"They tried to cure me of being gay"
From Glamour
Christine Bakke walks into a church in suburban Denver, a long, low building that used to be a supermarket. It’s closed, but the 35-year-old graphic designer, whose wide smile and quick wit have always opened doors, tells the security guard that she is a former congregant and just wants to see the old place again.He lets us into the hangar-size sanctuary, and Christine strides up front to a stage, then stops. “This is where it happened,” she says, no longer smiling. “And after it was over, this is where I was on the floor crying.”
She still remembers the excitement in the air that night, the music pounding, the people pogo-ing up and down in revelry. “The preacher wanted me to say something,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to, at first, so he kept saying, ‘Repeat after me, repeat after me,’ until I finally yelled it out at the top of my lungs: ‘I want to be the woman God created me to be!’ It was this real heal-the-lesbian moment.
Christine saw her choices as stark and self-limiting: To be a “real Christian,” she felt she could no longer be a “real lesbian.” She began investigating various ex-gay programs and thinking about starting her life over. Initially she was drawn to a residential boot camp program, but the literature made it sound too restrictive. The many rules included a ban on computers (so you couldn’t see anything gay online) and no time alone for the first three weeks (not uncommon in ex-gay programs--one even times how long people stay in the bathroom to prevent masturbation).
Bill McCartney
