Writing for Vermont’s monthly Out In The Mountains, Robert William Wolff praises gay activist Wayne Besen’s book about the ex-gay movement, Anything But Straight.
Wolff shares his own enthusiastic reactions to Besen’s detailed and thorough presentation of perceived wrongs of the ex-gay movement. Wolff’s key criticism seems to be that the book is harsh (in personal terms) on ex-gay support group participants and others.
Read the review, then read more at Besen’s book site or at Amazon.com.
Waynes book was instrumental in helping me to put aside much of my experience with the ex-gay ministry I was involved in, and to really step back and see it is obvious the majority of those leaders have their own issues in avoiding their sexuality.
I actually had the opportunity to see Wayne in person when he spoke at A Different Light bookstore in West Hollywood. Although I have yet to read the book myself (I’ll get to it eventually), I have read a number of times on here from different posters about how snide he supposedly comes across in his writing.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but at least in person, he wasn’t. He was very measured, and I never got the impression he was anti-religion, either. Even when members of the audience made derogatory comments about specific ex-gay leaders, he didn’t respond in kind, but simply repeated information he had written in the book. If he didn’t know much about the personal goings-on of a particular individual, he said so.
I actually found his presentation to be very interesting and informative.