EVANGELICALS URGED TO STALK GAYS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA by Phil Comer

PART 4. THE EXORCISM

[Start with Part 1 (Go!) Or click the title above to hear Talley sing.]

Ex-Gay Kirk Talley Sings To His Helmet

SQUEALING LIKE PIGS

The Evangelicals' music is good.

All that hands-up-in-the-air business looks too much like waving bye-bye to Jesus.

Pert, creased, manicured and coifed gospel singer Kirk Talley said he practices while wearing a motorcycle helmet, "Try it. It beats singing in the shower!"

Talley also described in graphic detail the exorcism that presumably delivered him from homosexuality. The exorcism was orchestrated by Rev. Roy Blankenship of Exodus International. Rev. Blankenship, a dead ringer for Karl Rove, was another of the presenters.

I'm skipping this part. If the Village People included "Gospel Singer," that Talley guy would have been "Miss It"!

Misses Indian, Cop, Biker and Construction Worker were quite sufficient.

Need a beer? I'm outta here.

Quickly while he's away: Crucifixes (not the Christ-less Protestant kind). Bibles. Ice water. Non-erotic writhing. Shouting. Tongues. Exhortations. Gnashing teeth. Rending cloth. Meanwhile, members of the opposite sex gather within earshot for prayer and supportive wailing. Upon deliverance of a sign -- perhaps calling "Uncle"? -- the recipient receives a change of orientation. The ladies then serve red velvet cake and the sweet iced tea of thanksgiving.

Back. Can't make that stuff up! That part was SO creepy. What needed changing after all that was the guy's underwear. The crowd ate it up!

Interesting, "ex-gay" ministries preserve quaint anachronisms like exorcism yet eschew sacred rites such as snake-handling. Frankly likely due to the latter being too gay.

Shaking your serpent or somebody else's could open any number of wormholes.

EVANGELICALS URGED TO STALK GAYS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA by Phil Comer

PART 3. THE MOJO OF HOMO NO MO'

[Start with Part 1 (Go!)]

'Doctor Ex-Gay' Joe Nicolosi, NARTHoleptic

You take it. Over my head.

Listeners were bombarded with pseudoscience mumbo jumbo about why people end up with same-sex attractions in the first place. They kept quoting a Dr. Joseph Nicolosi as "the world's leading authority on homosexuality" and his organization, NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, as where to find the "science" that backs them up. One might imagine a better acronym for the alleged fount of all knowledge.

Yeah, NARTH conjures images of Death Star, Darth Vader and Dick Cheney.

I know junk science when I hear it. My fear is that vulnerable kids – and their parents – might not.

I did a search of all the journals indexed by the National Library of Medicine. As of November, 2010, a total of zero, zip, nada studies turned up in the mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature for "Nicolosi AND homosexuality" or permutations of "NARTH." Only three studies and one review popped up under any combination of those terms. They were published in what most scientists would consider a vanity journal.

What's that?

A magazine that prints almost anything for a fee.

Since Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, the National Library of Medicine has tracked 18,701 studies under its search term "homosexuality," 18,701 versus NARTH's max of four. I can't, however, vouch for each study.

But the diagnosis is clear: A tragic case of NARTHolepsy.

EVANGELICALS URGED TO STALK GAYS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA by Phil Comer

PART 2. LESBIANS ARE HOT

[Start with Part 1 (Go!)]

Ex-Gay Melissa Fryrear Travels with Protection

FUN HOUSE MIRRORS

The presenters were slick. What a head job! Like, by the time Haley testified he'd been arrested for same-sex prostitution in Dallas, folks were clapping, rebel yelling, stomping feet. Never heard such. And in a church! Well, this place was more like a sports arena. Christ Chapel at SportsTowne, that's what they called it.

Yes, odd. Haley said he loves talking to "gay activists."

Focus on the Family's lead ex-lesbian, trim schoolmarm-ish Melissa Fryrear, prefers the term "gay militants" for those demanding equal treatment under the law. All those not militant, she lumps as "moderates," their target. A gay moderate, she said, was someone who "may have gone to a few Gay Pride parades."

She didn't say how many.

There were no protesters. That was unfortunate in that at several places in their scripts, they refer to "the gay activists protesting outside."

Yeah, we heard they'd be punching below the Bible Belt. Tried to get word out to stay home.

We're just tickled pink that they know we're here even if we weren't there.

By the afternoon session, Fryrear was so pleased with the friendly crowd and so comfortable in her sensible shoes, at the last minute she substituted her more hard hitting talk, "Why We Can't Stay Silent," for her previously announced, "Homosexuality and the Culture."

Apparently everything Melissa Fryrear and Mike Haley said was scripted by Focus on the Family's "policy wonks," which they both insisted they weren't.

Wonks, that is.

They used the word lesbian but always put quotes around "gay."

I see you're putting quotes around "ex-gay" here.

The word queer was never used. The only exception was an "ex-gay" website targeting gay and lesbian youth, "inqueery.com."

Cool. Wish that one was ours.

EVANGELICALS URGED TO STALK GAYS IN SMALL-TOWN AMERICA by Phil Comer

PART 1. THE JESUS PIECE

Ex-Gay Mike Haley - Clap For His Kids

TOO GAY, OR NOT TOO GAY?

The Religious Right recently floated a novel take on homosexuality in my hometown.

Why'd you drag me along?

Somehow, I can't quit you. The daylong multimedia revival was billed to the largely white Evangelical audience as "a fresh Christian approach." All the speakers were affiliated with Dr. James Dobson's Colorado-based Focus on the Family and/or the Florida-based "ex-gay" ministry, Exodus International. Every presenter recommended that Evangelical Christians tone down their rhetoric toward the gay and lesbian community.

Yeah. What was that all about?

I'm not sure. The political objectives of these religious groups remain unchanged: They oppose what they term "the redefinition of marriage"; they want adoptions banned for people "living homosexually" and all "public promotion of homosexuality" ceased.

That was clear from their PowerPoints.

LOVEY DIALS THE DEAD by Phil Comer (October 11, 2008)

Lovey is a first-cousin, fourteen years my senior. Neither of us is old. She's a sister I never had, a petite Southern Belle, no bigger than a buttercup, as resilient as a Phi Mu in Rush.

Camellias Bloom All Winter in Sandtrap, Jawja

I was her pet, trailed her like a puppy. One of my earliest memories is her wedding. I scattered camellia petals down the aisle for her to walk on.

For reasons unfathomable to those not born of the South, I still have the land line phone number from our grandparents' Avalon Avenue homeplace. "Homeplace," one word, not two for our extended family.

That house was a high-ceilinged ramshackle Victorian affair long gone in a neighborhood fallen to urban blight. Today that same number rings in Sandtrap, generations of voices now departed.

Recently a mutual cousin intimated that Lovey might be losing it, talking out of her head. This I rejected outright. Impossible, not our Lovey. When next Lovey called, she sounded fine.

"I told you so," I reassured myself.

But then she asked to speak to Aunt Lilly, our beloved aunt, last matriarch of the big house on Avalon Avenue, twenty-five years dead.