There is a 2003 episode of Law & Order: SVU that is both the effect of and a direct reference to the ex-gay movement’s 1998 advertising campaign. Although its primary focus is the homophobia underlying conversion therapy, “Abomination” also addresses the claim that selling ex-gay change is consumer fraud. Five minutes into the episode, detectives Elliot Stabler (Christopher Maloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) scour the ads plastered on a New York construction site to find one of a smiling man and woman holding hands below a Christian cross that reads, “We Chose the Path of Love.” The detectives were led there by a bouncer convinced he had seen their murder victim in a “gay ad.” A hard cut to police headquarters has forensic psychiatrist George Huang (BD Wong) explain: “It’s a Christian ministry advocating
‘freedom from homosexuality’ through prayer and counselling. It started in the 80s with the so-called ‘ex-gay movement.’” Although not based on real people (says the show’s disclaimer), the detectives investigate first the “repressed” founders of the ministry (Don Stephenson and Andrea Cirie), hinting at real-life ex-gay media personalities Anne and John Paulk; then a hate-filled preacher who pickets funerals (James Otis), strongly suggesting real-life Westboro Baptist Church preacher Fred Phelps; and finally a reparative therapist (George Segal) soon charged with murdering his son’s gay lover, maybe implying real-life psychoanalyst Charles Socarides.40 Along the way, and almost previewing Boston Legal’s “Selling Sickness,” they discover their victim’s Masters research argued that reparative therapists willingly sell a “snake oil cure.”
In the previous chapter I outlined the conditions of emergence of the ex-gay movement through a genealogy of confession rooted in the work of Michel Foucault. I analyzed the way aspects of that genealogy still play out today, both in the movement and in the discourse of
40 Charles Socarides, author of several books on the therapy of homosexuality (1968; 1975; 1978; 1989), opponent of declassification in 1973, co-founder of NARTH in 1991, and champion of conversion therapy until his death in 2005, never murdered his son’s gay lover. He does, however, have a gay son, Richard Socarides, who is a lawyer, CNN political commentator, and former LGBTQ advisor to President Bill Clinton. Ironically, one of Socarides’
early books, The Overt Homosexual (1968), is dedicated to his son, then a closeted 16-year-old.
identity politics that surrounds it. I argued ex-gays do not try to pray the gay away, but confess it away through a contradictory mix of confessions of sin and disease and true belief, and
testimonies of self-sacrifice and self-emergence. I also argued a similar confessional quadrate operates outside the movement. In all cases confession is governmental, understood in a broad sense, revolving around religious and psychological power-knowledges designed to operate as technologies of the self. Put another way, the last chapter used the problem of ex-gay confession to demonstrate that contemporary society continues to obstinately engage with the question of a true sex, which has its own political economy as manifested in the twentieth century invention of identity politics wherein normative confessions of the self become life-long labours of self-formation and struggle embedded in long-standing religious and psychological power relations.
In this chapter I will argue that confession is a governmental practice that continues to be modified by our current political economy, and the ex-gay movement plugs directly into that phenomenon. I will show confession to be embedded within a neoliberal problematic of rational choice versus consumer fraud. Foucault argued that through psychoanalysis confession spread out into advertising and popular culture. I will argue that through advertising and popular culture confession has become inseparable from our economic system and the ex-gay movement is a case study of how it operates in that context. As the movement now justifies itself through the discourse of rational choice, I will consider it in relation to rational choice cost-benefit
discourses. While this analysis will help elucidate how neoliberal economic theory has colonized the field of psychology, it will also reveal that the movement actually resists what amounts to its own commodification at the same time that it embraces it. As part of this analysis, I will consider the struggle for ex-gay change as a flawed technology of the self that is sold not for financial profit, but as a form of religious heterosexual entrepreneurship sold by true believers with
confession as part of the business model. However, there is an impoverishment and insufficiency
associated with this entrepreneurship because it forecloses choice, denies risk, and limits entrepreneurship only to the creation of heteronormativity. It fact, the movement’s engagement with the knowledge and rhetoric of rational choice, and its transformation of confession into advertised entrepreneurship, has opened it up to accusations of consumer fraud.
Ex-gay Advertising and Truth in Fraud
Unlike in Boston Legal (see the Introduction), the references to advertising and consumer fraud in “Abomination” are fleeting, operating first as narrative twists and second as catalysts for a more in depth exploration of ex-gay homophobia, both religious and psychological. Thus it might be easy to miss, in spite of the whole Law & Order franchise revolving around criminal confessions and legal testimonies, that in their ex-gay ad there is a confession of desire and a testimony of cure; because to “choose” the path of love in this context, and to proclaim it, indicates that a different path has been rejected, a sinful path confessed and sacrificed away. The claim being made is that through the light of faith the souls of the people in the ad were purified, which is what allows them to testify to their new path as truth while confessing their old path as purged. By the end of the episode, however (with advertisement and fraud forgotten in favour of confessions of homophobic murder), another confession of self-emergence is testified to: the reparative therapist’s deeply conflicted (and arguably complicit in murder) son (Jonathon Tucker) comes out of the closet to reveal himself a gay man. And it all begins with that
advertisement, because, as detective Benson puts it, their murder victim was literally “the poster boy for the gay movement.” As it happens, Anne Paulk was literally the poster girl for the ex-gay movement in 1998 when the real story “came out” and the movement’s advertised offer of
“freedom” introduced ex-gay change to the public and put it at the heart of a mediated debate.
We know that that first ex-gay ad was structured as a full confession. Unlike in Law &
Order, however, Anne’s confession does not end with one line of testimony. Rather it tells in
great detail of how she was “made” a lesbian through a childhood sexual assault and how, years later (after womanhood “became a mystery”), she met a former lesbian who helped her leave homosexuality through faith in God’s love and hard work. That Anne may not consider her testimony to be a confession, because for many Christians testimony and confession are not the same thing, within a Foucauldian analytic they are two sides of the same coin. What was true in the medieval monasteries of feudal Europe is, in a strange sense, also true today in North America: a conservative Christian cannot testify truth, whether personal or biblical, without confessing sin through self-sacrifice, and he or she cannot confess sin away without the light of truth as his or her testimony. The difference today is that dynamic has spread; it has been
psychologized, merged with testimonies of self-emergence and identity, and, as we shall see, has even come to underlie the truth games at play in the buying and selling of economic choice.
As described in Chapter 1, Anne’s advertised testimony was typeset around a smaller photo of about a hundred people identified as ex-gay with a caption that reads, “Thousands of ex-gays like these here walked away from homosexual identities.” A larger version of that photo appears at the top of another ad printed in both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times on July 14 and July 27 respectively (Alliance For Traditional Marriage, et al. 1998b). The testimonial nature of this second ad is not as apparent as the first, because it is buried under the
“factual” delivery of statistics (because, the ad says, statistics “don’t lie”) linking homosexuality to a variety of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as to “alcohol, drug abuse and emotional and physical violence” (ibid 1998b). However, following the statistics is a summary of the confessed psychological “root causes” of so many ex-gays: “rejection from early childhood and lack of bonding to same-sex parents, sexual violence and rape, or mental and emotional abuse” (ibid).
Following that is a collective testimony of true belief rooted in the right to free speech: “For years Christians have taken a stand in the public square against aggressive homosexual activism”
(ibid). Although this is an ad that professes to be about science and reason rather than testimony, even stating outright, “We want reason in this debate, not rhetoric” (ibid), at its core it is another confession. It is a collective ex-gay confession of diseases and root causes, and a Christian testimony of truly believed statistics, as well as a declaration of the right to speak that truth freely. It is an example of religious and psychological confession merged and marketed as Truth wherein conservative Christian belief is testified to as a form of rationality.
Another ad defending straight football player Reggie White’s right to publically oppose homosexuality appeared in USA Today on July 15 (Alliance For Traditional Marriage, et al.
1998c); and one more appeared later that month in The Miami Herald, which included the headline “From Innocence to Aids” and featured the parents and testimony of an ex-gay leader named Michael Johnston (ibid 1998d). In each ad, the benefit sold is “Truth,” the method of delivery is confession, and although no reference to financial cost is made, any suggestion that there is a cost (because freedom from homosexuality is being offered in an advertisement) is offset by the risks of homosexuality as sin and disease. In the Reggie White ad, “truth” is referenced repeatedly: “The truth about the non-genetic roots of homosexuality,” “The truth about ex-gays,” “The truth about raw political power,” and the “The truth about sexual sin”
(Alliance For Traditional Marriage, et al. 1998c). These truths, which reference and build on ex-gay confessions of psychological root causes and the sin of sex, are declared in relation to the right to speak freely, the right to testify one’s truth publically. Indeed, for Reggie White, the right to condemn homosexuality as sin and disease is a constitutional religious right.
The Michael Johnston ad is structured around the confession and testimony of his mother, who recounts her son’s struggle with homosexuality and return to Christ within a story about a
“painfully shy” boy who was “lacking confidence” and who was “ridiculed by other boys his age” (Alliance For Traditional Marriage, et al. 1998d). Although she insists that she and her
husband gave their children “a secure, loving home,” there is an implied confession of guilt, because she could not teach her son the confidence he needed, protect him from the taunts of the other boys, or prevent him from becoming “a loner” (ibid). While it is true, she also tells of her prayer asking that God “take him out of this lifestyle,” that prayer happened before Michael became ex-gay, and it is subservient to the guilt-ridden confession the her son now has AIDS.
Taken together, all these ads combine religious and psychological confession with religious and statistical testimony in a marketing campaign promoting not just freedom from homosexuality, but the freedom to choose. What is interesting is that the “right” choice is telegraphed through testimonial cost-benefit analyses—the costs of homosexuality, of sin and disease, as juxtaposed with the benefits of Christian family and constitutionally guaranteed American values.
Law & Order: SVU’s “Abomination” became part of the ex-gay debate within two years
of Dr. Robert Spitzer presenting (within months of published) a notorious ex-gay study that suggested some gays and lesbians could change. The episode’s focus on psychology and reparative therapy suggests the Spitzer study may have been the primary catalyst for the story;
however, by opening with an ex-gay ad and by suggesting that reparative therapy is consumer fraud, the episode reveals itself as an effect (albeit a negative effect) of ex-gay advertising.
Indeed, the 1998 ads were only the first of many. As we know, in 1999 television ads appeared, and in the following decade the ads spread across communication platforms, appearing on the radio, plastered across billboards, and embedded in multiple conservative Christian websites (TWO 2014a).41 Most of the ads emphasized the “truth” that change is possible with no direct reference to financial cost, relying instead on “evidence” of the cost of being gay. Nevertheless, the financial cost of ex-gay participation is a key aspect of the discourse, as evidence not only in
“Abomination,” but also in Boston Legal, where six months of counselling cost $40,000. The
41 As noted in Chapter 1, ex-gay television ads even appeared here in Canada in 2008 on a Sudbury CTV station
question is, are ex-gay advertisements that promote change through cost-benefit testimonies false advertising? Or do they offer freedom of choice for individuals in a market of sexual identities?
Indeed, a common argument from those promoting the movement is that they “respect the autonomy and right of self-determination of individuals who, because of their personal values, religious or not, desire to seek change of their sexual orientation” (Jones and Yarhouse 2007, 377; see also Chambers 2009; Nicolosi 2006; and Nicolosi, Byrd, and Potts 2000). The
promotion of the movement through advertising builds on that position, offering ex-gay change as not just freedom from homosexuality, but freedom of choice for consumers. Yet many gay rights activists do argue that the movement engages in false advertising and consumer fraud (Besen 2003; Rachel Maddow Show, The 2009; Rachel Maddow Show, The 2010). In fact, echoing Boston Legal (in a situation where life imitates pop culture), a recent lawsuit in New Jersey literally accuses the Jewish wing of the movement of consumer fraud in the full legal sense (SPLC 2014a). Confession, apparently, is good for the soul—unless it does not work.
Foucault cites advertising as a key aspect of the twentieth century’s confessional nature (2003a [1974/75]). As it happens, the question of one’s true sex is often used tactically in the buying and selling of fetishized commodities that appeal to consumer desires and identities.
Raymond Williams (1993 [1980])42 once said as much when, building on Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, he references the role of fantasy in the “inducements and satisfactions” of advertising as “a magical system” (335) where commodities are transformed into “magical signifiers” (During 1993, 320). In that light it is worth repeating Foucault’s statement that “all kinds of mechanisms everywhere—in advertising, books, novels, films, and widespread pornography—invite the individual to pass from this daily expression of sexuality to the
42 Williams is a foundational scholar in both cultural and communication studies. His essay on advertising was written for his 1961 book The Long Revolution but was not published until 1980 as an essay in his Problems in Materialism and Culture. While not exactly current, its publication twenty years after it was written and subsequent republication in a 1993 culture studies reader, speaks to its value in understanding advertising even today.
institutional and expensive confession of his [sic] sexuality to the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, or sexologist” (2003a, 170). When Foucault made that statement in the 1970s, advertising had long been “the source of financing for a range of general communication” (Williams 1993, 334), but it is even more so today. Mattelart (1991 [1989]) describes how “processes of deregulation and privatization of the systems of information and communication” allowed advertising to expand worldwide in the 1980s (206), and McChesney (2008a) calls it “the bone marrow of corporate capitalism” (266). Now it is also the bone marrow of the Christian ex-gay movement.
Today books, novels, films, and widespread pornography rely on advertising to invite the individual to confess him or herself not just to the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and sexologist, but to all kinds of people everywhere, expert or not. Indeed, the astounding ubiquity of pornography on the internet still invites some, conservative Christians for example, to confess its consumption in shame to their ministers, Christian psychotherapists, or sexoholics anonymous counsellors;
however, it invites many more to shamelessly confess its consumption with pride to their friends, acquaintances, and social science pollsters, not to mention the multitude of marketing companies who advertise their commodities (and hide their spyware, even though we all know it is there) on so many pornography webpages. Confession today is both a marker of guilt and pride, of shame and identity. Nikolas Rose (1998a) summarizes Foucault’s account of confession as both
identifying and subjectifying and updates its spread from psychology into today’s general society through discourses of neoliberal political economy. First he writes:
Not only does confession… characterize almost all of the proliferating systems of psychotherapy and counseling. It also provides a potent technical form that has come to install itself in a range of other practices where the conduct of personal life is at stake, from the doctor’s surgery to the radio phone-in, from the social work interview to the frank exchange of lovers. (96).
He then ties today’s psychology to the liberal and neoliberal “aspirations of freedom, choice, and identity” (97), writing that we need to understand the multiplication of confessional, behavioural,
and cognitive therapeutics in relation to “the norm of autonomy and promise of achieving it under the regime of [a neoliberal] rational management of existence” (ibid). It is interesting, however: Rose insists that the prescribed authority of psychological confession, “has replaced the claims of god and religion with those of nature and the psyche” (ibid). But it was only a year after his words were published that the ex-gay movement began to advertise ex-gay change, which fuses nature and the psyche into God and religion as a technology of individualized self-care. Williams (1993) places the beginning of a “psychology of advertising” (329) in the early part of the twentieth century, differentiating between “the old methods of the quack and the new methods of psychological warfare” (330); but if Williams is correct that advertising is a magical system employing psychological tactics, then confession is clearly one of those tactics, except its magical nature involves hiding itself in the process. In his introduction to William’s essay, Simon During (1993, 320) explains that “Williams’ advertising is ‘magic’ because it transforms commodities into glamorous signifiers… [and] makes us forget how much work and suffering went into the production of commodities” (320). The ex-gay ads transform the hard work and suffering of trying to reproduce oneself as ex-gay (itself a magical signifier for heterosexuality) by transforming that work and suffering into the glamorous signifiers of Christian grace and American freedom. Yet even though the confessional nature of each of the ads can easily be read if one digs deep enough, the magical power of prayer is what most people see.
Thus what Foucault was saying in regard to confession and sexuality in the 1970s is crystalized four decades later in the now very visible ex-gay phenomenon: except that today, through advertising and advertising-funded mass media, the ex-gay is invited to pass from a daily expression of his or her changing sexuality to the institutional and expensive confession of
Thus what Foucault was saying in regard to confession and sexuality in the 1970s is crystalized four decades later in the now very visible ex-gay phenomenon: except that today, through advertising and advertising-funded mass media, the ex-gay is invited to pass from a daily expression of his or her changing sexuality to the institutional and expensive confession of