An article in the New York Times Magazine looks at what I view as the bizarre renunciation of homosexuality by Michael Glatze (pictured with his former partner) who now professes to be "straight." I believe that individuals have the right to be who they want to be even if that means deluding themselves - so long as it doesn't harm others. Glatze once was openly gay and once worked at XY, a San Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men. Then, after a health scare he walked away from his former life, embraced evangelical Christianity and is a frequent anti-gay gadfly at far right anti-gay publications such as World New Daily, a/k/a Wing Nut Daily on this blog.*
Having spent 37 years strenuously working to convince myself that I wasn't really gay, I know full well how once can engage in all kinds of mental games and tricks aimed at continuing the self-delusion that you are not who you secretly know in your heart that you are. During my decades of trying to will and pray myself straight, I also experienced the cult like aspects of religion which can be used as a tool - a drug almost - to try to further support the denial that one is striving for. Some of the article about Glatze sounds like the self-delusion I inflicted on myself. Also, from the great deal of reading I've done on the subject, I well aware that no credible mental health experts believe that one can change your sexual orientation.
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Honestly, it's the religious brainwashing that's false as opposed to being gay and accepting it and being honest about it - especially to one's self. Thus, my questions to Glatze are (1) how long will it be before the religiously induced and supported self-denial crashes and burns, (2) how empty will you feel when that fall eventually comes, and (3) how much harm will you have cause to others in the LGBT community by allowing yourself to be used as a tool by the modern day Pharisees of the Christian Right? Candidly, I feel sorry for Glatze - or I would but for the damage he is willfully doing to others. Here are some brief highlights from the article:
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Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay. “Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,” he wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY and Y.G.A. “Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic,” he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily article a week later, he said that he was “repulsed to think about homosexuality” and that he was “going to do what I can to fight it.”
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Though I don’t doubt that sexual attraction can evolve, I was skeptical of Michael’s claim of heterosexuality — and I rejected his argument that “homosexuality prevents us from finding our true self within.” Besides, I had a hard time believing that Michael’s “true self” was a fundamentalist Christian who writes derogatorily about being gay. But whatever aspirations I had about persuading Michael to join the ranks of ex-ex-gays, they were no match for his eagerness to save me.
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“God loves you more than any dude will ever love you,” he told me at the cafe. “Don’t put your faith in some man, some flesh. That’s what we do when we’re stuck in the gay identity, when we’re stuck in that cave. We go from guy to guy, looking for someone to love us and make us feel O.K., but God is so much better than all the other masters out there.”
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Michael, who is 36, now often refers to gay life as a kind of cave — or cage. In an open letter to Ricky Martin, published on WorldNetDaily after Martin came out, he wrote, “Homosexuality is a cage in which you are trapped in an endless cycle of constantly wanting more — sexually — that you can never actually receive, constantly full of emptiness, trying to justify your twisted actions by politics and ‘feel good’ language.”
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Michael didn’t begin to question his life path, he told me, until a health scare in 2004 that led to what he calls his “spiritual awakening.” That year, when Michael was 29, he experienced a series of heart palpitations and became convinced that he suffered from the same congenital heart defect that killed his father when Michael was 13. (Michael lost both his parents young; his mother died of breast cancer when he was 19.)
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After tests eventually ruled out his father’s illness, Michael felt that he had escaped death and found himself staring “into the face of God.” In a published interview with Joseph Nicolosi, a leader in the controversial field of reparative therapy, which seeks to help people overcome unwanted homosexual attractions, Michael said that he became “born again” in that moment and that “every concept that my mind had ever entertained — my whole existence — was completely re-evaluated.”
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Michael told me that he has no same-sex sexual desires today, a claim that I found hard to believe. Many ex-gays admit to struggling with same-sex attraction years after they’ve rejected a gay identity, and a handful of high-profile leaders in the movement have been humbled by public slips or “relapses,” a word borrowed from the language of addiction recovery. (Many ex-gays see same-sex attractions as a kind of addiction, one with no “cure” but with the possibility of freedom with God’s help.)
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Ben went on. “To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide into these camps where we’re always right and the other side is always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that, and I think Michael is one of them.”
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For an ex-gay intent on staying that way, there are few safer places in the world than a Bible school in Wyoming. The country’s least-populous state — where Matthew Shepard was murdered and left to die on a rural fence post, and where two fictional cowboys fell in love on Brokeback Mountain but never allowed themselves a life together — is also a state without a gay bar. My old friend, it seems, has picked the perfect place to go straight.
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