Amanda Hess at the Washington City Paper did an exposé on the "ex-gays," the folks who think you can pray away the gay. Well, actually, that's not entirely correct. They don't believe you can pray away the gay at all. They believe that you can pray enough to become celibate, and perhaps sleep with the occasional woman, but don't expect it to ever be as satisfying as sleeping with someone of the same sex, and don't ever expect to lost your homosexual desires. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, they're straight as an arrow.
Of PFOX’s 10-person board of directors, nine claim a home base in Maryland, Virginia, or D.C.; Quinlan, the group’s token ex-gay, is the only non-local. For years, PFOX was content to keep the ex-gay perspective on the outskirts of the organization. Falzarano formed the group in 1995 as an alternative to Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). But Falzarano would turn out to be the first in a line of PFOX ex-gays who would be deployed and disposed of at the organization’s convenience. In 1998, Falzarano was forced out of the group after accusing the religious right of using ex-gays as political pawns. Succeeding Falzarano as the ex-gay face of PFOX was Richard Cohen, a Bowie-based “sexual reorientation” therapist. Cohen was similarly scrubbed from the group after he demonstrated his bizarre therapeutic techniques on national television. His “touch therapy,” in which a man pets and rocks another man in his arms in order to re-create the parental bond, came off as particularly homoerotic. “When he actually went on television, they realized it did not look good,” says Rigby. “He embarrassed them with his man-hugging and pillow-thumping.”
The visibility of ex-gays is necessary to PFOX’s survival, but the ex-gay reality is often too strange, off-message, or gay to sit well with the everstraight conservatives who make up PFOX’s inner sanctum. PFOX’s new legal strategy, however, actually encourages ex-gay public embarrassment—by attempting to coax gays and ex-ex-gays into harassing them, much as a defender in basketball strains to draw a charging foul. In Quinlan, who has a history of alleging physical and verbal attacks at the hands of gays, PFOX may have finally found a fitting ex-gay poster boy for PFOX’s political cause. He may be the only one. “They’re using ex-gay people in public venues as bait,” says Rigby. “But I don’t think they have enough ex-gay people to pursue that as a strategy. They just don’t know enough people who identify as ex-gay who would be willing to file such suits.”
