Details Looks At "Gay Exorcisms"

Detail Magazine's Matt McCallester has chronicled a few of the "gay exorcisms" that still take place in some of the nation's evangelical churches. Here's how one went down:

"You need to be delivered from homosexuality," the prophet said into a microphone so that all the church could hear. Kevin was embarrassed, but he stayed put. This was no normal preacher—she spoke God's truth. According to church dogma, homosexuality is a sin foisted on humans by demons who take possession of their bodies and compel them to act against God's will. These evil spirits can be exorcised by those trained in spiritual warfare in a ritual known among Pentecostal Christians as deliverance. Perhaps, Kevin thought, this prophet could finally deliver him from his demons. The prophet placed her hands on Kevin and began to pray over him. "Come out, come out!" she shouted. "In the name of Jesus, I command you to come out! You gonna free him right now!"

Kevin closed his eyes, thinking to himself, "There's something wrong with me; I need to change." A part of him believed this prophet could do what no one else had been able to do during previous deliverance attempts—make him heterosexual. But the prophet was loud and she looked at him with disgust and contempt as her chants became more and more belligerent. Even now Kevin can't bring himself to repeat the most hurtful things she said. He soon began to cry. And then, with the prophet still exhorting the demons in him to depart, he blacked out and collapsed.

As many of these "exorcism" abuses are inflicted upon children, some have demanded that the government intervene. But child welfare agencies and prosecutors have cited freedom of religion protections and have done nothing.

The Hasbian Decade

Oh brother. In another one of their meant-to-cause-outrage pieces, Details Magazine says there's a new "trend" of lesbians dating straight men. Because their biological clocks are ticking and they need a baby. Also, the "novelty" of lesbianism has worn off.

There are no reliable statistics by which to gauge how many refugees there are from the isle of Lesbos. Nor could there be: Bisexual women, for instance, don't have to "switch teams" to enter into relationships with men, even if they've lived with other women for decades. But if the hasbian (and for simplicity's sake, we'll include bisexuals who've shifted from women to men) really is having a coming-out moment, it might be because the lesbian had her big coming-out moment in the nineties—the decade that saw Cindy Crawford shaving k.d. lang on the cover of Vanity Fair, the birth of Lilith Fair, and the mainstream popularity of lesbian-friendly folksingers like DiFranco, the Indigo Girls, and Dar Williams, not to mention a slew of literal "coming-out moments" set off by Ellen's "Yep, I'm gay" in 1997.

Today, The L Word has come and gone, Katy Perry has qualified her confession about kissing a girl with "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it," and the tabloids are far more preoccupied with LiLo's dropout antics than with her sexuality—just as we are more compelled by Rachel Maddow's intelligence than by her orientation. It's safe to say the novelty has faded. A woman who began her sexual exploration in the lesbian-leaning nineties would be in her thirties now. Is it unreasonable to suggest her biological clock could also affect her sexual proclivities?

I'm trying to think of something pithy to add, but mostly I'm just pithed.

HomoQuotable - Sir Ian McKellan

"It's never crossed my mind that it'd ever be possible for me. That's the scar that I and so many others bear—we believed ourselves to be second-rate citizens for so long, the idea of being able to say 'This is my husband, these are my children' was not an option. I remember Tom Stoppard saying to me when I came out, 'I feel so sorry for you, because you'll never have children.' These days I would say, 'Well, why not, Tom?' But 20 years ago I accepted his judgment." - Sir Ian McKellan, telling Details Magazine why he never considered marrying a man.

Is Bash Back The New ACT-UP?

Details Magazine has published a profile of Bash Back!, the "queer anarchists" who last November provided the right-wing with oceans of anti-gay ink when they invaded a Michigan church during services, shouted slogans, pulled the fire alarm, and threw leaflets at parishioners. In May, the Alliance Defense Fund filed a federal lawsuit against Bash Back. From Details:

The group's website features images of activists wielding clubs. They seem theatrical given the pranksterlike tenor of the protests, but members insist that their threats to use force are genuine. Real or not, their hard-line stance has struck a chord. Bash Back! has 15 chapters, in cities like Denver, Milwaukee, and West Palm Beach. Such rapid growth troubles the gay establishment. "This looks too much like something I don't want to be involved with," says Sue Hyde, a director at the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force. "Seeing weapons in the hands of gay folks in the U.S.? There's plenty of hate in the world."

But Bash Back! doesn't need the support of movement leaders to make headlines. The chapter in Olympia, Washington, glued a Mormon church's doors shut to protest the Latter Day Saints' financial support of Proposition 8. To avenge the 2008 shooting death of Duanna Johnson—a transgender woman who, months earlier, had achieved a measure of fame when the vicious beating she'd received in the custody of two Memphis cops was broadcast on YouTube—Bash Back! launched a nationwide campaign. Though the officers were fired, her killer remained on the loose. In Philadelphia, members blocked traffic and wrote STOP TRANS MURDER in pink chalk on streets. In Milwaukee, they dropped a banner at the University of Wisconsin that read R.I.P. DUANNA. The Memphis chapter sent a hearse and coffin to one of the cops' houses with a note that read SEE YOU SOON . . . —DUANNA BB!

"We're not trying to change people's minds, we're not trying to bend straight people to give us freedom—we're fighting back," says Milwaukee member Tristyn Trailer-Trash. "We're going to stop them from preaching hate, stop them from creating an environment that's unfriendly to gay, queer, and trans people. We're not going to be nice about it—they're not being nice about it!"

In May I had this to say about Bash Back's Michigan protest: "It was a dumbass, pointless, unfocused action directed at hapless nobodies. Nothing but a black eye for our movement." My opinion on that incident is unchanged. I'm all for confronting our enemies a la ACT UP, but I'm unconvinced, so far, that Bash Back has helped the movement at all.

Not Straight, Bisexual

Details has published a rather dumb story called What If You Only Thought You Were Gay? in which the author recounts the stories of a number of men who married women after years of living as gay men. It's not a story about "ex-gays", more a few anecdotal instances in which gay men fell in love with women.

For Andrew Brin, who grew up in Milwaukee, it was all about girls—until he had sex with a guy at the end of his senior year of high school. "It was fun and I had a great time, but I remember having the feeling that I was doing something that wasn't right," he says. In his early thirties, Brin started dating a man and came out to his brother. When he later fell in love with a woman (who was at the time a lesbian) and realized he was straight, he didn't inform anyone that he'd been waving that rainbow flag mistakenly.

And although there aren't statistics to show how many men go through a similar sexual shift, anecdotal evidence suggests that some men who consider themselves to be gay experience this kind of change not because of sexual experimentation or peer pressure but because they decide that they want to sleep with women instead of men.

Obviously, these are actually examples of men discovering their innate bisexuality, not coming to a realization that they'd been "mistakenly gay." Plenty of noted gays have ended up in hetero marriages, including singer Tom Robinson, whose Glad To Be Gay remains a gay rights anthem.