Open Door's wider calling. Frank started meeting on a weekly basis for counseling and discussion at Open Door with six people, who contacted him because of the personal testimony he advertised in local newspapers. A woman in the group suggested the name Love in Action (LIA), and Philpott and Frank agreed. As we discussed the early history of New Hope and Open Door, Frank jokingly referred to LIA as “Lots of Action,” a reference to the unintended and unsanctioned dating that went on at the weekly support group. Although he appeared reserved and soft-spoken, Frank frequently surprised me with one of these trademark sardonic comments. He was not afraid to occasionally poke fun at the ministry or the ex-gay movement.
In the late 1970s, Kent Philpott became the director of Love in Action, with Frank acting as assistant director. With Frank's input, Philpott authored two books, The Third Sex? in 1975 and The Gay Theology in 1979, that presented the personal testimonies of the men and women who attended the support groups at LIA. The Third Sex? contained dialogues between Philpott and ex-gay men and women: Jim, Susan, Bob, Polly, Ted, and Eve. The stories of how these six individuals became homosexuals provided a model for how New Hope and the ex-gay movement would structure their testimonies of conversion for decades. The books also generated publicity and enabled Philpott and Frank to continue counseling. Philpott called the first book The Third Sex? to argue against the idea of the legitimacy of homosexuality as an identity: “There is no third sex! For many reasons—some known, some unknown—men and women have exchanged the truth about God for a lie and have become homosexual. Homosexuality is a choice, a choice to be and do what was not intended….The simple conclusion is that there is no such thing as a bisexual or homosexual according to God's established order. Both distortions of original sexuality exist for the same reason man hid from God in paradise—rebellion.”9 Philpott also established the religious basis for the LIA program: homosexuals could change not through counseling alone but through a relationship with God. It was the failure to achieve this relationship that triggered sexual falls. Philpott wrote about how at one of the first LIA meetings, a brazen man who had lived as a homosexual for six years claimed he had been converted. This man denied ever having temptations and argued that he had erased all traces of his former life. An enthusiastic Christian organization had already sponsored him, and he was counseling at prisons and rehabilitation centers. Philpott writes that less than a month after the LIA meeting, this man had “fled with a young boy from a rehabilitation house and had returned to homosexuality. The problem? This man simply wasn't honest.…God wants us to be honest with him, others and ourselves. It saves us from drastic mistakes.”10
Love in Action began with a regular group of ten to twelve people meeting at Open Door on alternate Thursday evenings. The men came from a wide range of church affiliations, but they quickly established a routine of sharing their stories and devotions, praying, and listening to Kent Philpott speak. Later, when too many men and women arrived unannounced at the door with suitcases, it became necessary to find a long-term solution. In 1979 Love in Action was inaugurated as the first residential ex-gay program, and it soon had ten to twenty men and women living in its houses. Many had already read The Third Sex? and they arrived with hopeful and somewhat unrealistic misconceptions about the process of change. Frank recalled, “We took people off the street. No screening, no nothing. They stole everything. It was really bad, but again, we didn't know what we were doing. So after a year or two we began to screen people.” Frank and Mike Riley integrated these “strugglers” into the church community houses despite ridicule from the heterosexual Christian men already living there and reluctance on the part of the church elders. Their idea was to foster interaction between “straight” men and LIA men to promote healing. Eventually, the number of LIA-affiliated people eclipsed the other Christians in the houses.
One of the men whose story Philpott chronicled in The Third Sex? joined LIA permanently and began writing a monthly newsletter for the ministry. Bob, a former schoolteacher, dedicated the first LIA newsletter in December 1975 by sharing the philosophy behind the group: “In making a positive commitment to Christ, we hold firm the belief that He will lead us through this valley, give us victory over homosexual desires and give us a new life and a new walk that is within His will. He will do this if it means our remaining single and celibate. This is a costly price for people so highly oriented towards sex, but worth it, if we are to hold our faith up in truth.”11 LIA also created the “Brother Bob Tape Ministry,” with Bob's personal testimony on it to supplement that of “Brother Frank.” The newsletter advertised more tapes for purchase on topics such as sex and the Bible, biblical demonology, the normal Christian family, and the second coming. The local Christian general store, where Anita took me on one of my first visits to New Hope in 2000, agreed to sell these booklets and more cassette tapes with titles like Pitfalls, How to Counsel a Homosexual, and Examination of Gay Theology.
Many of the ministry's ideas about sin, forgiveness, and healing homosexuality emerged from these early meetings and newsletters. At one meeting, Philpott writes, Frank, Philpott, and the men were discussing forgiveness. One of the recent arrivals was fretting about his past sins and wondering if God could forgive him. They all encouraged him, reminding him of God's mercy, and Frank said, “If God can forget, so can I.” Frank rarely discusses his life before he began LIA, and Anita still knows very little about his first forty years. She told me that sometimes Frank would mention something about his past life during a speech or testimony that she had never heard before, but that she preferred it that way. Even from the beginning, LIA held to the idea of each participant becoming a “new creation” in which his or her previous life no longer mattered as long as he or she had a relationship with God. In the LIA newsletter, Bob stressed that homosexuality was forgiven by God through the process of being born again. “If we are truly a ‘born again' Christian and it is in fact a real experience, then we are called to claim our new lives and step out and be the new creatures that we are declared to be. God sees us as new creatures, not new homosexual creatures, however.” Bob wrote prolifically and earnestly about the idea of conversion as a God-induced process.
This very weekend one of our brothers said to me, how can I last through even one more year of this? I said in response, how can I last one more week? But I will last and so will he. We have each other, and the sharing and fellowship and caring are God's ingredients to healing, long-lasting healing that will impart strength as God does it in His time and not in ours. So we continue to hold together supporting one another in every way possible, bearing the hardships as Christ bore them. We stumble along, making mistake after mistake and He forgives and forgets and we pick ourselves up and start back up the mountain.12
He also coined the term “ex-gay” as a way to describe the conversion process. “But I am a homosexual, really, even though I lay claim to my new life. The old hasn't passed away. That's man's thinking, not God's. God sees us as ex-gay, but He also sees us as struggling and dealing with the old nature with its spiritual warfare.”13
The LIA residential program had its first house of women in the summer of 1986. Jeanette Howard, an Australian, wrote her book Out of Egypt: Leaving Lesbianism Behind during her time as the house leader. It was the first ex-gay book to focus on women's experiences, and it set the precedent for the ex-gay movement's ideas about lesbianism. Jeanette Howard revealed her own sexual abuse by a relative and the lack of attention she received from her father as the root causes of her homosexuality. The book was eventually distributed widely in the United States and translated into Spanish. There were four other women involved with the program who still remain affiliated with New Hope or live in the area, but the women's ministry ended in the early 1990s after no one proved willing to be the house leader. However, some members of the women's program are still active in the ex-gay movement, such as Anne Paulk, who has become a minor celebrity since marrying fellow LIA graduate John Paulk. Frank has never devoted much energy to ministry for women, and New Hope and other residential programs still continue to be geared toward men. Despite Jeanette's book and the years of a woman's program, Frank has always been the driving force behind the ministry, and his ideas about the root causes of homosexuality are central. He admits that he is less informed about women's issues around sexuality. This has contributed to inequity in the movement as a whole, which tends to be male dominated and focused on male homosexuality, a problem I discuss in chapter