Dear Joe,Ok, I read this and almost stopped breathing.
I found your blog today after googling for items about Exodus, the ex-gay organization you wrote about yesterday. I am a mom in Texas and I keep an eye on whatever Exodus is doing, because you see Joe, I found some of their materials among my son's personal items after he took his life in 2002. Joe, he was only 19 years old and he was just the sweetest boy you'd ever want to know. My son had problems, yes, but his father and I (we are divorced) both feel that the Exodus people took advantage of his confusion about who he was. Even though he knew that we loved him, they helped him hate himself. Please don't stop writing about Exodus and the terrible, terrible harm they do to young people. I miss my boy so much.
Just a mother, Texas
I remember when I was about sixteen and a few of my friends from the swim team started going to this meeting at a church called "His House" and I didn't really know what went on there except that it was a church. They kept pestering me to go so one night my friend Sue and I got really stoned and then went and ate cookies while people talked about how being saved had changed their lives. It was all kids around my age, a lot of whom I knew from school.
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One of the most frightening moments of my childhood was when my mother took me to see a "Spirit of 76" musical that was put on by a born-again christian group. (To be fair, I don't think she realized who was behind it.) I think it must have been a few years before 1976, because I know I was younger than 14, which is how old I was in 1976. I think I was 10 or 11. Anyway, in the middle of the show the actors started talking about how they had been saved, and invited people from the audience to come up on stage and accept jesus as their savior. They wandered through the crowd, too, and one came up to me and asked me if I'd accepted jesus into my heart and when I said, "no," she said, "you're going to die and become nothing" or something similar. It was really disturbing - my first confrontation with my own mortality, handed to me with a smug sneer by someone who was supposedly all about love. It haunted me for years. Not surprising that I never became a true christian, is it?
I remember nothing about the actual play, just that woman telling me I was going to die, and then sitting in an IHOP afterwards unable to bring myself to eat and unable to tell my mother what was upsetting me.
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