Photographs by Edward Linsmier for BuzzFeed
It's mid-afternoon on a Monday in July and the offices that once housed Exodus International are quiet. Exodus, which for 37 years was more or less synonymous with the ex-gay movement and at its peak employed 24 people in this office, closed down in June. Since then, a skeleton crew of three people has rattled around the largely empty workspace overseeing the dismantling of an association that once included more than 150 Christian ministries in 17 countries, all devoted to the idea that homosexual feelings need not lead to eternal damnation. They could be managed, ignored, overcome, repented for, and perhaps even transformed into something more biblically acceptable. Just as long as they weren't acted upon. Its mission statement: "Mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality."
The building — a fading white, multistory rectangular block situated on a side street in an area of Orlando well-stocked with dreary strip malls and office parks — is wholly unremarkable, the kind of place you'd drive by a thousand times without taking a second glance. Exodus bought it five years ago, but it hasn't been a great investment, and in light of the organization's demise, the property is now up for sale.
Despite recent upheaval, Alan Chambers looks pretty comfortable ensconced in his large corner office on the second floor. Chambers, 41 — who after living as a gay man in his younger years now has a wife and two children — led Exodus for its final 12 years. He's long been a poster boy for the Christian right's belief that it was possible to "pray the gay away." Chambers disputes the notion that he ever promoted Exodus as the "gay cure" ministry, though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is the book he wrote in 2009 called Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out. He maintains that his overarching goal was always to provide homosexuals with the comfort, fellowship, and love they'd been denied by traditional churches. And yet, for example, in a 2005 Exodus newsletter, he wrote, "One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can."
The following year, he and his deputy at Exodus, Randy Thomas, visited the White House at George W. Bush's invitation as Bush announced his push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Chambers was also a prominent supporter of Proposition 8 in California. In 2009, an Exodus board member — not Chambers — traveled to Uganda and spoke at a conference on the evils of homosexuality that helped build the hysteria there that led to the country's infamous 2009 "Kill the Gays" bill, which prescribed a potential death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" or life imprisonment for "the offence of homosexuality." (It has never been voted on but was reintroduced last year.) It took Chambers nearly a year to publicly disavow his organization's involvement.
And yet this June, Chambers not only closed Exodus in sudden and dramatic fashion, but acknowledged the ineffectiveness of gay-to-straight reparative therapy and offered a remarkable mea culpa that apologized for his organization's many missteps. He's now founding a new organization focused on bringing Christians and homosexuals together, called Speak. Love. Many in the LGBT community hailed Exodus' demise as a victory in the culture wars but were disappointed Chambers hadn't gone further in his support of gay rights or his renouncement of the religious underpinnings of the ex-gay theology. To many evangelicals, the man who had not only been a leader of the ex-gay movement but also a living example of its successes was now a lost sheep, or worse, a heretic.
"There are times when I feel like I don't have a country," Chambers says, not far from a wall of photos that include shots of him with his wife, with his kids, and with Mike Huckabee. "There are people who have been invested in this fight for years on both sides. It's the vocal minority on either side that gets the microphone. What I believe is there are far more people in the middle."
It's this middle group that he's hoping to represent and talk to. The question is, will he have the chance? At the moment, he's working on defining specific plans for the new organization and raising money to keep the lights on. But in order to succeed, he'll need to convince people that his divisive past has indeed passed, and that his own personal struggle won't get in the way of his public mission.
Photograph by Edward Linsmier for BuzzFeed
Alan Chambers is not gay, although this kind of depends on what your definition of "is" is. To hear him recount his personal history, it sounds very much like the familiar story of a young man coming to terms with his sexuality.
I meet Chambers for lunch in the posh Orlando suburb of Winter Park, where he grew up. I get there before him, look around, and wonder if his choice of locale — a sleek sports bar with 30 flat-screen TVs assaulting diners with reruns of SportsCenter — is a way of nakedly proclaiming his embrace of traditional gender roles, but the truth is, the place he really wanted to meet, an upscale Italian bistro down the street, is closed on Mondays. He arrives apologizing for being a few minutes late, dressed in a blue blazer, striped button-down shirt, blue bow tie, and jeans cuffed fashionably at his ankles, along with tan loafers, no socks. He sits down and immediately makes a joke about ordering an appetizer called "bleu balls." He's definitely not trying to butch it up.
Chambers is bald with a neatly trimmed gray beard framing his face. He comes from a big family, the youngest of six kids. As in most families in central Florida, sports were a big deal, and Chambers' lack of ability or interest in anything athletic immediately made him stand out. His parents persisted for a while in trying to get him to play baseball, but he couldn't hit, he couldn't throw, it was hot outside, and he was bored.
"I hated it," he says. "Maybe if the uniform was cool enough I could've liked it. But most of my friends were girls, so I gravitated toward the things they gravitated toward." He dressed up in his sisters' clothes and often pretended to be a girl. "People thought I was a girl. I had beautiful curly brown hair, these big eyes, and eyelashes for days. People would say, 'Your little sister is so cute!' All this just reinforced my feeling that I was not like other boys." Still, it took time for him to understand what all these things really meant. "It was puberty when I realized all the boys in my class liked girls and I liked all the boys."
This revelation horrified Chambers. He'd been raised Southern Baptist in a heavily religious family with a father who was ex-military. He had no experience or knowledge of what it meant to be gay, other than believing it was bad. He didn't know anyone who was openly gay, and growing up in the '80s, there were few, if any, gay role models. As he got older, he was teased and bullied. He remembers being afraid to change in front of other boys before gym class, and having them bang on the stall where he would get dressed, hollering "fag" and "queer" at him through the walls.
"That's probably when I realized, I've got to do something about this," he says. "Then the prayers started every night: 'God, fix me. Cure me. Heal me. Whatever I've done to become this dirty, rotten sinner, fix this.'"
As his high school years waned and he started attending a local community college, Chambers was in the midst of a full-on struggle with his sexuality.
"The majority of the encounters I had were shameful, anonymous encounters," he says. "I don't know that tons of people feel good about that stuff anyway." Even when he coupled with men he had gotten to know a little bit, he was filled with self-loathing. "Because it wasn't about a relationship, it was about sex. That was difficult, especially for a typical Christian kid who was afraid he was going to go to hell at every turn." After confiding in a counselor at a Christian youth retreat about his homosexual urges when he was 19, he was turned on to a local ministry in Winter Park called Eleutheros that was affiliated with Exodus.
At the time, Exodus had been around for over 20 years; it was started by a group of men in the 1970s who were struggling with the same tension between their sexual attractions and their devout belief that homosexuality was a biblical sin.
Most of their programs closely mirrored Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-step program, with open groups where people could talk about their struggles, and "accountability partners" who worked much like AA sponsors to be on call to help a member deal with daily temptations. In addition, many of the ministries offered mental health counseling — some done by licensed professionals, but plenty also by lay or faith-based counselors — for those working out deep-seated issues such as childhood sexual abuse. Many of the ministries also had connections to reparative therapists who engage in the controversial practice of trying to change the sexual orientation of their clients through a mix of psychoanalysis of past traumas, behavior modification, engagement in traditional "gender-appropriate" activities and other processes such as "holding therapy," in which a man would hug another man at length with the goal of symbolically repairing the non-sexual male bond that may have never successfully formed between the man and his father. (The scientific theories behind reparative therapy have been debunked and the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, and American Psychological Association have all been critical of the practice. In 2001, United States Surgeon General David Satcher issued a report stating, "There is no valid evidence that sexual orientation can be changed." New Jersey this week became the second state, after California, to outlaw the practice for minors. Similar bills have be introduced to state legislatures in New York and Massachusetts.)
Chambers has often said that his introduction to Exodus saved his life. Coming from a sheltered childhood, it was the first time he'd been around other people wrestling with the same issues he was. Somewhat ironically, though, his early days at Exodus also coincided with his deepening identification as a gay man. "I went to Exodus when I was 19, and that's when my eyes were opened to the whole gay world around me," he says. "So in the midst of being involved with the local Exodus group, I also got involved with the gay community. I wouldn't say I was out and proud with everybody I knew, but there were certain people that knew, people I worked with at a restaurant."
His goal at Exodus though was clear: He wanted to become straight. "I went in and told the guy the first time I met with him, 'I want to be here six months, then I want to be done with this.'"
Chambers told his parents of his struggles with what he calls "same-sex attractions," and they surprised him by being extremely supportive, particularly of his efforts to change. Chambers attended an open group, sharing his experiences and praying for himself and his fellow strugglers. He worked with an accountability partner and had sessions with a counselor to talk about being molested by an older teenage boy when he was 10.
"He was an actual licensed mental health counselor that I would meet with once a week and we'd talk through all these things," he says. "No hocus-pocus, just talking. It was amazing and helped me deal with a lot of wounds I had. But I never went through reparative therapy."
Despite the work he was doing, he eventually realized his original goal — to walk out in six months as a happy, well-adjusted heterosexual — was unrealistic. "I hoped the gay stuff would go away and I wouldn't feel that way anymore," he says. "It never did happen."
Photograph by Edward Linsmier for BuzzFeed
The next morning I meet Chambers and his wife, Leslie, at a Starbucks. She's got brown hair and a warm face dotted with a few freckles, and she's wearing a pink-and-white blouse with a blue jean skirt. She's not the timid and retiring minister's wife of popular cliché, but rather sharp, funny, and down-to-earth. She tells me the first time she ever saw Alan was on TV, in the mid-'90s.
"He and a friend of his were sharing their stories," she says. "So I knew that part of him first. The next time I saw him, he walked into church with that same guy and I was like, 'There's those two gay guys.'"
Chambers says he was attracted to Leslie the first time he saw her. He'd been mildly attracted to women before, and had a few girlfriends back in high school, but he'd never felt anything like this in the past. At the time, Leslie was working as a nanny for the family of then-Major League pitcher Orel Hershiser, and she got Chambers a job as Hershiser's personal assistant. A few months later, Alan told her he wanted to be more than just friends.
"I told him it's never going to happen," she says. Over the course of the next few months, though, her feelings began to change. In March 1997, they went on their first date, and the following January they were married.
"I was 30 years old and hadn't found anybody yet," says Leslie. "But I had only two things I wanted in a guy: I wanted somebody who liked me first. I wanted to be pursued. And I wanted somebody who could tell me no, because I was a fairly strong person."
Chambers laughs. "Was."
Leslie continues. "Those were the only two things. Well, and he was a Christian, which was important and non-negotiable, so that wasn't even on my list. Over those months that we were friends, he absolutely became that person. He pursued me first, and I didn't doubt him in his pursuit of me. I felt very validated and secure in his attractions for me."
After getting married, Chambers grew more invested in Exodus. He'd first begun working part-time at Eleutheros when he dropped out of college in 1992. He'd gone full-time at Eleutheros in 1994 but then quit two years later to work with the Hershisers. In early 1999, he started his own local Exodus ministry, focusing on youths and teenagers grappling with homosexuality. The next year, he was named to Exodus' board of directors, and the year after that, he was elected president. From the beginning, his goal was to grow Exodus into an aggressive, dynamic, influential organization. And as a charismatic speaker with a personal testimony of his own transformation from unhappy gay man to happily married heterosexual, he was a walking advertisement for the group's then-motto: "Change Is Possible."
Of course, the truth was a bit more complicated. Chambers has admitted many times that his attraction to men has never fully receded but maintains that the person in the world he is most attracted to is his wife. The couple have two children, a boy and a girl, both 8 years old, both adopted. Before I can even ask why they chose to adopt, Chambers tells me.
"We were infertile," he says. "Both of us. We tried for seven years to have kids and to no avail. We got the two best things we could've ever asked or prayed for." When I bring up the subject of their sex life, Chambers answers like someone used to fielding the question.
"Sex is a huge part of our marriage," he says. "It has been and it's great and I love it. I'm attracted to my wife and I don't think of anything but my wife when I'm having sex with her. I have never in almost 16 years of marriage ever felt a temptation to be unfaithful to her. But sex isn't the pinnacle of our life together, nor should it be. There are a bunch of things more important than my sexual impulses, whether they're toward men or toward women, and I have both."
Photograph by Edward Linsmier for BuzzFeed
