By now you’ve read the delicious tale of Dr. George Rekers, a leading advocate for ex-gay junk science, being photographed coming back from Europe with a young blond “assistant” he hired from Rentboy.com. He hired the boy, he insists, merely to carry his luggage. At least that was the first draft of the tale.

The story changed within 24 hours, as his cohorts on the religious right dropped him off their sites. Now Dr. Rekers claims he was “ministering” to a confused young lad, for by definition all athletic young men who shyly sell themselves on Rentboy.com with promises of a “smooth, sweet, tight ass” and a “perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)” must be confused. And to such sweet and perfect and guileless confusion (see photo at left), our 61-year-old Christian crusader was uniquely qualified to minister.

For one thing, Rekers was actually a Baptist minister, though that is not how he made his mark in the world. As a professor of Neuropsychiatry & Behavioral Science, Dr. Rekers spent his life trying to reclassify homosexuality as a psychosis.

In this effort, he co-founded with James Dobson the vile Family Research Council, a Christian lobbying group focused, in actuality, on criminalizing all aspects of homosexuality. Rekers is also an officer of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), a faith-based center for the curing of homosexuality that the American Psychiatric Association has condemned as a sham.

NARTH, when it is not damaging the usually young Christian kids sent to it by their parents, is busy inveighing against the longstanding consensus of mental health professions that homosexuality is normal, positive, and not a mental disorder. Leading the charge, Dr. Rekers (at right, December to Rentboy’s May) most recently turned up in Florida, in 2008, to testify as a so-called expert witness against gay adoption.

And yet there he is in the photos arriving at Miami International Airport, fresh from London, Rome and Madrid, all the fleshpots, as the preachers used to say, of Europe, with his rentboy in tow. Rentboy, by the way, is not carrying even so much as a flight bag, let alone luggage. The Miami New Times reported that Dr. Rekers was humping his own baggage cart all the way through customs.

So first the story was, I recently had surgery and hired the boy to carry my luggage. Then Homo Horror breaks out in Jesus U.S.A., fanned by the happy hands of our own little pixies and elves of Gayland. And Dr. Rekers’ story changes. It changes on — what else? — Facebook when the good doctor makes the mistake of replying to Joe Jervis, proprietor of the wildly popular gay site Joe. My. God. Joe, in a friend request, asks the doctor — and this is a quote — where he might find “the hottest male prostitutes” in Europa.

“Thank you for taking the time to write to me about the recent ‘news’ story that is a mixture of truth and falsehood, ” Dr Rekers began in what sounds like a standard boilerplate reply. “Jesus is my hero,” he announced, “who loves even the culturally despised people, including sexual sinners and prostitutes. Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them. Mark 2:16-17 reads, ‘When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said to them…”

And it goes on like that for awhile.

Finally Dr. Rekers brings his hop, skip and jump through the New Testament to a close with a long-winded encomium to himself that starts off with the ringing line: “Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I…”

As the L. A. coroner in the OJ Simpson case famously remarked, this doesn’t pass the smell test.

Will the good doctor climb up on a cross like his hero Jesus Christ and ascend into heaven too? And how exactly did he “reveal” to use his words, the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the fallen ‘Lucien”? Did the revelation include bathrobes suddenly parting in hotel rooms?

Odd in the face of all this selfless ministry that at first the good doctor said he had no idea that this boy he hired through the innocently titled Rentboy.com was a prostitute. No mention of teaching the Sermon on the Mount then.

In fact, the doctor was shocked and saddened to learn the harsh truth about the gentle man-child who carried his bags for 10 days through Europe and who, in the first lines of his profile on Rentboy.com was offering not only blandishments for the sweetness of his hairless rear and the prodigious length of his robust front, but a handy summation for his entire package in a phrase as classic as boyhood: “Up for Anything.”

Nothing, oddly, about muscle strength for lifting suitcases.

At right a closer look at “Lucien” as the news reports called him; real name supposedly “Jo-vanni Roman,” not exactly a spelling that inspires confidence.

Shocked and saddened, we remind our readers, was Dr. Rekers in his first draft of the tale. But now the record has been set very much straight. In their single hotel room, Dr. Rekers proclaims, they passed the long Roman nights”sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse.”

An explanation of such fantastic proportion that it must finally dethrone the once royally unassailable: “I have a wide stance.”

Let us then imagine the sort of science that was shared on that far-away night, overlooking we would like to think a palazzo in the glow of bursting fireworks. The desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse. Oh, how they desired it. Oh, the prayers that were pitched to heaven, with each shooting starburst. One or the other of them, we are sure, sweated blood.

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