According to the Miami New Times, an anti-gay activist and NARTH officer took a vacation with a rentboy he met through the sexually explicit gay hookup website Rentboy.com.
George Rekers, PhD is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, and has been lurking behind the scenes of the Religious Right and the ex-gay movement for decades. In 1983, he co-founded the vociferously homophobic Family Research Council with Dr James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and – among other political activities – he testified against gay adoption in the state of Florida, in 2008. He has written extensively against LGBT persons, as a search of the NARTH website will show.
But now the academic who has worked tirelessly for discrimination against gays has reportedly vacationed with a gay male prostitute he met through a gay website. The Miami New Times reports:
Rekers said he learned [travel companion] Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.” (Though medical problems didn’t stop him from pushing the tottering baggage cart through MIA.)
Yet Rekers wouldn’t deny he met his slender, blond escort at Rentboy.com — which features homepage images of men in bondage and grainy videos of crotch-rubbing twinks — and Lucien confirmed it.
There would appear little doubt that Rekers met Lucien by deliberately trawling the explicit website. As the article points out, users must manually agree to to enter the site in the knowledge that it contains graphic sexual material.
Dr Rekers is the second NARTH officer this year to be exposed by the media. In February, the pseudo-psychiatric organization’s Executive Secretary Arthur Abba Goldberg was revealed to have been hiding a criminal past. Goldberg, who also co-founded and co-directs the Jewish ex-gay organization JONAH, was found to have been convicted and jailed for his part in a major Wall Street fraud during the 1980s.
Goldberg subsequently resigned from NARTH – but not before blaming the LGBT community for his failings.
We can expect Rekers’s name to be quietly removed from NARTH’s list of officers in the coming days.
Hopefully he will feel an inkling of the pain he has dedicated his life to inflicting upon others, millions who are trying to just live truthfully. Anyone can learn new tricks, even if they deny or lack most of the faculties that make us human.
Well, that didn’t take long. It’s already gone. But luckily you can still find it archived if you ever need to.
It seems their ilk touts personal responsibility when it suits them, but somehow can’t find the strength to practice the same.
I just checked and he is still listed as an officer at NARTH.