Deliverance: An ‘ex-gay’ journey

by Iain Clacher
Queensland Pride
February 2000

After two suicide attempts and with another stewing in his mind, Steven Brett was saved when his mother committed him to a psychiatric hospital four years ago.

Under the guidance and ‘counselling’ of three Pentecostal churches and the Brisbane chapter of ‘ex-gay’ ministry Exodus International, Steven had spent a decade begging God to deliver him from the ‘demon of homosexuality’ inside.

Lured by hope he could ‘overcome his sexual brokenness’ and ‘live how God intended’, he submitted to three exorcisms and countless programs he now describes as “destructive and abusive brainwashing”.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was the most bludgeoning, destroying, soul-sapping experience of my life,” Steven says as he flicks through the pages of a photo album from the time.

The slim, youthful, 33 year old public servant says he was raised by working class parents who didn’t subscribe to any religious views, although when he was a boy his mother ‘did the done thing’ and sent him off to Sunday School.

Like many gay men he knew from an early age he was ‘different’, but this difference was only ever discussed at home and school in the most negative way. “I was plagued with this terrible dilemma. I thought it was an evil, vile, despicable, terrible thing because that’s what everyone around me was saying”.

Having escaped school at 15, Steven had his first taste of ‘the gay scene’ at 16. “I went to the Zoo (now Dooley’s) and the very first night I was there the police arrived. We were bundled outside and lined up in the street. I was taken into a paddy wagon and strip-searched. No-one asked for my ID. I thought, ‘I have a sickness, this is an illness and I’m going to be ostracised and punished and my life is going to be hell. What can I do?’”

Extroverted, yet craving acceptance, Steven joined a Pentecostal church in 1986 after accepting an invitation to a hot-dog and roller-skating function. At the end of a sermon on isolation and loneliness, the very things Steven then suffered, he ‘gave his life to Christ’.

“Apart from wanting to belong, I knew that homosexuality was wrong in the eyes of the church. I thought, if I became a Christian, at least that would stop the talk and the rumours and the shame I’m bringing on myself and my family,” he explains.

The first eight months were ‘wonderful and exhilarating,’ he says because be had a new group of friends in an accepting environment. He convinced himself that he had experienced a ‘communication with God’.

Charismatic or Pentecostal churches say those who are ‘born again’ experience the ‘gifts of the spirit,’ often including the ability to heal by faith, prayer and the ‘laying of hands’. Many such churches routinely claim being ‘touched by the holy spirit’ will cure a host of diseases and disabilities from cancer to quadriplegia. But just as they promote the healing powers of God’s spiritual force, they also believe demons from hell are real beings which cruise the earth to wreak spiritual havoc.

While Steven poured his heart and soul into repressing his homosexuality, his body rebelled. “Trapped in the chasm between who I was and who I should be, I started doing beats,” he says, admitting he became so ‘addicted’ he would even visit beats on his way to church.

“At beats I discovered gay men. Men like me, but men who -- like me -- had something to hide and were clearly ashamed and operating under the cover of darkness. I was also a constant visitor to the front of the church confessing publicly that I went to parks and public toilets and had sex with men. It was so demeaning, but that’s who I was.”


“They’d march around me and cast out the demon of sodomy,
the demon of beats, the demon of promiscuous sex”


By 1989, the pastor at Steven’s church didn’t know what to do with him. Lacking direct experience in homosexual issues, the pastor referred Steven to ‘the experts’, the Brisbane chapter of Exodus International.

Funded and supported by a range of Protestant churches, Exodus officially regards homosexuality as a destructive and sinful disorder that can only be healed by Christ. According to Exodus’ policy statement, “[the] process entails the freedom to grow into heterosexuality”.

First, Steven met Peter Lane, Exodus’ Brisbane leader. Married with two children, this “veteran of street and bar evangelism,” was a Teen Challenge worker when he founded Brisbane’s first ex-gay ministry, Liberty, in 1978. Ten years later, Lane’s Restoration Ministries officially affiliated with Exodus. He is now chairman of Exodus International South Pacific.

“He’s a lovely man,” Steven says, “he really believes in what he’s doing. He opened me up to a whole new world I had never experienced before in the church. Here was information about why I was homosexual and information about how I could ‘overcome’ my homosexuality.”

While they would never use words like ‘conversion’ or ‘cure’, Steven says the prospect of conversion to heterosexuality was ‘definitely a strong undercurrent’ of the Exodus message.

Steven nominates Singapore-based evangelist Sinclair ‘Sy’ Rogers as Exodus’ most exalted role model. Described as a “gifted international communicator,” the one-time pre-op transgender now makes a living selling his story of ‘sexual redemption’. During a severe attack of chest pain in 1979, Rogers says he begged God to let him ‘live to know you first’. Three years after tossing his hormones away, Rogers married wife Karen. The couple now have a daughter, a blessing he claims “proves that nothing is impossible with God”.

“He was so well-spoken, so eloquent,” Steven says of the ‘alabaster-skinned’ Rogers. “I had his videos and tapes. He was an inspiration. We all used him when trying to convert or lead other homosexuals to Christ and to deliver them from this dreadful burden.”

Steven had heard a lot about ‘deliverance’ through his church. “Exorcism is a dreadful word you might hear in movies. They never use that word. It was called deliverance. You would be delivered from these demonic influences,” he says. Steven submitted to three deliverance sessions, once with his church and twice through people he describes as having a ‘partial leadership and administrative role’ in Exodus.

“They marched around me praying at me in tongues. I’d sit there trying to focus on Jesus and they’d be screaming at me, casting out the demons. The very thought that I could be inhabited by these celestial, demonic beings was dreadful and traumatic. They’d march around me and cast out the demon of sodomy, the demon of beats, the demon of promiscuous sex.

“If you displayed any kind of manifestation of giggling or smiling -- and I did that because it was all a bit ridiculous -- they would really hone in and yell at you and point at you. It was dreadful,” he explains. But Steven did not emerge ‘cured’. Instead, he felt ‘freaked out’ and overwhelmingly disappointed.

At one stage he was ‘packed off’ to another Pentecostal Church, the Christian Outreach Centre at Mansfield, for a different form of ‘therapy’. There, he endured a kind of ‘re-birthing’. “They’d take you right back to the womb. When you were remembering all these early, traumatic experiences you’re supposed to think of Jesus in that situation. It was very forceful, very bludgeoning to think of Jesus in situations such as my parents’ divorce,” he says.

“Underneath, Exodus was a meat-market. It was like the lights coming
on at a gay bar at four in the morning. People were desperate”

For a time, Steven lived with several other Exodus members in a ‘half-way house’ in one of Brisbane’s well-heeled western suburbs. Although unofficial, the house was established by Exodus members who believed if they lived together they could support each other with their struggles.

“It was a complete shambles. None of them were successful. They were all having secret sex behind the scenes,” he says. “If you put gay people in a room together -- even if they’re there to ‘overcome their homosexuality’, of course there’s going to be sexual sparks, undercurrents and attractions because that’s natural. Underneath, Exodus was a meat-market. It was like the lights coming on at a gay bar at four in the morning. People were desperate.

“None of the people I knew here in Brisbane or Melbourne were successful in overcoming their homosexuality. There were some who certainly lived celibate lifestyles, but they always struggled. They couldn’t fully embrace heterosexuality. Everyone that I had contact with was fucked in one way or another. They were in emotional and psychological distress. Whilst they may have got comfort from going to church and being amongst church people, they were all deeply unhappy and confused.”

So too was Steven. “I was an absolute potted mess. The more I suppressed, the more I acted out under cover of darkness, the more my imagination and private life were becoming exaggerated and distorted.”

So intense was his distress Steven would frequently go for long prayerful walks with his eyes closed, trusting God that when he reached the top of the hill he would be cured. At one stage he even begged a doctor for depo-provera, the drug used to ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders.

“My whole personality changed towards the last few years. I became petulant and manipulative and frustrated. I was in constant confusion. It was an absolutely mind-altering experience”.

After one of several visits to Exodus’ Melbourne branch, Steven began feeling even more deeply depressed. One of Steven’s friends from Exodus had already committed suicide. He stresses that while Exodus was not solely to blame for his friend’s death, “the pressure on him because of the religious experience and the dreadful struggle on him to overcome his homosexuality had pushed him over the edge”.

“I decided I could not go on and that this was the end. Even though suicide is considered as dreadful a sin as homosexuality, I thought it was better to be dead and face the consequences than to live with this every day.”

However, Steven’s mother noticed his distress and decided to take action.

Telling her son they were going for a drive, Steven’s mother took him to a doctor, then on to the Winston Noble Psychiatric Unit where he was interviewed by a psychiatrist. He was committed for three months.

Steven says his recovery began with daily therapy. “My nurse never criticised the church and he never criticised gays either. All he did was focus on me learning to accept who I am. One day it just clicked and I stopped feeling shame and pain. Everything just stopped and I stood up and said ‘I’m okay’. I realised my homosexuality was natural to me, that it was inherent. It was part of my constitution”.

Upon his release, Steven had to rebuild his life from scratch. He regards Dr David Orth as his ‘lifesaver’. He also credits off-scene social group Frontiers, the gay press and the ‘out’ gay community for challenging the fundamentalist view he’d been ‘force-fed’ to believe: that it was impossible to be free, gay and happy.

Now stable in his career and private life, Steven has rekindled the happy-go-lucky extroversion he felt within before homophobia took its toll. He and his loving, supportive partner of two years are now window-shopping for a home they hope to buy later this year.

Some have described the ex-gay movement as ‘psychological terrorism’, and like former hostages caught in a terrorist siege, many ex-ex-gays report experiences of post-traumatic stress. For Steven, that stress reappears every time he sees a snippet of anything religious on television or whenever he hears people talking in “Christianese”. Most hurtfully, it’s manifested every time he crosses paths with one of his many ex-gay friends.

“I know a lot of people who have been through the experience and came out the other end shattered. [When I meet them again] I become this other person and the guilt and shame wash over me again, so I’ll just drink and drink and drink and drink”.

Despite the ongoing pain, Steven says he doesn’t hate anyone involved with either Exodus or the church. Just as Christians profess to love the sinner but hate the sin, Steven maintains those involved were ‘good people at heart’, but their misguided attempts to force reality to fit scripture caused a lot of damage to a lot of people.

“I have a damn good handle on the whole Christian - homosexual perspective,” Steven says. “I talked the talk, walked the walk, did all the programs, read all the materials, did the conferences, did all the fasting and prayer and everything. I never doubted what they were telling me. I believed it with all my heart and soul. But I am convinced today that if there is a God, this is the way he intended me to be.”

“Steven Brett” is a pseudonym. .

Further Reading:

Sleeping in a Garage doesn’t make you an Automobile:
www.newtimesla.com/1998/102298/extra1-1.html

The ex-files: Not Your Usual Gays:
www.indegayforum.org/articles/pietrzyk1.html

Ray of Light Project:
www.hrc.org/ray/

Why Reparative Therapies and Ex-Gay Ministries Fail:
www.hrc.org/pubs/change.html

Getting Straight:
www.sfweekly.com/extra/beyond/nicolosi1.html

Attempts to Change Sexual Orientation:
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_changing.html