If the anti-gay religious right had a resident intellectual, it would be George Alan Rekers. He’s a kind of anti-Anita Bryant — bookish, quiet, loathe to hog a spotlight, working indefatigably behind the scenes to provide at least the approximation of an intellectual basis for a religiously-inspired dislike of homosexuals. He does this through academic papers by the hundred, books, and lectures around the world. (His preferred speaking subject: “Teen Sex.”)
With James Dobson, Rekers co-founded the Family Research Council in 1983. He is an adoptive father and frequent foster-parent, who testified as an expert witness against gay adoption in Arkansas and Florida. And perhaps most interestingly, at least for the purposes of Swift, he is a board-member of NARTH, an organization devoted to curing gays of their gayness — a pursuit generally regarded by professionals as pseudo-scientific, and which often involves such practices as the "laying on of hands."
For this reason and many more, we were delighted to be present last month at Miami Int‘l Airport, hot-pink camera in hand, when Rekers returned from a 10-day European vacation with a male prostitute.
To read the rest of that story, we invite you to visit its right and proper home on the web, The Miami New Times. (Also, doing a Google search for mentions of “George Alan Rekers” over the last 24 hours will lead you to some pretty entertaining responses, the funniest of which are probably PZ Myers’ mini-essay at Pharyngula and the comments at New York Magazine.) Unfortunately, journalism being what it is, we were not given sufficient space in that news organ to bring up this (purely speculative) point:
If NARTH’s de-gaying treatment works so well, how is it that George Alan Rekers, of all people, should come to this ugly little impasse? (Rekers’ answer — that he didn’t know about the lad’s line of work, and needed someone to help him carry his luggage — is not really worth responding to, though we do give the notion a fairly thorough savaging here.) And if the man cannot muster the intestinal fortitude to own up to his proclivities, take Jesus by the hand, and NARTH himself into a frenzy of other-sex attraction, then what does it say about his faith in the treatment he advocates?
It is both wonderful and inconvenient that sexual attraction is still only vaguely understood by the scientific community — “wonderful” because breaking attraction into its component parts sounds like a real romance-killer, and “inconvenient” because ignorance makes a wonderful vacuum for frightened people to fill with half-truth and superstition. Already we know that our usual taxonomy of sexual orientation — “gay,” “straight,” “bi” — is shorthand at best, primitive and reductive, and more a product of convenience than of nature. Yet NARTH and its cousins, such as Exodus International, treat nature’s messy reality as though it were simple. They not only claim to know what makes a person attracted to a particular kind of person/place/thing, but also how to transmute those attractions into something else. Rekers, with his scholar’s language, retiring disposition, forests of papers, and prestigious posts (he once drew his paycheck from Harvard), has done much to contribute to their delusion of mastery. Now, he may have a part in undoing it.
If this story develops further, we'll follow it at New Times. Stay tuned.