Gay politics do not go easy on those who practice outright denial of truth about sexuality. We are hard on those who say that our relationships are just transient conditions, or that God wants to change us. Even when we know the people preaching those views are secretly gay themselves, we condemn them.

Ted Haggard and his allies are our favorite targets of criticism. We know that he is not without his hidden torments – to pursue an anti-gay religious philosophy and believe, wholeheartedly, that same-sex sexual contact will lead you to Hell, yet be unable to restrain that very human desire, is surely a never-ending nightmare.

We are hard on those who tell us – in spite of all evidence – that we can magically convert to Leave It To Beaver-style heterosexuality, because those people do have the power to torture us through their vice-grip on the Republican party and public policy.

They get their way more often than not; their whim to have everybody else conform to a certain view trumps our interest in pursuing our own happiness, and even our allies in politics back down or appear impotent. So when a person with an obvious same-sex attraction joins the anti-gay cause, we disown them as gay people and hope they will be bountiful in moral failures.

But these people aren’t intrinsically or fundamentally different from us. Their lives are different, but not their essence. They are easily who we could be if our upbringing was different, and who most us were when we still lived in our parents’ household and went to the churches from which apostasy was our own unique coming-of-age ritual.

I think that almost all of us, excepting those who came up in the most progressive and creepily well-adjusted families, panicked about how we would tell our parents, prayed to be straight, wondered if an openly gay man could ever get a job, and most of us, long ago, led-on some poor unsuspecting teenage girl, kissed her, and told her she was the sexiest thing we ever laid eyes on.

In that sense, it’s hard not to sympathize with those who remain caught in those thought prisons their whole lives, who seem to have attached their romantic feelings not to real men but to an abstract image of Jesus, their fickle lover, and hold out in hopes that they’ll change. Imagine ticking uncomfortably through the years, turning 25, 35, 40, 60, and still waiting for some miracle or transformation at which point you will find your wife rockin’ hot, and finally your ordinary-person’s life will “begin.”

That’s what Ted Cox discovered in a weekend trip to an “ex-gay” therapy retreat as an infiltrator; Cox is a straight man who doesn’t have any affiliation with evangelical Christianity or ex-gay causes. What he found was an unending progression of creepy rituals; counselors were eager to convince attendees that their same-sex attractions stem from father-abandonment issues, and they were all encouraged to role-play attacking their fathers or play-act finding the affection from a masculine male that their fathers failed to give. Some moments were hilariously awkward or contrived, and it’s impossible to ponder how the men going through this program stuck with it with a straight face.

When Ted Cox got his therapeutic father’s hug from one of the program managers, it was laced with a secret – the man who played his father had an erection – which was uncomfortably pressed into the author’s back. Perhaps part of the appeal of these programs is that the men in them get to experience what is ultimately the closest they’ll ever let themselves get to romance.

Some gay men who read this article will cheer Cox on. Others will feel an uneasy sense of exploitation by this straight guy who pursues a group of tortured homosexual men as a semi-comical case study. To be mentioned in Cox’s story is to be non-consensually psychoanalyzed, and to have some of your darkest secrets brought into public view.

Who are we, as openly gay men, more similar to? Are we more like the author, who shares our views on the absurdity of ex-gay groups, or the unfortunate men who differ so greatly from us in politics but share our uncontrollable sexual orientation?

I like to think I’m more like the author, who, though straight, is on our side in the view that same-sex attraction is not a thing that needs to be fixed. It reminds me again how sexual orientation is so different from race or sex or disability, all of them categories that make it impossible to go into such exquisite, long-lasting denial, and allow for a greater sense of solidarity then we as gay men tend to share.

Still, we have some things in common with the wanna-be “ex-gays” that Cox can never understand, and know what he saw better than he does. We’ve had the experience of convincing ourselves we simply wanted to emulate our attractive, masculine straight friend when our fixation was really a crush. We’d carry on saying “I got your back, bro” or following some cocky good-looking guy around as one of his admiring buds, but in our dreams and sexual fantasies we knew the difference. You don’t jerk off to the thought of giving your “best bud” a blow job. How much are pleasure and torture intertwined during those years?

I hope that someday we all get out of that trap.

© 2010, Matt P.. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com