In the summer season of 1967 1000’s of younger folks descended on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district seeking intercourse, medicine, and transcendence. For a lot of the ‘Summer time of Love’ symbolised liberation from conformity and repression. However to Kent Philpott, a younger Baptist seminarian, the Haight was not a utopia. It was a battlefield within the battle towards Devil.
Philpott, then a pupil at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary, felt known as to minister to the hippies flooding into San Francisco. Lengthy-haired and armed with an acoustic guitar, he blended into the counterculture. But his message couldn’t have been extra conservative and his experiences there laid the foundations for what would change into often known as the ‘ex-gay motion’.
He claimed dramatic experiences on the streets: encounters with folks he believed have been demon-possessed, sudden bursts of supernatural exercise, and his personal initiation into glossolalia, or talking in tongues. In 1973 he revealed A Guide of Demonology and the Occult, which described dozens of such instances – together with nameless women and men he related to homosexuality – and insisted that ‘the fact of Devil and demons’ defined what he had seen. Launched by the evangelical press Zondervan, the Guide popularised his imaginative and prescient of San Francisco as saturated with the occult and fashioned the mental foundation for his rising counselling of lesbian, homosexual, and bisexual folks.
Philpott’s message was strikingly syncretic. He accepted the scientific language of psychology – diagnoses equivalent to schizophrenia or psychopathy – however argued that these have been usually misreadings of demonic possession. He insisted that psychological sickness might make people weak to demonic assault and that solely prayer and exorcism might supply actual deliverance. In his thoughts, homosexuality was not an inborn trait however the results of early household trauma, gender ‘confusion’, and, finally, the machinations of Devil – a synthesis that was common amongst conservative Christians of the period, who started mixing Freudian fashions of household dysfunction with religious warfare.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies homosexuality was nonetheless broadly considered each a psychiatric dysfunction and a religious disaster in conservative Christianity, an issue to be cured moderately than an identification to be affirmed. It was on this local weather that Philpott’s ministry was reworked. In 1972, inside a single week, three males had approached him in search of assist to desert their same-sex needs. To Philpott, this was an indication. He started organising small prayer teams, which quickly expanded to incorporate ladies. Out of those grew Love in Motion, a Christian residing neighborhood devoted to serving to folks depart ‘the gay life-style’ via Bible research, prayer, and intense communal oversight.
Love in Motion was one of many first organisations of its type in the USA. It helped set up the Bay Space – not the Bible Belt – because the cradle of the ex-gay motion. Individuals from throughout North America wrote, and even travelled, to Philpott after listening to of his work.
Philpott publicised his efforts in two influential books, The Third Intercourse? (1975) and The Homosexual Theology (1977), by which he revealed testimonies from ten women and men who claimed to have renounced homosexuality after spiritual conversion – one girl recalled that ‘all I noticed was the vacancy’. These tales turned prototypes for what would later be often known as ‘ex-gay testimonies’, private narratives of transformation deployed in church buildings, in political campaigns equivalent to Anita Bryant’s 1977 ‘Save Our Youngsters’ campaign, and, later, within the broader tradition wars. By the late Nineties nationwide newspaper ads featured ‘former homosexuals’ as proof that sexual change was potential.
The books additionally codified Philpott’s fusion of psychology and faith. He argued that overbearing moms or absent fathers might create same-sex needs in youth and that true therapeutic required each religious salvation and adherence to conventional gender roles. Males needed to embrace masculinity and headship; ladies needed to domesticate femininity and submission. For Philpott, heterosexuality was not merely about sexual want but additionally required people to carry out their ‘God-given’ gender.
These writings gave the fledgling motion an mental and theological basis, however in addition they drew criticism. A few of Philpott’s interviewees – most prominently John Evans, who appeared as ‘Ted’ in The Third Intercourse? – later disavowed their supposed transformations. Evans accused Philpott of taking liberties together with his story and enhancing an exorcism that didn’t occur the way in which he stated it did. Others merely drifted again into homosexual life, quietly undermining the credibility of Philpott’s claims. For conservative Christians within the Nineteen Seventies, although, his books supplied a potent counter-narrative to the rising visibility of the homosexual liberation motion.
Regardless of his pioneering function within the ex-gay motion, Philpott’s place within the historical past of conversion remedy has usually been missed. Partly it is because the motion itself shifted within the Nineteen Eighties, embracing a extra scientific vocabulary. By the early Nineties, leaders within the ex-gay motion, equivalent to scientific psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, promoted what they known as ‘reparative remedy’, a counselling strategy to aligning one’s gender identification with one’s beginning intercourse. Couched in quasi-scientific phrases, reparative therapists distanced themselves from any discuss of demons and exorcism.
Philpott’s personal downfall additionally contributed. Within the early Nineteen Eighties he was compelled to resign from ministry after he sexually assaulted an adopted daughter. The scandal meant that later histories of the motion tended to omit his identify, at the same time as they drew on practices he had pioneered.
Philpott’s story complicates our understanding of San Francisco’s place in American sexual historical past. The town is often remembered as a capital of homosexual liberation, from the Castro’s emergence as a homosexual neighbourhood to Harvey Milk’s political profession. But it was additionally a seedbed for conservative response. The elements that drew LGBTQ folks to San Francisco – its openness, its experimentation, its promise of self-actualisation and reinvention – additionally attracted conservative Christians who noticed a chance for evangelism.
At this time ‘conversion remedy’ is broadly condemned by medical associations as each ineffective and dangerous. In 2012 California was the primary state to ban licensed therapists from providing the follow for minors, and greater than 20 states have adopted swimsuit. (Spiritual counsellors, equivalent to pastors, monks, rabbis, and pastoral counsellors, can nonetheless present faith-based approaches.) Memoirs by survivors element the despair, trauma, and suicidal ideation such programmes fostered. Help for conversion remedy has plummeted within the US, with fewer than one in ten People now believing same-sex needs can – or ought to – be modified. Philpott, nevertheless, has remained unrepentant throughout these cultural and political shifts. In a 2013 reflection he warned that whereas LGBTQ activists is likely to be ‘successful political battles’, their victories wouldn’t endure ‘within the without end’.
Chris Babits is an impartial researcher primarily based in Northern Utah.
