Ex-Gay activist Christopher Yuan will speak to an audience of Yale students at the Af-Am House this Friday at 7:00, at the invitation of campus Christian organizations. Yuan’s claim to fame is his “deliverance” from some rather bad habits which, as is a common practice among ex-gays, he associates with being gay. He attributes his behavior change to God, and his mother’s prayers.
What many would consider their worst nightmare has become a reality for Christopher Yuan. While attending dental school, he began living promiscuously as a homosexual and experimenting with illicit drugs. Within a few years, he was expelled from dental school, imprisoned for drug dealing and discovered that he was HIV positive.
Yuan espouses the tired if convenient Exodus line “the opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality, it’s holiness.” Yale seems like a rather enlightened place for this type of thinking, so this news surprised us. Yuan’s website reflects his movement toward making his ex-gay narrative a source of income, complete with speaking engagements and a book or two. His ideology tracks closely with Exodus and he defends them when questioned.
Anybody from Yale out there?
oh don’t worry. we know. we’re ready
I didn’t go to Yale, but I lived near there for awhile and knew people who went there. Their reasoning is probably diversity of ideas. They want to hear all views and all sides of an issue and then engage in discussion of it. While I am highly critical of ex-gay groups because of the damage they wreaked in my own life, as a doctoral student in higher education I can agree that a university setting would be a proper place for these ideas to be presented and debated in a rational way. If anything, in a liberal thinking environment like Yale, some people who did not know that these arcane practices even existed are likely to be made aware and, no less important, the fallacies of the ex-gay reasoning and shoddy science behind it will be revealed in front of an educated audience.
https://yaleherald.com/thebullblog/ex-gay-activist-will-speak-at-yale-on-friday/
Thanks T.J. I suspect you are correct. After all these years I guess I just have trouble seeing ex-gay anything as a viable debate topic. While I think investigating the reasons people chose such a direction could be a reasonable effort, the effort itself seems beyond any rational discussion. It’s basically an evangelical exercise, like talking with an audience about why being a Jew is to be lost and heading for hell, and how one can change that. Both are a mixture of social stigma, personal and institutional prejudice, and theological doctrine. Giving that a Fox News type “fair and balanced” evaluation is really beyond the pale at this point.
As I wrote to an exgay guy;
You don’t know much about your religion, or you would know that for no other sin is the opposite of that sin holiness. Does that make you wonder why this one is so special? And you are still born into sin in any case and, I am sure, have a multitude of others. so in no case can you be holy, only saved. It makes a great slogan which is quite soothing, but it is not any kind of a Christian concept. But you know, a spoonfull of sugar helps the poison go down.
you don’t know much about homosexuality, or you would know that there is nothing wrong with you, and that all of the fantasies you have about a “lifestyle” are just that, a fantasy, whether or not you have lived them out personally. There is nothing in being gay that gives you a self-destructive lifestyle. That’s you responsibility. You never see an ex-gay who had a happy gay life. And you never see a person who is happy in his life go to an ex-gay ministry.
you don’t know much about Exodus, or you would know that its messages change according to its audience. It has an abysmal failure rate, and peddles the only therapy in the world where it is the patient’s fault if it doesn’t work, not the doctor’s. It is allied with the anti-ex-gay industry– and it is an industry– that accrues billions in wealth and power by demonizing and lying about people just like you. Remember the money changers in the temple? If they truly had holiness on their side, they wouldn’t need the lies and the doeminzation.
Finally, you don’t know much about yourself. If you did, you would know that your self-hatred is your problem, and always has been, not your homosexuality. I don’t even know you, and I know that, beacuase I have never yet seen anyone in your position for whom that is not true. Exodus makes money off of that self hatred, and you pay whether they succeed or they don’t. Deal with your self hatred, and you will finally be able to decide whether you are gay or straight, and make your decisions accordingly.
Every time I read something like this, it makes me realize what a bullet I dodged.
I was raised Catholic, and could easily have wound up as bent in the head
as poor Mr. Yuan. Instead, here I am at fifty, legally married to my wonderful husband,
father to two sons, and living my life with pride and openness.
May he find such happiness for himself, one day.