After 11 years of life in seclusion, two original founders of Exodus international, a church-based coalition of so-called "ex-gay" ministries," have gone public with their personal stories, denouncing all such programs which seek to "convert" homosexuality into heterosexuality, according to an audio-taped interview conduced by the Gay Broadcasting System.

In the two-hour telephone interviews with GBS's Kurd Wolfe, Exodus co-founders Michael Bussee and his lover Garry Cooper discussed at length the formation of the organization and their departure from it after they discovered that, despite year in the program, their sexual orientations had in effect remained unchanged.

"I had no success with them," stated Bussee." I counseled ... hundreds of people ... who tried to change their sexual orientation and none of them [were] successful. If you got them away from the Christian limelight and asked them, 'Honestly now, are you saying that you are no longer homosexual and you are now heterosexually oriented?' ... not one person said, ''Yes, I am actually now heterosexual.''

Prodded into action by the rise of the Anaheim, California-based Rev. Louis Sheldon and his Coalition for Traditional Values, Bussee, once a driving force behind the "ex-gay" movement, now looks with consternation at Sheldon's promotion of "reparative therapy" for homosexuals. Presently a family counselor for gay and lesbian couples, Bussee now looks back at his years in the movement, calling what he and the group did "psychosocial damage."

"There may very well be out there people that I talked to who are dead now because they committed suicide because of the guilt that I inadvertently heaped on them," he added, "I feel guilty about that. I mean, it was well intentioned. I was getting brainwashed by the church; this was what I was supposed to be doing. [But] it damaged me; it damaged the people I talked to."

The damage Bussee and Cooper say they brought to themselves and others had its humble beginnings in the Orange County, Calif.. neighborhood in which they still reside.

The two first met in the early 1970s when they both attended Melodyland a now-defunct local Christian fundamentalist church. And it was while a 20-year-old Bussee was part of the staff at the Church's hot line in 1974 that he confessed to a church director that he had what he called "a homosexual past."

After a brief time, Bussee, who was then setting his Master's Degree in counseling, found himself pushed to the forefront by church leaders who asked him to help train hotline volunteers to counsel homosexuals into foregoing the gay or lesbian lifestyle for heterosexuality and to promote the service.

Soon, he realized he was not alone. With another church volunteer, whose name he declined to reveal, and a 21-year-old Cooper, who was then also part of the church staff, Bussee linked up similar shoe-string organizations in a handful of churches nationwide to stage the first ever conference of "ex-gay ministries."

It was out of that conference that Exodus was born

For the next four years, Bussee, Cooper and other Exodus staffers traveled the nation, speaking to church groups and recruiting local parishes into the "ex-gay" movement. But even then, the men were well aware of the program's shortcomings, noticing that none of the hundreds of (mostly) men they counseled actually changed their sexual orientation. The majority, they now note, at most, managed to be celibate.

"I was convinced it was working," Bussee said. "Every once in a while, a crack in that conviction would occur. I'd [ask], "'How come I'm still having these feelings?" I'd see a Christian psychologist, and he'd say, 'Oh, that's just temptation. Ignore it, or suppress it. You are different. You are now ex-gay. You're no longer gay. Those feelings don t mean anything."

But those feelings didn't go away. For either of them.

In fact, even during their tenure with Exodus, some 'ex-gay' counselors actively engaged in gay sex, even after a full day of 'ex-gay' counseling.

"One of the guys who was real active in presenting himself as an ex-gay went [with me] to ... Philadelphia to speak to the United Presbyterian Church ... general conference," Bussee reports. "After we finished speaking, he took me on a tour of all the porn shops in Manhattan. This is how much he had chartered."

But in the eyes of Exodus, that was acceptable - that is, as long as it was confessed as a momentary lapse back into sin.

"If you were in the church and admitting you were sinning," Cooper said, "you could admit that you had backslid. You could add that you had an affair or you could admit that you had the feelings. It was acceptable. That was OK as long as you would also follow that by admitting that you realized you were in sin and you backslid.'

Yet, even in their four-year promotion of the ministry there were times when they were at odds with others in the fundamentalist churches. In one instance in 1977, they were roundly criticized when, while promoting their ministry on Rev. Pat Robertson's 700 Club (where Robertson loyalists described homosexuals as being "possessed by demons") Bussee and his group declined to endorse the anti-gay rights campaigns of Anita Bryant in Dade County, Florida and John Briggs in California, saying they were not in the movement to be political. They were also occasionally booed by several of the congregations to which they spoke when they portrayed homosexuals as humans afflicted with a psychological condition, rather than evil people possessed by "demons."

It was during that time that the two friends, both with wives and children at the time, began to simultaneously realize that despite their strongest efforts, they were still gay. It was Cooper's two-month trip into despair that actually precipitated the pair's break from the group. Placed on heavy doses of anti-psychotic medications (the names of which he still doesn't remember) by a Melodyland-affiliated psychiatrist (whose name also escapes him), Cooper found himself split between his conflicting public and private personalities.

"It got to the point that I felt ... like I was split in two, "Cooper now says. "I thought I was two individuals. I was this one person that was really Garry, and there was this other person that everybody expected me to be, going to Melodyland." And that's when it all snapped. He escaped. Sequestered away from his family, his church and his friends, Cooper pondered his next move. Finally, he decided to accept his being gay and quickly called his parents, his wife and the man who would soon leave Exodus with him, his lover, Michael Bussee.

"The main question has to be, "Cooper asserted, "Why does somebody want to change? Why would a homosexual person want to change and become heterosexual:? I think ... the reason was that I felt I had to change [was] because this is what society expected. I was fearful of losing love of family, losing my wife, losing jobs, losing all my security that I had grown up to know."

It wasn't long after that 1979 incident that Bussee left Exodus as well. The reactions from their former colleagues, however, was less than friendly.

"I got immediate and complete abandonment from all the people I knew before," Bussee told Wolfe. "I was anathema I was backslidden. They have this thing about turning you over to Satan, the destruction of your flesh kind of thing? It was as though I didn't exist."

"All that did for me war make me feel even more inadequate that there was something I wasn't doing right," he added. "it doesn't work. The bottom line is it doesn't work. We're not talking about just changing a behavior. That's what he likes to push: this idea that it's a choice, that it's a behavior. I believe it is an intrinsic part of who you are. You might be able to suppress the behavior, but you can't change the feelings. 1 don't trust it when he says that we should give more compassion because he doesn't sound like a very compassionate man to me."

Casting further suspicion on the "ex-gay" -cum- "reparative therapy" movement. Bussee, who through his work still keeps abreast of the latest in studies on homosexuality, points out with a fair degree of trepidation that Sheldon has never renounced employment of radical techniques in his programs.

Although noting that Exodus during his tenure only used the standard Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step model coupled with church and Bible study Bussee voiced fears that Sheldon might be using genital electroshock and chemical aversion therapy to thwart his client's homosexual urges.

"[When] Sheldon goes on the air and he ... says that reparative therapy [is] possible or desirable it just makes me mad," Busses adds. And it scares me, because even though they may not necessarily employ ladies like shock or drugs the psychological damage is there.

 (left) Gary Cooper and Michael Bussee (right)

When asked by Wolfe what they would tell a gay man or lesbian seeking to "become" heterosexual the pair responded with equal candor.

"I'd ask them to explain to me as best they can why it is that they want to change to find out what is motivating the unhappiness that they feel," Bussee said. "is it the homosexuality itself, or is it the feedback that they've gotten from family, from friends, from a culture that says that they must be sick or they must be demon possessed or they must be horrible people if attracted to people of their own sex?"

 "I think for most of the people that I talked with," Cooper added, "that was the number one reason for wanting to get out of the quote-unquote, homosexual life-style. It wasn't because, 'I hate it,' and 'Ooh, it's icky,' and 'I don't like having sex with another man or another woman' whatever the gender was. It was, 'I've got to change because my family will abandon me." 

Told that, since his and his lover's exit from the group, Exodus has come to encompass virtually all 'reparative therapy' programs Bussee's response was sharper still.

"That just curdles my blood," he says, "I'm so ashamed. The cancer keeps growing." 

by Michael Bourke

I was interested in the statement attributed to [The Rev.] Tony Higton [leader of anti-gay forces in the English General Synod] in Church Times, March 16, that homosexual orientation is morally neutral, whereas the practice is considered sinful. Similar statements have been made frequently in recent debates.

My difficulty with this view is that it seems to run counter to Jesus' teaching about ethics, especially as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount and in Mark 7. Jesus grounds the morality or immorality of human behavior not on actions, but on the motives of "the heart" which inspires them; indeed his refusal to make the traditional distinction between action and motive is one of the hallmarks of his ethical teaching. If the desires of the gay person's heart are morally neutral, how do they suddenly become culpable when they are expressed in action?

Perhaps Mr. Higton and those who agree with him simply mean that gay people are not personally to blame for their orientation. But that is rather different from saying that the orientation is morally neutral. If the Church of England's view of this subject is not to become incoherent, we must choose one of two alternatives. The first would start from the conviction that homosexual behavior is in all circumstances sinful, in which case the orientation itself must be regarded as morally disordered. This is, I suspect, what many people really feel, and it explains the tragic experience of Dennis Nadin (letters, 9 March) that the Church really wants gay people to be silent.

The second alternative begins with the motives: if, as I believe (apparently with Tony Higton's approval) homosexual orientation is morally acceptable, then committed homosexual partnerships must be seem as a responsible Christian option. This is not at all to cave in to permissiveness or to approve all that goes on in the gay community. It is a difficult and morally demanding search to establish relationships in which, as in marriage, the natural instincts and affections implanted by God can be hallowed and directed aright.

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