An excellent exposé of PFOX in the Washington City Paper, The Ex-Gay Movement that Wasn’t: Meet the city’s tiniest demographic, fleshes out their strategy – and introduces me to an amusing new word: “Everstraight.” In case you don’t know, that would refer to a straight person who has never identified as gay. I did not know we needed a word for that.
I didn’t know this, either:
Ex-gays aren’t even welcome in PFOX meetings. In an e-mail posted on one ex-gay message board, a PFOX rep made the group’s target audience clear: “PFOX meetings are for families and friends of strugglers only, and not for ex-gays.”
How…supportive.
PFOX doesn’t exist to support “ex-gay” people in their struggles, though. “Their strategy is to create fake hate crimes,” Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out told the paper. We saw an example of this at the Arlington County Fair, and apparently there have been other incidents following the same pattern. The same general meme (“we’re being bullied by the big powerful mean GAYS!”) is seen in the attempt by the “Fairfax Family Foundation” to “donate” a big pile of anti-gay books to the Fairfax Public Library back in October of last year, and the too-dumb-for-words “man in the ladies’ room” hoax in the Montgomery County nondiscrimination law saga (expect to see that one tried again as Congress moves toward – finally – passing a fully inclusive ENDA).
As we said at the time of the FFF stunt, “it’s just another version of the up-is-down notion that if people with anti-gay prejudice are inhibited from violating the rights of GLBT people, their own rights are being violated, or when we assert our right to live free of discrimination, we are being “intolerant” of those who wish to discriminate against us.”
Wasting time with Bob Marshall
Here’s how the conversation went when I contacted self-described “Virginia’s chief homophobe” Delegate Robert G. Marshall (R-13) to discuss the Equality Virginia candidate survey.
That was good enough for me – but not, apparently, for Delegate Marshall. He called me back five minutes later:
I had to interrupt his belligerence with a second observation that this was a waste of time before we could mutually end the call.
Equality Loudoun’s motivations are pretty transparent. We were doing what every other issues advocacy group does at election time; no surprises there. Why, then, was Mr. Marshall compelled to call back? Was he angered by the assumption that he could have experienced some personal growth and might have something new to say? Perhaps he was outraged by the fact that, after all the time and energy he has invested in demonizing our community, we are still willing to sit down and talk to him. It must be infuriating that we continue to insist that we are human beings (not “behaviors”), and that we haven’t gone away. What he wants is for us to meekly accept his belief that we shouldn’t exist as permanent and unchangeable: “You know my views.” How rude and uncooperative of us to imply that even Bob ‘Virginia’s Chief Homophobe’ Marshall is capable of learning and repentance.
As odd as it sounds, the fact that he had such an emotional reaction to our refusal to write him off as hopeless is a positive sign – it suggests that he feels shame. That’s a start.