persons are individuals that choose their sexual orientation [and] that it can be fixed,” said Human Rights Campaign’s Religious Liaison Joshua Romero, whose parents persuaded him to attend one of its conferences while in college. “That’s a hard pill to swallow when you know it’s a part of who you are.”

Last August, a special task force established by American Psychological Association (APA) to study the research on so called “conversion therapies” on sexual orientation released a two year study, which included a review of 83 peer reviewed articles on the subject, concluding that “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and involve some risk of harm.”

“Contrary to claims of sexual orientation change advocates and practitioners, there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation,” said Judith M. Glassgold, chair of the APA’s Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation.

In its study, the task force recommended that practitioners assist clients through therapies that “involve acceptance, support and identity exploration and development without imposing a specific identity outcome.”

“This is good news,” said Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public about the ex-gay movement. The APA study “put the ex-gays [movement] on the defensive.”

“We’ve seen them retreat in many ways from the public. They were very much about getting out there and talking to wide audiences. Now they are kind of narrowcasting in the last years, speaking only within churches. I think that is a positive development,” Besen said.

And yet the movement continues, Besen said, adding that many of the movement’s teachers or therapists are not qualified to teach or counsel.

“They don’t have qualifications. They [the ex-gay organizations] don’t do background checks on a lot of these individuals. I would caution anybody and any parent there, who’s at Love Won Out, to be very careful and look who you are going to put your child with.”

The major speakers featured at Skyline Church’s Love Won Out conference – Melissa Fryrear, Joe Dallas or Nancy Heche – do not hold any non-religious based degrees in psychology or counseling.

When Romero attended the Love Won Out conference, he said speakers told him that he was not normal because he was gay and that he was wrong and a sinner despite his commitment to God and his faith, Romero said.

“It created a lot of dissonance within me by what they said,” he said.

Romero said that speakers at the conference also said that homosexuality was a myth.

“So then what am I? asked Romero. “I’m a person of faith, but there’s no such thing as me? That hurts.”

“It makes such a deep cut into who you are and part of your identity,” he added.

Marriage and family therapist Michael Bussee knows a thing or two about the ex-gay movement. He was one of its founders. But after several years of running one of the movement’s first organizations, Exodus (now Exodus International), Bussee came to realize the damage he was doing to himself and the gay and lesbian people that came in contact with his organization.

“If I had to title my speech it would probably be something along the lines of, ‘What the heck were you thinking?’ Bussee said.

Following the advice of a supervisor whom said that you could either be homosexual or Christian but not both, Bussee choose to be a Christian and created a workshop on how to counsel gay callers at a church-based crisis intervention hotline he worked for. The workshop emphasized that gay people could change their sexual orientation by fully accepting Jesus Christ into their lives.

“I and a man named Jim started doing this workshop together. Other churches started finding out about it and suddenly we had a ministry. We were called by God to do this! And we started getting invitations to go everywhere,” Bussee said.

After creating the ministry called EXIT (Ex-Gay Intervention Team), Bussee started the more known ex-gay coalition organization called Exodus (now Exodus International).

“At first there was a sense that we really were changing. There was a sense of freedom. You were meeting other people like you. You fully believed it was going to happen. You had faith. And that feeling stayed for about two years,” Bussee said. “Then I noticed that none of the guys in the group were changing. There was a lot of hooking up after the prayer group. And then it got really, really bad. Guys started turning to depression, drug and alcohol use, and we had a couple of suicide attempts.”

At that point, Bussee and Exodus co-founder Gary Cooper, decided to call it quits. The two then became life partners and “went underground” for nearly a decade.

One night, while watching TV together, the two came across conservative pastor Louis Sheldon talking about the virtues of Exodus.

“Gary and I looked at each other and I said, ‘Are you ready?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ So we went public,” Bussee said. The two then began work on a documentary about their journey and the ex-gay movement called One Nation Under God. Since then, Bussee – Cooper died of AIDS as they were going public – has been speaking out about their experience.

“We wanted to go public because we saw the harm that had been done, done to us personally and to our families,” Bussee said.