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New Hearts, a Christian group, offers prayer and support to gays and lesbians who want to become heterosexual. But studies show such change is unlikely.
By SHARON TUBBS
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 24, 2001
TAMPA -- One by one, eight people drive a narrow neighborhood street, past the coin laundry, the soul food restaurant and the barber shop, to the white building with tinted windows.
They file inside. They are Hispanic, black, white. One looks like a college student in khaki shorts, T-shirt and sandals, a backpack weighing down his shoulders. A woman with short gray hair wears a flower-print muumuu.
It's Monday evening, time for a New Hearts Outreach group meeting. Director Mark Culligan greets each person.
"Are you comfortable with a hug?" he asks a first-timer.
Christian music from a CD player fills the room. The people gather in a semi-circle and begin to sing and pray. Some sit, some kneel, others lie face down on the floor. They have their own ways of talking to God but, all in all, the same prayer.
They don't want to be gay anymore.
New Hearts is a Christian group for homosexuals who want to change, who want heterosexual lives with imprinted wedding invitations, wives or husbands, kids with soccer games and graduations. Most importantly, participants say, they want a closer relationship with God.
Culligan tells them they can have it, if they pray and believe strongly enough in the power of Jesus Christ. "It is safe here," he tells the group. "There is grace here."
Efforts to "heal" or transform homosexuals are highly controversial. Though many such groups exist around the country, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics all denounce efforts and counseling intended to convert homosexuals as ineffective and emotionally damaging.
The people here have heard all that. Still, once a week, they come to talk about the Bible. They exchange words of comfort in one moment, crack jokes the next, then confess what they believe are sinful temptations to masturbate.
They share stories of other people who say they've changed.
Dennis Jernigan an award-winning Christian singer, was "formerly gay, now married with children," Culligan tells the group. There's also gospel singer Donnie McClurkin, whose testimonial book Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor was released in June.
These stories give them hope that they can complete the difficult transition out of what they consider an unholy life.
For 20 years, Culligan, 59, lived as a closeted homosexual. He'd meet with men, then keep the relationships a secret, knowing Christian friends wouldn't approve.
He got married, hoping that would change him. It didn't.
"My wife and I had great difficulty with intimacy," Culligan said. "After six years where I really was denying this woman what she deserved from a man, we just decided to divorce."
That was 11 years ago, about the same time he heard of an "ex-gay" ministry in Tampa. "I had hope," Culligan said. "It was like, for once, people understood what was going on with this."
Culligan said he began to study the Bible. He read testimonials from people who said they had changed from gay to heterosexual. He began to believe that a stronger Christian life meant power against homosexual temptation.
That group disbanded, and Culligan started New Hearts in January 1999, taking the name from Ezekiel 36:26: A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you. . . . "
New Hearts is funded by private donations. The group meets in a building owned by Abe Brown Ministries, also known as Prison Crusade Ministries. For his work with New Hearts, Culligan lives rent-free in a Tampa halfway house for former prisoners, also run by Abe Brown Ministries.
Culligan tells his story of transformation often -- to prisoners, to people he talks with on his hotline for the "sexually broken" and to the support group.
At the New Hearts meeting, he tells the group that people become homosexual for a number of reasons, including sexual abuse. The idea that people become gay instead of being born gay is rejected, however, by every major gay and lesbian group.
Louis Wetzel, a member of the group, interrupts Culligan to say that not everyone has been sexually abused. Wetzel says he believes a demon visited him at a young age and instilled homosexual desires in him.
"It was a demonic stronghold," he said.
Culligan says in his case, his sensitive personality and the lack of a strong relationship with his father were major contributors.
But now that his relationship with Jesus Christ is strong, Culligan says he has not desired a man in years.
"I actually am open and have prayed for the right woman," he said recently.
Medical experts say treatments to transform homosexuals have not been proven and, worse, can be destructive.
The American Psychological Association offers answers online to common questions about homosexuality.
One question: Can therapy change sexual orientation?
The Web site's answer: no. Though sexual orientation is not a mental illness, people sometimes try to change it. Some therapists who undertake such a task report they have succeeded, but there are doubts.
"Many of the claims (of successfully changing someone) come from organizations with an ideological perspective on sexual orientation. . . . The treatments and their outcomes are poorly documented; and the length of time that clients are followed up after the treatment is too short," the Web site says.
Experts also say attempts to change homosexuals can be harmful.
"The psychosocial problems of gay and lesbian adolescents are primarily the result of societal stigma, hostility, hatred and isolation," according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Therapy directed specifically at changing sexual orientation . . . can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation."
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money. Maybe we're ragged and fuuun-ny. But we'll travel along, singing a song. Side by side. . . .
"We were extremely happy," Holmes said. Certainly happier than when she was married to a man she said had "a black belt in mouth."
Then Holmes' mother died a year ago. Her dying wish, Holmes' sister told her, was this: "All I want is for Jan to come back to the Lord."
Holmes knew what that meant. "I would have to leave (my partner)." She had been raised in the Pentecostal church, brought up believing homosexuality was an abomination. Her mother never accepted Holmes' relationship.
Holmes says she had a vision last November, six months after her mother's death. She was watching a Christian program on TV when she suddenly saw herself walking a narrow path. Walls, black and high, lined each side. Holmes stopped. A deep chasm -- deeper than the Grand Canyon -- lay ahead.
It was a message from God, Holmes says. "The Lord said if I took one more step in the direction I was going, he wouldn't save me. So I turned around and went back to the Lord."
She left her partner and her home. A church helped her find shelter. She started praying every day. She found New Hearts, where there were people like her, people who would share her struggle.
"I don't have the lesbian desires anymore," says Holmes, 53. "I don't have the dreams anymore."
Traditionalists rely on scripture, including Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22 and Romans 1:26-27, as proof that homosexuality is sinful. But more and more members of the clergy are coming out as gays and lesbians and saying the Bible has been misinterpreted.
"The Bible was at one time used against the black people -- slavery was justified," said the Rev. Joyce Stone, a lesbian and pastor of Christ the Cornerstone Church, a predominantly gay congregation in St. Petersburg. "When people start speaking for God and what God wants, that's very dangerous."
Stephen Moch, a St. Petersburg rabbi who left his congregation after he came out as a homosexual last October, agrees.
"I believe that the Bible comes from God, but it's been transmitted by people," he said.
People may have brought their own prejudices into the text, Moch says.
"The Bible has a lot of our misunderstandings about what God wants from us," he said. "It's not a perfect document."
For Moch, one thing is clear cut. "God loves me for who I am, and he doesn't mock me."
Stone believes homosexuality is genetic and notes she has two cousins who also are gay. She doubts efforts to change sexual orientation really work and says testimonies that they do likely come from homosexuals suppressing their true emotions.
"I can go and get contacts to make my eyes look blue, but they're still brown underneath," she said.
New Hearts member Cheryl Clark traces her homosexual attractions as an adult back to her childhood.
She grew up on a farm. Dolls meant nothing to her. She preferred baseball, basketball, trucks and chasing the family dog.
"I was pretty much raised as a boy," she said. "I was in my 20s before I learned to put make-up on. And I think that's part of the problem. I think that's where a lot of it comes from. I'm still trying to figure all that out."
At a New Hearts meeting in March, Clark begins to cry. She broke up with her girlfriend a few months ago but has visited her regularly since then, she confesses.
"Satan keeps sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear, "You had a good time together,' " she tells the group. "I don't want to remember the good times. I want to remember the time she kicked my car door in. I want to remember the time she broke my dishes."
Clark says she has had just this one lesbian relationship, with a college student she was tutoring in a computer course. Like others in the group, she tried to hide it from the people at her Baptist church.
Daily prayer, New Hearts and more intensive sessions with another "ex-gay" group for women called Choices Ministry Tampa have helped, she says.
Maybe her lesbian relationship was an act of rebellion, Clark says, looking around the group.
"Against my parents," she says, "and against life in general."
Recent studies on efforts to transform homosexuals have been inconclusive. But in a well-publicized study released earlier this year, Columbia University psychiatrist Robert Spitzer's research found that some "highly motivated" gays can become heterosexual.
The study involved 45-minute telephone interviews with people who had tried to change their orientation. Of 143 men and 57 women who participated, 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of the women achieved "good heterosexual functioning."
According to the Washington Post, Spitzer summarized his findings by saying, "The subjects' self-reports of change appear to be, by and large, valid, rather than gross exaggerations, brain-washing or wishful thinking."
But Spitzer cautioned that there was no information on whether such changes were the exception or the norm. He also said his findings "should not be misused to justify coercive treatment." And the study showed that significant percentages of men and women who wanted to change had not.
But religious groups that deem homosexuality a sin still counted the findings a victory. For once, a reputable doctor noted that transformation was possible among the "highly motivated."
About the same time, though, New York psychologists Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder released findings of another study on homosexuals in which only six of 202 gay men and lesbians reported what they called a "heterosexual shift."
Gay activists lean toward the Shidlo-Schroeder results. They criticize Spitzer's study because his subjects were recruited from groups that condemn homosexuality, such as Exodus International, a larger ex-gay organization that includes New Hearts on its list of referral programs.
Culligan was among the men interviewed for Spitzer's study. He too believes the religious convictions of the people studied boosted the relatively high rate of change in sexual orientation.
But Culligan sees that as a good thing. He says that's proof that faith is the most effective way to "overcome" homosexuality. Culligan hopes people will start thinking, "Maybe there's something to this religious component."
Recently, Culligan got a job as director of ministry outreach for Molly D'Andrea. D'Andrea is well-known in local religious circles as host of Set Free If You Want to Be, a show on the Christian Television Network for people wanting "to come out of the homosexual lifestyle and to those wanting to be set free from sexual bondage."
Some who watch D'Andrea's show call the station for referrals to area programs like New Hearts.
Come fall, Culligan will take his efforts to another level with the start of a 30-week structured program called Living Waters: Pursuing Sexual and Relational Wholeness in Christ. Living Waters was developed by Desert Stream Ministries, an international group that provides literature and referral services for people who don't want to be gay. Culligan is training group leaders for Living Waters, which includes a set curriculum and carries a fee.
But Monday evenings are still reserved for the New Hearts group meetings.
One woman tells the group she's having trouble sleeping at night. Wetzel and Clark suggest she anoint her bedroom with consecrated oil before going to sleep.
The meeting ends with a treat. Holmes has a song to sing.
Come and see, she sings. Come and see. Come and see the king of love.
They grab their Bibles and get up from their seats. More than three hours have passed since they walked through the tinted door. Evening has turned to late night. Some of them have work in the morning. Yet they linger, smiling, hugging, finding something to chat about a little while longer.
Some take turns pulling Culligan aside. They are asking for advice, looking for ways to attain a new heart.
If you missed part one of our two-day series, "Homosexuality and Religion: People Behind the Debate," which appeared Sunday, you may read the stories on our Web site at www.sptimes.com/gayreligion.