Let's Talk About Alan Chambers, The Former 'Ex-Gay' Creep Just Arrested For Trying To Solicit A Child

I never liked that guy.

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Gross.

Depending on your menu of daily reading sources, you might have read about this story several times already this week. But not from me! So let’s fix that.

Back in the day, Alan Chambers was one of the two or three best-known leaders in the so-called “ex-gay” fraud/torture movement, which is still around and adapting and changing forms to keep up with the times, like kudzu or COVID. Chambers led Exodus International, which was definitely the flagship model of pray-away-the-gay “ministries,” the one the others aspired to emulate, in their quest to shame children and adults alike into trying to change their sexuality through religious abuse. (Exodus always had a weird focus on the kids.)

There was a time 10 to 15 years ago when it really looked like the “ex-gay” movement was dying a pathetic death. The leaders of these organizations and their most celebrated success stories kept getting caught with dicks in their mouths. (At least the male leaders did!) The movement’s biggest cheerleaders, who preached with smug self-assurance that God was really totally for real removing same-sex attractions from people and magically converting them into the penis-in-vagina/traditional marriage Americans of His godliest dreams just looked sillier and sillier, every time they said it.

Also, as this was before the onset of MAGA white supremacist Christian fascism, there was momentum for eradicating the practice entirely, with a number of states outright banning it, at least for minors, recognizing it as the torture and child abuse it was.

Obviously the subtext here is that it’s all making a comeback now — this time with more than a soupçon of anti-trans hate mixed into the Christian child predators’ regularly abhorrent anti-gay ratatouille — but it really did seem there for a minute like the fight had been won, or at least that these bastards had been pushed way back, to a point that their ability to hurt children, to make children hate themselves to the point of suicide, would be severely curtailed for the foreseeable future.

There were a lot of prongs in that fight against the “ex-gay” scourge back then. There was a documentary called This Is What Love In Action Looks Like, by director Morgan Jon Fox, which followed another large, now-defunct “ex-gay” organization called Love In Action, which was based in Memphis. Before I landed at Wonkette, I worked with Wayne Besen’s Truth Wins Out organization, which has existed for many years now with a laser focus toward exposing the snake oil salesmen and quacks of the “ex-gay” world. Medical professionals were speaking out against the practice, as they are unfortunately still having to today. Movies like But I’m A Cheerleader helped show the wider world just how clownfucking absurd the movement was.

Back in those days, it seemed like every four seconds an “ex-gay” leader was coming (back) out of the closet, with a number of them beginning the long process of apologizing and trying to make right what they had done, atone for the innocent lives they had harmed and ruined. It was and is heady stuff.

Many of those leaders made real apologies, the kinds that fully grappled with what they had done, and also with who they themselves were. It does seem that to truly embark on the the work of healing the harm one has done as an “ex-gay” leader would necessarily involve battling one’s own inner demons, making peace with one’s own self.

Many of the leaders from that time are now in long-term relationships and marriages of the very decidedly gay variety. (I am friendly with several of them now! We who used to be their adversaries. Life is funny like that.)

And then there was Alan Chambers. His apology always hit me different, and I think that matters for our purposes today, which are that Alan Chambers just got arrested in Florida for allegedly soliciting someone he believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a child, for sex. (Alan is 54.)

Here is a local news report on the arrest:

According to the arrest report, Alan met the child on Snapchat in a To Catch A Predator-type situation. Except the child was not a child. It was a cop. Alan allegedly told the cop he thought was a child that he wanted to “make love.” He talked about “forbidden love.” And he just kept reaching out to the cop/child, and tried to meet up with them. Instead he got arrested.

So here’s what I think is important here, because remember two seconds ago I said Alan’s apology felt different to me? Wayne Besen put out a press release from Truth Wins Out reacting to this, which alludes to that difference:

Although Chambers eventually rejected the term “ex-gay” and acknowledged ongoing same-sex attraction, he did not become a representative of the LGBTQ community after coming out of the closet about his sexuality. He remained married to his wife Leslie, remained active in church, and continued to present himself primarily through a conservative Christian framework.

“Alan Chambers should not be portrayed as an LGBTQ leader,” said Besen. “He was a former leader of a movement that harmed LGBTQ people. His later apology mattered, but it did not make him a community spokesperson or erase the suffering caused by Exodus International.”

In other words, it doesn’t seem like Alan actually did the work.

When Exodus was forced to shut down, Alan didn’t get the fuck out of the movement that created the conditions to foster the sorts of child abuse the “ex-gay” world supports and protects. And to be clear, I am talking about both the institutional abuse of the self-hatred-based prayer therapy they offer — which often gets weirder than that, see video below — as well as the weird predatory setup of these joints, where mommies and daddies are supposed to trust strange men and women who say they’ve “prayed away the gay” to be alone with their kids.

You will not be shocked to learn that sexual abuse has always been rampant in the “ex-gay” industry. As Besen explained in the press release about Chambers, “[ex-gay outfits] isolate vulnerable LGBTQ youth, tell them their natural identity is shameful, and then hand power to religious leaders who claim they can ‘heal’ them. That is a dangerous formula, and history has shown again and again that predators can exploit it.”

Oh sure, Alan Chambers demonstrated contriteness, or at the very least he read his lines. But there was always something lacking about it. Here’s a video from Truth Wins Out in 2019, several years after Exodus shut down in 2013, which features Chambers heavily. If you have time to watch it, please do, but I will highlight the parts I think are important below.

What we hear in that video is Alan Chambers acknowledging that “ex-gay therapy” and “ministry” are bullshit, and harmful, and creepy, and abusive, and that he deeply regrets being a part of it. Alan even says the word “bullshit” in the video, and admits that he never lost a scintilla of same-sex attraction, nor had he ever met anyone who had. He seems genuinely sorry.

What we don’t hear, though, is Alan saying yes, fully, LGBTQ+ people are perfect children of God just the way they are, no asterisks, not if they do this, or if they refrain from doing that, or as long as they agree to deny themselves the experience of the fullness of who they are. He offhandedly refers to people still being attracted to the same sex as a “temptation” that doesn’t go away. (Chambers did allow at the time that even sexually active people could go to heaven, which is less than a full-throated endorsement.)

At one point, in a clip from a Lisa Ling special Alan did before Exodus’s dissolution, where he was confronted by “ex-gay” survivors, one of those survivors suggests that Exodus had merely morphed into a “recloseting” ministry. That they were admitting you couldn’t change, so instead they’d just help you self-hate yourself back into the closet.

Seems interesting to go back and listen now, the week after Alan, a gay man to this day married to a woman and cosplaying a traditional Christian heterosexual lifestyle, was arrested for trying to meet a 14-year-old boy child for sex.

In case you are wondering, this story is very much a part of The Moral High Ground’s Pervert Pastor Project*, not only because Alan Chambers placed himself on a pedestal of religious authority over vulnerable youths — Exodus really had a weird thing with kids — but because he once served as an associate pastor in what is or was his church, Calvary Assembly of God in Orlando. (How often do extremely conservative Assembly of God/pentecostal types come up on our longrunning list of religious leaders who sexually abuse, rape, or otherwise try to sexually prey on children? A LOT.)

I don’t know if Alan Chambers and his heterosexual marriage still go to that church. I know he wrote a book a decade ago with his wife called My Exodus: From Fear to Grace, the blurb of which says it’s “a book for everyone who wants to be welcoming and loving to all people without compromising their faith or their biblical theology.” Uh huh. Would hate for people to fall down the slippery slope of loving people in a way that compromises their “biblical theology.”

If I sound skeptical of Alan Chambers, it is because I have always been, in a way that I quite frankly don’t feel about some others who used to have powerful positions in the “ex-gay” world and then came out the other side, literally. A couple of them might end up reading this. Hello!

Speaking of, Randy Scobey, who also worked at Exodus, has written on his Substack reacting to Alan Chambers’s arrest, which is worth reading for a perspective from somebody with decades of history with the man. He also has a post about how Peter LaBarbera, the marginal anti-gay creep everybody used to call “Porno Pete,” back when people knew who he was, has of course been using this to spread his bile about how Alan Chambers’s arrest says something about gay men, and not about, you know, everything I just discussed, including what I see as the remaining deceit in Alan’s apology story. I was quite frankly surprised to find out Porno Pete was still around.

As Randy writes:

Alan Chambers is not an advertisement for gay identity. Alan Chambers is an advertisement for what happens when you spend decades inside the evangelical ex-gay industrial complex and stay firmly entrenched in modern cultural conservatism — a movement Peter LaBarbera championed, promoted, and defended. Alan didn’t come out as a proud gay man and then allegedly do this. Alan spent years as the president of Exodus International, the flagship organization of a movement that told gay people God could make them straight if they just tried hard enough, prayed hard enough, suppressed hard enough.

Uh yeah.

As I said, this story is very much headline news for The Moral High Ground’s Pervert Pastor Project. Porno Pete — enough alliteration in this graf for you? — might be interested in checking out that project, where I have been following the literally hundreds of conservative Christian pastors, youth group leaders, priests, Christian school teachers and coaches who are arrested, tried, sentenced and imprisoned every single year for raping and molesting children, trading kiddie porn, and all manner of other abuse you can think of. As Dan Savage once memorably said, “If Kids Got Raped At Denny’s As Often As They Get Raped At Church, it would be against the law to take your kid to Denny’s.”

But sure, Porno Pete, keep fucking that chicken, if your dick even works.

And oh boy, was Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta correct in his post about this, when he said that “Chambers was a useful tool for the right in the past and some things never change.”

This has been your Moral High Ground post about the arrest of Alan Chambers. I never liked that guy.

Tip your bartenders.

*Oh and yes, there will FINALLY be large updates on the Pervert Pastor Project soon! I had to come to a place where I admitted I needed help compiling the list — you know, because every week you don’t update there’s a whole new list of conservative Christian religious leaders who have raped kids. Anyway, I found the help. Stay tuned for that and more. In the meantime, subscribe to help support that work and all the rest of the work!

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