R/I ~ AA
Unless you’ve been living on another planet since 2021, you are no doubt aware that June has been declared “Pride Month” across the United States. So at the Ruth Institute, we plan to spend the next four weeks discussing a topic you aren’t likely to hear about from anyone else.
We are going to talk about people who have journeyed away from an LGBT identity and are now living happy, fulfilled lives. In fact, that information is so suppressed in mainstream sources that you may never even have heard that many people have at one time, in one way or another, identified as lesbian or gay, but no longer do so.
We think society would benefit from including their voices in the conversation about the meaning of human sexuality and its place in a well-lived life. Therefore, we are proclaiming the first Sunday in June to be “Ex-Gay Visibility Day.”
Ruth Institute Senior Research Associate Fr. Paul Sullins has been studying people’s current behavior, self-identification, and patterns of attraction with what they reported five years ago. Though I have been aware for some time of people who have journeyed away from homosexual identities, and am proud now to call some of them friends, I had no idea how many people fit that description until I looked at Fr. Sullins’s charts.
He estimates that at least as many people have journeyed away from a homosexual identity as those who currently embrace one. In the United Kingdom, there are slightly fewer ex-gays than men who currently call themselves gay, and decisively more ex-lesbians than current lesbians. Taken together, “ex-gays” and “ex-lesbians” in the UK outnumber those who continue to identify with those labels!
Likewise in the US, there are a LOT more ex-lesbians than ex-gay males, producing the same overall result: more people who formerly identified as gay or lesbian, than those who currently do.
What do you think? Does it seem only fitting and proper that a segment of the population that outnumbers those who identify as gay and lesbian have their own national day of recognition?
Thurston Howell III
Article URL : https://stream.org/celebrate-ex-gay-visibility-day/