Praying Away the Gay

By MARGARET CARLSON

Remember Harry and Louise, the whiny yuppies who bad-mouthed Clinton's health-care bill to death? Well, meet their evil twins, Anne and John Paulk, the poster couple for the notion that homosexuality can be stopped if only heterosexuality is embraced. Once gay and unbelieving, Anne and John accepted Christ and then each other: one cured homosexual married one saved lesbian. There's a Jack for every Jill in the land of the Christian right.

The Paulks are at the center of a campaign by a coalition of Christian-right groups that placed full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today last week. The Times ad features a big picture of Anne, who claims to have been saved by Exodus International, a ministry that believes gayness can be overcome by "ongoing submission to the Lordship of Christ." The ad quotes extensively from "The Other Way Out: The Stories of John and Anne Paulk" (and thanks Trent Lott for having the courage to speak the truth about sexual sin). Anne's story is rather chaste: she had several "fleeting" relationships with women in college and a significant one afterward. Even so, she insists that her life-style eventually eroded into "deception, and emotional instability." John is a character out of a Lifetime mini-series. There was Curt, his first love, who left him; his summer job as an $80-an-hour prostitute; and three years of performing as a drag queen. After his college pastor saved him, John tossed his high heels, dresses, jewelry and wigs into a Dumpster, telling "Candi" goodbye and "I don't need you anymore."

You can't help thinking, Are these people really gay, or is it Memorex? When contacted by TIME, Anne Paulk refused to identify the woman with whom she had had a serious affair and conceded that her ties to women in college were "more emotional than sexual" anyway. But she insists "they would have led to sexual relationships" had they continued. Her husband, a former Kinko's manager now with Exodus, is more defensive about his wife's credentials. "It doesn't matter whether she dated 400 women or one. She was a lesbian." So there.

Definitions aside, the couple is certainly useful for putting a kinder, gentler gloss on gay bashing. We aren't intolerant, James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, can say. We just believe you aren't trying hard enough, and we're here to help.

But the helping hand is hiding a club. If the right could challenge the growing belief that gayness is innate and not a life-style choice, it could galvanize the troops for the fall elections, all the while looking Christian. At this very moment, House conservatives may try to pass a harsh amendment reversing the federal ban on discrimination against gays.

No doubt there are a few people who think they're gay but aren't, and maybe Exodus has found every one of them. Reading their stories is like watching a spin-off of the Oral Roberts show in which a skeptic finds Christ, shouts that he is healed and throws away his homosexual crutches. Maybe the lame walk and homosexuals become heterosexuals, but I doubt it.

--Reported by Wendy Cole/New York

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York