Date

April 14, 2013

Jill Stark

Senior writer for The Sunday Age

Right to the end, Damien Christie feared that the God he worshipped did not love him back.

Rejected by his Pentecostal church for his sexuality, he underwent gay ”conversion” therapy at a Christian ministry in Melbourne. If the program’s aim was to ”pray away the gay”, it failed. He remained a homosexual man with a strong faith, and found a new church that embraced him.

Yet the turmoil of trying to reconcile the warring parts of his identity left an indelible mark.

On March 27, Damien (below) took his own life. Nobody can know with certainty what triggered the decision, but those close to the 43-year-old personal carer believe ”reparative” therapy at Mosaic Ministries in Melbourne’s south-east scarred him deeply.

”I saw him every two weeks for counselling and he would often ask the question, ‘Does God still love me, Matt?’ Despite me reassuring him every time, it just couldn’t stick. He was a very sensitive, kind, compassionate man. So many people loved him but life was just too hard. It’s tragic.”

Mr Glover, who conducted Damien’s funeral last Wednesday, hopes his death will be a wake-up call for church leaders in denial about the damage caused when they reject gay members of their flock.

It’s a view backed by other Christian counsellors and health experts, who say the phenomenon of what they call ”gay religious suicide” is vastly under-reported.

While conversion programs are at the extreme end of the spectrum – and relatively rare, with fewer than 15 believed to be operating in Australia – rejection of gay church members is common as religious leaders from all denominations grapple with homosexuality within their ranks.

In Fairfax Media story last year, Damien, a regular volunteer at the Lort Smith Animal Hospital, described how he was driven to attempt suicide after being told in therapy that his homosexuality was a ”sickness” that could be cured.

He said Carol Hardy, who runs Mosaic Ministries – which, according to its website, aims to ”inform and educate communities, parents and families to better understand and handle those who struggle with sexual confusion” – had suggested the sexual abuse he suffered as a child might have caused his homosexuality, and during a prayer session had pleaded for the ”spirit of Jezebel” to leave him.

Another man, David Lograsso, told a similar story, saying that during counselling Mrs Hardy had linked his sexuality to his relationship with his father.

Mrs Hardy last week denied the claims, saying they were ”bizarre”. When The Sunday Age questioned why two men who had never previously met would invent such stories, she said: ”Well, that might be their perception, people have their perceptions. I’m not saying they’re lying.”

She insisted sexuality had not been the focus of her sessions with Damien, whom she had not seen for more than 2½ years, and maintained she had repeatedly reassured him that God loved him unconditionally.

When asked if she believed homosexuality could be changed by her therapy, she said: ”No, not necessarily … The aim is to work with what the client’s wanting to work on, and I work alongside them and the desires that they have.”

In a separate interview, David Hardy said the claims against his wife were ”malicious lies” and that she had tried to help Damien.

Asked if his wife had ever told people she counselled that she could cure them of their homsexuality, he said: ”Wrong. Only if the person wants to be cured. They can be cured of anything. I’m not saying they can be cured completely but they can overcome it, like alcoholism.”

Damien’s friends acknowledge that his troubles were complex – he struggled with alcohol issues and had been sexually abused as a child – but they feel the ministry’s teachings damaged his self-esteem.

Mr Lograsso said the program had left both him and Damien feeling inadequate. ”His faith was still strong because he loved God but the residual effects of the ministry played a large part in his mental health. He used to say how he felt damaged and unworthy. The pain was just too great.”

Former evangelist preacher Anthony Venn-Brown, who now runs support groups for gay Christians, said he had received hundreds of emails from people who had been driven to attempt suicide due to the conflict between their faith and sexuality.

”If a 14-year-old kid goes to his pastor and says ‘I think I might be gay’, his first response most likely will be, ‘Well, we’re going to pray with you and help you overcome this’, and that sets them on a path of self-destruction. If you’re really involved in a strong evangelical church, that’s your whole life, so you’re worried you’re going to lose your social network, you’re going to go to hell, your family might reject you and your relationship with God will be over,” he said.

Professor Anne Mitchell from La Trobe University’s Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, who has conducted extensive research on same-sex-attracted youth, said those from faith-based backgrounds were much more likely to self-harm or attempt suicide.

”There’s no doubt it’s an under-reported phenomenon. For many kids it means a choice between their faith and being gay. But they just can’t cut the gay stuff away to be acceptable to their religion and eventually there has to be a resolution. For most young people it’s to leave the church, but sadly for some it would be to kill themselves,” she said.

It was concerns over high suicide and self-harm rates among gay and lesbian people from faith backgrounds that led Rob Buckingham, pastor of the Pentecostal Bayside Church in Cheltenham, to deliver a groundbreaking sermon two years ago with the message that ”real Christianity is accepting”.

”The church in general needs to reach out with the love of God for all people. Jesus had a special compassion for those who were marginalised by society and the religious institutions of his day. I believe the church of today needs to reflect that same compassion,” he said last week.

Mr Venn-Brown said education was vital for religious leaders.

”We need to tackle what’s going on in these big mega-churches. What’s going on with pastors and church leaders who are completely ignorant? I know of a church where one of the pastors recommended to a guy that he go and see a female prostitute because he couldn’t comprehend that this guy could not be attracted to or enjoy sex with a woman,” he said.

In a statement, Australian Christian Churches – the nation’s largest Pentecostal movement – said it had ”a commitment to endeavour to show the love of God to all people, regardless of culture, creed or sexual orientation”.

The Catholic Church was unable to provide anyone to comment on this story.

Mr Venn-Brown has formed Bridge Builders and Ambassadors International, an organisation that aims to reach out to and educate church leaders from all denominations to ensure gay people of faith are welcomed.

”There are pastors and church leaders out there still living with that outdated belief that either you become gay because your dad didn’t love you enough or your mum was overbearing, or you were sexually abused, or that you choose to be gay and that you can change it,” he said.

”The culture of secrecy and silence breeds shame, and until we change that these tragedies are just going to be repeated.”

For help or information call Suicide Helpline Victoria on 1300 651 251 or Lifeline on 131 114, or visit beyondblue.org.au

[email protected]

Date 7 April 2012

Homosexual ‘cure’ is hell for many.

Note from Rowland: I knew Damien, fairly well. We’ve talked, prayed, cried, and walked together quite a few times – and exchanged messages on Facebook, which, of course, I now treasure. When Christians tell him he either can be ‘cured’ … or even worse, he’ll go to hell because of his gay orientation, am I allowed to get angry? There’s some good evidence Christians/church-related LGBTI people have a higher-than-average suicide rate.

Damien Christie (right) and David Lograsso. Photo: Craig Sillitoe

DRIVING home from a date with another man, David Lograsso was tormented by a recurring thought: ”I’ll be going to hell for this.”

As a born-again Christian, he ”knew” that being gay was wicked, sinful and wrong. Desperate to change, the 27-year-old vowed to exert more self-control. To pray even harder. To do whatever it took to become straight.

Lograsso was undergoing three ”conversion” programs in Melbourne, lured by claims that he could rid himself of his homosexuality.

Lograsso found his three programs on the internet. Two were support groups – Living Waters and Roundabout Ministries – and the third, Mosaic Ministries, involved prayer sessions and counselling. He also attended a weekend retreat in Sydney run by Liberty Christian Ministries.

The Sunday Age understands that none of these programs are run by accredited psychologists or psychiatrists. Critics, including medical professionals, say they can and do cause severe psychological harm.

Returning from his date, Lograsso began dreading his next Living Waters meeting, especially the ”accountability sessions” that left him feeling shamed. Each week, the 10 participants were required to confess to the group how many times they had masturbated, watched pornography or fantasised about other men. Having seen what happens to other ”fallen” members, he knew what to expect: everyone in the room would surround him, bow their heads and pray.

He also feared telling his peers at Roundabout Ministries, where ”you get [reprimanded] if you even exchange your number with another guy”. But it was the reaction of his counsellor at Mosaic Ministries, Carol Hardy, he was most anxious about.

Her attempts to attribute his homosexuality to his father – whom Lograsso describes as affectionate and loving – had upset and disturbed him. ”Carol kept examining my childhood and asking if I’d been abused,” he says. ”There are all these things that are supposed to have made you gay; you’re supposed to have been abused or raped or have a father who doesn’t care about you. I ended up really confused and thinking, ‘Was I actually abused? Have I blocked it out?’ It plants ideas in your head.”

As his car neared home, he fleetingly fantasised about having a relationship with the man he’d just kissed – ”Someone to hold my hand” – then he cursed his ”naive” dream.

Lograsso was in crisis. Anxious and depressed, he’d spend entire weekends in his bedroom. His self-esteem was in pieces and his faith was crumbling. ”I kept thinking, ‘God must not love me because he’s not answering my prayers’,” he says.

At his worst, he considered suicide.

Helen Kelly, producer of a new documentary about ”ex-gay” therapy called The Cure, says her research uncovered many participants of ”reparative” programs struggling with depression and self-harm. ”These groups never take responsibility for the fact that some people who’ve been through them commit suicide,” she says. ”They’re not registered and they have no duty of care.”

While some group leaders describe themselves as ”counsellors” or ”therapists”, such titles require no training and critics say many do not have the expertise to counsel emotionally vulnerable people.

As a young gay man, Paul Martin spent two years in the early 1990s with Exodus and Living Waters in Melbourne. After quitting, he became a psychologist and has treated many former reparative therapy participants.

”I’ve worked with maximum security prisoners in Pentridge, yet the people who’ve been through ex-gay programs are some of the most psychologically damaged people I’ve seen in my life,” Martin says.

”I have a client who went through 35 years of these programs … One of the most crushing moments was when he said, in tears, ‘I’ve just realised that I’ve never known what it’s like to love or be loved’.”

Martin is especially critical of groups that point to the disproportionate rates of depression and anxiety among gay people. ”The irony is that they’re actually creating the terrible emotional damage that leads to these statistics,” he says.

Three years ago, Lograsso realised the programs were not working. He quit the groups, came out to his family and embraced his sexuality.

The turning point was a simple realisation: of the 40 or so men he’d met in the three programs, none had become heterosexual. There was, however, a group leader – a married father – who claimed the program worked for him. ”But he was camper than any queen at Mardi Gras,” Lograsso says. ”He kept telling me, ‘You can change’; then he’d tell me that when a muscly delivery man turned up to his house, his mind started racing.

”In the end, I’m like, ‘These are your success stories? These are your poster boys?”’

He now attends a support group for gay Christians called Freedom2b and is a convener of Young Bucks, a secular social group. He’s in a new relationship and is close to his parents. He says his faith is stronger than ever. He is also at pains not to attack those who run the ex-gay groups. They’re not bad people, he insists, just misguided.

The three groups that Lograsso attended – and similar Melbourne groups EnCourage and Exodus Asia Pacific – all refused multiple requests for interviews, or to provide evidence or examples of their effectiveness. None are explicitly linked to or funded by specific churches except for Mosaic Ministries, which is attached to the Destiny Church in Dingley. None appear to be driven by profit; relying only on donations or token fees.

And most insist they don’t run ”ex-gay” or ”conversion” programs. They claim they help those with ”unwanted same-sex attraction”. Haydn Sennitt, the pastoral care worker at Sydney’s Liberty Christian Ministries, said in an email: ”We do not offer ‘fixes’ or ‘cures’ for homosexuality but we do believe that it can be healed over time.”

This is merely semantics, according to Kelly, who found 15 such groups in Australia when making her film. Only the Sydney representative of Living Waters agreed to be interviewed on camera. ”You can get into a never-ending debate with these groups about what they do,” she says. ”But when push comes to shove, they’re saying that if you have same-sex attraction, you can’t be a Christian. So your same-sex attraction becomes ‘unwanted’ and then you put yourself through one of their programs.”

In an email, former Roundabout Ministries leader Adrian Rowse said his group was aimed at young men with a variety of sexual problems. At times, many members expressed a wish to rid themselves of same-sex attractions. ”I can see how someone new to the group may have felt that this was an aim,” he wrote, ”[but] I have never promised anyone that they can be ‘free’ of homosexuality.”

While local ”reparative” programs generally avoid attention, their American counterparts have been hampered by the public renouncements of dozens of former leaders and participants. Exodus International, one of the world’s biggest ex-gay groups, was established in 1976. Three years later it was rocked when two of its founders left to be with each other.

In 2000, Exodus chairman John Paulk was ousted by the board after being seen in a gay bar. Five years ago, current president Alan Chambers appeared uncomfortable when confronted with claims he took nine months to consummate his marriage.

”There was a learning curve,” said Chambers, who has admitted ongoing same-sex attraction. ”It had nothing to do with the struggle with homosexuality … It had everything to do with, ‘I’m not quite sure how this all works’.”

In a statement, the Australian Psychological Society said that ”reparative therapists have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of cure … APS recommends that ethical practitioners refrain from attempts to change individuals’ sexual orientation”.

Recalling the attempts of Exodus and Living Waters to turn him straight, Paul Martin laughs. Men, he says, were taught how to speak in a monotone and walk ”without swishing” while women were encouraged to ”wear the Laura Ashley look”. Gay fantasies were to be suppressed by envisioning a stop sign. Both programs involved workbooks and prayer sessions.

Martin also helped lead an Exodus group but after a life-changing trip to Thailand in the mid-’90s, he decided to leave. Nervously, he told his co-leader, Wendy Lawson – who stunned him by revealing she was quitting too.

Lawson, who married her long-term girlfriend in Britain in 2007, tells The Sunday Age she was suicidal during her Exodus years, living in ”constant fear” and feeling like an ”abomination”. Since accepting her sexuality, she says, ”life is one of fulfilment and satisfaction”.

Like most who enter reparative therapy, Lawson and Martin were, at the time, conservative Christians. ”There’s usually a fundamentalist, Pentecostal or evangelical background,” says Rachel Goff, a Monash University researcher who studied ex-gay participants for a thesis. She found the vast majority were men. ”They place their Christian identity above all other aspects of their identity, including their sexuality.”

Damien Christie entered reparative therapy in Melbourne in 2006 after splitting with his long-term boyfriend. Having recently joined a Pentecostal Church, he sought help from Carol Hardy at Mosaic Ministries.

Hardy, he says, seized on the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, blaming it for his ”sickness”. In a prayer session, she pleaded for the ”spirit of Jezebel” to leave him, suggesting he may have been cursed in the womb. Ashamed, Christie spiralled into alcoholism.

”I would drink to pass out,” he says, his voice cracking. ”I acted out sexually, I was doing drugs and my self-worth was destroyed. I had no sense of self-love or care.” He even attempted suicide.

Yet his faith remained. In 2010, he confronted Hardy in her Dingley office, telling her he believed that Jesus loved and accepted him. ”She banged her Bible down on her desk and said, ‘You do know what this says about being gay, don’t you?”’ Christie says. ”She just wouldn’t take any responsibility for the damage and hurt her counselling had done to me.”

Hardy has refused to comment.

Christie and Lograsso, who are friends, say they’re sharing their story to help others. Both urge gay Christians to contact Freedom2b, a support group co-founded by former Pentecostal leader and ex-gay therapy critic Anthony Venn-Brown, who detailed his own struggle with such therapies in his 2004 memoir A Life of Unlearning.

But they also see this as a public declaration of self-acceptance. ”I’m not some broken person,” Lograsso says, a flash of anger crossing his face. ”I don’t need to become straight. I’m now living a life I never dreamed I could have. This is freedom.”

thecuredocumentary.com.au

freedom2b.org

Lifeline: 131 114