Q Toon: Whoops for Wholeness

The Conversion Therapy scam lost another one of its founding fathers this summer. Hope for Wholeness founder McKrae Game publicly apologized on Facebook and in an interview with the (Charleston, South Carolina) Post and Courier this month for the damage the quack ministry had caused countless already conflicted and vulnerable gays and lesbians.

“Conversion therapy is not just a lie, but it’s very harmful, because it’s false advertising. ... I was a religious zealot that hurt people,” Game said in an interview. “People said they attempted suicide over me and the things I said to them. People, I know, are in therapy because of me. Why would I want that to continue?”

While condemning Wellness for Hope's practices, McKrae nevertheless believes that its Baptist construct could somehow serve as a community for people who believe “homosexuality is incongruent with their faith.” The Post and Courier article includes this response from a dissatisfied Hope for Wholeness client:

Josh Crocker, 32, a Greenville man who is gay and sought counsel from Hope for Wholeness as a college student in 2006 (known then as Truth Ministry), said that particular sentiment was troubling. There is no part of Hope for Wholeness, he added, that could be of benefit to anybody.
“For me, I just think that’s inadequate. ... I think he should be afforded the time and space to process all the things he needs to process and become who he is,” Crocker said in an interview, “but I’d love for him to apply that same passion he had for Hope for Wholeness ... to advocacy for the LGBTQ community ... and to dismantle conversion therapy and ex-gay ministries.”

Game founded Truth Ministry in 1999, after having "lived as a gay man for three years," according to the Hope for Wellness website. Now 51, he was fired from the program in 2017 and publicly declared himself gay this past June.

Game is hardly the only LGBTQ conversion therapist to discover that self-loathing is no way to live one's life. Sadly, the determination to force themselves to live heterosexual lives has left scores of ruined marriages in its wake.

[Mormon and conversion therapy advocate David] Matheson then confirmed [conversion therapy advocate Rich] Wyler’s assertions on Tuesday with a Facebook post of his own. “A year ago I realized I had to make substantial changes in my life. I realized I couldn’t stay in my marriage any longer. And I realized that it was time for me to affirm myself as gay,” he wrote.
Matheson, who was married to a woman for 34 years and is now divorced, also confirmed in an interview with NBC News that he is now dating men.

There was also ex-gay poster boy John Paulk, who appeared on the cover of Newsweek with his wife Anne back in August of 1998, only to transfer the prefix "ex-" from his gayness to his wife. Love in Action leader John Smid (the basis for the character of conversion therapist Victor Sykes in "Boy Erased") tried for 24 years to make a go of his mixed-sex marriage before admitting that he was not heterosexual and had "never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual." Exodus International former President Alan Manning Chambers is apparently still married to his wife Marilyn, but now identifies as gay and, like the others, has publicly apologized to the LGBTQ community.

In spite of all this, and several states and cities officially banning conversion therapy, the ex-gay Christianist movement is reportedly making a comeback, according to the Washington Post. Jonathan Merritt interviewed for his report one new-wave ex-gay leader after another — Rosaria Champaigne Butterfield, Jackie Hill Perry, Matt Moore — who has married or become engaged to an opposite sex partner.

No doubt those couples will be very happy together.

✍

I've arranged the four panels of this week's cartoon in one column as an experiment in making multi-panel cartoons legible on teeny tiny phone screens. It wasn't drawn to accommodate the format, and I'm not particularly pleased with the result.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go. You want to read cartoons on your smart watch? Sorry, Dick Tracy.

Q Toon: Coming Attractions

Q Syndicate✒Dec 25, 2014

The cable channel still known as "The Learning Channel" plans to air a special in January titled "My Husband's Not Gay." As the cartoon explains, the show peers into the lives of a handful of gay Mormons and the women who married them plus one single gay Mormon guy in the market to marry such a woman.

I'm sure he's quite a catch.

✒

We had some distribution problems with this week's cartoon, which is challenging enough with a midweek holiday. I had to send my cartoon files (a grayscale version, a high-resolution file for printing, and a low-resolution file for the web) to an alternate address which I apparently didn't have quite right. I've been cc-ing that address for years without getting any mailer daemon alert, so somewhere at Pridesource.com there is an untended email address filling up with cartoons.

Q Toon: Rebranding the Tool

Q Syndicate✒Dec 11, 2014

This week's cartoon applies only in the states of California and New Jersey, plus the District of Columbia, where laws banning "reparative therapy" to change a minor’s sexual orientation “including efforts to change behaviors, gender identity or expression, or to reduce or eliminate sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward a person of the same sex or gender” have been signed into law. (Language from the D.C. bill.)

Court challenges by conversion therapy advocates to the California and New Jersey laws on the grounds that their exercise of religion was being infringed were both rejected. A court challenge to the D.C. law may be unnecessary, should the Republican Congress decide to step in. (Republicans talk a good game about "local control," but put them in charge of state and federal government, and they will not hesitate to make decisions about how big cities they don't live in ought to be run.)

Meanwhile, a similar laws failed to pass in New York, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington in the latest biennium.

Rick-Perry-tive Therapy

At their party convention earlier this month, Texas Republicans added a platform plank supporting "reparative therapy," a disreputable form of brainwashing euphemistically known as "praying away the gay." Appearing before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco last Wednesday, Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) was asked whether he believes that homosexuality is a "disorder." He essentially called it a disease, like alcoholism.

"I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that. And I look at the homosexual issue in the same way."

Asked to defend his remarks, Perry fell back on the old "We are all children of God" treacle that is meant to sweeten any accompanying hateful statement.

Q Toon: Exeunt Exodus

As much as I would have liked to have known when I drew this week's cartoon on Sunday night how yesterday's Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Prop 8 would turn out, my crystal ball has no bars downstairs at my drawing board.

Perhaps the guys in charge of pray-away-the-gay ministry Exodus International were able to foresee the Court's ruling, however, and decided that this was as good a time as any to fold up its tent and sell off the circus animals.

"I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn't change," [Exodus President Alan] Chambers wrote in a statement on his website. "I am sorry that I ... failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine."

(Chambers is different-sex married, with children, although he admits still being attracted to men.)

One side story to this cartoon: I looked through a couple of my books for a picture of a hearse as a model for the one in the background above. One of those books was of Chas Addams cartoons; and while there were a couple of cartoons set in cemeteries, there were no hearses in any of them. There was, however, a cartoon featuring a Supermoon, which some of you may recall was the celestial highlight outdoors and on Facebook on Sunday night.

To share this find with my own Facebook friends, I located an eBay page where someone has been offering that very cartoon up for sale. You have to click on the image for a pop-up so you can read the caption, which is a bit more well-phrased than the title the seller has given it.

Not As Fun As Ex-Gay Birds

Gay 'cures'? There shouldn't be an app for that. But there's a new one called "Setting Captives Free," available in ... Google Play stores, meant to teach you how to stop being gay.
It's a 60-day course that tells gay people they are not "born this way" and offers to help them find "freedom from the bondage of homosexuality." 

-- AllOut.org 

The app had also been available from Apple's iTunes, but no longer.

By the way, hasn't anybody else wondered why the aliens in Close Encounters go to such great lengths to abduct little Barry Guiler in Indiana only to send him trotting back to his mother when their spaceship lands a week or so later in Wyoming? Why are we so sure that's really little Barry?

Q Toon: There's Got to Be a Morning After

If you were expecting a cartoon congratulating the victors of last night's election this morning, sorry. I had to have this week's cartoon to my syndicate by Monday morning, when the results were still unknown, and I figured there would be plenty of other cartoons out today exulting in the end of the nasty ads and incessant phone calls.

Mother Nature and the predictable religious idiots who blame every hurricane, earthquake and volcanic eruption on gays and lesbians provided me with today's non-election-related cartoon. Those religious idiots include a Pennsylvania pastor John McTernan, an upstate New York rabbi Noson Leiter, a Maryland pastor Luke Robinson, and some twisted ex-gay sister Lisa Miller.

Drawing water, by the way, is mighty tricky. It doesn't have a lot of corners. It doesn't sit still so you can draw its edges. It does have a mood: calm or angry, pleasant or turbulent. I've been looking all over (for a couple weeks, actually) for a book I have somewhere on the history of the comic strip; I remember there being an excellent drawing from the 1940's of Tarzan swimming through some angry water. There must have been some other example from Terry and the Pirates and Tintin, I'm sure.

You don't see a lot of today's editorial cartoonists or comic strip artists drawing with the evocative precision of Hal Foster (there are some choice examples of how to draw water at that link, by the way). Who has time to draw each individual raindrop? Just for kicks, here's a cartoon by Stuart Carlson. Here's one by Dave Granlund. And here's an example by Pat Bagley.

Qtoon: They Pray Away, but Are Gay to Stay

Exodus International President Alan Chambers has admitted that "reparative therapy" for gays and lesbians does not turn us into straight gentlemen and ladies. Now living in a different-sex marriage ("The best marriage I know," he says), Chambers admits that his attraction to men has never gone away; he just doesn't give in to those attractions.

"For someone to put out a shingle and say, 'I can cure homosexuality' — that to me is as bizarre as someone saying they can cure any other common temptation or struggle that anyone faces on Planet Earth."

This has led some ex-gay hucksters, such as First Stone Ministries, to break up with their erstwhile partner. But is not going to stop the folks at Exodus. Exodus will soldier on, alone and unloved. Exactly the life model Exodus recommends for the suckers who come through their doors.