THE LAST TEMPTATION : A Controversial Form of Counseling Promoted by Fundamentalist Christians, Called ‘Reparative’ Therapy, Has Led Some People to Reject a Gay Lifestyle and Try to Embrace Heterosexuality

Like any young man captivated by the thrill of love, Bill was eager to show off his girlfriend.

He just happened to have in his briefcase a formal portrait of the pretty blonde, whose wholesome looks complement his own.

After all, she is his first sweetheart--his first female sweetheart. Until recently, Bill--31 years old--had never so much as asked a woman for a date.

Throughout his adolescence and most of his 20s, Bill was only attracted to men. “I was sick, really sick,” he now believes. He often felt tormented by his homosexuality; he could keep it a secret from his Catholic parents, but he could not keep it a secret from God.

Then the Costa Mesa man found salvation in an evangelical Christian church, which provided him counseling that it said could redirect his sexual orientation.

Unfailingly polite and selfless, he opened his interview at a local restaurant with a prayer that he would provide “whatever information is needed to make this a good story”:

I grew up in Oregon, in an average, middle-class family. Even before grade school, relatives called me a sissy because I liked to play with girls, which really made me question my masculinity.

At the age of 17, I first got into the homosexual lifestyle. When I moved to Orange County five years ago, I got involved in the lifestyle more than ever. There were times I enjoyed it--at least, I thought I did. I didn’t know any better, I guess.

I believe very strongly that homosexuality is directly connected with demonic principalities. I believe that God created men to be with women, and that the devil tries to destroy that with people who don’t know what they’re doing.

No matter how I tried to justify being gay, I knew it was wrong. It just didn’t make sense. I thought, my God, what am I going to do? Then a guy I knew started going to this church (Joy Christian Fellowship in Costa Mesa), and he told me they counsel homosexuals and help them get out of it. And I said, that’s for me.

The pastors told me, it’s not going to be an easy walk; it will be the hardest thing you ever do in your life. And it was hard; depression would set in, because you’re ripping away something that was your identity. It was like, who am I?

But today I can genuinely say: “I am not a homosexual.” I can see an attractive man and not be tempted.

For years, Christian-oriented therapists throughout the country have been “treating” homosexuals, much in the same way that they would treat a client suffering depression. Dig deep enough into a gay’s childhood history--so goes the theory--and the puzzle of his or her homosexuality will unravel.

As an organized movement, the therapy has its roots in Orange County. Fourteen years ago, two counselors with Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim founded Exodus, a nationwide coalition of ministries that embrace gays seeking to change their sexual lifestyle. The two men have since left the group and are now living together as lovers.

In recent years, Orange County has been the springboard for the movement’s gain in notoriety. The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, the vocal proponent of “curing” homosexuality who coined the term “reparative therapy,” has brought the treatment, once practiced quietly, out of the closet and into the news.

An accurate count of reparative therapists is difficult to calculate because most evangelical churches are independent of the umbrella organization, the National Assn. of Evangelicals, according to its spokesman, Donald R. Brown.

The therapists themselves realize that their clients are not representative of the gay community. “My opinion is that most gays and lesbians are perfectly happy the way they are and should be left alone,” said Joe Dallas of Genesis Counseling, based in Orange.

“The people I see have specific standards that they want to live up to as conservative Christians. They believe it is God’s plan that sexual expression take place within the security of a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman,” he said.

Furthermore, reparative therapists are far from representative of the mental health profession. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Assn. struck homosexuality from its widely used “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”--underscoring the belief that homosexuality should not be viewed as deviant behavior in need of mending.

“Sexual orientation is at the very bedrock of our personality structure,” said Bryant Welch, executive director of the American Psychological Assn.’s Practice Directorate. “It’s fair to say that mainstream opinion holds that a characteristic so fundamental as sexuality is not likely to change.”

That predominant philosophy, reparative therapists say, is precisely the reason that their services are necessary--to offer an alternative to mainstream psychology.

“Most of my clients, by the time they come to me, have already been to therapists who told them that homosexuality is fine and healthy,” Dallas noted. “They did not find that satisfactory; they were put in a situation where they were saying, ‘OK, he’s telling me homosexuality is all right, but my own value system tells me it’s not all right.’ ”

A serious yet warm man with a soothing voice, Dallas is deemed by his colleagues as one of Southern California’s foremost reparative therapists. Whether a brave pioneer or--as critics claim--a misguided extremist offering false hope to vulnerable clients, he believes he’s doing the right thing.

The former evangelical minister does not believe that gays are automatically sentenced to eternal punishment: “Clearly, the Bible states that homosexual behavior is sinful--but if sin kept people out of heaven, nobody would go to heaven.”

But he does believe that homosexuality is the product of childhood trauma rather than a naturally occurring condition; therefore, he says, gay people need not wallow in guilt over an emotional problem that can be resolved through analysis.

“I think that certain family situations create the ingredients for homosexual orientation,” Dallas said.

For instance: “Most of my male clients grew up with a perception of being very cut off from their fathers. Many of them report a hostile relationship, or a distant relationship, or a passive and weak father.”

Brad McCaul, a counselor with South Coast Community Church in Irvine, said that he approaches homosexuality as he would “any other compulsive behavior, such as alcoholism or drug abuse”--by pinpointing its origins and guiding clients away from its practice.

“You can’t just tell people to stop taking part in the lifestyle without first giving them an understanding of how they came to view themselves this way,” McCaul said. “The aim of treatment is to help the individual gain insight into where, along the course of his development, he found himself feeling certain attachments to the same sex.

“Eventually, of course, the person is going to have to separate himself from the gay life style. If he continues to frequent gay bars, obviously that is not going to help his recovery. I encourage clients to find a support group of people who are not involved in the gay community.”

And Jack Felton, director of Compassion Move Ministries in Orange, believes that “sexuality is a learned process, developed over a number of years. No one chooses to be gay, but they can choose to change their homosexuality.”

However, the majority of mental health professionals see homosexuality--whatever its causes may be--as unalterable in most cases. Nor do they, on the whole, buy reparative therapists’ supposition that the “distant father” is a common thread in male homosexuality.

“There is absolutely no data to support that theory,” said the APA’s Welch, a Washington psychologist and civil rights attorney. “Even if one could show that paternal relationship problems were in fact a recurring complaint of gay men in treatment, it wouldn’t necessarily establish which is cause and which is effect.

“Evidence indicates that genetic as well as environmental factors can contribute to homosexual orientation. Regardless, homosexuality is not a matter of individual choice. Throughout history, 10% of the population has been gay. That is a relatively constant percentage, irrespective of the different historical eras, societal standards, religious beliefs and childhood upbringings.”

Even the reparative therapists admit that their success rate is less than astounding.

“This isn’t the Schick Center; we can’t promise that you’ll be through with the cravings in six months,” Dallas said. “Almost 80% of my male clients have reported a significant reduction in homosexual feelings, and about half have reported the beginnings of sexual feelings for women. But no one has ever left therapy saying, ‘Wow, I have absolutely no homosexual thoughts or fantasies.’ ”

Two of the people for whom reparative therapy eventually failed are Michael Bussee and his boyfriend, Gary--founders of Exodus, the Anaheim-born coalition of ministries devoted to reversing homosexuality.

“Isn’t it the ultimate irony?” Gary remarked.

Occasionally you meet a couple who are so compatible, so in synch that the fates seem to have brought them together. Bussee and Gary are one of those couples. The only difference--however major--is that they are not husband and wife but husband and husband.

The two men wear matching wedding bands--symbols of their decadelong “marriage.” After struggling since adolescence to live as heterosexuals, they left their wives for each another in 1979. Bussee and Gary (Gary requested anonymity) fell in love while working together as Exodus counselors.

Despite the defection of its original leaders, Exodus remains in existence and counts among its 63 memberships Joe Dallas’ Genesis.

Bussee, 36, a family, marriage and child counselor, is the father of one child. Gary, 37, an office manager for a medical center, has three children. The couple share a house in Huntington Beach.

During a recent interview, the friends completed each others’ sentences and affectionately reminisced about their romance--like eternal newlyweds.

Bussee: I fought my (homosexual) feelings from the time I was 11, because of the rejection I was sure I would experience. I married my high school girlfriend after my first year in college. When I realized that I could sexually perform with my wife, I thought that was proof that my homosexuality was indeed just a phase I went through as a teen-ager.

Gary: I, too, had a high school girlfriend, because I thought that’s what Mom and Dad wanted of me. I got married my last year of high school and we had our first child a year later. I thought, great, everything is going fine--Mom and Dad are happy with me, society is happy with me. But I still had the (homosexual) fantasies; I’d just stopped acting on them.

Bussee: I became a Christian in 1971 and joined Melodyland Christian Center. I started a ministry there to counsel gays who wanted to go straight.

Gary: My wife and I became “born-again” Christians at about that same time. We got more and more involved in the church--to the point that we were eating, drinking, breathing nothing but Christianity.

I was feeling good about myself; I thought the (homosexual) feelings were starting to go away. But I still had this pit in the bottom of my stomach that was yearning for something different. So I started going to Melodyland School of Theology--I thought that maybe if I become a minister, I would finally lose the temptation. I thought I had to do more, strive harder, trust God more. I had a job at a bottling company; I was carrying two Bibles to work every day and reading them during lunch and breaks.

Finally, I thought, “I’ve done everything I can and I still have these feelings.” So I went to counseling at the church. That’s where I met Mike.

Bussee: My ministry began getting letters from churches around the country that wanted to establish similar ministries (to help gays change their sexual preference). Gary and I put together a conference for these groups in 1976, and at the conference we decided to form an umbrella organization, which we named Exodus.

While working together in Exodus, Gary and I started to develop feelings for one another, but neither of us admitted this. Then in 1979, we were asked to speak at a church conference in Indianapolis. On the plane, we ended up talking about our feelings--it was an emotional coming out for both of us.

In Exodus, we had men who had become basket cases because they weren’t able to make the change (to heterosexuality). They’d look at us and say, “But you guys are married and have kids; I want to be just like you.” (During the conversation on the airplane) I said, “We’re damaging people, Gary. I don’t believe in what we’re doing anymore.”

Then we got to the hotel and discovered that they’d accidentally put us in the same room. So our relationship was consummated that night.

Gary: I had never before experienced such passion and romance. To this day, from time to time I think, “This must be what heterosexuals experience when they make love.” With my wife, I simply performed. But I want to emphasize that it wasn’t sex that brought Mike and me together. Just as with heterosexuals, sex is only one small facet of our relationship.

We left our wives and the church not long after that night in Indianapolis. But just because we left that particular church, we didn’t leave God and God didn’t leave us. I can only believe that God loves me for who I am--that this is the way I was created and this is who I was meant to be.

I just pray to God that none of those people we counseled committed suicide because of something that we said (while in Exodus).

Bussee: Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I’ve prayed many times that God will forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing.

Whether reparative therapy helps or--as Bussee and Gary now charge--harms its recipients, the question exists: How can a gay who feels in his very core that God condemns homosexual behavior find inner peace?

Gay rights activist Jeff LeTourneau, head of the Orange County Visibility League, succinctly summarized his opinion of the moral conflict that can haunt gay fundamentalist Christians: “The problem lies in the fact that they ascribe to a religion that is bigoted and persecutes them.”

But Patricia Hannigan, president of the Orange County Psychological Assn., does not see the dilemma in such black-and-white terms.

“Each person has to decide where his or her own satisfaction lies; there is no one formula,” said the Newport Beach psychologist. “If the foremost priority in one’s life is his religious faith, then his personal happiness might come from conforming to that faith rather than from pursuing his sexual orientation.

“It is not a matter of repression if the person has dealt with his ambivalence and has made a rational decision that homosexual activity does not comply with his value system. This is not so different from a priest or a nun choosing to be celibate in honor of their religious beliefs.”

Hannigan did express concern, however, regarding reparative therapists’ qualifications to counsel clients about an issue so complex as sexuality.

“People who claim to specialize in that area should have training that goes above and beyond the standard requirements for a license,” she said.

Like many Christian-oriented counselors, Dallas, McCaul and Felton are not licensed psychologists, psychiatrists, or family, marriage and child counselors; all three are therapist trainees, working on their licenses. “That in and of itself is not reason to decide against a particular therapist,” Hannigan said. “But a person seeking therapy should look into the therapist’s credentials and should obtain referrals. In California, almost anyone can call himself a therapist.”

“The point is that a so-called reparative therapist, who starts with a particular bias, can only stand in the way of an individual discovering his or her basic sexual orientation,” the APA’s Welch said. “You know, God made us all, and he made 10% of the population gay. And for a therapist to label that 10% sinful, of course, is going to make the client feel bad about himself.”

With her trendy, daring hairstyle--one side cropped close to the scalp, one side bushily permed--Andria Sigler looks more like a Hollywood creative type than she does a Cypress minister. But the petite, elfishly cute 35-year-old writes sermons for a living rather than screenplays.

Sigler works for Break Thru Ministries, where she counsels people seeking to change their homosexual orientation. As do many practitioners of the controversial therapy, she addresses her clients from a first-hand perspective. Until she became a “born-again” Christian at the age of 28, Sigler accepted her lesbianism as innate.

Now happily married, Sigler said that her decade of homosexuality “seems like another lifetime.” A quiet, guarded woman, she pensively selected her every word. Careful not to make generalizations, she often opened her statements with such qualifiers as, “Well, I can only speak for myself . . . “

At one time I believed I was born homosexual, because even as a child I was drawn toward other girls. I didn’t actively enter the gay lifestyle until I was 18; I was tired of suppressing whatever was in me.

I moved into a series of relationships with women. I had fun--it was all I knew at the time. But as I look back now, I see that those relationships were really dysfunctional. They were dependent rather than interdependent relationships, almost as if you were trying to use the other person to fill this big void inside you. I began to sense that more and more, and to become more and more dissatisfied.

I became a Christian when I was 28, and stopped practicing homosexuality. But internally, I was still attracted to women. I realized I needed some therapeutic counseling, so I went through the Desert Stream program (an Exodus ministry based in Santa Monica).

It’s been three or four years now that I could say I don’t have homosexual inclinations at all. My homosexuality was resolved as I worked through deeper issues, such as a couple of sexual molestation incidents when I was a child.

I’ve been married for two years. My husband and I enjoy a healthy sex life; it’s a marriage in all senses. I met my husband at a church event. I told him I had been gay within a couple of months of dating him--as soon as I saw that I was really interested in him and it was reciprocal. He reacted very well, considering. He took it in, went away for a day and thought about it. The next day he said he didn’t have a problem with it and appreciated my telling him.

As a minister, I would never try to force change on someone; each individual has to decide where they want to go. I think that God has this great life available to us, but none of us chooses to achieve our fullest potential. So if someone is homosexual because of a dysfunctional family background and they choose to remain homosexual, I don’t think they’re achieving their full potential. But I don’t think that makes them bad people.

In general, reparative therapists seem to share Sigler’s view that gays are not “bad people.” Lost souls, perhaps. Confused. In conflict with biblical teachings. But certainly not scheming villains.

“They don’t want to molest our children, they don’t want to take over the world,” Dallas allowed.

Sheldon, on the other hand, sees homosexuals as no less than “the enemy.”

“They’ve positioned themselves to overhaul America,” Sheldon said. “It only takes a few, remember. If the good people don’t speak up, then the evil people will prevail.”

And so as one of the good people--”as a non-homosexual, as a fully heterosexual”--he has assumed the role of torchbearer for reparative therapy. Sheldon believes that public schools should make the therapy available to adolescents.

“What we need to do is train in schools the early warning signs of gender-identity disorders, before the child is socialized by going to a gay and lesbian community center,” he said.

The “militant, politicized homosexual community,” Sheldon said, preys on young adults at their most vulnerable and experimental stage. If such victims are not rescued by reparative therapy--but instead are told “hey, this (homosexuality) is a good alternative”--as much as 25% of the population could become gay, he added.

“Western civilization could take a terrible nose-dive,” Sheldon said. “You are playing with dynamite in destroying the sexual ecology of the human race.”

When the subject of religious conflict over homosexuality was broached, Sheldon brushed it off, saying, “That’s not the point I want to make.” However, he tipped his hat at the Christian-oriented therapists who do deal with homosexuality from a moral standpoint. “It’s the Joe Dallases that are initiating” treatment for homosexuality, Sheldon said. “It isn’t coming out of the medical profession. It’s coming out of a gut-level human tragedy and individuals like Joe saying, ‘You can recover.’ ”

Said Dallas, with a tight-lipped smile: “I like Lou, but I am not associated with him. There are some things he has said that I don’t agree with, but I appreciate his efforts.”

In fact, Dallas shies away from adopting Sheldon’s now commonly applied term, reparative therapy.

“I have a distaste for any special names. (The word ‘reparative’) can be insulting to gays; but my main objection is that it makes the therapists sound as if we do some exotic form of specialized counseling. To me, it’s just therapy--same as the therapy I would use for any person who comes in here with an emotional problem,” Dallas said.

“When you get right down to it, all this hatred of homosexuals is silly,” psychologist Welch said of organizations like the Traditional Values Coalition. “You have to ask the question, why do these anti-gay groups have such strong feelings about homosexuality? What is the problem? We have children who are dying of starvation every day, yet these people are worried about the way in which consenting adults express themselves sexually.”

While few mental health professionals today accept Sheldon’s argument that homosexuality should be changed, some leave room for the possibility that it could. “With human beings, truly anything is possible,” Newport Beach psychologist Hannigan said.

Bill, the Costa Mesa man in love with a woman for his first time, presents himself as living proof.

I met my girlfriend, Nancy, in church two years ago. She knew about my homosexuality before she ever got involved with me. My getting set free from the gay lifestyle was somewhat of a public thing in our church.

Nancy and I both believe that God has brought us together, and we’re excited about it. I have a genuine attraction to her, which is a very beautiful thing. It’s not burning lust--I know what that is. I used to have that with guys. I don’t think that’s right. I think women deserve better treatment than to just be a reciproc a l of some guy’s lust.

We won’t ( have sex ) until we’re married. Because we’re Christians, we don’t feel that would be appropriate. So I’ve never slept with a woman. But I’m not nervous about my wedding night; I look forward to it. I’m confident that God’s brought us this far, and He’s not going to stop now.

I haven’t kissed her yet, either. My life had been so promiscuous that to have a relationship that’s pure is the most satisfying, fun thing I’ve ever gone through in my entire life.

One of my gay friends said, “You’re kidding yourself, Bill--you’re gay and you’ll always be gay.” There are those who hate me--everything they stand for I’ve come out of, and they can’t handle that.

Still, just like a recovered alcoholic wouldn’t go to a bar to hang out, I wouldn’t go to a gay bar as an ex-homosexual. The spirit could always come back. It’s a choice to do warfare and fight it off. I refer to it as warfare--it really is a war.