Wayne Besen, author of Anything But Straight, a new book seeking to expose and ultimately disprove the controversial “ex-gay” movement, will hold book signings on Jan. 27 and 28 in San Diego. Besen, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign and a nationally recognized GLBT rights advocate, is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the ex-gay movement.

The book outlines the history of ex-gay ministries, how they developed and the various methods and techniques they use. “I show their follies, I show their failures, and how they have very bizarre techniques that don’t help people at all but destroy lives,” Besen said. “There has never really been a book written like this before that puts it all into perspective. It’s one-stop shopping on the ex-gay myth. This book gives activists the ability to counter these ministries, and know what they’re truly about — who they’re targeting, who is funding them, and what we can do about it. It’s also incredibly important this year because we have this divisive election year, and the President just announced that they might do the $1.5 billion protect marriage campaign. It is an important and crucial year in our history.”

When Besen began work on the book four and a half years ago, he had already had personal experience with ex-gay methods. “When I first came out in 1988, my parents bought me an ex-gay tape called ‘Gay and Unhappy,’” he recalled. “Half of it was self-hypnotic and the other half was subliminal. It tried to say ‘you are gay because you have a bad relationship with your parents; count to three and you will search your soul records and you will become heterosexual.’ The interesting thing is that I had a great relationship with my parents until they bought me this tape. I felt they had been duped and conned by the people who made this tape, and I saw what I think is indicative of these ministries, that they disregard the coming out process, instead of bringing families together they tear them apart, offering false hope to vulnerable and desperate people, as my parents were when I first came out. When I was a kid this was used against me at a very precarious time. Here I was trying to explain that I’ve been gay all my life and here’s these people saying I can snap my fingers and become straight, basically.”

Besen said that while working for the Human Rights Campaign a million-dollar ad campaign was launched by Focus on the Family, a conservative religious group that used the slogan “Pray away the gay.” The organization took out full-page ads in The New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, among others, using a man named John Paulk as their ex-gay poster boy.

“When this political campaign came up, it was a real opportunity to explore these ministries, investigate what they were really about and see if there was any truth to them,” Besen said. “What I found was that it was a sham, and a scam that needed to be exposed.”

While out with a colleague in the summer of 2000, Besen spotted and photographed ex-gay poster boy Paulk at a Washington D.C. gay bar. Because of the bad press, Paulk was removed as chairman of the North American board of Exodus International, the ex-gay ministries group, and put on probation as a board member. In August 2003, Besen traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, where he uncovered allegations that HIV-positive ex-gay leader Michael Johnston was having unsafe sex with several men while still a spokesperson for Rev. Jerry Falwell and other conservative religious groups.

Besen began reading as many books on the ex-gay topic as he could find, and attended numerous ex-gay ministry meetings, some undercover and some as himself.

“It’s very bizarre,” Besen recalled. “It’s a cult of personality. It’s usually one person leading these ministries who says they’ve changed — one person on the payroll saying they’ve changed, and then all these other people are on what they call ‘a journey.’ But it’s not really a journey at all; it’s more like riding on a stationary bicycle. They’re pedaling and pedaling and trying to distract these people with all kinds of bizarre techniques and mind control, but people wake up a year later or maybe many years later, saying that their lives are ruined, that they went on that journey on that stationary bike, and realized that they hadn’t gone anywhere.”

Besen said that doing research at the ex-gay ministries and gathering information for the book was often emotionally draining. “It’s all very sad,” he said. “There is a lot of misery and pain, and a lot of suffering. It’s a lot of people who basically want to die, who talk about suicide and depression and unhappiness. It’s all so heartbreaking. Sometimes I’d have to stop this book for several weeks at a time, because I could only read so much negativity in the books, meet so many people who were one step away from ending it all, or had just lived years resigned to a life of misery with no love. Others had married people they didn’t love or had sex with people they weren’t attracted to.”

Anything But Straight was released Oct. 11 of last year in conjunction with National Coming Out Day.

Besen has already completed the first leg of the book tour, and it has not provoked any protests or negative actions from agencies affiliated with the ex-gay movement. “There has been a concerted effort to ignore this by the religious right; it’s an organized effort to ignore this because none of them are commenting,” Besen said. “That’s okay. I know that a lot of people in their programs contact me, so they can officially ignore it all they want, but unofficially it is changing lives and helping people escape the ex-gay trap.”

Besen said that the recent upsurge in media attention the ex-gay movement has received in the last several years is due to heavy advertising by right-wing religious organizations. “If you put a million dollars into advertising like the religious right has, of course they’re going to seem like they’re successful,” he said. “You could use a million dollars and advertise that eating roaches is good, and people will say that there is a new trend that people are eating cockroaches. That’s exactly what we’re talking about here — you take these people with these false stories and you put them on a full-page ad that cost $100,000 in USA Today, it’s going to have an impact. There are a lot of fraudulent products that are advertised that don’t help anybody, but nonetheless people will buy them, and it looked like it worked because they had a big infomercial. That’s what this is, it’s therapy by infomercial.”

According to Besen, the religious right does not give money to directly to ex-gay ministries. “The religious right doesn’t even believe in this, and I can prove it,” Besen said. “What they do is they give money to the ads, where they profit, and don’t give a dime to these ministries. The ex-gays have actually complained about that. If Focus on the Family really believed that this stuff was working, they would put millions into launching these programs themselves. But the fact that they don’t speaks volumes about their own belief in it. It’s all PR and spin.”

As part of the second leg of his book tour, Besen plans to personally deliver a signed copy of his book to Focus on the Family’s headquarters in Colorado, and will attend a Focus on the Family rally in Nashville. “I’m also going to deliver a book to John Paulk in Portland, Oregon. I’m going to sign a personal copy for him, as he runs away from a gay bar on the cover of my book. I think he needs to read it, too.”

For more information about Anything But Straight, visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com and click on this article for a link to the website. Besen will be holding book signings Tuesday, Jan. 27, at Obelisk Bookstore at 7:00 p.m., and Wednesday, Jan. 28, at Ramsden Morrison Gallery at 7:30 p.m.