aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Straight to Jesus

Last month I pointed to a sensitively written article in the Boston Globe on the ex-gay movement by Tanya Erzen, an assistant professor at Ohio State University.

Her book, ”Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement,” has just come out and is reviewed today in Salon:

Erzen spent 18 months hanging out with and interviewing the members and administrators of New Hope Ministry, which runs a residential program for evangelical Christian men who are “struggling with homosexuality” in the San Francisco Bay Area. She even volunteered in the ministry’s office, revamping its Web site, all as fieldwork for her dissertation. (She’s now assistant professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.)

Erzen wasn’t interested in collecting fodder for political battles, though, and that’s what makes “Straight to Jesus” so enlightening. As an ethnographer, she made every effort to listen to and understand everyone at New Hope Ministry, whether or not she agreed with their beliefs (and it’s fairly clear that most of the time she didn’t). That’s practically unheard of in most popular discussions of charged issues like homosexuality—and rare in scholarly discussions, either. Nowadays, everyone’s convinced that they already know everything the other side has to say and that actually having to listen to it would constitute an insupportable demand on their own patience. Everyone thinks their side of the argument never gets any exposure, yet rabid, ranting opinion of all varieties howls at us everywhere we turn.

What emerges from “Straight to Jesus” is a far more nuanced and moving picture of the “ex-gay” movement than most readers will expect.