In anticipation of the January 29 broadcast of The Trials of Ted Haggard on HBO, an older and perhaps wiser Haggard was quizzed by the press on , what else, his sexuality and previously announced “cure.”

“I’m completely heterosexual!” he had declared with a big toothy grin back in 2007 after he went on a wonder diet of what we can only imagine was the complete Jenna Jameson catalog — although Jesus not Jenna got the hosannas.

And it took just 3 … count ‘em … 3 weeks of “intense therapy” — make that non-licensed Christian “counseling,” renown for its regimen of round-the-clock prayer and magical thinking.

But that was then.

Today, well 100% ain’t what it used to be.

“The stereotypical boxes don’t work for me” he told a roomful of glib-faced reporters at the HBO event announcing the documentary. “My story’s got some gray areas in it.”

This, only after being grilled by one reporter after another, asking the same question in slightly varied form. And only after a largely nonsensical preamble about sexuality being “confusing and complex.”

Hey, Ted, it’s call a hard-on. Either you get one or you don’t. Few things in life have this clear a litmus test. It’s not one’s own sexuality that’s complex and confusing but the willingness to name it frankly. It’s the barbed wire that megachurches have thrown around it, the religion-based shame about the human body itself — fragile and humble and temporary though it be — that makes such issues “difficult.”

Today, Ted Haggard is, as he puts it in the HBO doc, an “exile” from the very megachurch he founded, unable to get hired in or out of the pulpit. Instead, he goes door to door selling health insurance. He also makes the case — not unjustly (see Nightcharm’s previous Haggard updates, below) — that he was alway shockingly liberal on gay issues. Shocking, that is, to his colleagues in rival megachurches.

Listen to him, for instance, on gay marriage when he was questioned last week by the San Francisco Chronicle:

“‘Prior to my crisis, I was for equality under the law no matter how people grouped. Whether it was two old spinsters living together or a homosexual couple or a heterosexual couple, I think it ought to be the same under the law. But prior to my crisis, I thought the word ‘marriage,’ I thought it was worth defending the definition of it — the traditional definition of it, and I no longer believe that. I’m looking out a window right now and the steel in the frame is married to the glass. So marriage doesn’t just mean the union between a man and a woman, it also means where two pieces of steel come together or where the curb meets the street, it marries the street.”

“Ted, that’s too much metaphor. Do you think gays should be allowed to marry each other?

“‘I think the government should recognize the union between people whether they’re gay or not in whatever the language they choose, whether they call it a marriage or a civil union, it’s up to them. If the government is going to be in the business of recognizing people grouped together as couples, then they need to that across the board. It’s a big change for me.”

“‘It’s not a change in my view of civil liberties. I’ve always believed this. It’s a change in semantics. I’m saying prior to the crisis, I would defend marriage as the sacred term for the church to use for heterosexual monogamous couples. Now I’ve broadened that and said it’s not worth having a war over the definition of a word. I believe that under civil law people should be respected. And it should be equality under the law. So either the government needs to get out of recognizing that couples are together and make everybody file the same tax returns, etc. Or they need to recognize all of them. I don’t think it’s wise for the government to separate based on what goes on in a person’s bedroom.”

“Now, less than an hour after we spoke, an HBO publicity person called to say that Haggard wanted to be clear that he wasn’t saying he was for gay marriage. Uh, OK. Sounds like we’re playing semantical chicken.”

But then, of course, it’s all so confusing and complex.

© 2009, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com