An interview with “ex-ex-gay” Jeff Ford on
the bad psychology of Reparative Therapy
and its debilitating consequences

Jeff Ford, MA, is a licensed psychologist, and a clinical member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. He is the director of Associated Resources In Psychology, PA, in St. Paul, MN, where he maintains a private therapy and consulting practice.

Jeff specializes in addressing the complexities involved with the antigay therapy known either as Reparative Therapy or Sexual Conversion Therapy, which purports to prevent and cure homosexuality. He speaks from experience as one who participated in the ex-gay movement and practiced reparative therapies for years. Because of his personal and professional experience, Jeff challenges the dangerous use of pseudo scientific theories like these and other discredited methods. He is a frequent workshop presenter and guest lecturer. Jeff was formerly the executive director of OUTPOST an “ex-gay” ministry located in Minneapolis, MN. For almost 10 years, he claimed to be a “former homosexual”. He was a national speaker for Exodus International, the governing Board and communication hub for most ex-gay ministries. Jeff’s story, along with the stories of twelve other “ex-ex-gays” is featured in, Finally Free, compiled by the Washington DC based Human Rights Campaign. Jeff is interviewed by Rev. Steven Kindle, editor.  

STEVE KINDLE: Jeff, just what is the ex-gay movement?  

JEFF FORD: Put simply, it’s a loosely knit group of mostly Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians who believe that homosexuality is an aberrant psychological state that can be cured, and must be cured (if one is a sexually active homosexual) for one be acceptable to God. They prop up their beliefs with a pseudopsychological theory called Reparative Therapy. I think it started out in California with Melodyland, and then Love In Action was formed and some of the other early ministries. They started by just grappling with the issues of being Christian and being gay, but coming from a place of believing that it was sinful and wrong. In the last five to ten years, the Church and bigger organizations have begun to pay attention to the ex-gay movement because it was a way to actually, in my opinion, bring in more money and attention to other causes, and also for political motivation. So organizations like Focus On The Family and NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, have millions of dollars and have started getting behind the ex-gay movement. They actually have a staff that are dedicated specifically for dealing with homosexual issues. But primarily it becomes a political movement. It’s no longer particularly interested in addressing the biblical issues and helping people struggle with right or wrong. They’re more about getting into the schools, getting into government, getting into various places and changing laws and taking away rights of gay and lesbian people based on a belief that gays can be changed through what they’ve come to call “reparative therapy.”  

SK:  So, what is reparative therapy?  

JF:  It’s a generic term. It’s not like Gestalt or some formal therapy that would be practiced the same way from office to office. It can encompass anything from some highly charismatic groups that still believe there might be some demonic influence and would perform some deliverance or exorcism. Others are more pastoral and look at a discipleship model of people just learning to submit themselves daily to Christ, and a fairly Evangelical/Fundamentalist position. Others are more professionally trained. The theories that Elizabeth Moberly, Joseph Nicolosi and others have centered on, espouse the need for a reparative experience with a same sex, same gender person, and saying that homosexuality is kind of a reparative drive to heal something that got broken because of a child’s inability to bond with the parent of the same gender. So it encompasses just about anybody who believes that it’s sinful or INTERVIEW...continued on page wrong or can be changed.  

SK:  How successful are these therapists?  

JF:  Well, there’s no real documented evidence apart from this very highly questionable report that Robert Spitzer is going to be publishing and presented at APA. There’s really no documented evidence that shows that reparative therapy does anything in terms of changing sexual orientation. It can provide support for people who have felt lonely, and can provide an opportunity for people to talk about something they’d been afraid to talk about before. It can bring people together with like-minded views about the sinfulness of homosexuality. But, in terms of changing sexual orientation, healing people, and having these remarkably dramatic changes, the evidence just isn’t there. It’s more about sublimating, repressing, living chaste lives, more of a celibacy thing. And some of the exgay ministries are more honest about that, but it’s still a big battle, and there are going to be temptations, and the orientation doesn’t change. So they feel they have to live with it like a thorn in the flesh. Whereas others are what I believe to be more deceptive and promise some sort of real healing where you’re going to be free from any kind of either erotic homosexual feeling or thoughts or responses, and you’re going to become a heterosexual, and that just doesn’t happen.  

SK:  What are some of the results that you have noted in people who have undergone reparative therapy for whom it was unsuccessful?  

JF:  Incredibly shamebased people come out with significant amounts of depression, sometimes suicidal ideation, and frequently a very distorted faith life or sense of spirituality, feelings of failure, feelings that they take personally, feeling that it works for other people, but it doesn’t for me, so somehow God doesn’t love me. Here I am, not good enough. Others become very, very angry and alienated from the church. They see the hypocrasy. They see the kind of bad behavior that occurs within the ex-gay movement in terms of people secretly being sexually active and then coming to meetings and confessing that or not confessing that, or counselors crossing boundaries inappropriately, which has happened numerous times through the years. They become very angry and alienated against the church and don’t want anything to do with God. It’s a real spectrum, you know. Some people, in some way, believe that some good came out of their experience, but they’re ready to use that as a stepping stone into coming out and accepting and loving themselves more, rather than continuing to try to deny or repress their true sexuality.  

SK:  Are you able to track any of these people in an organized kind of way so that they might be able to take advantage of your services?  

JF:  That’s something that’s not very organized right now. It’s loose knit through the guest books on my website. People can identify each other through e-mail and begin to correspond at the HRC, who put out the Finally Free books that had 14 testimonies of people and ways to contact those folks, but there really isn’t a centrally located ministry for ex-ex-gays. It’s still kind of loose knit right now.  

SK:  About fifteen years ago, I read an article in “Christianity Today” in which the ex-gay movement virtually announced its demise. I guess that what has happened in the intervening years to bring about its resurgence relates to the fact that Focus On The Family and others have tried to politicize this.  

JF:  Exactly.  

SK:  Is there anything more than that?  

JF:  Well their demise came with some pretty highly publicized bad behavior. I think Colin Cook was one of the big ones. I think that article might have come out around the time when he was an Adventist man who was married, with a couple of kids, who claimed to be completely heterosexual. Then Kinship, the pro-Gay Adventist Group, uncovered over a dozen people who had [sexual] experiences with him, and that really dealt them quite a serious blow. They began to talk more honestly for awhile, anyway, that the change doesn’t really occur. Then groups like Courage were formed within the Catholic Church, with people that know that one’s sexual orientation is not going to change, but still believe it’s wrong to act on it. Again, a little bit more honest ex-gay movement was occurring there for awhile, and the money started pouring in. It really doesn’t go to the grassroots ministeries. They still struggle from month to month to make their budgets. The big money goes to running full-page ads in the newspapers, making TV commercials and sending out mass mailings and trying to generate fear. Focus on the Family has a traveling seminar called “Love Won Out,” and they bring these people from NARTH and other organizations in and they get 900,000 people to come and attend their slick PowerPoint presentations.  

SK:  I’ve been there. Yeah.  

JF:  It’s quite convincing to people who don’t have very much scientific background who are already predisposed. But they have in their minds that it’s something that is not helpful or not good, and they get really revved up by the “sissy-boy Three take stand against Roman Catholic abuse of GLBT Christians syndrome”, and the abandoned child and parent issues, you know... that whole thing.  

SK:  I’ve found that many of the leaders of the ex-Gay movement, including the current director of Outpost, are now characterizing their ministries as helping gays to successfully resist their homosexual temptations rather than actually converting them to heterosexuality. What’s going on here?  

JF:  Well, these bigger organizations that want to influence government, school boards and those kinds of things, aren’t honest about that. They continue to talk about change and healing.  

SK:  Someone–within the ex-gay movement–suggested that the slogan Exodus International uses should be changed to say, “Come suffer with us”—  

JF:  Right.  

SK:  – rather than “Be healed from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.” So then, what is an exex- gay ministry?  

JF:  Well, there aren’t too many that are officially set up that I’m aware of. It would be people coming together trying to reconcile their experience of having gone through anything from having demons cast out, to going through electric shock therapy, to spending thousands of dollars, for the promised change. These people who are wounded through having attempted the ex-gay process, come together to get strength from one another and to heal personally. They also stand up against this big machine that is out there running. It’s pretty frightening when you see the “Love Won Out” group. They are gaining a lot of support, but we have to get the attention of the school board leaders and politicians and bring good, accurate information that refutes what the ex-gay movement is doing.  

SK:  So you’re a therapeutic plus educational organization?  

JF:  Well, I have a private practice, Associated Resources in Psychology, where I see people. That’s my primary income, that of a therapist. Then, on the side, because there’s such a hole, I try to have an internet presence. Also, I put on workshops or go and teach for anybody that wants to bring me in to talk about my own personal experience having gone through the ex-gay movement and then led an ex-gay ministry for a number of years.  

SK:  I know that many of the exex- gay leaders were originally part of the ex-gay movement. Can you tell us something of how many former ex-gay leaders have abandoned the movement and what they’re doing now?  

JF:  Most of them have gone into obscurity. You know, most of them have not contacted me or made themselves very public. There are a few exceptions to that, but a lot of them just silently slipped away, and nobody has really tracked what’s happened to them. That was part of what I saw quite often when I was active in the movement; one day somebody would be on the board of directors of an ex-gay ministry, and another day they’d be gone And there’d be nobody really talking publically about what happened.  

SK:  Jeff, you’ve really been trashed by Christians who consider you and your ministry to be an abomination before God. How do you handle this?  

JF:  Oh, with a grain of salt. It really doesn’t affect me too much personally. I know that there are a lot of people that believe that I’ve followed the lie and that I’m abandoning the cause. You know that Fundamentalist belief system, that I’m going to go to hell and all of that. I just keep on telling the truth. What helped me get out of all of that was that it just isn’t true. What I was saying, even though I really wanted to believe it, and believe that God was going to make it happen, it just simply wasn’t true. My orientation wasn’t changing.  

SK:  Well, in the area of the people who come to see you. What kind of issues do they bring to you?  

JF:  A lot of it is around anger or depression, feeling ripped off for having spent so many years of their lives trying to do something and being promised something that just simply didn’t happen. Others still really, really love God and are convinced that they’re bad, but they couldn’t keep on going to the ex-gay ministry, because they felt like they weren’t measuring up. It just wasn’t happening for them. And really trying to reconcile holding on to an Evangelical or Fundamentalist belief system with being gay, or with falling in love and having somebody that you really care for. That creates quite a cognitive dissonance inside the person and could lead to some really drastic measures if it isn’t worked through,.  

SK:  Do you have a particular psychotherapy that you use most of the time?  

JF:  Well, I call myself a solution focused therapist. I really look at what’s happening right now, and what can we do to help you feel a little bit better. We look at some of the ways you can begin to take more control of your own life, and certainly working within somebody’s spirituality and being able to talk out loud about the love and grace of God I also talk about my own life when people want to know about my experience. I’m pretty open about sharing that with people.  

SK:  Our readers, of course, are located across the United States. When we come across people that we think could be helped by people such as you, how do we get them connected to the right therapist?  

JF:  In Minnesota, we have a great GLBT organization called “Out- Front Minnesota,” and they have throughout the whole state, networked therapists who are gay-friendly or gayidentified and are very willing to work with people who have come through the ex-gay movement. I would start with people looking at their local statewide organization and seeing if they’ve got any identified therapists who are specifically trained or have any personal background. You may certainly contact me, although I don’t have a national network of names. I would probably try to help people get in contact with a statewide organization wherever they are and start there.  

SK:  I think we know what impediments Christianity has placed in the way of the gay community. How about some resources within Christianity that you see as being helpful in your work and to lesbigays in general?  

JF:  Well, obviously we’ve all been guilty of lumping Christianity in there as this one very far right Fundamentalist religion, and it’s certainly not. There are many different forms of Christianity. Some are very loving, and liberal, and open, and affirming, and there certainly are movements within many of the denominations to be more inclusive and open. So seeking out a church that has taken a stand at being open and affirming, such as the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay-identified church. I’d look for a church more into understanding the grace and love and inclusiveness of God versus a very legalistic and rather sin-based or fear-based theology.  

SK:  What resources do you recommend for people who would like to follow up on this interview?  

JF:  Well, there’s a book that was just published and was picked the best book of the year, by the American Psychological Association, called Sexual Conversion Therapy. It has 15 chapters – I wrote one of them – but there are a number of really good essays and chapters that deal with this whole sexual conversion therapy issue, and you can obtain information about that on my website, as well. It’s a pricier book – it’s more like a textbook – but it is a good resource. HRC out of Washington, DC has good materials that are available. There are a number of links on my website to various books or pamphlets. One is called, “Just the Facts,” that’s my resource to grade school teachers or school board administrators or others who are trying to figure out how to respond to NARTH or some ex-gay group that’s wanting to come and present or teach. It’s an excellent resource. Another link is “Calculated Compassion,” and that’s about a 70-page document that looks at the motivation of the ex-gay movement and would be a good resource.  

SK:  Okay. Well, Jeff, is there anything that you’d like to add to this interview that I’ve overlooked or that occurs to you as being helpful?  

JF:  I just want to get across to people that you don’t completely have to abandon God. That God is an all-loving, allpowerful, very, very graceful source of strength and support in our lives, and it’s just a distortion to get caught up in a narrow way of thinking that you have to abandon yourself and your identity, or you have to abandon God. Rather there is a wonderful way of integrating homosexuality and spirituality. That’s why I’m real impressed with your website and the ministry that you folks are doing.  

SK:  Well, thank you very much, Jeff, and best wishes for you and your ministry in 2003.