of bright flowers, a few bristling cacti, and vines trailing down from the first-floor landing, which I later learned were assiduously tended by two men in the program. Upon arriving, I was ushered into a small room by Anita, who made it clear that in order to talk to Frank, I would have to pass muster with her. Anita was in her early fifties, with short brown hair and a no-nonsense manner that some considered brash, but I found refreshing. Slightly heavyset but not overweight, she struggled with dieting, I later learned, even as she bustled around the office with ease. We sat in a small prayer room with a plaque on the wall that read:
Some Facts from God to You:
You need to be saved
You can't save yourself
Jesus has already provided for your salvation
Jesus will enable you to overcome temptation
Your part: Repent
After I explained that I hoped to comprehend the perspectives of men and women in an ex-gay ministry through prolonged fieldwork and interviews at New Hope, Anita informed me that “we are in a battle,” and the battle is between “us versus them.” I was unsure what she meant, and she clarified that “them” meant Satan, and she was convinced that many people were in his service. Her next question, “Who do you serve?” was calculated to establish where my allegiances lay.
I had never been faced with the choice of God or Satan, but I replied that since I was at the ministry to understand their viewpoint rather than simply to dismiss or ridicule them, I supposed I was on the side of “us.” Somehow, I passed the test, and my answer enabled Anita to assimilate me into her religious universe. From my ov n patchwork religious background of first-generation immigrant Carholic grandparents and brief childhood forays into a New England United Church of Christ congregation, Anita read me as a Christian, albeit an unsaved one. She remained undecided about my research, but the New Hope leadership team would “pray on it” and get back to me. After a few weeks of group prayer and consultation, Anita and the other leaders determined that it was part of God's wider plan for me to come to New Hope. They incorporated my research agenda into their own worldview through the idea that it was part of a divine scheme, and they had faith that God was directing the course of my research. Implicit within my acceptance by the New Hope leadership team was their belief that I, too, had the potential for conversion to a Christian life. However, no one ever directly proselytized to me or insisted that I pray or give a testimony in church. Instead, Anita and the men I met imparted their stories of healing as reminders of what God could effect in my own life if, in their words, I allowed my heart to be open.
Ethnographic research has a tradition of investigating groups with whom the ethnographer shares a political, cultural, or social affinity. Only within the past decade have ethnographers begun to document their experiences with groups they may disagree with politically. These ethnographers have illustrated how they grapple with conflicting emotions and expectations when the social and religious conservatism of the people or groups they study—which have ranged from anti-abortion activists, to Jerry Falwell, to the women's Ku Klux Klan, to the Christian Right—reflect moral and political ideals that are distinct from their own.3 Their studies also highlight crucial questions about what it means to have a fieldwork agenda when one's research subjects are conservative Christians with their own conversionary agendas for the researcher. There are inherent tensions in this situation, especially when writing about a proselytizing community means committing to understanding the community's belief instead of viewing it as “false belief.” For instance, in her book on Jerry Falwell, Susan Harding raises complicated questions about how to comprehend the experience of faith, asking whether academic understanding necessitates conversion to her subject's religious belief system.4 As one researcher bluntly put it, we go to coffee with them for data, and they want to save our souls.5 From my first meeting with Anita, in which she pressed me to choose between God and Satan, it was evident that there would always be inherent frictions and incongruities between the biblically based language of evangelism and the language of ethnography. Knowing I was entering a community that placed a premium on the ability to evangelize, I accepted with some trepidation Anita's invitation to attend Friends and Family Weekend a month later.
However, I later learned that despite New Hope's religious interpretation of my research agenda, Anita's motives were not merely godly. Around the time we met, the ministry had been praying for someone to update their Web site, which was functioning but required editing and reorganization. In what I considered a fortuitous coincidence and Anita considered “God's work,” I had done freelance Web programming throughout graduate school and discovered that helping New Hope with its Web site and other computer woes would provide a basis to spend time in the office. I thus became an unofficial volunteer as well as a researcher. Performing concrete tasks like reviewing New Hope's booklets and testimonies and spending hours on the phone with Pacific Bell because no one in the office could connect to the Internet eased my entry into the world of New Hope. Being in the office also led to my first meetings with Brian, a thirty-two-year-old who had originally designed the New Hope Web site and now worked full time as a computer engineer, and his close friend, Drew, New Hope's affable Danish office manager, also in his thirties, both of whom had completed the program several years earlier.
Although gradually everyone at New Hope became aware that I was there to conduct interviews and research, to them, the idea that a single woman would move across the country to spend time at New Hope was more inconceivable and bizarre than their decision to spend a year in an ex-gay residential program. The desk that I used faced the wall behind Drew's desk, so I found myself sitting back to back with him in the office every day I was there. Our unavoidable proximity made informal conversation necessary, and his wry humor made it comfortable. Because the office was the focal point for the ministry and people dropped by after work and throughout the day, I gradually became a familiar presence to the men in the program. Drew oversaw the office and the application process for the program, while Curtis, the newest arrival, bore the brunt of less exalted work like copying and collating hundreds of pages to make the workbooks for the classes men attended. He worked in another room, across the hall, at a crowded desk pushed against an oversize window. From there he could monitor who came and went from the ministry apartments across the street. As in any office, the dynamic between these two colleagues ranged from camaraderie to outright annoyance. Drew seemed perpetually bemused by Curtis's antics, especially his bold fashion choices and tendency to alternate between Christian techno music and Ukrainian polkas on the stereo.
The offices were sparse aside from computers and a literature table. The main decoration was a colorized photograph of a lighthouse, New Hope's official symbol, on the wall. Frank and Anita had separate offices that sandwiched the room where Curtis worked, jammed with file cabinets and poster boards covered with photographs of men who had completed the program. At the end of the first month, I noticed that my bag with my laptop computer in it had mysteriously disappeared when I returned from talking to Anita in her office. As I began to panic, I heard Brian laughing outside. I had become the latest victim of his infamous pranks. His antics were so frequent that when his bike was stolen, it took days for the other men to convince him that it wasn't in revenge for his practical jokes. Unlike most of the men, who had been amiable toward me, Brian had been suspicious from the beginning, and this fake theft represented a thawing in his attitude. At our first encounter, he had plopped down next to me without introducing himself and asked confrontationally, “Why are you here, and what are you going to write about us?” He had been living out of a storage room in the office until he could move into his own apartment and was therefore around all the time. By our second meeting, he had put my name into the Google search engine, and he quizzed me relentlessly about conferences I had attended and places I had worked. “So, you're basically a liberal who thinks we're crazy, right?” It took many conversations over several months before we began inching toward friendship and a wary trust.
Once Curtis, Drew, and Brian had accepted my presence and incessant questions, it was easier to interact with others in the program. Men sauntered into the office after work to chat with Drew and, gradually, with me by extension. Many seemed flattered that I deemed their lives important enough for an interview, and they were curious about what I had found in my research. Some assumed that I had objective or even expert knowledge of the movement, even though in the ex-gay world, expertise